The Kardashians Read online

  “When we call out the appropriation of our beauty,” continued the Black Lives Matter official, “it isn’t because we are being petulant, but because the Kardashians, and so many others have no conscience about how their appropriation of our culture disempowers and disenfranchises us.”

  Adding to Matthews’s criticism of the Kardashians’ lifting of black style and culture was Sam Ennon, the founder of the Black Owned Beauty Supply Association (BOBSA), who declared that the Kardashians “want to be black so bad it hurts. It’s just crazy. It’s like they’re trying to prove themselves. Black women are offended because they think they’re going to take their black man.”

  While the Paper cover of Kim and her behind didn’t actually “break the Internet”—the stunt line used to promote the now-famous cover, which became an instant collector item—the photo caught the attention of literally millions of people across the globe with access to a computer.

  As Mickey Boardman noted, “The hysteria started immediately. I got an e-mail from Kim. Her subject line was ‘Break the Internet,’ and she wrote, ‘We did it. I’m proud to be a part of it. Thank you so much.’

  “At the time,” said Boardman, “we thought it would be an amazing cover. We had no idea what a humongous cultural phenomenon it would be. There are a lot of celebrities who don’t want to do anything too risky, but we had a feeling Kim wanted to do something wild, something iconic, and that’s exactly what happened.”

  * * *

  IN 2016, A SELF-ABSORBED Kim Kardashian, with a grandiose view of herself—an exhibitionist once described as a “poster child for the naked self-portrait”—took a four-day vacation in Mexico, and while there she shot a mind-blowing six thousand selfies, an average of fifteen hundred per day, according to a calculation made by Page Six, the colorful gossip column of the New York Post.

  As the tabloid observed, “Kim Kardashian’s narcissism has a number.”

  Kim responded to all the criticism, declaring, “I am empowered by my body. I am empowered by my sexuality. I am empowered by feeling comfortable in my skin.… The body-shaming and slut-shaming—it’s like, enough is enough.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The “Misfit”

  One-time Olympic decathlon champion, three times a husband, six times a father, Wheaties cereal box hero to boys and girls of all ages, and reality TV star Bruce Jenner seemed to always be surrounded by sexy women.

  Never thought of as anything but masculine and straight, people who knew him well for decades, including his ex-wives and his many girlfriends, didn’t give his preference for being surrounded by glamorous women a second thought. He was, they had no reason to doubt, all guy. Until a very few found out differently. Later, the entire world would know his secret: He adored being around glamorous women because he actually liked to try on their clothing and makeup and be like them, because he believed he was one of them.

  “It was only natural that Bruce would go for fabulous babes,” said a close male friend, looking back in 2016. “He was an athlete and a celebrity, and women were attracted to him, and he to them.”

  Then the intimate quickly added, “He still likes them. But now he’s one of them. Or thinks he is. I’m still unsure. It’s wait-and-see for me. I’m really mixed up about the whole thing.”

  When Jenner was married to Kris Houghton Kardashian for more than two financially successful decades—he gained international fame again as a member of the Kardashians’ reality program—he was lost in a feminine world of makeup, lingerie, revealing club clothing, and generally sexually provocative females—his wife, his daughters, and their girlfriends. Females galore. For a straight man, it might have been heaven. For a man who considered himself a woman trapped in a man’s body, it was pure hell.

  Secretly, he squeezed his athlete’s six-foot-two muscular form into their clothes, tried to slip his size-twelve clodhoppers into their Manolos, and tested their makeup for the right look, and just once, one of his adopted Kardashian daughters, the sex tape star Kim, walked in on him, saw him in a feminized state, and hurried away—presumably shocked and traumatized. But supposedly she kept what she saw to herself, at least at the time.

  Before his very public and highly publicized coming-out as Caitlyn in April 2015—on national television with Diane Sawyer before seventeen million viewers, on the cover of Vanity Fair in July, looking dramatically and demurely stunning in a one-piece strapless number, and soon, naturally, with his own T-girl reality TV show, I Am Cait. On the same cable network as his pre-divorce family’s show, Ms. Jenner was seen socializing and traveling with a transgender male-to-female (all, or in part) entourage and espousing to the world her new Caitlyn lifestyle.

