My mom is at home when the phone rings. It is the police. They tell her that one of her sons has been in an accident and has been transported to the hospital. They never give a name, so she does not know whether it’s Burt or me. She comes out of the apartment pale and shaking. A next-door neighbor, a young mother, sees her and asks what happened, and she tells her there has been an accident involving one of her sons. The young mother can tell she is terrified.
You’re not driving.
She takes my mom to the nearest hospital in Farmington. She learns that it is Burt who is injured. But he isn’t there. He has been taken to a larger hospital in Hartford.
They don’t mention to her that it’s a trauma center.
Burt had taken the Porsche on Old Canton Road. Because the road was old, it was also narrow and curvy. There was a rise, and Burt took it too fast. The Porsche went airborne and then crooked. It hit a tree and then a rock wall of sizable boulders. Hutchings was flung from the car and killed instantly. Burt suffered critical injuries.
My dad is typically stoic as we drive, with his residual toughness. He says little, if anything. He had seen so much horror in the war, I wonder if that is what he is thinking now and maybe trying to brace himself for whatever happened. Although I also know that whatever he saw, it never involved his son, his flesh and blood.
My mom is already there in a waiting room when we arrive. They try to give her tranquilizers but she refuses, because there is no way she is going to put up with that.
One of the neurosurgeons comes in. My mom remembers it vividly:
You get to the hospital and a surgeon comes down and talks to you and says “I hate to tell you this but your son cannot live.” Oh God. And then you sit around for hours as Bill and I talk and the doctors say “we have him on life support. We can keep his heart going and his breathing going for who knows how long because he’s so young and so strong, but there are no brain waves.” Bill and I talk it over for a few hours and go back and forth into his room. He was lying there, they had him all cleaned up and the damage was to the back of his head so you can’t see it and he’s lying on the bed and you say to yourself “My God there’s nothing wrong with him! He can’t be dying.”
Dad and Mom make their decision.
We want him taken off life support.
My mom puts her cheek on her youngest son’s cheek before he dies. She whispers to him for the final time:
I love you wherever you are now.
It’s just like my mom described. He still looks beautiful when the machines are dismantled. He still looks just like Burt, the eighteen-year-old kid who has figured out the next step of his life. The Burt I am just getting to know. The Burt who in his yearbook, which I found and looked at the day after he died, used a lyric from Cat Stevens’s “Peace Train” as his favorite words of inspiration:
Now I’ve been smiling lately, thinking about the good things to come
And I believe it could be, something good has begun
That same day my dad and I go to the funeral home to pick out a casket. I have never been to a funeral home before. I have never picked out a casket before.
But now I am, for my brother.
I have struggled with the issue of guilt. What if I had never taken the car from the dealer? What if I had never lent it to Burt? Why did he pick up an innocent young woman who had her whole life in front of her? Why did he drive so carelessly? But never in my life have I ever beat myself up about it. It is a mechanism of protection, I know, but I have come to the conclusion that it was Burt’s day to die, just as, on the beaches of Normandy, it was my father’s day not to. It was the way it was. That’s what happened. The accident had a fate and will of its own: two people tragically lost their lives, and my brother was the one responsible. But I have to move on because so much of my life has been about moving on—get over it, get through it, don’t show outward emotion because it only leads to inner emotions, and I must keep those in check. The floodgates open and I am done. It is why I could not bear to view the casket and not wait to leave town when the funeral was over.
For many months after his passing my mom could not bear to go inside his room, so it remained the way it was, with those bags packed and ready to go like standing soldiers, for an afternoon flight to California he never got to take and never will.
Chapter Six
What Goes Up…
I am waiting for it.
No story lasts forever, and the one of God and country and Bruce going out and winning the Games and becoming the golden boy and Prince Valiant and the hero and the face of the Wheaties box and having a lovely flight attendant wife who steadfastly supported him through thick and thin is too good to last forever. The media loves you until they hate you. They elevate, then denigrate. They fixate, then grow bored. They make you larger than life, then smaller than life. Anybody in the public eye knows that. The guillotine of celebrity. Try to prolong your reign for as long as possible before they take your head.
I just don’t want to make it easier for them. But in the late 1970s and early 1980s there is ammunition if they can locate the cache. There are whispers of Bruce the playboy and Bruce the asshole. So I am waiting. But you are still not prepared for it. The only solace is that after six months the media will move on to something else. (Remember, this is pre-Internet. The attention span of the media now is more like six minutes, but it only takes six minutes for a story to go around the world and back.)
I knew this going in. No one can sustain the qualities ascribed to me, the hyper hyperbole. I have tried to live an exemplary life, but no one lives a totally exemplary one. I still believe every word of the “Finding the Champion Within” speech, how you don’t have to be great at anything to be great, how single-mindedness and hard work and a fixed goal can take you to wherever you want to go. The panties and the bra underneath is my little bonus.
But Chrystie and I are fraying: we are not a perfect partnership because there is no perfect partnership. Training for the Olympics was simple; we had no needs and very little money. We lived in an apartment that cost $145 a month. Nobody knew who we were. It was so easy and innocent compared to the pressures of trying to live up to something you know you are not. It’s extraordinarily difficult under any circumstances. But for me…
Sometimes I wonder if it would be better to run away, just disappear. But where?
