My marriage to Linda is short-lived, lasting only about four and a half years before we separate. Looking back now it was inevitable. Although I did not know what the term meant at that time in the early eighties, it was clear that I had gender dysphoria. It is unconscionable that I did not mention any of my issues to Linda before we were married. The failure was not malicious: there was the fear that if I had mentioned my struggles, any woman thinking of marrying me would have just run. I wanted domesticity. I wanted a family. I wanted full-time companionship. Just as I also thought that by having those things, I would exorcise what was living inside.
The ugly aspects of my personal life gone public do not help the marriage to Linda, either. They have left me tarnished: General Mills, which had originally signed me to a five-year $1 million contract after the Games with a one-year option, elects not to renew it. I still have my broadcasting career: in 1978 I moved to NBC from ABC and signed a very lucrative contract. The expectation was that I would play a pivotal role in NBC’s coverage of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow. It was in my wheelhouse, a place for me to truly land, until President Carter called for the United States to boycott because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Once again there is the question of where I am going to fit in given that the sports of football and basketball don’t appeal to me. I like nontraditional sports, and I become something of an expert in hosting so-called superstar competitions, which are in vogue in the late seventies and early eighties. But I’m not sure it will be enough for NBC to keep me beyond my original contract.
My short marriage to Linda does produce two stupendous achievements: my sons Brandon and Brody. They were sublime boys then, and they are sublime men now. Brandon is an exceptional songwriter and musician who does everything well—flying helicopters, off-road biking, surfing the famed waves of Malibu, building a house. In one of the greatest athletic slaps in my life, he beat the crap out of me in table tennis as we prepared for a tournament. (I hired a ball machine to practice without telling him; he hired a world-class pro without telling me. In other words, I got punked.) I can also see in him the qualities of grace and openness he inherited from his mom and his stepfather, David.
I am also lucky that over the years my relationship with Brandon, after an unforgivable absence, has only grown stronger. He is not simply my son. He and Burt are my best friends in a life that has had few lasting close relationships.
Brody is the resident hunk, ruggedly handsome. He always has a million ideas going and is fearless in his entrepreneurship and risk—reality television star on The Hills, sought-after DJ.
They both are opinionated (Brandon quite, Brody not so quite). They speak with a bluntness and directness only exceeded by Burt. They are stubborn, sometimes maddeningly so. Gee, I wonder where all those qualities came from…
But they have what their father never had: they know who they are, they are comfortable with who they are, and it did not take them until the final quarter of life to even begin to like who they are.
Thank God.
For my debut role as an actor I choose the 1980 film Can’t Stop the Music, produced by the wild and flamboyant Allan Carr. I star with Steve Guttenberg and Valerie Perrine and the Village People. I play a goofy and nerdy lawyer who somehow through a series of tortuous twists becomes the manager of a group that resembles the real-life Village People. Interspersed are scenes of Guttenberg singing and dancing for reasons that even today cannot be fully explained in terms of plot.
Carr had produced the immensely successful film Grease starring John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John. He had chops and a track record, not to mention raucous parties that rivaled Hefner’s with Carr, who weighed over three hundred pounds, as master of ceremonies. He was hoping to cash in on the disco craze, which was hot when the movie went into production and not when the movie was in post-production. Roughly a year before the premiere was the epic Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park in Chicago after the first game of a White Sox doubleheader. The idea was for fans to bring disco records, and they would be collected and put into a crate rigged with explosives. Many of the records were never collected, and after the detonation a riot started in which records were flung about the stadium like Oddjob’s hat. At least six people were injured and thirty-nine arrested.
It is safe to say that disco took a major blow after that, just as it is also safe to say that the reaction against disco, symbolized by the Village People, was not-so-veiled homophobia. It was also safe to say that the original title of the film, Discoland—Where the Music Never Ends!, just didn’t have the same ring anymore and was changed, which made no difference when the film premiered in the United States on June 20, 1980. Nobody went to see it, although it is something of a minor cult classic and definitely worth watching in any state where it is legal to get high.
It did win a notable award, the first-ever Golden Raspberry for Worst Picture, so it did not go entirely unnoticed. I was also nominated for Worst Actor of the Year but lost out to Neil Diamond for The Jazz Singer in what many critics felt was an enormous upset. The reviews of me were predictable—another former athlete vainly and amateurishly trying to become an actor.
After the disaster of the film, a few other acting opportunities come my way: when Erik Estrada, the lead actor on the NBC television show CHiPS, about the adventures of the California Highway Patrol, holds out for more money and threatens to quit if he doesn’t get it, I am offered the job as his replacement. I like the power trip of the show: in one scene I am supposed to be directing traffic, and drivers actually think I am directing traffic. I also get to wear a very tight uniform, which I always enjoy. I do six episodes in 1981 before Estrada, realizing that the show indeed goes on without him, settles his differences with the network and returns.
