CAN’T STOP THE MUSIC : Twenty Years Later, 1976 Decathlon Champion Bruce Jenner Is Busier Than Ever

Twenty years later, Bruce Jenner keeps going, and going and going.

He has nine children. He has an Olympic gold medal. He is a licensed pilot with his own aircraft corporation. He won a water-skiing championship. He has raced automobiles at Daytona and Sebring, raced powerboats and mountain bikes and soon will drive a Humvee all-terrain vehicle in a two-week road rally through Africa. He has been a broadcaster, producer, promoter, actor, author of several books, guest host of “Good Morning America” and a judge in the Miss America pageant. He has his own line of fitness products, has done more motivational speaking than anyone since Norman Vincent Peale, more TV infomercials than everyone except Kathie Lee Gifford and co-starred in a Hollywood musical with, of all people, the Village People. He counts as his greatest joy taking the hand of his wife, Kris, for better or worse, the extremes of which were tested in the couple’s involvement with their once-upon-a-time dear friends, O.J. and Nicole Brown Simpson.

Knowing Jenner, he completed one thing and began another during the reading of that last paragraph.

“I’m trying to arrange some time with Bruce,” a phone-caller tells Kris.

“Book me an hour with him, would you?” she kids back.

The last American to win the Olympic decathlon, Bruce Jenner crossed a finish line in Montreal on July 30, 1976, and never looked back. There’s just no stopping him. A dyslexic child, Jenner, now 46, seems to have spent his entire life overcompensating for a reading disability by doing the things that others merely read about, making up for lost time. His battle cry once was “Go, Bruce, Go.” Obviously, nobody told him to slow down.

Tanned, trim and impeccably groomed, with a face almost preternaturally youthful, Jenner looks much the same as when wags at the bicentennial-year Olympics called him “Prince Valiant with muscles,” boyish and swathed in America’s colors across the front of a Wheaties box. He has a relentless enthusiasm and energy level, flying himself from place to place in his Mitsubishi MU2 with the star-spangled banner on the fuselage, forever circling back home to a Bruce’s Bunch house full of kids at a Beverly Hills 90210 address.

His motivational mantra is “Find the Champion Within,” which is also the theme of a book Jenner is finishing for Simon and Shuster, due out in the fall. Doing your best is a subject Jenner knows inside out, having sculpted himself into the world’s greatest athlete--a distinction that decathlon champions traditionally claim--on sheer willpower and work, with limited prowess and little money. There would be no comebacks, no world tours, no withdrawal pains in his future. Bruce left the track and hit the road. He abandoned his vaulting poles right there in Montreal, knowing he never needed to see them again.

A decathlon has 10 events. In seven of them, Jenner did his personal best at the Olympics. He found the champion within.

At a track meet on June 1 in San Jose--the Bruce Jenner Classic, as it happens--where athletes aiming for the Atlanta Olympics engaged in one last major competition before the trials, Jenner traded a baby for a microphone and addressed the crowd, as usual holding nothing back. With his wife dandling their daughter, he said, “It seems like yesterday, but it’s 20 years, no matter how you cut it. I’m 46 years old and I’m in the best place in life that I’ve ever been before, because of this woman right here. She’s the love of my life. And there in her arms, that’s little Kendall, who’s 7 months old and this is her first track meet.

“Hopefully, we’ll all be back here someday for our 40th anniversary.”

A couple of thousand strangers in the stands, but there stood Bruce, telling them how much he adored his wife, aglow in the sun as a gold medal. When he gives, he gives all he’s got.

*

Jenner was born in Mount Kisco, N.Y., where his biggest fear in school was reading in front of the class. He would do anything to get out of it. Such was his embarrassment that classmates would discover that the words that came second nature to them were to him a jumbled bowl of alphabet soup. By third grade, Jenner lost all interest in school. He became consumed instead with sports--so much so, he says, that on a field of play he would challenge anyone he knew to be a good student, just so he could clobber that kid and then say: “Read that.”

The guilt he still feels over such behavior keeps Jenner actively involved with dyslexia foundations. Yet, in an unexpected way, he came to realize that his condition made him the man he is today. In his motivational speeches, Jenner tells adults and children alike, “If I wasn’t dyslexic, I probably wouldn’t have won the Games. It gave me great determination. Life wasn’t easy growing up; it was frustrating. If I had been a better reader, then that would have come easily, sports would have come easily, everything would have come easily and I never would have realized that the way you get ahead in life is hard work.”

