‘I live in hope he will reach out to me before it’s too late’: Steve Jobs’ biological father speaks of yearning to meet his son

The biological father of Steve Jobs has begged him to get in touch ‘before it is too late’ – 56 years after he gave him up for adoption.

Abdulfattah John Jandali said that he was desperate to speak to his son for the first time before cancer claimed his life, but insists he is not after his son’s money.

The 80-year-old said he was overcome with guilt for abandoning the boy but admitted that after all this time he was too proud to make the first move.

Biological father: Abdulfattah John Jandali has expressed regret over giving up his son Steve Jobs for adoption and wants to meet him

Instead he implored the Apple founder to call and arrange a reconciliation.

Frail: Steve Jobs was seen on Friday being helped by a friend in Palo Alto

Mr Jandali’s intervention came just days after Mr Jobs stepped down as chief executive of the computing and electronics giant.

Photographs taken since then show him looking more gaunt than ever and have raised renewed fears his long lasting battle with cancer may finally be coming to an end.

Mr Jandali, a Syrian immigrant to the U.S. who now works as vice president of a casino in Reno, Nevada, said he only recently learned that his son went on to found Apple, the second largest company in the world behind Exxon with a net worth £221billion.

He said he has emailed Mr Jobs a few times but has not called for fear he would wrongly think he was after his money.

‘This might sound strange, though, but I am not prepared, even if either of us was on our deathbeds, to pick up the phone to call him,’ Mr Jandali said.

‘Steve will have to do that, as the Syrian pride in me does not want him ever to think I am after his fortune.

‘Now I just live in hope that, before it is too late, he will reach out to me, because even to have just one coffee with him just once would make me a very happy man’.

Mr Jandali said that it was 56 years ago that his girlfriend Joanne Simpson fell pregnant and he was forbidden from marrying her.

Without telling him she left their home in Wisconsin and went to San Francisco where she had the baby and gave it up for adoption, he told the New York Post.

Like Mr Jobs his father is a workaholic who has no plans to retire, even though he is 80 years of age.

The only contact over the years has been the occasional email he has sent marking his son’s birthday, but that has been all out of respect for his adopted parents.

‘Because I really am not his dad,’ he said.

‘Mr and Mrs Jobs are, as they raised him. And I don’t want to take their place. I just would like to get to know this amazing man I helped in a very small way to produce.’

He added that even though he thought of himself as a ‘computer dunce’ he owns a Mac computer, iPhone and and iPad.

He said: ‘I honestly look at these things and cannot believe Steve created them’.

Jobs, who has endured a much-publicised battle with cancer since 2004, has always been fiercely protective of his private life and little is known about the powerhouse behind the Apple brand.

The stereotype of a cool New York sophisticate, he famously wears only black and has a minimalist philosophy so severe that friends recall visiting his mansion to find it virtually empty but for a picture of Einstein, a Tiffany lamp, a chair and a bed.

In the Apple HQ, so great is the culture of secrecy that executives are said to deliberately pass misinformation to colleagues to see who spreads it.

Resemblance: Mr Jandali just found out a few years ago that Jobs, 56, is his son

Engineers working on sensitive projects are watched constantly by cameras and have to cover up prototypes with black sheets so no one can see them.

For decades, Jobs, thought to be worth more than $5 billion, has tried to put a metaphorical black sheet over his private life, too, stalking out of interviews and blacklisting publications that did not tell his life story as he presented it.

A biographer has described him as the ‘Jackie Kennedy Onassis of business and technology — a figure who is ubiquitous as a symbol of his times, but little known as a human being’.

Women have been a complicated issue with the man who has been described as the ‘God of our consumer age’.

Turn back time: A young Steve Jobs in 1994 with one of the first apple computers. he resigned from the company last week

Grandfather; Mr Jandali tried to contact Jobs’ daughter Lisa through Facebook as he is trying to reconcile with his biological son before it is too late

Friends who knew about his own adoption were horrified when Jobs’ first serious girlfriend, a painter named Chris-Ann Brennan, became pregnant in 1977 and he refused to believe he was the father.

The mother initially raised their daughter on benefits. Jobs accepted his responsibilities after a court-ordered blood test proved he was the father.

It wasn’t until he was in his thirties that Jobs discovered his sister Mona and the two became friends.

Although he has been married since 1991 — happily, insist Silicon Valley insiders — to blonde beauty Laurene Powell (they have three children), Jobs previously had a string of well-connected girlfriends.

Deciding the ‘young, superintelligent, artistic women’ he liked were not to be found in California, in the Eighties he bought a multi-million-dollar apartment at the top of New York’s famous San Remo building on Central Park.

It became his base for periodic visits to the Big Apple where he would take out famous actresses, including Diane Keaton, artists  and writers. None of his romances lasted long.

He once dated the folk singer Joan Baez. A college friend believes he became her lover ‘because Baez had been the lover of Bob Dylan’, with whom he had long been fixated.

His adoptive parents, working-class couple Paul and Clara Jobs, raised him in Mountainview California, were only allowed to sign the adoption papers if they promised to send Jobs to university.

He lasted only a few months at a university in Oregon and then survived on free meals from a local hare Krishna temple before going to India to become a Buddhist.

source daily mail