The Kardashians Read online

  “When Kris was cheating on my brother or whatever, I don’t know what went on behind his doors,” said Kardashian, looking back. “He wasn’t the type who would come to his brother and say Kris is doing this, or this. So I don’t have a take on what went on. But I lived in Beverly Hills, so it didn’t take much for me to hear the gossip. My ex-sister-in-law’s made a success, she’s made some major accomplishments. But the cost of what went into that success, I’m not so proud of.”

  Waterman claimed that the affair ended when he realized private detectives were tailing him. His mother, a onetime regional sales director for a company that did building maintenance, claimed it had ended when Kardashian telephoned her home asking for his wife.

  “Robert called in the middle of the night. He was very upset. I picked up and he said, ‘She’s with your son.’ I said to him, ‘It’s two thirty in the morning, your wife is thirty-six and my son is twenty-four. I suggest you talk with your wife and I’ll talk with my son.”

  Ilza Waterman said she did have a mother-son chat with Todd about his relationship with the married mother of four, and at that point Todd moved to London in hopes of getting Kris Kardashian out of his system, and to escape the wrath of her cuckolded husband.

  SEVENTEEN

  Emotional Wreck

  Robert Kardashian, in his mid-forties, filed for divorce in the summer of 1990. He retained one of the top domestic relations attorneys in Los Angeles, if not the country, Neal Hersh, reputed to be the “divorce lawyer to the stars.” Hersh learned the ropes from five years as protégé to the charismatic attorney he terms the “Godfather of family law in Beverly Hills,” Simon Taub, whose one and only brief marriage had ended in divorce. Taub knew to not try marriage for a second time; it was all too risky. Instead, he handled the emotional and angry marital issues of big stars for big bucks.

  Following in Taub’s footsteps, Hersh made his reputation in the late eighties in the glare of the tabloids, representing the actress Robin Givens in her divorce from the boxer Mike Tyson. Then came the headline-making Brad Pitt–Jennifer Aniston divorce. He handled buxom Baywatch star Pamela Anderson’s divorce from Kid Rock. And he was in Halle Berry’s corner in her divorce bout with Eric Benet. Kim Basinger retained him in her complex divorce case with Alec Baldwin. He was there for a number of the stars in the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills reality TV show. And even some of the Kardashian women enlisted his services long after their father had passed on.

  But Hersh has never forgotten his relationship with Robert Kardashian, and how hurt he was in the wake of catching Kris cheating on him.

  “Robert was emotionally devastated,” when they first met to discuss Kris’s adultery and what the cuckolded husband should do about it within the bounds of the law, recalled Hersh. “The divorce was not something he was happy about. He was a family guy, and all he was interested in was his wife and his children. But he and Kris had different ideas about what that entailed. So he was very distraught, and he was wishing the divorce didn’t have to happen. I think he wanted to salvage the marriage despite anything Kris might have done in terms of having a boyfriend.

  “There was an age difference,” continued Hersh. “Kris wanted to go out and have a different lifestyle than Robert did. But Robert was a homebody, the most dedicated, loving, kind person and father that you could ever imagine. He was Armenian, but he was like the typical nice Jewish guy who wanted to keep his family.”

  Hersh met the defendant, Kris, for the first time when he arrived at the Kardashians’ Tower Lane estate for a settlement meeting and “to divide furniture, which I rarely did. Lawyers don’t really go to people’s homes to divide up their crap, but Robert asked me. And Kris was very gracious. When I looked at Kris I didn’t think to myself, ‘Oh, Christ, she’s going around with her exercise guy or whoever he was.’ Kris was endearing.”

  The divorce went smoothly and without much anger, he stated.

  But that’s not the way Kris saw it. The divorce, she asserts, “got ugly.”

  She, too, had hired a lawyer to the stars, Dennis Wasser, who specialized in representing famous athletes and Hollywood celebrities who wished to end their marriages. A female friend of Kris’s, the wife of a professional ballplayer, had recommended Wasser, but Kris had to borrow ten thousand dollars from the friend in order to pay the high-powered Wasser’s retainer. His law firm, with his daughter, Laura Wasser, as a partner, would have their own star lineup of clients: Angelina Jolie, Maria Shriver, Mariah Carey, Ashton Kutcher—and the list went on, and one day would include Kim Kardashian.

