The Secrets of My Life

by Caitlyn Jenner

  Who Am I?

  I am looking in the mirror in a suite of the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal the morning after my Olympic win. I am naked with the gold medal around my neck. Now that it’s over, who am I?

  I am trying to see if I feel different after winning the gold and setting a world record and already being offered a broadcasting job by ABC.

  The world’s greatest athlete.

  Nobody can say that except the thirteen gold medalists who have come before.

  But I don’t feel particularly different. I look into the mirror and I still see what I always see to one degree or another—a person who in working so hard to erase what is inside him has overcome nothing. Now that the Grand Diversion of training for the Olympics is over, now that I have won, what happens next? Will I find something else to preoccupy me, to take the edge off? My wife, Chrystie, is sleeping in the next room. She thinks she knows me almost four years into our marriage. She does know me.

  She doesn’t know me at all.

  My fingers feel like talons, my shoulders and arms humped and ridged with bony muscles. My hair… I hate my hair no matter how long I try to make it. I look into my eyes. I take a few steps closer and burrow into them. What do I see?

  What do you see?

  I still see Bruce Jenner.

  Not the Bruce Jenner the world now sees and wants and desires.

  The Bruce Jenner I never wanted and never desired.

  I am proud of my accomplishment. The day of the closing ceremonies at the Munich Olympics in 1972, where I finished tenth as a twenty-two-year-old, even I was surprised to have gotten that far. I wondered, But what if I spend every minute of the next four years of my life training? What if I test myself to the limits to see how good I can become at something?

  I did exactly that.

  But now that I have won, how special it could possibly be if I could do it. I am a skilled athlete who works harder than the rest, who has to prove his manhood more than the rest. I may act self-assured, but I still am not. I may exude an attractive confidence, but I feel neither confident nor attractive.

  I still see Bruce Jenner.

  I look in the mirror and think of Chrystie.

  Her maiden name was Crownover. We met at the end of freshman year at Graceland. She was the daughter of a minister and, like me, lived a sheltered and cloistered life: My only sexual experience had been that one night my senior year in high school in the backseat of my mom’s car. She was not aware of my gender issues when we started dating sophomore year, and I wasn’t about to tell her, not then.

  Chrystie was smart and assertive, the first in what would become a trend of wives who were also the same way. They took care of me, did everything for me, and I let them do everything for me, not simply because it made my life easier but because of my own internal weakness that only got worse over time. I am averse to confrontation; my only comeback is too often a whiny petulance. I felt I did not deserve to be assertive. I did not deserve to be proud. All of my marriages had a distinct pattern: compatibility and love followed by eventual unraveling.

  Chrystie and I fell in love quickly. When we made love, it was warm and gentle, two people discovering our physicality. I also had my sights then set on the 1972 Olympics, a thought ridiculous to everyone except L.D. and Chrystie. That was when the Grand Diversion began to kick into gear, training every afternoon after classes from three to six p.m., only quitting so I could get to the cafeteria for dinner before it closed.

  We moved in together, a huge step given the moral values of Graceland (the school had only a year earlier sponsored its first dance ever, girls on one side of the room and boys on the other and everyone terrified of the middle).

  I didn’t tell my parents. She did not tell her parents. We did not discuss marriage, except that I knew an athlete whose wife supported him so he could train, and I felt it was wrong to use his spouse like that. Chrystie disagreed, saying that if a husband and wife were working together toward a goal they both shared, then it did not matter who was supporting whom financially. Which is primarily why Chrystie went on to become a flight attendant for United Airlines.

  At the end of December 1972, several months after the Munich Olympics, we got married. We were both in our early twenties, and I think we both had the same attitude that if you were going out into the big, bad world, it was a lot easier to do it with someone else. We had our wedding at the chapel at Graceland where I was finishing up my degree. There were about twenty guests, including my parents and her parents. Then we drove to Des Moines, where we had reserved a suite at the Holiday Inn, which for us was very swanky. The suite was not quite what we expected, since it actually had no bed. So we switched rooms and I carried Chrystie over the threshold, and by then it was ten p.m. We hadn’t eaten dinner, so we tried to order room service but it was closed, and then we tried takeout, but every place had a two-hour wait. So we went to McDonald’s for an intimate wedding night supper. We were planning to splurge on a trip to Hawaii, but then our car gave out and we spent pretty much all our money to fix it. But we still managed to spend a week there on two hundred dollars.

  I told Chrystie in 1973 about my gender issues. It wasn’t by choice: she was putting clothes away and noticed a rubber band on one of the hooks of her bra. When she asked me about it, my first response was noncommittal:

  Gee, I don’t know.

  It was not very convincing. Rubber bands don’t mysteriously appear on the hooks of bras. There was no way out.

  That’s why the rubber band, because I’ve been wearing your clothes.

  She was totally shocked. She didn’t know anyone who cross-dressed (neither did I) and had very little understanding of the whole thing (so did I). But she was 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. I tried to pass it off as just a phase, a fantasy that some men have, and hey, all men have fantasies anyway. Chrystie processed it as simply a piece of information, and then it was time for me to go back to being a guy.

