The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [28]
Steve and Barbara began a romantic relationship, and Steve essentially lived in Barbara’s shack in the mountains. Sometime during that period, Chris-Ann became pregnant and insisted that the child was Steve’s. When he didn’t seem to care, she reacted with violent outbursts. She threw plates at him, scrawled angry words in charcoal on the walls of the bedroom where he hardly ever slept. Steve denied his parentage and refused his support, even though some of his most trusted friends—including Dan Kottke and Elizabeth Holmes—believed that he was the father. They couldn’t understand how the Steve they knew, who had struggled emotionally for so many years with the knowledge of his own abandonment and adoption, could make an orphan of his own child. They had trouble thinking that the Steve they knew—honest, generous, sharing, empathetic, spiritual, searching—would deny his role and refuse his responsibility. It was bad karma.
Chris-Ann went off to the commune in Oregon, the All-One Farm, where she gave birth to Lisa in 1978. But soon the mother and daughter were back in northern California, living on welfare. The county sued Steve for child support and subjected him to a blood test at UCLA, which determined a 94.4 percent probability that he was the father. Still, he doggedly denied his parentage and refused to provide financial support. Chris-Ann asked for a settlement of $20,000, a sliver of Steve’s paper wealth. His colleagues on the Apple board implored him to settle. They worried about the potential for adverse publicity, especially since the company was preparing to go public. Just before Apple’s initial public offering in 1980, Steve finally agreed to pay $385 a month in child support.
The Chris-Ann story remained quiet, but as Steve’s celebrity grew, it was inevitable that it would be revealed. In 1982, Time’s San Francisco correspondent, an affable Oxford graduate named Michael Moritz, interviewed Steve for a story on American entrepreneurs. Steve’s portrait ran on the magazine’s cover. Soon after, Steve agreed to give him unhindered access to write a behind-the-scenes book about Apple. Michael interviewed Dan Kottke, who talked about the episodes with Chris-Ann and Lisa. Dan didn’t think that he was revealing anything that wasn’t public knowledge: he thought the story had run in the local newspapers, and surely it was openly discussed by all the other Apple insiders.
As 1982 came to a close, Steve knew that Time was planning to make him its “Man of the Year” for his role in the computer revolution. Then Moritz informed his editors about the darker side of Steve’s personality. So the issue was published with “the computer” as “Machine of the Year.” The cover story was followed by a shorter three-page piece on Steve, an accurate, well-balanced portrait that described his accomplishments as well as his autocratic bent. It also revealed his prolonged refusal to support his out-of-wedlock child.
Steve was enraged. He gathered together the entire Macintosh team and accused Dan Kottke of betrayal. The two men had been the closest of friends in college. They had dropped acid together and traveled to India together. They had worked side by side in the now-legendary garage. But from that day onward, Steve would no longer talk to Dan.
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WHILE HIS EX-GIRLFRIEND Chris-Ann had shared his interest in the counterculture, Barbara was part of the realm of business and technology, where Steve was now immersed. He could take Barbara along with him on social outings with techno-geniuses like his buddy Bob Metcalfe, an MIT Ph.D. who had done breakthrough work in computer science. Steve and Bob were neighbors in Woodside and they liked to double-date together, driving up to San Francisco and staying over at Bob’s crash