afterwards, in January 1981, in a beautiful setting overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Hawaii at the beachfront house of Allan Carr, the producer of Can’t Stop the Music. Bruce’s son Burt was best man, even though he was only two, and spent the entire ceremony tugging at his father’s sleeve, saying, ‘I want up.’ Linda walked down the ‘aisle’ to the sound of Elvis singing ‘Hawaiian Wedding Song’. It was very romantic.
At the time, Linda was already three months pregnant with their first child, Brandon, who was born the following June. Fortunately, she got on well with Bruce’s older children, both of whom came to the hospital to visit their new brother.
Linda and Bruce became fixtures on the celebrity circuit around Los Angeles, making friends with stars like Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie and Sugar Ray Leonard, who would later feature in the Kardashian story. They appeared on the front cover of Playgirl magazine in May 1982: she revealed an impressive cleavage; he showed a lot of chest hair.
The cover headline on the article read ‘The Fall and Rise of an American Hero’. This bolstered the Bruce Jenner image of a man fighting against the disadvantages of life, including dyslexia. His story was one of triumph over adversity and was a considerable money-spinner during his years as a media personality and motivational speaker. It was an image he later promoted in his 1996 book Finding the Champion Within.
At no stage did he reveal to his audience his real struggle within. He would bounce on stage, all vigour and enthusiasm, wearing a pair of silk panties underneath his three-piece suit. Bruce, it appeared, was a master of living up to an image created for the general public. It wasn’t real.
The offers flooded in after the Olympics and soon Bruce was a very wealthy young man. He appeared on all the top talk shows, including The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson and The Merv Griffin Show. He became a well-known face on sports programmes, at one time co-presenting the popular Wide World of Sports.
He also revealed an entrepreneurial streak that would later fit in very well with the Kardashian flair for business. Their philosophy is all about making the most of every opportunity. Bruce bought his first plane in 1978 and started Bruce Jenner Aviation, which sells aircraft supplies.
He was marketed as a personality much more than the usual famous sportsman. He became the spokesperson and face on the packet of the iconic cereal Wheaties, the ‘breakfast of champions’, and a million families breakfasted with Bruce on the kitchen counter every day for years.
His acting ambitions didn’t reach the hoped-for heights, however. He wasn’t going to be the next James Bond any time soon. He tried out for the Superman movie, but the role went to Christopher Reeve.
He ended up in Can’t Stop the Music, a musical comedy based on the New York disco group Village People. Kris Jenner refers to it as Can’t Stand the Music. The film cost $20 million to make and returned $2 million at the box office. It was the first winner of the Golden Raspberry Award (Razzie)for Worst Picture. Bruce was nominated as Worst Actor, but the judges decided Neil Diamond deserved the award for The Jazz Singer.
On one level, the film could be viewed as compulsive viewing. Bruce plays a sober-suited lawyer who undergoes a transformation when he becomes involved in the world of the Village People and ends up dancing down the street in a crop top and cut-off denim shorts. If it were released today, as a snapshot of the age, Can’t Stop the Music would probably be hailed as a must-see, glorious camp classic.
Bruce’s acting career stalled at the first hurdle and didn’t much improve with a guest-starring role in the popular motorcycle cop series CHiPS. He played Officer Steve McLeish, who took over from the lead, Frank Poncherello (Erik Estrada), for six weeks. He started off as a movie star and became ‘made for TV’ in the space of a year.
Bruce and Linda, meanwhile, shared an idyllic life by the ocean in Malibu, strolling along the beach together at sunset, playing sports, going to all the best parties and welcoming another son, Brody, into the world on 21 August 1983. Nothing could upset their happiness – or so Linda thought.
Just after New Year 1985, Bruce sat his beautiful wife down and told her his secret. It wasn’t a confession she could ignore. The first time round with Chrystie, Bruce had been fairly light and matter of fact about things; this was far more serious and heartfelt. ‘I have lived in the wrong skin, the wrong body, my whole life. It is a living hell for me, and I really feel that I would like to move forward with the process of becoming a woman, the woman I have always been inside.’
The couple tried therapy, but the counsellor confirmed that there was no cure or fix for what Bruce was going through. Linda would later write movingly that the enormity of what she had been told ‘broke her heart into a million pieces’.
While Linda began the painful process of ending her marriage, Bruce began gender reassignment treatment for the first time. He had always hated his ‘ski jump’ nose, so a touch of plastic surgery to remove the bump and make it more feminine was a good start. He also had painful electrolysis treatment to remove his masculine beard and chest hair.
He started injecting female hormones, which led to him growing breasts. They weren’t Kim Kardashian-sized or anything like that, but when his young sons saw him in the shower one day, they told their mother, ‘Daddy has boobs!’ She tried to explain it away, saying that his well-muscled body had turned to fat now that he wasn’t training. Linda told the Huffington Post that she didn’t reveal the truth about their father until her sons were 31 and 29 respectively. She had sought to protect them – and him.
Bruce, by his own admission, went on a downward spiral in the late eighties. He and Linda were divorced rapidly in 1985 and he found it difficult to cope on his own. He was living by himself in a one-bedroom house in Malibu, with no real close friends. His work had dried up. When he met Kris Kardashian, he had $200 in the bank and debts, he estimated, of $300,000. His clothes were old and worn, his house was a tip and he seemed to spend half his life in his grubby van. She needed to sort him out. She would give him her love and the energy to re-establish himself with the American public.
For his part, he decided to put his gender reassignment treatment on the back burner and stop taking the hormones. He couldn’t go further at that point, because he feared the effect his transformation might have on his young children.
5
Kim wanted to be a housewife when she grew up. She was a sweet and thoughtful little girl who dreamed of being not Madonna, but a wife and mother, and maybe a grandmother one day, just like her nanas whom she adored. ‘I always thought I would have lots of kids. Be getting up going to the gym every morning – super early. Coming home, making breakfast for everyone. Packing lunches and driving the kids to school.’ It must have been very bewildering for a girl who wanted to play happy families to witness what was going on within her own home.
It wasn’t long before Bruce was practically living at Tower Lane. The mansion was much more comfortable than his Malibu home. Robert Kardashian wasn’t especially pleased by the turn of events. He blinked and his wife was having an affair with Todd. He blinked again and Bruce Jenner was sitting on his sofa.
Todd alleged that at this point he was still involved with Kris: ‘I wouldn’t say we were dating … she was still coming over to the apartment and we were still sleeping together when she had started dating Bruce.’
Todd found the situation troubling. It began ‘messing with his head’, as he puts it. Kris has never commented on his allegation, but described
