The Secrets of My Life

by Caitlyn Jenner

  I’ll have a grande vanilla latte.

  Anything else?

  No, that’s it.

  For the first time in my life I hoped there would be no more conversation.

  She told me the amount. I paid her and she gave me my change with the same cheerful expression she gave to everyone else. A few minutes later the barista handed me my grande vanilla latte.

  God, that felt good. Even if it happened only once before I became Caitlyn.

  Now, several years later, I am at the SALT conference. I am staying at the Bellagio and walking through the casino with a great outfit on. The atmosphere is the same as it was a few months earlier at the Westin. People stop me and talk to me and want to take selfies. They are genuinely excited to see me, and that gives me great gratification and strength. I can make a difference. I have made a difference. I love how they come up to me, their voices alive in excitement:

  Caitlyn! Caitlyn!

  God, that feels good.

  All the time.

  Chapter Ten

  Bye Bye Breasts

  I will never get out of my mind Linda’s reaction when she saw me dressed up in women’s clothing in the New York hotel room for the first and only time. She was shocked, and shocked would have been okay. Sometimes you adjust to shock. It was much more how uncomfortable she was, how she could barely look at me, and when she did her eyes were somewhere else, desperate to avoid any direct contact. Linda wanted to be supportive. Linda wanted to understand. But it was all too much, and I in turn felt not simply freakish but dirty and indecent, a screwed-up weirdo unable to control his impulses, inflicting himself on others who wanted no part. We had had our differences. The marriage could not be saved, but in that room I felt she was revolted by me. I know she did not mean to, but her reaction was my greatest fear realized.

  With Kris it is different. It is different because unlike with Linda, who I never told a single thing until we had been married for several years, I talked to Kris about my issues very early in our relationship. She knows there is something inside me that must have a place to go. I blindsided Linda when I dressed up. She had no time to prepare and get emotionally ready, and neither did I, for that matter. Kris and I talk. She is willing to see what it feels like. So the first time I dress up in front of her, she seems comfortable. But I am the one who is uncomfortable, the memory of Linda’s reaction still fresh even though it was roughly six years ago.

  I get the feeling that Kris is willing to let me cross-dress on certain occasions only because this is what I want. She has no real interest, and it’s kind of ridiculous of me to think that she would. So I stop after a few times. It is easier and causes fewer problems.

  She married Bruce. It is Bruce whose career she is trying to resuscitate. She has defended Bruce to her friends who have heard the rumors.

  Eventually Kris and I do reach an understanding—take Caitlyn on the road—but she is not to play in our home or hometown. End of discussion.

  I am okay with that. I can handle it. The excitement of a new marriage and the resurgence of family and career are energizing. It really is a partnership of equals—I am the product and Kris the agent and manager and negotiator. She is indefatigable and also undaunted: if someone says no, she doesn’t get discouraged or take it personally but simply believes that she was talking to the wrong person. And trust me on this, she will find the right person, no matter how long it takes. When somebody approaches me about a business deal, I listen and say, “You have to talk to my manager about it,” and silently wish him or her good luck because they are going to need it if they think they are going to outnegotiate Kris. It makes me relieved that I am just the product.

  Kris and I and all the kids are truly one big happy family in the early 1990s. It is a profound moment of my life, the most profound moment. I am a father, a real father, not a pretend one or a preoccupied one or a selfish one, no matter how well meaning. Kris has welcomed Burt and Casey and Brandon and Brody into our lives with loving and gracious arms. Their moms have custody, but they visit regularly. Kris adores my kids as much as I adore her kids, another aspect of our partnership.

  But the complexities of divorce make things difficult. Linda married David Foster, a very successful record producer, also in 1991. I felt that both Linda and I had successfully managed to get on with our lives. Our divorce settlement had been reached quickly without acrimony.

  Then in the mid 1990s Linda files for support payments with the Los Angeles Superior Court. It was her right and prerogative under California law (the case is ultimately settled with a minimal monthly payment, and I don’t think much of anything was achieved except legal fees).

  We are initially subpoenaed late at night. Kris is upset, very upset, that her efforts to be a good stepmother are not appreciated. She is no longer inclined to make the effort. She also feels that both Linda and Chrystie really don’t want the kids to be with us. Every time she invites them to do something, she feels there is some excuse as to why they can’t come. When asked many years later, the Jenner kids have a different viewpoint: Kris just did not want them around anymore once we had our own children, fierce in her belief that I had only one family now and that was her and the Kardashians. Linda and Chrystie say they never did anything to stop our kids from spending time with Kris and me.

  An entire book can be written on who did what to whom without any agreement or resolution. Everybody has a version, including me.

  None of which matters, anyway.

  Burt and Casey and Brandon and Brody are my children, and it was incumbent upon me to see them and make them part of my life regardless of what others wanted or didn’t want. The kids are a part of my life, and I had to do whatever it took to make them a part of my life. I needed to assert myself. But I could not. So I let go of them, which is a softer way of saying I abandoned them. Because I did abandon them.

