The Kardashians Read online

  With all those international hot spots, a number of Kardashian’s Dorsey High classmates who didn’t go immediately to college and secure a deferment like him were drafted into the army, while some patriotic young men enlisted.

  Robert had signed up for the draft at eighteen as required by the Selective Service, but according to Tom Kardashian, “He never did go in. He was 4F, or whatever they called it. He was kept out of the draft because he had acid reflux, and his esophagus would close up and he had a hard time swallowing.”

  But close friends of Robert’s like Joni Migdal and Larry Kraines had trouble swallowing Tom’s story.

  Migdal, for one, said she was totally unaware of Robert having an issue with acid reflux back then, and was “sure” it was more likely that he “got a doctor to write something,” which resulted in a medical exemption that along with school deferments kept him from being drafted and possibly sent to war.

  Immediately after graduation Kraines enlisted in the California Army National Guard’s 40th Armored Division, on the advice of his ex-military father, who told him that with the Cuban Missile Crisis, and with “Vietnam ramping up,” he should get his military obligation out of the way.

  But, Kraines said Robert went off to USC and “did the school deferment thing forever,” and he questioned Tom Kardashian’s version of events. “Robert really felt strongly against what we were doing at the time in Vietnam, and he just didn’t want to have any part of it. That’s what made him continue his education to the degree that he did. The longer he stayed in school the safer he was.”

  * * *

  ROBERT KARDASHIAN, WHO WAS SHORT, liked being around big athletes, especially football players. For a time he played quarterback for the Dorsey High “B” squad, the team for the smaller, good athletes, recalled Kraines, who played halfback on the varsity squad, the Dorsey Dons.

  “Bob and I were both not of athlete size; that wasn’t gifted to us,” said Tom Kardashian. “And my brother was never big enough or strong enough to play football when he went to USC. We both loved football. Our dad used to get tickets to the USC games before we ever went to school there, and the Coliseum wasn’t too far from where we lived, and we used to go to the Los Angeles Rams games, too. It was kind of a family thing to do on Sunday.”

  When Tom was at USC, four years before his brother, he was manager of the Trojans football team, and Bob took the same job when he matriculated there.

  He loved being manager, idolized the players, traveled with the team, and stayed in hotels with the squad for away games, and it made him feel important.

  “Bob had to be at practice every day, and part of the responsibility of the team manager was to make certain that there were forty-two players on the bus, forty-two players at the training table, all the things that were required to babysit the team,” said Kardashian. And he boasted, “My brother and I had what was called lifetime passes to all the games given to us because we were four-year varsity lettermen as team managers.”

  Still, Joni Migdal acknowledged that, Robert, was really nothing more than a “glorified water boy,” and another close observer called Robert’s managerial slot “the prototypical hanger-on position.” But with all that pigskin in his blood, it was no surprise to anyone who knew him well that one of Kardashian’s closest adult bonds was with famous USC alumnus and Heisman Memorial Trophy winner O. J. Simpson, which underscored Robert’s desire to pal around with gridiron heroes. Kardashian bonded with O.J., who was three years younger, after both were out of college.

  At Dorsey High, Robert’s pal Pennino was one of the school’s handsomest guys—he was named the “best-looking” in his class—and one of its top athletes, playing varsity football. And he was not surprised that Kardashian would later become close to the Juice.

  “I know that Bob and I were friends really because I was one of those guys,” he observed, looking back years later. “Bob liked that I was a handsome guy and a football player, and Bob liked to hang with those kinds of people. He liked to be around the good-looking people—the athletes, the people who stood out, the big shots. I hate to use the word ‘sycophantic,’ because it’s kind of extreme, but there was a bit of that in Bob. He liked those in the limelight, and he liked the limelight, he liked the glitz.”

  Later, Pennino followed Kardashian’s life after they had gone in different directions and lost touch. This was when Kardashian was front and center in a moneyed, fast crowd and was hanging with O.J. Pennino concluded that that was Robert Kardashian’s “destiny—the big houses, the Rolls-Royces, the women. He was comfortable in that social strata.”

