I have not reached that point. I don’t want to give the impression that I am thinking, Is this really me? But I do think about gender. I am firmly on the side of womanhood now. But I am not a woman. Nor will I ever be.
I am a trans woman. There is a difference.
I never menstruated or had menopause. I obviously cannot give birth. I was never screwed out of a job because of the sexism that is still pervasive.
Is my gender female? Yes. Has it always been female? Yes. I use the women’s restroom because I am a woman. I changed the gender on my birth certificate to female because I am a woman. But it’s a different kind of womanhood for me. And that will never change. I’m fine with that. It doesn’t diminish Caitlyn.
I’m glad when Kim carts off several bags of clothing to her car. I need the closet space. Plus the best stuff, all the athletic gear I wore over the years as Bruce, I’m still keeping.
I never told her about the drawer full of breast forms and hip pads I used to wear. They are in the bedroom closet where all of Caitlyn’s clothes now hang. I don’t need any of them now, so I wonder why I even kept them. But then I realized why: they symbolize my struggle when I was Bruce, but they are also part of the journey of my life. I can’t ignore them. I don’t want to ignore them.
I pack them up into a box. I know exactly where I am going to put them: in the garage next to the accordion.
Chapter Five
Golden Boy
It doesn’t even take a day before the sportswriters, intent on finding a story to take out of the Olympics, start furiously tapping their typewriter keys. They need a happy ending. America needs a happy ending. The aura of male invincibility they ascribe to me is already in high gear: I am an athlete who comes along once in a millennium, or so they write.
Bruce Jenner’s next move should be the rental of a Brinks truck. Prince Valiant with muscles… Imagine. A movie. Our hero is handsome beyond right. His wife is a beautiful blonde who wears a yellow t-shirt with the words “Go Jenner Go” on the back. Our hero is winning the decathlon, the event that from Jim Thorpe’s day has been the measure of the world’s greatest athlete.
—DAVID KINDRED, THE COURIER-JOURNAL OF LOUISVILLE
Bruce Jenner, the golden boy from San Jose, Calif.
—ROBERT FACHET, WASHINGTON POST
Bruce Jenner of San Jose, Calif., wants to be a movie or television star. After his record-breaking victory in the Olympic decathlon today, he probably can be anything he wants.
—FRANK LITSKY, THE NEW YORK TIMES
Hollywood-handsome.
—ASSOCIATED PRESS
Bruce Jenner always says the right thing at the right time, no matter what the place… everything that glitters is Bruce Jenner.
—PHIL HERSH, CHICAGO DAILY NEWS
This is a couple America will not be allowed to forget…
—KENNETH DENLINGER, THE WASHINGTON POST
Jenner is twirling the nation like a baton; he and his wife, Chrystie, are so high up on the pedestal of American heroism, it would take a crane to get them down.
—TONY KORNHEISER, NEW YORK TIMES
The only thing missing is that I have this woman living inside me. I don’t like what I see when I dress up: big arms, legs long but too muscular, no clothes that really fit. It is all great for the decathlon but not very good for a night out on the town. But the last thing I can do is physically alter my appearance in any way. The sportswriters won’t tolerate it. America won’t tolerate it.
I will continue to play the game of Bruce, the demands upon him never greater. That’s actually good, a new zone of preoccupation. But being busy is only a distraction, not a solution.
Otherwise the sportswriters nailed it.
I am not innocent in all the hoopla. I know I am photogenic and telegenic and wholesome, actually because I am photogenic and telegenic and wholesome, and so is my wife. Our partnership is a legitimate story, and the media laps it up. We play along with it even though we are beginning to have problems. We do interviews together and appearances together and present ourselves as the ultimate apple-pie couple.
A few in the media suggest that I had a game plan in place before the Olympics on how to capitalize if I won. Did I hope there would be opportunities? Of course. Remember, these were the days of true amateurism, when there were no financial sponsorships. But I had no idea what they would be nor did I care. I only wanted to win. Chrystie only wanted to win. If I had never gotten a single endorsement after the Games, that would have been fine.
