The Kardashians Read online

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  For Caroline, Trixie, Ruggles, Toby, Jesse, Louise, Julien and Max, and in memory of Cukes

  SOME OF THE CAST OF CHARACTERS

  ROBERT GEORGE KARDASHIAN

  O.J. Simpson’s friend and “mouthpiece,” he became a born-again Christian because of a horrific family scandal, and his later life spun out of control through misplaced loyalty, disastrous choices in women, and failed businesses.

  KRISTEN “KRIS” HOUGHTON KARDASHIAN JENNER

  From dysfunctional blue-collar roots with little more than a high school diploma, her sole ambition in life, with her single mother as her enabler, was to find and marry a rich man. She was later branded an adulteress and “momager.”

  THOMAS ARTHUR “TOMMY” KARDASHIAN

  Older brother of Robert, he would follow in their father’s footsteps running the family’s meatpacking business, but would get caught in a corruption scandal that would forever impact his life.

  PASTOR KENN GULLIKSEN

  Helped to convert Bob Dylan to born-again Christianity, Gulliksen did the same for Robert Kardashian, and became a close confidant, officiating at Kardashian’s marriage to Kris, and watching as their marriage fell apart.

  CESAR SANUDO

  A professional golfer from Mexico, he met and fell in love with seventeen-year-old Kris, but caught her with Kardashian, and soon after ending it with her Sanudo discovered his valuable gold coin collection was missing.

  PRISCILLA PRESLEY

  Kardashian desperately wanted to wed the ex-wife of Elvis, but the “King” continued to dominate, and she ended it with Kardashian, which is when he married Kris Houghton, who he thought was too young and unsophisticated.

  DENICE SHAKARIAN HALICKI

  Blond, buxom third cousin and fiancé of Robert Kardashian, who retained him to help in an estate battle. They fell in love but their relationship ended when he cheated on her.

  JONI MIGDAL

  A confidante from childhood and Robert Kardashian’s lover for a time, she was present when he first met Kris and asked for her telephone number. Later, her attorney daughter was O.J. Simpson’s murder trial “babysitter.”

  BARBARA WALTERS

  She got the first TV post-trial sit-down with Kardashian, but she broke her promises about how the interview would be conducted, and he lied to her about how the trial impacted his life.

  LARRY KRAINES

  Multimillionaire close friend of Kardashian since high school, and known as “Uncle Larry” to the Kardashian kids, he caught Kris cheating with her lover in his Beverly Hills mansion, and warned his furious pal.

  JOAN ZIMMERMAN

  Close school chum of Kris, Joan saw big changes in her when, in eleventh grade, Kris began pursuing older men and was seeking them out at a resort that reportedly catered to mobsters.

  CINDY SPALLINO

  Bonded with Kris Houghton when they were training to become stewardesses, and saw how desperate she was to marry Kardashian, and how jealous she was of Priscilla Presley, for whom he had dropped Kris.

  ROBERT HOUGHTON

  Kris’s alcoholic, abusive biological father, he abandoned the family when she was seven, and later took up with a number of younger women. He was killed when his Porsche crashed into a truck on his way to marry again.

  O. J. SIMPSON

  Football hero, actor, and acquitted murderer, he was Robert Kardashian’s hero, and he defended Simpson when he was accused of murdering his wife, Nicole Brown, and her friend, Ron Goldman, in the “trial of the century.”

  CAITLYN MARIE JENNER (AKA BRUCE JENNER)

  Olympic gold medal winner, he married Kris Kardashian even before the ink was dry on her Kardashian divorce papers. She claimed she didn’t know he was always a woman trapped in a man’s body during their years of marriage. In January 2017, he had gender reassignment surgery.

  Prominently featured, too, are the leading featured players in the long-running Kardashian drama. The cast of characters could not be complete without the theatrics and spectacle of Kim Kardashian West and her siblings: Kourtney, Khloé, Rob, Kendall Jenner, and Kylie Jenner.

