He adorned the front of the Wheaties box. He tried out for the lead role in the film Superman, which was too much of a stretch without acting experience, although Jenner was actually one of the great actors of our time. ABC executive Irwin Weiner had offered him a broadcasting job the very same night as his Olympic victory, in Montreal. Everything had seemed perfect then, or as close to perfect as it can be when you are pretending your way through life, conforming to the vision of millions because that’s what they expect, and that’s exactly what you give them because you are good at it, scary good. His career was in limbo after an income of half a million dollars the first year after the Olympics. He was living in a one-bedroom house in the Malibu hills in almost total seclusion after he started to transition in the 80s. It also could be seen as a precursor to the fractured relationship that would occur when he essentially lost contact with the four children from his first two marriages, eventually in favor of yet another new family, with values that had once seemed so alien to his, the Kardashians. It was obviously a bizarre thought, indicative of his terrible confusion. Jenner had once talked in jest about going to Denmark and coming back to his four young children as Aunt Heather. The physical changes had been so noticeable that rumors started, including a call from The New York Times about what was going on with Bruce Jenner, in particular Bruce Jenner the winner of the gold medal in the decathlon in the 1976 Olympics, a symbol of masculinity as interwoven into American culture as the Marlboro Man. He took hormones that resulted in breast growth and had his beard removed through an incredibly painful two-year regimen of electrolysis that he withstood without any medication because “pain is kind of, for me, part of the pain for being me … this is what you get for being who you are. Jenner had actually gone through various stages of transition once before, in the mid- and late 1980s. It was perhaps the only open space he could go to without getting besieged by the paparazzi, not only with their cameras hanging from their necks like evil eyes but also with their questions: “Are you a woman yet?” “Do you still have a penis?” He often played two balls at a time, voicing the usual golfer epithets of “Sit!” and “Get down!” He liked the peace of it, the Santa Monica Mountains safeguarding the holes like a cupped hand. He didn’t take his game very seriously: he could have been a scratch golfer if he had. He played by himself because he almost always played by himself, a loner who said he wasn’t lonely, although it was hard to see the difference. He has been a member there for 15 years, ever since Kris Jenner, feeling generous toward her husband, paid the roughly $225,000 initiation fee. Several days earlier I had walked with him as he played golf at the exclusive Sherwood Country Club, in Thousand Oaks. But there was more than just physical dread. He knew there would be pain, and he hated taking any kind of drug to alleviate it because of the way it made him feel. The car made its way to the surgical center in Beverly Hills without incident. There would also be a procedure to augment his breasts. Pioneered in the 80s and 90s by San Francisco plastic surgeon Douglas Ousterhout, it can involve such procedures as hairline correction, forehead contouring, and jaw and chin contouring. On this Sunday his destination was the office of a surgeon specializing in what is known as facial-feminization surgery. He had had his nose fixed twice and the tracheal shave. The hair on his body and his facial hair had been removed. So the more nondescript the car the better, which is why the black 2014 BMW sedan, in the conspicuous consumption of Los Angeles, was inconspicuous. Detection seemed unlikely this early in the day even the paparazzi go back to their wormholes for a few hours’ sleep before the body count begins again.īut anything could happen, as it had in January of 2014 in the space of roughly five feet from the back door of a medical office to the car, with Jenner’s neck in a bandage from a tracheal shave, his picture snapped and disseminated into the Internet infinity of insatiable gossip at warp speed. On March 15, the day of the Los Angeles Marathon and myriad street closures, Bruce Jenner left his bunker-style home above Decker Canyon in Malibu at 4:15 in the morning to avoid any possibility of being late.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |