The Kardashians Read online

  In any case, the wedding ceremony was one joyous event. “It was very, very beautiful—beautiful music, the most beautiful clothes, the best of everything,” recalled the pastor.

  O. J. Simpson, who would divorce his black wife a year later with eventual plans to marry blond Nicole Brown, was a groomsman, and his idolizing shadow, Al Cowlings, later the wheelman of the infamous white Ford Bronco LAPD chase, was the bearer of Kris’s ring. Robert’s best man was his brother, Tom, the felon, and Kris’s sister, Karen, with whom she would have a cold and distant relationship, and who would have a troubled life, was the bride’s maid of honor.

  Along with Joyce Kraines, Kris’s high school chum Debbie Mungle, who was with her in Hawaii when Kris scored a hole in one in meeting her first lover, Cesar Sanudo, and then roomed with the two of them in his town house condo, was one of the bridesmaids, as was Kris’s close friend Cindy Spallino, from Kris’s recent past as a junior flight attendant—the kind of life she’d never have again thanks to the love and generosity of Robert Kardashian.

  None of the principals and none of the three hundred or so guests in attendance would have ever guessed at what a tumultuous and ill-fated union the bride and groom would have, or what the aftermath would be like.

  As Pastor Gulliksen pointed out many years later, “It seemed to me to be a beautiful and genuine relationship. When I looked at them and the way they looked at each other and when I heard them share their vows, I was convinced their marriage would last forever. I knew Bob was astute and wasn’t one who I thought would be taken by a woman. He was older, he’d been out with a lot of women, so he knew what he was doing, so I was well convinced that at least his vows were utterly genuine. As I recall, Kris’s weren’t very long. Bob was a man who once he was married assumed, presumed, expected his wife to be faithful to him forever.”

  After the ceremony, Mr. and Mrs. Robert Kardashian hosted a reception for their friends at the very exclusive Bel-Air Country Club, where the initiation fee was as much as six figures, and where high-powered captains of the entertainment industry, big-name Hollywood stars, and powerful politicians played. Years earlier the eccentric mogul Howard Hughes, who was running late for a round of golf with Katharine Hepburn, had landed his plane on the golf course’s verdant green, refused to pay the parking fee, and resigned from the club.

  Kris later called the reception an “elegant, beautiful affair.”

  And on her wedding night in bed at the Hotel Bel-Air, her groom told her that she was his “‘dream come true,’” that from the moment he first laid eyes on her at the Del Mar racetrack’s two-dollar window he knew she was going to be his wife, “‘my future, my love,’” or so she claimed he said. And he may have even used the same loving words in bed with Priscilla Presley, whom he wanted to marry, but she didn’t need him and what he had to offer as much as Kris Houghton did.

  Kardashian, who wanted to teach young Kris the meaning of a dollar, who didn’t buy her the hundred-thousand-dollar ring he showed her in the fashion magazine advertisement when he proposed, who even refused to fork over the little bit of money for four new tires for her beat-up car, had actually had her use her saved-up American Airlines mileage to fund the transportation to Europe for their honeymoon in France.

  And in romantic Paris she said he set her straight about money. “‘I can give you a lot of material things. But I’m not going to give them to you all at once, because too much, too soon is not a good thing, either.’”

  Her “greatest gift” besides the big house, expensive cars, and all the rest, she said, was when Kardashian gave her the first of the four children they would have together. In fact, far down the road, those kids would be the best investment ever. Kris learned she was pregnant with Kourtney two weeks after the newlyweds returned from their honeymoon.

  * * *

  A MONTH LATER ROBERT flew to Honolulu, where he returned the honor and served as his brother Tom’s best man. Tom’s August 1978 marriage to Joan Esposito, who was eighteen months younger, a divorced mother of two daughters, was “pretty much spur of the moment,” Tom said. “We went together for a little over three years, and it was time. When I proposed to her I gave her an option—‘do you want to wait and get married next year [1979], or do you want to get married this year? If we do, then we should run off and get married in Hawaii. Everybody doesn’t have to feel that they be burdened about coming at the last minute, all that stuff.’”

