The Kardashians Read online

  SIXTEEN

  Another Affair

  When Robert Kardashian twice saw the film The Stepford Wives back in the mid-seventies, he was turned on by the dominance the husbands had over their robot-transformed mates. Later, Kris would claim it was an eighties TV miniseries she had watched, The Thorn Birds, with Richard Chamberlain and Rachel Ward, about romantic passion, which had turned her on to finding hot sex again with someone else.

  With Robert, she felt a “switch” had been turned off and she no longer had a desire to make love with him. What she wanted, she declared in her memoir, was “so much more passion.” She was now still relatively young, and bored with her husband, and she had a pair of what she viewed as great, new faux breasts, for which he had paid a whopping twenty thousand dollars for both surgeries.

  Thus armed, it was time for Kris Kardashian to find a lover.

  While she doesn’t deal extensively with it in her book, Robert Kardashian’s friends contend that beyond Kris’s loss of passion for him, she was sick and tired of his controlling every aspect of her life.

  All she says in her book about his dominance is “He was always the boss of everything.”

  With his children, Kardashian surprisingly was a “very strong disciplinarian, very firm,” asserted Larry Kraines, “and he was that way with Kris, and that was the problem. What started out to be good for Kris, Kris didn’t want anymore. She had enough of his controlling ways and strong ideas. Kris had her own ideas about what she wanted to do with the rest of her life.”

  One example Kraines had never forgotten, was Kardashian’s directive to Kris to listen and learn from self-help cassette tapes that he gave her on a variety of subjects in order to make her smarter and more efficient as a wife, after which he would test her on what she had learned.

  And later, when Kris went ahead and found her new lover, Larry Kraines and his housekeeper would discover the two of them in the lower level of his Beverly Hills mansion when they thought no one was at home.

  “Kris was only eighteen when Robert met her, and she was young and beautiful, and Robert molded her, and Robert helped her to become a strong person, and what happened was he became very possessive of her, and she fought that,” maintained Joni Migdal, looking back. “Kris did not want to be possessed, and the harder Robert tried, the more Kris backed off, and I was hearing that from both of them. He wanted her to be the perfect housewife—the perfect Armenian housewife—the perfect cook, the perfect party maker. When he met her she was poor with not much education. But Robert taught her everything—how to give parties, how to entertain. He taught her how for every holiday to decorate beautifully in their home. Finally, she rebelled against Robert, against his rules and what he really valued. Robert really loved Kris. He thought that that was going to be the lasting relationship.”

  But bored and rebellious Kris had other ideas.

  “Kris would tell Robert, ‘I need to go out. I need to have fun. I want to have fun,’ and she would go out and stay out really late. She would go out drinking with [the wife of a powerful Hollywood executive] who had a boyfriend, and Kris was coming home at two and three in the morning drunk, and she would tell Robert, ‘I need my freedom. I need my independence. I have four kids and I have not lived life.’

  “She cheated on him because she believed he cheated her out of life—that she married him when she was young and that she never had a chance to go out and be herself,” was the way Migdal, who knew them both well, saw it. “Kris may have been trampy, but she was still a good mother to her kids. You can be a good mother and still be a tramp. You put the kids to bed, you have a nanny, and you go out. You just do it late at night.”

  It was as if Kris had completely erased the fact that she had long ago gone out, acted independently, and had an affair, oddly with her parents’ approval, when she was just eighteen, and with a much older man, a golf pro with a child. And back then he, too, had caught her cheating on him. The other man was none other than her current cuckold, her husband of a decade, Robert Kardashian.

  * * *

  KRIS TOLD ROBERT THAT she thought it best that they have a trial separation, but Kardashian was adamant: He told her Armenians don’t go through separations. They either stay married or they get divorced. But he did leave for a couple of days, and she felt free. But then to her dismay he returned. He thought a brief break would give her time to think, and get back to normal, and allow their lives to continue as before.

  It didn’t happen.

  As she put it, “I was going crazy inside.”

  Subsequently, when Robert was away on a “boys’ ski vacation,” Kris, always the opportunist, took advantage of his absence to go to a party at a close friend’s home, she claims, met a guy, had “an instant attraction” to him, and was off and running.