I star in an NBC made-for-television movie called Grambling’s White Tiger, based on the true story of a white quarterback playing on the legendary all-black football team at Grambling University. The film, which also stars Harry Belafonte as coach Eddie Robinson, gets excellent ratings, and I am well-received. But with the exception of a few cameo roles here and there, nothing else ever results. In the mid 1980s NBC elects not to renew my contract.
I will never know whether it was the slide of my career that caused my gender issues to inflame and make me feel desperate, or whether it was my gender issues that caused my career to slide.
I only know I am struggling with the issue of my identity more than ever in the early 1980s, so much so that I am getting uncharacteristically careless. Like the time I buy a Cosmopolitan magazine at a newsstand in Rockefeller Center, where NBC is headquartered, and an executive of the network sees me do it. I just ignore him as I walk by. Who knows? Maybe he is about to do the same thing anyway.
The afterglow of the Olympics, which preoccupied me and kept me going until the early 1980s, has largely burned out because I am burned out by it. I continue to do speeches and professionally race cars. But I am not locked on to anything. I have no motivation. Being a father to Burt and Casey and Brandon and Brody should sustain me. But I feel unworthy as a father, not good enough to play a major role in anyone’s life.
Issues of identity have become a twenty-four-hour-a-day preoccupation. It’s the same mindset as when I trained for the Olympics but without any goal or end result. All this preoccupation does is feed upon itself and make me feel worse and more insecure and confused than ever. It is inevitable when you are living a false life. You never feel comfortable. You feel like an impostor, a fraud, and there is no way you are going to have a positive image of yourself.
There is also a growing sense that by the early to mid 1980s the public, with the media as its conduit, after placing me on Mount Olympus, is now glad to see me gone. It has grown weary of me and is looking for someone else to anoint.
Live by celebrity. Die by it.
Unless maybe you are the Kardashians.
Even though we have two adorable little boys, the relationship between Linda and me is
fraught with tension. I am not only frustrated with the relationship but also frustrated with myself, depressed and ashamed of the mess I have made. One marriage is over; another one is going downhill. I’m trying to participate in the raising of four children under the age of eight and not doing a very good job of it.
We bicker. I am moody, the kind of moodiness that comes when you are yearning to be someone and something different, this fire inside you that only gets hotter and hotter with no real escape.
I seek every opportunity I can to cross-dress. It is a temporary fix, like it always is. You feel a rush of adrenaline and then you feel as sad and deflated as ever, playacting when you don’t want to play and don’t want to act anymore. But something is still better than nothing.
I get my hands on a couple of wigs. There is a light brown one that I think suits me. I begin to wonder what I would look like on camera. That would be kind of cool. So I get the little recorder we have and a tripod and I set it up in the bedroom. I shoot into the mirror so I can see my reflection: it makes the lighting on my face better if I position the camera a certain way. I also want to see how I walk—if I can adopt any fluidity at all and not the prototypical bowlegged on-the-balls-of-your-feet jock walk—and do several takes. I am having a real ball now, more fun than I have had for a long time. I play the video back. It is the first time I have seen myself in anything but a mirror. I look to some degree like a man who decides to wear a dress when the wife and kids are away. I am a man who decides to wear a dress when his wife and kids are away. But I don’t see that. I don’t see Bruce Jenner in a dress.
I see me.
I should erase the tape. There is too much risk of Linda finding it no matter how well I hide it: wives find everything anyway. But I can’t. This little glimpse of me is too important, too vital, to let go of.
Now I at least know.
If only for an instant.
Maybe if I tell Linda, it will be better. Maybe if I stop the lies and the deceit, show her that Bruce is just a façade, I won’t feel this pent up, pacing back and forth in my cage. It’s not like Bruce is particularly thriving at this point in his life. The highs are coming fewer and farther between. In fact, they are not coming at all.
So tell Linda. She is your wife. She is the mother of two of your children. Doesn’t she have the right to know? To understand why you are so angry all the time, as if it is only her fault?
I tell her.
She doesn’t understand. How could she in the context of the early 1980s, not only because gender identity is a foreign concept in the public mainstream but also because this is Bruce Jenner standing in front of her? The man she thought was a hunk when she and Elvis lay in bed and watched him win the decathlon (Elvis thought the same thing). The man she thought was the ultimate in macho and still thinks so.
Now you are telling her that you identify as a woman? That you have cheated on her in the most unimaginable way possible by concealing your identity?
Linda, to her credit, does want to understand. We eventually go together to a therapist, and she grapples with the concept of gender dysphoria. She wonders if it is temporary, something that goes away. The therapist is emphatic: never. It is only a matter of how you deal with it.
Linda and I struggle on. It isn’t that I don’t love her. It is bigger than that: I don’t love myself. We both know our marriage is almost certainly over, but I tell her to meet me in New York, where I am making an appearance, so we can spend some time together. It gives her hope that maybe the marriage can be saved. There still is love and our two beautiful boys.