  Because of his looks, athletic ability, and style, Pennino would later go into acting for a time after finishing college and serving in the army in Korea.

  He studied with the powerful acting coach Harry Mastrogeorge, whose students had included stars like Robert Redford—“and I thought I was going to be one of them,” said Pennino wryly, looking back at what turned out to be a rather lackluster career. However, he did appear in a couple of off-Broadway plays and was cast in a small role near the end of Rocky II.

  On the set, Sylvester Stallone “referred to me as ‘Rocky Jr.’ That was my big claim to fame,” he said, laughing at the memory.

  By then, he and Kardashian rarely saw each other.

  “I don’t think I carried enough weight for Bob to consider me worthy to be a friend in the later years, that’s my feeling,” said Pennino. But, if Pennino’s acting career had taken off, he speculated that they would have reconnected. “That would have been when it would have happened, absolutely. If I had become a star.”

  ELEVEN

  Jesus and the Kardashians

  Devastated by the bribery scandal that had enveloped his brother and the family meatpacking business, Robert Kardashian had sought to cleanse himself of the shame, taint, and guilt he felt by becoming a born-again Christian. He was baptized in the Holy Spirit in the Pacific Ocean surf in July 1974, during a ceremony at the Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa, home in conservative Orange County of the Jesus Movement.

  “I repent of every wrong thing I’ve ever done,” he declared in the service, “and receive the forgiveness that you offer. I surrender my life to you this day. You have made me a new creation, and I am now born again of the spirit of God. Because of you I will go to heaven when I die…”

  Robert prayed daily, carried a Bible everywhere, and publicly and proudly advertised his religious fervor and commitment by displaying the age-old Christian fish, a symbol that identified him as a true believer and one who had been baptized. The fish was emblazoned on a plaque on the back of his conservative black Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow for everyone to see, and after he sold it, he put another fish plaque on his next Rolls, a much flashier white Silver Shadow.

  His choice of luxury cars adorned with the Christian fish symbol underscored two sides of Robert Kardashian’s complex persona: the pious and the poseur.

  The Calvary Chapel, where Kardashian gave himself to Jesus, was the epicenter of the Jesus Movement. Its founder, the Reverend Chuck Smith, had introduced the conservative evangelical movement to the liberal hippies of the late sixties, luring them in with the beginnings of Christian rock ’n’ roll and his hip style.

  Still, like traditional evangelists going back ages, Smith—known as “Papa Chuck,” who preached in a Hawaiian shirt and replaced organ music with electric guitars—had predicted armageddon, the end of the world, was against sex outside of marriage, declared a war on drugs long before Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No,” and denounced abortion and homosexuality, calling it a “perverted lifestyle.”

  Before Smith’s death at eighty-six in October 2013, he declared that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were a sign of God’s anger with the public’s growing acceptance of homosexuality and abortion.

  During his reign at Calvary Chapel, Smith had mentored a number of pastors who went on to found their own popular evangelical churches, and one of them was handsome, blond-haired Kenn Gulliksen, son of a
Norwegian, who would found the hip and trendy evangelical Vineyard church, whose fast-growing membership back in the mid-1970s in the upscale enclaves of Brentwood, Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, and the San Fernando Valley included some of Hollywood’s and rock ’n’ roll’s biggest names as adherents. Gulliksen himself became known as “Bob Dylan’s pastor” after introducing the Jewish rocker to evangelical Christianity.

  And charming and likable Gulliksen, a father of four, would become one of Robert Kardashian’s close friends, his spiritual advisor, and the minister who would officiate at his marriage to Kris Houghton. He would also be involved in their premarital counseling, closely observe their turbulent union, and become aware of Kris’s cheating and witness how devastating it would be to her husband.

  While Bob never gave Gulliksen the precise reason why he had decided to become born-again, the minister believed “absolutely, unquestionably” that it was the bribery scandal in the Kardashian family that had brought Robert to the Lord.

