the apartment in Studio City to see Todd. Reading between the lines of her account, the enormity of what she had done – giving up what was so important to her life, the privilege and luxury of what Robert provided in Beverly Hills, for sex in a tiny bachelor flat – began to affect her.
She finally realised she had made a ‘ginormous’ mistake when she arrived at Todd’s apartment unexpectedly and discovered him in bed with a girl he had met in a bar. It was, apparently, a one-night stand. ‘I think I got busted,’ recalled Todd 20 years later, although he didn’t remember the exact circumstances.
Though they split up soon after, there is little doubt that they genuinely cared for one another. Todd told the Daily Mail that he was heartbroken when their relationship ended, but he knew that it would never have worked in the long term. He observed, ‘Sometimes you stop something not because you stop caring, but because it isn’t practical.’ At that point in his career, he couldn’t give Kris anything like the life she was used to and that was before you factored in the age difference. They both ended up with nothing to show for the pain and the passion.
It wouldn’t be the last time Kris enjoyed the obvious benefits of a younger male companion, but she vowed that never again would she be so vulnerable financially. It was a lesson she vigorously taught her children – Kim in particular.
Both Todd and Kris have since regretted the heartache their relationship caused Robert and the children. Todd could see how badly Kourtney, the eldest, was affected. She struggled to accept what had happened and certainly didn’t want anyone to replace her dad. It may or may not have affected her attitude to marriage but, at 36, she has yet to say, ‘I do’. Kim, on the other hand, appeared to deal with it more easily, but had married three times by the age of 33.
She has said that at the time she was more troubled by the size of her growing breasts, and would sit in the bathtub praying to God that they wouldn’t get any bigger. For a girl in the fourth grade, who had only just turned 10, one can understand her embarrassment, especially at school, where there was always some wise guy kid happy to twang the strap of her training bra. It didn’t help that her big sister would tease her mercilessly. The bath prayer didn’t work. She was a C cup at the age of 13.
More serious were the health concerns of their beloved grandmothers. Both Robert and Kris’s mothers faced grave problems that weren’t helped by the cataclysmic events in their children’s lives. Helen Kardashian had a stress-related stroke and Mary Jo Shannon was battling cancer. Fortunately, they both pulled through and the grandkids had many more happy times with them.
Just when it seemed that things couldn’t get any worse for Kris or her children, she went on a blind date that changed her life. The meeting with former Olympic champion Bruce Jenner was arranged by one of her close friends, Candace Garvey. She was the wife of Steve Garvey, one of the superstar baseball players with the Los Angeles Dodgers, known during his career as ‘Mr Clean’. Steve and Bruce were on the celebrity sporting circuit together. They were always bumping into each other at the various tennis, golf or fishing tournaments they were forever being invited to.
Candace obviously thought, quite rightly, that Bruce needed smartening up and that the fashion-conscious Kris Kardashian would be a perfect match. Bruce wasn’t so sure, until he discovered his date had four children, just like he did.
They met for the first time at the Riviera Country Club, where Bruce was playing in a golf tournament. He was immediately smitten by his vivacious companion, who was a good listener. The casual meeting led to dinner that first night, with Bruce pouring his heart out. ‘I’m 40 years old,’ he told her, ‘and I’ve never been in love.’
4
Rather like her mother in 1976, Kim had no idea who Bruce Jenner was. He was just suddenly there. She was still in the fourth grade at school and had to do a project on someone famous. She was asking Kris whom she thought she should do, when Bruce interrupted her and said, ‘Why don’t you do me?’
Kim replied, innocently, ‘Well, who are you?’ He had to explain to her that he was an Olympic decathlon champion.
Her project was a resounding success, especially when the man himself went along to the school. She pictured him taking part in all 10 events. Unsurprisingly, she got an A, which was unusual for Kim. Kourtney was acknowledged as the brighter of the two, while Kim was a steady B sort of student.
William Bruce Jenner came into the lives of the Kardashian family like a whirlwind. He was an action man who could ski, drive racing cars and power boats, play golf, water ski and, of course, run and jump. He was fearless.
It hadn’t always been like that. He was shy and suffered from poor self-esteem growing up in small-town suburbia in New York State. Nobody realised back then that he had dyslexia, and believed him to be either lazy or stupid – he was neither.
He was eight years old, a solitary child with few friends, when he started sneaking into the rooms of his mother and two elder sisters to try on their clothes. He was a boy, still in short pants, and he had no real awareness of what he was feeling or why he was fascinated by female clothing. He just knew it made him feel good. Instead of retreating more into his own private world of self-doubt, Bruce was able to find acceptance when it was discovered that he was a superb sportsman. He acknowledges simply, ‘Sports saved my life.’
Bruce was the third of four children in a comfortable, middle-class household. He was born on 28 October 1949 in the town of Mount Kisco, a little over 40 miles north of New York City in Westchester County. He described his mother Esther as an ‘all-American mom and housewife’. His father Bill was a tree surgeon who had competed in the US Army Olympics in Nuremberg in 1945 and won a silver medal in the 100-yard dash. Bruce was well built as a toddler and his proud dad called him Bruiser. Young William was generally known by his second name to avoid confusion with his father.
As a small boy, it was his dyslexia, rather than gender issues, which was the most obviously troubling. Not unusually for the 1950s, his learning disability wasn’t diagnosed. As a result, his schooldays were ‘torturous’. He even had his eyes tested, because it was feared his inability to read properly might stem from problems with his vision.
Bruce explained to Ability magazine, ‘If you are dyslexic, your eyes work fine, your brain works fine, but there is a little short circuit that goes between the eye and the brain.’ His undiagnosed problem ruined his self-confidence: ‘My biggest fear was going to school. I thought everybody else was doing better than I was. I’d look around at my peers, and everyone else could do the simple process of reading. I was afraid the teacher was going to make me read in front of class. There was always the fear that everyone would find out I was a dummy.’ Bruce had no enthusiasm for school and the teachers thought he was just a daydreamer.
When he was 11, in the fifth grade, a teacher set up a game in which everyone had to run around some chairs and back. The idea was to see who had the fastest time. It was Bruce. He was the swiftest in the whole school.
From that moment on, his life changed. Here was something he could excel at and receive a slap on the back from his fellow pupils at the quaintly named Sleepy Hollow Middle School. The village of the same name is famously the setting for Washington Irving’s short story ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’. The author lived in nearby Tarrytown, as did the Jenner family. Nowadays, Sleepy Hollow is even better known for the television series that is set in the village and is, very loosely, a modern update of the original fantasy of the headless horseman.
When Bruce was a freshman at the Sleepy Hollow High
