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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2015

Text © Sean Smith 2015

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Dedication

To Rodney and Nicky

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction: A Day in Calabasas

Part One: Kimberly

1 Mother Armenia

2 Tower of Strength

3 A Complicated Affair

4 The World’s Greatest Athlete

5 Dope on a Rope

6 Neverland

7 The Real World

Part Two: Kim Kardashian

8 Mrs Thomas

9 The Death of Robert Kardashian

10 Queen of the Closet Scene

11 Vivid Imagination

12 Keeping Up with Kim

13 Dancing Princess

14 Dating Her Work

15 72 Days

Part Three: Kim Kardashian West

16 The College Dropout

17 Fancy Seeing You Here

18 Body Confidence

19 Caitlyn

20 Double the Power

Last Thoughts

Kim’s Stars

Life and Times

Acknowledgements

Select Bibliography

List of Searchable Terms

Picture Section

If you like this, you’ll love …

Also by Sean Smith

About the Publisher

Introduction
A Day in Calabasas

It’s a scorchingly hot Thursday in Calabasas. A helpful guy in the sushi bar told me it was 100 degrees outside. In the middle of the day, even the shade is too warm. The old cliché that you could fry an egg on the pavement certainly applies; in fact, you could cook a full English breakfast. No wonder you are unlikely to see Kim Kardashian West in her new custom-designed silver Rolls-Royce Phantom before the sun has cooled in the late afternoon or early evening.

Calabasas is in what’s known in Los Angeles as ‘The Valley’. More accurately, this is the San Fernando Valley or the West Valley. Locals reckon it’s at least 10 degrees warmer here than in the fashionable beach areas of Santa Monica, Venice and Malibu. Calabasas, though, is becoming just as desirable, thanks to an influx of the rich and famous who realise a 40-minute crawl along the Ventura Freeway (Route 101) is a small price to pay for getting so much more bang for your buck. A $1 million property here might cost $10 million in Beverly Hills. That value for money won’t last forever. The Kardashians have made Calabasas famous, thanks to their reality show and the number of times they are photographed apparently living their lives in a normal way.

Other than Kim and her family, the most famous current resident is probably Drake, the phenomenally successful Canadian rapper, who immortalised the place in his song ‘2 On/Thotful’: ‘Crib in Calabasas man I call that shit the safe house. Thirty minutes from LA man the shit is way out.’

Local legend has it that Calabasas owes its unusual name to an incident in 1824. A rancher from Oxnard, 60 miles north, was on his way to Los Angeles when he crashed his wagon, spilling a load of pumpkins along the track. The next spring, hundreds of pumpkins or gourds started to grow by the roadside. As a result, the area was called Las Calabasas – the place where the pumpkins fell – after the Spanish word for pumpkin, calabaza.

Technically, Calabasas is a city that became part of Los Angeles County in 1991. It doesn’t feel remotely like Los Angeles here. The great Hollywood stars of the past didn’t live in Calabasas. Instead, they came to work here, although some would take Valley vacations away from the bustle of LA.

In 1935, Warner Brothers bought an estate near Calabasas Creek, which became known as the Warner Bros Ranch. Many classic films were shot there: in The Adventures of Robin Hood, starring Errol Flynn, the dusty terrain doubled for Sherwood Forest. Flynn travelled out to the Valley to shoot a number of movies, including the Western Santa Fe Trail, which co-starred a future President of the United States, Ronald Reagan. The Hollywood great, Gary Cooper, won an Oscar for his portrayal of Sergeant York fighting in the (Calabasas) trenches in the story of the First World War hero. Most famously, Casablanca, the wartime romance that features on almost every list of all-time best movies, was partly shot at the ranch.

Nowadays, classic movies have given way to reality shows, although the Valley has also long been a favoured setting for porn flicks. Keeping Up with the Kardashians is by no means the first reality show to be shot at a house in Calabasas. The best known was probably Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica, which began in 2003 and followed the embryonic marriage of boy band vocalist Nick Lachey and the blonde bombshell singer Jessica Simpson. The dumb blonde antics of Jessica were quite amusing, but the show had nowhere to go after three seasons, when she filed for divorce. Real life ruined the reality show.

The Kardashians aren’t seen in town as much these days, especially after moving their boutique, DASH, to West Hollywood in 2012. The original store, I discover, was in a small parade in Park Granada, just across the road from a large shopping complex called The Commons, the central point of Calabasas. A few years ago, the Kardashians were genuinely out and about every day, as they sought to build their business before the store became little more than a film location. It was pleasant enough, but nothing special – the sort of place you might find in a thousand small towns across America.

In the Shibuya sushi bar, a few yards down from DASH, they used to see the Kardashians every other day. The Kardashian women have always tried to keep their voluptuous figures in check by eating healthily. The chef preparing my tasty lunch of seared toro and peppered tuna at the counter told me that Kim had been to the restaurant lots of times, but Kanye West had joined her on only one occasion.

Shibuya is small and fills up quite easily, so when Kim and Kanye turned up on an evening in late April, they were made to wait in line and sat on a bench outside for half an hour until a table became available. Kim had just appeared on the talk show Jimmy Kimmel Live! and this proved to be a convenient photo opportunity on their way home. A photographer was able to shoot some very clear shots. Kanye looked miserable and scowled, as he always does for the cameras. Kim, elegantly made up and revealing her considerable cleavage, smiled happily.

Kim always favours the house sushi roll when she visits Shibuya. In actual fact, they had no need to stop off at all, because they employ a full-time chef. My own chef was not so absorbed in news of the Kardashians. He was extremely interested in Manchester United, however, and dreams of the day when Wayne Rooney pops in for a sashimi snack.

In and around the exclusive little shops, ice cream parlours and health food stores, you are far more likely to see Kim’s younger half-sisters, Kendall and Kylie Jenner, who, as teenagers do, prefer to hang out in the mall with their friends than in the fur-lined prison of their gated community.

Round the corner for coffee at the Blue Table deli, a young woman, who was working in Calabasas while she waited for her break as a singer, told me that she had seen Scott Disick the day before. The long-standing boyfriend of Kim’s sister Kourtney, and the father of her children, has become a well-known face from his regular appearances on the TV show. ‘What does he actually do?’ asked my companion. I had to admit I had no idea and made a mental note to find out.

Having celebrities pop in does wonders for local trade. A few hundred yards away, in yet another shopping centre, El Camino, is a ‘homey café for health-conscious bites’ called Health Nut, which has become celebrated as the place where the Kardashian girls buy the salads they are always munching on TV. I pop in to grab a takeaway of Kim’s favourite salad, whatever that might be.

‘No problem,’ said the man at the counter, bashing my order into the till and taking the money.

‘What’s in it?’ I asked.

‘No idea,’ he responded smilingly. ‘I just hit a button marked “Kardashian”.’

It turns out to be a pretty dull chicken salad with a pleasant tangy dressing – nothing the chef couldn’t run up in five minutes at home.

For a while, the Kardashians had a major rival as the most famous faces in the neighbourhood when Justin Bieber bought a house in a gated Calabasas community called The Oaks for $6.5 million in 2012. These days it’s a Kardashian enclave. Justin tired of life in the suburbs after two years and sold his five-bedroom mansion, complete with pool, hot tub, movie theatre and skateboard ramp, at a $1 million profit to Kim’s sister Khloé. She can easily walk round to see their elder sister Kourtney, who also lives there.

Khloé’s mansion is relatively ordinary compared to the extraordinary palatial luxury enjoyed by Drake. He is one of the biggest stars in the US, although he has yet to cross the Atlantic with similar success. His best-known British hit was as the featured artist on Rihanna’s number one ‘What’s My Name?’.

He lives in an outrageously opulent home in Hidden Hills, which was originally on the market for $27 million in 2009, but he was able to pick it up for the knockdown price of $8 million after the property market collapsed. It has a cinema, wine cellar, stables, volleyball court, Olympic-sized pool, stables, wet-room bar and so on. Drake once sang on a number called ‘Versace’ by the hip-hop group Migos: ‘This is a gated community, please get the fuck off the property.’ He may rap the language of the street, but I don’t suppose he wants to live anywhere near one.

Hidden Hills is the gated community that attracted Kris and Bruce Jenner when they were looking to move from Beverly Hills while Kim and her siblings were still at school. Kris was first introduced to the neighbourhood by a friend after her marriage to Kim’s father, Robert Kardashian, had collapsed.

There’s rumoured to be more money in Hidden Hills than in Bel Air. Kim and Kanye have now bought an estate there with an estimated value of $20 million. I heard they are going to turn it into a palace and it’s going to make Drake’s property seem like a terrace.

It’s supremely ironic that gated communities don’t just keep the public out, they fence the residents in. You can’t get past the guards without an appointment or, it seems, an E! Entertainment Television identification badge. At least for the famous people who live here, it means the paparazzi aren’t looking over the garden fence.

Hidden Hills has a number of entrances and exits, so the photographers split up and wait at each one. Kim will leave eventually, but they won’t know in advance which exit she is going to use. When she is spotted, the photographer stationed at that particular gate texts everyone else that she is on the move. By clubbing together in this way, they ensure that they all have the opportunity to get a picture. It is reminiscent of the days when squadrons of paparazzi used to hang around outside Kensington Palace in the hope that Princess Diana would go out. A Kim picture guarantees a sale in much the same way as one of the adored royal icon did.

I popped into a hotel in Calabasas to ask for some directions and told the receptionist, probably a resting actress, that I was writing a book about Kim Kardashian. She volunteered, ‘I don’t really like her. I don’t see what her point is.’ It reminded me of local hostility against Britney Spears when I visited McComb, Mississippi, where she was born. Perhaps it’s the way people always feel about the most famous face in their midst.

I enjoyed my day in Calabasas, but I needed to beat the traffic on the freeway to return to downtown Los Angeles and civilisation. Before I left, there was time to ask an elegant woman shopping for clothes in a boutique very similar to DASH what she thought of the Kardashians: ‘You don’t get anywhere in that family without a vagina. Bruce has realised that …’

Part One

1
Mother Armenia

Kim Kardashian West demonstrated to the world the global power of her celebrity when she arrived at the Armenian Memorial Complex in that obscure country’s capital of Yerevan in April 2015. The pictures of her, solemnly carrying a bunch of bright red tulips that matched the colour of her dazzling jumpsuit, went round the world.