  I begin to see less and less of the Jenner children. As the years go by I barely see them at all. My parental efforts are concentrated entirely on the raising of the Kardashian children and then Kendall and Kylie. I miss birthdays with the Jenner kids. I miss graduations, either because I am not invited or am invited and just don’t come. Burt idolizes the rugged and daring image of Bruce, and I piss on it. When Casey gets married in 2007, I am not invited. Nor should I have been, given my prolonged absence from her life starting at the very beginning when I wasn’t there for her birth.

  I cope the way I so often cope with things. I block the kids from my mind, almost as if they exist only as an abstraction, part of someone else’s life. I also don’t want to argue with Kris. I don’t want to argue with Linda and Chrystie. I cannot deal with any kind of confrontation. I run from it. Confrontation leaves me terribly wounded and even more insecure and filled with self-doubt than I already am. I am scared of asserting myself and often try to deflect with a humorous quip.

  The Jenner kids have loving mothers and stepfathers. So maybe that’s what I tell myself: they are doing fine and don’t really need me. It is another way of coping with my guilt in not fighting as hard as I should have to see them when they were growing into their adolescence and young adulthood. I employ my now-ingrained psychological mechanism when I am faced with something emotionally wrenching: I act as if I am powerless, that it wasn’t my fault, there was nothing I could do. I make myself a helpless victim.

  I do the same with my sister, who has been such a mainstay in my life and whom I have adored since I was little. When Kris threw a party to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of my Olympic win, Pam was not invited. Neither was my mother (my dad was). Pam was devastated. Out of deference to me she had not told a single soul of my gender dysphoria for roughly a decade, although it only made it that much harder for her to process it. Kris had not wanted her there—a reaffirmation that the only family that should matter to me now was her family—and I went along with the decision. It created a terrible rupture between Pam and me. We rarely spoke for almost twenty years.

  I could bla
me my gender dysphoria for what happened. There is a tendency to blame everything that goes south in your life on gender dysphoria. Insecurity and self-doubt do envelop you. But none of that somehow justifies abandoning your own children, some of them for roughly a decade, or the sister you idolized growing up. Then it’s just a sad excuse and yet, it’s the excuse I told myself.

  If God refuses to make peace with me, this will be the primary reason.

  It should be.

  In 1995 Kendall comes into our lives. It is an incredible moment, one that at a certain point we thought would never happen. I have been off hormone therapy for several years. But one of the possible side effects of therapy is that you shoot blanks, so to speak. Actually, you aren’t shooting much of anything. Kris and I discussed it and then together consulted with an endocrinologist, who after examination said that everything had returned to normal now that I had stopped the therapy.

  Kendall will go on to become a young woman of poise and beauty and kindness, the most down-to-earth of all the K girls and a little bit of a daredevil athlete like her father. She handles the fame she has already had in her life with steadiness, as at home at a riding stable as she is walking the catwalk for Chanel. Kylie follows twenty-one months later, as incredible as her sister but with a distinctly different personality: fiery and exotic beauty, headstrong and like her mother, with a sixth sense for business.

  After Kris gets pregnant with Kendall I become increasingly concerned about the breasts. I worry that I won’t even be able to go to a swimming pool because they are so obviously noticeable.

  These are not man boobs, folks. These are breasts. You don’t go to a plastic surgeon to get man boobs removed. Imagine your own father having them while continuing to maintain that he is a man.

  Actually, don’t.

  I talk to Kris about it. We go to a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon. He takes pictures of my chest and my paranoia is such that I worry that somehow some way they are going to get out, even though they are taken from the shoulders down so nobody would know who the hell it was anyway. But this is my thinking, always scared and terrified of discovery.

  I tell him they are the residue of steroid use, a condition known as gynecomastia. Which of course is a lie: I have never taken any steroids in my life. But at this point I am willing to sully my own reputation.

  The procedure is easy. He basically liposuctions them out, and from the vantage point of looking like a “normal” father I do look much better. But from the vantage point of myself I am sad for months afterward. I liked having them. Not only did they make me feel good about myself; I feel that my chest always should have been that way.

  On the other hand, trying to hide them has become a pain in the neck. On windy days I am constantly pulling my shirt down so you can’t see them. On one occasion I am walking across the street with Kris and the shirt is loose and I keep grabbing at it.

  I know what you’re doing.

  Yeah, I don’t want anybody to see them.

  So as sad as I am to get rid of them, it is the only thing to do. I am stuck in Bruce mode forever, and that’s that. Turn your focus elsewhere. I love being a father and stepfather to the Kardashians and Kendall and Kylie. I love raising kids. I love watching them grow up, taking them on trips, carpooling, anything and everything. It is my life in the 1990s and 2000s and 2010s, although I always know that no matter how much I try to block it out, there are four other wonderful children I have left behind.

  It is because of Kris that my social life expands, leading to a bizarre and ultimately horrifying relationship for both of us. She is extremely close with Nicole Brown Simpson, which also means that O.J. comes into my life. I already know him a little bit, and a little bit goes a very long way because of his endless braggadocio. We have both come out of the same world of the male athlete with all its stereotypes and behavioral expectations, a type of identity that I come to call the male athlete gender.

