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

by Brennan, Chrisann

  Was everything going to be a big awful lie again?

  I didn’t have them over for dinner nor did Steve and I talk about it. I didn’t even try to bring it up because I knew better than to try and manage that conversation with him. It would have amounted to nothing but another horrible argument so I just let the whole thing drop, incomplete as per our usual.

  Through the years Steve and many of his promotional people, including marketers, attorneys, and biographers, and the collection of people he had around him, worked in a number of ways at different times to publicly define me as an inconsequential person who was a hanger-on and a whack job, who got pregnant so that I would have access to Steve’s wealth. But I am not motivated to deceive. In fact, intentional deception absolutely terrifies me. I make for a very poor trickster and I am far from having the glossy finish of a player. The law of my being is that I only derive strength after achieving transparency into the truth. And so how strange then is it that I have been publicly vilified for exactly what I would not do and what Laurene successfully did do to become his wife? Steve respected power and Laurene had earned her place next to him by doing exactly as she had.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  THE WATCHTOWER

  In 1998, Andy Herzfeld of the original Mac team, with his wife, Joyce McClure, invited me to join them for a Bob Dylan concert at Shoreline. I jumped at the chance to see “Grampa Dylan” as Joyce affectionately referred to him. It was one of the most powerful performances I’ve ever witnessed. The sound that amplified out of Dylan’s four-man band was impossibly huge. It blew my mind. And when they played “All Along the Watchtower,” it seemed to gather the winds to whip up a storm out of nowhere. It was music as invocation with Dylan in the role of shaman. The memory of that night and that song has stayed with me all these years for one simple reason: Steve lived inside each and every song-temple Dylan ever wrote—perhaps that one most of all.

  That evening we sat in Woz’s box with around twenty other people. Woz! I hadn’t seen him since before Lisa was born. At intermission when he found out that I was present, he turned around and looked at me from the front of the box, stunned. We stared at each other for a very, very long time. I remember all these happy people trying to get me to go up and talk to him, “Come on up, come up here. Sit next to Woz and talk to him.” But I pressed back against my chair at the farthest corner of the box. It was the weirdest scene: Woz’s stare was so intense that I just couldn’t move or speak. It had been nearly twenty years of world-changing history since we had been in the other’s company, but from the way he was looking at me, I felt that he had some idea of what I had been through.

  Much later, in 2006, I heard Woz on NPR’s City Arts and Lectures. Among many things, he told his personal story leading up to the founding of Apple. I found it touching and also very interesting to hear how his personality and creativity wove through Apple’s history. I always knew that Steve expected to be famous, but I never thought about what it all meant to Woz. In the vacuum of any real knowledge I had assumed many things, yet as I listened to the interview that day I heard a surprising story and felt a puzzle piece click into place. Woz said that as a child he wanted to be an engineer like his dad. He didn’t have aspirations of fame and fortune. He just loved his dad and wanted to be like him.

  When Woz designed the first personal computer prototype Steve said something like, “Hey! We can sell this.” But from that interview I understood that Woz was reticent about being a founder of Apple and that Steve actually had to talk him into going into business with him. Steve needed Woz because even though Steve was proficient with technology, Woz was the technological genius. The way I see it, if Woz had made a different choice—as he almost did—Steve would have found another Woz. Because above all else, Steve was driven to move ahead, to become famous, and to make his mark. (As to that other creative genius, I believe that Steve was somehow informed by Dylan’s love of playing with amplification. Steve was certainly an amplifying genius.)

  Back to that 2006 interview. It was by way of Woz’s careful discretion that I understood even more of what went on when the interviewer mentioned a line in Woz’s book. It was something about how he (Woz) would rather be the guy who laughed than the guy who controlled things. The interviewer asked if he was referring to Steve. “No,” Woz said. It was just a “general philosophy.”

  * * *

  Sometimes people don’t say things because they understand too much. Sometimes they stay quiet because they don’t understand enough. Sometimes people speak before they really understand. And sometimes they don’t because they know no one is listening. But it’s all part of history, this speaking and not speaking.

  My history with Steve is so easily misinterpreted that I haven’t talked with the press very often. Society has assumptions about the type of woman who would claim that a powerful man like Steve is the father of her child—no matter that he is our child’s father. It’s just never been worth it for me to confront that stereotype.

  The histories of women involved with so-called great men occupy a shabby territory in the public’s mind. And so it was when I had no voice and little to protect me that Steve leveraged this misanthropic confusion to avoid responsibility (as if responsibility were a bad thing). It was that simple and that obvious. No one cared, so I held my silence and worked to keep my child safe, and later, to bring her together with her father. I was operating out of a mother’s instinct because I lacked the ability to do battle with Steve and all the moneyed interests that surrounded him. Lisa and I really suffered and should have been protected by law and by community. But we weren’t. Instead I learned to lay low and to study what was so right—and so profoundly wrong—with him for over thirty years.

