At the Jenner manse in Hidden Hills, California, as Kylie, left, and Kendall are being shot for the new season of Keeping up With the Kardashians.
Published in the June/July 2012 issue
Fathers suffer a curse, and Bruce Jenner knows this curse better than most: The day you become a father, you stop being who you were. in the eyes of your children, your life began when theirs did.
The strange thing about Jenner, now that he’s sixty-two years old: It’s not just his glorious past that has disappeared. It’s as though all of him, every previous incarnation of him, has been flooded out of view: by the fame of his adopted family — his third wife, the former-and-sometimes-still Kris Kardashian, her son, Rob, and her collection of daughters, Kourtney, Kim, Khloé, Kendall, and Kylie, the last two also Jenner’s — by the glib demands of reality-TV story lines, by dubious plastic surgery and eyebrows plucked to oblivion. Even in his own home, that familiar Spanish castle with the fountain splashing out front, you have to look hard to find those few traces of his existence. (“My mom’s house,” Kim calls it.) All of the photographs are of the children; all of the memorabilia and props are the product of their successes, not his. there is no red singlet in a frame; his gold medal is nowhere to be found. For the most part, Bruce Jenner, Olympian, has been banished to the garage.
Right now, that’s where he is, cleaning some stray grass clippings off his Goblin 700, a fluorescent-green remote-control helicopter. He owns many remote-control helicopters, and they are on rows of shelves in a corner of the garage. some of his other toys surround him: a Harley-Davidson, a Porsche kept under a black cover, his golf clubs, which he tries to swing every day. (Even here, however, he can’t escape the influence of the hurricane women in his life, a pink Vespa scooter leaning nearby.) But it’s the helicopters that receive the bulk of his attention. He has just been out flying the Goblin 700 in his pristine backyard, for the benefit of the ever-present camera crew that films Keeping up With the Kardashians, which began its seventh season in May. (He’s also dressed up for the occasion, sporting a flashy leather jacket.) They watched him fly the helicopter, and sixteen-year-old Kendall and fourteen-year-old Kylie did, too, for a few minutes — the episode currently being shot centers on them — until the sun grew too hot and they vanished back inside. Then the camera crew left as well. But there was Jenner, still in his backyard, flying his Goblin 700. And with it, he was doing magic tricks.
Flying these helicopters is not easy. “If you own one, you’ve crashed it,” Jenner says with a smile, because he is almost always smiling. They’re especially difficult because they require the operator to think from an unnatural perspective. Jenner has a flight simulator in his garage, a black computer perched on another shelf, and since he began flying these helicopters three years ago, he has spent hundreds of hours alone out here, on that simulator, training himself to see the world in all of its dimensions. Although he has been a real pilot for a very long time (and is a principal at Bruce Jenner Aviation, which sells corporate aircraft), he still had to adapt his brain to the peculiar demands of the Goblin 700. Depending on whether he has the helicopter’s tail facing toward him or away from him, on whether he’s flying the helicopter right side up or inverted, all the rules of flight change. Even something as simple as a gentle hover takes a delicate, practiced touch. Jenner still possesses an instinctive physical confidence, still moves with an athlete’s grace. And there he was, just a few minutes ago, his helicopter fluorescent green against the bright blue sky, defying gravity and physics with every spin, stall, and roll. in that moment, Jenner was a man of nearly perfect competence.
Neither his children nor the cameras were there to see it. They were gathered in the driveway, toward the front of the house. They are still there. Either Kendall or Kylie, it’s hard to tell which, is having some sort of animated disagreement with Kris. The cameras are there, in the girls’ made-up faces, and a boom mic is raised over their shining heads, recording every word of their spirited discussion, to be edited into a cohesive narrative about the perils of being a teenage girl in modern celebrity America.
Jenner, meanwhile, has finished his unrecorded acrobatics and returned to his unlit garage. He picks the last blade of grass from the body of his helicopter, and he folds its propeller so that both rotors point toward the tail, and he gently slides a protective sleeve over them, and he puts his Goblin 700 back into place on the shelf, each step as meticulous and careful as the last. He stops for a moment to marvel at the tricks that more talented others can do with the same machine. “It’s amazing to me that someone can even think that fast,” he says. Then, because he knows the cameras are no doubt done with him for the day, he heads inside to take off his leather jacket and change out of his fancy clothes.
In the driveway, voices are rising.
