I think about these things.
I remember once in another hotel how a man came up to me in the lobby. I was convinced this was it—busted. Instead he smiled and handed me a rose. I returned the smile and got away from him as quickly as I could. The last thing I wanted was a conversation. In the dozens of outings I have made to hotel lobbies over the years, I have never had a conversation with anyone. But I was flattered.
I leave the Marriott and get into my rental car and drive around for an hour or so. This is something I also would do, depending on mood and how much time I have. I see a strip mall and park the car on the outskirts of the lot, as far away as possible from any security lights. I walk around for a little bit, holding the car keys in my hand in case of an unexpected encounter that requires a quick dash back to the car. Thank God I am in sensible shoes. I do not stay out very long, but even the freedom of walking around in the farthest corner of a mall parking lot is still momentarily liberating. It is incredibly exciting—the pulse quickens, the heart rate rises, a combination of giddiness and confidence and daring the world and happiness, sublime happiness.
Going back so many years to the age of ten, I am still trying to figure out why. Am I truly gender dysphoric, clinically defined by the American Psychiatric Association as “a marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and assigned gender”? Am I maybe just a cross-dresser deriving some sexual high? Sometimes I wonder if dressing up like this is the equivalent of having sex with myself, male and female at the same time. I have no concrete answers.
Occasionally I venture out even beyond the parking lot. Like the time I was staying at the Opryland Hotel in Nashville. The Opry Mills mall is across the street. There was a multiplex cinema and I thought, What the hell, why not go to the movies by yourself?
I went over earlier in the day and had Bruce buy the ticket. That afternoon I gave the “Finding the Champion Within” speech. I went back to the hotel room and got fully dressed as the woman inside me. Then I walked to the multiplex and went right inside the darkened theater since I already had my ticket. I wanted popcorn—you have to eat popcorn when you are watching a movie, otherwise there is little point. But I was too scared to go to the concession stand. Fortunately the movie was good and I got into it, and for two hours everything else stopped.
I left the theater afterward and had to go to the bathroom. I doubt that for anyone else there it was a complex decision—you have to go, so you go. For me it was Oh my God, now what am I going to do? I had actually used the women’s room before during previous outings. Like everything else I had a particular routine: I would wait outside to make sure no one else was entering. That way I could go in by myself and use the stall farthest away from the door. If somebody came in I would wait until she left. Then I would get the hell out of there.
The line for the women’s room was lengthy that day. There was no way I was going to wait. So I scuttled back to the hotel as quickly as I could and made it up to my room.
I am still feeling good about myself when I get back. Nobody suspected anything. But I have an early flight tomorrow, which means Bruce will be back, rise and shine. Everything has to come off, unless I have a late departure. Then I sleep with the makeup on all night and it smears all over the pillow (sorry, housekeeping). Outwardly my life is good: terrific children, a strong marriage (at least before Keeping Up with the Kardashians takes off), steady work, a public that likes me. I continue to have a positive image.
It is not enough. It will never be enough. At this point in my life in the 1990s, in my forties, I honestly don’t think I will ever get that peace in my soul. Concerns over family and the strictures of society are just too great.
I seriously think about putting a stipulation into my will that I be buried as was always my gender. Maybe that’s the best and only answer to be the woman I always was, wearing what I always wanted for more than twenty minutes in a hotel lobby or going to a movie in the dark or driving around aimlessly.
That’s the way I want to go to heaven. That’s the way I want God to see me so I can finally ask him:
Did I blow it? Was there more I should have done?
I yearn for the answer here on Earth. But until I find it I do what I do best. I play Bruce.
Chapter One
A Stupid Boy
I have been divorced three times. I have given away enough furniture to outfit Ikea. I have lost too many homes to count. I have few pictures of my family growing up. When I separated from Kris in 2013 and moved into a rented house in Malibu, the entire home was furnished in a day with items from Restoration Hardware chosen by her and a crew of roughly fifty she assembled. I didn’t even bother to take with me the gold medal I had won in the Olympics. Kris kept it in the vault for safekeeping.
I kept the accordion.
I wonder why it is the only possession of mine that has lasted through those three divorces and ten children and stepchildren, why I have lugged it around for close to sixty years since I last played it when I was eight or nine, why it is on an upper shelf in the garage of the home I now live in still in its original cumbersome case, collecting dust. It was only just recently I realized it was there, when I cleaned out the garage.
I think about many facets of my life, unequal parts wondrous and improbably absurdist. I worry about my relationship with my children and stepchildren, which I thought would make us closer now that I am Caitlyn but am so afraid has not. I think about whether to have the Final Surgery. I think about all the issues facing the transgender community and what I can do to help, because that has become a sacred commitment in my life. I still fear loneliness, just as I also know I am happier and more fulfilled than I ever have been.
