Max
Whittaker/Prime for The Wall Street Journal ; WireImage
Abdulfattah
'John' Jandali, left, reached out to biological son Steve Jobs but
the two never met.
RENO,
Nev.—Periodically in the past year, Abdulfattah "John"
Jandali would shoot off an email to Steve
Jobs,
the son he never met. They were simple notes: "Happy Birthday"
or "I hope your health is improving."
Simon
and Shuster moved up the publishing date for an anticipated Steve
Jobs biography, based on numerous interviews with the Apple
co-founder, to Oct. 24 following news of his death. The book is
already topping Amazon's pre-sale lists, WSJ's Jessica Vascellaro
reports on Markets Hub. Photo: Reuters.
It's
unclear if Mr. Jobs ever wrote back. A person close to Mr. Jobs's
family said, no, he didn't, while Mr. Jandali said he did receive two
short replies.
The last
one arrived six weeks before Mr. Jobs's death, Mr. Jandali said, and
said simply, "Thank you."
For Mr.
Jandali, aside from the iPhone 4 he carries, his story of the emails
is pretty much all he has of a son who co-founded Apple Inc.
and grew into one of the world's most famous businessmen.
Mr.
Jandali, 80 years old and general manager of the Boomtown casino in
the barren hills outside Reno, Nev., presides over a staff of around
450 casino workers and is praised by his colleagues for his quiet
leadership style and a marketing savvy. Walking the floor on Friday,
he was stopped by an employee who thanked him for reinstalling $5
dollar slot machines. Mr. Jandali shook his hand, then sat down at
the casino's Chinese noodle joint to eat the salmon special, as he
does many days.
"I
can't take credit for my children's success," said Mr. Jandali,
who is also the father of the celebrated novelist Mona Simpson. Mr.
Jobs was put up for adoption as a baby. Mr. Jandali said he had
almost no contact with him and also has a strained relationship with
Ms. Simpson.
Mr.
Jandali's close friends say the estrangement with his children has
been a source of great sadness over the years. He kept the fact of
his famous offspring private from even those closest to him for fear
of being perceived as someone seeking to ride their coattails.
"To
me it felt like his whole life this (estrangement) is something he
regretted and he wished he made different decisions or wished there
was a different result," said Keith Henson, a general manager of
L'Auberge Lake Charles, a casino in Louisiana. Mr. Henson said he
found out only three years ago that Mr. Jandali had fathered Mr. Jobs
even though Mr. Henson was mentored by Mr. Jandali at Boomtown and
was the best man at his third wedding.
The
recent decline in Mr. Jobs's health attracted notice to Mr. Jandali,
which he said he finds uncomfortable. Mr. Jandali agreed to be
interviewed at the casino's noodle restaurant, only after saying he
didn't think his story was interesting enough to warrant the
attention.
With
crinkled eyes and white hair surrounding a balding head, Mr. Jandali
has a physical resemblance to Mr. Jobs. A side table in his office
prominently features a framed publicity shot of Ms. Simpson that Mr.
Jandali said he downloaded from the Internet.
He said
he learned of Mr. Jobs's death on Wednesday at the office, when a
stranger called to offer condolences. He quickly hung up the phone.
Mr.
Jandali only learned around 2005 that Mr. Jobs was his biological
son. He doesn't remember how he heard, but he said the news was "a
major shock."
After
that, Mr. Jandali began watching online videos of Mr. Jobs's famous
keynote speeches launching Apple products. He emailed a few times in
the past year after becoming aware of Mr. Jobs's failing health.
"I
don't know why I emailed," Mr. Jandali said. "I guess
because I felt bad when I heard about the health situation. He had
his life and I had my life, and we were not in contact. If I talked
to him, I don't know what I would have said to him."
After
hearing of Mr. Jobs's death Mr. Jandali called Ms. Simpson, who he
said didn't respond. He stared at pictures that were saturating news
web sites online of Mr. Jobs in his 20s and 30s.
Mr.
Jandali said he also read the speech last week that Mr. Jobs gave at
Stanford University in 2005 in which the Apple chief reflected on
life and death and told the story of his adoption. "My
biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student … She
felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates,"
Mr. Jobs said in the speech.
Mr.
Jobs, who was born in San Francisco in 1955, said in the speech that
in fact his birth mother finally agreed that he be adopted by Paul
Jobs, a high-school dropout who became a machinist, and Clara Jobs,
who never graduated from college. He grew up near San Francisco.
While Mr. Jobs has acknowledged he had a relationship with his birth
mother and sister, he didn't publicly discuss Mr. Jandali.
People
who know Mr. Jandali say he shares the intellectual capacity and
instinct for understanding of consumer desires as his son, albeit in
a different context. Yet unlike Mr. Jobs, a showman famous for wowing
crowds with new products, Mr. Jandali prefers to remain in the
background, he and others say.
"He's
a great influence on those around him," said Anthony Sanfilippo,
chief executive of Pinnacle Entertainment Inc., which owns Boomtown.
