O.J. walked in fifteen minutes later with his posse.
His notion of quiet was to sing at the top of his lungs:
Let’s talk about sex, baby!
Let’s talk about you and me!
If you didn’t know Juice was in the house, you surely would now. The singing also had the desired effect: other diners turned in their chairs and started yelling “Juice! Juice!” (so much for the uninterrupted sound of eating). He kept on singing like a downtown Vegas casino act.
We finished dinner and walked out onto Bourbon Street. The street was noisy. It was hard to imagine anyone wanting to make it noisier—except O.J., who was loud and boisterous and needed the crowd yelling “Juice! Juice! Juice!” just like he was back playing UCLA.
We stopped in front of a strip club. The line was thirty deep. As many people recognized me as they did O.J., but I was not about to crash the line. They had been waiting. Not O.J. He went right by high-fiving people as he walked right in. Once again the cries of “Juice! Juice!”
I had never been to a place like this. I know I was supposed to like it, because that is an essential part of the male athlete, stripper poles and revolving balls of light. I hated such clubs because whatever money the workers made, I could only assume, based on stories from other athletes, was from an interaction that was always demeaning women and ogling them and trying to grope them. The idea of getting a lap dance even for the hell of it was sickening to me. But it was also a slippery slope, because I could not seem to be turned off.
I tried to act as comfortable as possible, at least as if I was amused. But once again it only heightened for me the assumptions of gender that society imposes upon us, women this way and men that way and the male athlete a species unto himself. All I had to do was look at O.J. to see those expectations fulfilled, drinking and laughing and having lap dances like nobody’s business.
Much of my interaction with O.J. was on the golf course. I am a good golfer, and O.J. wasn’t. It drove him crazy that I was better, his macho core such that he always had to win at everything. Which is probably why he lied about the number of strokes he had taken and kicked the ball to get a better lie when he thought nobody was looking. I made small talk one time by mentioning a company I had signed with, and O.J. immediately said, Oh yeah, I know the CEO, we are really good friends. After a while I never brought up anything because I knew O.J.’s inevitable response would be that he had done it first and he had done it better. I could not imagine being married to him and having to feed his insatiable ego day in and day out. The more I learned, the more obvious it became that the slightest thing set him off.
About six months before the 1994 murders, Kris and I hosted our annual Christmas Eve party. Nicole and O.J. at this point had been divorced for a little over a year. But Kris and I wanted to be friendly, so we invited both of them on the assumption they would bring their two children. We had also invited a friend named Joseph Perulli, who had dated Nicole after the divorce.
O.J. hated Perulli. When Perulli left Nicole’s house, he would sometimes see O.J. down the street watching in his car. So Kris called Perulli.
Listen, O.J. is coming. Maybe you should not come.
I have a gift to drop off. I will just get there early.
O.J. came to the party with Nicole and their children before the other guests. He was in good spirits, hugs all around. We always had Santa Claus come, and the kids were excited. Since it was early we were relieved that Perulli had decided not to come at all. Then he walked in. O.J. was in the entryway by the front door when he saw him.
Hi.
He went into the living room. Kris came up to me. She was very nervous, which she almost never gets, as was Nicole.
Go in the other room. Talk to O.J. We are getting Joseph out of here.
I went into the living room, where there were two couches opposite one another with a coffee table in the middle. I sat down. O.J. was just staring ahead. I looked at him to see if anything would register and it did not. I tried to engage him.
Hey O.J., have you played any golf recently?
Nothing. Not a blink of the eye. Nothing. I had never been with anybody with such a reaction, or more precisely a nonreaction, like that. He literally was not there. I could not get up and leave without trying one more time.
Hey, O.J. I’m off Thursday. Want to play golf?
Nothing.
I left and found Kris.
This is the strangest thing I have ever seen in my life. He’s like not even there. I asked him some questions, and he was staring into space.
O.J. got up, found Nicole and the kids, and essentially grabbed them.