She knocks on the door of the hotel room where I am staying.
I open it.
I am in a dress and wig and makeup.
Linda says nothing.
I am not sure what I was thinking then, and I am not entirely sure thirty years later. I know I was terribly frustrated and irritable. Maybe I was blaming Linda for not letting me live my life when in fact I had never told her about my life until we had been married for several years. Maybe I wanted the marriage to end and this was the surefire way to do it. Or maybe after telling Linda I felt compelled that she now actually meet the woman inside me.
I had to try.
I realize I have done something terrible by putting her in this situation. I will never forget that look of shock and hurt on her face. I have hurt her, and she does not deserve it.
I guess this isn’t working out.
Perhaps the greatest understatement of all time.
I run into the bathroom and immediately change. I walk back out.
I am so sorry.
I mean the words. But I know they mean nothing. Because at this stage of my life there is nothing that means anything.
Linda is silent.
I am done, except to work as little as I have to and disappear the rest of the time. I won’t kill myself, because I am not that kind of person. But maybe I should. Maybe it would be better for everyone, most of all me. Within a decade after the Olympics, after all the glory and honor and so proudly embracing the flag of my country as I took a victory lap and could have taken a hundred more, I am in a place I never ever thought I would be.
I am alone.
November 12, 2015
“I went to school there. I got my degree there. I never wore heels there.”
I am on the road to Lamoni.
Every encounter, every event, still feels new and unpredictable as I approach my eight-month anniversary after transitioning. It isn’t about how I emotionally feel inside, because I am already at ease with myself. The roles have most definitely switched, Caitlyn on the outside and Bruce on the inside, where he will happily remain for the rest of my days.
When you are dealing with your gender identity, the intensity of the experience is different in every person. Some know right away at an early age that the gender they are living as is not their gender. For some it’s a longer process of discovery. Some never know, which is why the labels of female and male will one day no longer be applicable. Because that’s all they are anyway, labels that narrow experience instead of expanding it. The same goes for the label of trans. Right now we are inevitably referred to as a trans woman or a trans man. But I predict that in the next generation there will be no qualifiers, that we are women and men or whatever we wish to call ourselves, blending into society instead of being stigmatized as some fringe trans species. The less people notice us, other than that we are fun and interesting and as “normal” as anyone else out there, the more we will know we have been accepted.
We aren’t there yet because of our obsession with male and female. I never felt I was whole. It was almost like I was two people. I could live in the male world and did, but from birth there was always this woman inside me. She never went away, yet for so long I could not let her live, given the times and what I came to symbolize.
Until now.
Returning to Graceland almost forty-five years after graduation in 1973 is going to be a little bit different.
I went to school there. I got my degree there. I never wore heels there.
Several of those who coached me will be there today. Will the image they once had now be obliterated? Will they see me for who I am, or will they see some knock-off, not Caitlyn Jenner in a white pantsuit, but Bruce Jenner in a white pantsuit?
I understand if they feel that way. It would kill me, but I would still understand. The idea that everyone instantly feels at home with Caitlyn is absurd. It may take a day. It may take a week or a year, or it might never take at all. Getting upset because somebody uses the pronoun he instead of she when first meeting me is ridiculous. In the beginning after transition, even I began to write out “Bruce” when I signed checks. It is confusing, particularly for those who knew me as Bruce, and many millions did. Plus, seeing me as Caitlyn on television or in the pages of a magazine is totally different than seeing me in the flesh. There is no distance or filter or running for the hills or spitting in disgust or thinking this is just another Kardashi
an caper for maximum publicity.
After speaking to dozens of trans women and men over the past months, it is clear that an assumption is made that everything about us has radically changed overnight. We have radically changed, but we still retain many of our core beliefs, or at least I have. I am different than I was. I feel different and I look different, but I am not as different in personality as is sometimes assumed. It is often hard to convince people of that, which is why they are nervous and I am nervous, plus I also hope I made the right clothing choice.
Before we get to Graceland we have to get to Chicago. I am here with the six other transgender women who are regulars on the second season of I Am Cait. I am giving a speech to benefit Chicago House, a service organization that is providing remarkable support to the LGBTQ community and those impacted by HIV/AIDS by facilitating housing, employment, and legal services. Then the seven of us will board a bus and wind our way through parts of Iowa and eventually down to New Orleans.
A handheld megaphone blares in the cold of the windy city outside the Chicago Hilton Hotel after I am finished. The words are sharp and angry.
We don’t get jobs. We don’t get any money. It isn’t all fun and games. You don’t care about the real trans women of America. You get those awards and dress up, but you have no idea what it’s really like.
We don’t need you, we don’t want you. You don’t speak for us. We didn’t ask for your help. Do you have any idea of what is happening out here?
You have no right to represent us. You are an insult.
The Secrets of My Life Page 10
