Jenner’s first marriage unraveled. Jenner suggested when they were all but divorced and she learned Chrystie was pregnant with their second child that Chrystie get an abortion. “My first reaction was that I didn’t want it,” Jenner said in an interview in 1980 in Playboy. Cassandra Jenner was born that summer.
Three days after the divorce was finalized, Jenner married Linda Thompson, Elvis’ ex and one of the “Hee Haw Honeys” on “Hee Haw,” after meeting her at a celebrity tennis tournament at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion. She gave birth to Jenner’s third child five months afterwards.
“She was much different than Chrystie,” Jenner said in 1982 in an interview in Playgirl. “Chrystie was very dominant, tried to control me, belonged to NOW”—the National Organization for Women—“not that that’s terrible …” Jenner continued: “It was recently the way she tried to control me, and Linda was the opposite of that. She was a very warm, sensitive woman, and that struck me right off. Linda was a lot more gentle. To me she was a lot more woman.” Jenner kept talking: “Now that’s a pretty big statement, but it’s how she handled her man, OK. She was a lot more submissive, she let me be more the man.” Jenner didn’t stop: “Not that women have to be submissive to be feminine. I can’t really put my finger on it, but Linda is totally a woman, totally a lady.”
In the same Playgirl interview, Jenner also discussed the Vietnam War. Jenner wasn’t opposed on principle. Just didn’t want to serve.
“I never involved myself in the protests against the war and all that other stuff,” Jenner said. “I ran in the Olympic Games in ’72 and two weeks afterwards I flunked my physical.”
“Did they know you were an Olympic athlete?” the reporter asked.
“I never brought the subject up,” a grinning Jenner responded. “I got out because I had a bad knee. Running didn’t bother it at all, and walking was no problem, but marching killed my knee, so I couldn’t go in. I could run in the Olympic Games, and high jump and stuff, but God, marching …”
“I was very proud to have an American flag in my hand. On the other hand, I didn’t really want the all-American, apple-pie image. I’m not quite that. I didn’t win the gold medal for the United States. I won it for myself.”
“How does this square with your all-American image?”
“Who cares? I wasn’t trying to be all-American. I was recently trying to get out of the service. I didn’t worry about all-American. If I didn’t have to deal with the service, why deal with it? My dad was in the Fifth Ranger Battalion in World War II. He landed on D-Day. He was like a Green Beret of his day, and he said—‘Don’t go! Stay out if ya can, kid,’” Jenner said with a laugh.
“I was very proud to have an American flag in my hand,” Jenner said of the victory-lap scene before the medal ceremony in Montreal. “On the other hand, I didn’t really want the all-American, apple-pie image. I’m not quite that. I didn’t win the gold medal for the United States. I won it for myself. Living in the United States gave me a great opportunity to grow up and do with my life what I wanted, and I went with it. The government wasn’t paying me. The Olympic committee didn’t help. I did it all on my own. That medal is significant because of what I accomplished. It wasn’t because our system is better than any other in the world. … The medal’s in my house, not the White House.”
Jenner’s second marriage started to fail, too.
Like her predecessor, Jenner’s second wife struggled with the emotional disconnect in their relationship, the distance and the distractedness. Just never looked to be all there and whole. “Having enjoyed several hours with Elvis, discussing religion and philosophy and the meaning of love and life, I definitely noticed that Bruce did not seem to engage with these topics in quite the same way,” Thompson would write in 2016. “This is not to say he was in any way shallow, just that he looked to be most comfortable in motion.”
To the extent that Jenner was ever comfortable at all. In the ’80s, when given the opportunity of an empty house, Jenner more and more began putting on makeup, blouses and wigs, making VHS tapes, posing, playing them back, trying to see the way that she felt, roaming in parks in the dark in dresses.
Linda Thompson holding her book, A Little Thing Called Life: On Loving Elvis Presley, Bruce Jenner, and Songs in Between, in New York, Aug. 24, 2016. | AP Photo
“I identify as a woman,” Jenner told Thompson, according to Thompson’s memoir, in early 1985, when their older son was three and a half and their younger son was 18 months. “For as long as I can remember, I’ve looked in the mirror and seen a masculine image staring back at me, where there should have been a feminine reflection. I've lived in the wrong skin, the wrong body, my whole life. It's 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've always been inside.”
Jenner moved out. Still doing ads for London Fog and Ford along with a bi-monthly magazine called Bruce Jenner’s Better Health and Living—and the speeches, up to $25,000 a pop, talking to IBM, talking to the Future Farmers of America, talking to the Boy Scouts, about “Finding the Champion Within,” while on the inside feeling like “a fraud”—Jenner stayed in a Malibu rental, six acres, sheltered, and began transitioning. Feminizing facial surgery and hormones. Excruciating electrolysis, one hair at a time, to get rid of the beard. Quiet and prone on a table in tears.
“This is what you get for being who you are,” Jenner thought with each prick, shot and burn. “Just take the pain.”
“It’s difficult to be a legend. It’s hard for me to recognize me,” James Baldwin, the late writer and activist, said in an interview in 1987. “It’s unbearable because time is passing and you are not your legend, but you’re trapped in it.”
Trapped.
Couldn’t transition. Stopped in 1989. Couldn’t finish. “The culture of celebrity doesn't look kindly upon those who disappear. Becoming relevant again once you have largely made yourself irrelevant is often impossible,” as Jenner would explain years afterwards concerning the agony of having to share her life with an nearly fictitious character.
“Bruce still has earning potential. Bruce pays the bills. Bruce is tired of being lonely and isolated and wonders if as a trans woman she would be even more lonely and isolated,” as Jenner put it. “I've to get back in the game. I've to once again establish Bruce as the dominant presence, no matter how much I loathe him.”
Jenner met the divorced Kris Kardashian in 1990, through a retired Los Angeles Dodger, on a celebrity fishing trip. Their first date started at a celebrity golf tournament. A few weeks afterwards, according to Kardashian’s memoir, they went to a private cocktail party for Ronald and Nancy Reagan. The following spring, they were married in the backyard of the Bel Air home of the chair and CEO of Warner Bros. Entertainment.
Jenner saw opportunity with Kardashian. The feeling was very much mutual.
Jenner had the gold medal in a sock drawer. Kardashian went and took it out.
“There should be Bruce Jenner clothing, Bruce Jenner exercise products, Bruce Jenner endorsement deals, Bruce Jenner vitamin supplements,” she said.
The Kardashian-led hustle led to informercials for sunglasses and for home aerobics equipment, the Power Trainer, the Super Step, the Stair Climber Plus, and that led to yet more speeches. The champion from “The Champion Within” gave rah-rah talk after rah-rah talk, according to Jenner’s memoir, while wearing a bra, pantyhose and panties covered by a dark-blue suit before hurrying upstairs to put on a wig and a blouse and a dress and do a plastic-wrap waist cinch and a Krazy Glue facelift.