After she had laid the tribute at the eternal flame, bedlam broke out as TV cameramen and photographers – and the public brandishing phones – battled for pictures of Kim and her family. It had been the same story ever since she had touched down in Mother Armenia, as she calls the land of her ancestors.

‘Armenia, we are here!!!!!’ She posted to her then 30 million Instagram followers when she arrived. ‘We are so grateful to be here and start this journey of a lifetime. Thank you to everyone who greeted us. I can’t wait to explore our country and have some yummy food!’

On the flight from Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), Kim had slept completely hidden from prying eyes by a blanket. She always does this on planes so nobody can snap an unglamorous shot of her snoring with her mouth open. They flew the last part of their journey economy class, much to the amazement of other passengers.

When she arrived, she appeared completely refreshed, in ripped white jeans and a tight white top, although she hid her eyes behind a huge pair of sunglasses, in case the ravages of jet lag had caught her before her make-up artist, who always travels with her, could step in.

The visit saw Kim, and her younger sister Khloé, give an object lesson in how to combine glamour with tasteful respect. For their audience with the prime minister, they wore figure-hugging outfits that showed off all their curves. Kim chose beige and combined it with killer heels. Yet for their trip to the sacred Geghard Monastery, a World Heritage Site, she chose understated black.

Kanye West was on hand to secure his wife’s veil affectionately, although her wardrobe assistant took over to make the necessary adjustments for the perfect picture. Arguably, Kim has never looked lovelier than in this respectful homage to the country’s tradition. She looked very Armenian, with her coal-black eyes, long black hair and curvaceous silhouette.

This was Kim’s first visit to the land of her father’s family. Inevitably, there was nothing low key about it, especially as the plan was to feature her journey to the homeland in her long-running reality show, Keeping Up with the Kardashians. The television crew from E! tried to look as inconspicuous as possible – as if carrying around a large boom microphone were the most natural thing in Armenia.

A stills man from the Splash News & Pictures Agency, Brian Prahl, a sort of unofficial official photographer at the court of Queen Kim, travelled with them to record the trip, ensuring that the pictures taken were pin sharp and of the highest quality. Brian did his job well and everyone looked their best.

Wherever she went, the streets were lined with hundreds of people anxious to get a glimpse of her or, most prized of all, a selfie with the most photographed woman in the world. It was like a boisterous royal tour, with Kanye and Kim in the role of Prince William and ‘Princess Kate’. Their little daughter, North, captured hearts with an array of cute expressions, just as the baby Prince George had on his first overseas trip to Australia a year earlier.

Even Kanye broke into the occasional smile, usually when playing with North. He stayed a pace behind his wife, much in the manner of William with Kate, or Prince Philip accompanying the Queen. The men understand that they are not the focus of attention on these occasions.

Kanye did have his moment in the spotlight, however, when he gave an ‘impromptu’ concert for thousands of excited Armenians and was able to display some rock ’n’ roll behaviour by jumping fully clothed into Yerevan’s romantic-sounding Swan Lake. Apparently, he made the decision to go out and sing for the people only that night, although it’s doubtful if his Armenian security detail would have allowed such spontaneity. It proved to be good fun.

He had just started singing ‘Good Life’, when he took everyone by surprise by leaping into the water, which, a little undramatically, only came up to his knees. He managed to get his microphone wet, which brought the song to an abrupt halt. That didn’t bother his audience, who began to jump in and splash around as well. Kim, who, dressed in sweats, was looking about as casual as she ever gets, explained that he wanted to be closer to the fans on the other side of the lake. ‘It was an exciting, crazy night!’ she said. After he had been firmly helped out of the water by guards, Kanye sang another five songs: ‘Stronger’, ‘Jesus Walks’, ‘Power’, ‘Touch the Sky’ and ‘All of the Lights’.

His escapade lightened the mood of what could have been a very sombre few days. Despite the excitement her journey to Armenia generated, there was a serious point to it all. Kim wanted to draw attention to what many – and certainly all of the Kardashians – regard as the first modern genocide.

She had flown in just before the one hundredth anniversary, on 24 April, of the slaughter of more than 1.5 million Christian Armenians by Muslim Ottoman Turks. It preceded the Holocaust in Nazi Germany by a generation, but became a footnote in the history of the twentieth century, scarcely covered in school history lessons. Kim was determined to change that. She blogged, ‘Every year, I honour the memory of the martyrs who were killed during the 1915 Armenian Genocide.’

This didn’t sound like the sort of issue that might concern a woman posting selfies to her Instagram followers or sharing information online about her favourite salad or how to bleach your eyebrows. She explained, ‘So many people have come to me and said, “I had no idea there was a genocide.” There aren’t that many Armenians in this business. We have this spotlight to bring attention to it, so why would we just sit back? I will continue to ask the questions and fight for the genocide to be recognised for what it was.’ There are a few household names from Armenia: Cher, Andre Agassi and the popular French singer Charles Aznavour were three of the best known before the Kardashians became so famous.

Not only is their country a fleeting presence in history lessons, it doesn’t feature largely in geography classes either. The Republic of Armenia is a landlocked, mountainous country wedged between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. Turkey is to the west, Georgia to the north, Azerbaijan to the east and Iran to the south. Since it achieved independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, Armenia has relied on tourism to the beautiful country to bolster a struggling economy still reliant on Russian gas. An estimated third of the 3 million-strong population live in poverty.

The premier, Hovik Abrahamyan, welcomed Kim and Khloé with open arms, realising they were putting Armenia on the map for millions of people around the world. The sisters were joined by two previously unheralded Armenian cousins, Kourtni and Kara Kardashian, who hadn’t shared the limelight with their famous American relatives until now.

Prime Minister Abrahamyan praised the Kardashian contribution to the ‘international recognition and condemnation of the Armenian genocide’. Kim, in turn, repeated her pledge to campaign for worldwide acknowledgement of the atrocity.

She apologised for not being able to speak Armenian and said she and her sisters were intent on learning the language, which doesn’t feature in the curriculum of the exclusive private schools of Beverly Hills and Bel Air. Even her father, Robert Kardashian, so proud of his heritage, wasn’t a fluent speaker.

Kim’s efforts to reveal a more serious side to her public image received an unexpected boost when Pope Francis condemned the cruelty of the genocide during a service at St Peter’s in Rome. Many commentators acknowledged that the combination of Kim Kardashian and the Pope was a PR disaster for Turkey.

After the family left Armenia, there was one more important stop to make before they flew home. They travelled to Jerusalem for North to be baptised into the Armenian Apostolic Church. The hour-long ceremony at the Cathedral of St James in the Old City was conducted in both Armenian and English, and ended with North being anointed on the head with holy water.

Kim followed the custom of these occasions by wearing a striped wraparound floor-length dress and flat shoes and covering her head with a white shawl. Kanye looked relaxed and happy in white trousers and sweater. North, in a white christening gown, went to sleep. It had been a long trip for a little girl but, as a reward, she was treated to a day out in Disneyland on her second birthday in June.

The ‘state visit’ to Armenia was a triumph for Kim, although her one disappointment came when President Obama failed to use the ‘g word’ (genocide) in a speech marking the anniversary. He couldn’t risk antagonising Turkey, an important ally in the ongoing fight against terrorism. Kim, who doesn’t blame modern-day Turkish people, observed, ‘It’s very disappointing he hasn’t used it as a president. We thought it would happen this year. I feel like we’re close …’

When she had first arrived in Armenia, Kim made a point of saying that her father and his parents, now all dead, would have been hugely proud of the visit and what she was trying to achieve. Like her, they had been born in the United States. It was the previous generation of Kardashians, Kim’s great-grandparents, who preserved the family line by fleeing Armenia just before the mass slaughter of their countrymen.

In leaving the remote village of Karakale, where the family originated, they were heeding an extraordinary warning made by an illiterate and sickly boy who had visions about the future. Efim Klubnikin predicted, ‘Those who believe in this [prophecy] will go to a far land, while the unbelievers will remain in place. Our people will go on a long journey over the great and deep waters.’

Although he made the prophecy first as an 11-year-old boy in the 1850s, he repeated his warning 50 years later, just in time for some 2,000 Armenians to leave before the nation’s holocaust. Kim’s forebears were among the lucky ones. Accounts testify that ‘every soul’ in Karakale was murdered. The village is now an entirely Muslim settlement, near the city of Kars, in the harsh, snow-covered environment of eastern Turkey.

In an extraordinary twist, Klubnikin urged his ‘believers’ not just to flee to the United States, but to settle specifically in Los Angeles. Kim’s great-grandparents sailed independently to a new life, and met and fell in love on the boat from Germany. They were among some of the last to flee, not setting sail until 1913.

At the time of the massacres, Armenia was still in Russia. The First Republic of Armenia was formed in 1918 and became a founding member of the Soviet Union four years later. Strictly speaking, the Kardashian ancestors were of Russian-Armenian stock and the family name was Kardashcoff, which doesn’t trip off the tongue as well as Kardashian, although they could still have called their famous boutique DASH.

By the end of the First World War, the Kardashian family was beginning to establish itself at the centre of the new Armenian community in Los Angeles. Many had settled in a poor, slum-like neighbourhood known as ‘The Flats’ in Boyle Heights, East LA. The area was a gateway to the city for newcomers, and one that they aspired to leave. The Kardashians were no exception.

The displacement of some of a nation’s finest men and women bred great spirit and a desire for achievement. Friendships forged in adverse circumstances would last a lifetime, binding successful Armenian families together. A fierce loyalty was the hallmark of the community.

The rise in fortunes of the Kardashians began with a rubbish collection business and moved on to hog-farming. From there, it was a natural progression to opening a slaughterhouse for meat processing, as an outlet for their livestock concern. The Great Western Meat Packing Company started up in 1933 in the city of Vernon, 5 miles south of downtown LA. It’s a very unprepossessing, almost exclusively industrial area, full of warehouses and plants – and slaughterhouses. Vernon is not a place where you would want to live.

