The Kardashians Read online

  Meanwhile, back at Tower Lane, with both parents stubbornly refusing to vacate the luxe premises as their divorce proceeded, Kris Kardashian noted that her children were “living on a battlefield.”

  Joni Migdal observed what was happening and maintained that Kardashian was “always there” for his children. “He did his best to be a good father. They always had wonderful birthday parties. They went to church. Back then they were all down-to-earth kids, and the divorce devastated all of them. And there was the anger that Robert felt toward Kris, and the anger that Robert felt toward his life and himself.

  “It was horrible.”

  * * *

  DURING THE WHOLE DIVORCE and separation mess, Kris had befriended another young, attractive mother, Anita Friedman, whose unidentical twin daughters, Johanna and Elizabeth, had become chums with little Khloé Kardashian at the public El Rodeo Elementary School, in Beverly Hills, and the children had a number of playdates together.

  A Messianic Jew—one who believes that Jesus is the Messiah—Friedman was the wife of a journalist and author, Robert A. Friedman, who, like Robert Kardashian, had become a born-again Christian. One of his books was entitled What’s a Nice Jewish Boy Like You Doing in the First Baptist Church? He also wrote dialogue, she said, for Mickey Rooney, and boasted that his father had invented the flexible drinking straw, and the Sheaffer refill pen.

  While Anita Friedman had no knowledge at the time of Kris’s affair with Todd Waterman, she knew her marriage was on the rocks, that there was a separation in progess, and that the turmoil at home was having an emotional impact on six-year-old Khloé, who she recalls was “sweet, but very passive.” And Friedman viewed Kris as a “bored housewife” who sported Chanel everywhere she went.

  Later, when it all came out about Kris’s affair and the divorce, Friedman said she looked back to that time and realized that Kris must have been thrilled knowing she could run off to meet her lover and be able to drop off Khloé “for a playdate, and Khloé was my girls’ go-to friend.”

  And Friedman found her to be a wonderful child.

  “I remember looking at Khloé at Christmas break, and she’s standing there with a cage with a guinea pig in it and she was by herself and everybody was getting picked up, and I go, ‘Hi, sweetheart, are you getting picked up?’ And she says, ‘Yes, my daddy’s picking me up.’ And when I looked at her, I thought, this girl has no guile whatsoever. She’s just the sweetest, and the nicest—very unpretentious, not pushy, and I think my daughters kind of pretty much ruled her—‘let’s play this, let’s play that.’

  “She had those beautiful greenish-blue eyes and that golden hair and she did absolutely look different from the rest of them,” continued Friedman. “Lately, when they [the tabloid and celebrity media] are showing possible fathers for Khloé, she looks just like that hairdresser, and he looks like Khloé—they have the same facial structure, and those eyes.”

  Later, when Khloé was a teenager, she was working with her older sisters in a boutique they had in the L.A. suburb of Calabasas, and Friedman and her daughters spotted her there. She looked completely different and had lost her childhood cuteness.

  “She looked like the dregs,” recalled Friedman. “Black hair and black bangs, and very goth.”

  In the midst of the Kardashians’ divorce battle, Kris had invited Friedman to a birthday party for little Khloé, and because it was a swim party at the Kardashian pool she decided to stay to keep a watch over her daughters because Kris didn’t have a lifeguard present, and it was “just a free-for-all type party.”

  The only man present was Khloé’s father, who Friedman had never before met, and Kardashian was seated “away from everybody,” cleaning a separate spa pool with a net on his property. Since Kris was visibly ignoring him and not making any introductions, the gregarious Mrs. Friedman, seeing how glum and lonely he appeared, decided to introduce herself.

  “So I went and sat with him,” she said, “and he was very downcast, very sad, very disturbed, and very angry because they were breaking up, even though they were still living in the same house. He was very cordial, very sweet, but very down, but not just depressed—it was more of an anger, and he had a right to be angry. He was looking at the kids in the pool in the distance and he seemed sad.

  “I was talking to him and the talk turned to England because my family had lived there for a year, and he says out of the blue, ‘I have a castle in Ireland.’ Castles in Ireland weren’t that pricey in those days, and since this was Beverly Hills, it didn’t strike me as an outrageous idea that he had one in Ireland.” (However, no one in Kardashian’s circle recalls that he had ever owned such a property.)

  Friedman noted that there was absolutely no communication between Kris and Kardashian during the party. Kris was in a bikini, and carrying Rob, then about three, and “she’s got her sister with her and they were whispering and giggling about Mr. Kardashian. There was great tension in the air. There was a great disconnect, and there was animosity.”

  What surprised Friedman, too, was how Kris looked stripped down to a skimpy swimsuit.

  “It’s not like she had lard, it didn’t look like she had cellulite, but she didn’t look that great,” recalled Friedman. “But I’m looking at her and I remember thinking, this gal is divorcing her husband and she’s got four children, but she’s looking like she’s getting ready to be over the hill—not run-down or anything, but not looking her best, even though she was a pretty woman.”

  At one point, Friedman walked into the Kardashian home and the first thing that struck her was an immense oil painting of the Kardashian family “when they were all younger, and wow, did Kris look beautiful in that picture, which was the focal point of the living room.”

  Wandering to the kitchen, she stopped suddenly in the entrance to avoid interrupting the tender scene she had come upon.

  “Kourtney and Kim were hugging Robert, saying, ‘We love you, Daddy.’ They kept telling him how much they loved him, and that they were going to miss him because he was going to San Francisco for the weekend, and he had his bags with him.”