We’re leaving.
Several months after the party, Kris and I were in bed watching the news at around ten thirty p.m. when we got a call from Nicole.
Where’s Kris?
She’s right here.
Put her on the line.
She wanted to talk to both of us, so we placed the call on speaker. We had a mutual friend named Faye Resnick. She was great when she was sober but also had a cocaine problem and a very addictive personality. We had not seen her for a while, so we were concerned something was up. Nicole confirmed it.
Faye got back into drugs, and if she doesn’t stop she’s going to kill herself. She will just keep taking drugs until she dies. We need to have an intervention. We have to get a group together who knows her and do it tonight.
Tonight?
She has to be in rehab by the morning. That’s our goal.
We got dressed and went to Starbucks to get some coffee and picked up Nicole at her house. Then we went to Faye’s.
We walked in and there was Faye, and I wished all my children could have been here to see what drugs can do. Faye was a thin, attractive woman who always cared about the way she looked. But now she was completely disheveled and had lost thirty pounds and was almost skeletal.
There were about six or seven of us who gathered, including her ex-husband and ex-boyfriend. We all were fundamentally saying the same thing:
Faye, you have to go to rehab.
Oh, I’m fine.
We went through her purse and found cocaine. We started cleaning up the house, which was a mess.
Over and over, Nicole kept saying the same thing to Faye:
If you don’t stop, you’re going to die. And you don’t want your daughter to grow up without a mother.
I was listening to the urgency and sincerity and love in Nicole’s voice. She, more than anyone else in my mind, was the one who got her to rehab.
Three or maybe four days afterward, Nicole was dead.
Still to this day, I wish we had known that the person we needed to save in that room at that very moment was Nicole. As serious as Faye’s situation was, Nicole’s was even more life-threatening:
It was her children who would grow up without a mother.
I was in Chicago playing in a celebrity golf tournament on June 13, 1994, when somebody drove up to me in a cart and said I had to call home because there was an emergency. I instantly feared someone in the family had gotten hurt. I immediately called Kris, who was crying over the phone.
Nicole is dead… Nicole is dead… Nicole is dead…
What?
You have to come home right away.
Kris did not know the circumstances, whether it was a robbery or home invasion or what. I threw my stuff into my suitcase and headed for the airport. I did not know until later that O.J. had been in Chicago as well playing in a different golf tournament. I did not know that until after the murders of Nicole and Ron Goldman the night of June 12, 1994, he had left for the Windy City the same night, presumably to give himself an alibi.
When I got to the ticket counter, the agent recognized me and smiled and casually uttered what would turn out to be the creepiest thing ever said to me, a chilling reminder that no matter how different O.J. and I were, people would always perceive us as being from the same male athlete gender mold, recognizable celebrities because of o
ur sports accomplishments, peas in the same pod.
Oh, O.J. had to get back to Los Angeles, too.
I have tried to erase O.J. from my mind. Everybody I know has. I believe he got away with two savage murders, but the trial caused enormous tension within the family because of all the improbably woven strands. Kris and I, knowing the background of O.J. and Nicole and her hatred and fear of him, believed he had done it the minute we heard of her murder and the circumstances surrounding it. Because of Robert Kardashian’s relationship to O.J.—being on his defense team and one of his longstanding friends—Robert’s daughters Kourtney and Kim were on O.J.’s side (Khloé was too young to really understand).
The case was impossible to discuss, two daughters firm in the conviction that he hadn’t done it because of their father’s involvement, and their mother and stepfather firm in the conviction that he had done it. When O.J. was found not guilty, Kourtney came into the house after school and said to me:
See, I told you he didn’t do it.
I am always cognizant of my role of stepfather, but this was one of the rare moments where I just stepped in without checking with Robert first, because that simply wasn’t possible given his role in the trial. I took both Kourtney and Kim aside privately and explained to them that a jury finding of not guilty did not mean that O.J. was innocent of two murders. I also said to them:
The name of O.J. Simpson will never be mentioned in this house again.