The accordion is just an instrument taking up space, a relic of the long-ago past. But I believe that everything happens for a reason, so there must be a reason it is still with me. Sometimes I think if I can solve the riddle of its continued existence I can solve the riddle of my life: world record–setting Olympic gold medalist with no interest in ever truly competing in anything else ever again after I won, a fraud when it came to being my authentic self, public figure and private shadow, good father to my stepchildren but at one point abandoning my own children from my first two marriages, assertive yet deathly afraid of confrontation, a lover of people yet lonely, open yet absent of empathy, outwardly comfortable in my own skin yet inwardly desperately uncomfortable in it, wanting to be liked yet never quite sure I was liked because there were so many moments when I did not like myself.
I have felt different intensities of these feelings at different times. Some days were better than others. There were some days, even some blessedly long stretches, where I didn’t examine my soul at all or at least thought it was a phase that would pass or that maybe it could be cured—two aspirin and a glass of water and a clove of garlic around the neck and a rabbit’s foot under the pillow.
For a long time I did not understand what was happening. There was no context or point of reference. The term gender dysphoria, increasingly and mercifully a growing part of the vernacular today, had as much application in the world in which I grew up as Facebook or Twitter or Instagram. Its first usage was not until 1974.
America in 1949.
It was four years after the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and Harry Truman was still president. The Volkswagen Beetle was introduced to America, Los Angeles recorded its largest snowfall ever, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific opened on Broadway with Mary Martin, and Howard Unruh became the country’s first single-episode mass murderer when he gunned down thirteen neighbors in Camden, New Jersey, with a souvenir Luger.
Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel were born that year. So were Meryl Streep and Sissy Spacek.
Then there was me, on October 28, 1949, the same day an Air France jet crashed into the Azores and killed all on board. But also the sixty-third birthday of the Statue of Liberty.
Typical of the conflict of my life.
My coming
of age was the 1950s, the American age of the automobile and the creation of the interstate system under Eisenhower and McCarthyism and paranoia over communism, the age of Gunsmoke and Perry Mason and Bonanza and Leave It to Beaver and other shows in which virtually every major actor was a white male. In politics there were no African Americans in the US Senate and only one woman, Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, who had been elected.
I didn’t know a single gay person growing up, or perhaps more accurately, I did not know a single person who would openly identify as gay because of the atmosphere that existed then. It is better today, but that same atmosphere still exists in too many places when it comes to being different from the status quo, which for me represents nothing except the arbitrary judgment of ignorant and hateful others.
Roughly a year after I was born, the US Senate Investigations Subcommittee of the Committee on Expenditures was directed to make an investigation into the employment by the government of what was termed as “homosexuals and other sex perverts.” Among their conclusions and findings, which still bear repeating, was:
The authorities agree that most sex deviates respond to psychiatric treatment and can be cured if they have a genuine desire to be cured. However, many overt homosexuals have no real desire to abandon their way of life and in such cases cures are difficult, if not impossible…
These perverts will frequently attempt to entice normal individuals to engage in perverted practices…
The lack of emotional stability which is found in most sex perverts and the weakness of their moral fiber, makes them susceptible to the blandishments of the foreign espionage agent. It is the experience of intelligence experts that perverts are vulnerable to interrogation by a skilled questioner and they seldom refuse to talk about themselves.
To put it too mildly, it was hardly an age of enlightenment in the America in which I grew up. I wonder to what degree this environment influenced my conservatism, because I am sure it did. But it was also an age of increased bounty and consumerism—if you were white. Suburbs were rising, tens of thousands of affordable homes were being built, a middle class was burgeoning and booming. America was a safe and good place—if you were white—and I felt safe in that womb with my parents and my siblings as I grew up in Westchester County in New York and eastern Connecticut.
My father, William (Bill) Jenner, with a sense of humor as subtle and sly as his Boston accent was not, was emblematic of the Greatest Generation. He met my mother, Esther, at a roller skating rink in White Plains, New York, in the spring of 1942 after she had moved east from the Midwest. He was an excellent skater and was naturally skilled in many athletic activities. He had the ability to instantly master whatever he tried, a trait I was lucky enough to inherit. My mom was a wobbler on skates and slightly nervous as a result. She remembers it with her typical razor-edge bluntness:
Could I have this next skate?
Well, it’s your funeral.
Esther was from Ohio and had spent a good portion of her youth on a seventy-three-acre farm at the top of a sloping hill near Shadyside, overlooking the Ohio River. Her father, a portrait photographer by trade, was a man of remarkable determination and focus in areas that intrigued him, essential qualities I inherited that served me in training for the decathlon. He built the house they lived in, sturdy and modest. In his spare time he was an amateur geologist, astronomer, and maker of telescopes. He loved to tinker and mechanically experiment. Just like me.