  We moved to San Jose so I could do nothing but train eight hours a day for the Montreal Olympics. We picked out an apartment roughly twenty yards from the San Jose City College track: all I had to do was climb over the fence and begin training. On a good day I could throw the discus into the middle of the field from our little third-floor balcony.

  Together we formed a true marital partnership. Her powerful demeanor was an antidote to my soft one. She was the primary breadwinner while I fanatically trained, and she acted as buffer and protector, since it was my inclination to say yes to everything and Chrystie was the one who stepped in and said no. As the Olympics neared, the media became interested and began to play up the partnership angle. There were stories here and there, and then ABC’s Roone Arledge amped it up.

  The president of ABC Sports singlehandedly took the Olympics and transformed it from an event of minimal interest into a television sensation, the fee for rights going from $597,000 for the 1964 Winter Games to $25 million for the Montreal games. Arledge committed the network to an unprecedented 76.5 hours of coverage. He was the father of the overcoming-adversity narrative where the athlete defied all odds, cue-the-violin schmaltz poems, or what the network called “Up Close and Personal.” He saw them as potentially enormous rating boosters, and in particular he saw Chrystie and me as the stars of the show.

  I would not be at the Olympics without Chrystie. I would not be staring into the mirror with a gold medal around my neck. But I also wonder if now that the Grand Diversion is over, will the woman living inside me still be content to remain quiet, or will she want more? And if that happens, if my gender issues only heighten, what will happen to Chrystie and me?

  I look in the mirror and there is something dreamlike about it all. Bruce did it. He actually did it. He beat the defending champion, Mykola Avilov of the Soviet Union. It was more than simply defeating Avilov. It was beating the Red Menace of the
Soviet Union at the peak of the Cold War. Roughly a year and a half earlier, in April 1975, South Vietnam had fallen to communist forces. The Soviets were intent on spreading their domination by military force, such as the invasion of Afghanistan three and a half years later.

  The Olympics had become more of a test of nationalist prowess and strength than ever before. The medal count had never been more important, the barometer by which countries were considered strong or weak.

  The Soviets were on their way to winning forty-nine gold medals, East Germany forty, and the United States thirty-four. The overall performance was a terrible disappointment, particularly in track where the American men’s and women’s teams netted one individual gold medal. The days in Montreal were winding down, and the only major events left were the finals in men’s basketball and the decathlon. I was the overwhelming favorite to win. At the 1976 US Olympic Trials in Eugene I set a world record. I have lost one decathlon in three years, because I was bored, and losing was actually good because it renewed my commitment.

  Because of all the disappointment in the US team, it was falling on me to salvage the country’s performance. It wasn’t only that we needed to defeat the Soviets. Our country was convulsing in the aftermath of Watergate, the resignation of Richard Nixon as president, and the debacle of Vietnam. Our political system had failed us. Our once-sacred values had failed us. We felt weak and confused. We were a country adrift. Sports could help right us. It was that powerful. Just to make the pressure a little bit more intense, the country had celebrated its bicentennial just a few weeks earlier. Patriotism was at its peak. Heroes were at a premium.

  But it got to me when I watched teammate Dave Roberts, the overwhelming favorite in the pole vault, lose because of heavy rain. The rain? How could I control the weather when the decathlon started three days later?

  Oh, Chrystie, I’ve got to carry the whole United States…

  My knees buckled. My body felt fragile, crushed. For the first time I wondered if I could handle the pressure. I started crying as Chrystie held me. She tried to encourage me. Then we both realized the same thing: It rains, it rains. It snows, it snows. It hails, it hails. The ground collapses beneath us, the ground collapses beneath us.

  There was not a thing I could do about any of it except go out and do it.

  As usual the waiting for the damn thing to begin was excruciating. I entered the stadium and psyched myself up and worked out a little bit until I realized that no amount of working out was going to help at this moment. Either you have trained enough or you haven’t. Either you embrace the pressure or you choke. But I still had to wait for endless inspections by the International Olympic Committee: length of spikes, height of soles for the shoe used in the long jump, making sure the number I had been assigned matched the master set. It only made it harder to maintain focus.

  I watched the first heat of the 100 meters on a closed-circuit television. Avilov with his drooping moustache was in the first heat. I hoped it would slow him down. I would have shaved the damn thing off.

  False start.

  False start.

  False start.

  This was good, very good.

  Somebody was overanxious.

  The fourth start was clean. Avilov, responsible for one of the false starts, was slow and lumbering off the mark. He was a step behind after ten meters and only lagging farther behind. He finished in 11.23 seconds, significantly worse than his Munich time of 11.00. Decathlons are measured by personal bests, and Avilov hasn’t come close.

  The second heat…

  I ran 10.94 seconds, the best 100 meters I had ever run in my life under the conditions, seventy points more than Avilov.

  I had him. I knew I had him with nine events still to go. His concentration was off. Mine was like a tight wire. So that was when I knew I was going to win, the lever of momentum fast and furious, the golden moment of omnipotence that the athlete feels when he can race to the moon and be back in time for dinner with a side trip to the sun.

