Sean Smith - Kim Kardashian

His acting ambitions didn’t reach the hoped-for heights, however. He wasn’t going to be the next James Bond any time soon. He tried out for the Superman movie, but the role went to Christopher Reeve.

He ended up in Can’t Stop the Music , a musical comedy based on the New York disco group Village People. Kris Jenner refers to it as Can’t Stand the Music . The film cost $20 million to make and returned $2 million at the box office. It was the first winner of the Golden Raspberry Award (Razzie)for Worst Picture. Bruce was nominated as Worst Actor, but the judges decided Neil Diamond deserved the award for The Jazz Singer .

On one level, the film could be viewed as compulsive viewing. Bruce plays a sober-suited lawyer who undergoes a transformation when he becomes involved in the world of the Village People and ends up dancing down the street in a crop top and cut-off denim shorts. If it were released today, as a snapshot of the age, Can’t Stop the Music would probably be hailed as a must-see, glorious camp classic.

Bruce’s acting career stalled at the first hurdle and didn’t much improve with a guest-starring role in the popular motorcycle cop series CHiPS . He played Officer Steve McLeish, who took over from the lead, Frank Poncherello (Erik Estrada), for six weeks. He started off as a movie star and became ‘made for TV’ in the space of a year.

Bruce and Linda, meanwhile, shared an idyllic life by the ocean in Malibu, strolling along the beach together at sunset, playing sports, going to all the best parties and welcoming another son, Brody, into the world on 21 August 1983. Nothing could upset their happiness – or so Linda thought.

Just after New Year 1985, Bruce sat his beautiful wife down and told her his secret. It wasn’t a confession she could ignore. The first time round with Chrystie, Bruce had been fairly light and matter of fact about things; this was far more serious and heartfelt. ‘I have lived in the wrong skin, the wrong body, my whole life. It is a living hell for me, and I really feel that I would like to move forward with the process of becoming a woman, the woman I have always been inside.’

The couple tried therapy, but the counsellor confirmed that there was no cure or fix for what Bruce was going through. Linda would later write movingly that the enormity of what she had been told ‘broke her heart into a million pieces’.

While Linda began the painful process of ending her marriage, Bruce began gender reassignment treatment for the first time. He had always hated his ‘ski jump’ nose, so a touch of plastic surgery to remove the bump and make it more feminine was a good start. He also had painful electrolysis treatment to remove his masculine beard and chest hair.

He started injecting female hormones, which led to him growing breasts. They weren’t Kim Kardashian-sized or anything like that, but when his young sons saw him in the shower one day, they told their mother, ‘Daddy has boobs!’ She tried to explain it away, saying that his well-muscled body had turned to fat now that he wasn’t training. Linda told the Huffington Post that she didn’t reveal the truth about their father until her sons were 31 and 29 respectively. She had sought to protect them – and him.

Bruce, by his own admission, went on a downward spiral in the late eighties. He and Linda were divorced rapidly in 1985 and he found it difficult to cope on his own. He was living by himself in a one-bedroom house in Malibu, with no real close friends. His work had dried up. When he met Kris Kardashian, he had $200 in the bank and debts, he estimated, of $300,000. His clothes were old and worn, his house was a tip and he seemed to spend half his life in his grubby van. She needed to sort him out. She would give him her love and the energy to re-establish himself with the American public.

For his part, he decided to put his gender reassignment treatment on the back burner and stop taking the hormones. He couldn’t go further at that point, because he feared the effect his transformation might have on his young children.

Kim wanted to be a housewife when she grew up. She was a sweet and thoughtful little girl who dreamed of being not Madonna, but a wife and mother, and maybe a grandmother one day, just like her nanas whom she adored. ‘I always thought I would have lots of kids. Be getting up going to the gym every morning – super early. Coming home, making breakfast for everyone. Packing lunches and driving the kids to school.’ It must have been very bewildering for a girl who wanted to play happy families to witness what was going on within her own home.

It wasn’t long before Bruce was practically living at Tower Lane. The mansion was much more comfortable than his Malibu home. Robert Kardashian wasn’t especially pleased by the turn of events. He blinked and his wife was having an affair with Todd. He blinked again and Bruce Jenner was sitting on his sofa.

Todd alleged that at this point he was still involved with Kris: ‘I wouldn’t say we were dating … she was still coming over to the apartment and we were still sleeping together when she had started dating Bruce.’

Todd found the situation troubling. It began ‘messing with his head’, as he puts it. Kris has never commented on his allegation, but described in her book how he arrived at Tower Lane one night and caused a scene. He subsequently moved to London to forget her and later became a successful animator.

Financially, things improved for Kris when Robert agreed to a monthly settlement, but the divorce trauma was ongoing. In the divorce papers, Robert commented on her new relationship: ‘My children are exposed to another man living with their mother. I believe that is inappropriate …’

The arguments, which were inevitably about money, and who was finally going to get Tower Lane, were apparently ended when Bruce and Robert thrashed things out over dinner. Kris gave up any claim on the house and settled in Malibu with Bruce. She observed, ‘There was a period of a couple of years where it was really ugly and hard and you didn’t want the kids to take sides.’

By the time the divorce was made final in March 1991, Kris and Bruce had been engaged for four months. They were married four weeks later, on 21 April 1991. Kim was 10 and a half.

Bruce had managed to persuade his own children’s nanny, Pam Behan, a student from a small town in Minnesota, to leave his ex-wife Linda’s house and go to live with his new family. Pam adored Bruce, her first platonic male friend. Only in Los Angeles could the attractive new nanny be enjoying a fling with Sylvester Stallone.

Linda Thompson had previously been dating the star of Rocky and Rambo , but had moved on to the multimillionaire music producer David Foster. They eventually married and formed a formidable songwriting partnership, writing, among others, ‘I Have Nothing’ for Whitney Houston and ‘Tell Him’, a hit for Barbra Streisand and Celine Dion.

Pam was responsible for making sure Kris’s daughters didn’t get chocolate down their pristine white dresses before the wedding ceremony. Bruce’s eldest daughter Cassandra, known to everyone as Casey, was also a bridesmaid and, like the others, wore a garland of white and pink flowers in her hair. His three sons, and three-year-old Robert Jr, looked dashing in black tuxedos and pale pink bow-ties that matched the groom’s. Only Kourtney, still missing her dad, looked slightly uncomfortable about the happy family day out, She did, however, manage a weak smile for the wedding pictures.

Kris and Bruce were married in the garden of the Bel Air home of Terry and Jane Semel. He was the boss of Warner Bros, and subsequently chairman of Yahoo! This was the orbit of extreme wealth and influence the Kardashians already inhabited. In the world of the Kardashians and Jenners, everyone is a ‘dear friend’, but the generosity of the Semels was obvious.