  It “was the kind of omen,” said Gulliksen in 2015, “that causes people to grapple with deeper issues in life. When something like that happened to his brother, without question that would cause Bob to be humbled, and that opened his heart to the reality that he needed something more. Bob’s only comment to me when we talked about his family—and this is before he met and married Kris—was that there had been family difficulties, but he never told me any of the details. He never talked about his family except about the kind of prophetic word that convinced the family to get out of Armenia.”

  As Tom Kardashian’s bribery case was being adjudicated, Robert, freshly minted as a born-again Christian, appeared at Gulliksen’s first independent Bible study held at the home of Christian rocker Chuck Girard in the town of Sun Valley, in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley. Girard, looking back to that time, said, “It was during the O.J. murder case when I realized, ‘Oh, that’s that guy who came to Kenn’s Bible study. It was then I made the connection.”

  It was because of Kardashian’s hair.

  Always most memorable about Kardashian’s look was that very odd white streak in the front of his hair. Many thought he was making some sort of fashion statement, that he was having the white streak put in by a Beverly Hills hairstylist in order to give himself, a small man with a big ego, a signature look. It worked but it wasn’t planned. The white streak had begun to appear in his late twenties because of a lack of pigmentation.

  The next time Girard ran into Robert Kardashian after noticing him at his home during Gulliksen’s first Bible study was at another hip nondenominational charismatic evangelical church in Los Angeles called the Hiding Place, started by “another Jesus music guy,” Henry Cutrona. “One night I went there and Bob had brought his girlfriend, Priscilla Presley.”

  According to Girard, the Hiding Place had “just gone through kind of a revelation that people called ‘name it and claim it,’ where God wants everyone to be wealthy, and you just speak out with your words what you want, and God starts to bring you those things, so it was a little bit materialistic. I got to see Kardashian there, and Priscilla up close, which was kind of cool.”

  Priscilla Presley wasn’t the only celebrity who came to services at the Hiding Place, according to Cutrona. Other stars included the actress Meg Ryan, along with fellow actors George Clooney and David Hasselhoff—all part of a congregation of about two thousand who Cutrona describes as “The kind of people who came to this church because they were the kind of people who didn’t go to church.”

  When the Hiding Place ended its run, Kenn Gulliksen’s Vineyard church was going strong, and Robert Kardashian was playing a big role. “I invited him to participate as an Elder in our church board,” said the pastor. “That’s how real his relationship with the Lord was, and his passion to bring people into the church. Bob was very aggressive as basically a layman evangelist, so to speak, to bring his friends into the church.

  “Before he brought Kris, he would bring the women he was dating with the genuine hope that they would become born-again, and one, obviously, was Priscilla Presley. I walked up to Bob and gave him a hug, and he said, ‘I’d like to introduce you to Priscilla,’ and I said, ‘Hi, Priscilla,’ but I really didn’t recognize who she was.

  “And then someone whispered to me, ‘That’s Priscilla Presley.’ But that didn’t really impress me, because we were surrounded by those kinds of folks. There were lots of actors and actresses, and thirty percent of the church were Jewish believers. We were in West L.A., so lots were in the business, and lots had a deep, deep love for Jesus.”

  But layman evangelist Robert Kardashian wasn’t always successful in luring potential converts who he felt needed to be saved. Priscilla Presley, for one, later became a devoted member of another church—the controversial Church of Scientology. And Kardashian tried and failed with two other of his closest friends, Joni Migdal and O. J. Simpson, to bring them to the Lord.

  * * *

  “AS BOB WOULD BRING his dates to our church, he also brought all of his friends and clients, and he brought O.J.,” a connection that Kenn Gulliksen had never forgotten. “And I probably spent more time at O.J.’s place on Rockingham than at Bob’s house for a number of reasons.”

  Brought by Kardashian, O.J. first appeared at a Bible study on Easter Sunday, 1975. It was regularly led by Gulliksen at a beautiful home on Bundy Drive in Brentwood owned by a born-again Christian interior designer by the name of Beverly Trupp.

