Caitlyn Jenner has three families with two children each, and as a result some of the kids just didn’t get enough attention from their dad while growing up. Son Brandon Jenner claims that he got the short end of the stick when it came to father-son time. In his new book To Me, He Was Just Dad, Brandon, 38, says that after his dad — then Bruce Jenner — and mom Linda Thompson divorced in 1986, he only saw his dad a handful of times. The number dropped greatly after he married then Kris Kardashian.
“I am my mother’s first child and my father’s third. My half-brother Burt and my half-sister Casey lived with their mother. My younger brother Brody, my mother, my father, and I lived in a quaint wooden craftsman house in Malibu, one of the first built. But I don’t have many memories from before my parents split up and my father moved out. I was four-years-old at the time,” Brandon writes.
“They got divorced because my dad decided to start transitioning to female (at least that’s what they had discussed). I, of course, was too young then to have any idea what was behind their decision.” Brandon goes on to explain that “A few years after my parents divorced, Dad decided that it wasn’t the right time to transition and had many of his surgeries reversed. After that, his relationship with my mother grew more hostile. She had worked hard to accept that the reason my dad couldn’t be with her was because he was working towards transitioning.”
“When he started dating Kris Kardashian, that reasoning fell apart. It was tremendously painful. The effect of my parents’ souring relationship was that I didn’t see my father more than half a dozen times between the ages of eight and 25. Sadly, the infrequent exchanges felt more like staged photo opportunities than real bonding. In fact, they were staged photo ops for “family” Christmas cards: me, Brody, Burt and Casey alongside our father. We were one big happy family. For a day,” Brandon continues.
“Because of this, most of the memories I have of my dad are from the narrow slice of time before I was eight years old,” Brandon writes. He later adds that, “After dad met and married Kris, family became a business for him, and I stayed away most of my teenage years. I didn’t want to be part of their dynamic. I know now, though, that Dad was pretty unhappy in that house and felt like [she] wasn’t treated well.” Caitlyn and Kris married in 1991 and went on to have daughters Kendall and Kylie Jenner in 1995 and 1998, respectively. They separated in 2013 and divorced in 2015, the same year Cait transitioned.
Fortunately today, the 70-year-old former Olympian and Brandon are doing quite well. “It’s great. It’s great. It’s really good. [Caitlyn and I are] close. We’re closer than ever,” Brandon EXCLUSIVELY told HollywoodLife, when he dropped by our Los Angeles office in July 2019 while promoting his new solo EP Plan On Feelings. “We do fly a lot, because we’re both pilots, so we like to go and fly,” Brandon explained. “We’ve got a little old plane that we can go and jump in and fly around and look for different airports to go to and then go have lunch, and stuff like that. So, we do a lot of that.” At least they’re making up for lost time.