Now there are opportunities. Some are beyond silly—General Mills actually wanted me to jump out of an oversized Wheaties box for the sake of some cheap promotion. But I do intuitively understand the media game and the fame game and the endorsement game. It is all a game and you have to play it. I am all too aware of what happened to Mark Spitz, the American swimmer who won seven gold medals at the 1972 games and set seven world records in every event in which he participated. The hope was that Spitz would become the first American Olympian to parlay his performance into a fortune. It was projected that Spitz might get $5 million in endorsements, and there were hyperbolic predictions of a major film career. But he just didn’t have the personality for it. He scored a legendary bomb on a Bob Hope special two months after the Games and quickly proved to the film industry that not only could he not act but he didn’t like acting.
He also burned a lot of bridges with companies he endorsed. He was never very good at the shadow dance with either the media or sponsors, which entails being humble and endlessly appreciative. I once heard him say he spent fifteen years on his swimming and fifteen minutes on his speeches. It just didn’t seem like he was cut out for this kind of life.
I try not to make the same mistakes as Spitz. Already at this point in my life I know I am a good actor even if I have never appeared in a single thing. If I have successfully hidden my true self from the world, how hard can it be to do film or television? At least I know I can cross-dress.
I prove it when I do a Bob Hope special on NBC after the Games. I appear with Bob and former Los Angeles Rams defensive lineman–turned–actor Merlin Olsen as the “Melody Maids.” The gag is that we are going to appear with Bob in drag together, which for me isn’t a gag but something of a godsend. I have to be careful not to show too much enthusiasm, so I play it cool, guy’s guys dressing up like a woman. Yuk-yuk-yuk.
Bob looks the best of the three of us. Merlin’s beard is not working for him. Our wigs and dresses are purposely ridiculous. But the red heels I think not only look good on me but also fit, so I steal them after the show.
Forty years later I am ready to return them.
It is a tremendous high to go out and conquer the world physically. I feel like a gladiator going into the arena and being the only one left standing. I don’t want to diminish that. But the Games have only made me feel strong physically. They don’t make me feel strong emotionally. I don’t feel like I remotely have my act together, a place in life that truly fits. I still feel weak. I still feel unworthy.
But suck it up, Little Brucie. Suck it up. Play the game.
You’ve always been good at games.
So work it, little Brucie. Work it.
And by the way, tell the woman inside you to keep her mouth shut.
In the aftermath of Montreal I become a staple of the talk show circuit, often appearing with Chrystie: Good Morning America with David Hartman as host and Billy Carter as guest; the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and guests John Davidson (remember), Madlyn Rhue (don’t remember), and Steven Landesberg (Barney Miller, right?); a weeklong stint on The Mike Douglas Show with Chrystie as co-host; Dinah! opposite a repeat of Marcus Welby, M.D., The Edge of Night, and The Bugs Bunny Show.
I have my portrait taken by the world-renowned photographer Francesco Scavullo for a book he is working on and spontaneously do a handstand. I am mobbed on the streets of New York for autographs, surrounded by a chain of whispers of “There’s Bruce Jenner!” at every major air
port in America. I talk to everyone. But the talk is small and getting smaller; like Chrystie, I wonder how much is left for me after the exhaustion of being besieged.
My business manager, George Wallach, is not making it any easier to have a few quiet days off. He says in print that I have as much film potential as Robert Redford and that my reception in New York was similar to that after Charles Lindbergh had completed his historic nonstop flight to Paris. I have rejected several endorsements offered immediately after the Games as well as other business opportunities. I want to be in this for the long run and not look like a money whore, but George’s public boasting is running the risk of the same oversaturation as Spitz. I need to take it slow.