It wasn’t.
But it still lingered in so many different ways, because he would always haunt us.
I always wondered why Robert Kardashian was so aligned with O.J. They had both gone to the University of Southern California, Robert had helped him on business deals, and there was no doubt that their friendship was deep and sincere and that they both saw admirable qualities in one another. But his defense of O.J. was so extreme given Robert’s impeccable character. When I tried to sort it out, I wondered if it somehow had to do with Kris.
The divorce still devastated Robert. Everybody knew that. And now Kris at that point in the 1990s was appearing in hundreds of infomercials with me, looking lean and fit and happy as we promoted our exercise equipment. I wondered if Robert saw all this and began to think she was becoming something of a celebrity and it ate away at him—until the O.J. case, when he became a superstar and completely overshadowed her. All of a sudden he was the one all over TV, and I wonder if it was his way of saying to her what I think she was saying to him when she married me: a big fuck you.
Long after the trial and the verdict of not guilty, Robert and I were in the car one day. We had always been friendly to one another and liked one another. We talked all the time about parenting. We never talked much about the trial. The look of shock on his face when O.J. was acquitted had become famous because of its very indication that he was shocked by the verdict. In a subsequent interview with Barbara Walters on ABC’s 20/20, he did admit that he had doubts about the verdict in light of the blood evidence against Simpson. But that was as far as he went.
I don’t even know why the trial came up in our conversation. At that point there had been two of them, the criminal trial in Los Angeles Superior Court and the civil trial in the same court in which a jury quickly concluded that O.J. had done it and held him liable for millions of dollars in worthless damages because he didn’t have any money. The hysteria had died down, so maybe Robert felt comfortable. Or maybe his guard was down. Or maybe he didn’t care anymore. But he turned and said to me:
I would’ve been okay with it if they had gotten him in the first trial.
The implication was obvious that he believed O.J. was guilty. But there is no way of knowing now what he exactly meant, since he tragically died of cancer in 2003 at the age of fifty-nine. Just as there was no way of him knowing that the name Kardashian would one day become a pop culture phenomenon all over the world. Or that his children and Kris would collectively become impossibly famous.
Or that his ex-wife’s husband would one day be called Caitlyn.
April 4, 2016
“It was only a game”
I am in Eugene.
I am returning to one of the most legendary track and field facilities in the world on the University of Oregon campus. The Nike shoe was invented here by the then Oregon track coach Bill Bowerman and Phil Knight, a middle distance runner at the university. I cannot possibly match such accomplishments. But I was invented here as well, the first time the name of Bruce Jenner became associated with the Olympics. I came out of nowhere in 1972 when I finished third in the US Olympic Trials. I never went back to nowhere again as an athlete.
I am here for Sports Illustrated. They are doing a cover story on the fortieth anniversary of my win in the 1976 games. Some of the photographs are being taken by Heinz Kluetmeier, who also shot pictures of me competing in the Games for the magazine.
AWRRIGHT! read the headline of the magazine cover in capital yellow letters after I won, looking as tall as Times Square neon. Beneath: BRUCE JENNER WINS BIG.
The story will be part of Sports Illustrated’s “Where Are They Now?” issue appearing in July 2016, featuring such other athletes as Ken Griffey Jr., Drew Bledsoe, and William Perry. There are about a dozen of us named in all. We have all traveled a long way from then to now, some more remembered than others. But it is safe to say that none of the other male athletes honored now wear a blouse or a dress or a gown or a pantsuit (at least in public).
I am sitting at the end of a long bench at Hayward Field, painted in the dark green of the University of Oregon colors. It isn’t a field but a track and field shrine, with seating for 10,500, and the host of the US Olympic Trials six times, including 1972 and 1976, when I competed. The Nike origins only add to the legend: from a track shoe inspired by a waffle iron into a company with a market capitalization of $100.1 billion.
