Steve Jobs

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, 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.”

She never did, but years later Jandali saw his relationship to Jobs mentioned online. (A blogger noticed that Simpson had listed Jandali as her father in a reference book and figured out he must be Jobs’s father as well.) By then Jandali was married for a fourth time and working as a food and beverage manager at the Boomtown Resort and Casino just west of Reno, Nevada. When he brought his new wife, Roscille, to visit Simpson in 2006, he raised the topic. “What is this thing about Steve Jobs?” he asked. She confirmed the story, but added that she thought Jobs had no interest in meeting him. Jandali seemed to accept that. “My father is thoughtful and a beautiful storyteller, but he is very, very passive,” Simpson said. “He never contacted Steve.”

Simpson turned her search for Jandali into a basis for her second novel, The Lost Father, published in 1992. (Jobs convinced Paul Rand, the designer who did the NeXT logo, to design the cover, but according to Simpson, “It was God-awful and we never used it.”) She also tracked down various members of the Jandali family, in Homs and in America, and in 2011 was writing a novel about her Syrian roots. The Syrian ambassador in Washington threw a dinner for her that included a cousin and his wife who then lived in Florida and had flown up for the occasion.

Simpson assumed that Jobs would eventually meet Jandali, but as time went on he showed even less interest. In 2010, when Jobs and his son, Reed, went to a birthday dinner for Simpson at her Los Angeles house, Reed spent some time looking at pictures of his biological grandfather, but Jobs ignored them. Nor did he seem to care about his Syrian heritage. When the Middle East would come up in conversation, the topic did not engage him or evoke his typical strong opinions, even after Syria was swept up in the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings. “I don’t think anybody really knows what we should be doing over there,” he said when I asked whether the Obama administration should be intervening more in Egypt, Libya, and Syria. “You’re fucked if you do and you’re fucked if you don’t.”

Jobs did retain a friendly relationship with his biological mother, Joanne Simpson. Over the years she and Mona would often spend Christmas at Jobs’s house. The visits could be sweet, but also emotionally draining. Joanne would sometimes break into tears, say how much she had loved him, and apologize for giving him up. It turned out all right, Jobs would reassure her. As he told her one Christmas, “Don’t worry. I had a great childhood. I turned out okay.”

Lisa

Lisa Brennan, however, did not have a great childhood. When she was young, her father almost never came to see her. “I didn’t want to be a father, so I wasn’t,” Jobs later said, with only a touch of remorse in his voice. Yet occasionally he felt the tug. One day, when Lisa was three, Jobs was driving near the house he had bought for her and Chrisann, and he decided to stop. Lisa didn’t know who he was. He sat on the doorstep, not venturing inside, and talked to Chrisann. The scene was repeated once or twice a year. Jobs would come by unannounced, talk a little bit about Lisa’s school options or other issues, then drive off in his Mercedes.

But by the time Lisa turned eight, in 1986, the visits were occurring more frequently. Jobs was no longer immersed in the grueling push to create the Macintosh or in the subsequent power struggles with Sculley. He was at NeXT, which was calmer, friendlier, and headquartered in Palo Alto, near where Chrisann and Lisa lived. In addition, by the time she was in third grade, it was clear that Lisa was a smart and artistic kid, who had already been singled out by her teachers for her writing ability. She was spunky and high-spirited and had a little of her father’s defiant attitude. She also looked a bit like him, with arched eyebrows and a faintly Middle Eastern angularity. One day, to the surprise of his colleagues, he brought her by the office. As she turned cartwheels in the corridor, she squealed, “Look at me!”