The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [89]
When A Regular Guy came out, Mona was besieged by reporters who wanted her to talk about the real-life parallels to Steve, but she refused, saying it would be unfair. “There is some biographical truth in what I do, but I want the license to make things up—which I do,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “I remember a lot, but I don’t think I remember a lot necessarily accurately.”
Meanwhile, the New York Times asked Steve whether he felt exploited or betrayed by his sister. “Of course not,” he said dismissively. “It’s a novel.” How much of himself did he see in Tom Owens? “About 25 percent of it is totally me,” he said.
That’s not what Steve’s friends believed. The few people who knew Steve well thought that the fictional protagonist, Tom Owens, was much closer to 100 percent Steve Jobs. Nearly all the major characters were easily identifiable and drawn with extraordinary accuracy. It wasn’t just that Mona had captured the emotional and psychological truths about Steve and the women—his daughter and her mother and his girlfriend—close to him. It showed how he was a narcissistic workaholic who didn’t give them enough love until he was ousted from his company and finally humbled. She hardly bothered to change or disguise the actual details, and even the names of the characters, places, and companies were closely modeled on the actual names. Steve’s girlfriend Christina became “Olivia.” His daughter Lisa became “Jane.” Sculley was switched to “Rooney.” Apple morphed into “Genesis” and the Macintosh into “Exodus.” Palo Alto equaled “Alta.” Cafe Verona was “Cafe Napoleon.” Steve’s adopted sister Patti reappeared as “Pony.”
In real life, Steve had given an expensive specially equipped van to his girlfriend’s friend Gary Bricklin, who was confined to a wheelchair. In the novel, Tom gives a van to his girlfriend’s friend “Noah Kasdie.” In real life, Steve often embarrassed Tina by flirting openly with attractive women, then retreated when they began to return his interest. In the novel, Mona creates a composite character, “Julie,” as a proxy for those women.
Mona hadn’t needed to disguise her characters because so little was known publicly about Steve’s private life. After Steve’s dark side was documented by Michael Moritz, who published his Apple book, The Little Kingdom, in 1984, Steve had withheld his cooperation from biographers, and he tried to block journalists from writing feature stories that focused on his personal life rather than the latest achievements of his companies.
Most critics mentioned briefly that A Regular Guy was loosely based on Steve’s life and then proceeded to judge it on its own terms as a literary work (the reviews were mixed). Several newspaper reporters even asserted, erroneously, that Tom Owens was modeled on Bill Gates as well as Steve Jobs.
The truth was that long passages from Mona’s book could have been published intact in a biography of her brother, beginning even with the first sentence: “He was a man too busy to flush toilets.” (That had been true during the early days of Apple.) Steve’s friends and close colleagues saw so much in the book that they knew was true that they had to wonder about the rest. In one scene, the Steve character has sex with a sixteen-year-old virgin, then feels somewhat guilty but does it again. An invented scene, or real life?
Mona wouldn’t discuss her sources, but she did make one confession to a reporter. She was called at her office at Bard College by Lisa Picarelle, who was writing a profile of Steve for a computer industry trade publication. Mona revealed that the book had ended her close relationship with Steve. He still called her occasionally because he hadn’t much family and he thought it was important to keep up a connection. But he had felt betrayed.
The media attention about A Regular Guy passed quickly. One month after its publication, Steve Jobs