  I struggled against it because of my issues and extreme discomfort in that world and its constant objectification of women, and the endless bragging about fucking to the point where you had to wonder what these guys were really hiding. O.J. was at the completely opposite side of the spectrum as me—women as eye candy and sex toys, physically abusive when he did not get his way or felt he was being defied, the loud life of the party anywhere and anytime, like so many other athletes.

  I did not care when my fame faded in the 1980s. I was consumed by something far more important. Fame was never important to me, except as a means to an end in having a career. O.J. could not bear the thought of losing his fame. So he behaved the way the male athlete too often behaves, doing anything he could to draw attention to himself. I saw countless male athletes like O.J. They were not as extreme, but their need for power and fame and public spectacle became even more intense after their careers because they knew it was the only way to not be what they feared the most: forgotten.

  For all our profound personal differences, our careers had shared many similarities.

  He seized the attention of the nation when he played football at the University of Southern California, capped off with a Heisman Trophy and the indelible image of him running for a sixty-four-yard touchdown to beat UCLA in 1967 in one of the greatest college football games of all time. It put him high atop a public pedestal that only grew higher when he played pro football for the Buffalo Bills and set a single-season rushing record in 1973 with 2003 yards. I likewise seized the attention of the nation when I won the decathlon, capped off with setting a world record on live television and the indelible image of the victory lap I took waving the American flag. We both became the faces of major brands, O.J. with Hertz and I with Wheaties. We both became sportscasters for ABC and later NBC. We both did motivational speeches. We both had modest film careers. We were both on the charity golf and tennis tournament circuit. We both knew what it was like to feel that pedestal, like a block of ice, begin to melt and the inevitability that others will take our places.

  Because we had much in common, there perhaps should have been a lot for us to share and talk about. But there wasn’t. We may have been of the same world, but we were not in the same world. If I looked in the mirror and loathed myself, I looked at O.J. and saw a monster of a male athlete. I wonder if this contributed to my feelings of awkwardness around him, that even if he embodied an archetype I hated, it was also the archetype that people expected from me.

  There were other contributing factors in my distaste for him: he was the most narcissistic, egocentric, neediest asshole in the world of sports I had ever seen, and I had seen a lot of them.

  I first met O.J. at the US Olympic Trials in Eugene, Oregon, in 1976. I was competing and he was broadcasting. I saw him after that at a charity tennis tournament in Forest Hills when we were both invited as celebrities. I always found him affable, but I also felt he was trying with every fiber of his soul to be affable. The more I saw of him, the more I felt he was never genuine. I eventually found him exhausting and pathetic, his need for one-upmanship such that it was almost like he was on the football field again in which everyone else was an opponent. I was always wary.

  Kris’s relationship to O.J. also went back a long time. He had been an usher at her wedding to Robert Kardashian in 1978. When Kris first mentioned O.J. to me, the marriage between him and Nicole was fundamentally over.

  Kris told me that Nicole hated him to such a degree that she once had said to her:

  Every time he gets on a plane I hope it crashes.

  The week after Kris shared Nicole’s comment with me, I saw O.J. at the Robert F. Kennedy charity golf tournament in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. He was practicing putts. He was friendly, but he also had to know that Kris and I were dating and that Kris had probably told me about the dark depth of his relationship with Nicole. Right away as we exchanged pleasantries I could see him going into the male athlete mode of “everything is perfect because I’m supposed to be perfect.” He was also putting on a show for me, wanting m
e to think that everything between him and Nicole was cool. I was cordial, as I always am.

  So, how’s everything going with you?

  Hey, when your wife’s happy, you’re happy.

  Wait a second. I thought:

  Your wife just told Kris she wishes you were dead. So it can’t be that good.

  I continued the conversation just to get it over with.

  Hey, that’s great.

  It became even stranger when O.J. said he had taken a Lear jet from New York for the tournament and it was so crowded that he had to sit on the toilet in the back. He made fun of it, and I laughed along with him, but once again I was thinking something very different.

  That would have made your wife even happier.

  The pathological need of O.J. to still be the big man on campus came sharply into focus when we were in New Orleans to cover the 1992 US Olympic trials for NBC. All the broadcasters used earpieces so the lead producer could communicate with us during the event. During commercial breaks, a song that was popular at the time by Salt-N-Pepa came blaring through:

  Let’s talk about sex, baby!

  Let’s talk about you and me!

  The song was like water torture after a while. It stuck to your brain. It was driving me berserk. It was driving everyone berserk. Except O.J., belting out the lyrics every time it came on. Others laughed but I found it sad, this desperation to be noticed, the need for cheers in any situation.

  Kris was in town with me, so we made plans with O.J. to have dinner that night at a vintage New Orleans French restaurant. We got there early. All I wanted to do was be discreet, get in and get dinner and get out without attention since I was still frequently recognized. The restaurant—I think it was Galatoire’s—had a steady hum, and that was the sound of eating remarkable food. A thousand great and famous dignitaries and celebrities had eaten there.