  PROLOGUE

  Shortly after the O. J. Simpson murder trial concluded with a shocking acquittal on racial lines in October 1995—considered to be one of the grossest miscarriages of justice in the twentieth century—O.J.’s longtime friend and legal “dream team” defender Robert George Kardashian attended a small gathering of confidants who were born-again Christians like him and offered them an eerie story about a curious prediction that had suddenly come true.

  After regaling everyone with insider stories about what would become known as the trial of the century, Kardashian revealed that a Christian prophetess—a religious woman who foretells the future—had once held his hand and made a curious prophecy.

  “She prophesied that one day my name, the Kardashian name, would be known around the world,” he told his rapt friends.

  Kardashian went on to disclose that he had long forgotten the odd prediction, but that the prophetess’s words had come rushing back to him as he stood before a microphone in the lobby of a Century City office building for a press conference announced by O. J. Simpson’s lead attorney, Robert Shapiro. It was shortly after five P.M. on the day of the infamous white Ford Bronco police chase. Shapiro had asked Kardashian—the press would later refer to them as “the two Bobs”—to read to the assembled media throng the letter the on-the-run accused murderer had penned and left in Kardashian’s Encino home before he fled in the Bronco with their mutual friend Al “A. C.” Cowlings at the wheel, and “the Juice” in the backseat with a loaded pistol aimed at himself.

  Like other contemporary historic events, such as the Kennedy assassination, O.J.’s run of his life was filmed and televised. Millions of viewers around the country were mesmerized, watching the police chase, and thousands of Angelenos stood alongside L.A. freeways and on overpasses cheering as the Bronco raced past, followed by a swarm of LAPD black-and-white cruisers.

  Usually shy about public speaking back then, Kardashian initially resisted Shapiro’s entreaty to read O.J.’s words, but soon acceded.

  The date was June 17, 1994.

  An international army of reporters, who had descended on Los Angeles to cover the breaking news story about the vicious murders of O.J.’s beautiful wife, Nicole, and her young friend, Ronald Goldman, with the football great as the prime suspect, listened intently and took notes as Kardashian slowly and precisely read O.J.’s letter.

  “I have nothing to do with Nicole’s murder.” Kardashian solemnly and confidently began reading his friend’s plea and conceivable suicide note. “I loved her, always have and always will … Peace and love, O.J.,” he concluded.

  It took Kardashian six minutes to go through the entire bizarre missive. He did it like a pro, surprising even himself.

  Six minutes was all it took for Robert Kardashian’s life to become an Amer
ican moment.

  And when he was finished, the press mob barked at him to identify himself. “Who’s the bloody mouthpiece?” shouted a journo for a Fleet Street red top.

  To the assembled scribes, Kardashian was an unknown, just another Beverly Hills type in an expensive designer suit with fashionably wide lapels, and with a funny-looking white streak in his well-coiffed hair.

  Obediently, he said his name was Kardashian, Robert Kardashian.

  “Spell it,” the reporters shouted, and he did. “K-A-R-D-A-S-H-I-A-N.”

  On TV screens across the country, the super popped up under his frozen face. It read: “Robert Kardashian, Simpson Friend.”

  At that moment, for the first time—on live television and in press accounts transmitted around the world—the Kardashian name, virtually in an instant, had become known, just as the prophetess had prophesied long before.

  Fast-forward to the spring of 2016.

  A born-again Christian woman with the joyous name Happy Rue recalled Kardashian’s revelation about the prophecy at that small gathering at the home of his close friend and religious counselor, Pastor Kenn Gulliksen, some two decades earlier. Rue was the widow of Brent Rue, an evangelical minister who had been Gulliksen’s associate pastor at his charismatic evangelical Vineyard church for two years, and there had closely bonded with the church’s Elder, Robert Kardashian.

  “My husband and Robert got along so well,” she recalled. “They both had an incredible sense of humor. Brent was kind of a fun-loving guy who was quick with his humor, and Robert was, too, and they played on each other.”

