The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life with Steve Jobs

by Brennan, Chrisann

  When we arrived, Steve parked about three hundred yards away from the house and as we all got out he continued his line of thought. It finally dawned on me how long this frigging conversation had been going on. It was likely that he felt badly; if anyone had more influence in our child’s life it would be me because of all the work and time I had put in compared to him. So as per his usual method of dealing with feelings of insecurity, he flipped this into his having the dominant genes. It was also typical of him to plant a suggestion, intending it take root in my sad sense of disempowerment. The truth is, Steve never had to worry because once he and Lisa had come into each other’s lives, she lived as much in his conscious and unconscious as she lived in mine. She was like blotting paper, she soaked us both up because she came from both of us. He just did not know how love worked, and I think he simplistically/primitively thought in terms of owning more shares.

  When we walked into the house that afternoon, Steve found Tina and I remember being really relieved that I didn’t have to deal with him and that conversation anymore. It was the beginning of my friendship with Tina. I adored this woman, and Lisa really liked her, too. She was a shiny, lovely person who worked to keep her heart bright and open, and in time she was someone, I came to discover, who had a fabulous sense of humor, which helped me deal with Steve. I did not know then that Tina and I would be good friends for years.

  A bunch of people at the party were standing in the kitchen when Steve and Tina leaned up against each other, propping themselves against the counter, and started making out. They would do this a lot, at my house, in restaurants, and I could never quite wrap my head around how public they were about their intimacy. I steered Lisa out of the kitchen and into the living room, where she ran about talking and playing with everyone. My daughter has a bright, innate sense of friendship with all beings great and small; it is just the way she is. And as I sat drinking a beer and eating chips, I watched and enjoyed her interactions with everyone that day. Tina and her friends and family always felt like family to my heart, and they had a beautiful sense of childhood and were playful with Lisa. Steve never brought the genes issue up again.

  TWENTY-THREE

  THE PATH OF THE HEARTH

  I think Tina believed if she could just love Steve enough, he would be okay. For my part, I think I was too exhausted to care about Steve with such earnestness anymore. We did like each other in many ways, but I no longer had the illusion that I could bolster him up or save him. There was just too much history between us; I was backed up and closed down. I was done. We sort of existed side by side, for Lisa’s sake. What I now believe is that Steve and I were well matched, but it would have only been by telling the deepest truths that we could have had a real relationship. In the end, I don’t think we knew how to be honest enough to be responsible to love. I guess that’s what it all came down to.

  Tina’s father died when she was young, but she had a strong mother with a tremendous spirit who had escaped Nazi Germany during World War II. Ruth was very real and one day asked her daughter, “Tina, why are you with Steve? He doesn’t even see who you really are!” Ruth was angry with her daughter for wasting time with Steve. But Tina was also a keen observer, and told me a number of times that it was the result of watching how Steve parented Lisa—and how he treated me—that she knew she would never marry or have children with him. Still, when Kobun encouraged Steve to propose to Tina, there was a flutter of activity.

  Tina and Steve had broken up and she was beginning a relationship with another man, but because of Kobun’s influence, Steve walked back into Tina’s life and asked her to marry him. Despite her awareness and all of her misgivings, I saw her consider it—all the hope and the bright possibility. Tina confided in me to some extent. She told me how Steve had driven to her house in Pescadero, and how awkward it was for her new boyfriend to leave the house because Steve had suddenly arrived with his proposal. Tina was discreet about the details but I got the picture.

  It was during this window of time that I drove with Lisa to NeXT to meet up with Steve. It was on a Saturday afternoon and except for Steve’s Mercedes, the parking lots around NeXT were completely empty. When I drove up I was surprised to see Tina. She and Steve were talking to each other next to his car. They seemed upset. I parked, with the nose of my car pointed to the south, and suddenly I gasped: in the parking lot one over, crashed and crumpled, was Tina’s new car, totaled. That day, we canceled the plans and Lisa and I left. Tina later explained that upon getting into her car after a fierce argument with Steve, she accidently put it into reverse and accelerated backward, crashing about fifty yards over a six-foot embankment on the south parking lot. She was okay, but she told me the incident made her realize that she couldn’t endure a life with Steve. She would end up killing herself, she said, whether by “accident,” as in accidentally driving off a road, or worse. She ultimately declined the marriage proposal and they separated for good.

  Tina shared two insights with me that still boggle my mind. In the late nineties she told me that Steve shared with her that I was one of the most creative persons he had ever met. Why oh why didn’t he tell me this? She also told me, some twenty-five years after the fact, that while she was dating Steve there was a moment in which she understood that his and my coming together would have created the deepest peace inside Steve, which is what she wanted for him. I believe this to be true. I had my own sense of it, and now I feel that the most radical piece of insight I have ever understood about Steve and me is that—it was our souls that matched, not our neuroses. Moreover, not only would our coming together have created the deepest peace in Steve, but it would have done so in Lisa and me, too. But this was not to be. The closest we got was when Steve came over a few times to the house on Rinconada and happily said, “You know, it’s like we are married!”

