The Kardashians Page 16

  One of Kardashian’s big ideas that seemed to have grand-slam, bases-loaded potential written all over it was called Movie Tunes. He had close ties with the AMC movie theater management chain and with record company executives from his R&R experience, and his idea was to have the theaters play music that promoted artists before the start of films and during the intermissions. The record company paid the bill and the theaters gave Kardashian’s operation exclusive play rights.

  “It was just music, like you would have in a doctor’s waiting room, which was transmitted in,” said Tom Kardashian, who got involved with his brother on this venture. “But in movie theaters we were able to play music on a CD, and it would play playlists of songs that we sold for the month to a record company, say, Capitol Records, or whoever had an artist that they wanted to expose.

  “The beauty of it was we had a captive audience,” he continued. “Our concept was to tell the customer—the record company—that the song was going to be heard so many times, by so many people—millions of people throughout the theaters around the country—and the audience can’t change the channel. We’d have an announcement, ‘You just heard Barbra Streisand, with her new album, soon to be released on Capitol Records.’”

  On paper, it seemed a brilliant, very lucrative idea and concept. As Neal Raymond Hersh, Robert’s lawyer and close friend who would handle his divorce from Kris, observed, “He created a whole genre of advertising that had never been done before. It was just a remarkable endeavor. It was incredible.”

  In reality and in actual practice, not so much.

  Complaints started to pour in from moviegoers, for the most part parents with young children who heard an obscene lyric and were angry and appalled. Some walked out and demanded their money back. Theater managers were not happy.

  “That,” said Kardashian, “was a major problem.”

  As a result, the theater chain required that songs with questionable lyrics be edited, which was a major undertaking with all sorts of pitfalls.

  Worse, there was a sudden consolidation of movie theater chains, which meant less competition and less business for Movie Tunes, and movie theater technology advanced, all of which required the Kardashians to pour more money into the business, which wasn’t the way they operated.

  “We just didn’t want to make a big capital investment,” said Tom Kardashian. “We were more traditional and old school.”

  * * *

  WHILE MOVIE TUNES HIT a roadblock, Robert Kardashian still believed he could arrange a moneymaking marriage between movie theaters and music, and, even better, with concert video of the performers this time. It was called Concert Cinema. And he was joined in the venture by his buddy O. J. Simpson and Bob Wilson, whom he had partnered with in Radio & Records. This time, though, Kardashian was the president and spokesman. They called their company, formed in 1984, the Movie Theater Network.

  The idea was that the nation’s movie theaters would get five-minute film clips of music stars in concert free of charge, and the Kardashian group would make their money from selling a fifteen-second commercial that was inserted in the film, with such promised stars as born-again Christian Bob Dylan, the Police, and Van Halen. Their acts were taken directly from a recent concert, and the clip was shown before the feature film. The first sponsor, claimed Kardashian, was the Pierre Cardin company, and he boasted that some seven hundred theaters in twenty-eight states had reportedly signed up.

  In what probably was the first time Robert Kardashian was quoted in the press—a decade before his name became internationally known in the O.J. murder case—he confidently told United Press International, with a Hollywood dateline, “There are eighteen thousand screens in this country and we expect to put Concert Cinema in five thousand of them with about forty-five sponsors a year. The concert preconditions the audience for what it is going to see. Our tests show they help increase attendance and are a popular addition to the program.”

  While he told the press that everyone profits from the venture—exhibitors, audiences, and the performers “who are getting exposure in a new medium with enormous audiences,” he appeared to be blowing a lot of smoke, and the project quickly disappeared from America’s silver screens. As the Los Angeles Times reported, “The yearlong enterprise became expensive and neither Simpson nor Kardashian made money on it.”

  By the time of the O.J. case in the mid-nineties, Kardashian was involved in pitching movie theaters on the idea of having lobby vending machines dispensing compact music discs. That concept, called Hit Tunes, also disappeared without any great financial reward.

  Fortunately, Robert Kardashian had hit the jackpot with Radio & Records, since nothing afterward had profitably panned out for him, despite his myriad of ideas.

