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Lisa Moves In
In the middle of Lisa’s eighth-grade year, her teachers called Jobs. There were serious problems,
and it was probably best for her to move out of her mother’s house. So Jobs went on a walk with
Lisa, asked about the situation, and offered to let her move in with him. She was a mature girl, just
turning fourteen, and she thought about it for two days. Then she said yes. She already knew
which room she wanted: the one right next to her father’s. When she was there once, with no one
home, she had tested it out by lying down on the bare floor.
It was a tough period. Chrisann Brennan would sometimes walk over from her own house a few
blocks away and yell at them from the yard. When I asked her recently about her behavior and the
allegations that led to Lisa’s moving out of her house, she said that she had still not been able to
process in her own mind what occurred during that period. But then she wrote me a long email
that she said would help explain the situation:
Do you know how Steve was able to get the city of Woodside to allow him to tear his Woodside home
down? There was a community of people who wanted to preserve his Woodside house due to its
historical value, but Steve wanted to tear it down and build a home with an orchard. Steve let that house
fall into so much disrepair and decay over a number of years that there was no way to save it. The
strategy he used to get what he wanted was to simply follow the line of least involvement and
resistance. So by his doing nothing on the house, and maybe even leaving the windows open for years,
the house fell apart. Brilliant, no? . . . In a similar way did Steve work to undermine my effectiveness
AND my well being at the time when Lisa was 13 and 14 to get her to move into his house. He started
with one strategy but then it moved to another easier one that was even more destructive to me and more
problematic for Lisa. It may not have been of the greatest integrity, but he got what he wanted.
Lisa lived with Jobs and Powell for all four of her years at Palo Alto High School, and she began
using the name Lisa Brennan-Jobs. He tried to be a good father, but there were times when he was
cold and distant. When Lisa felt she had to escape, she would seek refuge with a friendly family
who lived nearby. Powell tried to be supportive, and she was the one who attended most of Lisa’s
school events.
By the time Lisa was a senior, she seemed to be flourishing. She joined the school newspaper,
The Campanile
, and became the coeditor. Together with her classmate Ben Hewlett, grandson of
the man who gave her father his first job, she exposed secret raises that the school board had given
to administrators. When it came time to go to college,
she knew she wanted to go east. She applied to Harvard—forging her father’s signature on the
application because he was out of town—and was accepted for the class entering in 1996.
At Harvard Lisa worked on the college newspaper,
The Crimson
, and then the literary
magazine,
The Advocate
. After breaking up with her boyfriend, she took a year abroad at King’s
College, London. Her relationship with her father remained tumultuous throughout her college
years. When she would come home, fights over small things—what was being served for dinner,
whether she was paying enough attention to her half-siblings—would blow up, and they would not
speak to each other for weeks and sometimes months. The arguments occasionally got so bad that
Jobs would stop supporting her, and she would borrow money from Andy Hertzfeld or others.
Hertzfeld at one point lent Lisa $20,000 when she thought that her father was not going to pay her
tuition. “He was mad at me for making the loan,” Hertzfeld recalled, “but he called early the next
morning and had his accountant wire me the money.” Jobs did not go to Lisa’s Harvard graduation
in 2000. He said, “She didn’t even invite me.”
There were, however, some nice times during those years, including one summer when Lisa
came back home and performed at a benefit concert for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an
advocacy group that supports access to technology. The concert took place at the Fillmore
Auditorium in San Francisco, which had been made famous by the Grateful Dead, Jefferson
Airplane, and Jimi Hendrix. She sang Tracy Chapman’s anthem “Talkin’ bout a Revolution”
(“Poor people are gonna rise up / And get their share”) as her father stood in the back cradling his
one-year-old daughter, Erin.
Jobs’s ups and downs with Lisa continued after she moved to Manhattan as a freelance writer.
Their problems were exacerbated because of Jobs’s frustrations with Chrisann. He had bought a
$700,000 house for Chrisann to use and put it in Lisa’s name, but Chrisann convinced her to sign
it over and then sold it, using the money to travel with a spiritual advisor and to live in Paris. Once
the money ran out, she returned to San Francisco and became an artist creating “light paintings”
and Buddhist mandalas. “I am a ‘Connector’ and a visionary contributor to the future of evolving
humanity and the ascended Earth,”
she said on her website (which Hertzfeld maintained for her). “I experience the forms, color,
and sound frequencies of sacred vibration as I create and live with the paintings.” When Chrisann
needed money for a bad sinus infection and dental problem, Jobs refused to give it to her, causing
Lisa again to not speak to him for a few years. And thus the pattern would continue.
Mona Simpson used all of this, plus her imagination, as a springboard for her third novel,
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