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did add a nice acknowledgment at the end of the book to “Steve Jobs for forcing me to use a word processor by putting one in my kitchen.”
Finding Joanne and Mona
When Jobs was thirty-one, a year after his ouster from Apple, his mother Clara, who was a smoker, was stricken with lung cancer. He spent time by her deathbed, talking to her in ways he had rarely done in the past and asking some questions he had refrained from raising before. “When you and Dad got married, were you a virgin?” he asked. It was hard for her to talk, but she forced a smile. That’s when she told him that she had been married before, to a man who never made it back from the war. She also filled in some of the details of how she and Paul Jobs had come to adopt him.
Soon after that, Jobs succeeded in tracking down the woman who had put him up for adoption. His quiet quest to find her had begun in the early 1980s, when he hired a detective who had failed to come up with anything. Then Jobs noticed the name of a San Francisco doctor on his birth certificate. “He was in the phone book, so I gave him a call,” Jobs recalled. The doctor was no help. He claimed that his records had been destroyed in a fire. That was not true. In fact, right after Jobs called, the doctor wrote a letter, sealed it in an envelope, and wrote on it, “To be delivered to Steve Jobs on my death.” When he died a short time later, his widow sent the letter to Jobs. In it, the doctor explained that his mother had been an unmarried graduate student from Wisconsin named Joanne Schieble.
It took another few weeks and the work of another detective to track her down. After giving him up, Joanne had married his biological father, Abdulfattah “John”
Jandali, and they had another child, Mona. Jandali abandoned them five years later, and Joanne married a
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colorful ice-skating instructor, George Simpson. That marriage didn’t last long either, and in 1970 she began a meandering journey that took her and Mona (both of them now using the last name Simpson) to Los Angeles.
Jobs had been reluctant to let Paul and Clara, whom he considered his real parents, know about his search for his birth mother. With a sensitivity that was unusual for him, and which showed the deep affection he felt for his parents, he worried that they might be offended. So he never contacted Joanne Simpson until after Clara Jobs died in early 1986. “I never wanted them to feel like I didn’t consider them my parents, because they were totally my parents,” he recalled. “I loved them so much that I never wanted them to know of my search, and I even had reporters keep it quiet when any of them found out.” When Clara died, he decided to tell Paul Jobs, who was perfectly comfortable and said he didn’t mind at all if Steve made contact with his biological mother.
So one day Jobs called Joanne Simpson, said who he was, and arranged to come down to Los Angeles to meet her. He later claimed it was mainly out of curiosity. “I believe in environment more than heredity in determining your traits, but still you have to wonder a little about your biological roots,” he said. He also wanted to reassure Joanne that what she had done was all right. “I wanted to meet my biological mother mostly to see if she was okay and to thank her, because I’m glad I didn’t end up as an abortion. She was twenty-three and she went through a lot to have me.”
Joanne was overcome with emotion when Jobs arrived at her Los Angeles house. She knew he was famous and rich, but she wasn’t exactly sure why. She immediately began to pour out her emotions. She had
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been pressured to sign the papers putting him up for adoption, she said, and did so only when told that he was happy in the house of his new parents. She had always missed him and suffered about what she had done. She apologized over and over, even as Jobs kept reassuring her that he understood, and that things had turned out just fine.
Once she calmed down, she told Jobs that he had a full sister, Mona Simpson, who was then an aspiring novelist in Manhattan. She had never told Mona that she had a brother, and that day she broke the news, or at least part of it, by telephone. “You have a brother, and he’s wonderful, and he’s famous, and I’m going to bring him to New York so you can meet him,” she said.
Mona was in the throes of finishing a novel about her mother and their peregrination from Wisconsin to Los Angeles, Anywhere but Here. Those who’ve read it will not be surprised that Joanne was somewhat quirky in the way she imparted to Mona the news about her brother. She refused to say who he was—only that he had been poor, had gotten rich, was good-looking and famous, had long dark hair, and lived in California.
Mona then worked at the Paris Review, George Plimpton’s literary journal housed on the ground floor of his townhouse near Manhattan’s East River. She and her coworkers began a guessing game on who her brother might be. John Travolta? That was one of the favorite guesses. Other actors were also hot prospects.
At one point someone did toss out a guess that “maybe it’s one of those guys who started Apple computer,” but no one could recall their names.