  At one point during the divorce, and as Wasser’s client, Kris got a restraining order that banned both her and her husband from “molesting, attacking, striking, threatening, sexually assaulting, battering, or otherwise disturbing the peace of the other party.”

  Kris claims she was dead broke when he filed for divorce. “I had no money—not one dollar.” And now, without him, she claimed she was lost when it came to handling money because he took care of all their finances. Kris had been treated like such a delicate princess by Kardashian that by the end of the marriage she didn’t have a clue regarding the cost of her Beverly Hills lifestyle.

  The ex–junior flight attendant, who once earned five hundred dollars a month, but had moved on up to the Beverly Hills big-time, didn’t even know how much the gardener got paid, let alone what their monthly mortgage payment was. The only credit card she used was for the upscale market where her help shopped for the family’s groceries. She had no idea whether there were monthly payments due on the family’s fancy cars, which she drove. Her first-world complaint was, “I had never paid a bill.”

  And she swore she’d never be in the position of having “no power” ever again when all this was in the past.

  In her book, Kris maintains that Kardashian had canceled her credit cards and that her grocery shopping privileges at an upscale food market had been revoked, and her lowest moment came when she was faced with the realization that she couldn’t afford to “buy pizza” for her then-chubby children—Kourtney, Kim, Khloé, and little Robert Jr., then ranging in age from two to eleven.

  Not so, asserted Hersh.

  “Quite frankly, I don’t remember cutting her off,” he said. “It isn’t my style to cut credit cards off. It’s my style to put a limit on credit cards, and the reason is not so altruistic. Walking into a courtroom when you cut off a family from all funds is very risky business, because the judge thinks you’re a prick, and what do I need that for. My recollection is that the divorce was very amicable, pretty amicable. I don’t think we ever walked into a courtroom. I don’t remember it being contentious at all.”

  But according to court papers, Kardashian signed an affidavit on January 11, 1991, swearing that the previous December he had ended any form of employment he had and declared, “I am now unemployed and have no income,” which clearly was an excuse for not helping Kris financially.

  Kardashian began representing himself near the end of the divorce case, which Hersh termed a “strategic decision” that he was on board with, but he declined in 2016 to state why in order to avoid breaching his long-deceased friend’s “client privilege confidentiality.” But another well-informed source claimed Kardashian wanted to “play hardball with Kris; he was furious, he didn’t want to give her a dime, and he probably felt Neal was being too nice of a guy.”

  Kris must have taken note of Hersh’s compassion, because he later would represent her daughters in marital issues. When Khloé married the six-foot-ten black pro basketball player Lamar Odom in 2009, it was Hersh who handled the prenup at Odom’s request, which was “cleared” by Kris. When Kim divorced Damon Thomas, the first of her three African-American husbands, it was Hersh who handled the case.

  While remaining friends with Kardashian, Hersh also had developed a bond with Kris through a friendship Hersh’s wife had with Kris’s “very close friend” Stephanie Schiller, the ex-wife of the writer Lawrence Schiller, who later penned a book a
bout the O.J. case, using Robert as a key source. But that collaboration would not turn out to be in Kardashian’s best interest.

  And the relationship between Kris and Hersh would end on a sour note, too. A gossip item about the Kardashians had appeared in the press, and Kris freaked out and blamed the leak on Hersh. “I said it wasn’t me,” said Hersh, “but she got very upset with me. I’m sure she’d say hello to me,” he believed, but thereafter he had lost all the Kardashian women’s domestic affairs business, which, in their bizarre lives, could make for sizeable billables. “But they didn’t use me again. They didn’t reach out to me,” said Hersh. “Their business manager refers them to Laura Wasser, who is much more age appropriate for Kim and her group. But I don’t think there’s bad blood.”

