The Kardashians Read online

  “O.J. had what we call street smarts, growing up in the underprivileged areas in San Francisco,” said Tom Kardashian. “So when I first knew him he had already owned two or three Pioneer Chicken franchises, and he had already had a great relationship with the Hertz Corp. as its spokesman.”

  But his business involvement with Tom’s brother, Robert, was never very successful.

  “I knew they weren’t lucrative deals,” maintained Tom Kardashian.

  Looking back to Kardashian’s business deals with the Juice, Robert’s friend the multimillionaire businessman Larry Kraines declared simply, “That was all bullshit.”

  With a growing list of business failures on his résumé, his financial mentor, George Mason, then the senior managing director of Bear Stearns & Company, asserted, “Some click, some don’t. He’s not the kind who wants to be chained to a desk and take a briefcase full of work home with him every night.” And his record industry power broker pal, Irving Azoff, was once quoted in the Los Angeles Times as saying that Kardashian had some good ideas. “Some have and some haven’t been as successful. But he’s real dependable and honest and quite an entrepreneur.”

  One of Kardashian’s clients at the Bedrosian-Eamer law firm was a creative young man by the name of Bob Wilson, who had a great idea but no money to launch it. According to Tom Kardashian, Wilson was a program director at radio station KDAY, in Los Angeles, and his brainstorm was to produce a pop music tip sheet aimed at radio broadcasting executives, record companies, and disc jockeys, so they would be current on the latest, hottest tunes people were listening to, week by week.

  “My brother came to me and said Bob Wilson needed some backing and some business acumen, and Robert and I always discussed business stuff,” said Kardashian. “Bob Wilson was a young guy with no money. My brother and Bob Wilson were very much the creative side, but didn’t have the business acumen, and I had already gone through all kinds of business stuff”—not to mention a federal charge of bribery in 1974 for which he had copped a plea and was a convicted felon—“so my brother and I put up the money.”

  While Kardashian declined to reveal how much he and Robert invested, he said it was “a lot less” than a million dollars. And during the first year of operations, Wilson ran things without getting a salary. “We let Wilson think he didn’t have to worry about the money side,” noted Kardashian.

  Whatever the investment, the Kardashians and Wilson would make a bundle when they sold their shares in the very successful trade publication, Radio & Records, known as R&R in the industry, and they became multimillionaires—on the low end of the millionaire scale, but enough to live large.

  “It was,” Tom Kardashian said, “a matter of luck and timing. But timing is luck.”

  The Kardashian brothers got others to “buy into the concept”—people in the record business. One of those was Azoff, a kingmaker, who Tom Kardashian boasts was “one of my brother’s close friends, a really successful record guy because he represented the right guys early on, like the Eagles, Chicago, and then he became a promoter, and my brother did a lot with Irving, who was pretty much the frontrunner, one of those kind of guys who was just a killer business guy.”

  According to the 1990 book Hit Men: Power Brokers and Fast Money Inside the Music Business, about the seamy side of the record industry, Irving Azoff once delivered a snake to a business associate as a way of underscoring a stern message. The book’s author, Frederic Dannen, alleged that friends of the five-foot-three, curly-haired Azoff “called him the ‘Poison Dwarf.’ [E]asily one of the most loathed men in the music business.… once … when service was too slow at a chic Beverly Hills restaurant … he set his menu on fire.” And then-CBS Records chairman Walter Yetnikoff asserted, “Irving lies even when it’s to his advantage to tell the truth. He just can’t help it.”

  “Sure I lie,” Azoff once told a Rolling Stone reporter. “But it’s more like … tinting. I’ve inherited a lot of dummies’ deals. What then happens, you gotta make it right. It’s all just negotiating theatrics.”

  The diminutive, scary Azoff was described as the “enfant terrible” of the music business. “To get his clients top dollar, he’ll rip up a contract, yell, scream, terrorize.”

  Azoff’s much younger, glamorous wife, Shelli, became one of Kris Kardashian’s close friends, a confidant, and a member of her Beverly Hills posse. The two pals had children around the same time—Kim Kardashian and Allison Azoff grew up together and were friends—and sometimes the two moms sported the same outfits by chance for social occasions, and were said to party together at times.