  He was already doing business with some people in Hawaii, and when he told them he had decided to get married there they made the arrangements with just three weeks’ notice—plus one of his friends who had a second home on Oahu turned it over to the newlyweds for their stay. The ceremony was held at the Central Union Church of Honolulu, a United Church of Christ, whose slogan was “We engage and embrace all as we seek to embody Christ.” The church’s roots went back to the time of whaling ships and missionaries in the nineteenth century. When the Kardashians were married, Central Union was considered the place to tie the knot and combine it with a Hawaiian honeymoon. His brother and sister-in-law would celebrate their first anniversary there, too.

  Unlike his brother’s spectacular wedding affair, with a cast of hundreds, Tom’s wedding was simple and small. As he stressed years later, “There were no celebrities. My brother’s was a bigger thing, big and fancy with a lot of people.” From the mainland came the bride’s two young daughters, and Joan’s mother and sister, as did the groom’s proud parents, Arthur and Helen, and some close friends of his.

  Tom and Joan’s ceremony was not professionally filmed like Robert and Kris’s royal affair. Years later, when virtually everything in Kris Houghton Kardashian Jenner’s life appeared to become fodder for ratings, publicity, and cash, some frames of her betrothal to her late first husband were shown on an episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians.

  While the Kardashian brothers gave up their long bachelorhood a month apart, their wives, Kris and Joan, never became close. “They were totally different types,” asserted Tom. “Kris was a lot younger.”

  He says it was his mother, Helen Kardashian, “who was the maternal person who held the family together, not that there were arguments, but when there were functions—Thanksgiving, Christmas—she’d figure how to get us all together. My mom would be more the one to do that than the two wives.”

  While Joan Kardashian, who once mentored and was best friends with Priscilla Presley, was most willing to bond with her new sister-in-law, Kris, who was at least a decade younger, she couldn’t break the ice. As a mutual friend recalled, “It was all about Priscilla. Kris believed Robert still had a thing for her, plus she still resented how she believed Priscilla had stolen Bob away from her and how that would have meant the end of her Beverly Hills dream. It was very weird. It was like Elvis’s ex-wife’s ghost was haunting her.”

  As in-law couples—Robert and Kris, and Tom and Joan—they “didn’t socialize, didn’t go on trips together,” Tom Kardashian said, even though both couples lived close by in Beverly Hills, and the brothers even shared the same dry cleaner. “Growing up, Bob and I had a lot of similarities,” maintained Tom, “but that definitely changed when we both got married. I was doing my thing, and he wasn’t telling me about his personal life.”

  * * *

  TOM KARDASHIAN DIDN’T GO the born-again route like his brother had following Tom’s 1974 bribery conviction. When he and Joan were married four years later and he adopted her two daughters, who went to Catholic school, he said they all joined Angeles Mesa Presbyterian Church, which was in the View Park–Windsor Hills neighborhood, where the Kardashian boys and their sister had grown up. The church’s purpose was to “spread the good news about the resurrection power of Jesus Christ available to all believers through the Holy Spirit.”

  The minister, he says, was Reverend Donn Moomaw, who had been an all-American football player at UCLA. “And so I could relate to him, and so he and I became best friends,” says Kardashian, who, like his brother, ido
lized gridiron stars—O. J. Simpson, their bosom brother, being the best example.

  In fact it was Moomaw, later pastor at the tony Bel-Air Presbyterian Church, on Mulholland Drive, which had a wealthy, celebrity-studded congregation, who would officiate at thirty-seven-year-old Simpson’s 1985 marriage to pregnant twenty-five-year-old Nicole Brown.

  Like O.J., Moomaw, the man of the cloth, had serious issues regarding women.

  When Moomaw, who had the honor of being President Ronald Reagan’s minister, was in the pulpit at Bel-Air Presbyterian, the handsome, married, six-foot-four religious leader and one-time star lineman was accused of “repeated instances of sexual contact” with five women, and sexual intercourse with at least one of them in 1993, and was forced to resign. He was then sixty-one. Church officials had kept the affair secret until the scandal was revealed in 1995. Two years after being suspended, he was back in the pulpit at a church in San Diego County.