  But Jenner was pretty much known to some for years as a cross-dresser.

  When she was involved in a headline-making fatal accident on the Pacific Coast Highway not long after he declared himself a she, a private investigator, Paul Cohen, who represented one of the accident principals, was long aware of Jenner’s taste for dressing up.

  “There was always talk, going back years. I would see him occasionally in Malibu. He would show up at the market in Trancas and he would be wearing nail polish and makeup and eye shadow. And this was at least ten years before his transition became news,” said Cohen in 2016. “I’d come home and tell my wife, ‘I just saw Jenner. He looks like a girl. He’s dressing like a girl.’”

  After her divorce from Bruce, with whom she had two daughters, Kylie and Kendall, was finalized in 2014 on the grounds of “irreconcilable differences,” Jenner’s third and best known wife, Kris, publicly maintained that she never really knew what was going on in the transgender department with her husband, whom she married just days after Robert Kardashian divorced her.

  But a well-connected family and business confidant said, “Bullshit! She knew—Kris absolutely knew. She and her team just weren’t sure how it would play in Boise with her show and all of her side deals and sponsors, and all that money the Kardashians were raking in. So she went the public denial route. She played it safe. She’s smart. Talking about Bruce’s sexual issues could have muddied the waters. She left that to him.”

  * * *

  IN THE EARLY EIGHTIES, around the time Bruce Jenner met the woman who became his second wife—the Tennessee beauty Linda Thompson, who was Elvis Presley’s live-in lover in the King’s last years—Jenner had been staying part of the time at the Playboy Mansion West because his first wife, Chrystie Crownover Scott, mother of his first two children, had walked out on him.

  “Bruce became like one of the Bunnies,” claimed a longtime Mansion regular and Playboy Bunny afficionado. “One night he’s boogying in a tux with the girls at a dress-up party, and the next night he’d be like one of the girls and all dressed up—makeup, hosiery, high heels, the whole nine yards. I used to laugh, and just thought it was Bruce’s schtick, that he was just being funny, like when Milton Berle used to come on TV in drag. I mean, come on, Bruce fucking Jenner—the Olympics, Wheaties, a total guy’s guy. Give me a fucking break. Who thought?”

  Having gotten over Elvis’s premature demise, Linda Thompson actually met Jenner at a meet and greet at Hugh Hefner’s famed Holmby Hills party house during a charity celebrity tennis tournament. Then doing a lot of television—Starsky & Hutch, Vegas—it was fate for Thompson meeting Jenner there because it was her first time ever at the mansion, and she needed a man in her life.

  Handsome, charming, boyish Jenner told her that he was separated, that his wife had taken their son, Burt, born just eight months earlier, and flown the coop. He had come home to find her closet—a closet whose contents he had come to know intimately—empty. In the wake of Elvis, Thompson was open for a relationship. So was Jenner, who didn’t waste time. He asked if he could accompany her home from the party, and they were off and running.

  She then had a roommate, a girlfriend from high school, and that first night when she saw Linda on the sofa getting to know Bruce Jenner, her teenager-like reaction was, “Oh my God,
he is so hot.”

  Almost from the get-go, Thompson thought of Jenner as the kind of guy “I could start a family with,” she acknowledged in a revelatory bestselling memoir published in 2016.

  One chapter, about their turbulent life together, was candidly entitled “I Married a Woman.”

  For a very brief time, Jenner and his first wife, Chrystie, had a brief reconciliation. And Thompson figured it was all over for her and her handsome, manly Olympian. During his time back together with Chrystie, she got pregnant and had another child with him. But that on-and-off relationship didn’t last very long.

  Out of the blue, Jenner called Thompson and told her that he had good news and bad news.

  The bad news was that he was a father again, this time the newborn heir was a daughter, Cassandra Lynn “Casey” Jenner.