Arthur Kardashian, Kim’s grandfather, was born in Los Angeles in 1918 and married her beautiful grandmother, Helen Arakelian, who was a year older, when he was 20. He took over the family business with his brother Bob when their father retired and built it into one of the most successful Southern Californian enterprises, with a turnover of more than $100 million.

Art and Helen became pillars of a new prosperous Armenian community, settling in the affluent suburb of Baldwin Hills, a million miles away from The Flats. Former California Senator Walter Karabian, a frequent guest, described their home as ‘beautiful’ and ‘upscale’. In the space of a generation, the Kardashians had risen from hard-working immigrants to millionaires. They possessed an ideology of success and how to achieve it that they would pass on to their children and grandchildren.

Kim adored her grandparents. Particularly, she was close to Helen, who died, aged 90, in 2008. ‘Nana was seriously so much fun,’ she said. ‘She was your typical Armenian grandmother and always cooking the best Armenian meals. Our favourite when we visited was a breakfast dish called beeshee, which is a pancake topped with lots of sugar.’ Her grandparents eventually retired to Indian Wells, near Palm Springs, where they originally had a holiday home. When Helen died, she and Art had been married for 70 years.

The biggest influence in Kim’s life was her beloved father, Robert Kardashian, who was born in Baldwin Hills in 1944. She observed, ‘My father always taught us never to forget where we came from. We grew up learning so much about our Armenian ancestors that we will teach to our own kids one day.’ She is clearly giving North a head start in that regard.

2
Tower of Strength

Robert Kardashian is a name that sounds as if it belongs to a very serious person. In reality, Bob, or Bobby as he was known, was funny and fun-seeking, a young man with a reputation as a practical joker, who never wanted to be tied to the family meat-packing business. It didn’t suit his style at all. He would leave that responsibility to his elder brother, Thomas, known as Tommy, who was four years his senior. An elder sister, Barbara, pursued a successful career as a dentist.

He followed them both to USC – the University of Southern California – in Los Angeles where he studied business administration from 1962 until 1966 and, like his brother, was the senior manager of the student American football team, the formidable USC Trojans. Both brothers were keen on sport, particularly football, and could play to a high, if not professional, standard.

Robert decided to continue his education at the University of San Diego, where he graduated in 1969 with a law degree. Tommy observed that his younger brother went to law school to avoid going into the family business. The elder Kardashian already had a Rolls-Royce and Robert was determined that he would have one too. On his return to Los Angeles, aged 25, he joined the firm of two USC law graduates, Richard Eamer and John Bedrosian. After two years, he became a named partner in Eamer, Bedrosian and Kardashian of Beverly Hills.

Bedrosian, a fellow ‘hye’ (the Armenian word for an Armenian), developed the firm’s interest in healthcare, while Robert found entertainment law more to his taste. One of his friends, George Mason, who founded the Armenian newspaper The California Courier, observed, ‘He’s not the kind of man who wants to be chained to a desk and take a briefcase full of work home with him every night.’

If Robert had stuck with his partners, he would have ended up considerably wealthier. They established National Medical Enterprises, which became one of the top healthcare providers in the US before it was sold in the 1990s. As a result, they moved into the realms of the super-rich.

Robert, though, enjoyed the world of celebrity more than the boardroom. He met the man who would change the future for him and his family on a tennis court in Beverly Hills one Sunday morning in the spring of 1970. A game of doubles was set up by the maître d’ at the Luau, which was a popular local place for young playboys on the prowl.

Robert and his brother Tommy were a formidable pairing, but they were concerned they had met their match in O. J. Simpson and Al Cowlings. These two had both won sporting scholarships to USC, but did not enrol there until after the Kardashians had left. Orenthal James Simpson, known as ‘The Juice’, was the most famous college footballer in the US and the winner of the prestigious Heisman Trophy as the most outstanding player of the year. In UK terms, it would be the equivalent of discovering that your weekend tennis game was against David Beckham.

O. J. was already a celebrity. Robert and Tommy were well known in the fashionable bars and restaurants of Hollywood, but they mixed more with professional people. O. J. would change that.

To their surprise, experience narrowly won the day for the Kardashian brothers. The four all became friends and the one-off game became a weekly ritual. Robert and O. J. got on particularly well, despite their very different backgrounds. O. J. had been brought up in a poor area of San Francisco, belonged to a street gang and served time in a youth detention centre. When he moved from college into the professional game, he became one of the most sought-after names in the celebrity world and, by 1971, was said to have earned enough money from endorsements to retire.

Robert recognised the selling potential of his new friend. O. J. would be perfect as the public face of some business ventures. Robert had the ideas and O. J. had the fame, and together they started several stores and restaurants.

They both still had a strong affinity with USC and one of their more successful enterprises was a fashion boutique on the campus called jag O. J. – a play on the popular student cocktail of orange juice and Jägermeister. It sold top-of-the-range jeans and casual wear and they made a tidy profit when they sold the shop after a couple of years.

One of Robert’s policies where his start-ups were concerned was not to hang on to a business for too long, whether it was successful or not. He formed a corporation with O. J. called Juice Inc. and opened a frozen yoghurt shop in Westwood Village, which they called Joy and, once again, sold after a couple of years.

The association with O. J. opened up a new world for Robert Kardashian and his brother. They moved into a house in Deep Canyon Drive, Beverly Hills, which they turned into a bachelor’s playground. O. J. was always around, helping to attract a constant stream of guests for tennis and pool parties. In the mid-seventies, he even stayed with the brothers for six months during an off-season as the star running back of the Buffalo Bills. There were three Rolls-Royces parked in the driveway then. Robert had finally acquired one – and he was still in his twenties. O. J. also rented space in Robert’s offices to oversee his growing business concerns away from football. Robert’s legal secretary, Cathy Ronda, became O. J.’s personal assistant. The connection between the two men was a very strong one.

Robert wanted to pursue interests in music, one of his great loves. His fortunes were transformed in 1973, when he set up a magazine, Radio & Records, with his brother Tommy and a new partner, Robert Wilson, who had many music contacts. They had spotted a gap in the market for a weekly trade publication for radio and the music industry in general. At least a third of the pages were charts and statistics. Record company executives could see what radio stations in Alabama or Iowa were playing that week. The idea was to turn it into something that was an essential read for anyone working in the world of music and, to that end, it succeeded brilliantly. It became widely known as R&R, a sister to the famous Billboard, and an industry bible.

Eventually, the success of this and some of the ventures with O. J. allowed Robert to reduce his law commitments until, in 1979, he was able to stop practising altogether. By that time, he had fallen in love.

When Robert George Kardashian met Kristen Mary Houghton, he was a lawyer, an entrepreneur and a very eligible bachelor living in Los Angeles. She was an 18-year-old girl from San Diego growing accustomed to the finer things in life, thanks to a relationship with a professional golfer 12 years her senior.

They bumped into each other at the renowned Del Mar Thoroughbred racetrack, which boasted the famous slogan ‘Where the Turf Meets the Surf’. In the summer months, Hollywood stars would mingle with the cream of moneyed society in a beautiful setting by the ocean. A consortium of famous actors from the golden age, including Gary Cooper and Oliver Hardy of Laurel and Hardy, had clubbed together to build the course. They were led by Bing Crosby, who was on the gate greeting racegoers when it opened in 1937.

The meeting in July was a little like Royal Ascot, in that the wealthy and well-connected would travel from San Diego, 20 miles south, or Los Angeles, 100 miles to the north, to be seen and to show off their new hats. It was definitely a place to interest an aspiring socialite.

According to Kris, Robert barrelled up to her outside the exclusive Turf Club and said that she was someone he knew, even though he kept getting her name wrong, insisting she was called Janet. She thought he bore a striking resemblance to the pop singer Tony Orlando, who memorably sang ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree’. With his big, heavy moustache and slick black disco hair, he might also have been mistaken for a seventies porn star. She was a shapely brunette with great sex appeal. She had oomph.

He persisted with his corny chat-up lines and asked for her phone number, which she refused to give him. He trailed after her for the rest of the day and even introduced her to his elder brother Tommy, who was with him that afternoon. Naturally, her reluctance to give him her number lit the blue touch paper of his enthusiasm. At the time, she thought he was too old, although, at 30, he was four months younger than her boyfriend.

In her autobiography, she refers to the golfer only as Anthony. That wasn’t his name, of course. Much later, he was revealed to be a forgotten, if handsome, face on the PGA tour called Cesar Sanudo, who was from a modest Mexican family. He had been a caddie before graduating to playing golf himself. He was on the tour for 14 years at a time when great names like Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer and Tom Watson ruled the fairways. The irrepressible ‘Super Mex’, Lee Trevino, was one of his best friends on tour.

Although Cesar won only one tournament, the 1970 Azalea Open Invitational at the Cape Fear Country Club in North Carolina, he was a popular figure, always at ease with ordinary golfers and film stars like Bob Hope and Clint Eastwood. He also played golf with presidents, including Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and George Bush, Sr.

After they started dating, when she was just 17, he gave Kris the perfect introduction to the world of celebrity, and took her to golf tournaments all over the world. His brother Carlos maintained that it was Cesar who provided Kris with the connections she was able to use throughout her life.

Cesar installed his teenage girlfriend in his townhouse near the ocean in Mission Beach, an area of San Diego rather similar to Malibu or Santa Monica. Kris moved in, with her best friend from high school, Debbie Mungle, for company, as Cesar spent so much time on the road at golf tournaments. It wasn’t Beverly Hills, but it was a step in the right direction.

Kris may not have enjoyed the privileged upbringing that plenty of money gave Robert Kardashian, but she was comfortably middle class. Her father, Robert Houghton, had a good job as an engineer with the now defunct aircraft company Convair in San Diego. Her grandparents ran a candle store called Candelabra in fashionable La Jolla and her mother, Mary Jo, was their part-time assistant. When she was old enough to be a help and not a hindrance, Kris worked in the back room too.

Kris paid tribute to her grandmother in her autobiography Kris Jenner … and All Things Kardashian. She ‘taught me the value of hard work’, she explained. That ethic is very much in keeping with the philosophy of Robert Kardashian and one that they passed on to their children, especially Kim.

