Entertainment

Caitlyn Jenner says Keeping Up With The Kardashians was her idea and her fame gave it green light


Caitlyn Jenner has been famous ever since her record-breaking win at the Olympics in 1976, but Keeping Up With The Kardashians brought her into the limelight for a whole new generation.

And if you ask Caitlyn how the hit US reality show came about, she’ll tell you it was all her idea.

The I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! star was married to Kris Jenner at the time.

Then as Bruce, before her transition, she was step-parent to the Kardashian kids; Kourtney, Kim, Khloe and Rob, and shared daughters Kendall and Kylie Jenner with Kris too.

And she says that after watching MTV show The Osbournes one night, she suggested their family should be doing the same thing.

The Kardashian Klan pose up with Ryan Seacrest

Caitlyn says the show was her idea

Caitlyn wrote in her book The Secrets Of My Life: “The show is amusing: watching Ozzy in a domesticated role as a father and husband has its moments. He seems like he is intoxicated half the time, and he later admits he was intoxicated all the time during the shooting of each episode from 2002 to 2005.

“Under our own roof we now have six children, five daughters and a son. The house is awash in puberty and adolescence and young adulthood and two parents with very different styles. It seems to me something is there for television.”

She adds: “Kris says she is the one who came up with the idea and decided to actively pitch it to Ryan Seacrest, the host of the enormously popular American Idol and a television producer looking for projects…”

Caitlyn says Kris already knows Ryan and has a meeting with him, and that he loves the concept for the show, but struggles to convince the big bosses at E!

Caitlyn with ex Kris

Caitlyn Jenner's rocky love life - secret marriages, 3 divorces and a Kardashian feud
Caitlyn, as Bruce, and Kris married after seven months of dating

She claims that the network’s vice president of original programming, Lisa Berger, said: “I don’t know if I get it. The only person in the room I know of is Bruce.”

Caitlyn says Seacrest keeps pushing the show and that eventually it gets the green light for four episodes “largely because I am in the public eye and maybe that’s a hook”.

Kris says the show was all her idea.

Speaking on daughter Kim’s True Hollywood Story, she said her pal Kathie Lee Gifford was dying to see the family on TV after coming over for dinner one night.

She said: “[She] would tell me constantly, ‘You guys need a show, nobody would believe what goes on in your life’.

Kendall and Kylie in 2007

Bruce Jenner
Bruce and Kim in 2007

“This went on for a couple of years, until I met the casting director for Dancing With the Stars. She came over for dinner one night and was just watching all of this chaos. She goes, ‘This is just crazy, I’ve got to introduce you to Ryan Seacrest’.”

Caitlyn also says in her book that her family were ashamed of her after seeing the show, and that she “sold out” by doing it.

She writes: “The implication is that I have sold myself out, willingly destroying what positive reputation I have left.

“Pretty much on the mark. I still feel weak and inferior. I still have no self-respect. I feel as trapped in the middle between male and female as I ever have been. So maybe it’s only fitting that I am treated on the show like a new version of electrolysis without painkillers: reality-show humilation.

The most recent Kardashian Christmas Card

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“But I don’t care. The impetus for doing it is that the money generated will create a healthy trust fund for all the Kardashian kids and especially for Kendall and Kylie.”

After her split from Kris in 2013, Caitlyn began featuring on the show less and less as her decision to transition caused a rift in the family.

She later went on to have two series of her own E! show, I Am Cait, which followed her new life after her transition.

* I’m A Celebrity airs nightly at 9pm on ITV

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