The Kardashians Page 12

  “So, he actually brought me down to talk to Robert Schuller, at the Crystal Cathedral. I told him I was Jewish, that I was happy being Jewish, and Schuller looks at Robert and says, ‘Robert, leave her alone. She’s one of the chosen people, why are you bothering her?’ And that was the end of it.”

  Migdal believed that one reason for Kardashian’s push to have her convert came around the time the two platonic friends became lovers for a brief time, long before his marriage to Kris. “Robert’s parents were not happy about the fact that he would be with a Jewish woman, but if I were a born-again Christian that might be more acceptable.”

  That would not be surprising, because there was evidence of anti-Semitism in the Kardashian clan of Robert’s parents’ generation and the earlier one.

  Tom Kardashian notes that Jewish competitors in the meatpacking business made life difficult for the Kardashian family business, Great Western Packing.

  “You gotta understand that when my grandfather and my parents grew up in what’s called Boyle Heights [once an immigrant-ethnic area of Los Angeles], that was a section of town that was mostly Jewish, and nobody trusted anybody. And there was maybe only two gentile [meatpacking] companies, and the Jewish guys, even though we got along with them, they were competitors and you might say they were friendly, but they weren’t. Those Jews were extremely competitive. They would tell you one thing and do another.”

  Earlier, in the late forties, Robert and Tom’s grandfather, Tatos Kardashian, then the family patriarch who dominated the Kardashian household, had helped sponsor and pledged to build a temple in Los Angeles for an Armenian faith healer and mystic, twenty-year-old robed and bearded Avak Hagopian. For a time Kardashian had actually teamed up with another financial backer of the mystic, one Clem Davies, an avowed anti-Semite, whose books included such titles as The Racial Streams of Mankind, What Is Anglo-Israel?, and Pre-Adamic Races. He was known as a member of the Christian Identity Movement, using strange interpretations of biblical scripture to “prove” white superiority and to demonize Jews.

  The anti-Semitic hate that Davies spewed seemingly didn’t conflict with Tatos Kardashian’s old-world Armenian views of Jews. The hatemonger and the businessman appeared to get along swimmingly.

  Fast-forward to 2015, when the Kardashian sisters—Kourtney, Kim, and Khloé—and their entourage visited their paternal forebears’ homeland and were greeted by throngs as the world’s most famous Armenians. The trip was featured on their reality show and received enormous publicity. But unmentioned on the show was the fact that anti-Semitism was still alive and well in the homeland of their forebears. An Anti-Defamation League poll revealed that 58 percent of Armenians harbored anti-Semitic views, and in recent years there had been acts of vandalism against Armenia’s small Jewish population.

  A December 2014 article on Armenian anti-Semitism by Dr. Alexander Murinson, a professor at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, reported that “Horrifically, many Armenians have taken to addressing Jews as ‘ocar,’ the Armenian word for soap … an underhanded reference to the Nazi practice of turning corpses of the victims of their extermination camps into soap.”

  * * *

  ROBERT KARDASHIAN WAS FROM a different time and place and had little or no prejudices. Some of his best friends were Jewish. And as a born-again Christian, he was well-known for his generosity. To Kenn Gulliksen’s Vineyard church, he usually tithed 10 percent of his income, and he often opened his own home in Beverly Hills for religious fellowship gatherings.

  “Sometimes we had an all-day men’s retreat just to talk about a topic like dealing with sexuality,” said Gulliksen. “The new believers, the young men who had just accepted the Lord into their lives, would meet in Bob’s big family room. One Saturday, we had an especially large group, about seventy, and I started off by saying that now that you’re all here, the first part of this meeting will be about circumcising the new believers, and I pulled out a big knife.

  “Everyone in the room froze, but Bob doubled over. He enjoyed that. He thought it was pretty funny.”

  * * *

  COMPARED TO KARDASHIAN’S RELIGIOUS FERVOR, junior flight attendant Kris Houghton’s religiosity involved little more than lighting a candle at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, in Manhattan, where she was based for American Airlines in 1976–77, and self-servingly asking God to get her a transfer to Los Angeles so she could permanently be with the guy she “thought” she loved, or so she claimed.