  In her book, Kris gave her first known lover, Cesar Sanudo, the phony name “Anthony.” The fake name she gave to her latest, Todd Waterman, was “Ryan.” Golf pro Sanudo was a dozen years older than Kris when she caught his eye at seventeen. This time around, the unhappily married mother of Kourtney, Kim, Khloé, and Rob was at least eleven years older than her new lover. And Waterman was, at twenty-three, a relatively unknown soccer player with the struggling L.A. Heat, and not a “producer,” as Kris identified him. He was definitely no David Beckham.

  When Kris Houghton had first encountered Robert Kardashian at the Del Mar racetrack a decade earlier, igniting their romance behind Cesar Sanudo’s back, she was initially attracted to him because she thought Kardashian resembled the singer Tony Orlando. Now, ten years later, still apparently attracted to celebrity look-alikes, she thought Waterman looked like and actually was the actor Rob Lowe when she first laid her big, brown Natalie Wood eyes on him.

  Moreover, Lowe was famously rumored in Hollywood for being very well endowed, which equally was an attraction for Kris. Around the time Kris fell for Waterman, the real Rob Lowe proved the gossip to be true when he was caught in a scandal—on video having sex with a sixteen-year-old girl of legal age who he met in a nightclub. The tape also showed Lowe and a male friend having intercourse and oral sex with a model in a Paris hotel room, which later became one of the first celebrity sex tapes commercially available to a porn-hungry public with a VCR; a later one, in 2007, would famously feature Kris’s very own second-born, Kim, and her then-former studly black boyfriend, William Raymond Norwood Jr., better known as Ray J, a hip-hop record industry figure.

  Not long after Kris and Waterman began chatting at that party at Kris’s friend’s house, she claims, he followed her upstairs, grabbed her, and kissed her. She thought, as she crudely states, “What the fuck?” and passionately kissed him back.

  Taking a slap at her late husband and the biological father of at least three of her four Kardashian children, Kris states in her book that she “hadn’t been kissed like that in ten years,” which meant all the years of her now crumbling marriage. As the affair with Waterman quickly progressed to sex everywhere and anywhere, she boasted, “I hadn’t had that feeling for Robert for years.” And she noted that her loss of sexual attraction to her husband was even before she hooked up with Waterman, who was a decade younger and in his prime. And she’d eventually rationalize her affair as more “running away” from Robert rather than “running to” Waterman.

  Other than the honeymoon period before and right after their marriage, and when they made babies together, Kris was admitting that she had long lost all interest in Kardashian and was just playing along to enjoy her Beverly Hills benefits as his wife. And when she declared all that negativity about her ex-husband in her book, he had been dead for eight years.

  Despite Kris’s account that she met Waterman at a party at a friend’s house, he later claimed they got together at a Los Angeles nightclub after he first saw her photo at the Beverly Hills home of a friend and was intrigued.

  But Robert Kardashian told his confidante Joni Migdal that Kris and Waterman had actually met in Europe, where Kris was said to be vacationin
g with Shelli Azoff, wife of Robert’s close associate, the music mogul Irving Azoff.

  Once back in Los Angeles, according to what Kardashian told Migdal, “Waterman moved to Malibu and rented an apartment at Kris’s urging and Kris furnished it.” A furious Kardashian had shown Migdal a cache of receipts he had found hidden in his Tower Lane mansion documenting furniture purchases Kris had made—presumably with her husband’s money—for Waterman’s love nest.

  Where and how they met aside, Kris became consumed with Waterman. As she graphically put it in a description straight out of a campy made-for-TV Lifetime movie, or a pulp romance novel, they had “Wild crazy sex all the time, sex everywhere we could think of.”

  She claimed they had sex in cars, had sex on a tennis court, had sex in a pool house, had sex in a garage, and had sex on stairs, and she compared their “out of control crazy, dangerous” sex games to a movie she had once seen starring Richard Gere and Diane Lane, appropriately titled Unfaithful.

  And in another slap at her late first husband, she suggested that she was not only unfaithful, but also “unfulfilled.”

