The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life with Steve Jobs (33 page)

William Fenwick of Fenwick & West was the lawyer Steve used to fact-check and change the birth certificate. Though he is a corporate attorney he did this work as a favor to Steve because of the history they shared in regard to my pregnancy and Lisa. Fenwick called me and introduced himself and said he had a few questions he needed to answer in order to get the facts straight on the birth certificate. At this time he also said, “You have an incredibly lovely and impressive daughter. And you have done a very nice job with her.” I said “Thank you” but held my reserve. I didn’t need kudos from people like him. I knew she was lovely and impressive. And I knew I was a good mom. Still, I was concerned. How had this man met Lisa without my knowing about it?

After Fenwick asked his questions, I decided to risk asking him some questions. For years I had decided that if I ever had a chance to talk with any of the men who were around Steve when Lisa was born I would do so. “Why, Mr. Fenwick, didn’t, you, as an older man, advise Steve to do better for Lisa and me in the beginning years?” I added something like, “Steve was young, he needed the advice of older, more mature men. Why didn’t you say anything to him to help him grow up and take appropriate responsibility?” William Fenwick proceeded to tell me that when he found out that Lisa’s eyes were brown that he had a talk with Steve about just accepting responsibility. He said he was proud of having done a good thing and it was why Steve had asked him to do the legal work on her birth certificate. I knew what he was indicating. Chris, whom I had met at Duveneck Ranch, was the only person Steve could identify to target and pin the paternity of his child on. Chris had blue eyes, so Fenwick had done a service to Steve to call him to accountability.

Carefully, building my case, I then went on to ask him about when Apple went public and the attorneys had celebrated because Steve had gotten away with paying me so little child support. I told him about the conversation I’d had with the woman at Peet’s. I had definitely assumed that he would have been a party to that gathering. Fenwick’s voice broke with baffled shock and he said, “Well I was never at such a meeting. And I never would have celebrated such a thing, either.” The tone in his voice was honest. I believed him.

Yet, because I thought I might never have another chance to talk with him, I pushed on, “Mr. Fenwick, do you really think five hundred dollars a month was an adequate amount of money for any woman to raise a child much less Steve Jobs’s child?” He fired back, “You could have gotten your own attorney!” He spoke fast, harsh, hard, and defensively, and I suddenly understood that I had stepped into his mean sandbox. I could hardly speak because ten thoughts hit me at once. I was unable to parse through them quickly enough and pursue questioning. We soon got off the phone.

Perhaps William Fenwick believes that the law is an equal playground and that a young single mother could be a match for Steve and all the moneyed interest that surrounded him. But that was not the case. Moreover, Steve’s advisers failed him, too. To all the men who thought they did a good job by protecting Steve, I want to know, was there some point to keeping him infantilized? And even now, I ask, what is the enlightened response in me to all of this? What will bring me strength and grace in the face of such useless, mindless, wasteful collaborations for power and position when the memory of our daily unmet needs still haunts me?

*   *   *

In 1980, after the paternity was established and Steve was sending an automatic transfer to my account once a month, one day out of the blue he came over to my house on Oak Grove to speak to Lisa. Lisa was not yet three. He sat on the floor with us and then proudly announced to Lisa, “I am your father.” It was like some kind of Darth Vader
moment. Then he waited for a response with a big, slightly fake smile on his face. I knew he was trying to do the right thing, so I watched, not knowing how to help. Lisa had no idea what he was saying and I was baffled by his stance. The Prodigal Daddy, come home. “Ta-da, here I am!” and, “This is what I look like.” “It’s me!!!” He literally said, “I am one of the most important persons of your life.”

I looked at Lisa and then Steve and then Lisa and then Steve again. After which I was doing the equivalent of hitting my forehead thinking what a fool I’d been. Here was the world genius and the complete village idiot. Suddenly I understood that the person I was longing to save the situation didn’t have the basics of emotional intelligence, much less a real conscience. He was somehow just blank and theoretical.