  As Joni Migdal noted, “When he sold R&R he did very well with that. He got a lot of money and he lived off of that for a while.”

  And when things weren’t going well, he applied in July 1988 for a real estate license in the hot Southern California home sales market. His license expired in July 1992. There is not evidence that he had ever sold a home.

  FIFTEEN

  Who’s Your Daddy?

  Having walked away with a bundle of money from the sale of Radio & Records, a another bundle of joy entered Robert Kardashian’s life.

  Kris claimed she got pregnant with Khloé Alexandra Kardashian while on a European vacation with her husband in September 1983. After Kourtney and Kim, “Robert and I decided it was time to have another baby. We conceived again in Italy,” she asserted in her memoir some years after her ex-husband was no longer around.

  And Kris said much less about the conception and birth of Khloé on June 27, 1984, compared to how she elaborated about Kourtney’s, Kim’s, and Rob’s entrances into the world.

  However, Kris did note one important fact: Khloé “looked different.”

  With her blond hair and green eyes, she resembled no one else in her family—from her dark-haired, olive-skinned, brown-eyed, Armenian-featured siblings to her swarthy Armenian-American father. And even Khloé’s mother had very dark brown Natalie Wood eyes and hair.

  When Khloé got old enough, people in the Kardashians’ circle began to notice just how different she really did look and raised questions. Kris would explain away the suspicions by saying that Khloé looked like her maternal great-grandmother, Lou Ethel Fairbanks. And Robert’s friend Joni Migdal recalled how Robert would shrug off their suspicions and claim that Khloé looked just like his mother, Helen, who was Armenian but didn’t have Armenian features.

  However, when the Kardashians became famous, questions arose in the tabloid and gossip media about whether the late Robert Kardashian, who had divorced Khloé’s mother because of her philandering, was really the girl’s biological father.

  Even Khloé’s half sister Kylie Jenner, fourteen years old and already with a fashion line, jumped on the “Who’s Khloé’s Real Father?” bandwagon when she caustically posted a seemingly dummied-up but possibly authentic photo online of then twenty-seven-year-old Khloé with Alex Roldan, who reportedly cut and styled Kris’s hair and that of a number of women in her Beverly Hills circle. Kylie wrote: “First official photo of my sister and her dad! Like father like daughter!”

  Rumors about Kris and Roldan—he and Khloé actually did look alike—had been making the gossip rounds seemingly forever. Another whisper was that Khloé was the illegitimate daughter of O. J. Simpson after stories circulated that Kris and the Juice had had an affair, which Kris laughed off. Khloé termed false all the salacious chatter about Roldan, and Kylie subsequently tweeted, “It was a joke everyone! Lol!” Kris simply scoffed at the crescendo of titillating innuendo.

  Long before Kylie’s snarky comment, however, the two women who Kardashian married after he divorced Kris—the first Jan Ashley; the second Ellen Pearson—went public in the celebrity press, stating that Kardashian had told them that Khloé was not his.

  On May 19, 1999, four years before his death from cancer, Kardashi
an signed a sworn declaration in the office of his prominent attorney-to-the-stars and close friend, Neal Hersh, who partly handled his 1991 divorce from Kris. The legal paper was part of Kardashian’s successful case to nullify his November 25, 1998, marriage to Ashley after just a few months. In the statement, Kardashian claimed that he had married her, a glamorous, childless widow, “with the expectation of having a child together. I am the one who changed my mind.”

  But it was learned that Kardashian had actually deceived Jan Ashley from the beginning about having a child with her because, as he had long before revealed to confidants, he had secretly had a vasectomy after the birth of Rob, the last of his children with Kris. At least that’s what he claimed to two close friends. “Robert said he had a vasectomy. He didn’t want any more kids,” asserted Larry Kraines. “He told me, ‘I’m done having kids. I’ve had enough kids.’ So that whole deal [with Jan Ashley] was a joke. And I never knew about Jan Ashley saying, ‘Let’s have kids.’”