A pole vault and high jump champion in school, as well as a water-skiing champion in a large Eastern U.S. competition, Jenner attended a cornfield college in Iowa--Graceland, sponsored by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints--that gave him a scholarship. His coach there was a javelin thrower who pointed Bruce toward the decathlon. If he couldn’t be great at one event, perhaps he could be good at many.

Daley Thompson, the great Great Britain athlete who would win the 1980 and 1984 Olympic golds, once described the decathlon as “nine Mickey Mouse events and the 1,500.”

In those 1,500 meters Bruce Jenner pretty much became Captain America. The new stadium in Montreal was a nimbus of light and sound, thousands of voices clamoring for a man to finish third. That was where Jenner needed to place for sufficient points to take the gold medal. Everything had come down to this. The $9,000 yearly income he lived on, from selling insurance. The ’63 Volkswagen he drove. The $145-a-month apartment he occupied with his first wife, Chrystie, where he set a hurdle in front of the TV and leapfrogged over it, night and day, like a character in a Cheever short story. Training eight hours a day or more, Bruce threw an imaginary discus while his wife, wearing a “Go, Jenner, Go” shirt, shopped in the supermarket.

Tenth in the decathlon at Munich four years before, Jenner became obsessed with winning, acknowledging now, “It was not a well-rounded life. But it was my last decathlon. I knew that I would have 60 or 70 years to recover.”

Upon beginning his victory lap, having broken the world record, Jenner heard a commotion and saw a part-frightening, part-comical scene. A young man from Maine, later identified as Steve Elliott, had gotten carried away in the stands and come bounding onto the track, with a borrowed flag that he intended to hand Jenner. He underestimated the plunge, dropping 15 feet to the ground with a splat. Then he fled from Canadian cops, who chased him through the high-jump pit toward Bruce and the finish line. It was this flag that Jenner waved, memorably, while the mounties got their man, dragging him off to a holding cell.

“Everybody remembers me with that flag, partly because General Mills had me on a cereal box for the next five years,” Jenner says, relaxing in the atrium of an Atlanta television station after doing an Olympic commemorative coin promotion. “That was our bicentennial year, remember, so patriotism was in the air. But it was also four years after Munich, so terrorism was in the air. Everybody was pretty jumpy about some stranger leaping onto the track, including me.

“The thing is, I wasn’t sure what to do with that flag. I didn’t want it to look like grandstanding. Waving the flag wasn’t something everybody did, the way they do today. George Foreman had done it the same year two other athletes gave black-power salutes. The country was still in a funny mood from the war. I waved that flag a couple times and put it away. Today, they have their flags planted right where they can find them. Carl Lewis doesn’t even slow down. He goes right to it. It’s like if you don’t wave a flag, you’re not patriotic.”

Just recently, Jenner tracked down Elliott, a landscaper in North Penobscot, Maine, for the first time.

Jenner told him, “I think I owe you 10% of my action.”

The decathlon behind him, Jenner wouldn’t reassess for years the magnitude of what he had done. “I watch it now and it’s so much more difficult to win than I ever thought,” he said. “You’re 26, you’re fearless, what did I know? I had blinders on. I never realized the tremendous amount of pressure there is. Like, how do you train? Carl Lewis does not run against Sebastian Coe in the mile. Decathletes have to train for every event, sprints one day, field events the next. You pump up to make yourself strong enough to throw? Try pole vaulting at 250 pounds. There are 32 guys in most decathlons, and they’re in 32 little track meets. I’m just glad my gold medal’s at home, because I’d hate to try to win another.”

*

Where one career ended, others began. Jenner sprung from a starter’s block into every field he could find. He lectured. He performed. He announced. The road became so hectic that Jenner learned to fly over it. He got his pilot’s license and bought a 1978 Beechcraft Bonanza A-36, obtained instrument, multi-engine and commercial ratings and today has logged more than 4,500 hours in the air. His new company, Bruce Jenner Aircraft, brokers private planes to executives. Jenner’s goal now is to cut down the commute from the local airport to home. He is learning to fly a helicopter.

Willing to try anything once, Jenner got a call one day asking how he would feel about acting in a lavish, big-budget motion picture from the producer of “Saturday Night Fever.” Bruce was game. After all, it starred Valerie Perrine, who was coming off an Oscar nomination for “Lenny,” as well as Steve Guttenberg, who became a friend to Bruce, so what the heck? The film was 1980’s “Can’t Stop the Music,” an Allan Carr production that now appears in many retrospectives of the biggest turkeys ever.