  “I kept praying, praying, praying, and lighting candle after candle … and believing that something good would happen,” she professed, suggesting to readers of her 2011 memoir that she possessed a religious leaning.

  In fact, her prayers worked. Her requested transfer was approved.

  “I fell to my knees and thanked God,” she actually avowed. “I was bawling, literally crying, over this miracle.”

  At LAX, Robert Kardashian, in his regal black Rolls-Royce with the Christian fish insignia on the back proclaiming his born-again baptized status, picked up Kris, then twenty-one, and their romance was now in full swing, with wedding bells in the not-too-distant future. She thought of him as her “prince,” and “flew” into his arms, she later gushed in her book, published two decades after her philandering-ignited hellish divorce and eight years after Kardashian’s tragic and premature death. “Oh my God, oh my God. I’m finally here!” she recalled crying out to him.

  In her book, Kris Houghton Kardashian Jenner would make the outlandish claim that what really attracted her most to Robert Kardashian was not his fabulous home, or his awesome Rolls-Royce, or all the money he had in the bank, or the Beverly Hills lifestyle that would be hers, but rather, as she declared, his “love of God and religion.”

  But Kenn Gulliksen, who became Kris’s pastor when she formally hooked up with Kardashian, saw a different persona than the one she later portrayed and asked readers of her book to believe.

  “I just sensed that Kris saw in Bob a kind of gold mine,” the pastor who got to know her well asserted. “That was my perception. I never, ever had the impression that Kris had a relationship with the Lord that was genuine, and certainly was not as real as Bob’s, and I always got the impression that her whole thing was more about getting Bob, so in that sense she didn’t come across to me as having any kind of spiritual relationship.

  “Kris was attractive enough to get pretty much any guy she wanted,” continued Gulliksen. “But, of those guys, Bob stood out because he had a genuine love for God, and that was attractive to her. But it didn’t mean she really shared it. Bob was someone she could trust and manipulate. He was a charming, rich guy who carried a Bible, and that was part of his charm for her.”

  At Kardashian’s urging, Kris claimed, she began accompanying him to a weekly Sunday Bible study at the stately, gated Beverly Hills mansion of entertaining legend and born-again Christian Pat Boone, at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and North Beverly Drive, close to the iconic Beverly Hills Hotel.

  “Pat Boone hosted, but others often led the studies, particularly our pastor, Kenn Gulliksen. Pat couldn’t have been nicer, and his wife, Shirley, was so sweet,” Kris stated in her memoir. “I met his daughters, too, and I was especially excited to meet his daughter Debby, who would become a popular singer just like her dad.… I had a wonderful time going to the meetings and I really became closer to Jesus Christ because of them.”

  But in October 2015, eighty-one-year-old Pat Boone firmly stated that he “barely knew” Robert Kardashian—and likely didn’t know of him at all until he became synonymous with the accused murderer O. J. Simpson some two decades later, in the mid-nineties. And Boone certainly would have had no knowledge at the time of his Bible study of the pretty, young, obscure flight attendant Kris Houghton, who later claimed Kardashian was squiring her to Boone’s home.

  “Pat and Shirley were very generous in opening up their home to different people who led Bible studies at different times,” said Kenn Gulliksen, who led a Bible study there f
or only two months. But Gulliksen emphasized that he had absolutely “no memory of Bob and Kris attending,” and he knew both of them well.

  In fact, Kardashian and Houghton, if they were there, would have been lost in the sea of famous faces—the actor Glenn Ford, the singer-actress Doris Day, Kardashian’s ex-girlfriend Priscilla Presley, and a glitzy celebrity who Kris avidly followed, the Gabor sister Zsa Zsa, a precursor of the famous-for-being-famous Kardashian sisters—among many other popular celebrities who attended Boone’s open houses.

  The stars crowded into his big family room and turned those weekly sessions into more of a red-carpet celebrity event than a Bible study. As Gulliksen recalled, “We stopped going to the Boones’ home because too many people were showing up strictly because they wanted to see what Pat Boone’s house looked like on the inside.”

