For years, she’s been a trailblazer for reality TV, with all the dramas of her life willingly — and many would say cynically — served up as entertainment.
She has made millions and is the living embodiment of both the benefits and the drawbacks of putting your life out there for all to see.
She first appeared in the 2003 American version of I’m A Celebrity . . . Get Me Out Of Here! as Bruce Jenner, the athlete who won gold in the decathlon at the 1976 Montreal Olympics and built a career as a broadcaster and motivational speaker.
She was the hen-pecked dad in the reality TV series Keeping Up With The Kardashians, trying to keep the peace among a brood of self-absorbed daughters and stepdaughters, not to mention a bossy wife called Kris.
Then in 2015, aged 65, Bruce became Caitlyn, her gender transformation announced when she posed seductively in a satin bustier on Vanity Fair’s cover.
Stylish: Caitlyn looks pretty in pink in Daily Mail’s exclusive photoshoot ay her Malibu home
She became the world’s most famous transgender woman and starred in TV series I Am Cait about her transition. The show was cancelled after its second season due to lacklustre ratings.
With all this reality TV experience, Caitlyn should have been prepared for the hardships of the jungle on her return to I’m A Celebrity this year, but on her first night in the camp, she had a meltdown.
‘I was thinking about the last five years and everything I’ve been through, which is a lot,’ Caitlyn says. ‘Two weeks before, I’d turned 70, which is traumatic for anyone. I was thinking, ‘Oh my God, how did I ever get here? It seems like a couple of weeks ago, I was 30.’
‘Plus, you’re cut off from your family and friends. I didn’t know anybody in the camp because they’re all UK celebrities, and getting out of the jungle seemed like an eternity away at that point.
‘So, I started crying and getting upset with myself and then I thought, ‘This is just another show. Suck it up. Get up every morning and do the best you can and eventually you’ll get out of here.’
Caitlyn leaving the I’m A Celebrity jungle in Australia after her appearance
When I meet her, ten days on from her exit from the show, Caitlyn looks very different to the bedraggled contestant who left the show after 22 days of having cockroaches, spiders and snakes thrown at her.
Her auburn hair has been blow-dried just so and her face — she has had surgery and electrolysis to make her features look more womanly — is beautifully made up. She’s wearing a short, fuchsia cocktail dress.
Perhaps the only things that show that she was once Bruce is her deep voice and the fact that she is 6ft 2in tall, without heels.
‘I had a physical the other day and I’m now 6ft 1,’ she corrects me, with a hearty laugh. ‘I’m going in the right direction. I figure that by the time I’m 90, I’ll be the perfect model-size 5ft 10.’
We meet at her home in Malibu, California, set on a mountaintop that overlooks the ocean. Decorated for the festive season, there’s a 10ft-tall tree in the living room, reindeer and Santa and Mrs Claus ornaments.
Bruce Jenner trains for the decathlon for the 1976 Summer Olympics
On a table in the dining area, there are photos of both Bruce, and Caitlyn, with her three biological sons and a daughter from her first two marriages. There are also pictures of Caitlyn with ex-wife Kris, the ‘momager’ of the multi-million-dollar Kardashian franchise, and step-daughters Kourtney, Kim and Khloe. She also has a stepson, Rob Kardashian.
On the opposite table, Caitlyn’s two biological daughters with Kris — Kendall, who is 24 and one of the world’s highest paid models, and Kylie, who is 22 and the billionaire owner of a cosmetics company — get their own display.
There’s a picture of them as little girls, and one of them with their father before gender reassignment surgery. There’s a framed Father’s Day letter from Kylie dated 2006, which says, ‘Your (sic) the best dad ever!’ Her children still call her Dad, Caitlyn says.
In the hallway is another table covered in awards, including one titled ‘Bruce Jenner Olympic Titan’, and another ‘Caitlyn Jenner — Glamour Woman of the Year’.
After she got over her nerves in Australia, Caitlyn says she found her second stay in the jungle, for the UK series, rewarding.
‘The first time I didn’t want to hang out with anybody as there were so many big egos. But this time everybody helped each other, felt each other’s pain when they had difficult things to do,’ she says.
She did not initially rate the chances of Jacqueline Jossa, the winner. ‘She was deathly afraid of spiders, bugs — you name it. I didn’t give her a prayer. But she was a tough little hombre. The public picked the right winner; she had to overcome a lot of phobias.’