  * * *

  The Apple cult was all about being hidden, but Daniel Kottke became a willing source of information about Apple and Steve (and about me, too). I feel that Daniel spoke to reporters before understanding his own relationship to the truth. But he speaks so well and was so available that many reached out to him. What a boon for the reporters. Steve purely hated him for it. I believe that much of what has been written about the Apple history has Daniel’s perceptions stamped all over it. We live in a time of multiple narratives. That’s a good thing because the collective wisdom is served by hearing different sides of a single story. I’m all for it, even if I’m still figuring it out for myself.

  Daniel was one of the first thirteen full-time employees at Apple, but the only one of the first one hundred who did not become a multimillionaire. After it was clear that Daniel wasn’t going to get a fair shake, it was Woz who later made sure that Daniel got stock in Apple. And I heard Steve ridicule Woz for it.

  Daniel used some of his stock to buy a Victorian house in Palo Alto. These days his house is filled with stuff. A lot of stuff. Daniel collects things he feels are interesting and important. It starts out on his front porch and moves to the entryway just inside the door. It goes up the stairway with piles on each successive step and down the hall of the ground floor, into the rooms and out into the backyard. Tall shelving is lined up and filled to overflowing in all the rooms, and blocks the light from the windows. To get through the house you have to move through pathways, negative space that has been sculpted between the valuables.

  Daniel’s home feels to me like the storage basement of an old museum or library. I don’t think he suspects he is a hoarder because he thinks of all of his things as extremely valuable. Over time, as the collectibles and the dust gathered, I began to understand something was wrong. Daniel’s house seemed to have turned into a holding pen for the lost idealism of the sixties and seventies. I feel Daniel has chased that idealism over the years, but has never been able to put things together, to clarify and organize. It’s as if he’s the curator of a lost time capsule, maintaining his collection and a loyalty to something he still doesn’t understand.

  When you talk to Daniel, his expressions are cultured; his words are intelligent and credible. He projects big bri
ght architectures with clear, gracious interiors. But when you see his house, you notice that things aren’t as they seem. I find that what Daniel projects and how he actually lives—what he says and what he understands—are as disjunctive as Steve’s visionary clarity and his inhumanity.

  People love Daniel and I remembered why when I saw him back in August of 2010. Daniel and I had dinner together and our conversation led us to his wanting to share some information in a book he had, so after dinner we went to his house to get it. The house was many times more stuffed with things than the last time I’d visited, some seven years earlier. It sent a jolt through me. I sat on a couch, where things fell in on me just from my weight pressing in on the cushions. I wedged my feet between the seat and the coffee table that was also completely stacked with books and science trinkets and other interesting things. I sat very still, careful not to disturb any of it because it all seemed alive.

  Totally entranced, I watched as Daniel calmly searched for the book. His eyes sparkle and his thin frame radiates a powerful warmth. I watched his hands—refined and careful, he has those techie spiderlike fingers, and he holds things at a distance in his fingertips, away from his palms. He’s pretty sure he knows where everything is and he’s proud of his ordering system, too. However, on this day he was fretting because he was unable to find the book he wanted to lend me. He was mad at himself and dismayed by the fact that he loans stuff out and never gets it back. Quietly under his breath, he said, “I need a better system for tracking the loans. Someone must have borrowed that book and never returned it.” Then he let out a small sharp cry, “People don’t return my stuffff!”

  In his late fifties, Daniel’s beautiful golden boy looks have left him. He has the careworn face of an old mother. It suddenly occurred to me to ask why he didn’t get a stock option at Apple. I wondered at myself for never having asked before. I had automatically aligned with Steve’s telling me that, “Just because Daniel pushes a broom around when the floors need sweeping doesn’t mean he deserves stock!” At the time, I had accepted the statement at face value, but by 2010 I finally had amassed enough life experience to question absolutely everything Steve had ever said.

  “Oh that,” Daniel told me. “Steve had offered me a job in marketing.” His words came out soft with layers of self-knowledge beneath the simple response. Hearing this I suddenly felt emblazoned by the prospect of Daniel in marketing. It seemed like it would have been a great idea because he is so people-oriented and bright. I reacted to it with enthusiasm, “Oh my God! He did? Is that ever a fit!” I had never thought of it. “Steve’s brilliant,” I said. Then Daniel went on to tell me, “But I wasn’t interested in marketing because I had something like a fever to understand the technology. I didn’t want to stop learning how the computer worked. I couldn’t stop!” This was even more eye opening to me. I’d never seen Daniel as having a strong, uncompromising passion for anything. He saunters, and his mind seems to have cultivated its own slim brand of equanimity, the kind that is the result of a familiarity with Buddhist thought, but somehow lacks an understanding of how much skin he has in the game. Many of my generation wanted to live the spiritual teachings, but we sometimes skipped the necessary work. The fact is, though, Daniel truly needed to understand how technology worked and his urgency to do so indicates to me that he may have been wrestling with the more profound riddles and inconsistencies in the technology itself. (The missing bite/byte, the missing piece/peace.)

  “So I never pursued the marketing opportunity,” Daniel told me. “I just couldn’t leave off from the technology.” Then he said, “Well, at least I have a home.” He knew that I had been ill (some kind of medically undefined infection for years), virtually penniless, and living with decency only by the kindness of strangers. To this I laughed out loud, stunned that he would say such a thing to me. Then he sighed and gave up his search for the book, and made a note to “upgrade his retrieval system.”