  * * *

  ODDLY, KRIS KARDASHIAN DIDN’T THINK having an affair would anger her husband to the extent that he would actually file for divorce. What was she thinking? Nor did she believe that her affair combined with the divorce would have a negative impact on her children, but the girls and boy were devastated. “They cried,” their mother stated. “It was horrible.”

  Years later Kourtney, Kim, and Khloé would dedicate their first book, published in 2010, Kardashian Konfidential, not to their momager mother, who helped make them wealthy reality TV stars and more, but rather to their late father, who “without you, we know we would not be the women we are today. We know that every blessing in our lives is because you are our angel watching over us.… We are sisters because of you. We love you, Daddy.”

  A publishing source with intimate knowledge of the book project recalled, “The girls specifically wanted to cite their dad and not their mother in the dedication, and I’m sure they saw it as a put-down of her.”

  And Rob Kardashian, the troubled namesake who was just sixteen when his father died a quick and horrific death from cancer, honored him in a special way, too, recalled his uncle, Tom Kardashian.

  “My nephew came up to me and said, ‘Uncle Tom, you’re not going to like this.’ Rob would always preface with those words because he already knew I would not like what he was going to tell me. It was about a tattoo, a tattoo of my brother’s image that Rob had put on his [left] forearm in memory of his father. And he says, ‘I know you’re not going to like this. I know you’re not going to like what you’re going to see. But I had my reasons.’”

  Tom Kardashian said he wasn’t happy about what Rob had done “just like I’m not happy about anybody’s tattoos.” But he said he understood why his nephew had had the ink applied to his body and close to his heart. “It was his way of memorializing the father he lost so early in his life. All of that was after my brother was gone.”

  * * *

  AROUND THE TIME KARDASHIAN filed for divorce, and just when Kris thought the self-inflicted cloud over her couldn’t get any darker, her mother, Mary Jo—her “mentor” and “support system”—was diagnosed with colon cancer, which she’d survive, after having previously beaten breast cancer.

  According to Kris, Robert, after filing for divorce, had moved out of their Tower Lane estate.

  But that’s not the way Larry Kraines remembered the tense and strange situation. Despite the Kardashians’ divorce drama, they remained under the same roof, he said.

  “They both stayed in the house together, and I’m thinking Robert stayed longer than most guys when they get separated and file for divorce and are pissed with their wives,” he said, looking back to that time. “I don’t think Kris really had a place to go, and Robert was probably playing a heavy hand. He was a stubborn guy, and didn’t want to leave, so they went back and forth, back and forth arguing. She wouldn’t leave, and he wouldn’t leave, and that went on for some time, and it was more strange than not. I’d been once divorced, and once you made a decision to get out, one or the other got out. But not in their case.”

  Continued Kraines: “Because Joyce [Kraines’s wife] and Kris were close I didn’t want to get in the middle of who was doing who. But Robert would call me, and we’d sit and talk, and he was angry, and I told him, ‘It’s time to move on.’ But he was saying, ‘She’s the mother of my children. How could she do that to me?’

  “I felt sorry for both of them, but more particularly for the kids, and they were good kids. I told Robert, ‘You’ve got to stay close to the kids. Don’t get into a pissing contest with Kris.’ But Robert was very upset, very depressed, like you’d normally be when you’re losing a wife and children and a home, and you’re basically starting all over again.”

  Despite all the problems Kris had ignited with her affair, she still couldn’t get Todd Waterman out of her system. Amazingly, she still hoped to be with him.

  On a weekend when Robert had left the house and taken the children to Palm Springs, Kris tried to reach Waterman by phone. Unsuccessful, and even though it was the middle of the night, she drove to his apartment, which she had helped furnish. There, she claimed, she discovered the young bachelor in bed with another woman.

  Her instant response?

  “You fucking son of a bitch!”

  In her book, she says she suddenly realized she had ruined her life to be with him.

  But after finding him with another woman, she still wasn’t over him.

  As she stated, “That’s how crazy I was.”