  Indeed.

  Tina contributed to my understanding of myself in a number of ways. She told me many times over the years that it was through me and my example that she learned the value of the feminine way of doing things, something she never thought highly of before. For years I wondered what she could possibly be talking about, but then another woman I knew told me the same thing. Eventually, it dawned on me. They were talking about the path of the hearth. There used to exist religions that connected women’s homemaking to a sacred dimension—from cooking, cleaning, and making things feel good and beautiful to raising children and loving men. What could be more sacred than a home?

  About two years after I moved into the Rinconada house, in 1987, I started a new business. It was inspired by a dream I’d had in which I was at Steve’s Woodside house where I saw a set of intricate carvings of the story of Beauty and the Beast. The dream eventually got me wondering about developing fairy tales in huge mural format as a business for children’s environments. I couldn’t shake this idea after it had landed, so I began figuring out how to do it. Eventually I was in full swing. I began making huge stenciled fairy-tale murals that made whole rooms into storybooklike experiences for children to walk into. I made all my own designs, hiring artists to assist when I needed extra help. I made them for homes, but mainly for pediatric environments such as hospitals, doctor’s offices, and Ronald McDonald House. I worked locally and also had some big installations in L.A. and in Boston. It was a business that would allow me to work commercially, retain a fine arts sensibility, and provide excellence in children’s environments for families in crisis. Eventually I got to the point of making all the murals in my studio on huge gessoed canvases that I would roll up and FedEx to clients to be hung like extremely expensive wallpaper. Everything was done with the love of layered paint and colored patterns, with textures you could run your hands over. This was the opposite of the infinitely replicable computer-generated image; I wanted children to feel the hand and the aura of the original. I worked to make my murals playful and daring and sweet, like childhood. I knew at the time this was not my real work, more like a placeholder with stacked purposes. It allowed me to wor
k at home late into the night while being within earshot of Lisa. It gave me flexible hours and was hugely important in providing me with years in which to develop my color and form awareness, while making money. It was a lot of work but it was gratifying and fun, especially when I had enough work to hire other artists to help.

  After Steve and Tina broke up, he was single for a while. It was then he started to come over to my house on weekends to sleep on my couch in the middle of the day, even when Lisa wasn’t there. I thought this was odd but fine until I realized he wasn’t talking to me during these visits, just sleeping and then leaving. I didn’t like it. I said, “You know, if you are not going to talk to me when you’re here, then please don’t come over.” I felt he wanted to soak up my creativity and the warmth of my home, but didn’t value me enough to talk to me. It all pointed to something but I didn’t know what. I had a mix of impressions as I watched Steve walk out the door and down the sidewalk to his car. Peering beyond the screen door, I examined my feelings about having basically thrown him out. He looked back at me with a kind of squirrelly hurt pride, but also as if I was the loser. I didn’t feel like a loser. I also didn’t like throwing him out but I felt he was using me without acknowledgment. If he had had the manners to greet me, talk a bit, and say good-bye, I would have made space for him but he came and went like a thief and it hurt, deeply. I did a lot back then to leverage everything for the common wealth while Steve tended to the amassing of his own uncommon wealth. Beyond this, in the logic of fairy tales, it was like the taking of the rose from the garden in Beauty and the Beast—it looked like such a small thing, but it wasn’t.

  * * *

  And then Steve met Laurene Powell. Within a week of their meeting, Steve took Lisa and me out for dinner and told us he had met, in his words, “someone special.” He met her at a talk he’d given to the Stanford Graduate School of Business, a talk that he had almost canceled because he was so tired. But he was unbelievably glad he had gone, he said, because he’d met this woman and it seemed like a big deal. Steve gave us the details about how she sat in the front row and then waited for him at the back of the room until after everyone had left, leaning back on a chair and looking intently at him.

  “Is she pretty?” Lisa asked.

  Steve laughed and threw up his hands. “I really have no idea,” he said. “I can’t tell.”

  We showed our happiness for him because he was happy, but I think Lisa and I were also both a little uneasy.

  What would it mean?

  We would find out a couple of months later.

  Lisa and I sat on the floor in the dining room—I was helping her with an art project. I like sparse furnishings and we never had tables big enough for some of our sprawling projects so we just spread out on the floors when we needed it. I loved the floors at the Rinconada house—since Steve had them redone, they were white stained, clean, and without scuffs, and with a little wiping down were like the best tables ever. At this time, I think Lisa was making maps on poster board to learn every country in the world. It was a part of the Nueva curriculum to learn all the countries and their capitals. I always helped her when it came to building things because I liked showing her how to use the right art materials and I loved thinking about content and aesthetics with her. That day we had colored pens and pencils, X-Acto blades and cutting board, tape and spray mount all over the floor as we sat legs straddled and hunched over our work. Lisa’s petite body was so cute when she was focused and working like this.