Her childhood, however, was very different from Robert Kardashian’s. His parents were married for 70 years, but Kris’s parents split up when she was seven. It was a traumatic time for Kris and her four-year-old sister Karen. Mary Jo had to sell the family home and go out to work full time. Eventually, Kris’s mother met a reformed alcoholic called Harry Shannon, who gave up booze for life when they married. Kris loved Harry’s entrepreneurial spirit and thought he was a ‘great guy’.

Mary Jo believed in bringing up her daughters to follow strict household rules, but that didn’t stop her from agreeing to let her eldest go to Hawaii with Debbie to watch a golf tournament, which is where she met Cesar. Robert Kardashian didn’t know at first that, while he was pursuing her, Kris had accepted her boyfriend’s proposal of marriage.

Robert wasn’t the least put off by her initial refusal to give him her phone number. He promptly found it via a friend who worked for the telephone company and boldly rang her up. She explained to E! that despite her initial hesitation and annoyance at his perseverance, they eventually realised there was a spark between them.

The path of true love didn’t run smoothly. On their very first date to the movies, they went back to the house she shared with Cesar, who was away playing in a golf tournament – or so she thought. Just as they were getting down to things in the bedroom, the door burst open and in charged Cesar. He made sure that Robert didn’t hang around to chat. Kris maintains they were still in their clothes. Cesar’s brother verified that they were discovered in the bedroom. He alleges that his brother was suspicious of Kris and had deliberately missed the cut in the tournament so that he would be home early. If that were the case, then his suspicions were confirmed, and it marked the beginning of the end of their relationship.

As well as the problems in her love life, Kris had to deal with a family tragedy that year, 1975. Her father, with whom she had been enjoying a much better relationship in recent years, was killed in a road accident in Mexico at the age of 42. The evening before he planned to marry for the second time, he was driving his Porsche when he hit a truck head on. Kim never knew her maternal grandfather.

Two decades later, Star magazine in the US ran a story that Bob Houghton had been an alcoholic and had been drinking margaritas on the night of the crash. A girlfriend after his divorce, Leslie Johnson Leech, claimed, ‘I broke up with him because of his drinking.’

Kris and Cesar didn’t split immediately and technically remained engaged for a few more months. The end occurred with a counter allegation of cheating, which gave Kris the opportunity to leave her golfer once and for all. Cesar became a club professional in El Cajon, a suburb of San Diego, when he quit the main tour, but resumed tournament golf on the seniors’ circuit when he was over 50. He never spoke about Kris while he was alive, although his brother revealed some salacious details after his death in 2011. She has never responded, preferring her first serious lover to remain enigmatically as Anthony.

She didn’t waste any time and rushed into the arms of Robert, who was living the high life in his swanky new home in Deep Canyon Drive. She was trading up. He was clearly besotted with Kris and proposed within three weeks of her finally ditching Cesar. After she turned down his first proposal, Kris decided she needed her independence and wanted to see more of the world, so she trained as a flight attendant with American Airlines.

Robert responded to her rejection by dating Priscilla Presley, the ex-wife of ‘The King’, who was still alive and the biggest star in the world. He didn’t just phone her up and ask her out. Her best friend, Joan Esposito, was dating and would eventually marry his brother Tommy, so it wasn’t too surprising when Robert and Priscilla got together.

Joan was a former Miss Missouri who had been married to Joe Esposito, the larger-than-life road manager for Elvis. She forged a bond with Priscilla when they were both part of the mad Elvis world in the mid-sixties. Joanie, as she was known in those days, was a Vegas showgirl called Joan Roberts when she married Joe. As a couple, they went everywhere with Elvis and Priscilla. Joe was best man when the Presleys married at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas and Joanie was matron of honour. Both women settled in Los Angeles in the early seventies after their marriages ended.

The Kardashians were very popular. Susan Stafford, the original host of the game show Wheel of Fortune, described her friends Tommy and Joan as ‘decent and terrific people’. More interestingly, Susan had no idea that Robert Kardashian, fun and sociable, would eventually become famous in his own right. She observed, ‘The longer you are in Hollywood, you find yourself rubbing shoulders with people who become headline news.’ That would be particularly true of Kim Kardashian and her extraordinary family. Hollywood is indeed a very small world.

Fortunately for the history of the Kardashian clan, Robert’s dalliance with Priscilla was short-lived, although he did move into her house on Summit Drive for a short time. When it ended, Robert resumed his pursuit of the woman with whom he was clearly very much in love.

After completing her training, Kris was based in New York, but flew the route to Los Angeles every week. Robert, always dapper and expensively dressed, would meet her at LAX in his Rolls-Royce and whisk her back to the house, where they would play tennis or relax by the pool. He kept two Rollers in the garage now: one black and one white (and a convertible Mercedes for sunny days).

Robert could easily have continued living the life of the Hollywood playboy, but he was determined to marry Kris. He introduced her proudly to his close-knit family and friends, like O. J. Simpson and Al Cowlings.

Kris tells an amusing story of how she and Robert joined O. J. and the Bond actress Maud Adams on a trip to the Montreal Olympics in 1976. By now O. J. was even more famous, thanks to a blossoming movie career, with roles in The Klansman and the blockbuster The Towering Inferno. Everybody recognised him wherever he went, but nobody, including Kris, had a clue who Bruce Jenner was … until he won the decathlon gold medal.

Eventually Robert and Kris married at the Westwood United Methodist Church on Wilshire Boulevard in July 1978, five years after their encounter at the racetrack. It was a big, opulent wedding with a reception for 300 at the Bel-Air Country Club. Tommy was best man, O. J. was the principal usher and the massive Al Cowlings, known as A. C., was ring-bearer. Her younger sister Karen was the maid of honour.

Kris returned from an idyllic honeymoon in Europe, free from her job as an air hostess, happy and pregnant. She would later observe, ‘The Armenian women watched and counted the weeks until I gave birth to make sure I wasn’t pregnant before I got married.’

To the relief of the matrons, she wasn’t, and gave birth to her first child, Kourtney Mary, on 18 April 1979. She was 23. At 24, she had her second. She had conceived again on a skiing trip to the fashionable resort of Aspen, Colorado, with O. J. and his new beautiful blonde girlfriend, Nicole Brown.

Kimberly Noel Kardashian was born in Los Angeles on 21 October 1980.

It was time for the growing family of four to move to a house of their own. With perfect timing, in 1979, Robert pulled off his biggest business deal to date, when Radio & Records was sold for an estimated $12.5 million. He was thought to have made about $3 million on the deal – a sum worth $10.5 million in today’s money. Unsurprisingly, he stopped working as an attorney and relinquished his licence to practise law.

As a result of his windfall, he was able to buy a dream home four miles away. Tower Lane is a cul de sac that is so private it contains only three massive, luxurious mansions. 9920 Tower Lane would be the house where Kim and her siblings would enjoy an idyllic childhood. All three properties were behind massive iron gates to avoid the prying eyes of star-hungry sightseers.

Nobody knew who the Kardashians were at this point, of course, although they soon became renowned for throwing the best parties in the neighbourhood. The mansion had a large swimming pool, a tennis court, a Jacuzzi and a bar by the pool. To buy it in 2015 would cost something like $6 million. There was nothing a thousand other homes in the gilded nirvana of Beverly Hills didn’t enjoy. A housekeeper took care of the shopping and the washing, allowing Kim’s mother the time to go out to lunch with her friends. Uncle O. J. would stop by every week to play tennis, and there would always be a big barbecue for friends and family at weekends.

As there were so few houses in their little enclave, they decided to call theirs Tower Lane, the same name as the street, so Kim was brought up in Tower Lane, Tower Lane, which must have confused the postman. Anybody who found themselves wandering up Tower Lane would have been looking for a glimpse of either Madonna or Bruce Springsteen, who occupied the other houses during the 1980s. Bruce made it his permanent home, while Madonna was just renting for a short time. This is Los Angeles, however, so you would never walk, even to chat to a neighbour like the famous talk show host Jay Leno, who lived in the next road. The drive at the Kardashian house was almost too long to walk in any case.

It was a paradise for the little girls, and their early lives were recorded on video by a doting father keen not to miss a second of his children growing up. He called his second daughter Kimbo, or by the pet name of Joge, although she never knew why. In Armenian, the word means ‘imagine’. Kim was a very sweet and pretty child, as the countless home movies show. She and her elder sister Kourtney were so close together in age that they tended to wear the same outfits and often resembled twins. Even though there was plenty of space, the two sisters shared a bedroom, which meant that they forged a special bond and became a clique of two.

There were cats and dogs, rabbits and birds, and lots of dressing up. The two cats were called Coco and Chanel, an amusing tribute to the queen of French fashion, Coco Chanel. Among the pack of dogs was Valentina, a little Bichon Frisé who, the sisters recalled in Kardashian Konfidential, died after eating some poison. Kourtney and Kim cried their eyes out.

Having two babies by the age of 24 didn’t stop Kris from having two more by the time she was 30. Khloé Alexandra was born on 27 June 1984, and a longed-for son arrived on 17 March 1987. In the best Armenian tradition, he was called Robert Arthur, after his father and grandfather respectively. Just as Kourtney and Kim were particularly close growing up, Khloé and Robert Jr likewise played together – although the youngest daughter was regarded as a personal plaything by her two elder sisters.

If the children tired of their wonderland at home, there were always the annual vacations to look forward to: a spring break at Robert’s parents’ holiday home in Indian Wells, skiing in Colorado every autumn to celebrate Thanksgiving and, in between, a trip to Mexico or, if they were very lucky, to Hawaii.

One of the most important aspects of Robert Kardashian was the strength of his religious beliefs, a product of his Armenian Christian roots. He would meticulously say his prayers every morning by his bedside. He would also say grace before meals in their sumptuous dining room and often carried a Bible with him. Traditional bedtime stories for kids would be mixed with the occasional tale from his Bible. He was very keen for his family to follow his beliefs. The importance of worship, a strong spiritual bond and the belief that marriage was sacred would come to be supremely ironic in a family culture in which adultery and broken marriages became the rule rather than the exception.

The leading light in the religious community that Robert and Kris were drawn to was the famous fifties singer Pat Boone, who would host weekly Bible studies for like-minded neighbours, including Doris Day, Priscilla Presley and the Kardashians, at his luxurious mansion. Boone was well known for baptising some 250 people in his swimming pool.