  In March 2016, the good Reverend Moomaw, still the Reagan family’s minister, assisted the vicar of the Washington National Cathedral at former First Lady Nancy Reagan’s private family funeral service in Santa Monica.

  FOURTEEN

  A Three-Thousand-Dollar Belt

  The first of twenty-three-year-old Kris’s brood, Kourtney, was born on April 18, 1979. If the baby had been a boy, the father wanted to give him the Armenian name Sarkis, a common Armenian handle, and the first name of an Armenian painter—still lifes, not houses—Sarkis Ordyan. Instead, Kardashian got a male dog, a Doberman, and named him Sarkis. During her first easy pregnancy Kris had gained fifty pounds, which she quickly lost, working out at a trendy Beverly Hills gym with cute buff trainers.

  Kourtney’s first positive act in life as an infant was to throw up on “Uncle O.J.,” as the Kardashian children would later call him.

  The next three would come in relatively quick succession. Kim, whose maternal grandmother, M.J., suggested she be named after Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton’s Mexican love nest, Casa Kimberly, came into the world on October 21, 1980. But there would be questions about the birthright of number three, Khloé, born June 27, 1984, and whether Robert Kardashian was really her biological father. By March 17, 1987, birth of number four, Rob, the patriarch’s namesake, his father and mother’s marriage was already beginning to crumble; their divorce was just three years away, with much hell in between.

  Kris claimed that even when she was back in high school she had always dreamed about having six children, but the last two—Kendall and Kylie—who brought the final tally to her wished-for half dozen, would be fathered by her next husband, Bruce Jenner, the Olympic gold medal winner.

  Kardashian, the epitome of the proud, show-off father who handed out twenty-dollar-a-pop banned Cuban cigars to his friends, bragged to everyone about how beautiful his girls, Kourtney and Kim, were as babies. For instance, Kris, a serial embellisher, would call Kim “absolutely breathtakingly beautiful … just stunning from the beginning.” But beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and friends who actually beheld the little darlings weren’t as impressed as their father was with their winsomeness. “My wife and I used to actually joke, ‘It’s such a shame those Kardashian baby girls are so homely, and looked like hairy little monkeys,” said a longtime close Kardashian friend. “I realize it was a mean thing to say back then, but in light of where things are today with those two, I guess they have the last laugh.”

  With her marriage to well-to-do Robert Kardashian, Kris finally had the Beverly Hills life she had dreamed about. Her close stewardess friend back then, Cindy Spallino, witnessed and experienced her pal’s fabulous, rich world firsthand.

  “Our paths started to diverge after she married Robert, and that was mainly because I was a working flight attendant and I couldn’t afford the fancy Beverly Hills lunches that Kris was having,” said Spallino. “And I really wasn’t drawn to that life—that lifestyle she adored so much of expensive lunches and two-hundred-dollar dinners. She loved that. I was living in a little apartment in Corona del Mar and she was living in Beverly Hills, a big difference.

  “I think the last time I had lunch with her my share was like eighty dollars, and I couldn’t afford it. That was like almost twenty percent of my salary, so I just couldn’t do it. My life was now so different from hers. And going shopping and having lunch in expensive Beverly Hills restaurants seemed so shallow to me, and that was her life. She began to have children right away, but then she had a live-in nanny so she could still shop and go to expensive restaurants.”

  Spallino flashed back just a few years to the days Kris and she lived in expensive Manhattan on meager junior flight attendant salaries, five hundred dollars a month, sharing cramped apartments with other stewardesses, and never having enough money to go anywhere for fun except Central Park to people-watch and feed the squirrels.

  But for Kris, that all changed with Kardashian.

  “Kris’s whole life led up to the Beverly Hills moment, and it felt right for her to be there,” observed Spallino, who spent thirty-three years as a flight attendant, and loved every minute of it. “Kris was comfortable there. She was relaxed there, and she didn’t seem out of place there as a small-town girl. Beverly Hills was like a world it seemed she had always been a part of, and wanted, and was happy there, and comfortable there, and she was never ill at ease there.”