But it’s hard to keep your head straight when soon after the Games the producers of the film Superman want me to test for the title role. It’s a little bit of a stretch—actually, it’s absurd. I have never done a screen test in my life. “I’ll have to see the script, though I think I can identify with the part,” I quip. I like new challenges, and I am hoping to act someday, so Chrystie and I fly to Rome. They have me do a fight scene with a stand-in playing the evil villain Lex Luthor. Then they feed me lines. They tell me I’m “great,” and I think they mean it.
But there is an immediate problem.
They want me to cut my hair for the role, and I won’t do it. My hair is one of the few ways I can feel my femininity, and it is these tentacles that keep me going, make me feel some tiny piece of my authentic self.
After not hearing from the producers for roughly a year, I learn the role is given to Christopher Reeve—and at that point I don’t particularly care whether I will be cast or not. Not caring—another familiar motif in my life after the Games.
I am living the dream, and sometimes it feels like a dream, or at least enough of a diversion to suppress my gender issues. I miss the Grand Diversion terribly, that feeling of waking up every day and knowing exactly what I was going to do. I don’t know how I am going to replace it, although I have given it considerable thought.
I knew I wanted out of sports, which is why I left my vaulting pole in the Olympic stadium. It’s always better to finish an athletic career at the top instead of being shoved out at the bottom when it’s obvious to everyone except to the athlete that the skill is gone. I don’t want to get caught in the trap of not preparing for when your career is finished. I have seen it too many times and witnessed the devastation too many times. You stay terrified of doing something different. You are coddled for so much of your life that you have no clue how to live on your own. Plus, let’s be honest: there isn’t much demand for a decathlete outside of the Games. It takes two days, there are ten events, and anybody who says they truly understand the scoring is lying. I want to leverage my athletic success if I can, not depend on it.
I officially sign with ABC in October 1976, where I will ultimately become a jack-of-all-trades and master of none. I like learning the new skill of broadcasting and being on air. But I don’t lock on to it. There is no mission to be the best. I have lost my ultracompetitive instinct, odd for someone who had such a strong one.
As much as I loved the Grand Diversion, I have concluded that it can be dangerous to become so obsessed with competitiveness and winning. It stunts you from ever growing as a person: all you are on Earth for is to train, score points, win. Nothing else mattered for me when I was determined to win the decathlon in Montreal, which I know was a tremendous source of frustration for Chrystie and my parents. When I was with them, I wasn’t present in the moment but far off in my own moment—faster, higher, stronger. As much as I loved the single-mindedness of that, I never want to be that single-minded again. And yet I need to be single-minded in something if I am to keep my gender issues in check, so it is a difficult contradiction. I am single-minded so I can live. I am not single-minded so I can live. Caught once again in the middle.
I see right away my limitations in broadcasting, the demon of dyslexia still intent on humiliating me, the past always prologue. ABC wants to try me out as the permanent co-host of Wide World of Sports with Frank Gifford in Los Angeles and myself in New York. We do a practice run, and it is clear I cannot handle the teleprompter because I am a slow reader. The words scroll through the monitor too quickly. I cannot keep pace.
I try to get over the hurdle of the teleprompter. I learn to memorize the script and make progress. But from the very beginning I am marginalized.
My first assignment is on a show called Battle of the Network Stars as an on-field reporter offering commentary and asking contestants how they feel after they do running and swim relays and 100-yard dashes and tugs-of-war and hitting a golf ball with accuracy. The show debuts on November 13, 1976; it is wacky and kind of oddly wonderful, a celebrity Olympics with animated fireworks at the beginning in which the participants show up in limos. There is no teleprompter to work with, which is good. I do well given my inexperience. People respond positively to my friendly and casual style. I feel good about myself, and when that happens, my gender issues go into semi-hibernation. I feel as close to a sense of peace as I can get.
For exactly seventeen days after the show’s debut.
