Steve Jobs Ex Pens Memoir, Talks About Sex Life

Steve Jobs’ ex girlfriend reveals all in memoir

Chrisann Brennan, a former girlfriend of Steve Jobs, has penned a memoir recounting her rocky romantic relationship with the deceased Apple founder. Along with detailing the steamier details of their sex life, she describes the difficulties of being in a relationship with Jobs. Among other things, he denied their daughter was his until she was 15 years old. His initial denial marked the end of their relationship.

They met in high school in California in 1972 and dated sporadically during this time. During one of their “on” moments they lived with Daniel Kottke, who became one of the first Apple employees. Brennan view of Jobs is a man who is incredibility driven in the work place, but lacking in respect for those around him. One of these scenes depicts him harshly belittling waiters in restaurants.

During their relationship he began to work with a Zen master for spiritual guidance. He tried to bring her along in his spiritual development. She writes about how they took drugs together and how he tried to get her to try primal scream therapy.

Brennan’s Book, The Bite in the Apple, is due for release by St Martin’s Press on October 29.

Here, in an excerpt from Brennan’s first-person tale, “The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life With Steve Jobs”…

Steve often said that he had a strong sense of having had a past life as a World War II pilot. He’d tell me how, when driving, he felt a strong impulse to pull the steering wheel back as if for takeoff. It was a curious thing for him to say, but he did have that sense of unadorned glamour from the forties. He loved the big band sound of Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, and Count Basie. At the first Apple party he even danced like he was from the forties. So I could see the fit: Steve as a young man with all that American ingenuity from a less encumbered time, with that simple sense of right and wrong. But that’s not how I pictured him in 1977. Apple was taking off and Steve wasn’t in an airplane, he was in a rocket ship blasting out beyond the atmosphere of what anyone imagined possible. And he was changing.

It was around this time that Steve, Daniel, and I moved into a rental in Cupertino. It was a four-bedroom ranch style house on Presidio Drive, close to Apple’s first offices. Steve told me that he didn’t want to get a house with just the two of us because it felt insufficient to him.

Steve wanted his buddy Daniel to live with him because he believed it would break up the intensity of what wasn’t working between us. Our relationship was running hot and cold. We were completely crazy about each other and utterly bored in turns. I had suggested to Steve that we separate, but he told me that he just couldn’t bring himself to say goodbye.

I was glad to hear this but I was also, by this time, deferring to his ideas way too often. Steve also didn’t want us to share a room at the Presidio house. He said he didn’t want us to play assumed roles and that he wanted to choose when we would be together. I was hurt by this, but reasoned that he had a point, that we both needed a sense of space and choice. And so I went along with it.

Steve selected the bedroom in the front of the house. It was like him to want to position himself as the captain of the ship — in front. He was always vying for that superior position. I chose the master bedroom and settled in, knowing I had the best room. Daniel, who was sort of charmingly odd, slept in the living room on the floor next to his piano. But after a month Steve literally picked me up and moved everything I owned and took over the master bedroom. He’d finally realized that I had the better deal: a larger room with an en suite bath and the privacy of the backyard. Steve had paid the security deposit for the rental so was, in fact, entitled to the room he wanted. But he was so graceless that I felt humiliated and outraged.
Even after swapping rooms in this way, Steve and I still shared nights of lovemaking so profound that, astonishingly, some fifteen years later, he called me out of the blue to thank me for them. He was married at the time of his call and all I could think of was, Whoa . . . men . . . are . . . really . . . different. Imagine if I had called him to say such a thing.
We remembered different things. Mainly I recalled how awful he was becoming and how I was starting to flounder. But he was right: our lovemaking had been sublime. At the time of Steve’s phone call, I found that as I listened I was as awed by the memory as by his strange need to risk an expression of such intimacy. After I hung up I stood still and thought, Maybe Steve thinks that love has its own laws and imperative. But why call now?

His timing had always been so particular.