  “They were always on the same page,” noted a friend of both.

  When O. J. Simpson’s wife Nicole and her friend Ron Goldman were discovered brutally butchered with a knife, it was Shelli Azoff who first informed Robert Kardashian, telling him on the phone that his best friend’s wife had been “shot and killed,” based on erroneous gossip from her hairstylist, Alex Roldan.

  Like Kris Kardashian Jenner, and like tough-talking husband Irving, Shelli Azoff had a reputation for being one tough cookie. She reportedly once sent a live snake to the singer George Michael’s manager, Michael Lippman, after Lippman invited her husband to a party but asked that he not bring Shelli, pissing her off. When executives at Sony Pictures denied the Azoffs access to screen the film Sex Tape on their yacht, Shelli reportedly threatened then-studio boss Amy Pascal with a refusal to license music from Azoff’s talent pool or permit them to appear in Sony films.

  The talk around town was, “Don’t fuck with Shelli.”

  And when Kris first met boy-toy soccer player Todd Waterman, who became her lover in the late eighties and the main reason for her divorce, Kris was accompanied by Shelli Azoff, the two of them vacationing together in Europe, according to an account Kris’s furious husband told his friend Joni Migdal.

  Billboard was considered the leader of music industry tip sheets, but Billboard listed retail sales of records, while R&R, sold on newsstands and subscribed to by people in the broadcasting and record businesses, had its own niche. It listed presales, which, according to Tom Kardashian, was “more relevant to a radio station or a record store because those were the most important songs that listeners sixteen to thirty were requesting.”

  The year 1978, when Kris Houghton became Mrs. Robert Kardashian, among the top tunes being pitched to industry readers in Wilson and the Kardashian brothers’ tabloid-size publication were the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive,” “With a Little Luck” by Wings, and Chic’s “Le Freak.”

  While founder and creator Bob Wilson declined to be interviewed for this book, his onetime assistant, Donna Kramer, remembers life at the R&R offices—where Kardashian was a daily presence—as being sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll personified, and that was the main reason Kramer eventually left. “It was a more wild scene,” she said, looking back. “More hip people, more partying people, and I’m not that way. So I didn’t love working there. They definitely were smoking marijuana, that type of thing. It was pretty extreme for me. I just didn’t look forward to going to work every day.”

  When she gave Wilson notice, he told her, “On your last day I want you to come into my office and smoke a joint with me and tell me what you think of me and why you’re leaving,” she recalled. It was the far-out ambiance and culture of R&R, at least to her, that convinced her to resign, despite Wilson’s constant promise that “‘If you stay with me, I’m going to make you a rich woman.’ But I didn’t hang around long enough to see that happen.”

  As part of his investment deal, Kardashian had a posh, private office in R&R’s headquarters, located in a small office building in the Century City West complex of Beverly Hills, between Santa Monica and Olympic Boulevards. Initially, it had been located in offices on Sunset Boulevard. Also headquartered in the R&R building was RKO General, one of the major radio station chains.

  While Tom Kardashian kept his money in, but stayed away from the business, remaining a silent partner, Robert
was there virtually every day, but the born-again Christian looked the other way when certain staffers took breaks up on the roof to “do drugs, smoke pot,” and possibly have a sexual interlude, according to what Donna Kramer gleaned around the office.

  The place was an eclectic mix of young people, hipsters, and music buffs, and there were as many as a hundred employees who covered and researched the weekly trends in rock, pop, and country and western.

  Like Kardashian, his personal secretary, Lynn Wright, a portly woman with a pretty face, was born-again and had been one of the original members of the Bible studies that became Pastor Kenn Gulliksen’s Vineyard church. She was very active in the life of the church, like Kardashian, and Gulliksen thought of Wright as “one of the most genuine, kind, loving persons” he’d ever met. Kramer got the position as Wilson’s assistant through Wright, who was friends with Kramer’s cousin, Lani Riches, also a born-again Christian.

