It's about time!
At long last, Caitlyn Jenner made her debut on Jimmy Kimmel Live! Tuesday. "You've had every member of my family here," she said. "It's about time you had me! I've got all the good stories."
Ironically, Jimmy Kimmel just so happens to be Kendall Jenner's neighbor—something Caitlyn hoped to use to her advantage. "If I brought over some binoculars, could you kind of spy down on her?" she asked. "I never know what's going on in that house." The ABC host laughed and replied, "Can I tell you what's going on in that house? There's a lot of people bringing clothes in and out of the house—just all the time. There's so many clothes going in and out of the house!"
"I can see that," Caitlyn said. "No, Kendall is a very great kid."
Jimmy then confessed he had actually met Caitlyn "a long time ago" when he was a radio sportscaster at KROQ in 1996. "We were at the Olympics in Atlanta. You were on the Kevin & Bean show—I was the sports guy on that show—and we met at that time," the comedian said. "It was a big deal for me because I am of the age where—like, you were on the Wheaties box!"
"I'm trying to get back on it now," Caitlyn joked. "Maybe I should come out of retirement!"
That led Jimmy to bring up "the elephant in the room," which he could no longer ignore. "It's unusual that now I'm meeting you as a woman after meeting you as a man...Is it strange for you to look in the mirror and go, 'Hey, now I'm who I wanted to be?'" he asked. Caitlyn smiled wide and told the host, "No. I wake up in the morning and I have a feeling of peace. It's very difficult to go through your life with this. I never met anyone else who was trans until after I came out."
Recalling her lifetime of "hiding" and "secrets," Caitlyn shared a "funny" story she'd never told anyone before. "If you noticed today on Instagram, I posted a picture of me and Steven Tyler."
"I was at a fundraiser in Minneapolis, and he was the entertainment. I had met him, I think, once, briefly—many, many years ago. But he was sitting there and I'm thinking, 'I've got to go say hi,'" the Olympian said. "So, I go backstage after and I look up at Steven and I said, 'I have had some really, really tough times in my life. For six years, at one point, I stayed in my house, and every once in a while I would get dressed and go sneak out in the dark and drive around."
Caitlyn said she told Steven all about how she would drive around town listening to Aerosmith's "Dude Looks Like a Lady," years before she came out as transgender. In fact, she said, "That became my theme song, driving around in my little car with my little CD in there, whipping up the tunes and stuff. I said, 'I just want you to know, it made me feel good.' He loved it. He hugged me and said, 'We've got to get together.'" In her Instagram caption, Caitlyn joked that she and Steven "are working on our duet for Dude Looks Like a Lady. One of my favorite songs!"
Later in the interview, Caitlyn gave Jimmy some grief for mocking her on TV before she came out. "We didn't know what was happening," Jimmy told her. "We thought you were just vain!"
"I know. It's OK," Caitlyn said, to which Jimmy replied, "Sorry about that, by the way."
"It's OK," Caitlyn reassured him. "Now he's going to apologize! I accept your apology. I don't know if you saw, but when I was on [The Tonight Show with] Jimmy Fallon, I gave him a real hard time." Seizing the opportunity to tease his affable late-night rival, the host laughed, "Well, he deserves it. He said some real terrible things. He does that a lot. He is very hard on people."