  She made no mention about the sneaky sex she had with Waterman in the home of Robert’s best friend, Larry Kraines, who confronted her about it and told her to stop cheating.

  Reckless, dangerous, devious, and hurtful. That was the kind of game Kris Kardashian was playing. At first she was said to have lied to Waterman, leading him to believe she was separated from her husband. Then, even more strangely, after she did acknowledge she was still married and was cheating on her husband, she would actually take some of her children along on dates with Waterman, who particularly took a liking to Kris’s then-youngest daughter Khloé, who was just five.

  At the same time as Kris’s twisted rendition of her adulterous eighteen months with Waterman, she described herself as both a “Christian girl who loved the Lord”—which Pastor Kenn Gulliksen found sad and laughable when he read her book—and “a fuckup because I couldn’t get my marriage together.”

  Todd Waterman was furious when he learned that his affair with Kris was detailed in her memoir some two decades after the fact. So, a year after her book was published—and even though she didn’t identify him by name or profession—he broke his silence and talked to various celebrity-oriented media outlets that through the years had helped make the Kardashians famous with constant, gossipy coverage, among them Star magazine, Britain’s DailyMail.com, and Radar. She would later demand that he sign a confidentiality agreement never to publicly discuss her or their relationship, according to his mother, Ilza Waterman, who also talked to one of the celebrity gossip Internet sites. Moreover, she claimed that Kris set up her son to make an appearance on the Kardashians’ reality show in season seven in 2012 by showing up with her camera crew at his country club and surprising him.

  When the affair was happening, Waterman’s mother stated that she was led to believe that Kris was separated from Kardashian. “She wouldn’t talk about her husband with me. If she did I would have said, ‘What are you doing here with my son? What are you doing coming after my young son with all of these kids?’”

  According to Todd, the first time he had sex with Mrs. Kardashian “was in her friend’s closet. We found a little place in the house and consummated the relationship. It was a magical night, surreal,” he stated, sounding almost scripted. “I think it was two people who were both open to experiencing something in their life at that time. It was fate; we invited it and we just ran with it and from that point on, we didn’t look back.”

  Brazenly, Kris had even brought Waterman back to her family’s Tower Lane estate, where he is “sure” he had sex with her, but probably not in the Kardashian marital bed. Kris would tell her husband that Waterman was just another tennis instructor teaching her how to play, or a friend of a friend. On one occasion Waterman volleyed on the Kardashian court with the cuckolded master of the house watching.

  Waterman’s tennis partner that day was his British pal the openly gay soccer player Justin Fashanu. “Robert was watching us play. We’re in the affair now and I’m sure he suspected at this point,” Kris’s one-time lover recalled later. “He was trying to throw me off my game actually. He was just calling out ‘foot fault’ while I served.” A decade after that game, thirty-seven-year-old Fashanu hanged himself in 1998, in London. In a suicide note, he denied allegations made by a seventeen-year-old youth that he had sexually assaulted him in Fashanu’s apartment in Maryland.

  Along with Kris bringing her lover to her home, she brought daughter Khloé along on dates with Waterman. “Khloé would go out with us,” Waterman stated. “She’d be in the backseat of the car if we were going to lunch. I had a special relationship with her more than the other children. She just was the cutest. When talking to her sisters, she would say, ‘You don’t like him, do you?’”

  During the affair, Waterman quit soccer because, he claimed, the pay wasn’t good enough, and Kris began picking up his bills, treating him like a gigolo.

  “She was generous,” he stated. “She was paying a lot, or it was Robert I guess. There was no way I could support her or help maintain what she was accustomed to financially.” He says she was the one who helped pick out his apartment, and, according to the receipts Kardashian found, Kris also helped to furnish it. Waterman would go to parties with Kris openly “as her boyfriend,” running into such celebrities as Magic Johnson, Billy Idol, and George Michael.

  Kris was lying to everyone, even her close girlfriends Joyce Kraines and Shelli Azoff, when they began questioning why she wasn’t around much anymore to go shopping, or to have long, gossipy girly lunches. She’d give them lame excuses, while she was actually off supposedly having it off with Waterman.