Caitlyn Jenner looking both glamorous and cosy on a fur topped chair outside her Malibu Home
Caitlyn bunked up with Good Morning Britain presenter Kate Garraway. ‘We had a bed and a pillow — that’s big stuff when you’re out there — and Kate and I spent three nights in our little quarters,’ she chortles.
‘I’ve told her I’m coming to the UK to do an interview as it will be the first interview I’ve done with somebody I’ve slept with and showered with.’
Caitlyn stripped down to a bikini for shower scenes, but asked campmates Kate and Nadine Coyle to hold up a sheet for privacy when she stripped naked after a dirty bushtucker trial. ‘The girls held up a modesty blanket for me or else it would have all been out in the open,’ she jokes.
When she became the seventh contestant to be voted out, there was criticism that none of Caitlyn’s family was there to greet her for the walk back to civilisation over the rope bridge. Ejected contestant James Haskell met her instead.
‘My family are very well-known,’ Caitlyn says. ‘I never asked any of them to come down or expected them to — they all have businesses and families,’ she says. ‘I was disappointed they were criticised. After the show was over, I texted or called all the kids to apologise.’
While we have been talking, Caitlyn’s companion Sophia Hutchins has been listening in. The 23-year-old U.S. beauty entrepreneur is also a trans woman. She used to identify as a gay man before her gender change, which she has said was partly inspired by Caitlyn.
The blonde Ivanka Trump lookalike, an imperious character who seems to rule the roost in the Jenner household, lives with the reality TV star and has been described as Caitlyn’s girlfriend. Some reports went so far as to say that the pair were to marry.
In a recent interview, however, Sophia revealed the two are not romantically involved and that she acts as Caitlyn’s manager, a role once taken by the star’s ex Kris.
‘I saw nobody was managing her and there were all these people taking massive advantage,’ Sophia told The New York Times. ‘And I was saying: ‘Caitlyn, if I don’t step in here and start managing you, you’re going to go broke.’
Caitlyn, pictured with her extended family, says she has a good relationship with all of her children. Pictured: Khloe Kardashian, Lamar Odom, Kris Jenner, Kendall Jenner, Kourtney Kardashian, Kanye West, Kim Kardashian, Caitlin Jenner and Kylie Jenner
She apparently negotiated Caitlyn’s reported half-a-million-pound deal for appearing on I’m A Celebrity — one of the highest fees in the show’s history. She was also waiting for Caitlyn when she returned to her hotel in Australia.
So what is the nature of their relationship? The poised Sophia defers to Caitlyn. ‘We’re business partners, friends, all of the above,’ says Caitlyn, breezily. ‘She’s wonderful to be around.’
For our exclusive interview and photoshoot, Caitlyn is clearly relishing the chance to dress up. ‘I’d always fantasised about having beautiful clothes that fit, but here’s my dilemma in that department,’ she confides. ‘I feel like, on the one hand, I’ve got to dress age-appropriately because I’m 70 years old, you know? Fortunately, I have good skin tone and I’ve taken care of myself…’
She pauses and then she roars with laughter. ‘On the other hand, little Caitlyn’s only five years old and a girl’s gotta have a bit of fun. And so, I go back and forth on that. I want to be a cool chick.’
In her 2017 book The Secrets Of My Life, Caitlyn describes how she first secretly started borrowing her mother Esther’s and sister Pam’s clothes aged ten.
‘I thought it was something that would pass,’ Caitlyn says. ‘But when you deal with something like this, it’s not like you can take two aspirin, get lots of sleep, wake up the next morning and you’re fine.’
Changing gender does seem to have taken its toll on Caitlyn’s relationship with her children. Caitlyn Jenner (left) and Kylie Jenner (right) pictured together in 2015
For most of her life as Bruce, she says, she cross-dressed in women’s clothes as an ‘escape’ from feeling she was a woman inside a man’s body. ‘Sometimes I just want to rip the skin off me. Get out of this ridiculous costume of flesh and bone,’ she writes in her memoir.
Her first marriage to Chrystie Crownover — the mother of daughter Cassandra and son Burt — ended in 1981, partly because of that gender confusion.