  Kraines wasn’t the only friend to whom Kardashian confessed about his claimed vasectomy. “He told me he had it done after his son was born,” said Joni Migdal. “He did not want other children. And that whole series of weddings, with Jan and Ellen—I don’t think his heart was in either of them. He just did it because he probably was lonely. Those last two wives were spur-of-the-moment wives. I don’t think he cared very deeply about either of them.”

  Unless Kardashian had had his claimed vasectomy reversed, which sometimes works, he could never have been able to father a child with Ashley.

  Meanwhile, the key point that Kardashian made in his sworn declaration—the one that Kris Jenner and Khloé Kardashian have pointed to in the media to prove, they claim, that Robert Kardasahian is, in fact, Khloé’s father, stated:

  “Approximately two months after our marriage, I changed my mind [about fathering a child with Jan Ashley]. I decided that since I already had four biological children, I did not wish to have any more.… I declare under penalty of perjury under the laws of the State of California that the foregoing is true and correct.”

  By claiming “four biological children”—meaning Kourtney, Kim, Khloé, and Rob, and sworn to under oath by Kardashian—Kris steadfastly maintained that no other proof was needed as to the identity of Khloé’s biological father. Therefore, allegations by two ex-wives and a supposedly practical joke social media posting by a half sibling were to Kris nothing more than salacious gossip and crazy fun.

  The news media, with nothing more to go on, went along—after all, a sworn statement is a sworn statement.

  But just like how Kardashian reportedly pulled the wool over Jan Ashley’s eyes, he conceivably could have pulled a fast one in his lawyer’s office by swearing he had fathered four biological children. In 2016, his lawyer Hersh said he had “no memory” of Kardashian ever making such a declaration, despite the paperwork.

  However, there is further evidence that Robert Kardashian believed that Khloé was not his biological child, that someone else was the father.

  As Kardashian’s longtime friend and minister, Kenn Gulliksen, put it, “Kris and Robert had four children. Well, they had three kids and somebody else’s kid. Bob never asked my counsel, but I simply heard from him that Khloé wasn’t his biological daughter. He gave me no names of who he thought the father was. But I certainly know it wasn’t O.J.

  “Bob just was very straightforward. We were simply having a conversation about everything he’d been through. It was my strong impression from him that he loved Khloé very much but he said it in a way that implied ‘she’s not my blood daughter,’ meaning his biological daughter. That was the implication.”

  Continued the man of God: “My understanding from him was that he and Kris hadn’t had sex during the period of time they would have had to have had sex when Khloé was conceived. And there were other things that I know he kept to himself about all of that, things he didn’t talk about. He was obviously wanting to protect his family.”

  Larry Kraines said he was at the hospital when every one of the Kardashian kids were born, and when the issue of Khloé’s conception came up, Kardashian’s only response was, “‘It’s all bullshit.’ And that’s the way he wanted to handle it.”

  In her memoir, Kris makes brief mention of her romantic and sex life with Kardashian, some of it in a negative fashion. At one point she mentions that the two of them would have what she called “date night.” With her babies—then just Kourtney and Kim—put to bed and with a nanny on duty, the two would “head out for a night in Beverly Hills. We were living la vida loca!”

  At another point in her book, however, she claimed that after calling Robert and telling him she wanted to have sex (which they hoped would result in her becoming pregnant with a son), her husband would “race home and it was wham, bam, thank you, ma’am. We didn’t have sex frequently, but just enough.”

  Joni Migdal said that she and Kardashian talked about the Khloé situation often. “But he was unwilling to take a DNA test.” Such tests were first available in 1985, when Khloé was a year old.

  When Migdal first saw Khloé and noticed how different she looked from the rest of the Kardashian family, she kept her mouth zipped. “I just didn’t say a word. What was I supposed to say? I had two children of my own. I didn’t think it was appropriate to mention her looks, so I didn’t say anything.”

  As with Gulliksen, Migdal believed that Robert and Kris weren’t having sex when Khloé was conceived.