  The good news was that Chrystie “left me again!”

  Jenner said they were finally going to get a divorce.

  Linda Thompson was back in the game.

  Years later she and Kris Kardashian Jenner would learn that they weren’t the first two women to discover that they had been wed to a sexually troubled man, or as Jenner informed the world, “For all intents and purposes, I am a woman.”

  After Jenner went public with his gender dysphoria, the first Mrs. Bruce Jenner, from 1972 to 1981, went public herself, revealing that in their first year of marriage he had confessed his secret.

  On the TV program Good Morning America, Chrystie said she couldn’t “remember the exact words” Bruce had used in revealing his secret to her “because it was such a shock to me.” Using the last name of Scott, and with a career as an interior designer in Southern California, the attractive brunette in her early sixties recalled, “He told me he wanted to be a woman, and understandably, I didn’t know what to say.… It’s so hard to wrap your head around it, particularly because he was such a manly man.”

  She recalled that Jenner had “never indicated anything feminine in his demeanor,” and she noted, curiously, that Jenner’s problem, at least at first, “wasn’t really a problem” for their relationship and didn’t “threaten” it. But she did leave him once, as he told Linda Thompson, and Chrystie decided to divorce him after their second unsuccessful round together. Robert Kardashian’s widow, Ellen, claimed that Chrystie had once told her that Jenner was a cross-dresser who tried on her clothing and lingerie, which would be reason enough to cause marital discord.

  To a weekly tabloid magazine after Jenner went public, Chrystie Scott declared, “I support him in whatever he chooses to do. I just want him to be happy.” They still saw each other at family events, she said, and with their two children having families, Caitlyn Jenner was a “very proud and present grandfather.” With his adult son, Burt Jenner, he’s gone car hunting and racing, and his daughter, Cassandra, claimed to People magazine that she “supported” his big change.

  It seemed that once Jenner let the cat out of the bag, everyone from her past got in on the act.

  * * *

  WHEN JENNER GOT INVOLVED with Linda Thompson, he was doing well. He was generating revenue from sponsors such as the raincoat manufacturer London Fog and the camera company Minolta, and he was doing commentary for NBC Sports. He was known to millions facing him at the breakfast table on the Wheaties box, he was giving lucrative motivational speeches, and as a hobby, a dangerous one, he was often seen behind the wheel of a racing car.

  At one point Linda, by then known as Jenner’s girlfriend, accompanied Bruce to Australia to promote a film. It was called Can’t Stop the Music. His costars were the popular late seventies, early eighties predominately gay disco group the Village People. It was produced by the flamboyantly gay Allan Carr. But there was no hint in the film that Bruce Jenner was anything but the Bruce Jenner who the world loved and respected. And no indication that Carr had cast him because he knew his secret.

  As Linda truly believed, the guy she had fallen in love with was ambitious, driven, successful, and the “ideal” all-man.

  Early on, as she put it in her book, “I never really had a reason to doubt Bruce.”

  * * *

  THEY TALKED MARRIAGE AND discussed having children, and Thompson was convinced they “shared the same basic values … the traditional idea of home and hearth.”

  To Linda, “Bruce was capable of deep passion and emotion.”

  In the fall of 1980, Thompson became pregnant out of wedlock with the first of the two children she would have with Jenner, whose sperm seemed to know no bounds. This one was his third. She reportedly also got a part in The Love Boat, a popular TV series. Jenner proposed to her near a dirt road in Malibu, and they were married on January 5, 1981, in Hawaii, when she was five months pregnant with their first son, Brandon Thompson Jenner, Bruce’s third child. Life was even more perfect when they bought a “relatively modest” home in Malibu. In 1983, their second son, Brody, was born.

  He was going on two years of age in early 1985 and Brandon was almost four when their father confronted their mother. She practically fell on the floor when, she claimed, he declared:

  “I identify as a woman.… I am a woman trapped in a man’s body.… 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 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.”