They didn’t go in for any of that in the Kardashian pool, although friends were always welcome to drop in for a swimming lesson. That circle of friends widened naturally when Kourtney and Kim went to school, first to the Beverly Hills Presbyterian Preschool in Rodeo Drive, and then to the ultra exclusive Buckley School in Sherman Oaks, where today it would cost between $33,000 and $39,000 a year to send your child.

Kim would forge some long-standing friendships with schoolmates, who included Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie, fashion designer Nikki Lund, Kimberly Stewart, the daughter of Rod Stewart and Alana Hamilton, and T. J. Jackson, the nephew of Michael Jackson. Her best friend, however, is Allison Azoff, who has never sought fame outside her privileged world.

Allison is the daughter of Irving Azoff, one of the biggest names in American music. In 2012, he was named the most powerful person in the music business by Billboard magazine. While best known as the boss of Live Nation, Azoff has also managed the affairs of a string of famous artists, including The Eagles, Christina Aguilera, Maroon 5 and, most aptly, as far as Kim is concerned, Kanye West. Irving and Kanye were brought together by Kris, who has been best friends with Irving’s wife Shelli for more than 30 years.

The Azoffs and the Kardashians lived near each other in Beverly Hills, so it seemed natural that their children would grow up together, spending time at each other’s houses. Kim used to enjoy exploring Shelli’s wardrobe and jewellery box, in particular, and trying on her diamond rings for size.

Kim has always been respectful of Allison’s desire to keep a low profile and the pair are seldom pictured together, even though they still speak all the time. Kim often says that she and Allison ‘met the day I was born’ and leaves it at that. Other friendships with equally famous people may receive far more publicity, but Allison is her oldest and dearest.

This rarefied upbringing relied on Robert continuing to make plenty of money without having to go back to the meat-packing business. Not all of his investments went as well as Radio & Records. Irving Azoff observed, ‘Some have and some haven’t been successful. But he’s real dependable and honest and quite an entrepreneur.’

The Kardashian family were firmly entrenched in Beverly Hills society. They were established in the pool and party circuit, with four lovely children and all the trappings that success could bring. This happiness didn’t last. In 1990, the Kardashians’ world fell apart.

3
A Complicated Affair

The Kardashian family always ate dinner together, even when the children were young. After prayers, Robert would go round the table for ‘The Peak and the Pit’. Everyone in turn had to declare the highlight and lowlight of their day. When Kim revealed on television that they used to do this, it was copied in homes around the country.

On one particular day in 1990, there were no peaks. That was when Robert and Kris sat them down and explained quietly that they were getting a divorce. Robert Jr was only two, so he wasn’t involved, but the three girls were in floods of tears. Their parents tried hard not to reveal the true extent of their own anguish.

They wanted to cause as little disruption as possible to their children’s lives, having vowed that their welfare would remain the most important consideration and they would try to act as normally as possibly. That was easier said than done: divorce papers would later make clear just how upset Kim had been by the course of events.

Robert was completely devastated. Kris had been having a tempestuous two-year affair with a younger man called Todd Waterman, a very fit and handsome footballer with a soccer team called LA Heat. She was 33 and he was 10 years her junior.

He had spotted her first in a photo at a friend’s house in Beverly Hills and liked what he saw. She evidently felt the same way when they got together during a night out with friends. Their versions of events are different. She says they kissed for the first time in the hall closet of her friend’s house. He says they had sex for the first time in said closet, adding, gallantly, that it was ‘magical’.

They both agree that they subsequently had a lot of sex. In her memoir, Kris, who once again gives her former lover a false name – this time Ryan – recalls less coyly that they had ‘wild’ sex in almost every imaginable location: tennis court, pool house, garage, back seat of the car and up and down the stairs. ‘Sex everywhere, all the time,’ she added.

Todd confirms that the sex was adventurous, both outdoors and indoors. ‘We were pretty prolific,’ he remembered with understatement. His memory failed him when he was asked if they had made love in the marital bed at Tower Lane. He did say he was sure they’d had sex in the house, but he didn’t recall anything specific.

They were clearly very much in love and, as sometimes happens in those circumstances, they became foolhardy and indiscreet. Todd was like a trophy boyfriend, always on Kris’s arm at celebrity parties and barbecues. She was behaving like a woman obsessed. She was seeing so much of Todd, even taking a skiing holiday with him, that his mother Ilza thought Kris and Robert were already separated: ‘She wouldn’t talk about her husband with me. If she did, I would have said, “What are you doing coming after my young son, with all these kids?”’

Not surprisingly, Robert became suspicious. He kept seeing Todd in the company of his wife, especially at the house, where they would play tennis together. Todd amusingly recalled that on one occasion Robert decided to umpire their game and kept calling foot faults against him.

More seriously, Robert hired a private detective to follow his wife to the modest apartment in Studio City, which she and Todd were using as a love nest. The inevitable clash with Robert is another incident that the two lovers remember differently. She recalled that it was in a restaurant in Beverly Hills, where they were having a cosy breakfast together. Todd said they were pulling out of his garage in an open-topped Jeep, when Robert dashed up in a convertible Mercedes, jumped out and started swinging a golf club at the back of the car. Todd was all in favour of stopping and confronting Robert, but Kris was worried that her distraught husband might have a gun, so the two vehicles set off on a high-speed car chase through Beverly Hills, which ended when Todd swerved into another road.

Todd, who only came forward in 2012 after he featured as Ryan in Kris’s book, was concerned for his personal safety, especially after a phone call he claims he received from O. J. Simpson warning him to stay away from Kris. O. J. apparently invited Todd over to his house to discuss things further – an invitation he had no trouble turning down.

One of the cruel ironies of the affair was that Kris paid for almost everything. But she, by her own admission, had no money. She was using credit cards that were paid for by her husband. The first thing Robert did on discovering the affair and deciding on a divorce was to cancel all of Kris’s credit cards. The financial implications would eventually lead to bitter and acrimonious divorce proceedings.

The whole sorry saga was shaping up like a bad episode of Dynasty (or a good one, depending on whether you were living it or just watching). To her credit, Kris hasn’t tried to justify her behaviour other than to acknowledge how unbearably miserable she had become in her marriage. The shattering effect her affair had on her family, particularly the two eldest girls, became clear when divorce papers were revealed in Star magazine in the US and published in America and the UK.

The most heartbreaking incident occurred in May 1990, when Kimberly, as they called her then, found her mother crying after a ‘brutal’ conversation with Robert. He was so emotionally distraught by what was happening that he would call Kris some horrible names whenever they tried to speak to one another. In her statement, Kris said, ‘She became so upset I had a difficult time getting her to her [school] carpool on time.’ She added that Kim called twice that afternoon begging her to come home. Clearly the young girl was worried that her mother was going to leave them.

Khloé, being that much younger than her sisters, seemed fine with Todd and would happily sit in the back seat of the car if he was going out to lunch with her mother. He thought she was smart and ‘just the cutest kid’.

Robert moved out of Tower Lane, leaving Kris to manage on her own. In the divorce papers, her sworn statement details what she termed was a ‘luxury lifestyle’. The mortgage payment on the house alone was $15,000 a month and then there were wages for the gardener, a maid and a housekeeper, as well as $800 a month to pay for the children’s clothing and $2,000 a month for herself. Credit card debts on various store cards had grown to more than $21,000.

The unhappiness that both Robert and Kris were feeling didn’t end with her sailing off into the sunset with Todd – far from it. At first, they carried on in much the same way. If Robert was looking after the children at the weekend, she would drift over to the apartment in Studio City to see Todd. Reading between the lines of her account, the enormity of what she had done – giving up what was so important to her life, the privilege and luxury of what Robert provided in Beverly Hills, for sex in a tiny bachelor flat – began to affect her.

She finally realised she had made a ‘ginormous’ mistake when she arrived at Todd’s apartment unexpectedly and discovered him in bed with a girl he had met in a bar. It was, apparently, a one-night stand. ‘I think I got busted,’ recalled Todd 20 years later, although he didn’t remember the exact circumstances.

Though they split up soon after, there is little doubt that they genuinely cared for one another. Todd told the Daily Mail that he was heartbroken when their relationship ended, but he knew that it would never have worked in the long term. He observed, ‘Sometimes you stop something not because you stop caring, but because it isn’t practical.’ At that point in his career, he couldn’t give Kris anything like the life she was used to and that was before you factored in the age difference. They both ended up with nothing to show for the pain and the passion.

It wouldn’t be the last time Kris enjoyed the obvious benefits of a younger male companion, but she vowed that never again would she be so vulnerable financially. It was a lesson she vigorously taught her children – Kim in particular.

Both Todd and Kris have since regretted the heartache their relationship caused Robert and the children. Todd could see how badly Kourtney, the eldest, was affected. She struggled to accept what had happened and certainly didn’t want anyone to replace her dad. It may or may not have affected her attitude to marriage but, at 36, she has yet to say, ‘I do’. Kim, on the other hand, appeared to deal with it more easily, but had married three times by the age of 33.

She has said that at the time she was more troubled by the size of her growing breasts, and would sit in the bathtub praying to God that they wouldn’t get any bigger. For a girl in the fourth grade, who had only just turned 10, one can understand her embarrassment, especially at school, where there was always some wise guy kid happy to twang the strap of her training bra. It didn’t help that her big sister would tease her mercilessly. The bath prayer didn’t work. She was a C cup at the age of 13.

More serious were the health concerns of their beloved grandmothers. Both Robert and Kris’s mothers faced grave problems that weren’t helped by the cataclysmic events in their children’s lives. Helen Kardashian had a stress-related stroke and Mary Jo Shannon was battling cancer. Fortunately, they both pulled through and the grandkids had many more happy times with them.

Just when it seemed that things couldn’t get any worse for Kris or her children, she went on a blind date that changed her life. The meeting with former Olympic champion Bruce Jenner was arranged by one of her close friends, Candace Garvey. She was the wife of Steve Garvey, one of the superstar baseball players with the Los Angeles Dodgers, known during his career as ‘Mr Clean’. Steve and Bruce were on the celebrity sporting circuit together. They were always bumping into each other at the various tennis, golf or fishing tournaments they were forever being invited to.