As he spoke to Lisa, Steve presented himself as the big bright shiny balloon that was all too easily popped and gone because if anyone said the wrong word, Steve could just walk away. He would suffer nothing if the environment didn’t suit him. I felt so unspeakably heartbroken watching as Lisa, mute and shy, took him in with her soft eyes. She only knew a few words and had no idea who this Mr. Glad Rags was. He wasn’t looking in wonder at her and saying anything like, “Hi, little one, who are you? You’re so cute! Let me look at your sweet little hands. What is your favorite toy?” My mind spun because he was so outside of anything I knew how to help with.

Eventually, after not getting the applause he had somehow expected, he then asked if we could go outside. At the moment of the request, I understood that my living room was so lacking in beauty that Steve could not bear to hang out in it any longer. Standing in the outer yard next to his car he shared a few more hyped-up words with me and then was gone as quickly as he had come, speeding off without a care in his little black Porsche. It was shudderingly weird. I wondered if the visit was another one of Kobun’s “encouraging” ideas? Here I was living in poverty and Steve didn’t know or care about anything except that he found things unpleasant to be around and wanted to move away from them. I told Daniel about it in the weeks that followed and he would have forgotten this, too, if it weren’t for the fact that it was because of him that some version of it ended up in the made-for-TV movie
Pirates of Silicon Valley.

Steve never came by again.

When I think back on all this now I wonder at Steve’s not being more invested in Lisa; I think it was because he did not provide me with enough money. Lisa and I were very valuable to him but he didn’t know it. There are many men who in a backward kind of logic seem to care only for what they pay for and invest in. As there was so little invested, he did not know to care.

TWENTY

MACHINE OF THE YEAR

I met David one Saturday morning at Peet’s Coffee in Menlo Park. I didn’t realize that he was drop-dead gorgeous, but I did notice that his eyes were full of light and honesty and the perfect amount of mischief. David was a world-class rock climber and a creative force. And though he was less complex than Steve, they both shared some kind of elemental power and a desire for the straight-up climb. I fell deeply in love with David. Lisa and I moved to Tahoe City to live with him in 1982.

David had a nice house with a short walk to the north side of the lake. The sweet-smelling pines and the clear air of the higher altitude were renewing, and David was glad to provide this to us. Lisa was three and a half when David and I met, and he welcomed her with pure delight. There was great potential for us as a little family. David had a clear passion and delight for my daughter and they bonded in many ways, but after a while I found myself uneasy about his parenting. Everybody carries their family’s unconsciousness around with them, their family patterns. Steve and I had our own complicated histories, so I wasn’t exactly judging. But things had been pressing in on me for a long time and I was worn down. Not having resolved my own history, the thought of dealing with David’s was too much to handle. I believe that David and I had the potential for a terrifically good marriage and that Lisa would have thrived. But I lacked the experience to figure it all out. When things grew uncomfortable between us I fell into fight or flight mode. After a lot of fighting, and too many impossible silences,
flight
won. Lisa and I left Tahoe after a year and moved back to the familiar surroundings of the Bay Area.

It was while David and I were still together that Michael Moritz of
Time
magazine approached me for an interview. I thought of this as an opportunity to tell the truth about what had happened with Steve. It would be my first big interview about him. And my last. Moritz was a serious guy, an intelligent writer type, bristling with ambition. (He would later become a major venture investor at Sequence Capital.) Moritz was professional and personable enough and I think we talked for about three hours. At the beginning of the interview Moritz told me he felt that there was something really off about Steve and that he intended to get to the bottom of it. Anyone who knew Steve knew that something was off, so I believed him. I told Moritz my story as his questions rolled out, and at the end of the three hours I remember him looking thoughtfully and saying, more to himself than to me, maybe I’ll call you “Charlotte Broils.” There had been some discussion of keeping my real name undisclosed for fear of Lisa being kidnapped. Moritz’s comment was a nod to this, and also to how burned I had been. Hence,
charbroiled
. It was clever and insulting and it gave me some idea of how others saw me.

The interview hadn’t been as glamorous as I thought it would be, more a combination of exhausting and alarming. Moritz’s questions were uninteresting to me, like a drill. There wasn’t anything creative or revelatory about our exchange. Years later I was told by another reporter from another big business magazine that the outcome of the article would affect Moritz for years, because he’d had no idea what it was to have gone up against Steve. Now that was revelatory.

