Brennan with Lisa. From “The Bite in the Apple”
FORTUNE — It may tell you all you need to know about Chrisann Brennan’s The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life With Steve Jobs that first serial rights were sold to the New York
Post
, the Rupert Murdoch tabloid that takes juvenile pride in such headlines as Osama Bin Wankin’ (terrorist porn stash) and Hung Fu (David Carradine’s asphyxiation).
Brennan, Steve Jobs’ first girlfriend and the mother of his first daughter, Lisa, writes about Jobs’ aggressive spirituality, his “profound” lovemaking and his deteriorating interpersonal skills during Apple’s (AAPL) early years.
A sample:
As Apple grew, so did Steve’s sense of self-entitlement; in parallel they both seemed to take on lives of their own. And his behaviors didn’t improve with success, they changed from adolescent and dopey to just plain vicious. For example, in the pre-Apple days whenever we’d go out for dinner (which wasn’t that often), Steve would often be sarcastic toward the restaurant staff. The host would say, “Two?” and Steve would reply, “No, fifteen!” driving for the implicit “DUH!” But after Apple started we ate out a lot more and Steve’s behavior toward service people changed into a different kind of disempowerment.
Steve would order the same meal night after night, yet he’d complain bitterly each evening about the little side sauces that were served with it, cutting the air with disdain for the waitstaff who would serve up such greasy-salty-tasteless-mock-fine cuisine. He seemed to assume that everyone at the restaurant should know better than to serve up such wallpaper paste — not only to him, but at all. Steve would run down the waitstaff like a demon, detailing the finer points of good service, which included the notion that “they should be seen only when he needed them.” Steve was uncontrollably critical. His reactions had a Tourette’s quality — as if he couldn’t stop himself.
Of course, it must have been sort of wild to have your genius recognized at the age of twenty-two, to be thrust into such a role of authority.
Steve had always been a brilliant misfit, but at this time — to be generous — he wasn’t managing his growing power very well. In fact, he was positively despotic. Excellence had always been a gorgeous thing in Steve, but now he was using it like a weapon. He’d look for excellence and when he didn’t find it, he’d behave badly and take it out on people.
The Bite in the Apple is published by St. Martin’s Press and scheduled for release Oct. 29. You can read the Post‘s excerpt here.