In 1978 Chrystie and I have our first child, Burt, named after my brother. He is a beautiful baby and will turn out to be a beautiful son: tough, fiercely independent, loyal, the owner of a burgeoning dog-sitting business that he started from scratch.
It is a sublime moment, but only a moment. Chrystie thinks I am remote and frustrated, which I am. I find her snappish and angry over things that to me seem incidental. I feel hurt and she feels hurt. I sometimes worry that so much of my life is in the public eye now that there is nothing left of me in private, addicted to celebrity because it is your life, depleted by celebrity because it is your life, loving celebrity because it is your life, hating celebrity because it is your life.
My gender issues are there—gender issues are always there—but Chrystie and I have just grown apart. Those simple days were the best days. I don’t believe I have changed since the Games: it is the entire world that has changed around me, literally overnight, a space capsule dropped into the ocean and a million people wanting to be the first to reach it and touch it and take home a tiny piece of it.
Chrystie leaves without telling me first. I come home and she is gone and so is our child and some of Chrystie’s clothing. I don’t know where she has gone, although I assume—correctly, as it turned out—that she is with her mother. Maybe she has grown weary of being in my shadow; maybe she feels I had become one-dimensional. Her recollection is that I had gotten bored and no longer cared about the marriage. I have my truth. She has hers. Anyone who has been in a serious relationship that is fighting for its life knows that both interpretations are likely correct.
We remain
separated for several months. We are trying, but as in any wounded marriage, trying is often not enough. I am confused, bored, lonely. I need to try something totally out of my wheelhouse, at least take advantage of the Bruce Jenner reputation.
Enter Hugh Hefner.
The founder of Playboy Enterprises had invited Chrystie and me to his mansion in Los Angeles for his Thursday night at the movies in the past. We never went. But now that we are separated, the mansion does intrigue me.
There is no better way to make people think you are a testosterone-juiced male than hanging out at the mansion. It’s not that I suddenly feel like a man’s man. I actually have great difficulty making friends with men. I gravitate toward women because I far more readily identify with them and feel more comfortable with them, to the degree I feel comfortable with anyone. They are more fun, more feeling, more interesting. I feel I have more in common with them—I obviously do at this point—but women themselves only see the male athlete stereotype when they see me. The idea of us having something in common seems preposterous, so the conversations are often short and awkward. I can’t let too much leak out anyway. Asking questions about eyebrow-plucking is a dead giveaway.
I am wary of overdoing it with women because I am always wary. So I laugh it up with the guys. It has been roughly three years since the Olympics and I am more entrenched in the role of Bruce than ever as I near thirty. At this point I have not only the Wheaties deal but other major endorsements as well including Minolta cameras and Tropicana. I also have my broadcasting career, and I am still curious about acting and getting genuine feelers.
My entire livelihood won’t simply be jeopardized if I explore what is inside me; it will end. It is my nightmare, and it will be a recurring one as I weigh what to do. I just can’t throw my career away. So I make a conscious choice that I am going to date women now, given the separation. I am also physically attracted to them. I need to make the point once again (and no doubt will again so it really sinks in) that your gender has nothing to do with your sexual preference. I also have a tendency, when I start to seriously date a woman, to end up marrying them.
I am a prude.
On May 1, 1979, I am at the Playboy Mansion for a charity tennis tournament for the John Tracy Clinic for people with hearing loss. The 22,000-square-foot home in Holmby Hills has twenty-nine rooms and a pool and a zoo and the infamous grotto lit up at night by sheets of purple and gold and green—a little bit like an open-air strip club, I would imagine (at this point in my life I have never been to a strip club).
I win the tournament. A woman named Linda Thompson gives out the winning trophy and a T-shirt. At the time she is twenty-eight years old and has a role on the television show Hee Haw, although her real claim to fame is having been Elvis Presley’s girlfriend for four years (Presley died in August 1977, eight months after they broke up). I don’t know any of this about Linda. Pop culture is a mystery to me (not so anymore): when my publicist asks at some point if I want to appear on Howard Stern’s radio show, my first response is “Who the hell is Howard Stern?” because I have no idea.
I just know that we hit it off, and I find Linda fun and sexy and Southern-belle sweet. I am determined to ask her out, so I spend much of the night at the mansion, still in my sweaty tennis clothes, within an arm’s length of her, outlasting the advances of George Peppard (who would later become the cigar-chomping leader on the television show The A-Team) until he finally gives up and leaves.
We begin to go out together. Nothing serious. We like to dance, shades of my mom and dad cutting it up with the Lindy on those forties dance floors. She knows I am separated because I tell her right away.
What are the odds of your getting back with your wife?
Fifty-fifty.
Then I’ll be your friend, but I’m not going to be involved with you.
We continue to do things together. Chrystie hears about it and understandably brings up the subject. I tell her I have met someone I like. It is an obviously difficult moment. We are separated but still married. We have been through the lean years and the fat years and have built up a shared history I have never come close to having with anyone else. We have a baby we both love. Chrystie has been living in a rented beach house, and we decide we must try to reconcile. I call Linda and tell her I cannot see her anymore. Her hope is genuine that the marriage will work out. She sends me books on how to stay married.
