Brennan told me that it was her choice to have the baby: “He said he was fine with an abortion but never pushed for it.” Interestingly, given his own background, he was adamantly against one option. “He strongly discouraged me putting the child up for adoption,” she said.
There was a disturbing irony. Jobs and Brennan were both twenty-three, the same age that Joanne Schieble and Abdulfattah Jandali had been when they had Jobs. He had not yet tracked down his biological parents, but his adoptive parents had told him some of their tale. “I didn’t know then about this coincidence of our ages, so it didn’t affect my discussions with Chrisann,” he later said. He dismissed the notion that he was somehow following his biological father’s pattern of getting his girlfriend pregnant when he was twenty-three, but he did admit that the ironic resonance gave him pause. “When I did find out that he was twenty-three when he got Joanne pregnant with me, I thought, whoa!”
The relationship between Jobs and Brennan quickly deteriorated. “Chrisann would get into this kind
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of victim mode, when she would say that Steve and I were ganging up on her,” Kottke recalled. “Steve would just laugh and not take her seriously.” Brennan was not, as even she later admitted, very emotionally stable. She began breaking plates, throwing things, trashing the house, and writing obscene words in charcoal on the wall. She said that Jobs kept provoking her with his callousness: “He was an enlightened being who was cruel.” Kottke was caught in the middle. “Daniel didn’t have that DNA of ruthlessness, so he was a bit flipped by Steve’s behavior,” according to Brennan. “He would go from ‘Steve’s not treating you right’ to laughing at me with Steve.”
Robert Friedland came to her rescue. “He heard that I was pregnant, and he said to come on up to the farm to have the baby,” she recalled. “So I did.”
Elizabeth Holmes and other friends were still living there, and they found an Oregon midwife to help with the delivery. On May 17, 1978, Brennan gave birth to a baby girl. Three days later Jobs flew up to be with them and help name the new baby. The practice on the commune was to give children Eastern spiritual names, but Jobs insisted that she had been born in America and ought to have a name that fit. Brennan agreed.
They named her Lisa Nicole Brennan, not giving her the last name Jobs. And then he left to go back to work at Apple. “He didn’t want to have anything to do with her or with me,” said Brennan.
She and Lisa moved to a tiny, dilapidated house in back of a home in Menlo Park. They lived on welfare because Brennan did not feel up to suing for child support. Finally, the County of San Mateo sued Jobs to try to prove paternity and get him to take financial responsibility. At first Jobs was determined to fight the case. His lawyers wanted Kottke to testify that he had never seen them in bed together, and they tried to line
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up evidence that Brennan had been sleeping with other men. “At one point I yelled at Steve on the phone, ‘You know that is not true,’” Brennan recalled. “He was going to drag me through court with a little baby and try to prove I was a whore and that anyone could have been the father of that baby.”
A year after Lisa was born, Jobs agreed to take a paternity test. Brennan’s family was surprised, but Jobs knew that Apple would soon be going public and he decided it was best to get the issue resolved. DNA tests were new, and the one that Jobs took was done at UCLA. “I had read about DNA testing, and I was happy to do it to get things settled,” he said. The results were pretty dispositive. “Probability of paternity . . . is 94.41%,” the report read. The California courts ordered Jobs to start paying $385 a month in child support, sign an agreement admitting paternity, and reimburse the county $5,856 in back welfare payments. He was given visitation rights but for a long time didn’t exercise them.
Even then Jobs continued at times to warp the reality around him. “He finally told us on the board,”
Arthur Rock recalled, “but he kept insisting that there was a large probability that he wasn’t the father. He was delusional.” He told a reporter for Time, Michael Moritz, that when you analyzed the statistics, it was clear that
“28% of the male population in the United States could be the father.” It was not only a false claim but an odd one. Worse yet, when Chrisann Brennan later heard what he said, she mistakenly thought that Jobs was hyperbolically claiming that she might have slept with 28% of the men in the United States. “He was trying to paint me as a slut or a whore,” she recalled. “He spun the whore image onto me in order to not take responsibility.”
Years later Jobs was remorseful for the way he behaved, one of the few times in his life he admitted as
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much:
I wish I had handled it differently. I could not see myself as a father then, so I didn’t face up to it. But when the test results showed she was my daughter, it’s not true that I doubted it. I agreed to support her until she was eighteen and give some money to Chrisann as well. I found a house in Palo Alto and fixed it up and let them live there rent-free. Her mother found her great schools which I paid for. I tried to do the right thing. But if I could do it over, I would do a better job.
Once the case was resolved, Jobs began to move on with his life—maturing in some respects, though not all. He put aside drugs, eased away from being a strict vegan, and cut back the time he spent on Zen retreats.
He began getting stylish haircuts and buying suits and shirts from the upscale San Francisco haberdashery Wilkes Bashford. And he settled into a serious relationship with one of Regis McKenna’s employees, a beautiful Polynesian-Polish woman named Barbara Jasinski.
There was still, to be sure, a childlike rebellious streak in him. He, Jasinski, and Kottke liked to go skinny-dipping in Felt Lake on the edge of Interstate 280 near Stanford, and he bought a 1966 BMW R60/2
motorcycle that he adorned with orange tassels on the handlebars. He could also still be bratty. He belittled waitresses and frequently returned food with the proclamation that it was “garbage.” At the company’s first Halloween party, in 1979, he dressed in robes as Jesus Christ, an act of semi-ironic self-awareness that he considered funny but that caused a lot of eye rolling.
Even his initial stirrings of domesticity had some quirks.
He bought a proper house in the Los Gatos hills, which he adorned with a Maxfield Parrish painting, a Braun coffeemaker, and Henckels knives. But because he was so obsessive when it came to selecting furnishings, it
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remained mostly barren, lacking beds or chairs or couches. Instead his bedroom had a mattress in the center, framed pictures of Einstein and Maharaj-ji on the walls, and an Apple II on the floor.
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CHAPTER EIGHT
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XEROX AND LISA
Graphical User Interfaces
A New Baby
The Apple II took the company from Jobs’s garage to the pinnacle of a new industry. Its sales rose dramatically, from 2,500 units in 1977 to 210,000 in 1981. But Jobs was restless. The Apple II could not remain successful forever, and he knew that, no matter how much he had done to package it, from power cord to case, it would always be seen as Wozniak’s masterpiece. He needed his own machine. More than that, he wanted a product that would, in his words, make a dent in the universe.
At first he hoped that the Apple III would play that role. It would have more memory, the screen would display eighty characters across rather than forty, and it would handle uppercase and lowercase letters.
Indulging his passion for industrial design, Jobs decreed the size and shape of the external case, and he refused to let anyone alter it, even as committees of engineers added more components to the circuit boards. The result was piggybacked boards with poor connectors that frequently failed. When the Apple III began shipping in May 1980, it flopped. Randy Wigginton, one of the engineers, summed it up: “The Apple III was kind of like a baby conceived during a group orgy, and later everybody had this bad headache, and there’s this bastard child, and everyone says, ‘It’s not mine.’”
By then Jobs had distanced himself from the Apple III and was thrashing about for ways to produce something more radically different. At first he flirted with the idea of touchscreens, but he found himself
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frustrated. At one demonstration of the technology, he arrived late, fidgeted awhile, then abruptly cut off the engineers in the middle of their presentation with a brusque “Thank you.” They were confused. “Would you like us to leave?” one asked. Jobs said yes, then berated his colleagues for wasting his time.
Then he and Apple hired two engineers from Hewlett-Packard to conceive a totally new computer.