Playing a strait-laced tax attorney, Jenner gets a load of the Village People singing in their construction-cop-cowboy-chief costumes and tells Perrine her friends are a little far-out for him. In the book “The Worst Films of All Time,” author Michael Sauter writes there are scenes “you find yourself wanting to see a second time, because you can’t quite believe what you think you just saw.”

Jenner, who could find a silver lining in a hunk of bronze, brightens. “You know what?” he asks, all but bouncing in his seat. “ ‘Can’t Stop the Music’ has become a cult film. It’s kind of shocking to me. People come up to me all the time and say, ‘I just saw it!’ The Village People are kind of back. ‘YMCA’ won’t die. ‘Macho, Macho Man.’ Seventeen years after we shoot the movie. Isn’t that funny?

“At the time, the movie centered around the disco craze. Allan Carr was hot, John Travolta. Remember how disco came in real fast? It went out just as fast as it came in. Well, it’s a year-and-a-half process to get a film done. They were blowing up disco records in stadiums the week we were coming out with the movie. I said, ‘I think we’re in trouble.’ We would go on tour, go to radio stations where the disc jockey would say they promised their listeners they won’t play any disco. I said, ‘We are dead. We are dead.’

“Of course, I heard it was the No. 1 movie that year in Australia.”

That’s Bruce. You can’t stop him, any more than you can the music. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

He laughs and says, “You know what? I should show it to my kids. Be a good excuse for a party.”

This kind of eternal flame of optimism is what drew Kris Jenner to Bruce in the first place. They met six years ago at Magic Johnson’s charity golf tournament. Her best friend, Candace Garvey, arranged it as a blind date. They were supposed to meet at Ivy at the Shore restaurant in Santa Monica, but ducked in at Riviera Country Club first for a peek. Kris and Bruce--each with four children from previous marriages--were married five months later in the home of Terry Semel, the president of Warner Bros., and became good friends with the Garveys, Candace and her husband Steve, the former baseball star.

Kris calls it love at first sight and says, “I saw someone in Bruce who was perfect in every way for his honesty, his integrity, his humor, his sincerity, and let’s face it, being very, very handsome doesn’t hurt. He’s the sweetest, most delicious guy in the world.”

Their affection for one another gushes openly and sincerely, two people head over heels. “Kris is the most wonderful thing that could possibly ever happen to me,” says Bruce, whipping a snapshot from his pocket. “Not only is she your lover, your best friend, mother of your children, your partner in life all rolled into one, she’s also a great businesswoman. The reason today I am working as hard as I am is Kris. I got rid of all agents, all managers, all the outsiders who prey on you. She knows how to keep all the percentages everyone else is always taking from you, until there’s nothing left for ol’ Bruce. She remade me from head to toe.”

Kris Jenner runs many of the family enterprises and appears with Bruce on television infomercials for the SuperStep, PowerTrainer and other health and fitness products that are aired more than 2,000 times per month, in 17 languages. With five children permanently in residence and four others running in and out, Kris catches her breath and says, “Every day’s a decathlon at our house. We have 10 different activities going at once. With kids ranging from a 17-year-old teenager to a 7-month-old infant, life can be crazy. My friends ask what I’m doing and I say, ‘I’m waxing one and diapering the other.’

“The best part is how much the kids adore Bruce. He’s the best daddy in the world. We get up at 5:30 and that’s my only time to myself, when I can go to the gym. That’s my ice cream for the day, working out. Bruce does the car-pool, the breakfast, feeds the baby, changes the diapers. Then he takes off for 47 cities in four days, or whatever. Thank God for phones and faxes. If only somebody would invent fax sex, we’d be all set.”

They work at their relationship the way they work at everything else. Grab a night at a hotel, whatever. Surprises. One morning, Bruce was flying Kris and another couple into the airport at Santa Maria, still upset because his own plane was out of commission. First, the insurance had lapsed. Next, the mechanic needed a part. Bruce looked down from his pilot’s seat and saw a plane like his ugly beige one, painted red, white and blue. “Hey, they stole our idea,” Bruce said, whereupon he spotted a tail painted: 1-76-BJ. “Hey, that’s my number, too! First in ‘76, Bruce Jenner!” Only when everyone began laughing did he realize that his wife had invented excuses to hijack his plane and repaint it.

“She’s a great gift-giver,” Bruce says.