Candace obviously thought, quite rightly, that Bruce needed smartening up and that the fashion-conscious Kris Kardashian would be a perfect match. Bruce wasn’t so sure, until he discovered his date had four children, just like he did.

They met for the first time at the Riviera Country Club, where Bruce was playing in a golf tournament. He was immediately smitten by his vivacious companion, who was a good listener. The casual meeting led to dinner that first night, with Bruce pouring his heart out. ‘I’m 40 years old,’ he told her, ‘and I’ve never been in love.’

4
The World’s Greatest Athlete

Rather like her mother in 1976, Kim had no idea who Bruce Jenner was. He was just suddenly there. She was still in the fourth grade at school and had to do a project on someone famous. She was asking Kris whom she thought she should do, when Bruce interrupted her and said, ‘Why don’t you do me?’

Kim replied, innocently, ‘Well, who are you?’ He had to explain to her that he was an Olympic decathlon champion.

Her project was a resounding success, especially when the man himself went along to the school. She pictured him taking part in all 10 events. Unsurprisingly, she got an A, which was unusual for Kim. Kourtney was acknowledged as the brighter of the two, while Kim was a steady B sort of student.

William Bruce Jenner came into the lives of the Kardashian family like a whirlwind. He was an action man who could ski, drive racing cars and power boats, play golf, water ski and, of course, run and jump. He was fearless.

It hadn’t always been like that. He was shy and suffered from poor self-esteem growing up in small-town suburbia in New York State. Nobody realised back then that he had dyslexia, and believed him to be either lazy or stupid – he was neither.

He was eight years old, a solitary child with few friends, when he started sneaking into the rooms of his mother and two elder sisters to try on their clothes. He was a boy, still in short pants, and he had no real awareness of what he was feeling or why he was fascinated by female clothing. He just knew it made him feel good. Instead of retreating more into his own private world of self-doubt, Bruce was able to find acceptance when it was discovered that he was a superb sportsman. He acknowledges simply, ‘Sports saved my life.’

Bruce was the third of four children in a comfortable, middle-class household. He was born on 28 October 1949 in the town of Mount Kisco, a little over 40 miles north of New York City in Westchester County. He described his mother Esther as an ‘all-American mom and housewife’. His father Bill was a tree surgeon who had competed in the US Army Olympics in Nuremberg in 1945 and won a silver medal in the 100-yard dash. Bruce was well built as a toddler and his proud dad called him Bruiser. Young William was generally known by his second name to avoid confusion with his father.

As a small boy, it was his dyslexia, rather than gender issues, which was the most obviously troubling. Not unusually for the 1950s, his learning disability wasn’t diagnosed. As a result, his schooldays were ‘torturous’. He even had his eyes tested, because it was feared his inability to read properly might stem from problems with his vision.

Bruce explained to Ability magazine, ‘If you are dyslexic, your eyes work fine, your brain works fine, but there is a little short circuit that goes between the eye and the brain.’ His undiagnosed problem ruined his self-confidence: ‘My biggest fear was going to school. I thought everybody else was doing better than I was. I’d look around at my peers, and everyone else could do the simple process of reading. I was afraid the teacher was going to make me read in front of class. There was always the fear that everyone would find out I was a dummy.’ Bruce had no enthusiasm for school and the teachers thought he was just a daydreamer.

When he was 11, in the fifth grade, a teacher set up a game in which everyone had to run around some chairs and back. The idea was to see who had the fastest time. It was Bruce. He was the swiftest in the whole school.

From that moment on, his life changed. Here was something he could excel at and receive a slap on the back from his fellow pupils at the quaintly named Sleepy Hollow Middle School. The village of the same name is famously the setting for Washington Irving’s short story ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’. The author lived in nearby Tarrytown, as did the Jenner family. Nowadays, Sleepy Hollow is even better known for the television series that is set in the village and is, very loosely, a modern update of the original fantasy of the headless horseman.

When Bruce was a freshman at the Sleepy Hollow High School, aged 15, he asked the captain of the football team, known as the Headless Horsemen, for some help with punting the ball. Within an hour, Bruce was kicking it as far as his coach was. The young Bruce was extraordinarily gifted as a sportsman.

His family moved to Connecticut when Bruce was 16. They built a house on Lake Zoar, where they all could enjoy their passion for water skiing. Bruce was so good that he won the Eastern Regional Water Ski Championships and competed in the Nationals in 1966. At the local Newtown High School in Sandy Hook, he excelled in basketball, track and field and American football, and became all-state pole vault and high jump champion. He was unashamedly what Americans call a jock – a muscular athlete, usually good looking, whose life revolves around sports and girls and who is always one of the most popular guys in school.

Aged 18, Bruce was named the MVP (Most Valuable Player) in the track squad and the basketball team. He played both running back and quarterback in the school football team. His coach, Peter Kohut, recognised that he was an outstanding athlete: ‘He was a good kid, came to practice every day, seemed like he was always in good condition.’

At this stage of his life, Bruce was a very clean-cut young man – the sort of suitor who was bound to impress your mother. Nobody knew that behind the masculine exterior beat the heart and mind of a man who was more female than male.

Bruce was never going to be a great scholar, but he did win a football scholarship to a small college called Graceland in Lamoni, Iowa. Any hopes of becoming a professional footballer were soon dashed by a knee injury in his first year. That turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because the athletics director, L. D. Weldon, recognised his potential and persuaded him to put all his energies into the decathlon. Bruce needed an operation to repair his damaged knee in early 1969, but when he was fully recovered, he abandoned football and became a full-time athlete, reluctantly also giving up water skiing.

Weldon was one of the most respected coaches in the country, whose CV, crucially, included training Jack Parker, who won the bronze medal in the decathlon at the Berlin Olympics in 1936. He was an acknowledged expert in the multi-event discipline and encouraged Bruce to train hard.

Success was almost immediate. Jenner broke the Graceland decathlon record at his very first try at the 10 events. At his first open meeting, he placed sixth in the prestigious Drake Relays in Des Moines, the state capital. The following year, he returned to win the competition. In 1972, he came from nowhere to place third in the Olympic Trials, earning himself selection for the US team that travelled to Munich for the summer games. He could finish only tenth, but the promise was there. He had four years to fulfil his destiny.

Bruce was still at college in 1972 when he married his girlfriend, Chrystie Crownover, a minister’s daughter from Washington State. She had no idea, when they became man and wife, of the internal struggles her new husband had faced all his life. During their first year of marriage, she became the first person he confided in. She recalled, ‘He told me he always wanted to be a woman. Understandably, I was speechless. It was hard to wrap your head around it because he was such a manly man.’

His confession didn’t harm their marriage. In some ways, his revelation brought them closer together, as sharing a secret sometimes can. In her eyes, he remained a real guy, who was, quite simply, her hero.

After graduation, the couple moved to California, where the training facilities and the climate were better suited to an athlete with his eye on Olympic gold. Chrystie worked as an air hostess for United Airlines to support them, because in those days the Olympics were strictly for amateurs. She was entitled to free plane tickets, which were a godsend for Bruce, as it gave him the means to travel to athletics meetings all over the world. Today sport is a professional career and Bruce Jenner, an all-American hero, would have been a multi-millionaire, travelling first class around the world.

Chrystie was by his side when he flew to Montreal for the 1976 Olympics. He was the current world record holder and favourite to win. He was in second place after day one, but came charging through to claim the gold. He embraced his young wife, wrapped himself in the American flag and, for a fleeting moment, was the most famous man in the world. Now he needed to make some money.

Frank Litsky of the New York Times famously wrote of his triumph: ‘Bruce Jenner of San Jose, California, wants to be a movie or television star. After his record-breaking victory in the Olympic decathlon, he probably can be anything he wants.’ He wanted to be a woman and that was one thing he couldn’t be … then. Instead, he immediately retired from athletics.

Just when it seemed nothing could interrupt a happy future, tragedy struck the Jenner family. His younger brother Burt died in a car crash. Bruce was visiting his parents’ home in Connecticut and during his stay was loaned a Porsche by a local car dealer. Eighteen-year-old Burt volunteered to fill her up with petrol, but ended up crashing into a telegraph pole. He died in hospital, along with his young girlfriend, who had skipped school to go for a ride in the top-of-the-range sports car.

Bruce named his first child Burt in honour of his much-loved brother. His son was born in 1978, six years after he and Chrystie were married. Sadly, the cracks had already begun to appear in their relationship. Faced with a future that did not contain eight hours of athletics practice a day, the reality of Bruce’s gender dysphoria – the technical term for his gender identity crisis – was making him unhappy and discontented with his situation.

He and Chrystie separated for the first time the following year, and he met the woman who would eventually become his second wife at a celebrity tennis tournament. It was held at the Playboy Mansion in upmarket Holmby Hills, LA, where he had been staying temporarily. Bruce won the tournament and the beautiful Linda Thompson presented him with the trophy.

She provided another bizarre link with Elvis Presley in the Kardashian family saga. His relationship with her was probably the most important Elvis had after Priscilla. She was a 5ft 9in willowy blonde, who was the reigning Miss Tennessee when she met The King. He moved her into Graceland, his famous mansion near Memphis, in 1972, and she was with him for four years.

Linda had been a speech and drama major at MSU (Memphis State University) and, by all accounts, was the brightest of Elvis’s women. She was popular with the notorious Memphis Mafia – the entourage who seemed to be ever present with Elvis – and she had looked after him well. Marty Lacker, the unofficial foreman of the group, explained, ‘She was like a mother, a sister, a wife, a lover, and a nurse.’

Elvis had bought an apartment for her in Santa Monica so she could pursue her acting ambitions. After he died in 1977, she became a regular member of the cast of a variety show called Hee Haw as a singer of country music.

Bruce was immediately struck by Linda’s statuesque presence. He told her he and Chrystie were separated and they hit it off right away. He was uncertain about his future, however, and briefly reconciled with his wife. After Chrystie fell pregnant, he wanted her to have an abortion, because their marriage had failed. He told Playboy magazine in July 1980, one month after the birth, ‘My first reaction was that I didn’t want it.’

Initially, Chrystie went along with his wishes, and even paid for an abortion, but changed her mind after a conversation with a friend made her realise she didn’t want to go through with the termination. She said at the time, ‘I thought, “What an idiot I am.” I wanted the baby very, very much. But I was conditioned to make decisions that were best for him [Bruce]. It was totally my choice to have the baby.’

