Benjamin franklin and albert einstein, this is the exclusive biography of steve jobs

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.

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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 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 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,