In January of 1983
Time
’s “Man of the Year” issue was on the newsstands. Except that “Man of the Year” was turned into “Machine of the Year.” I was in Tahoe when my father’s wife called and warned me that the article was “a bit rough.” Nothing could have prepared me for what I would read, though. I’m not sure what else may have gotten stuck in Steve’s craw, but I imagine Moritz had fired a gotcha question at him about why he’d questioned the paternity of his firstborn.

I imagined that Steve’s response was vicious and contemptuous: “28% of the male population in the United States could be the father.” But actually I don’t know whether he said it in hatred or if he was cool and collected. What I do know, however, is that applying a number like “28%” to such a question is exactly how Steve worked. Steve had long before figured out that numerical detail fascinates the mind. And he was like a magician: good at creating distractions.

In that article Steve had also said that he had named the Lisa computer after an old girlfriend. This of course was a fabrication. He had no old girlfriends named Lisa. It was typical of Steve. He had taken poetic license over the edge. Now he was just lying. Before the article was published I’d been living in some kind of an illusion, telling myself that Steve appreciated all the work and love I brought to raising Lisa. She was almost four when the issue came out, and despite all evidence to the contrary, I still believed in Steve’s basic goodness. My daughter had this effect on me.

After I read the
Time
article I was hit so hard that three days went by where I was hardly able to speak or focus. To have been treated dishonorably by Steve in a national publication was so incomprehensible to me that I just went blank. I must have retreated to some place inside myself to work it all out. I don’t really know how I got through it, only that after three days I came back with all the love and laughter for Lisa and David I had before.

*   *   *

Steve had the deepest impulse to refine everything he touched, as if the act of refining was in and of the total law of his being. So it should be no surprise that, along with all else, Steve refined hatred into the coldest and most controlled inhuman indifference. Steve’s ruthlessness was so stunning that people often endured repetitions of his cruelty in order to understand what was happening so that they could figure out how to get out of the way. Also, I suspect that he used people’s suffering as an energy source for himself.

In the days after I recovered from the
Time
article I realized that I was frightened not because I was afraid
of
him—but that I was afraid
for
him. And it made me frightened about the world, too. How on earth, I wondered, could he not know what was important? How could he not know what was real? He seemed to have become a binary automaton of left-brain thinking: yes-no, one-zero, black-white, love-hate. Nuance was gone. Emotional reflection, complexity, and context were gone. What
did
he care about?

Some years after the
Time
article came out Steve was voted one of the “Top 10 Worst Bosses” in the United States. A great weight was lifted off me when I learned this. I mean I floated for a few days in wonder. I had always thought that I was alone in what I had endured. More to the point, I kept forgetting that I
wasn’t
alone because being in the sights of Steve’s hatred was so disorienting, I crumpled under the weight of it unable to think or remember anything. But here was evidence that many other people had seen it.

Despite his genius, Steve made a huge miscalculation his whole life: he believed that hatred was a legitimate force in the world. And because it gave him such unassailable power, he used it and didn’t doubt it. Moreover I think he mistook power for love because it made him feel bigger and better. To my great disappointment, he died before figuring out the mistake.

*   *   *

Later I confronted Steve. “Why did you say twenty-eight percent of the male population could be Lisa’s father?” I asked. “And that I would name my child after one of your old girlfriends?” “Moritz lied,” he said, unblinking.

If Moritz had lied, what had he lied about? It took me a couple of weeks to realize that it was Steve who was lying. I had spent just a little time with Michael Moritz, yet I knew telling the truth was a big part of his professional legitimacy. The magazine’s, too. I came to think that even if Moritz had misquoted Steve, or lied in some way, it would not have been on those statements. Besides this, Steve did have a sense of decency when he was in the right, and if he had been misquoted he would have called me the moment the magazine issue came out to apologize. He would have done something about it, too. But this did not happen, because Steve had lied. And he’d lied because he didn’t want people to see who he really was.