  “Robert would joke around and say the father was probably the swimming pool man,” recalled Migdal. “But Robert was not angry, because he didn’t care. He said, ‘Whatever she is [ethnically], whoever her father is, whatever has happened, she is my child.’ He made a decision that no matter who Khloé’s father was that Robert was going to love her as his own, and it was all done. That was his decision. It was the honorable way of doing it, and the respectful way.

  “He didn’t want a DNA test done, he didn’t want to find out anything. He told me, ‘I love Khloé. She’s wonderful. She’s mine, period.’ But he knew she wasn’t his. His confirmation to me was, ‘she’s mine and I don’t care who the father is.’”

  * * *

  WHILE ROBERT KARDASHIAN ACCEPTED his third daughter, Khloé, as his own, and loved her as his own, he felt tortured thinking that his wife of six years, Kris, had made a baby allegedly with another man.

  As Robert and Kris’s minister, Kenn Gulliksen, in whom he had confided his innermost feelings about the Khloé situation, later observed, “Robert knew people had affairs, and he’d certainly been a swinger in his time. But he was a man who, once he was married, expected Kris to be faithful to him forever. When he found out she was unfaithful, he was done.”

  But presumably that didn’t happen with the birth of Khloé. It happened when Kris had an affair four years later that Kardashian discovered, and he learned the identity of her lover, tracked him down, and confronted his cheating wife, which would result in an acrimonious divorce.

  It’s hard to imagine that Kris, from lower-middle-class roots and with no more than a high school education, would give up all that Robert Kardashian had given her—a new life for a decade with all the luxuries that money can buy, and with the “picture-perfect” family that she often boasted about, for a clichéd roll in the hay with another man.

  But that’s what happened.

  In her memoir, published in 2011, Kris, then the wife of Bruce Jenner, spoke glowingly of her late first husband and her Beverly Hills life with him.

  “I was so much in love with Robert,” she stated at one point. And at another she declared, “There wasn’t one thing that I wanted that Robert didn’t eventually give me. He was the most thoughtful, generous, amazing guy I had ever met. He was my prince.”

  Still, she cheated on him. But first came new breasts.

  In 1988, when Kris was thirty-eight and nearing the onset of middle age, Kardashian paid for her to have implants, which she desperately wanted—the first
pair replaced with a bigger second pair—because that’s what many of her friends were getting, and Kris, mother of four, wanted to look hot, desirable, and porn-girlish just like them. And in that eighties go-go era in Kris’s circle of trophy wives and high-end-escort-like girlfriends, all of them, she noted, “wanted to have big, enormous boobs. We were all obsessed.”

  A friend who visited her just after she got her first implants and was recovering raved, “You look like a supermodel!” But they weren’t big enough, or perkier enough, or attention-grabbing enough for Kris’s taste. Therefore, she had them redone after she saw her pal Nicole Brown Simpson’s newly implanted silicone breasts, which she noted O.J. loved. And so did Kris.

  “My mouth fell open,” when Nicole revealed them to her, she declared. “They were gorgeous. I thought, I want two of those, please!”

  By the time they both had new breasts, Kris was well aware that Robert’s best friend, the Juice, had been beating up Kris’s close friend Nicole, then the mother of two—Sydney and Justin. In 1989, when Kris would begin the final affair that would end her first marriage, O.J. was charged with the spousal abuse of Nicole. Their fatal attraction would only grow worse.

  During those turbulent eighties, Kardashian’s pal O.J. and Kardashian’s ex-girlfriend Priscilla Presley, who never did remarry, costarred in the three zany Naked Gun movies with Leslie Nielsen. O.J., who played a dumb cop, received a producer credit, and was riding high.

  Despite Kris’s new breasts, her Beverly Hills lifestyle, and a husband who was “absolutely devoted to me,” she still didn’t feel fulfilled, and therefore life in the House of Kardashian wasn’t as copacetic as it had once been, or had ever appeared to be.

  By the end of the eighties, Kris had come to the stark realization that she no longer was in love with Robert Kardashian, to whom she had then been married for a decade.