It is early morning and the sun is rising. I am in the cold of shadow and then the warmth of light, and while I prefer the light better I am not uncomfortable with the shadow since I spent so much of my life there. I am gazing out onto the oval of the track, sitting on a bench. It is the pose of pondering that photographers and magazine editors resort to to suggest reflection and the ooze of nostalgia over past triumphs since I had three distinct ones here.
I cooperate with the producer, who is doing a companion video for Sports Illustrated Films to the written piece by Tim Layden. There are several videographers and, of course, Heinz.
I was on a mission to make something out of myself after finishing third here in the trials in 1972 and being such an unknown that the New York Times misidentified me in its wrap-up. In 1975 I set a world record here. In the 1976 trials here before Montreal, I broke it. But it was all just a game. Just sports. Maybe that sounds dismissive: without my athletic accomplishments I would not be writing these words or no one would care if I were writing them. I know that.
It was only a game because of what I know now, what I feel now, that the only worthy self is the true self. It is not the sole province of those living their lives in the wrong gender, or those discovering their sexual preference, but in anyone who is different and feels different and wants to celebrate that difference as a natural outgrowth of our humanity, defined not by what others believe but the beautiful singularity of our hearts and souls.
If I ponder anything, it is not the past but my present and my future. Life is wonderful today as I have just passed my first anniversary after transition, although not without its conflicts and sometimes being a piñata for the media.
I am used to it, of course. They bother me for a little bit, and then the bother goes away. They are forgotten in the bottomless pit of the Internet. But sometimes they linger, and they do hurt and cause damage, and not just to me.
Like the story floated by a Canadian writer named Ian Halperin, desperately and pathetically trying to generate publicity for some silly book he wrote on the Kardashians. Halperin claimed in an interview that I was unhappy and considering transitioning back
to Bruce. The story was one hundred percent wrong and garbage and swill. But the story went viral and was printed all over the world, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, without verification. They legitimized the story, making it seem like fact.
The other problem with these stories, the problem virtually everyone in the public spotlight faces, is that there is no recourse. So I want to make the point here one more time as emphatically as I can. I have never been happier. Transitioning back? It’s the opposite.
Halperin’s story has another pernicious effect. In church I met a teenager who wanted to transition but was having difficulty convincing his parents. I gave him my phone number so he could talk to an understanding voice. He called me one day and said that his father read the story about my alleged desire to transition back and was using it as ammunition against his son; in other words, the son would regret it just as Caitlyn Jenner regretted it. I can only convey to the father that the story is totally false. But who knows whether I will be believed or not. It would be a terrible tragedy if I’m not.
We move down to the track itself. The producer wonders if it is not impossible to want to run again or at least bounce around on the track a little bit. I do so in an exaggerated way so I purposely look clownish.
He wants me to say I miss being back here, what a big part of my life it was. I say the appropriate words, but my heart isn’t in it. Actually, being on the track makes me realize how much I don’t want to run at all. (It’s the same with the shot I find when cleaning out the garage in Malibu. I look at it, think about picking it up for old time’s sake, realize I have no interest in the shot put anymore, and roll it several feet into a corner.) I know it would be great for the cameras for a tear to come to my eye. But there is really no sense of nostalgia for me.
Bruce may be stuck here. And that’s fine.
Caitlyn never was and never will be.
Chapter Eleven
No Way Out
Kris and I are watching a television show on MTV one night called The Osbournes. It is about a family of four living in Beverly Hills, presided over by Ozzy Osbourne, a heavy metal god whose days of biting off the heads of bats at raucous concerts are behind him. The show is amusing: watching Ozzy in a domesticated role as a father and husband has its moments. He seems like he is intoxicated half the time, and he later admits he was intoxicated all the time during the shooting of each episode from 2002 to 2005.
The Secrets of My Life Page 18
