was still in the fourth grade at school and had to do a project on someone famous. She was asking Kris whom she thought she should do, when Bruce interrupted her and said, ‘Why don’t you do me?’
Kim replied, innocently, ‘Well, who are you?’ He had to explain to her that he was an Olympic decathlon champion.
Her project was a resounding success, especially when the man himself went along to the school. She pictured him taking part in all 10 events. Unsurprisingly, she got an A, which was unusual for Kim. Kourtney was acknowledged as the brighter of the two, while Kim was a steady B sort of student.
William Bruce Jenner came into the lives of the Kardashian family like a whirlwind. He was an action man who could ski, drive racing cars and power boats, play golf, water ski and, of course, run and jump. He was fearless.
It hadn’t always been like that. He was shy and suffered from poor self-esteem growing up in small-town suburbia in New York State. Nobody realised back then that he had dyslexia, and believed him to be either lazy or stupid – he was neither.
He was eight years old, a solitary child with few friends, when he started sneaking into the rooms of his mother and two elder sisters to try on their clothes. He was a boy, still in short pants, and he had no real awareness of what he was feeling or why he was fascinated by female clothing. He just knew it made him feel good. Instead of retreating more into his own private world of self-doubt, Bruce was able to find acceptance when it was discovered that he was a superb sportsman. He acknowledges simply, ‘Sports saved my life.’
Bruce was the third of four children in a comfortable, middle-class household. He was born on 28 October 1949 in the town of Mount Kisco, a little over 40 miles north of New York City in Westchester County. He described his mother Esther as an ‘all-American mom and housewife’. His father Bill was a tree surgeon who had competed in the US Army Olympics in Nuremberg in 1945 and won a silver medal in the 100-yard dash. Bruce was well built as a toddler and his proud dad called him Bruiser. Young William was generally known by his second name to avoid confusion with his father.
As a small boy, it was his dyslexia, rather than gender issues, which was the most obviously troubling. Not unusually for the 1950s, his learning disability wasn’t diagnosed. As a result, his schooldays were ‘torturous’. He even had his eyes tested, because it was feared his inability to read properly might stem from problems with his vision.
Bruce explained to Ability magazine, ‘If you are dyslexic, your eyes work fine, your brain works fine, but there is a little short circuit that goes between the eye and the brain.’ His undiagnosed problem ruined his self-confidence: ‘My biggest fear was going to school. I thought everybody else was doing better than I was. I’d look around at my peers, and everyone else could do the simple process of reading. I was afraid the teacher was going to make me read in front of class. There was always the fear that everyone would find out I was a dummy.’ Bruce had no enthusiasm for school and the teachers thought he was just a daydreamer.
When he was 11, in the fifth grade, a teacher set up a game in which everyone had to run around some chairs and back. The idea was to see who had the fastest time. It was Bruce. He was the swiftest in the whole school.
From that moment on, his life changed. Here was something he could excel at and receive a slap on the back from his fellow pupils at the quaintly named Sleepy Hollow Middle School. The village of the same name is famously the setting for Washington Irving’s short story ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’. The author lived in nearby Tarrytown, as did the Jenner family. Nowadays, Sleepy Hollow is even better known for the television series that is set in the village and is, very loosely, a modern update of the original fantasy of the headless horseman.
When Bruce was a freshman at the Sleepy Hollow High School, aged 15, he asked the captain of the football team, known as the Headless Horsemen, for some help with punting the ball. Within an hour, Bruce was kicking it as far as his coach was. The young Bruce was extraordinarily gifted as a sportsman.
His family moved to Connecticut when Bruce was 16. They built a house on Lake Zoar, where they all could enjoy their passion for water skiing. Bruce was so good that he won the Eastern Regional Water Ski Championships and competed in the Nationals in 1966. At the local Newtown High School in Sandy Hook, he excelled in basketball, track and field and American football, and became all-state pole vault and high jump champion. He was unashamedly what Americans call a jock – a muscular athlete, usually good looking, whose life revolves around sports and girls and who is always one of the most popular guys in school.
Aged 18, Bruce was named the MVP (Most Valuable Player) in the track squad and the basketball team. He played both running back and quarterback in the school football team. His coach, Peter Kohut, recognised that he was an outstanding athlete: ‘He was a good kid, came to practice every day, seemed like he was always in good condition.’
At this stage of his life, Bruce was a very clean-cut young man – the sort of suitor who was bound to impress your mother. Nobody knew that behind the masculine exterior beat the heart and mind of a man who was more female than male.
Bruce was never going to be a great scholar, but he did win a football scholarship to a small college called Graceland in Lamoni, Iowa. Any hopes of becoming a professional footballer were soon dashed by a knee injury in his first year. That turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because the athletics director, L. D. Weldon, recognised his potential and persuaded him to put all his energies into the decathlon. Bruce needed an operation to repair his damaged knee in early 1969, but when he was fully recovered, he abandoned football and became a full-time athlete, reluctantly also giving up water skiing.
Weldon was one of the most respected coaches in the country, whose CV, crucially, included training Jack Parker, who won the bronze medal in the decathlon at the Berlin Olympics in 1936. He was an acknowledged expert in the multi-event discipline and encouraged Bruce to train hard.
Success was almost immediate. Jenner broke the Graceland decathlon record at his very first try at the 10 events. At his first open meeting, he placed sixth in the prestigious Drake Relays in Des Moines, the state capital. The following year, he returned to win the competition. In 1972, he came from nowhere to place third in the Olympic Trials, earning himself selection for the US team that travelled to Munich for the summer games. He could finish only tenth, but the promise was there. He had four years to fulfil his destiny.
Bruce was still at college in 1972 when he married his girlfriend, Chrystie Crownover, a minister’s daughter from Washington State. She had no idea, when they became man and wife, of the internal struggles her new husband had faced all his life. During their first year of marriage, she became the first person he confided in. She recalled, ‘He told me he always wanted to be a woman. Understandably, I was speechless. It was hard to wrap your head around it because he was such a manly man.’
His confession didn’t harm their marriage. In some ways, his revelation brought them closer together, as sharing a secret sometimes can. In her eyes, he remained a real guy, who was, quite simply, her hero.
After graduation, the couple moved to California, where the training facilities and the climate were better suited to an athlete with his eye on Olympic gold. Chrystie worked as an air hostess for United Airlines to support them, because in those days the Olympics were strictly for amateurs. She was entitled to free plane tickets, which were a godsend for Bruce, as it gave him the means to travel to athletics meetings all over the world. Today sport is a professional career and Bruce Jenner, an all-American hero, would have been a multi-millionaire, travelling first class around the world.
Chrystie was by his side when he flew to Montreal for the 1976 Olympics. He was the current world record holder and favourite to win. He was in second place after day one, but came charging through to claim the gold. He embraced his young wife, wrapped himself in the American flag and, for a fleeting moment, was the most famous man in the world. Now he needed to make some money.
Frank Litsky of the New York Times famously wrote of his triumph: ‘Bruce Jenner of San Jose, California, wants to be a movie or television star. After his record-breaking victory in the Olympic decathlon, he probably can be anything he wants.’ He wanted to be a woman and that was