I should have read them more closely.
There is a renewed physical intimacy between Chrystie and me when we come back together. I am twenty-nine now, and I find it lovely. We are both committed. All we have to do is look across the kitchen and see Burt in his high chair to know we have a responsibility to do everything we can to make it work. It is one of those urgent moments where I convince myself I can suppress my gender issues for good. If I can just cross-dress every now and then, I will be fine. I can manage. I can even be happy. Chrystie already knows I like to wear her bras.
We are together for three months. There are issues, but to me at least the renewed intimacy is a good sign. Then Chrystie moves out for a second time without telling me, back to San Jose to live with her mom. I come home one day from a speech on the road and she is gone, the bedroom closets empty. There is no note or explanation as far as I remember.
At this point the marriage is truly over.
If I can pinpoint a period in my life where the edges begin to disintegrate, it starts here with the end of my first marriage. The sequence of events is admittedly blurred. All of this is from my perspective, and no matter how much I search my soul it will always be from my perspective. I also know I did things I very much regret.
A month or two after Chrystie moves out for the second time, I get back in touch with Linda. Our relationship becomes serious. When you are supposed to be squeaky-clean Bruce Jenner and you are now hanging out at the Playboy Mansion and that’s where you first met the last girlfriend of Elvis Presley and then you start dating her, there is no way to keep that private even though it is private. Stories leak out—ADONIS DUMPS WIFE FOR ELVIS-EX PRINCESS—or something like that.
Every storm passes. I believe that. Then Chrystie calls and tells me that she’s pregnant. The news stuns me. It is not something we ever discussed, although when you do not use birth control, which we did not, you take the chance.
I suggest to her that given we are headed for divorce, she doesn’t have to give birth and can get an abortion. I am thinking about what life will be like for a child brought into the world in which the parents are in divorce proceedings. And yes, I am thinking about my image and future livelihood.
Chrystie becomes livid. She makes it clear that the child is hers, not ours, and wants me to have nothing to do with raising the child. I bring up the issue of financial responsibility and ask why I should help support a child when the mother has told me to stay away. Maybe it sounds callous to anyone who has not been involved in a divorce. Nothing is ever framed the way it should be. You are blinded by emotion and view everything only from your own perspective.
With our marriage headed for divorce, I am not prepared to have another child. I cannot emotionally handle another child. The idea of raising Burt as a divorced couple is hard enough.
All of this is intensely private and painful. But I am a public figure, which also means you have no private life. I am Mr. Squeaky Clean, and now I am dirty. At least that is how the media will portray it. I can see the story now, a new and juicier version—BRUCE JENNER LEAVES PREGNANT WIFE FOR ELVIS EX. The only good thing is that my comment about abortion will always remain private.
Linda and I continue to date. Chrystie moves back into the home we own in Malibu—I come home one day and all my stuff is in the garage. I move into a rented house on Las Flores Beach in Malibu. It’s junky and small, but all of this is temporary.
I will outlast the media. Maybe it is better that I am not Bruce the golden boy. I can be seen as human now, far more real, although of course I am not close to real.
Chrystie gives birth on June 10, 1980. I am on the road in a hotel room in Kansas City when her mother calls to tell me that Cassandra was just born. I cry my eyes out, guilt-ridden over not being there, knowing that I should be there but also knowing that Chrystie did not want me there. I had always considered myself a person of high moral standing. I had always tried to do things right. But all of this has turned out so horribly wrong.
At least it can’t get any more complicated…
Linda and I are at the Las Flores Beach house several months later in the fall of 1980. She gives me a card that says “Congratulations” on the top. I am a little confused—I am not sure what I am to be congratulated about—until Linda tells me she is pregnant. I can envision the newest set of headlines: PRINCE VALIANT SWINGS MIGHTY SWORD MANY TIMES.
I tell her we must get married. I cannot bear any more hurt and pain in my life or anyone else’s. I want to play a real role in fatherhood. So we decide that as soon as my divorce is final we will wed. The ceremony takes place in Hawaii on January 5, 1981. My son, Burt, is there as the best man. It is quiet and beautiful.
A week later, in what I would term a very unexpected wedding gift, People magazine prints a first-person account from Chrystie of the circumstances of our break-up, in which she writes the following:
… one night I was out to dinner and my friend asked me why I wanted an abortion. I told him, “I don’t want the abortion.” He said, “Why are you having it?” And I said, “Because Bruce wants it.” He said, “You are having the abortion because the man that you are not going to be living with wants you to have it?” I thought, what an idiot I am.
I am not sure why Chrystie chose to write that. It further damaged my reputation. I also know that Casey later found out I had made the comment, which only added to the sorrow of a relationship that was never right from the start and can never be fully repaired. I was not an attentive father as she was growing up. I never felt comfortable, given the circumstances. Casey is now bright and gorgeous and an incredible mom to three children with an equally incredible husband. I know I terribly disappointed her as a father, nor was she the only child I terribly disappointed.
The Secrets of My Life Page 9