The meeting occurred in the lobby of the St. Regis Hotel. “He was totally straightforward and lovely, just a normal and sweet guy,” Mona recalled. They all sat and talked for a few minutes, then he took his sister for a long walk, just the two of them. Jobs was thrilled to find
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that he had a sibling who was so similar to him. They were both intense in their artistry, observant of their surroundings, and sensitive yet strong-willed. When they went to dinner together, they noticed the same architectural details and talked about them excitedly afterward. “My sister’s a writer!” he exulted to colleagues at Apple when he found out.
When Plimpton threw a party for Anywhere but Here in late 1986, Jobs flew to New York to accompany Mona to it. They grew increasingly close, though their friendship had the complexities that might be expected, considering who they were and how they had come together. “Mona was not completely thrilled at first to have me in her life and have her mother so emotionally affectionate toward me,” he later said. “As we got to know each other, we became really good friends, and she is my family. I don’t know what I’d do without her. I can’t imagine a better sister. My adopted sister, Patty, and I were never close.” Mona likewise developed a deep affection for him, and at times could be very protective, although she would later write an edgy novel about him, A Regular Guy, that described his quirks with discomforting accuracy.
One of the few things they would argue about was her clothes. She dressed like a struggling novelist, and he would berate her for not wearing clothes that were
“fetching enough.” At one point his comments so annoyed her that she wrote him a letter: “I am a young writer, and this is my life, and I’m not trying to be a model anyway.” He didn’t answer. But shortly after, a box arrived from the store of Issey Miyake, the Japanese fashion designer whose stark and technology-influenced style made him one of Jobs’s favorites. “He’d gone shopping for me,” she later said,
“and he’d picked out great things, exactly my size, in flattering colors.” There was one pantsuit that he had
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particularly liked, and the shipment included three of them, all identical. “I still remember those first suits I sent Mona,” he said. “They were linen pants and tops in a pale grayish green that looked beautiful with her reddish hair.”
The Lost Father
In the meantime, Mona Simpson had been trying to track down their father, who had wandered off when she was five. Through Ken Auletta and Nick Pileggi, prominent Manhattan writers, she was introduced to a retired New York cop who had formed his own detective agency. “I paid him what little money I had,” Simpson recalled, but the search was unsuccessful. Then she met another private eye in California, who was able to find an address for Abdulfattah Jandali in Sacramento through a Department of Motor Vehicles search.
Simpson told her brother and flew out from New York to see the man who was apparently their father.
Jobs had no interest in meeting him. “He didn’t treat me well,” he later explained. “I don’t hold anything against him—I’m happy to be alive. But what bothers me most is that he didn’t treat Mona well. He abandoned her.” Jobs himself had abandoned his own illegitimate daughter, Lisa, and now was trying to restore their relationship, but that complexity did not soften his feelings toward Jandali. Simpson went to Sacramento alone.
“It was very intense,” Simpson recalled. She found her father working in a small restaurant. He seemed happy to see her, yet oddly passive about the entire situation. They talked for a few hours, and he recounted that, after he left Wisconsin, he had drifted away from teaching and gotten into the restaurant business.
Jobs had asked Simpson not to mention him, so she didn’t. But at one point her father casually remarked that he and her mother had had another baby, a boy,
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before she had been born. “What happened to him?”
she asked. He replied, “We’ll never see that baby again. That baby’s gone.” Simpson recoiled but said nothing.
An even more astonishing revelation occurred when Jandali was describing the previous restaurants that he had run. There had been some nice ones, he insisted, fancier than the Sacramento joint they were then sitting in. He told her, somewhat emotionally, that he wished she could have seen him when he was managing a Mediterranean restaurant north of San Jose. “That was a wonderful place,” he said. “All of the successful technology people used to come there. Even Steve Jobs.” Simpson was stunned. “Oh, yeah, he used to come in, and he was a sweet guy, and a big tipper,”
her father added. Mona was able to refrain from blurting out, Steve Jobs is your son!
When the visit was over, she called Jobs surreptitiously from the pay phone at the restaurant and arranged to meet him at the Espresso Roma café in Berkeley. Adding to the personal and family drama, he brought along Lisa, now in grade school, who lived with her mother, Chrisann. When they all arrived at the café, it was close to 10 p.m., and Simpson poured forth the tale. Jobs was understandably astonished when she mentioned the restaurant near San Jose. He could recall being there and even meeting the man who was his biological father. “It was amazing,” he later said of the revelation. “I had been to that restaurant a few times, and I remember meeting the owner. He was Syrian. Balding. We shook hands.”
Nevertheless Jobs still had no desire to see him. “I was a wealthy man by then, and I didn’t trust him not to try to blackmail me or go to the press about it,” he recalled. “I asked Mona not to tell him about me.”