Living with Steve in Cupertino was not as I had expected it to be. We shared nice dinners and some beautiful evenings, but we could barely sustain a sense of emotional intimacy, much less build on it. It was like a game of Snakes and Ladders, with Steve as the game master. The ups were hopeful and the downs were extreme. I didn’t know how to hold my own with him because he didn’t play fair. He just played to win — and win at any cost. I knew that a solid relationship couldn’t be built on any one person winning, but I couldn’t understand why things kept slip-sliding away and breaking into pieces.

When we first moved into that house, I was by myself during the days when Steve and Daniel went off to Apple. I was deeply frustrated by my lack of creative focus. I had made the commitment to myself to be an artist but I had no idea how to do it. There was so much pain between me and my work that I didn’t know where to begin or how to direct myself. So when my friend Ellen offered to help me get a waitressing job at a restaurant in Palo Alto, I jumped at the chance. I wanted to be around others, to make money, and to wash Steve and Daniel out of my hair on a regular basis. I needed my own independent life and perspective away from that house. I wanted to be around other people so I could remember who I was and what interested me. I also thought that it would help Steve and me to get on a better footing or, if we couldn’t, for me to find my own feet to walk out of the relationship if that’s what I needed to do.

Unfortunately I had to turn down that job because I didn’t have a car and so couldn’t get to Palo Alto. So I ended up working at Apple in Cupertino, driving in the mornings with Steve and Daniel and walking home in the evenings if we didn’t have plans together after work. Eventually I started to take art classes at De Anza, which was conveniently located between Apple and our home. At Apple I worked in the shipping department where, if I remember correctly, I soldered disconnected chips onto boards and also screwed those same boards into Apple II cases for final assembly. The work wasn’t interesting, but the banter and laughter with my cohorts, Richard Johnson and Bob Martinengo, kept me amused.

At that time Apple had about one thousand square feet to its name, divided into three rooms total: one for shipping, one as a kind of tech lab for R & D, and one larger office for all the executives and secretaries.

One day I remember a bunch of us standing around Steve’s desk when John Draper, aka Captain Crunch, called. (Draper is well known for his contribution to the blue box technology.) Steve put Draper on the speakerphone so that everyone could hear without Draper’s knowing we were all listening. Draper was full of anxiety, pleading with Steve to do something for him. I don’t remember what now, but I do know that people were quietly laughing at him. This is nothing in the annals of Steve Jobs stories, but I remember it because Steve’s lack of fair play seemed shameless to me. I didn’t care who he was making fun of. I just didn’t like it.

On the nights when Steve and I didn’t have something to do together — and there were more and more of these — he would often come home late and wake me up to talk and make love. On the nights he just wanted to talk, I knew he had been with Kobun [Japanese Zen master Kobun Chino Otogawa was a longtime spiritual adviser to Jobs]. I would wake up to find Steve gently ecstatic, speaking to me in symbolic language with the Zen master’s distinct speech pattern. A number of times he spoke to me about how he had been given “five brilliant flowers.” His demeanor would gleam when he said this, and I would listen to find out what the symbol meant to him. My best guess after months of these reveries was that the flowers were five different people whose enlightenment Steve would be involved in. These blooms apparently included me. In the beginning he talked about “one brilliant flower” and he would touch my nose when he said it, as if to say, “That’s you!” but then it rose to three and then five.
I’d wondered who the others were.

Steve was assuming the role of my spiritual master once again and I felt uneasy about it. What if I didn’t want to be one of his brilliant flowers. Beyond this, the general lack of transparency when it came to Steve and Kobun didn’t feel right, especially when it involved me. A few years earlier Steve had tried to get me to primal scream “Mommy, Daddy, Mommy, Daddy” when we had taken LSD because he thought he was fit to oversee that kind of opening up in me just from having read a book. The fact that he had never gone through primal therapy himself didn’t seem to concern him. It was that Pygmalion thing again.
On The Web:

Steve Jobs’ ‘Tantric’ Sex Life Revealed By Ex-Girlfriend In Tell-All Book
http://hollywoodlife.com/2013/10/17/steve-jobs-tantric-sex-life-revealed-by-ex-girlfriend/

Steve Jobs’ ex-girlfriend pens memoir on life with ‘vicious’ Apple founder
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/oct/15/steve-jobs-chrisann-brennan-memoir-apple