So, too, did her second marriage to Linda Thomson, Elvis’s former girlfriend and mother of Caitlyn’s sons Brody and Brandon.
It was a relief, Caitlyn says, when she found out in her mid-30s she had gender dysphoria, a condition where a person experiences distress because there is a mismatch between their biological sex and their gender identity. Bruce and Linda went to a therapist, but Linda hoped it was a condition that would go away.
In her memoir, Caitlyn describes asking Linda for a meeting in New York in the mid-1980s when their marriage was on its last legs. She opened their hotel room door dressed as a woman — in feminine clothes, wig and make-up. ‘I’ll never forget the look of shock and hurt on Linda’s face,’ Caitlyn writes. ‘She didn’t deserve it.’
The pair divorced in 1986, and Caitlyn went into self-imposed exile. ‘I lived right over the hill and for a good six years I barely left the house,’ says Caitlyn, pointing in the distance.
‘I had two failed marriages and four kids and didn’t see them as much as I should have. I didn’t feel like I fitted into the male world. I didn’t feel like I fitted into the female world.’
She underwent two years of painful electrolysis to get rid of facial and chest hair, had a nose job and began hormone therapy which caused her breasts to grow.
She considered undergoing full gender transition, but put the idea aside when, in 1990, she met Kris Kardashian. They married seven months later.
Caitlyn maintains in her book that she told Kris about her gender issues and that she dressed as a woman in front of her several times during their marriage.
In her memoir, Caitlyn describes the breakdown of their marriage as ‘a toxic combination of her withering anger with me and my defensiveness, and generally being at each other’s throats, and the kids asking their mother why she yelled at me all the time’.
Kris has said that, while she was aware of her husband’s use of hormones in the 1980s, ‘nobody mentioned a gender issue’.
The couple were together for 23 years before they announced their separation in 2013. A year later, Kris filed for divorce, citing ‘irreconcilable differences’. After her ex-husband became Caitlyn, she said the transition had taken her by surprise.
‘When Kris and I separated, it wasn’t because of trans issues. It was for a million other reasons,’ says Caitlyn. ‘Kris and I had a great relationship for a long time.
‘We built an amazing family. But circumstances and people change. And I think the hardest thing is to be able to make those changes together and still be as strong.
‘Our relationship didn’t work any more and we mutually decided that it was time to split up. There was no animosity.’
Less than a year after their divorce, Caitlyn underwent her transition from male to female. She had facial feminisation surgery, which entailed hairline correction and forehead, jaw and chin contouring. She had a procedure to augment her breasts and had gender reassignment surgery.
‘I took a long time to figure it out, which is fine. I have no regrets about playing Bruce for 65 years. He was a good guy — he did a lot of amazing things and raised a wonderful family,’ says Caitlyn.
The days of living a lie are behind her now, Caitlyn says. ‘Put it this way, my life today is so simple,’ she says. ‘It may take me a little longer in the morning to get ready, but I wake up and can be myself all day. I’m so much more comfortable in my own skin than I was before.’
One of the reasons she wanted to do I’m A Celebrity, Caitlyn adds, is to raise awareness about gender identity. ‘It’s a much bigger issue than people think. Trans people are everywhere, you probably just don’t know it.’
Many of her campmates had never met a trans person, and fired questions at her. ‘Everybody was curious about what I had been through. I think it’s important to be honest with people,’ she says.
She brushes off any social media abuse. ‘Ninety-eight per cent of my encounters with people are nothing but positive,’ she says.
But changing gender does seem to have taken its toll on Caitlyn’s relationship with her children.
Around the campfire, Caitlyn revealed that her stepdaughter Khloe has hardly talked to her since her transition and there are reports she is merely on civil terms with her ex-wife Kris for the sake of their two daughters.
‘I have a good relationship with all of my children, but with some of them, is it better than others? Yeah,’ Caitlyn concedes. ‘I don’t think there’s one of them that’s not good with it. They’re all very open-minded children.’
Does she see herself being in another relationship? Caitlyn pauses before replying: ‘Whether I’m in a relationship or not in a relationship, I see myself as being very happy in the future, so what that might lead to, I don’t know.
‘Going into the jungle was an opportunity to reflect on things, clear my head and put life in perspective. I’m glad I did it as it made me realise I’m very happy with where my life is right now.’