as the Headless Horsemen, for some help with punting the ball. Within an hour, Bruce was kicking it as far as his coach was. The young Bruce was extraordinarily gifted as a sportsman.
His family moved to Connecticut when Bruce was 16. They built a house on Lake Zoar, where they all could enjoy their passion for water skiing. Bruce was so good that he won the Eastern Regional Water Ski Championships and competed in the Nationals in 1966. At the local Newtown High School in Sandy Hook, he excelled in basketball, track and field and American football, and became all-state pole vault and high jump champion. He was unashamedly what Americans call a jock – a muscular athlete, usually good looking, whose life revolves around sports and girls and who is always one of the most popular guys in school.
Aged 18, Bruce was named the MVP (Most Valuable Player) in the track squad and the basketball team. He played both running back and quarterback in the school football team. His coach, Peter Kohut, recognised that he was an outstanding athlete: ‘He was a good kid, came to practice every day, seemed like he was always in good condition.’
At this stage of his life, Bruce was a very clean-cut young man – the sort of suitor who was bound to impress your mother. Nobody knew that behind the masculine exterior beat the heart and mind of a man who was more female than male.
Bruce was never going to be a great scholar, but he did win a football scholarship to a small college called Graceland in Lamoni, Iowa. Any hopes of becoming a professional footballer were soon dashed by a knee injury in his first year. That turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because the athletics director, L. D. Weldon, recognised his potential and persuaded him to put all his energies into the decathlon. Bruce needed an operation to repair his damaged knee in early 1969, but when he was fully recovered, he abandoned football and became a full-time athlete, reluctantly also giving up water skiing.
Weldon was one of the most respected coaches in the country, whose CV, crucially, included training Jack Parker, who won the bronze medal in the decathlon at the Berlin Olympics in 1936. He was an acknowledged expert in the multi-event discipline and encouraged Bruce to train hard.
Success was almost immediate. Jenner broke the Graceland decathlon record at his very first try at the 10 events. At his first open meeting, he placed sixth in the prestigious Drake Relays in Des Moines, the state capital. The following year, he returned to win the competition. In 1972, he came from nowhere to place third in the Olympic Trials, earning himself selection for the US team that travelled to Munich for the summer games. He could finish only tenth, but the promise was there. He had four years to fulfil his destiny.
Bruce was still at college in 1972 when he married his girlfriend, Chrystie Crownover, a minister’s daughter from Washington State. She had no idea, when they became man and wife, of the internal struggles her new husband had faced all his life. During their first year of marriage, she became the first person he confided in. She recalled, ‘He told me he always wanted to be a woman. Understandably, I was speechless. It was hard to wrap your head around it because he was such a manly man.’
His confession didn’t harm their marriage. In some ways, his revelation brought them closer together, as sharing a secret sometimes can. In her eyes, he remained a real guy, who was, quite simply, her hero.
After graduation, the couple moved to California, where the training facilities and the climate were better suited to an athlete with his eye on Olympic gold. Chrystie worked as an air hostess for United Airlines to support them, because in those days the Olympics were strictly for amateurs. She was entitled to free plane tickets, which were a godsend for Bruce, as it gave him the means to travel to athletics meetings all over the world. Today sport is a professional career and Bruce Jenner, an all-American hero, would have been a multi-millionaire, travelling first class around the world.
Chrystie was by his side when he flew to Montreal for the 1976 Olympics. He was the current world record holder and favourite to win. He was in second place after day one, but came charging through to claim the gold. He embraced his young wife, wrapped himself in the American flag and, for a fleeting moment, was the most famous man in the world. Now he needed to make some money.
Frank Litsky of the New York Times famously wrote of his triumph: ‘Bruce Jenner of San Jose, California, wants to be a movie or television star. After his record-breaking victory in the Olympic decathlon, he probably can be anything he wants.’ He wanted to be a woman and that was one thing he couldn’t be … then. Instead, he immediately retired from athletics.
Just when it seemed nothing could interrupt a happy future, tragedy struck the Jenner family. His younger brother Burt died in a car crash. Bruce was visiting his parents’ home in Connecticut and during his stay was loaned a Porsche by a local car dealer. Eighteen-year-old Burt volunteered to fill her up with petrol, but ended up crashing into a telegraph pole. He died in hospital, along with his young girlfriend, who had skipped school to go for a ride in the top-of-the-range sports car.
Bruce named his first child Burt in honour of his much-loved brother. His son was born in 1978, six years after he and Chrystie were married. Sadly, the cracks had already begun to appear in their relationship. Faced with a future that did not contain eight hours of athletics practice a day, the reality of Bruce’s gender dysphoria – the technical term for his gender identity crisis – was making him unhappy and discontented with his situation.
He and Chrystie separated for the first time the following year, and he met the woman who would eventually become his second wife at a celebrity tennis tournament. It was held at the Playboy Mansion in upmarket Holmby Hills, LA, where he had been staying temporarily. Bruce won the tournament and the beautiful Linda Thompson presented him with the trophy.
She provided another bizarre link with Elvis Presley in the Kardashian family saga. His relationship with her was probably the most important Elvis had after Priscilla. She was a 5ft 9in willowy blonde, who was the reigning Miss Tennessee when she met The King. He moved her into Graceland, his famous mansion near Memphis, in 1972, and she was with him for four years.
Linda had been a speech and drama major at MSU (Memphis State University) and, by all accounts, was the brightest of Elvis’s women. She was popular with the notorious Memphis Mafia – the entourage who seemed to be ever present with Elvis – and she had looked after him well. Marty Lacker, the unofficial foreman of the group, explained, ‘She was like a mother, a sister, a wife, a lover, and a nurse.’
Elvis had bought an apartment for her in Santa Monica so she could pursue her acting ambitions. After he died in 1977, she became a regular member of the cast of a variety show called Hee Haw as a singer of country music.
Bruce was immediately struck by Linda’s statuesque presence. He told her he and Chrystie were separated and they hit it off right away. He was uncertain about his future, however, and briefly reconciled with his wife. After Chrystie fell pregnant, he wanted her to have an abortion, because their marriage had failed. He told Playboy magazine in July 1980, one month after the birth, ‘My first reaction was that I didn’t want it.’
Initially, Chrystie went along with his wishes, and even paid for an abortion, but changed her mind after a conversation with a friend made her realise she didn’t want to go through with the termination. She said at the time, ‘I thought, “What an idiot I am.” I wanted the baby very, very much. But I was conditioned to make decisions that were best for him [Bruce]. It was totally my choice to have the baby.’
Bruce now says he too rejected the idea of an abortion, but when Cassandra, his eldest daughter, was born, he was in the middle of divorce proceedings and sitting in a hotel room far away in Kansas City. In his famous ground-breaking interview with Vanity Fair in July 2015, he told Buzz Bissinger that he wasn’t present at the birth: ‘Under the circumstances I could not even see myself being there.’
Instead,
