The Kardashians Page 13

  In any case, Kris moved into an apartment “behind a Marie Callender’s pie shop” in Sherman Oaks, over the hill in Valley Girl country from Kardashian’s manse in Beverly Hills, which she had already begun to feel was hers, too.

  But they continued to see each other.

  “We would still kiss and make out, but otherwise nothing because we were living this clean, Christian relationship,” she snidely remarked.

  On one visit, in her apartment complex garage, he accidentally put a dent in his glistening new white Rolls, and when he complained to her, Kris selfishly thought, “Serves him right for kicking me out!”

  Kris, who had a high sex drive, was furious at Kardashian, Bible or no Bible. At twenty-two, she wanted frequent sex, and if Kardashian wasn’t going to be the supplier, then maybe she needed to find another, as she suggested in her memoir.

  If there was anyone to blame for Robert Kardashian suddenly going all celibate on Kris in the name of the Lord, it was Kenn Gulliksen.

  “You know what? I’m going to plead guilty,” said the pastor, looking back to that time. “Obviously, Bob was very attracted to Kris. She was beautiful, much younger, and a lot of fun, and they undoubtedly enjoyed a lot of sexual experiences together. I spoke to him and asked him whether he was living with Kris, and he said he was, and I told him, ‘I can’t marry you if you continue living together, or if you have to live together because of circumstance, you need to stop your sexual relationship until you marry her.”

  Gulliksen and his wife, Joan, were both virgins when they got married, and he was shocked that Kardashian, as an Elder of the church, who every Monday morning at six A.M. arrived without fail to pray “for people’s needs,” had violated the church’s tenets regarding sex outside of marriage.

  But after Gulliksen gently confronted Kardashian, he “immediately embraced” his pastor’s request to stop living with, and having sex with, Kris Houghton, until if and when they tied the knot.

  “Bob said, ‘You’re right. I know we shouldn’t be doing this.’ So, it wasn’t my trying to talk him into something,” asserted Gulliksen. “It was what he already knew in his heart. He had a very genuine, deep relationship with the Lord. It was real. It was honest. It informed everything he did, although he did some things that I certainly wasn’t happy about, nor was he. We taught sex was for marriage, and he had had sexual relationships, and after he became a Christian he had sexual struggles.

  “And if Kris couldn’t hold off having sex with him, she needed to be seeing another kind of counselor. But, yes, I am the guilty one in her eyes. Kris never said anything to me about it. She only said what would ingratiate herself to me. I’m sure she didn’t want me to screw up her relationship with Bob.”

  * * *

  NOW LIVING ON HER own again in a studio apartment, unclear about her status with the man she thought she loved, and still flying for American, Kris Houghton was spending time again with her close stewardess friend and confidant, Cindy Spallino. But Robert Kardashian was always on Kris’s mind.

  And she especially fantasized about the rock he might put on her finger one day. In the end, her dream came true.

  “We would walk the streets of Beverly Hills and we would stop at every jewelry store and look in the windows at the shiny, sparkly things,” recalled Spallino. “Kris would say, ‘I don’t care if you’re married, or not married, it’s awfully hard to walk by a jewelry store and not look at all those diamonds.’

  “And she saw one ring in particular and thought it was beautiful. It was a big pavé diamond, with lots of small diamonds surrounded by two bands of gold. At that point in time she was just hoping, just musing that that was the kind of ring she’d love to be given. We were just two girls walking by jewelry stores, but then on down the road it happened to be the same ring that Robert picked out for her.”

  Shortly after New Year’s 1978, Kris had decided she finally needed to get Robert to commit to marry her, or she would move on and find another man who would treat her right and give her everything she desired. She decided to take a gamble. She’d go far away on a trip, not keep in touch with him, and hope he’d miss her so much that he’d take her back and propose.

  In her memoir, Kris says that she had gotten the “ski bug,” and had decided to go on what she called a “girls’ trip” to “Switzerland.” The term “girls’ trip” had an exclusive and expensive ring to it, and so did vacationing in Switzerland. But, once again, it was pure Kris Houghton Kardashian Jenner hype, the stretching of truth, and an outright fabrication.