  And her Beverly Hills extravagance as Mrs. Kardashian, wielding Mr. Kardashian’s credit cards, knew no bounds, according to a female cousin. “Robert had a lot of flair and confidence, but his base was truly simple and down-to-earth. But Kris never held back on her spending. She once went out and bought a belt for three thousand dollars, and Robert was like, ‘Three thousand dollars! Can you fucking believe that? Who needs a belt for three thousand dollars?’ He had not let the Hollywood philosophy get to him. But she had. Kris spent wildly.”

  As Joni Migdal noted, “A three-thousand-dollar belt wasn’t Robert’s style.”

  Their premarital days when Kardashian refused to foot the bill for new tires for Kris’s junker were long over, and Pastor Kenn Gulliksen heard his complaints about her spending.

  “Almost from the beginning Bob had issues with how freely Kris spent money, and how she constantly wanted more, and that affects the people that you hang out with as well,” he said. “You tend to want to get from everybody, not just your husband, and that was Kris. I know that Kris increasingly tried to dominate pretty much every area involving money, and would tell Bob how she wanted the house done, how he should spend. Robert was a very generous man, and that was especially good for Kris.”

  * * *

  AS AN ASSOCIATE IN THE John Bedrosian and Richard Eamer law firm, Robert Kardashian was no budding Clarence Darrow. Kardashian mostly handled the routine business matters of some of the firm’s clients, notarized legal papers for a modest fee, and helped entrepreneurs form small corporations that mostly involved paperwork. Until he became involved in the “Dream Team” defense of his pal the accused murderer O. J. Simpson in the mid-nineties, he had not been in a courtroom for two decades, and had never even seen the inside of a jail as an inmate’s lawyer. “It’s extremely depressing,” he said at the time. And he’d soon drop the practice of law altogether in pursuit of making a big score in business, restoring his law license only when he became a Simpson mouthpiece.

  By the time he married Kris, he was closing in on forty, soon with a growing family, a very extravagant wife, and a fancy Beverly Hills lifestyle to support. His dream was to make a killing in the business world, and he was always on the lookout for the perfect deal that would make him rich.

  With O. J. Simpson as a business partner, for instance, Kardashian and the Juice opened a clothing and jeans boutique called JAG O.J. on the campus of their alma mater, USC. JAG, an Australian brand, had been founded in 1972 by Adele Palmer and quickly developed an iconic celebrity following, ranging from Mick Jagger to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Kardashian, with O.J.’s moniker on the business name, hoped to cash in
on the lucrative jeans boom of the seventies.

  Kardashian had gotten a tip about the JAG brand from Joe Carl Leach, his stockbroker at Bear Stearns, whose financial mentor was the firm’s powerful and influential chairman, Alan “Ace” Greenberg, once romantically involved with Barbara Walters. A born-and-raised Texan from humble roots, Leach, a one-time basketball coach and biology teacher in the Lone Star State, discovered the JAG jeans brand—the first designer denim—while on a trip to Australia. Back in the states, he opened what was hailed as the first-ever jeans-only shop in Beverly Hills, and it was a roaring success.

  “Joe was really an aggressive guy, and so he brought the JAG deal to Robert and to get O.J. to endorse and be a partner as well,” said Tom Kardashian. “He brought my brother in because he was O.J.’s friend, and O.J. liked a lot of those different kinds of businesses. Joe Leach was kind of a mover and shaker, took a lot of chances, and my brother kind of liked that.”

  But for Robert Kardashian and O. J. Simpson, the boutique didn’t take off as they had expected.

  While the shop attracted many jeans-wearing coeds, they were more interested in meeting O.J. than in buying the merchandise, and the business closed after a few years.

  “O.J. and my brother didn’t bring me in to the JAG deal, and they were not successful,” said Kardashian. “When you’re young and you got name recognition you think you can open up something and people will come. But those businesses are usually a lot harder to operate than people think.”

  With O.J., whose name was the big selling point and draw, and with an investment from Joe Leach, Kardashian once again hoped to hit it big, this time in trendy, affluent Westwood Village, near the UCLA campus, with what was believed to be one of La-La Land’s first frozen yogurt emporiums. It went through two names, first Joy, then Forty Carats, both under the corporate name Juice Inc. But it was another relative flop, and the store closed after several years of trying to make a go of it.