by Sean Smith
The cover headline on the article read ‘The Fall and Rise of an American Hero’. This bolstered the Bruce Jenner image of a man fighting against the disadvantages of life, including dyslexia. His story was one of triumph over adversity and was a considerable money-spinner during his years as a media personality and motivational speaker. It was an image he later promoted in his 1996 book Finding the Champion Within.
At no stage did he reveal to his audience his real struggle within. He would bounce on stage, all vigour and enthusiasm, wearing a pair of silk panties underneath his three-piece suit. Bruce, it appeared, was a master of living up to an image created for the general public. It wasn’t real.
The offers flooded in after the Olympics and soon Bruce was a very wealthy young man. He appeared on all the top talk shows, including The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson and The Merv Griffin Show. He became a well-known face on sports programmes, at one time co-presenting the popular Wide World of Sports.
He also revealed an entrepreneurial streak that would later fit in very well with the Kardashian flair for business. Their philosophy is all about making the most of every opportunity. Bruce bought his first plane in 1978 and started Bruce Jenner Aviation, which sells aircraft supplies.
He was marketed as a personality much more than the usual famous sportsman. He became the spokesperson and face on the packet of the iconic cereal Wheaties, the ‘breakfast of champions’, and a million families breakfasted with Bruce on the kitchen counter every day for years.
His acting ambitions didn’t reach the hoped-for heights, however. He wasn’t going to be the next James Bond any time soon. He tried out for the Superman movie, but the role went to Christopher Reeve.
He ended up in Can’t Stop the Music, a musical comedy based on the New York disco group Village People. Kris Jenner refers to it as Can’t Stand the Music. The film cost $20 million to make and returned $2 million at the box office. It was the first winner of the Golden Raspberry Award (Razzie) for Worst Picture. Bruce was nominated as Worst Actor, but the judges decided Neil Diamond deserved the award for The Jazz Singer.
On one level, the film could be viewed as compulsive viewing. Bruce plays a sober-suited lawyer who undergoes a transformation when he becomes involved in the world of the Village People and ends up dancing down the street in a crop top and cut-off denim shorts. If it were released today, as a snapshot of the age, Can’t Stop the Music would probably be hailed as a must-see, glorious camp classic.
Bruce’s acting career stalled at the first hurdle and didn’t much improve with a guest-starring role in the popular motorcycle cop series CHiPS. He played Officer Steve McLeish, who took over from the lead, Frank Poncherello (Erik Estrada), for six weeks. He started off as a movie star and became ‘made for TV’ in the space of a year.
Bruce and Linda, meanwhile, shared an idyllic life by the ocean in Malibu, strolling along the beach together at sunset, playing sports, going to all the best parties and welcoming another son, Brody, into the world on 21 August 1983. Nothing could upset their happiness – or so Linda thought.
Just after New Year 1985, Bruce sat his beautiful wife down and told her his secret. It wasn’t a confession she could ignore. The first time round with Chrystie, Bruce had been fairly light and matter of fact about things; this was far more serious and heartfelt. ‘I have lived in the wrong skin, the wrong body, my whole life. It is a living hell for me, and I really feel that I would like to move forward with the process of becoming a woman, the woman I have always been inside.’
The couple tried therapy, but the counsellor confirmed that there was no cure or fix for what Bruce was going through. Linda would later write movingly that the enormity of what she had been told ‘broke her heart into a million pieces’.
While Linda began the painful process of ending her marriage, Bruce began gender reassignment treatment for the first time. He had always hated his ‘ski jump’ nose, so a touch of plastic surgery to remove the bump and make it more feminine was a good start. He also had painful electrolysis treatment to remove his masculine beard and chest hair.
He started injecting female hormones, which led to him growing breasts. They weren’t Kim Kardashian-sized or anything like that, but when his young sons saw him in the shower one day, they told their mother, ‘Daddy has boobs!’ She tried to explain it away, saying that his well-muscled body had turned to fat now that he wasn’t training. Linda told the Huffington Post that she didn’t reveal the truth about their father until her sons were 31 and 29 respectively. She had sought to protect them – and him.