Bill had been born in the city of St. John’s in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, moved with his family to Somerville, Massachusetts, and then Westborough. When he was young a terrible hurricane swept New England, downing thousands of trees. The logs were stored in lakes, and Bill’s father ran a portable lumber mill, moving from lake to lake. Bill worked there for a year after high school and then moved to Tarrytown in Westchester County, New York, in the late 1930s.
Esther found Bill maddeningly handsome, and it sounds as if Bill did, too (clearly, vanity runs in the family). He was working for his brother’s tree service and had a happy-go-lucky personality that Esther found infectious. They quickly fell in love, as many couples did back then, perhaps because they knew time was running out.
They got married in September 1942, when Esther was sixteen. America had declared war on both Germany and Japan, and Bill, like millions of young men his age, was desperate to fight. Because he was still a Canadian citizen, laws prevented him from enlisting in the US armed services. He could make himself eligible for the draft, but the minimum age then was twenty, and Bill was nineteen. On what seemed like a daily basis he went to his local army recruiter in New York to sign up for the draft. The recruiter finally could not take it anymore.
Have you got your birth certificate?
Bill produced his birth certificate.
Let me see it.
Yes sir.
The recruiter changed the date of his birth in pencil to make him twenty years old.
You’ll hear in a couple of weeks. Now don’t bother me anymore.
Three months into the marriage, Bill went off to the army and Esther did not see him for three years. She wrote to him every day, even though she quickly ran out of interesting things to say. She worried about my dad, and there was ample cause for worry. He did not just want to be a member of the army. He signed up to be an Army Ranger, one of those often brought into the most intense and difficult combat situations. He trained as a member of the Fifth Ranger Battalion at Camp Forrest in Tennessee, then was assigned to Fort Pierce in Florida, where he got his first taste of what was in store when he was put out into the Atlantic by ship and then returned to shore in rubber amphibious boats with forty-pound packs. Bill was adept in the water, but some of his fellow soldiers didn’t even have any idea how to swim. Nor were they asked if they could swim.
He was sent overseas to a base in Scotland for further amphibious and combat training. He was assigned to the headquarters division of the Fifth Ranger Battalion, in charge of eight soldiers whose job it was to keep lines of radio communication open between headquarters and units in the field.
He knew he was going to war.
Bill and his fellow soldiers received word of the objective three days prior, to be in the first wave that would attack the beaches of Normandy in what became known as D-Day. He and other soldiers were taken by ship across the English Channel. They started loading the amphibious boats at six a.m. on June 6, 1944. They were ten miles out and everybody was laughing at first, giddy for combat after two years of difficult training. The water was very rough. They had each been equipped with brown paper bags in case of seasickness.
My father was the toughest man I ever met. Nothing got to him. After the Olympics I bought a Pitts aerobatic biplane because of my love of flying and my penchant for pushing the limits. It was a two-seater with the passenger seat in the front. I was tested many times by friends who thought they were tough—give me your best shot—and they of course were the very first to get sick and plead for ejection. The only person who begged for more was my father. I tried everything—loops, double loops, spins, going as high as I could as fast as I could and then stalling and plummeting down before regaining control. I gave him all I got and he still wanted more.
Except during D-Day.
He did not get sick on the amphibious boat. But other soldiers did, violently so, those brown paper bags of little use. As they got closer to shore they could see shells exploding on the beach. Bullets whizzed by them. Everybody was quiet then. The giddiness of going into combat gave way to the reality of death and fire and blood and fear. Bill hit Omaha Beach into a swirl of chaos, the briefing they received useless. Running communications lines was hopeless, and placed him in the thick of combat with a submachine gun he became proficient with during training. The soldier in front of him was brushed by an .88-millimeter artillery shell, enough to split his body open. Bill hesitated for a second. He wanted to do something. But regardless of what all the umpteen films and books say, the ultimate o
bjective of every soldier who landed was self-preservation. So he kept on running to the seawall and crouched down with his entire body shaking. He looked behind him. An amphibious boat carrying flamethrowers was hit, and the boat exploded in a ball of fire. He saw men jumping overboard in flames and had to turn away. He wrapped the spurting hand of a fellow soldier who had lost several fingers. He watched as the officer in charge of communications went berserk from shell shock and tried to run away and had to be held down. He stayed in one spot for ten minutes, then, convinced the spot had worn out as a sanctuary from death, moved to another one. He painstakingly worked his way up the beach, which was littered with the bodies of American boys. Later, as he and members of his unit made it off the beach into a small French village, he would have to participate in the killing of two young French women who were married to German officers and acting as snipers.
My dad spoke little to the family about the experience of D-Day as we were growing up except for the acknowledgment that what saves a soldier in horrible combat is luck.
It wasn’t my day to die.
The Secrets of My Life Page 2