  Linda took Bruce to a therapist in 1985, hoping he would change. In sessions, he confessed to having “dressed up in his mother’s and sister’s clothing” when he was home alone.

  For his wife, the revelations were unimaginable. As Thompson stated with irony in her memoir, “I had never been sexually attracted to women.”

  The most “devastating moment” came for her when he invited her to meet him in New York City, where he was making a personal appearance—as a man in a man’s body. But when he opened his hotel room door, he was “dressed as Caitlyn,” Thompson wrote. “Full wig. Full makeup. Heels. A nice feminine dress adorning his muscular body. And a big smile on his red lips.”

  During a trip to Memphis to visit Linda’s parents, her mother spotted the future husband of Kris Kardashian, the future stepfather of Kardashian siblings, Kourtney, Kim, Khloé, and Rob, and the future biological father with Kris of Kylie and Kendall “posing” in front of a mirror with his genitals tucked between his legs “so that he was flat in the front.”

  Shocked, Jenner’s mother-in-law asked her daughter, “Is Bruce queer?”

  Her guilty response? “Maybe he was just being silly.”

  Soon Jenner began seeing a physician, getting female hormones, having electrolysis on his facial hair, and having his chest hair removed.

  In the late summer of 1985, Jenner moved out and confessed that when Linda was traveling to Nashville to film her part in the TV series Hee Haw, he would get into women’s clothes and stroll around a Beverly Hills park. When she told him he could get into trouble, he responded, “When I dress up, you can’t tell that I’m Bruce Jenner.”

  Later, she also had the answer as to why one of her silk blouses was stretched out of shape and smeared with makeup. Running through old videotapes, she was shocked to find one in which Jenner had taped himself performing a fashion show, posing in a “glamorous” wardrobe that was his own private stash. One day a former neighbor telephoned Linda to tell her he had run into Bruce, who was all dolled up and looking pretty.

  It was July, but Bruce said he was going to a Halloween party.

  “Bruce had fooled not just me but the whole world,” declared Linda Thompson years after their divorce.

  * * *

  IN 2016, WITH A MINISERIES and a documentary about the the O.J. murder case garnering much press and big ratings, one starring an actor portraying the late Kardashian patriarch, Robert; with the Kardashians’ reality show still scoring huge audiences; with various Kard
ashians on the covers of popular celebrity and fashion magazines; and with nonstop gossip about their lives online and in print, Caitlyn Jenner’s cable reality program, I Am Cait, was suddenly canceled by the E! network before its third season.

  An E! spokesperson said: “We are incredibly proud of the two seasons of ‘I Am Cait,’ a groundbreaking docu-series that sparked an important and unprecedented global conversation about transgender people, their struggles and triumphs. Caitlyn and E! have mutually decided not to move forward with another season at this time. She will always remain a part of the E! family, and we look forward to continue following her journey as she appears on Keeping Up with the Kardashians.”

  After the announcement, the former Bruce Jenner tweeted: “It’s time for the next adventure.… thank you for the best girlfriends I could ask for!”

  But Caitlyn had a bright future going forward after reality TV. She was brought on as part of the cast of season three of the award-winning TV series Transparent, about the life and loves of a neurotic Jewish family man, played by Jeffrey Tambor, who transitions. When the deal was announced in the spring of 2016, The Washington Post noted, “Two powerful influences in transgender activism are joining forces.” Jill Soloway, the show’s creator and the daughter of a transgender father, declared the union of Jenner and Transparent was a “dream come true.”

  The Post observed that Jenner had “become the international symbol of a transgender woman. She’s been criticized along the way for how she’s handled” her controversial role, but the paper pointed out that Caitlyn “aligns herself with a show that is widely considered to be sensitive and smart about the nuances of characterizing gender issues.”

  For a year or so, Jenner had been quietly working on a highly promoted, much-awaited memoir entitled, The Secrets of My Life, published in late April of 2017. But a month before the pub date, the book’s big reveal made headlines: Jenner had reportedly undergone gender reassignment surgery in January 2017.