  She had actually invited Waterman to go on a weekend ski trip with her close friends Candace and Steve Garvey—he a businessman and former first baseman for the Los Angeles Dodgers and, at the end of his career in the late eighties, the San Diego Padres. During his time at bat, he was a Most Valuable Player and all-star, who had earned the sobriquet “Mr. Clean” because of his wholesome public image in baseball.

  In her book, Kris portrays her pal Candace and her hubby the iconic ballplayer as a golden couple, a virtual Barbie and Ken.

  But Steve Garvey had a tarnished personal life unmentioned in Kris’s tome.

  In the same time frame that Kris was having her affair with Waterman, Garvey’s first wife, a local L.A. TV personality, published a tell-all entitled The Secret Life of Cyndy Garvey. She was the mother of Garvey’s two children, and one of her shocking allegations was that he had bizarrely given her away after seven years of marriage to a friend of hers, the award-winning composer Marvin Hamlisch, after the two men privately met in the Garveys’ den. “He was giving me away,” she wrote. “This was … too cold-blooded, even for Steve,” who had a reputation as a womanizer, and had a number of women in his life. Although he did not deny that he spoke with Hamlisch, Garvey remembers the conversation differently, claiming that his concern was with Cyndy’s happiness. Hamlisch, who died in 2012, married a woman named Terre Blair, an Ohio TV weather girl, the same year Cyndy Garvey’s book was published.

  Steve Garvey later met Kris’s close friend the former Candace Thomas, a divorcée in her mid-thirties with two adolescent daughters. They got engaged on the night of the 1989 Super Bowl, within weeks after meeting at a Deer Valley, Utah, ski event.

  People magazine, in a 1993 profile of Garvey and Candace, under the headline, “A Swinger No More,” noted that at the time Garvey married Candace, a popular bumper sticker read, “Honk If You’re Carrying Steve Garvey’s Love Child.” Kris’s friend Candace was quoted as saying, “The pain was excruciating. We cried and cried.” Back then Garvey, a staunch Republican, supported George H. W. Bush for president, and considered a run for the U.S. Senate from California despite what People called the “tacky publicity.”

  The tabloids were having as much of a field day with the Garveys’ private life as they would later with the bizarro world of the Kardashians.

  In April 2006, the Los Angeles Times detailed how Garvey was “plagued” with debt, even though he and Candace owned a mansion in tony Park City, Utah. “For years, Garvey and his wife, Candace, have neglected bills large and small, leaving dozens of people who either worked for them or sold them merchandise wondering if they were ever going to be paid,” the newspaper reported.

  A l
awyer who reportedly was owed $235,000 by Garvey declared, “Once a Dodger, always a dodger.”

  Despite the personal problems, and at Kris Kardashian’s invitation, Candace Garvey instantly became a close member of Kris’s hot, all-girl, hard-partying, big-spending Brentwood–Beverly Hills entourage, along with Nicole Simpson, Faye Resnick, and a few others. Like them, Garvey would be a witness for the prosecution at the O. J. Simpson murder trial.

  Blond, blue/green-eyed and with a grand-slam home-run figure, Garvey was everything Kris liked her friends to look, plus back in high school Candace was on the cheerleader squad, which Kris had failed to make.

  Asked in 2015 about Kris’s close female friends, her former brother-in-law, Tom Kardashian, responded, “Those are all—sorry, I just can’t say the word.”

  At the ski resort with Waterman and the Garveys, Kris hoped her hot times with her decade-younger lover could be rekindled. The setting was perfect: an outdoor Jacuzzi, a crackling fireplace in every room, champagne—until she spotted him flirting with sexy, much-younger Hawaiian Tropic bimbos who also were skimpily flitting around the resort.

  She was furious.

  When they got home, Kris told Waterman it was over. Seeing him eyeing women who were almost half her age, and with even bigger breast implants, Kris had come to the realization that she had made a “ginormous mistake” by giving up Robert and all the luxury that came with him for a sexual fling. Instead of criticizing Kardashian as a lousy lover and kisser, as she had done after getting a taste of Waterman, she was once again schizophrenically lauding him as “The greatest guy in the world … who encouraged me to be a good Christian,” according to the story she hawked to readers of her book.