  The Rues also got to know the pretty former junior flight attendant Kris Houghton even before Kardashian had married her.

  “When Robert first hooked up with Kris and they became kind of an item, he called up Kenn and his wife, Joanie, and me and my husband, to come over for dinner. He was so anxious to introduce us to her, and Kris cooked up a big Mexican feast there at Robert’s Beverly Hills house.” Happy Rue had never forgotten. “Kris was delightful, and Robert was so excited by Kris, really bedazzled by her. And I remember we were all holding hands and praying over Kris’s meal, and I’ve thought many times about what happened to all of us over the years, and about Kris’s history of infidelity with Robert, and how she really broke his heart.”

  * * *

  MOTHER OF FOUR AND COUGAR extraordinaire, Kris thought she had found the perfect spot in the late eighties to have afternoon assignations with her hunky twenty-three-year-old boy-toy lover, Todd Waterman. She knew the layout well. Kris had accompanied husband Robert to the Beverly Hills mansion of close friends Larry and Joyce Kraines a million times for socializing and as A-list guests at the Kraineses’ elegantly done soirees, where Kris was always considered the belle of the ball. Robert and Larry had bonded in tenth grade at Susan Miller Dorsey High School, class of 1962, in Los Angeles, and had remained close confidants ever since.

  “Robert and I and our families spent New Year’s Eve together forever it seemed,” Larry Kraines fondly recalled, reminiscing about their friendship years later.

  At first it was Robert and whomever he was dating at the time, along with Larry and Joyce Kraines, and O. J. Simpson and his first wife, Marguerite. Then it was Robert and Kris and O.J. and Nicole with the Kraineses.

  “We all did the New Year’s holiday for years,” said Larry, heir to an auto accessories fortune. “We went together on Thanksgiving trips, and we skied every Thanksgiving at Vail. Robert had a guy who he knew who rented a whole house to us in Vail, and we did that for years, usually during the spring break. My daughter and son went to the same school, Buckley, with the older girls, Kourtney and Kim, who were close friends. Before Vail we’d go to Park City, back in the days when Khloé was three. I had a plane and we took all the kids up.

  “My relationship with those girls and Kris and Robert goes back decades,” continued Kraines. “At their weddings today the Kardashian kids all run up and hug and kiss me. They still call me ‘Uncle Larry.’”

  It was Joyce Kraines, then pregnant, who threw Kris a fancy wedding shower when she became engaged to Robert in 1978, and she was one of Kris’s bridesmaids.

  With that kind of loving and long relationship, there was absolutely no reason for Larry and Joyce to question Kris’s motivation and agenda when she innocently asked permission to drop by on her own when no one was at home and use their professional gym to do her workouts in the lower level of the Kraineses’ gorgeous circa 1929 Spanish-style Beverly Hills mansion.

  She said she especially wanted to use their sun bed in hopes the ultraviolet rays would cure a bothersome and unsightly case of psoriasis she had. A Beverly Hills physician had advised her to spend time in a sun bed “every other day,” but it was her idea to combine treatment with sexual pleasure.

  To Kris’s friends the Kraineses, her request was a reasonable one, not a problem.

  Larry and Joyce trusted Kris implicitly.

  One afternoon, however, Larry arrived home early and was in for a shocking surprise when he “sort of got caught in the middle” of discovering his best friend Robert’s wife, Kris—who he thought he knew well after a decade of closeness—“with her boyfriend downstairs in my house, doing their thing, and she got caught, and this was going on, on Robert.”

  The Kraineses’ housekeeper had told the master of the house that Kris had been coming over to “do the sun bed, and then it went further, that this guy Todd Waterman was there working out with her,” Larry Kraines recounted. “What the housekeeper said was that they were doing something bad, that it was very quiet down there in the gym.”