Bruce, by his own admission, went on a downward spiral in the late eighties. He and Linda were divorced rapidly in 1985 and he found it difficult to cope on his own. He was living by himself in a one-bedroom house in Malibu, with no real close friends. His work had dried up. When he met Kris Kardashian, he had $200 in the bank and debts, he estimated, of $300,000. His clothes were old and worn, his house was a tip and he seemed to spend half his life in his grubby van. She needed to sort him out. She would give him her love and the energy to re-establish himself with the American public.
For his part, he decided to put his gender reassignment treatment on the back burner and stop taking the hormones. He couldn’t go further at that point, because he feared the effect his transformation might have on his young children.
5
DOPE ON A ROPE
Kim wanted to be a housewife when she grew up. She was a sweet and thoughtful little girl who dreamed of being not Madonna, but a wife and mother, and maybe a grandmother one day, just like her nanas whom she adored. ‘I always thought I would have lots of kids. Be getting up going to the gym every morning – super early. Coming home, making breakfast for everyone. Packing lunches and driving the kids to school.’ It must have been very bewildering for a girl who wanted to play happy families to witness what was going on within her own home.
It wasn’t long before Bruce was practically living at Tower Lane. The mansion was much more comfortable than his Malibu home. Robert Kardashian wasn’t especially pleased by the turn of events. He blinked and his wife was having an affair with Todd. He blinked again and Bruce Jenner was sitting on his sofa.
Todd alleged that at this point he was still involved with Kris: ‘I wouldn’t say we were dating . . . she was still coming over to the apartment and we were still sleeping together when she had started dating Bruce.’
Todd found the situation troubling. It began ‘messing with his head’, as he puts it. Kris has never commented on his allegation, but described in her book how he arrived at Tower Lane one night and caused a scene. He subsequently moved to London to forget her and later became a successful animator.
Financially, things improved for Kris when Robert agreed to a monthly settlement, but the divorce trauma was ongoing. In the divorce papers, Robert commented on her new relationship: ‘My children are exposed to another man living with their mother. I believe that is inappropriate . . .’
The arguments, which were inevitably about money, and who was finally going to get Tower Lane, were apparently ended when Bruce and Robert thrashed things out over dinner. Kris gave up any claim on the house and settled in Malibu with Bruce. She observed, ‘There was a period of a couple of years where it was really ugly and hard and you didn’t want the kids to take sides.’
By the time the divorce was made final in March 1991, Kris and Bruce had been engaged for four months. They were married four weeks later, on 21 April 1991. Kim was 10 and a half.
Bruce had managed to persuade his own children’s nanny, Pam Behan, a student from a small town in Minnesota, to leave his ex-wife Linda’s house and go to live with his new family. Pam adored Bruce, her first platonic male friend. Only in Los Angeles could the attractive new nanny be enjoying a fling with Sylvester Stallone.
Linda Thompson had previously been dating the star of Rocky and Rambo, but had moved on to the multimillionaire music producer David Foster. They eventually married and formed a formidable s
ongwriting partnership, writing, among others, ‘I Have Nothing’ for Whitney Houston and ‘Tell Him’, a hit for Barbra Streisand and Celine Dion.
Pam was responsible for making sure Kris’s daughters didn’t get chocolate down their pristine white dresses before the wedding ceremony. Bruce’s eldest daughter Cassandra, known to everyone as Casey, was also a bridesmaid and, like the others, wore a garland of white and pink flowers in her hair. His three sons, and three-year-old Robert Jr, looked dashing in black tuxedos and pale pink bow-ties that matched the groom’s. Only Kourtney, still missing her dad, looked slightly uncomfortable about the happy family day out, She did, however, manage a weak smile for the wedding pictures.
Kris and Bruce were married in the garden of the Bel Air home of Terry and Jane Semel. He was the boss of Warner Bros, and subsequently chairman of Yahoo! This was the orbit of extreme wealth and influence the Kardashians already inhabited. In the world of the Kardashians and Jenners, everyone is a ‘dear friend’, but the generosity of the Semels was obvious.