  “Bob brought O.J., and he brought Bubba Smith [then playing for the Houston Oilers in the NFL], and all these other Heisman Trophy winner guys,” said Gulliksen. “Bob was so committed to believing that these guys would realize there was forgiveness for their past and great purpose for the future if they had intimacy with the Lord. It was so genuine.”

  Unknown to the public, to his idolizing fans, and to the sportswriters who helped build his gridiron myth as one of the greatest football players ever, O.J. began coming to a Bible study every week, said Gulliksen.

  “O.J. I think was really impressed with these people [big names in the entertainment industry] who attended, and O.J. always liked to be around celebrities, and liked their celebrity to rub off on him,” Gulliksen perceived. “For all O.J. had accomplished, he was so insanely insecure.”

  Still, O.J.—long a textbook narcissist and a closeted sociopath at that point in time—refused to follow his pal Robert Kardashian’s preaching that he be baptized in the Holy Spirit and officially become born again.

  “Every week,” said Gulliksen, “I would corner O.J. as often as I could and ask him, ‘Why is it that you haven’t invited the Lord into your life?’ And he finally answered me and he said, ‘I don’t see any difference between Jesus and Buddha and these other guys.’ That was O.J.’s answer. But he still came, I think, in deference to Bob. But also he would come sometimes on his own because there were so many people there that were friends of his—other football players, film people.”

  At the time, O.J., who wanted a movie career, and with fantasy dreams of even becoming a studio head after retiring from football, was already doing lucrative commercials for Hertz as the first black spokesperson for a major corporation and beginning to make cameo appearances in lightweight films.

  But Gulliksen came to think of O.J. as a narcissistic jerk and viewed him as a self-loathing black man who wanted to be white.

  “O.J. was his own God, in his own universe,” the pastor soon concluded. “Everything was about O.J. There was not a time when I was with O.J.—and I’m talking hours and hours over the course of years—that everything he did was to get me to like him—nice things that he would do, his smiles, his ‘Hi, Kenn.’ And there was this odd sense that I had about him that he always wanted to be bigger and better—and that he actually wanted to be white.”

  Gulliksen had taken note that when O.J.’s black friends from the football world would come to the Bible studies, O.J.—who brought them there through Kardashian—wouldn’t sit with them.

>   “O.J. was always hanging out,” recalled Gulliksen, “with the rich white, Jewish, or Armenian folks.”

  Gulliksen’s oddest encounter with Simpson was in the immediate aftermath of his daughter Aaren’s tragic drowning death in the family pool, a month before her second birthday, in August 1979, a year or two before Simpson stopped attending Gulliksen’s Bible studies.

  “Marguerite probably called and we found out that Aaren was at the hospital, and I called O.J. and I said, ‘Can Joanie and I go pray for Aaren?’ and he was so detached, it was almost like I was calling him to get someone’s phone number—‘Yeah, sure, that’s fine.’ I mean there was absolutely no emotion. So Joanie and I immediately got in the car and zipped down to the hospital, but when we got there Aaren was dead. We wept. It was just a very sad experience.”

  * * *

  IN THE CASE OF Joni Migdal, Robert Kardashian was so determined to have his close friend dating back to childhood become born again and join Kenn Gulliksen’s Vineyard church that he delivered her to one of America’s then best known Christian televangelists, Robert Schuller, whose broadcast was seen worldwide, in hopes that he would help convince her to drink the holy Kool-Aid. The setting was the immense reflective-glass Crystal Cathedral, with the largest organ in the world, in Garden Grove, south of Los Angeles, in Orange County, and just twelve miles from where Kardashian was born-again, at the Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa.

  “Robert actually wanted me to convert and I’m Jewish. He was proselytizing,” related Joni in 2015. “I said, ‘Robert, I’m very comfortable with my religion.’ I told him no. And he said, ‘Well, come and talk to this person who runs the Crystal Cathedral.’ Robert seriously wanted me to consider changing my religion. He wanted me to at least give it a chance. I think because he had become born again and embraced it with such a fervent focus that he wanted me to do it.