Mr. Sanfilippo promoted Mr. Jandali to general manager of the casino
from head of hospitality around a year ago. "He is really the
opposite of a showman because he would always put the light on others
to take the stage. He understands what guests like and what they are
willing to pay for."
Mr.
Jandali said he was never very technologically savvy. But he does
consider himself an early adopter. His first and only computers have
been Apple products—he has both a laptop and a desktop at home—and
he purchased every iPhone model as soon as it came out, along with an
iPad. He maintains Twitter and Facebook accounts.
Mr.
Jandali said he was born and raised in Syria's third largest city,
Homs, to a prominent family that owned villages and vast amounts of
land outside the city, where workers tended wheat and cotton to
enrich his family.
His
father, he said, stressed education to his three sons, of which Mr.
Jandali is the youngest. Mr. Jandali planned to become a diplomat in
Syria. In 1952 came to the U.S., enrolling a year later to get his
PhD in political science at the University of Wisconsin. His emphasis
was on how Middle Eastern countries could emerge from colonialism.
University records show he was awarded his doctorate in 1956 with a
dissertation entitled "United Nations Efforts to Set Standards
for National Independence."
While a
student in Madison, he became romantically involved with Joanne
Schieble, a graduate student in speech therapy from Green Bay. Ms.
Schieble, now known as Joanne Simpson, became pregnant in 1954 but
her father didn't approve of the relationship, Mr. Jandali said.
Ms.
Simpson went to San Francisco for a few months to get away while she
was pregnant. She eventually put her son, Mr. Jobs, up for adoption.
Ms.
Simpson returned to Madison and soon after, her father died, enabling
Ms. Simpson and Mr. Jandali to marry. After he graduated they moved
to Syria but by then the government was in transition, disrupting his
plans to become a diplomat. Instead, he said, he managed an oil
refinery. Ms. Simpson was unhappy in Syria and moved back to Green
Bay, he said, where she gave birth to their second child, Mona.
Mr.
Jandali said he returned and began to teach at the University of
Wisconsin in Madison. There and later at other universities, he
didn't publish beyond a few articles in Arab-language newspapers.
(The University of Wisconsin doesn't have a record of Mr. Jandali
being employed as professor but he might have taught classes, said
John Coleman, the current chair of the political-science department.)
A few
years later Mr. Jandali and Ms. Simpson divorced, and she later
remarried. Mr. Jandali wasn't involved in the younger Ms. Simpson's
life when she was growing up, according to both Mr. Jandali and a
person close to the family. "He abandoned the family" and
was "for the most part unreachable," that person said.
As an
adult, Mr. Jobs found and contacted Joanne Simpson and forged a
relationship with her, as well as with Mona. Joanne Simpson couldn't
be reached for comment.
Mona
Simpson in 1993 penned a novel, "The Lost Father," about a
protagonist searching for a father she never knew. Mr. Jandali read
the book and recognized himself in the father character.
"The
way I look at it, it's her way of venting, and it's OK," Mr.
Jandali said. "She's entitled to that. It's the price to pay for
not being there for your child when you're a father. Even though I
don't see her, I love her dearly."
According
to the University of Wisconsin, where he got his PhD, Mr. Jandali was
affiliated with a number of universities around the country. Around
1968, he said, he taught in the political science department at the
University of Nevada, Reno. However, his time there was brief and he
left in 1970, according to university records. By that point he
already owned a restaurant in Reno, where he would sometimes treat
faculty members, recalled Joe Crowley, a former Reno colleague who
went on to become president of the university.
He
married a woman who worked in real estate and had grown children, Mr.
Jandali said. He bought a bankrupt French restaurant in Reno and
later sold it for a profit, he said, before joining a major casino in
Las Vegas to run a restaurant. He became head of food and beverage in
1999 for Boomtown.
Not long
after that, Boomtown and other Reno casinos faced the loss of
out-of-town customers from California to Indian casinos closer to
their homes. Turning to the locals as a source of income, Mr. Jandali
in 2000 pushed the casino to introduce a lobster buffet—which drew
thousands of customers on the weekends. "People thought I was
crazy when I introduced that," he said. "They thought we
would lose money. But it attracted a lot of people." Mr. Hansen,
the former colleague, said the move was "one of the most
successful promotions" for a casino in the region.
In 2006,
widowed, Mr. Jandali remarried and now lives on a cul-de-sac in a
gated Reno suburban community. He constantly reads books, usually on
his iPad, he and others say, and he has outlined several fiction and
nonfiction books that he hopes to finish writing if he retires.
But on
Friday he was more focused on the casino's affairs, including the
next day's "Super Spin Saturday" promotion, when
casino-goers have the chance to win up to $400,000 by spinning a
giant wheel.
Finishing
lunch, he walked out of the Chinese restaurant, past tables printed
with silhouettes of gun-slinging cowboys and by gamblers playing
video poker machines. As he left, Mr. Jandali waved the iPhone in his
hand. "They produce the best," he said quietly. "Steve
Jobs was a genius."
Tamara
Audi and Jim Oberman contributed to this article.
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