  I look in the mirror and think about what I did after I actually won.

  A spectator ran out from the stands and handed me a small American flag. I was surprised by the gesture. I wanted to run a victory lap, and I had the flag of my country with me, and I was not going to hand it to someone else to hold or put it down, because that would be disrespectful, so I circled the track with it. Legend has it that I was the first American Olympic champion in history to take a victory lap waving the flag. But that image, unplanned and so tiny in the course of a life, is what defines me, what people remember most. The flag was an extension of me, the patriotism and pride I felt as I circled the track becoming patriotism and pride all Americans could feel. We all just won.

  I look in the mirror and I can still see the tears in the eyes of my parents when I find them in the stands. But in the eyes of my mom, as sincere as my dad sometimes is not, I didn’t see euphoria but a split-second of fear.

  Fear that fame would change me no matter how much I resist it. Fear that I would become addicted to fame no matter how much I resist it. Fear that my ability to make emotional connections and reach out—already tenuous—would completely disappear as I am swallowed up into the public. Fear that the attention, no matter how much I tried to reject it, would become an addiction.

  I might be imagining it. But hearing my mother many years later, maybe I’m not:

  When it was finally decided that he was going to Graceland, I kind of figured he’d wind up to be a coach, a college coach, probably track. And do you know something, I sometimes wished that had happened.

  Fame and fortune takes the family apart. And I thought, you know, if he had come in second in Montreal, no one would know his name and wouldn’t it be wonderful if he had just had a much more normal life, got married, had his kids and a closer relationship.

  When our kids are growing up we wish for them to have fame and fortune and be successful, and we think of it monetarily mostly, that that brings happiness. But I think in my head now, “be careful what you wish for because you might just get it.”

  I don’t wonder about that now when I look in the mirror with that medal around my neck. All of that is yet to come.

  I only know that I am naked and about to become an American hero.

  October 14, 2015

  “Breast forms…”

  I am on the phone with my stepdaughter Kim.

  She asks me what I am up to. I tell her I am about to go through the downstairs closet of my Malibu home to get rid of what Bruce used to wear. She says to wait and will be right over. I am not entirely sure why, although I don’t think it is because she needs more clothing.

  She arrives. She wants to save several items for herself and her sisters as a way to remember who I once was, almost as if there has been a death in the family. It is mostly everyday stuff I used to wear, plus the suits I donned when I gave speeches. It is the same thing she did when her father Robert died, carting away several bags of his clothing to forever honor his memory.

  I don’t know what she will ultimately do with them, keep them tucked away in a remote corner somewhere or probably forget about them, as is the fate of most keepsakes.

  Getting rid of the clothing has been much harder than I thought. It was not nearly as exhilarating or exciting as I initially thought it would be, that feeling that this is so great, I can finally get rid of what Bruce wore since I don’t need them anymore. Instead there has been an undeniable feeling of loss even for me. So maybe there has been a death in the family.

  It is interesting to me the degree to which writers and commentators on transgender issues speak on my behalf and tell readers what I am thinking or feeling without ever talking to me. Right after I transitioned, Meredith Ramirez Talusan wrote on Fusion.net that Bruce was a so-called “dead name” and should never be used again. “It’s a matter of basic courtesy,” wrote Talusan. “Jenner hasn’t just definitively announced her true gender, but also let go of a male identity that she’s felt alienated
from since early childhood. If she thinks of her life in her male role as a lie, then it’s also true that her former name, the one that stands in for that life, is also a lie.”

  Bruce was not a lie. Bruce existed: what I did lie about or at least obfuscate was Caitlyn’s existence. Talusan suggested that the headline should have been TRANSGENDER OLYMPIC CHAMPION ANNOUNCES HER NAME: CAITLYN, which is not only a very big mouthful but untrue since I was not a transgender Olympic champion at that time but Bruce Jenner. If I were a transgender woman, I would have been stripped of the medal for competing in a men’s event.

  Bruce won the Olympics. I lived as a man before I transitioned. I had a life as Bruce, and the more comfortable I become as Caitlyn, the more I actually embrace Bruce as a valuable part of my life. I obviously don’t want to be called Bruce, but I am not going to bury him and send him to the “dead name” pile. There has to be some reality here, at least for me. You can’t simply blot out your past, your beliefs, your interests. The life that you lived as a father and dad and husband, the accomplishments and failures, do not get sent to the trash with a click of the mouse.

  I remember crying when I received my new birth certificate from the state of New York stating that I am female and giving my name as Caitlyn Marie Jenner. They were tears of joy in seeing the correct gender marker on such an important legal document. But there were also tears of sadness that Bruce was gone, the birth certificate being official proof.

  After the Diane Sawyer interview on ABC and the subsequent Vanity Fair cover and story, I got a letter from a trans woman named Jody who lives in Los Angeles. She transitioned fifteen years ago. Jody told me perhaps the most instructive story I have heard from a trans person. The subject of gender came up. Jody said it was three or four years after her transition when she put her head to the pillow one night. It was a night like any other except for something momentous:

  she had gone the whole day without thinking about gender.