After the divorce, relations between Robert and Kris settled down for the sake of the children. Kourtney still had a problem with Bruce taking her father’s place, but they saw plenty of Robert. He had moved back into Tower Lane and was in charge every other weekend, a time when he played the devoted dad.
Robert tried to keep everything as normal as possible. As always, he took the children to church at weekends and, if they were with him during the week, he made sure he drove them to school. He was very popular with Kim’s friends and would entertain them with a variety of spoonerisms – if he was going to take a shower, he would tell them he needed to ‘shake a tower’ – the sort of harmless sense of humour he had always had.
Nikki Lund, whom he insisted on calling Dicky, recalled that Robert was always stricter than Kris: ‘He was a fun kind of guy, but he had a responsibility as a man to daughters as beautiful as these. He would take us to church. He prayed and read the Bible. He was a really good dad. Kim was a sensitive girl and definitely spiritual.’
Robert gave Kim a Bible, which he signed, and it became her most treasured possession. The word Bible is one of her favourite expressions, said at the end of a sentence to indicate that she swears it’s true. She, Nikki and her other friends were young Christian girls, although they possibly liked church more because they could wear jeans there on a Sunday.
Kim was one of those girls who could fit into any group. She had her circle of friends, like Kimberly Stewart and Nikki Lund, but she was equally as happy mixing with Kourtney’s group – the nerds, as she called them. With her closest pals, she devised a special sign language that they all learned so they could ‘talk’ about people who were in the room or class with them. Nikki recalled, ‘It was a way of being in a group. It was our little thing. We were obsessed with it.’
Kim was becoming fascinated by clothes. She and Kourtney barely had time for breakfast in the mornings, because it took them so long to get ready. They would grab a vanilla sandwich cookie on the way to Pam’s car for the morning school run from Malibu to Beverly Hills. Pam, who wrote a book called Malibu Nanny, was thrilled to discover the house they were then living in used to be home to Sean Penn when he was courting Madonna.
Kourtney was definitely the boss, perhaps because she was older and a little brighter; certainly, she was the fastest reader in the household. The two sisters used to play fashion games together. One favourite, at least with Kourtney, was when she pretended to be the leading fashion designer Donna Karan, creator of the DKNY label, and poor Kim was her beleaguered assistant. Kourtney used it as a means to make fun of her. Kim recalled, ‘She would just make me do anything she said. She would do it on purpose and embarrass me in front of her friends.’ Despite the natural sibling rivalry, the two girls were very close.
At their new home, they had use of the obligatory pool and Jacuzzi, as well as a magnificent view of the ocean from the patio. Kim preferred to spend a lot of her free time in her room, however, indulging her passion for making things, particularly jewellery. She had every conceivable size, shape and colour of bead and would carefully sort and select them to make the right necklace, earrings or bracelet.
One of the jobs of the nanny was to make sure the children were tucked up comfortably in bed at night. Kim would often talk in her sleep. Sometimes she would even have a conversation with Pam, even though she was in a deep slumber. On one occasion, she shouted out, ‘There’s an elephant on my desk.’ Pam told her to get it off the desk, whereupon Kim, still fast asleep, replied, ‘Help me. Help me. Get it off.’ Pam had to leave the room before her laughter woke up her young charge.
Kim may have been a quiet girl when she was 10, but she had blossomed into a much livelier teenager by the time of her eighth-grade graduation from her junior school El Rodeo in Whittier Drive, Beverly Hills, in 1994. She was filmed at the party afterwards by another student eager to make a movie of the night. There’s always one home-movie maker who wants to be the next Spielberg.
The already curvy 13-year-old Kim is excited and enjoying herself, dancing madly, in a white blouse, perfect make-up and a shorter than usual bob haircut. She is talking straight to the camera, ‘Is anyone getting a tape of this? I hope you do, because when you see me when I’m famous and old, you’re gonna remember me as this beautiful little girl.’
