Caitlyn Jenner’s memoir fails to illuminate
...but the former Bruce Jenner’s ‘incredibly personal’ life story is long on narcissistic waffle and irritatingly short on revelation
The Secrets Of My Life Caitlyn Jenner Trapeze €17.99
To those who have been neglecting their Celebrity Studies, this book may well read like the final exam set text from hell. In 100 years’ time, specialist scholars will have to train for years in order to puzzle out who’s who.
Try this question, for starters: ‘I had stolen make-up over the years not only from Kris but the rest of the K-troop, Kourtney and Kim and Khloe and eventually Kendall and Kylie.’
In the above extract, what relation is Kim to Kylie, who are Khloe, Kourtney and Kendall and how is the narrator related to each of them? Show your workings. Electronic calculators may be used. As far as I have been able to work it out, Kim is the full sister of Kourtney and the half-sister of Kendall. Kendall is the full daughter of the narrator, and Kourtney and Kim are his stepdaughters, or, rather, her stepdaughters, as the narrator, Caitlyn, was Bruce until two years ago.
Furthermore – and here we are approaching PhD-level Advanced Celebritology – Kim, Khloe and Kourtney are all Kardashians, their father having been Robert Kardashian, who became very famous for defending OJ Simpson on the charge of murdering his wife Nicole, who was best friends with Robert’s first wife Kris, who then went on to marry Bruce, or Caitlyn-as-is, one of whose previous wives, Linda, was famous for having been Elvis Presley’s girlfriend. Incidentally, Caitlyn and Linda had two sons, one of whom, Brody, starred in the reality show The Hills.
And that’s the end of today’s Kardashian lesson. As Caitlyn Jenner boasts, with some accuracy: ‘There is no family that is better known not just in America but maybe the world.’
Over the course of the past 40-odd years, Jenner’s own fame has been a very hit-and-miss affair. In 1976 he won the decathlon at the Montreal Olympics and, in his own words, ‘literally overnight became an American hero. The Bruce Jenner who is the essence of virility and the ultimate conquistador of women’.
As an all-American hero, he the face of a suitably all-American breakfast cereal called Wheaties, as well as Tropicana orange juice. He then attempted to branch out into acting but without much success: he was passed over for Superman, and his appearance in the Village People movie Can’t Stop The Music saw him nominated for the Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Actor.
Happily, he managed to find a lucrative niche for himself as a motivational speaker. All he had to do
If you’ve neglected your Celebrity Studies this may read like the set text from hell
was deliver the same old speech – ‘Finding the Champion Within’ – to earnest middlemanagement types, over and over again. And this is where his story gets interesting: at the same time as he was at the podium churning his way through all the butch self-help clichés (‘We have to take fear and control it…’), beneath his dark-blue business suit he was wearing women’s underwear – ‘panties and a bra and pantyhose’. Just a thought, but I wonder if the same is ever true of Alan Sugar?
From the age of 10, Bruce Jenner had enjoyed dressing up in women’s clothes. He started with his mother’s scarf and his sister’s shoes, and went on from there. Soon after he married his first wife in 1972, she noticed a rubber band on one of the hooks of her bra, and her suspicions were aroused. ‘There was no way out. That’s why there is a rubber band, because I’ve been wearing your clothes.’
She was, he recalls, ‘totally shocked’ but also ‘overwhelmed with compassion and gratitude that I trusted her enough to tell her. Of course, she was also relieved that I was not cross-dressing in front of her, and never would.’
He tried a different tack with his second wife, Linda, greeting her at the door of his hotel room wearing a dress, wig and makeup. But it didn’t do the trick.
‘I will never forget that look of shock and hurt on her face,’ he says. By the mid-Eighties he was spending a fortune having his beard removed – ‘I hate my beard. It is revolting to me’ – by electrolysis, a painful process involving three-hour sessions every week for a full two years. He also had plastic surgery for a smaller nose – ‘I have always hated my nose’ – plus hormone therapy ‘including the development of breasts and some loss of muscle definition’.
By now he had hooked up with Kris Kardashian, exwife of O J’s lawyer. Jenner insists she saw him dressed as a woman on several occasions, and that he told her that for the past four years he had been having hormone therapy, resulting in size 36B breasts. He dismisses her claims that she didn’t have a clue. ‘For me, the idea that she was later shocked by my transition is equally shocking to me,’ he says. ‘It implies that I left her in the dark about the severity of my struggles. At least to me it does. Let’s leave it at that.’ The Secrets Of My Life is riddled with contradictions of this sort, often expressed in irritating, single-line paragraphs, presumably designed to demonstrate sincerity. The book is ghost-written, which may be why it has a glib, made-for-TV, glossy, Oprah Winfrey-ish feel to it. If it’s the truth, it’s only the very partial truth: Caitlyn Jenner’s differences with her children from her first marriage are mentioned but brushed over, and the final, all-important surgery to remove what she dismisses ‘this silly and useless lump of skin’ is covered in a very brief paragraph, as though any curiosity on the part of the reader is a damned impertinence. ‘The surgery was a success, and I feel not only wonderful but liberated. I am telling you because I believe in candour. So all of you can stop staring. You want to know so now you know.’ Well, pardon me for asking! Yet if you write a book about changing your gender called The Secrets Of My Life, and your publishers describe it as ‘incredibly personal’, then you should surely feel some responsibility to deliver the goods. Back in 1974, the travel writer Jan Morris wrote an infinitely more interesting memoir, Conundrum, which charted her own voyage from man to woman. This was at a time when such things were more perilous and more frowned upon. Her book began with this memorable first sentence: ‘I was three or perhaps four years old when I realised that I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl.’ Unlike Jenner, Morris made no attempt to simplify her condition; she also made it clear that any attempts to explain it could only be tentative. ‘For 40 years… a sexual purpose dominated, distracted and tormented my life: the tragic and irrational ambition, instinctively formulated but deliberately pursued, to escape from maleness into womanhood.’ Compare the pained complexity of that fine sentence to the trite showbiz simplicity of this, Jenner’s original tweet to announce her own transformation: ‘I’m so happy after such a long struggle to be living my true self. Welcome to the world Caitlyn. Can’t wait for you to get to know her/me.’ A similar narcissism hangs over the entire book. She is obsessed with fame and glamour, excessively focused on how her story will play out in the media. When it comes to the big announcement, she is determined to beat the Kardashians at their own game, so she doesn’t tell any of them. ‘This had to be about me and only me.’ Even a photo of little Bruce is captioned ‘at around age two, already with good legs’. Barely a page goes by without Jenner putting on women’s clothes and admiring herself. ‘I want to look sleek and gorgeous,’ she writes of her first big ‘instantly iconic’ publicity shot with Annie Leibovitz for Vanity Fair. At another point she writes: ‘Sometimes I wonder if dressing up like this is the equivalent of having sex with myself, male and female at the same time.’ It’s a sudden and startling revelation, but by the next sentence she has dived back again, behind her screen of waffle.
Reference to the final all-important surgery to remove ‘this silly, useless lump of skin’ is brief