  Kardashian looked the part of a hip late-seventies and early-eighties Hollywood music executive, even though he wasn’t involved in any way in the day-to-day operations of R&R. While he sometimes wore an elegant suit at the office, Kramer remembered him as being “pretty casual—he sort of had a ‘Tommy Bahama’ look in a floral pattern short-sleeve shirts, beautiful slacks and shoes—the best of everything, and he had beautiful hair with that white streak.”

  The office and the secretary were part of the benefits for Kardashian’s investment, but it was somewhat of a mystery what he actually was doing there every day. “He certainly wasn’t practicing law, unless he was helping friends,” recalled Kramer.

  Robert and Kris were still living in the Deep Canyon Road house in Beverly Hills that the Kardashian brothers had once jointly owned and often shared with O.J. The house was just minutes from the R&R offices, which allowed Kris to pop in when she was out splurging in the chic shops on nearby Rodeo Drive. They took long, leisurely lunches at eateries like Kardashian’s old hangout the Luau, where he once played the role of an Armenian Mafioso to impress a girl, and where he was first introduced to O.J.

  To Kramer, the boss’s young, “sexy” wife appeared “sweet and nice,” and when Kris gave birth to Kim, Kramer was invited to Deep Canyon to see the infant, bringing a baby gift for the future porn video and reality TV star. However, years later, when Kris and Kim and the Kardashian-Jenner gang became infamous, Kramer’s positive view, especially of Kris, radically changed.

  “I don’t know that Bob Kardashian would be happy about the paths that Kris and the children have taken,” she asserted. “Bob was a very Christian, good man, and I just don’t think Kris and the children’s lives are something he would approve of. And in retrospect I would think that Kris would be sorry that she lost Bob. He was a good catch and a wonderful person. And with the girls, I just don’t get it. I would think their father’s rolling over in his grave.”

  While Kramer worked for Wilson, the president and CEO, and had a good working relationship with him, she adored Kardashian, who she believed was sort of the chief financial officer. “Robert was the angel, not Bob Wilson—an angel in terms of being a kind, wonderful person. Everybody loved Bob Kardashian, the sweetest, kindest man.” She found Bob Wilson to be a bit gruff. “I’d hear him talk to people and he liked to make them squirm almost. He just wasn’t a gentle, nice soul like Bob. I couldn’t imagine that they were really personal friends; they were so different.”

  Virtually overnight, R&R grew successful, became known as the “radio industry bible,” coined format terms such as “Contemporary Hit Radio” and “Adult Contemporary,” and began holding annual conventions for industry people—disc jockeys, radio station executives, and record company honchos, at hotels like the posh Century Plaza in Beverly Hills. Donna Kramer was involved in helping to organize them. Every year there was a featured entertainer. When Kramer worked there, it was Donna Summer one year and the Blues Brothers—John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, who made their act famous on Saturday Night Live—another year.

  “They were putting a lot of money into the business,” Kramer said, “and R&R was a very respected company.”

  And the company was making a lot of money.

  And that’s when Bob Wilson thought it was time to cash in.

  “It was time for us to move on,” said Tom Kardashian. “And that only happens when things are going good.”

  In the eighties, the partners sold Radio & Records to Harte-Hanks Communications, a public company that operated newspapers in Texas—twenty-nine dailies and sixty-eight weeklies—and had gotten into the radio and television business.

  “Bob Wilson was the one who came up with the idea for Radio & Records, and my brother and I came up with more the business side of what to do, and the company really started growing and took off to where Bob Wilson said, ‘I don’t need you guys now,’ so it was time to break it up and sell the company,” asserted Tom Kardashian. “It was all Bob’s idea.”

  And Kardashian “absolutely” maintained that the Radio & Records partnership ended amicably.

  Still, in 2015, Wilson said he didn’t want to talk about the whole affair.

  The brothers Kardashian and Wilson happily divided what was said to be at least a twelve-million-dollar-and-change windfall profit from the sale—25 percent for each of the Kardashians and 50 percent for Wilson. Robert pocketed some $3 million, equal to more than $6 million in 2016 greenbacks, which to him was big money, but relatively small change in the Hollywood entertainment nexus, where deals in the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars were prevalent.