Bruce now says he too rejected the idea of an abortion, but when Cassandra, his eldest daughter, was born, he was in the middle of divorce proceedings and sitting in a hotel room far away in Kansas City. In his famous ground-breaking interview with Vanity Fair in July 2015, he told Buzz Bissinger that he wasn’t present at the birth: ‘Under the circumstances I could not even see myself being there.’

Instead, he resumed his relationship with Linda. They married soon afterwards, in January 1981, in a beautiful setting overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Hawaii at the beachfront house of Allan Carr, the producer of Can’t Stop the Music. Bruce’s son Burt was best man, even though he was only two, and spent the entire ceremony tugging at his father’s sleeve, saying, ‘I want up.’ Linda walked down the ‘aisle’ to the sound of Elvis singing ‘Hawaiian Wedding Song’. It was very romantic.

At the time, Linda was already three months pregnant with their first child, Brandon, who was born the following June. Fortunately, she got on well with Bruce’s older children, both of whom came to the hospital to visit their new brother.

Linda and Bruce became fixtures on the celebrity circuit around Los Angeles, making friends with stars like Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie and Sugar Ray Leonard, who would later feature in the Kardashian story. They appeared on the front cover of Playgirl magazine in May 1982: she revealed an impressive cleavage; he showed a lot of chest hair.

The cover headline on the article read ‘The Fall and Rise of an American Hero’. This bolstered the Bruce Jenner image of a man fighting against the disadvantages of life, including dyslexia. His story was one of triumph over adversity and was a considerable money-spinner during his years as a media personality and motivational speaker. It was an image he later promoted in his 1996 book Finding the Champion Within.

At no stage did he reveal to his audience his real struggle within. He would bounce on stage, all vigour and enthusiasm, wearing a pair of silk panties underneath his three-piece suit. Bruce, it appeared, was a master of living up to an image created for the general public. It wasn’t real.

The offers flooded in after the Olympics and soon Bruce was a very wealthy young man. He appeared on all the top talk shows, including The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson and The Merv Griffin Show. He became a well-known face on sports programmes, at one time co-presenting the popular Wide World of Sports.

He also revealed an entrepreneurial streak that would later fit in very well with the Kardashian flair for business. Their philosophy is all about making the most of every opportunity. Bruce bought his first plane in 1978 and started Bruce Jenner Aviation, which sells aircraft supplies.

He was marketed as a personality much more than the usual famous sportsman. He became the spokesperson and face on the packet of the iconic cereal Wheaties, the ‘breakfast of champions’, and a million families breakfasted with Bruce on the kitchen counter every day for years.

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.

5
Dope on a Rope

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.

After the divorce, relations between Robert and Kris settled down for the sake of the children. Kourtney still had a problem with Bruce taking her father’s place, but they saw plenty of Robert. He had moved back into Tower Lane and was in charge every other weekend, a time when he played the devoted dad.

Robert tried to keep everything as normal as possible. As always, he took the children to church at weekends and, if they were with him during the week, he made sure he drove them to school. He was very popular with Kim’s friends and would entertain them with a variety of spoonerisms – if he was going to take a shower, he would tell them he needed to ‘shake a tower’ – the sort of harmless sense of humour he had always had.

Nikki Lund, whom he insisted on calling Dicky, recalled that Robert was always stricter than Kris: ‘He was a fun kind of guy, but he had a responsibility as a man to daughters as beautiful as these. He would take us to church. He prayed and read the Bible. He was a really good dad. Kim was a sensitive girl and definitely spiritual.’

Robert gave Kim a Bible, which he signed, and it became her most treasured possession. The word Bible is one of her favourite expressions, said at the end of a sentence to indicate that she swears it’s true. She, Nikki and her other friends were young Christian girls, although they possibly liked church more because they could wear jeans there on a Sunday.

Kim was one of those girls who could fit into any group. She had her circle of friends, like Kimberly Stewart and Nikki Lund, but she was equally as happy mixing with Kourtney’s group – the nerds, as she called them. With her closest pals, she devised a special sign language that they all learned so they could ‘talk’ about people who were in the room or class with them. Nikki recalled, ‘It was a way of being in a group. It was our little thing. We were obsessed with it.’

Kim was becoming fascinated by clothes. She and Kourtney barely had time for breakfast in the mornings, because it took them so long to get ready. They would grab a vanilla sandwich cookie on the way to Pam’s car for the morning school run from Malibu to Beverly Hills. Pam, who wrote a book called Malibu Nanny, was thrilled to discover the house they were then living in used to be home to Sean Penn when he was courting Madonna.

Kourtney was definitely the boss, perhaps because she was older and a little brighter; certainly, she was the fastest reader in the household. The two sisters used to play fashion games together. One favourite, at least with Kourtney, was when she pretended to be the leading fashion designer Donna Karan, creator of the DKNY label, and poor Kim was her beleaguered assistant. Kourtney used it as a means to make fun of her. Kim recalled, ‘She would just make me do anything she said. She would do it on purpose and embarrass me in front of her friends.’ Despite the natural sibling rivalry, the two girls were very close.

At their new home, they had use of the obligatory pool and Jacuzzi, as well as a magnificent view of the ocean from the patio. Kim preferred to spend a lot of her free time in her room, however, indulging her passion for making things, particularly jewellery. She had every conceivable size, shape and colour of bead and would carefully sort and select them to make the right necklace, earrings or bracelet.

One of the jobs of the nanny was to make sure the children were tucked up comfortably in bed at night. Kim would often talk in her sleep. Sometimes she would even have a conversation with Pam, even though she was in a deep slumber. On one occasion, she shouted out, ‘There’s an elephant on my desk.’ Pam told her to get it off the desk, whereupon Kim, still fast asleep, replied, ‘Help me. Help me. Get it off.’ Pam had to leave the room before her laughter woke up her young charge.

Kim may have been a quiet girl when she was 10, but she had blossomed into a much livelier teenager by the time of her eighth-grade graduation from her junior school El Rodeo in Whittier Drive, Beverly Hills, in 1994. She was filmed at the party afterwards by another student eager to make a movie of the night. There’s always one home-movie maker who wants to be the next Spielberg.

The already curvy 13-year-old Kim is excited and enjoying herself, dancing madly, in a white blouse, perfect make-up and a shorter than usual bob haircut. She is talking straight to the camera, ‘Is anyone getting a tape of this? I hope you do, because when you see me when I’m famous and old, you’re gonna remember me as this beautiful little girl.’

She continues to lark about as the cameraman starts to walk away: ‘Excuse me, are you leaving? My name’s Kim Kardashian. I’m the dopest of the ropest person in this class. I’m dope on a rope.’ When someone off camera interrupts, ‘Define “dope”, Kim’, she answers, ‘Dope is Kim.’ She seems to be displaying a confidence she says she never had as a girl. She ends the clip by comparing herself to a classmate: ‘I’m more popular than she is … everyone loves me. I’m so popular and everyone loves me …’

She’s just a schoolgirl having fun on a big night out, but it’s interesting that she should be using ‘dope’ as hip-hop slang for excellent or wonderful. Perhaps she picked it up from her first serious boyfriend, Michael Jackson’s nephew T. J.

From a young age, Kim preferred black men. She wasn’t brought up in the Deep South like Britney Spears, where racism was still rife. This was Beverly Hills, where black families had just as much money and prestige. Lionel Richie and Sugar Ray Leonard were good friends and neighbours of the family. Lionel was the father of Nicole Richie, whom Kim was at school with. Sugar Ray was so close to the Kardashians that he was Khloé’s godfather. Most of the Jackson clan lived in the area. And there was Uncle O. J., too, of course. He lived on North Rockingham Avenue, in exclusive Brentwood, with his wife Nicole, whom he had married in 1985. The sociable Nicole had become very much part of Kris’s wide circle.

By 1994, the Kardashian family had undergone much change. Kourtney had started high school at an all-girl Catholic school called Marymount, on Sunset Boulevard, and Kim would be joining her at the start of the next academic year. Kris and Bruce had decided that travelling to and from Malibu was becoming too much of a logistical challenge and had rented a house in Benedict Canyon.

The most dramatic change was that Kim’s father had a new woman in his life. He had sold Tower Lane and leased an enormous 15-room house 10 miles away, in the pretty suburb of Encino. He was making a fresh start with his fiancée, Denice Shakarian Halicki, a graceful blonde, who wore very short skirts and was generally described as a ‘knockout’. She also happened to drive a Rolls-Royce, which had been left to her by her late husband. She was Armenian on her father’s side, but didn’t have the exotic features of the Kardashians. Instead, she had inherited her Norwegian mother’s looks. When she was 16, there had been talk of an arranged marriage, but that had come to nothing and she was able to pursue a career as a model and actress.

In 1983, she met Toby Halicki, who had become a multimillionaire thanks to his stunningly successful cult film Gone in 60 Seconds. He was a larger-than-life character, one of 13 children, who, in a great Hollywood story, came to Los Angeles, aged 15, with nothing but an extensive knowledge of automobiles and the salvage business that his family ran in New York.

His hit movie cost under $100,000 to make, but grossed more than $40 million at the box office. There was little in the way of a script, but there were lots of cars. For the film’s finale, Toby performed an amazing 39-metre jump, which resulted in him compacting 10 vertebrae and walking with a permanent limp.

He married Denice in May 1989, just before starting work on the sequel Gone in 60 Seconds 2. She was to be one of the stars, while he would again write, direct and perform most of the stunts. He had already bought 400 cars to be sacrificed in an orgy of vehicle destruction. He was preparing for a stunt during filming near Buffalo, New York, when a telegraph pole snapped and fell on him, killing him instantly. They had been married for three months.

Denice met Robert Kardashian through mutual Armenian connections, and they helped each other at a difficult time in their personal lives. Her late husband’s considerable fortune was tied up in probate for many years and she went to Robert for legal advice. She wasn’t the super-rich widow many might have assumed she was – at least not then. She had a traditional Christian upbringing and the couple shared a strong religious connection.