My brother Burt and I have never been particularly close for much of our lives. He is eight years younger, for one thing. He also has the misfortune of living in the shadow and footsteps of my exploits. He is a very good athlete himself. But he is tired of the endless comparisons in football and basketball and track. My mom remembers it best:
It was difficult for Burt and I blame these damn teachers and coaches, Burt being so much younger than Bruce and Bruce already in high school and the star. Coaches would come down the hall and run into Burt and say “Hey, young Jenner, we’re waiting for you!” What a lot of pressure was on that little boy that he has to live up to when he hasn’t had a chance to get started.
He was a very good athlete but he would not compete in anything that Bruce did. He wouldn’t compete in it. He was the fastest on the track in intramurals but he wouldn’t go out for track. And the coaches wanted him to and pressured him to, but he wouldn’t budge. He was built just like Bruce. Actually I think he was better looking, too.
Burt reacts by doing the opposite of everything I did. I played football. He plays soccer. I waterskied. He snow skis. I was a mediocre student. He is a very good student.
I am frustrated that he shies away from certain competitive sports, because I know how good he can be. There is tension between us, and the emotional distance only intensifies after I leave for Graceland at eighteen when he is ten. We both share vivid memories of the one and only time in my life I got drunk as a senior in high school and slept with him in the same bed because I could not make it to the top bunk. He was mad at me, and I was mad at him for not moving to the top bunk when I asked. From then on I only see him when I come home.
About nine months before the Montreal Games our relationship improves. I am more mature and he is about to graduate from high school, and he asks to talk to me privately one day, telling me that he wants to come to California, if Chrystie and I end up there permanently after the Games, and live with us. His plan is to work for a year to establish residency and then apply to an in-state school at virtually no cost. I like the idea. I like it because it will be a way of drawing us closer.
He is there in Montreal with my parents, Chrystie, and about sixty friends and family. Recently I saw the picture in Sports Illustrated that was taken of the entourage after I won. They were easy to pick out since they were all wearing those yellow T-shirts with GO JENNER GO on the back, very proud canaries. I could pick out everyone in the picture, except for Burt. He wasn’t there. I could not find him. Where was he? Why wasn’t he there? Where had he gone?
Burt’s bags are all packed on November 30, 1976. They are neatly side by side in his room like standing soldiers, ready to go. I am in town to do a speaking engagement in Canton, Connecticut, where he is living with my parents. We have tickets for an afternoon flight to Los Angeles out of Har
tford. Chrystie and I have just bought a house in Malibu, and Burt is going to live on the first floor.
Because I am going to be in Canton for several days, a local car dealer, knowing my weakness for Porsches, drops off a 911 model so I can have a car to drive.
I let Burt use it a little bit. For an eighteen-year-old kid who has just graduated from high school, few things in life, if anything, are sweeter than tooling around town in a Porsche 911. Burt is also responsible.
He won’t do anything stupid.
The speech is at nine a.m. We are leaving for the airport several hours later, so Burt says he can take care of filling the car with gas so the tank will be full when it is returned to the dealer.
The service station is only about a mile away, and on the route is Canton High School. Burt cannot resist driving in front of the entrance. He sees a girl he knows that is a good friend.
Hey, jump in. We’ll go down and get some gas, and I’ll bring you right back.
Her name is Judith Hutchings, and she is sixteen. She hops in and off they go down a back road that he has driven hundreds of times.
I am wrapping up my speech. My dad is in the audience listening. He cannot see the back of the room. But I can, and it seems strange when three policemen walk in. They ask if they can speak to us privately and then take us into a classroom. We still don’t know what is going on until one of them says:
There’s been a serious accident involving your son. You should get to the hospital right away.
I drive. My dad is next to me. He is banging on the dashboard as hard as he can, and I think he is going to break his hand. I remember him saying:
Goddammit! Goddammit! This is going to kill your mother!
Burt has a special place in my mother’s soul. She pleaded with Bill to have another child when he thought two was enough. There is a tenderness to Burt that steals her heart, a sweet and gentle softness I never possessed as her oldest son. He does what he is told. He does not argue. He even takes calculus.
The Secrets of My Life Page 8