  Faye Resnick, a member of Kris’s posse and a close pal of Nicole Simpson, remembers overhearing Kris talking on the phone to O.J., and the subject was why Nicole had stopped talking to Kris. The reason was because the abused Nicole had heard about Kris’s affair.

  “After Kris hung up, she explained to me that Nicole was a free spirit in many ways, but she did not condone people having extramarital affairs,” Resnick noted in a tell-all published in the wake of Nicole’s murder. “Nicole was adamantly against infidelity because O.J. had bedded women every chance he got. Nicole, Kris told me, had never fooled around on O.J. during their entire marriage.”

  Resnick called Robert Kardashian’s close friend O.J. “one of the fastest cocksmen in town.”

  A decade older than her lover, Kris wanted to look her sexiest: She dieted and lost “fifteen pounds”; some of that might have been attributable to the stress of cheating on Robert. She also began going to a tanning salon and “every other day” she was getting bikini waxes.

  Kris was always running out of the house to meet Waterman with one lame excuse after another for her husband.

  “I constantly lied to Robert,” she states. “I would tell Robert I was going to lunch … I had a baby son at school who needed me. But I would drop Kourtney, Kimberly, and Khloé off at school” and meet Waterman at his apartment.

  Kardashian told Migdal, as he had told Larry Kraines, that he knew Kris was having an affair. “Robert told me, ‘I need to know where Kris is going,’ and he said, ‘I’m going to follow her.’”

  And he showed Migdal a pile of receipts he had found hidden in their palatial Beverly Hills home, receipts for a refrigerator, a table, and four chairs. “Robert said, ‘What is Kris doing buying all this furniture? We have all this furniture.’”

  He soon discovered that she was paying to decorate her lover’s small Malibu apartment, which Kris described in her book as a “tiny, dumpy” place in the San Fernando Valley. “I was surprised that Kris furnished the guy’s place,” said Migdal. “And I was not real happy with Robert and the extent that he would follow Kris and spy on her. I just thought the whole thing was wrong.”

  Robert told Kraines he had followed Waterman in his car, and Kraines warned him to be careful, that he could get into trou
ble. On one occasion, Kardashian tailed Kris to a Beverly Hills restaurant, where he caught her having breakfast with Waterman and confronted them. Later that day he caught her leaving Waterman’s apartment. He also had hired a private detective to tail her and document her activities.

  Robert, Kris acknowledged, “caught us three different times.”

  Physical violence nearly ensued one late afternoon when Kardashian showed up at Waterman’s apartment complex and Kris’s lover threatened to call the police.

  With Kris in his Jeep, Waterman pulled out of his garage, when Kardashian “comes charging out” of his Mercedes-Benz 450 SL convertible, wielding a golf club. “He took a swing and whacked the back of my car,” claimed Waterman. “I said, ‘Holy shit, Kris, can I pull over and confront him? What do you want to do?’ She screamed out, ‘No, no, keep driving, he might have a gun in the car. I know he keeps a gun.’”

  A short chase in traffic ensued, but Kardashian pulled himself together and gave up the pursuit without further incident.

  Oddly, the confrontation echoed what happened many years earlier when Cesar Sanudo had confronted his fiancée, Kris, and Robert in Sanudo’s bedroom and chased both of them out of his condo, which ended their relationship. Now, Kardashian catching Kris with Waterman would end the Kardashians’ marriage.

  Kardashian had told O.J.—a man who knew something about cheating—about Kris’s affair. Later, with Kris standing next to the Juice in his Rockingham mansion, he telephoned Waterman and threateningly bellowed, “You just fucked Snow White. Do you know what you’ve done to this entire universe, you asshole? You motherfucker. Now you’re going to have to deal with me.”

  When he hung up he confronted Kris about why she was cheating on his best friend. Her response was that she didn’t have the “same feelings for Robert.”

  O.J.’s advice?

  Get a vibrator.

  Kardashian’s family—his parents, Arthur and Helen, his sister, Barbara, and his brother, Tom, were heartbroken when the prodigal son revealed that his wife was cheating on him. Tom Kardashian said he actually heard about Kris’s fooling around through rumors in Beverly Hills, not anything that his embarrassed brother had told him.