  In fact, she and Cindy Spallino had been offered a great discount deal by a pilot who organized cheap trips for airlines’ people with little money to spend.

  There was nothing exclusive or expensive about it. “It was so cheap,” said Cindy, “including airfare, transportation to the resort, lift tickets, accommodations, breakfast every day, ski equipment—everything, for like $250-a person.”

  And moreover, while Switzerland may have had the ring of chic to Kris and her readers, a place where the rich and famous skied on the slopes in ritzy locations like Gstaad, with places to shop like Prada and Hermès for apres-ski entertainment, Kris and Cindy’s actual destination was the far less tony ski resort town of St. Anton am Arlberg, which was in Austria, not Switzerland, as Kris had boasted. Once again in her book, Kris had embellished, if not blatantly fibbed about the facts.

  And it wasn’t a “girls’ trip,” as she had stated, suggesting a bevy of girls. “It was just the two of us,” said Cindy Spallino, “and we didn’t get to choose where we were going—you know, we want to go St. Moritz, but that wasn’t part of the deal. But we had a lot of fun, and it was like we had this very high-end trip, but it was very simple accommodations. I had skied since I was seven. She could go up and down, but I wouldn’t call her a skier.”

  It was while the girls were away that Kris shared “some” of what was going on with her and Robert, and about why they weren’t living together. She made it sound as if her living with him had been just a temporary thing, and that it was her decision to move.

  “She said, ‘I was just staying with Robert, but I got my own apartment.’ She didn’t say the part about him not wanting to have sex with her. She just said he felt it was not a good idea for them to live together until they got married. I didn’t judge that one way or another. I just figured that’s how some people are comfortable. When she told me she moved out, I thought, ‘Oh, that was just a temporary arrangement living with him until she secured an apartment.’ But I know she really wanted it to be permanent.

  “The ski trip was definitely meant to make Robert miss her,” Cindy asserted. “It drove Robert crazy that she didn’t call. I don’t know if she even told him where we were going, or staying, and she didn’t talk to him for the whole time that we were gone, which wasn’t that long.”

  Kris’s scheme and her gamble worked.

  Shortly after she returned home, Robert Kardashian proposed.

  He popped the question on Easter Sunday, 1978.

  She says she had slept over only so they could go to early Easter church services. She claimed he even dropped to one knee—the clichéd Hollywood love story position—to make his proposal. “‘I love you so much and I want to spend the rest of my life with you,’” were the words she said he said.

  She said “Yes!” and she claimed that he was “scared” and “quivering” and looked like he was “going to cry.”

  But he didn’t immediately slip on her finger that ring she had been fantasizing about ever since she saw it in a Beverly Hills jewelry store window when she was strolling with her buddy Cindy Spallino.

  Instead, she stated in her book that he gave her an advertisement in a fashion magazine for a “big gorgeous diamond,” and told her that someday he’d get it for her, but in the meantime he’d pick up something else.

  As she noted, Robert was a “frugal guy in those days,” who could shell out big bucks for a Rolls-Royce but was cautious about spending “h
undreds of thousands of dollars” for the kind of diamond that was on that Vogue page he had handed her. He also was the guy who’d declined to buy her new tires for her flivver because she needed to learn the value of a buck.

  The next day he surprised her by giving her the ring that she had seen with Cindy in the jewelry store window. She said it was her wedding ring, and that he never gave her an engagement ring.

  “I was literally shaking,” when she saw it, she recalled. “Robert was THE ONE FOR ME,” she exalted in uppercase type in her memoir.

  “She called me and she was so excited,” recalled Spallino.

  It was after the ski trip and in the early days of Kris and Robert’s engagement that Cindy met Kardashian for the first time, after hearing so much about him for months, and she saw him as a “warm, wonderful, welcoming guy.”