  “The sale really was lucrative for us,” boasted Tom Kardashian. “It gave us money to do whatever we wanted. The return on capital was good. After we got our separations from Radio & Records, my brother and I had our separate deals for a while. I invested in other things than he did.”

  For a time, Robert and Bob Wilson stayed on with the new owners under contract, and Tom Kardashian signed a noncompete agreement.

  “Bob was like a pig in shit,” recalled a colleague. “He was suddenly a millionaire and saw himself parlaying all that bread into new projects and making more millions. Maybe we were at one of Joe Stellini’s restaurants, and I remember O.J. high-fiving it with Bob and telling him with true admiration, ‘Man, you are now one nigger-rich motherfucker,’ and they embraced. I saw Bob wipe away tears.”

  After Kardashian’s contract expired with the new owners of R&R he began working for his close friend Irving Azoff at the MCA Radio Network, headquartered at Universal Studios.

  As Kris saw it, “Life was great and getting greater all the time.”

  * * *

  ONE OF THE FIRST THINGS Kardashian did after the sale of R&R was begin searching for his dream house, one that would befit a man of his newly found means. Rather than an all-glass Southern California contemporary, or a mansion with pillars, he bought a handsome two-story, six-bedroom, eight-bath, almost seven-thousand-square-foot circa 1977 Cape Cod–style home, at 9920 Tower Lane, in one of Beverly Hills’ most prestigious areas—a secluded enclave off Benedict Canyon, in an area that was home to the rich and famous.

  As a favor to his pal O.J. and his girlfriend, Kardashian rented Deep Canyon to Nicole Brown and the Juice, who was still not totally committed to marrying her but moved in. They would finally tie the knot a dozen days before Valentine’s Day 1985.

  “After Robert sold Radio & Records, that house on Tower Lane was a prize for him,” said Larry Kraines.

  On a private cul-de-sac, the Kardashian grand estate sat on a big piece of land and was gated with a swimming pool shaped like a duck with its own well-stocked bar and a pool house, a tennis court, and a Jacuzzi shaped like an egg.

  “That house was huge and beautiful and private and they decorated it beautifully and spent a lot of money in decorating it,” recalled Joni Migdal.

  Two of his next-door neighbors were the Cantors—Iris and Bernie, he the founder of the financial firm Cantor Fitzgerald, which lost many employees in the 9/11 terrorist attack
on the World Trade Center in New York City. In back was the Bruce Springsteen estate, on a big piece of property at the end of the cul-de-sac. Another neighbor had llamas and peacocks, and very young Kourtney and Kim had two cats, Coco and Chanel, named pretentiously by their striving-to-be-a-Beverly-Hills-fashionista young mother, Kris. Their father and the master of the house now had two Dobermans, the new one with the Armenian name Anoush, along with Sarkis.

  The Tonight Show host Jay Leno lived close by. And across the road was the home of the actor Robert Vaughn, who appeared in the popular sixties TV series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. as the suave spy Napoleon Solo.

  “It was quite a famous area,” noted Kraines. “When Kris and Robert had parties, they would invite Vaughn and he would come over.”

  Living large, the Kardashians entertained often—Kris’s idea—and the estate was considered “party central.” One New Year’s Eve, she hired cancan dancers to entertain. The invitations she sent out were chocolate female legs.

  Later, the gorgeous home that Robert Kardashian loved with all his heart—a platinum symbol of his success as a businessman, and a property that gave him the respect and street credibility he always craved—would become part of a vicious tug-of-war between him, his ex-wife, Kris, and her soon-to-be new husband, Bruce Jenner.

  * * *

  OF THE MANY VENTURES entrepreneur Robert Kardashian got into, Radio & Records was the most successful, according to his brother.

  After Kardashian cashed out of R&R, asserted Larry Kraines, “Robert was trying to find a handle on something. He was very creative, very visionary. He’d always come talk to me about business. He would share his ideas with me. In his wallet he had twenty different business cards of different ventures that he had his fingers into. That was his whole M.O., always looking for a home run. He had all these ideas for business—probably fourteen or fifteen or sixteen different kind of companies, or concepts, over a period of a handful of years, and had other stuff going on, but they weren’t successful, to be honest.”