Fooled again, he doesn’t realize as he says this that when he flies home next morning for Father’s Day, Kris will spring on him a beautiful set of collector’s pins from Imprinted Products that commemorate Jenner’s 20th anniversary as Olympic champion. Unbeknownst to Bruce, they will be available here during the Games, where he is representing Visa in sponsoring the U.S. decathlon team. It is the event that changed the course of his life.

Even a man with nine kids wants one more.

“I do things in multiples of 10,” Jenner jokes. “I got a thing for 10.”

*

In a model life, there have been very few cracks. When the 1980 Moscow Olympics were boycotted, Bruce lost exposure and income, but made up for it by winning Grand Prix auto races, or acting in a “Murder, She Wrote,” or co-hosting a popular morning program with Joan Lunden, or launching his own 26-segment health special on TV. He was a face and a force. John Belushi lampooned his Wheaties ad in a skit, wearing a USA tank top over his belly and training on chocolate doughnuts. In “Grambling’s White Tiger,” Jenner portrayed the only white guy on a predominantly black college football squad. He won the Battle of the Seas celebrity powerboat race in San Francisco, tried this, tried that.

There was a price. That was in Jenner’s personal life, in his first marriage and one to Linda Thompson, a former girlfriend of Elvis Presley’s.

“Who?” Jenner asks, not meaning Elvis.

It is the only topic about which he is terse. “I’ve had one marriage, and that was six years ago,” he says. “The other ones? Contracts. That’s all they were. Contracts. Not good experiences. I’ve had one marriage and I’m married to her right now.”

Bruce and Kris are so blissfully happy that it was all the more jarring on June 12, 1994, when Juditha Brown, mother of Nicole Brown Simpson, phoned to tell Kris that something terrible had happened.

“She kept saying, ‘She’s been shot. Nicole’s been shot.’ She was in a state of shock and didn’t even have all the details at that point,” Kris recalls. “When something happens like that, it just doesn’t register. I was asking things like, ‘Which hospital is she in? Should I meet you there?’ ”

The Jenners attended the funeral, and, later, the trial. Kris was put on the prosecution’s witness list. Nicole was one of her best friends. Kris was previously married to Robert Kardashian, the attorney and confidant of O.J. Simpson. She was 18 when she met Kardashian, nearly as young as Nicole was upon meeting O.J. For years the couples socialized, traveled together on vacations. O.J. was an usher at their wedding. It was Kris who first introduced Nicole to Faye Resnick, who later wrote a scandalous book. The Simpsons argued at a Christmas Eve, 1993, party at Bruce and Kris Jenner’s, which the prosecution’s Marcia Clark pressed in her questioning of Kato Kaelin.

Bruce: “O.J. was part of Kris’ life for 17, 18 years. Those families practically lived together at one time. She was there the day he met Nicole, through the whole divorce, when his daughter died drowning in the pool, Kris was there for the whole thing.”

Kris: “It was the ultimate nightmare. The tragedy is worst of all for the children, but Nicole’s murder changed everyone’s life.”

Bruce: “From the beginning we made a pact that we didn’t want to do anything media related, that we didn’t want to be within a million miles of a double homicide unless someone asked us to testify in court. We were on the witness list, but they didn’t call us. That was the last place I wanted to be.”

Kris: “I would have done absolutely anything to help Nicole and the Brown family with regard to the domestic violence portion of that trial, but most of it the jury never got to hear.”

Bruce: “We got 50 media calls a day. Kris avoided them all, except for talking to Barbara Walters. To lose a friend like that, someone we both loved. . . .”

Kris: “I’ll see Nicole in heaven. And I’ll be sure to ask God, ‘What were you thinking? What were you possibly thinking?’ ”

In the courtroom, the Jenners and Garveys sat together, attended the closing arguments, waited behind the scenes with Clark, Christopher Darden and the Brown and Goldman families for the verdict. Bruce says, “The Brown family asked us to come. They wanted to see O.J.’s old jock friends on the other side of the courtroom, because there was a definite division in there.

“And then to see this guy walk away, you know? As soon as the verdict came down, the first thing my wife said to me was, ‘Nicole was right. Because the bonehead told her he’s going to kill her someday and get away with it, because he’s O.J. Simpson. And he did.’ She was absolutely right. The guy got away with it. He’ll pay for it some day, some way.”

Bruce Jenner squeezed his wife’s hand and moved on from there, as ever, searching for brightness through a cloud. Some days are less easy than others for going forward. Yet it has always been his special gift, knowing exactly where to go and the fastest way to get there.