  A close colleague of Boone’s and Gulliksen’s, Susan Stafford, the first letter-turner on Wheel of Fortune, whose personal assistant, Joan Esposito, became Kris’s sister-in-law when she married Tom Kardashian, was an integral part of the Boones’ Bible studies. While Kris made the Boones’ event sound very exclusive, Stafford says showing up there was no big deal.

  “You could take anyone to Pat Boone’s, and sometimes it was for sincerity, and sometimes it was for making contacts, and sometimes it was to meet guys, or girls, and some of it was because we wanted to learn,” she observed, looking back years later. “It was a social event. We had a lot of people who came to follow the celebs. We knew that, but that was okay, because whatever it was, it got them in the door to believe in God, never mind Christ—and some of them didn’t even believe in God.”

  Stafford considered Robert Kardashian “a wonderful human being who cared a great deal,” but she saw Kris strictly as a “very attractive, very sexy” young woman, but who was “not” a true Christian, and “not born-again. I never saw her as a disciple.”

  Later, when Kris was married to Kardashian, Stafford said she heard “so much” from Tom and Joan Kardashian. “Everyone,” she asserted, “knew she was playing around. Joanie would indicate, ‘We have problems right here in River City’”—regarding Kris’s extracurricular activities—“and just shake her head. If it’s your sister-in-law you better be quiet.”

  Stafford said she only had respect for one thing about Kris after she became a reality TV star and momager: “She knows how to make money.”

  * * *

  IN 2015, PASTOR KENN GULLIKSEN decided to read Kris Jenner’s four-year-old memoir for the first time and was “shocked” at a number of her claims, even down to her relatively benign, if boastful, comments about meeting the Boones.

  “What Kris says in her book is a real stretch,” he asserted. “Pat didn’t even know who Kris was.”

  Kris further made the claim in her book that she had “accepted Christ through those [Boone] Bible studies … and I became a born-again Christian.”

  But this Pastor Gulliksen highly doubts from what he knew then, and in view of Kris’s disingenuous later life as the reality TV momager.

  “After reading her book, I was grieved as Kris described her infidelity, astonished at her language, her self-centeredness, and lifestyle. I was amazed at how totally self-centered and narcissistic Kris is. I did not see that when I knew her. I was astonished that I didn’t recognize this person. It’s the Kris she was, but not the Kris she presented herself to be, maybe because she was trying to impress me somehow—that she was a really sweet, innocent girl that would be good for Bob. I find her to be an absolutely dishonest person, who has perverted honesty, and was trying throughout the book to validate her behavior.”

  He continued: “My thought was how heartbroken Bob would have been had he lived.… He would be devastated by the family as it exists now, and that’s very sad for me as well. I pray one day Kris recognizes the counterfeit Christian as well as she recognizes a fake Gucci.”

  TWELVE

  A Stepford Wife

  Sometime in 1977, O. J. Simpson briefly reconciled with his wife, Marguerite, and moved out of the Kardashian brothers’ bachelor pad on Deep Canyon Drive in Beverly Hills and back into his mansion on Rockingham Avenue, in Brentwood, all the while continuing an affair with his future second wife, the hot, blond teenage cocktail waitress Nicole Brown, who had worked at the trendy Daisy in Beverly Hills. Around the same time, Tom Kardashian, engaged to divorcée and mother of two daughters Joan Esposito sold Robert his share of Deep Canyon and bought his own house for himself and his fiancée near Sammy Davis Jr.’s Beverly Hills estate, where they became friends with the popular entertainer, who had converted to Judaism and was then married to the third of his three wives, Altovise.

  Thus, with the “boys’ club,” as Kris Houghton called it, gone, the American Airlines junior flight attendant finally moved in with Robert, and thought it would be permanent. She thought wrong.

  She also assumed that as the current lady of the house she was free to spend, or at least borrow, money from her lover. She was wrong about that, too.

  When Kris moved into Casa Kardashian, she was flat broke, apparently having been unable to put away any of her modest airline salary because she was always splurging on clothes and partying. While Robert had a Mercedes and a black Rolls-Royce and was soon about to sell it and buy a white one, Kris was driving a clunker, believed to be the six-year-old red Mazda that her stepfather, Harry Shannon, had given her for her sixteenth birthday.