  When the knock came, I shouted “Come in,” and Steve ushered Laurene into my house. She walked toward me fast and certain, as if she were a model on a runway. When she got within four feet, she struck a pose. She placed one foot in front of the other, before turning them out at gracious angles. She elongated her arms and opened her hands, turned her head to the side, and then looked down at me sitting on the floor with a slight smile on her face.

  I was confused.

  Why was she modeling for me? Was this what the next generation of Stanford girls was doing? I don’t remember anything about the conversation, just the pose and my getting a sense that the world had changed. Maybe even gone backward, I thought. This kind of finishing school presentation was precisely what my generation had rejected. Here was a different kind of woman and I was trying to understand what the behavior meant in the mix of everyone being polite at a first meeting. I think I must have looked a little like a flashbulb had gone off in front me—bewildered. Whatever her motivation, I decided that she was very sweet and courageous to present herself as she did.

  After that I saw their relationship grow and I came to feel that Steve had met his match. She was ambitious and tough enough for him. I remembered them stopping by right after they had raced in their two cars down the freeway. They were laughing and full of vigor. She’d won, and oh did I love to hear this! Later I found myself very impressed by Laurene’s cool-mindedness and negotiation skills when Steve had a run-in with a surly waitress. It was right after their son, Reed, had been born and all five of us, Lisa, Reed, Laurene and Steve, and me had gone to Il Fornaio in Palo Alto for breakfast. Things got off on the wrong foot and Steve was in a power struggle with this older big-boned waitress who wasn’t going to let him boss her around. The waitress was in the wrong but Steve was being vicious. The whole thing was ridiculous. Laurene was very cool and narrated what the misunderstanding as it was happening. Her reasoning seemed to help tone down the tension. Right before they became engaged, someone in the group—Mona or Fin Taylor, Tina’s cousin—eventually named it. In sharp and utter contrast to all of us, Steve especially, Laurene had no quirks.

  * * *

  There are stories that Laurene had arranged for or anticipated (I am not sure how it came together) Steve’s talk at the Stanford Graduate School of Business so she could set up that seemingly fateful meeting. I only found out about this years after the fact. And Laurene claims that they are untrue. But when I first heard about there being a question it was by way of two different people, both women, independent of one another, who sought me out to tell me that there was some kind of setup. One was at the event and the other had a close friend at the event.

  Once I was told this I sat with the knowledge deep inside me for a couple of years. I couldn’t grasp why this woman who wanted to marry Steve shouldn’t marry him—especially since he came to want to marry her. And why had my friends who attended the event been so incensed? Eventually, in 2005 I decided to call on my friend Michael, to ask him what it meant.

  Through the years I have called on Michael for his perspective on many things. More often than not, I am relieved and enlivened by what he says, and to have his wisdom and great aerial view of human life. When I told him about what Laurene had allegedly done in order to meet and marry Steve, he laughed with a low and long-drawn-out chuckle. Slowly he said, “Well, you see, love is something we commonly believe is given to us, a gift from something bigger than ourselves, providence or from God, if you will. But if such a thing is manipulated from the level of worldly ambition, it is of a different order.” I would think on this for a long time. I liked that he had framed love as being outside the worldly spheres of ambition.

  Throughout history, there have certainly been many different kinds of marriages. And you could argue that if Steve wasn’t going to be more reflective about how he treated people (and if he wanted to be married), then he was very lucky that Laurene walked in. Moreover, if she chose herself for him in the way that some people have indicated that she did, it all points to her being a match for Steve. I assume that he eventually heard about all of this and I always wondered what he made of it.

  Laurene knew how to take care of herself. Though, by her own admission, she was not a warm person, I saw in her a capacity for self-interest that I consider to have aspects that are admirable and ahead of their time in terms of women’s empowerment. I came to feel that she was uniquely suited for Steve. Her thick bones, goal-oriented focus, and levelheadedness all told me she could
handle what he could mete out. I didn’t not like her. In fact, I found it easy to care about her. Not long after they married, she came to my house unexpectedly and sat with me on my porch and told me why she loved him. I believed her, but wondered why she was telling me.

  I now understand that it might have been strategic. On another day, she followed Steve through my living room enthusiastically telling him, “What a good father you are!” Steve was a pretty poor father, anyone could see that. And anyone could see that he wanted to hear good things about himself even if they weren’t true. Laurene was willing to do that for him.

  Within about five months of their going out, Steve asked me if I would have them over for dinner so I could get to know them together. It was to be a sort of welcoming dinner. But the request bothered me and I hung back. Parenting, especially single parenting, is exhausting. I didn’t have the extra money and I was often very tired by evening, after a full day, doing my own work, driving Lisa forty miles to school, and cooking, having dinner, getting her into bed with stories and conversations. I was usually done in by 8:30. Why couldn’t he just take the three of us out for dinner so we could talk and not have me work so much? Slowly it dawned on me. Steve was attempting to recast the roles to fit his newest narrative. This time it was with me as his mother, which would have made Laurene into my daughter-in-law. In that scenario, my having them for dinner made sense.

  I felt insulted and thunder rolled inside me.