While relations had improved a little with his ex-wife, it wasn’t a case of coffee mornings and trips to the beach together. It was awkward, especially if Bruce was around. When Robert went to their house to pick up the children, the two youngest, Khloé and Robert Jr, would be waiting outside. He would then honk the horn, which was the signal for Kourtney and Kim to run out of the house to join them.

The journey back to Encino took no more than 30 minutes. The new house was on Mandalay Drive, in a very quiet neighbourhood with manicured lawns and his and her luxury limousines in the driveway. While it didn’t have the extreme privacy of a gated community, the residents kept to themselves and tended to live in the same house for many years. It was very comfortable, but you were only likely to speak to your neighbours if you met them while you were collecting your letters from the mailbox.

Robert suggested that Kourtney and Kim might like to spend more time at his house, as the peaceful surroundings might be better suited to the serious study he wanted for his daughters. Kourtney was particularly keen, as she was still reluctant to accept Bruce. Kim wanted to stay close to her sister, and both girls enjoyed Denice’s company.

The new house was just a short 10-minute drive from Uncle O. J.’s mansion in Brentwood, but Robert had seen his old friend only twice in two years. O. J. put in an appearance at a surprise fiftieth birthday that Denice had thrown for Robert in February 1994, and gave him an autographed football jersey. They also bumped into each other by accident in Palisades Park in Santa Monica in May, when they were both playing with their children. Robert was throwing a baseball with his son, while O. J. was helping his daughter Sydney practice her basketball skills. The two children knew each other well and were happy to pass the time together while the two men chatted on the grass about their troubles with women.

Their mutual business interests had dwindled, mainly through lack of success. In the 1980s, O. J. had joined Robert in a venture called Concert Cinema, which screened music videos in cinemas before the main feature. It was early days for MTV, but demonstrated how Robert thought ahead. In this case, what was clearly a good idea proved too expensive to run, and after a year they closed the business without making a profit.

The blossoming friendship between Kris and Nicole had made it difficult for the two men to remain buddies. O. J. and Nicole had struggled with marital problems, which culminated in their divorce in 1992, after seven years of marriage and two children together. Nobody knew that their strife included domestic violence.

Since his divorce from Kris, Robert’s social circle had inevitably changed. O. J. was more likely to bump into Bruce Jenner on the celebrity circuit, although, as a football hero and movie star, O. J. was still far more famous than the former Olympic champion. Surprisingly, Robert didn’t even know that Nicole was living in a condo in Bundy Drive, Brentwood.

The morning of 13 June 1994 started like any other for Robert Kardashian. As he always did, he said his prayers and then worked out for 30 minutes before starting work in his large office in the house. He no longer kept any business premises. Just after 10 a.m., the phone rang. It was Shelli Azoff, buzzing with the story that Nicole had been killed. She had just found out about it at the hairdresser’s, so the whole world, except Robert, had heard the bombshell news. He phoned Kris and discovered it was true. His ex-wife had been due to lunch with her friend that very day.

Without being asked, Robert rallied round his friend of 23 years. He invited O. J. to stay in his home to escape the media storm that inevitably exploded around the murder. It transpired that Nicole had suffered horrendous stabbing injuries, including one violent open wound that exposed the larynx and spinal chord. A local waiter and aspiring actor called Ron Goldman was also found dead outside the home on Bundy.

Four days after the murders, Robert had to stop his friend from killing himself, when he found O. J. in the bedroom with a gun. He told him, ‘You can’t. This is my daughter’s bedroom.’ Both Kourtney and Kim were staying in the house, but neither registered the magnitude of what was going on.

A warrant was issued for O. J.’s arrest and his chief lawyer, Robert Shapiro, was told his client needed to turn himself in at a police station. Shapiro had co-opted Robert on to the team, realising that Bobby, as O. J. still called him, had a special relationship with Simpson and would be useful to him. It also meant that they would now be protected by attorney–client privilege. Robert would need to reactivate his law licence, which he had allowed to lapse.

He was still concerned that his friend was going to end his life after O. J. disappeared from his house when he was supposed to be leaving for the station. He had apparently made a run for it in a white Ford Bronco driven by his buddy Al Cowlings. It became the most famous and bizarre slow-speed car chase in history, as a flotilla of police vehicles, with more than 20 helicopters soaring overheard, followed them down Interstate 405 at 35 miles an hour. The police didn’t want to intercept the 4 x 4 because O. J., who was lying low on the back seat, reportedly had a gun and they wanted to avoid a violent end. Thousands lined the route and stood on overpasses to cheer him. Eventually, after 90 minutes, he gave himself up outside his Rockingham home. Millions watched on television, mesmerized by what they were seeing. It was described by one lawyer as ‘the day Los Angeles stopped’.

Meanwhile, Robert was in front of the TV cameras for the very first time, reading a handwritten document that O. J. had left at the house. It was his suicide note to the world. Robert, in his steady deep voice, read the letter in front of more than 100 members of the media: ‘… Don’t feel sorry for me. I’ve had a great life, made great friends. Please think of the real O. J. and not this lost person. Thank you for making my life special …’

This was the exact moment when life changed for the Kardashians. Now the media were shouting out and asking Robert how he spelled his surname. They mostly got it wrong. Kim and her siblings became the children of the famous lawyer Robert Kardashian. He would sit beside O. J. Simpson throughout the ‘trial of the century’. O. J.’s confidante and erstwhile manager, Norman Pardo, observed drily, ‘The Kardashians would be nothing without O. J. Simpson.’

6
Neverland

Incredibly, 10 weeks after the grisly killing of Nicole Brown Simpson, Kim’s life was rocked by another violent murder, which affected her just as deeply at the time.

All the Kardashian children grew up with the music of Michael Jackson blaring out from the sound system at the parties and barbecues their parents had. Robert Kardashian liked doo-wop, but this failed to impress his offspring. Kim enjoyed the music of all the Jacksons, but Janet Jackson was definitely her favourite in her youth. It was the next generation of the famous family with whom she came into contact, however, simply by moving in the same circles in Beverly Hills.

Kim was 13 when she started dating T. J. Jackson, the youngest son of Tito Jackson. The initials stand for Tito Joe, after his father and grandfather. They had met first of all at the Buckley School, but kept bumping into each other at parties. He was two years older than Kim, but she was a precocious young teenager.

T. J.’s father was the third oldest of the 10 Jackson children. When he was 18, he married Delores ‘Dee Dee’ Martes. She had been born in New York City to Dominican parents, but as a girl moved to LA, where she met Tito at Fairfax High School in West Hollywood. They married at the height of the Jackson 5 success in 1972 and had three sons, Taj, Taryll and T. J.

Despite the family’s enormous wealth and fame, Dee Dee was determined that her three sons would have a normal childhood. Tito observed, ‘She saw what the Jacksons had to endure to be successful.’ All three boys attended the Buckley School, where they excelled more in sports than music. They were good looking and well liked. Their mother adored her sons, whom she called the three Ts. Even after their parents divorced in 1993, the family remained close. Despite their regular upbringing, the boys couldn’t wait to follow in their famous family’s footsteps.

Their Uncle Michael doted on his three nephews and was a frequent visitor, acting almost as a third parent and giving them advice about enjoying the best years of their lives. They witnessed him being besieged by fans after one concert. He turned to the boys and said, ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ Of course they were. They called themselves, naturally enough, 3T and set about recording their debut album with their father as their manager. T. J. had just turned 16. It was very exciting for Kim to have a boyfriend who was going to be a pop star.

On 27 August 1994, the brothers received an early morning call from the daughter of their mother’s new boyfriend, telling them she had been in an accident. They were about to head off to the studio, but instead they rushed to the hospital in Inglewood, where she had been taken, to discover that she was already dead. Dee Dee was 39.

Initially, it was assumed the death was accidental. The boyfriend, a businessman called Donald Bohana, told police that they had been swimming that night at his house in Ladera Heights. He had popped inside briefly and when he returned Dee Dee was at the bottom of the pool. Her sons were suspicious of this explanation, as they were well aware that their mother couldn’t swim and would never go near water.

Their misgivings proved entirely correct, when a coroner’s report found that the numerous cuts, scratches and bruises on her body suggested ‘blunt force traumatic injuries’ and a non-accidental ‘assisted drowning’. The Jackson family, unhappy with the lack of action from the district attorney’s office, filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Bohana a year after the dreadful news.

The suit detailed 58 injuries Dee Dee had suffered, including fingernail gouges to her breasts. Tito explained, ‘It’s plain to see that it was more than a simple drowning. My sons came to me and said, “Dad, don’t let him get away with this.”’ The action speculated that there had been a row over money, in which Dee Dee had refused to help Bohana, who had massive debts and had filed for bankruptcy.

The lawsuit alleged that Bohana assaulted Jackson over a four-hour period and killed her by holding her head under water in the swimming pool. He then dialled 911 and told an emergency operator that someone had fallen into his pool.

The Jacksons would have to wait until 1997 for the case to come to criminal trial in the Los Angeles Superior Court. Bohana was found guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced to 15 years to life in prison. Tito added, ‘She was just a well-caring mother, and these kids were actually robbed of something that nothing can bring back.’

For her part, Kim was a 13-year-old trying to cope with a grieving boyfriend and a father desperately trying to help Uncle O. J., who would soon be standing trial for the murder of one of her mother’s best friends, Auntie Nicole. It was a grim welcome to an adult world.

Dee Dee’s tragedy brought T. J. and Kim closer together. He was polite, respectful and softly spoken. Her parents liked him very much, although her father warned her about the perils of interracial dating, even in a place as broad-minded as Beverly Hills: ‘He explained to me that he’s had a lot of interracial friends, and it might not be the easiest relationship. He said I should prepare myself for people to say things to me.’

One of the perks of dating a member of the Jackson clan came when Kim celebrated her fourteenth birthday in October 1994. The party was held at Neverland, Michael Jackson’s famous 3,000-acre ranch near Santa Barbara, about 100 miles north of Los Angeles. Even though she was growing up as a privileged youngster in Beverly Hills, where birthdays and holidays were celebrated with no expense spared, this was something entirely different and totally thrilling. Michael Jackson’s indulgent folly was a children’s paradise – no wonder her friends were keen to join her. T. J. and his brothers were also there, while Kris and Bruce drove everyone and joined in the fun.

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