  “Kris moved in but Robert really didn’t treat her very well,” recalled his close friend Joni Migdal. “Kris needed tires for her car and he wouldn’t buy them for her, and I said, ‘Robert, why not buy the tires?’ But he was adamant and said, ‘She needs to learn the value of a dollar.’ I said, ‘But she’s driving an old car.’ But he wanted her to learn about money. Even in the beginning he treated her sometimes like an Armenian housewife, which means that he needed to have power over her. Instead of giving her power, he had to be the powerful one, which I did not think was a good idea.”

  After they got married, though, Kris would show Robert her power, and how wantonly she could spend his money, and that would drive him crazy. Her lavish spending would become one of the many issues in what would be a very turbulent marriage. As Migdal asserted, “There would be no begging by Kris for money after they got married. She rebelled against Robert’s rules and became totally extravagant.”

  Along with possessing the stereotypical macho-male Armenian-husband gene—the man rules the house, the woman obeys the man, or else—Kardashian had gotten totally turned on by a 1975 sci-fi thriller that he saw several times, having found the story line and philosophy so intriguing. The Stepford Wives, based on the bestselling novel by Ira Levin, told the frightening tale of an exclusive men’s club whose sinister members turn their wives into beautiful, subservient robots who do their husband’s bidding, from obsessive housework to anytime sex, all of it set in the fictional bucolic town of Stepford, Connecticut, with some scenes shot in bucolic Westport, Connecticut, then the home of the most famous real-life compulsive housewife of all, the self-styled domestic goddess Martha Stewart.

  “The Stepford Wives had blown Robert’s mind,” recalled a close friend who went to see it with him the first time. “I think he always had a fantasy about being able to dominate and control women, so when he became seriously involved with Kris, he wanted her to become the ultimate Stepford Wife, and because of that film he felt that maybe his fantasy could be fulfilled. But Kris would be the one in control in the end. It totally backfired on him.”

  “The Stepford Wives,” observed Joni Migdal, became “the model for Robert’s marriage to Kris. But I always used to term that the Armenian housewife syndrome.”

  As a way of controlling—and even programming—high school graduate Kris’s knowledge and learning during the early years of their relationship, Robert gave her self-help audiocassette tapes on a variety of subjects and instructed Kris to faithfully listen and learn from them, according to the couple’s close friend, the
multimillionaire businessman Larry Kraines. “In Robert’s view that was to make Kris sharper, better, brighter, and he was proud to have contributed that to her. He wanted her to be the best. If there was a party and she had it, she made it the best. Because of Robert, Kris went out of her way to really make it everything to the nines.”

  But Kraines felt that Robert’s demand underscored his early control and dominance of her. “The whole deal with the tapes,” he observed, “was a little bit over the top. Kris would say, ‘Oh, God, I have to finish these tapes before the week’s out because we’re going to talk about them.’ But Robert was always making Kris smarter, teaching her. But my wife would have told me to stick those tapes up my ass.”

  Like the money issues, sex and religion had also become points of contention when Robert and Kris first started living together and she was still flying for American Airlines. The born-again Christian who kept a Bible on his nightstand and on his desk and carried one whenever he went out, prayed before every meal, and, as Kris later observed in her book, “wore his Christianity on his sleeve,” decided that the hot, “full-on” sex they had been having while living in sin had to come to an end.

  Kardashian had confided in Joni Migdal about the sticky situation, and her take was that “he wanted their relationship to be special, and he wanted her to want it as much as he did. He wanted her to love him as much as he loved her, and I would say he loved her more than she loved him. But she still was respectful.”

  Kris claimed that Robert had actually asked her to move out because living together and having sex out of wedlock was “not God’s will.”

  So she moved with great reluctance and anger, getting a hand from O.J.’s compatriot and Kardashian’s friend, Al Cowlings.

  People in Robert’s circle thought there had to be other reasons for him asking her to leave, and they had a hard time getting their heads around the fact that he would give up sleeping with her just like that because of his religious beliefs. Making it even more difficult for them to comprehend was the fact that he often boasted that Kris was wild in bed, the best sex he ever had. But he refused to talk about it, they said, looking back years later.