She continues to lark about as the cameraman starts to walk away: ‘Excuse me, are you leaving? My name’s Kim Kardashian. I’m the dopest of the ropest person in this class. I’m dope on a rope.’ When someone off camera interrupts, ‘Define “dope”, Kim’, she answers, ‘Dope is Kim.’ She seems to be displaying a confidence she says she never had as a girl. She ends the clip by comparing herself to a classmate: ‘I’m more popular than she is . . . everyone loves me. I’m so popular and everyone loves me . . .’
She’s just a schoolgirl having fun on a big night out, but it’s interesting that she should be using ‘dope’ as hip-hop slang for excellent or wonderful. Perhaps she picked it up from her first serious boyfriend, Michael Jackson’s nephew T. J.
From a young age, Kim preferred black men. She wasn’t brought up in the Deep South like Britney Spears, where racism was still rife. This was Beverly Hills, where black families had just as much money and prestige. Lionel Richie and Sugar Ray Leonard were good friends and neighbours of the family. Lionel was the father of Nicole Richie, whom Kim was at school with. Sugar Ray was so close to the Kardashians that he was Khloé’s godfather. Most of the Jackson clan lived in the area. And there was Uncle O. J., too, of course. He lived on North Rockingham Avenue, in exclusive Brentwood, with his wife Nicole, whom he had married in 1985. The sociable Nicole had become very much part of Kris’s wide circle.
By 1994, the Kardashian family had undergone much change. Kourtney had started high school at an all-girl Catholic school called Marymount, on Sunset Boulevard, and Kim would be joining her at the start of the next academic year. Kris and Bruce had decided that travelling to and from Malibu was becoming too much of a logistical challenge and had rented a house in Benedict Canyon.
The most dramatic change was that Kim’s father had a new woman in his life. He had sold Tower Lane and leased an enormous 15-room house 10 miles away, in the pretty suburb of Encino. He was making a fresh start with his fiancée, Denice Shakarian Halicki, a graceful blonde, who wore very short skirts and was generally described as a ‘knockout’. She also happened to drive a Rolls-Royce, which had been left to her by her late husband. She was Armenian on her father’s side, but didn’t have the exotic features of the Kardashians. Instead, she had inherited her Norwegian mother’s looks. When she was 16, there had been talk of an arranged marriage, but that had come to nothing and she was able to pursue a career as a model and actress.
In 1983, she met Toby Halicki, who had become a multimillionaire thanks to his stunningly successful cult film Gone in 60 Seconds. He was a larger-than-life character, one of 13 children, who, in a great Hollywood story, came to Los Angeles, ag
ed 15, with nothing but an extensive knowledge of automobiles and the salvage business that his family ran in New York.
His hit movie cost under $100,000 to make, but grossed more than $40 million at the box office. There was little in the way of a script, but there were lots of cars. For the film’s finale, Toby performed an amazing 39-metre jump, which resulted in him compacting 10 vertebrae and walking with a permanent limp.
He married Denice in May 1989, just before starting work on the sequel Gone in 60 Seconds 2. She was to be one of the stars, while he would again write, direct and perform most of the stunts. He had already bought 400 cars to be sacrificed in an orgy of vehicle destruction. He was preparing for a stunt during filming near Buffalo, New York, when a telegraph pole snapped and fell on him, killing him instantly. They had been married for three months.
Denice met Robert Kardashian through mutual Armenian connections, and they helped each other at a difficult time in their personal lives. Her late husband’s considerable fortune was tied up in probate for many years and she went to Robert for legal advice. She wasn’t the super-rich widow many might have assumed she was – at least not then. She had a traditional Christian upbringing and the couple shared a strong religious connection.
While relations had improved a little with his ex-wife, it wasn’t a case of coffee mornings and trips to the beach together. It was awkward, especially if Bruce was around. When Robert went to their house to pick up the children, the two youngest, Khloé and Robert Jr, would be waiting outside. He would then honk the horn, which was the signal for Kourtney and Kim to run out of the house to join them.