  By then, Cindy had known Kris going on two years, but what struck her on seeing Kris and Robert together for the first time was “how very comfortable Kris felt in that Beverly Hills setting. She was street smart and able to catch on to things quickly. Kris wasn’t book smart, but she was life smart in many ways.”

  On one of Cindy’s first visits to Kardashian’s Beverly Hills home, with Kris now living in, the discussion centered on a dinner party that the man of the house wanted to have. “And Kris had no problem at twenty-one, twenty-two finding the correct florist, getting the right caterer, setting up the house,” observed Spallino. “She didn’t need anybody to tell her how to do that. How she knew how to do that I don’t know. But she was a very capable hostess. She had certain life skills that I thought were remarkable for somebody her age.”

  And that probably was even before Robert Kardashian had begun ordering Kris to listen to the self-help audio tapes he gave her with strict instructions to learn from them, and then be tested about what she had learned. Cindy says Kris never mentioned those tapes to her.

  Soon after they were engaged, Kris never worked again while married to Kardashian.

  “When we got back from our ski trip, Kris had some vacation time. Then American told her she had to come back to work, and she had already missed her first trip. But at that point she just resigned,” recalled Spallino.

  With Kardashian hooked, Kris didn’t need the airline anymore. With her man, she would now fly in first class, with a respectful flight attendant at her beck and call.

  “Robert was a fun, generous guy,” Cindy Spallino came to believe after getting to know him. “I did think Kris really did love him. You don’t have four children with somebody you don’t love. But she also loved everything that he brought to her life—he brought her an entire life. She knew he could provide for her, and she knew that she’d never have to worry about anything ever again. He was a big part of her escape from a blue-collar background.”

  THIRTEEN

  Wedding Bells

  In the spring of 1978, Kenn Gulliksen assigned one of his assistant pastors, Reverend Larry Myers, to perform premarital counseling with the newly engaged couple Robert Kardashian and the future Kris Kardashian.

  A musician, Myers had joined Chuck Girard’s Christian rock band in the spring of 1975, and through Girard, who was allowing Gulliksen to have a Bible study in his home, he met the young pastor, then in his late twenties. Myers soon began attending the Vineyard church services, and Gulliksen, impressed with his devotion and talent, invited him to become part of the church staff, where he was introduced to Kardashian during the summer of 1975.

  “Bob was one of the church Elders already, was part of the corporate board, was very active, and was considered one of the leaders of the church,” Myers said. “Bob was quite outgoing, very warm, and impressive. He was still practicing law, and he was working with, and kind of managing O.J.”

  Larry Myers thought it was ironic that he would wind up counseling Kris and Robert as their marriage ceremony neared because he had once suspected that Priscilla Presley would be Kardashian’s bride. “Robert had dated other women before Kris, but Priscilla was the memorable one that he brought to our services,” he noted. “But eventually he got involved with Kris and they developed their relationship and decided to get married.”

  Myers, who was performing most of the premarital counseling in the Vineyard church, had a series of six meetings, each an hour long, over several weeks with the church’s Elder and his fiancée at the church’s headquarters on Ventura Boulevard, in the L.A. suburb of Van Nuys.

  “We just talked about all the different aspects of marriage, the different areas of responsibility, and I just tried to do as much preparation for them as possible,” he said. “Kris was a very sweet, likable lady, and I didn’t find their age difference strange at all because it wasn’t like she was seventeen. She was in her early twenties and she was very outgoing, and with a very confident personality, as was Bob, so they seemed to make a good match.

  “They were aware of what they were doing, what kind of a marriage they wanted, and how they would accomplish that,” he continued. “They didn’t ask many questions and just listened. I felt they were very conscientious and serious, and really wanted to have and establish a good marriage, and make a good home.”

  Unlike Pastor Gulliksen, who would officiate at the Kardashian-Houghton nuptials, but who had serious doubts that Kris had taken Jesus into her life and had become born-again, Myers, looking back, said he had “no doubt in my mind that Kris had embraced her faith and was serious about it, and about going forward in making a Christ-centered marriage.”

