Steve Job’s daughter has revealed how her father told her that she ‘smelled like a toilet’ as he lay on his death bed, a new book reveals. Lisa Brennan-Jobs, 40, has released a tell-all memoir about her tumultuous relationship with the legendary Apple founder who passed away from pancreatic cancer in 2011.
The book, titled Small Fry, reveals how Jobs initially denied paternity of his daughter but was forced by a judge to pay child-support after a DNA test proved that he had fathered Lisa during his five year on-off relationship with Chrisann Brennan during the 1970s. Lisa wrote in an excerpt published in Vanity Fair: “I was required to take a DNA test. The tests were new then, and when the results came back, they gave the odds that we were related as the highest the instruments could measure at the time: 94.4 percent. The court required my father to cover welfare back payments, child-support payments of $385 per month, which he increased to $500, and medical insurance until I was 18.” Lisa reveals how she regularly visited her father at his Tudor-style home in Palo Alto in the final 12 months of his life but said she was made to feel like a “nuisance” during her trips.
“I’d given up on the possibility of a grand reconciliation, the kind in the movies, but I kept coming anyway”, she admitted. During one particular meeting her father cruelly told her she “smelled like a toilet” after she had sprayed an expensive rose mist on her face in one of Job’s bathrooms. Before I said good-bye, I went to the bathroom to mist one more time,” she wrote. “The spray was natural, which meant that over the course of a few minutes it no longer smelled sharp like roses, but fetid and stinky like a swamp, although I didn’t realise it at the time. As I came into his room, he was getting into a standing position. I watched him gather both his legs in one arm, twist himself 90 degrees by pushing against the headboard with the other arm, and then use both arms to hoist his own legs over the edge of the bed and onto the floor. When we hugged, I could feel his vertebrae, his ribs. He smelled musty, like medicine sweat. I’ll be back soon,’ I said. We detached, and I started walking away. “‘Lis?’” “‘Yeah?’” “‘You smell like a toilet.’” During childhood, Lisa says her father began visiting her about once a month after he temporarily reconciled with her mother, bringing her roller-skating through the streets of her neigbourhood. During one visit she innocently asked if she could be given his Porche after learning the flashy vehicle had a scratch and need to be replaced. His scowling response shocked Lisa, then aged seven.
“‘Absolutely not,’ he said in such a sour, biting way that I knew I’d made a mistake,” she remembers. “I understood that perhaps it wasn’t true, the myth of the scratch: maybe he didn’t buy new ones. By that time I knew he was not generous with money, or food, or words; the idea of the Porsches had seemed like one glorious exception. I wished I could take it back. We pulled up to the house and he turned off the engine. Before I made a move to get out he turned to face me. “‘You’re not getting anything,’” he said. “‘You understand? Nothing. You’re getting nothing.’ Did he mean about the car, something else, bigger? I didn’t know. His voice hurt—sharp, in my chest.”
In later years, Lisa and her father grew to enjoy a respectful and sometimes caring relationship, thanks to the efforts of her biological aunt Mona Simpson. Jobs admitted some years that the flagship LISA computer, released in 1983, in fact, named after his daughter after claiming for years that the acronym stood for Local Integrated Software Architecture.
A movie about Job’s relationship with his former partner Chisanne and daughter Lisa was examined in a Danny Boyle directed biopic starring Michael Fassbender and Kate Winselt, which was released in 2015. Small Fry by Lisa Brenna Jobs will be released on September 4 2018 and is available for pre-order online.Photo Credit: Getty