  After Daniel lost out on the Apple stock because Steve thought he was undeserving, Daniel retaliated by talking to every reporter that came to town. I say “retaliated” because that’s what it looked like, especially in the beginning when he was so newly burned. But then Daniel seemed to take on the role of unofficial spokesman, talking to anyone about Apple. He would explain history through his perspective, and would then, generously, I thought, direct journalists to other people. To wit, a marketer! In later years I’ve sometimes thought Daniel felt he owned Steve’s history because for a while, if I ever told him something he didn’t know, he’d act huffy and proprietary. But even that behavior changed. He always seemed to keep moving forward through his role and in his effort to be a person of worth.

  There was day in about 2006 when I heard Daniel bragging of his association with Steve and Apple to a small group of men outside of Peet’s Coffee in Palo Alto. He didn’t know I was standing nearby, unable to avoid hearing all that he said. That day I saw the confusion in the full light of day that Daniel’s hoarding implied to me—hoarding being the outward expression of what we cannot afford to forget … or remember. My jaw dropped and my body squirmed to hear his gloating because I knew he had been such a casualty of it all and didn’t recognize that. When Daniel caught sight of me, he shifted effortlessly and greeted my arrival with a broad, languid smile and a bright long-drawn-out, “Well if it isn’t Chrisann!”

  * * *

  I’ve truly hated Steve at times, but never for very long. Sharing a daughter with him has forced me to think about things more deeply. Steve the saint, the alien, the despot, the primitive and punishing masculine god of yore, the liar, the marionette, the shaman, the super-brilliant, super-speedy, supersensitive, obsessed narcissist, the magician amplifier, the mastermind, the cult hero, the id of the iEverything, the extraordinarily beautiful and honest genius, the broken toy under the bed, the motherless boy. It is only because of Lisa that I have felt obligated to comprehend the many broken shards of Steve’s glittering brilliance—I never would have otherwise.

  For all the sparkling, spacious beauty of the Apple stores, the opposite was true of one of its founders. Steve was a haunted house. There was an obvious imbalance between us—our circumstances, our life views, the things we cared about and valued. And it was beyond the psychological and legal handles of our day to bring about a balance between the two of us because his brokenness was managed and orchestrated in such an extremely masterful way. Few, if anyone, could catch up to even define what was going on, much less legally address it.

  In thinking about how this polarization could have happened, I come back constantly to the reality distortion field. Because only a massive distortion of reality could seek to justify the lack of ethical accountability that was all too common in Steve, and in the world of business as usual.

  So much is out of balance these days. And I would include the computer in that because I believe that it is out of alignment with our greatest human values. Think about it. Steve and the tech industry made the computer into one of the most seductive, affordable tools for mass use of any century—perhaps the golden calf of our day. There’s no doubt that computers are incredibly useful and elegant. They increase organization, speed, and efficiency, and help us make virtual connections to people and ideas worldwide. Computers have helped us increase our productivity and creativity by magnitudes. And yet, at the risk of sounding naïve, I think it is what is inside us that makes them useful—if and when they are useful. I think it’s important to not only look at how they free us up but also how they limit us. The computer flattens the emotional and spiritual dimensions of our lives, as it coaxes us away from real-time, face-to-face relationships with people and the natural world. I fear that one day we will finally have the science to show that generations of children have been harmed from using computers way too early and way too much.

  * * *

  The sobering reality is that when Apple got big Steve had a chance to change business practices in the world to create more sustainable ecological and humani
stic standards for all business worldwide. But he didn’t do that.

  And so it is down to each one of us.

  In boardrooms, cafés, governments all over the world, around dining tables in conversations with friends and especially with our children, we should be engaging in new dialogues to expand our ethical imaginations. Positive ethical interaction has a life force all its own. I think wealth should not only be measured by the market capitalization of commercial enterprise but maybe even more so by dynamic reciprocity between all people and all living systems on earth.

  * * *

  I feel very lucky to be Lisa’s mom. She is the one who makes my heart shine. I also feel lucky because I know what my real work is, both as an artist and a mother. My work as a mother was so profoundly disregarded that I’ve had to go inward to where all the answers ultimately live and to acknowledge myself. From what I can see, the world is in the grip of having to work out the relationship between love and power. Between love that is not powerful enough and power that is not loving enough. Being in Steve’s shadow was a call to arms for me to understand what real knowledge is. Steve never gave me money appropriate to what I did for our daughter and for him, because he never managed to understand how much I gave, so I am left with that which is priceless. How about that.

  There is always more work to do. I now have the task of stepping into the world and dealing with the consequences of telling my story. But more than this, I plan on finding my way into joy—maybe even more than ever before. And Lisa, like all children, has the extraordinary job of understanding, integrating, and balancing the truth and the best of her two parents into her own one life, Since Steve and I never did work it out between us, it’s a real job for her. But we both gave her many gifts and now it’s her opportunity to lead a life that comes from having understood both her parents and so to move into her own calling and authority.