  But was Kris, savvy in weighing people’s reactions to her, just playing up her love for Jesus to the hilt with Myers in order to impress him and Robert and make both believers in her sincerity?

  Myers said he came away from the sessions feeling confident that Kris and Robert’s bond would last a lifetime. But he also learned a dozen years later that it hadn’t, that there had been many serious issues, and one of them was that self-proclaimed born-again Kris had cheated on her husband.

  “I wasn’t involved in their lives over the coming years, so I don’t know how things deteriorated,” Larry Myers said. “At the time we did the best we could in counseling them.”

  * * *

  THERE WERE TWO KARDASHIAN family weddings in the summer of 1978. The first was Robert and Kris’s, and a month later his brother, Tom, married the former Joan Esposito. Robert’s was a glitzy affair, a full-blown Beverly Hills production with a professional cinematographer filming the proceedings. Tom’s was nothing like that.

  Before Kris tied the knot, Joyce, the pregnant wife of Robert’s close friend Larry Kraines—who years later discovered her cheating on Robert with her lover in the lower-level gym of Kraines’s Beverly Hills mansion—threw a fancy bridal shower for her at the ritzy Hotel Bel-Air.

  By the time of the wedding, Robert Kardashian had long had a thing about not wanting to be alone, about always wanting to have a pretty woman in his life, so the fact that he was still a bachelor in his mid-thirties embarrassed him and caused him to worry that others viewed him as some kind of loser, or maybe even gay. All of that played into his decision to finally pop the question to Kris Houghton, after failing to convince Priscilla Presley to marry him. If Presley had accepted his proposal and they had tied the knot, Kris Houghton would have had to look elsewhere for another guy who would give her the kind of lavish life she always dreamed about.

  “I don’t think Robert ever really wanted to be by himself as many years as he was,” observed Larry Kraines. “He liked companionship. He spoke about that frequently over the years. He was bothered that he didn’t get married until late in life. He was bothered back in the day that people looked at him and his brother as maybe being a little weird because they weren’t married.”

  Robert’s parents, Arthur and Helen, didn’t really care who he married, whether it was wealthy and famous Priscilla, or poor and unknown Kris. As Tom Kardashian noted, “My mom and dad were just happy that he was finally getting married. It wasn’t about, ‘Oh, you’re not marrying
the right person.’ I’d gone long enough myself. I was thirty-seven years old, so that was a pretty late age to get married.”

  Robert George Kardashian and Kristen Mary Houghton’s marriage occurred on July 8, 1978, at the Westwood United Methodist Church, long the setting for spectacular weddings since after Black Friday 1929 and the start of the Great Depression, when the first chapel was built. It’s one of Los Angeles’s most prominent and elegant houses of worship. The famous organ has more than ten thousand pipes and can play chimes and trumpets, which, according to the church’s pitch for wedding business, “make glorious fanfares and send-offs.”

  Because Westwood United, on Wilshire Boulevard, was so elegant and prestigious, Kris had personally chosen it. She later stated that her “storybook romance” was “consummated” at its altar—above which was a stained-glass “Glory Window” depicting the life of Jesus Christ with a twenty-four-karat gold-leaf overlay.

  Pastor Kenn Gulliksen, who officiated, believed the church was chosen because “it was the most beautiful, so it was like kind of starting off their marriage with a public declaration—we belong, and making a statement in the heart of Westwood, which is where everything happened.”

  As Kris noted in her memoir, published two decades after Kardashian divorced her because of her adultery, “no expense was spared” for the wedding, and she even boasted that the same florist who did business with the White House of President Richard Nixon had supplied her flowers at the church. She did not mention, though, that at the time of her spectacular nuptials the disgraced Nixon had been in exile for five years after resigning in the wake of the Watergate scandal, during which he famously proclaimed, “I am not a crook.”

  Kris stated that Gulliksen, “our pastor from the Bible studies at Pat Boone’s house, officiated,” only part of which was true; Gulliksen did marry her off, but as quoted earlier, he didn’t remember Kris and Robert having ever attended, and Boone said he didn’t even know Kardashian.