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
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 songwriting 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,