  When confronted, Kraines had never forgotten, “Kris said, ‘Oh, he’s just my friend and we just came over.’ Kris is very quick on her feet, and she’s been quick on her feet her whole life.”

  Kraines knew by then that Kris had the ability to come up with an answer, an excuse, or an alibi in any situation with the best of them. And he immediately surmised that she “absolutely” knew his hectic work schedule and had started using his absence from his home to secure a creative meeting place for her clandestine afternoon playdates with her lover.

  “Kris would come over two or three times a week to work out. She’d use the sun bed, and basically this was an escape to meet the guy and do whatever,” asserted Kraines. “I knew something was up—Kris knew it, and I knew it. I saw guilt in her face. We talked about it, and I told her, ‘No, what you’re doing isn’t very good.’ I said, ‘Kris, this is wrong.’ I called her on it. I said, ‘Stop this, and not in my house. Robert’s my best friend.’”

  Larry and Joyce Kraines had suspected before Kris was caught that there was trouble in the Kardashian marriage.

  “I knew things were rocky because Kris was close to my wife, Joyce,” said Kraines.

  But Kris didn’t directly confide in her.

  “Kris was always very smart that way, smart and street smart,” observed Kraines. “She really didn’t want to embarrass herself by saying something stupid like admitting cheating. On the other hand, we knew there were problems, and by then Robert knew there was a problem.

  “Robert actually brought it up, and he told me that he knew Kris was cheating on him, and he told me, ‘I know who the guy is,’ and he asked me, ‘Do you know anything about it?’ I said, ‘A little bit,’ and I told him that the guy came over and was with Kris downstairs when she was in the sun bed.

  “Robert says, ‘Yeah, well, you know that’s all bullshit.’ I know Robert was following the guy around, and Robert told me that he once pulled up next to him and threatened him to stay away from Kris. I remember telling him, ‘You had better be careful. You can’t just do stuff like that.’”

  Kris later told Larry and Joyce that she “regretted” what she had done in their home.

  But she continued the affair.

  Years later Kris would make the odd claim that she was a “good girl,” and strangely attributed to the devil her desire to have an affair.

  In h
er 2011 memoir, Kris Jenner … and All Things Kardashian—in which she takes many liberties with the truth—she wrote: “I felt on some level like Satan had just taken over my body and said, ‘You’re mine.’”

  By then, shrewd operator Kris Houghton Kardashian Jenner was already known as the “momager”—a self-proclaimed sobriquet, meaning mom of her kids and manager of their lucrative careers—who had taken her and her vapid children’s well-plotted trials and tribulations to the world via reality television and, in the process, built the Kardashian Inc. brand, making them all a fortune.

  Their timing was spot-on, their debut in reality television coming as the Facebook generation and social media was exploding. Online, on TV, in the supermarket tabloids, on the covers of the celebrity weeklies, and even in the mainstream media, their banal lives were documented twenty-four/seven; the Kardashians would be loved, ridiculed, and despised around the world by millions, making them even more millions in the process.

  Long dead by that point—and likely rolling over in his grave; esophageal cancer had taken him at the age of fifty-nine—was the contemporary patriarch of the Kardashian tribe, Robert, dubbed the “mouthpiece,” who first made the Kardashian name famous by defending his bosom buddy O. J. Simpson in one of U.S. history’s most famous murder trials.

  And what may be the final act in the long-running Kardashian family drama starred Kris’s second husband, father of two more of her children, the gold medal–winning Olympian Bruce Jenner—an attention getter like the others—who for years felt he was a societal “misfit”—a woman trapped in the body of a man, in his case a very athletic man. He famously rectified his problem in 2015 by coming out blazing on national television as the glamorous transgender woman Ms. Caitlyn Marie Jenner, soon with her own well-publicized reality TV show, and with a new calling: defender of the transgender community.

  Here, then, is the untold and often shocking story of the Momager, the Mouthpiece, the Misfit, and their supporting cast of characters, told for the first time by the people who knew them best.