  * * *

  SOME MONTHS LATER, EL RODEO Elementary was holding an open house for parents and, Friedman had never forgotten, “Kris rolls in and she now looks really good. She’s reinvented herself, and she looks really skinny, and she’s wearing this short little pencil skirt and a beautiful, gorgeous Irish green Chanel jacket and carrying a Chanel purse, of course, and who does she have in tow but Bruce Jenner, who was her new beau, but they weren’t married yet, and he’s kind of hanging out, and he was not in a pencil skirt at the time.

  “Today I can just imagine Robert Kardashian watching this whole Kardashian-Jenner insanity from heaven. Who would have thought that chick in the bathing suit carrying baby Rob around at that party for little Khloé was going to do what she was going to do. I thought her glory days were almost over back then. Little did I know.”

  EIGHTEEN

  Enter Jenner

  Bruce Jenner, the gold medal Olympian with a mind-boggling secret, entered Kris Kardashian’s dysfunctional world courtesy of Candace Garvey. It was late in 1990 and Jenner—having just turned forty-one a few days before Halloween, his favorite holiday; he loved to dress up—had been divorced for four years from his second wife, Elvis’s former live-in, Linda Thompson. When Garvey, playing cupid, arranged to set up Kris with Jenner, he was then the prolific father of three sons and a daughter from two failed marriages. But he was open for a new and better relationship; a three-time loser back then he wasn’t.

  Jenner was intrigued when his friend Candace told him about her friend Kris, especially when he learned that she was a stylish dresser, and Bruce always liked the way certain women outfitted themselves. Garvey, for instance, favored a preppy look and, according to Kris, “dressed like a Ralph Lauren model.” For Jenner, that was a turn-on, kind of butch but still sexy. But back then, long before he became Caitlyn Marie Jenner, he didn’t care much about how he himself dressed, at le
ast in public, and usually was attired in sweats like the jock that he was reputed to be.

  As Kris put it after meeting him, “He had been living alone too long and didn’t care about his appearance.”

  It would be almost a quarter century later that Bruce Jenner, having transitioned in 2015 to her new identity—with nails and toes and lips painted red—could openly be all dolled up like she had always wanted to be, and with famous designers vying to dress her.

  Candace Garvey thought Bruce and Kris, then with eight kids between them, would make for a perfect match. Kris wasn’t so sure, but agreed with Garvey that she’d go out on a blind date with Jenner, mainly just to get Garvey off her back.

  Her divorce still wasn’t finalized, but she went on her pal’s word that Bruce Jenner was one “great guy.”

  Based on Kris’s checkered history, golf courses and racetracks were her usual venues for meeting future lovers—for instance, Cesar Sanudo she had met at the Hawaiian Open, Kardashian she had spotted at the Del Mar Thoroughbred Club—so it was no surprise that her first get-together and date with Bruce Jenner was at the Riviera Country Club in Pacific Palisades, where he and Steve Garvey were playing in a tournament. Jenner was a minor sports celebrity earning a meager living off his name, appearing in obscure athletic events, or giving paid speeches to organizations such as the Boy Scouts of America, who still revered him as a long-ago Olympic headliner.

  But the moment Kris laid eyes on him she thought he was “adorable,” and he spontaneously gave her a big “bear hug.”

  The next day he called and invited her to come to Florida with him, where he was going to be in some sporting events for a few days, and she jumped at the opportunity. During that trip she discovered that her still-far-in-the-future reality TV husband turned transgender diva was “such an exciting guy.… We just loved each other from the start.”

  By early 1991, Kris, still entangled in divorce proceedings with Kardashian, was sleeping with Jenner and rated him her “best lover.”

  But it wasn’t all a bed of roses.

  Todd Waterman, Kris’s other “best lover,” later claimed that they were still seeing each other even after she had gotten involved with Jenner.

  “I wouldn’t say we were dating, we were still communicating,” he asserted in 2013. “She was still coming over to the apartment, and we were still sleeping together when she had started dating Bruce. I would say that she was getting serious with him and we were still occasionally seeing each other, and it was messing with my head. I think we just had a hard time keeping away from each other.”

  In her book, Kris made it seem that Waterman had just suddenly appeared out of the blue again, and she made no mention of continuing a physical relationship with him.

  When gossip items began appearing about the relatively long-forgotten, twice previously married Bruce Jenner suddenly being romantically involved with the then publicly unknown Kris Kardashian—items that attention-hungry Kris herself might have leaked—Waterman showed up “on a wild and drunken binge” late one night at Tower Lane, Kris claims, yelling, “Fucking Bruce Jenner!? That is horrible. I want you back!” She says she convinced him to leave.

  He next reached her on her car phone a few days later, and Jenner picked up and told him to take a hike, or else.

  “Finally, I was able to close the door forever” on Waterman, who Kris still identified as “Ryan” in her book.

  Jenner then had a Hamburger Hamlet mano a mano with Kardashian and told him, Kris claims, that she wanted nothing out of the divorce—not the Tower Lane estate, worth millions, none of the luxury cars, nothing—except for child support, if he would just end this “nightmare of a divorce.”

  Kardashian, who would have fought tooth and nail to avoid giving Kris one red cent because of her blatant promiscuity and mistreatment of him, was thrilled with the offer, and agreed without hesitation.

  In early 1991, Kris called her lawyer and told him it was a done deal. The Kardashian marriage was over.

  * * *

  DURING THE DIVORCE PROCEEDINGS a six-page psychological profile was done, which showed Kris to have “histrionic and narcissistic traits,” and stated that both she and Kardashian were prone to “impulsivity” and had “a strong need for attention.” The report, first quoted in a celebrity weekly, also disclosed that Kardashian had a “more intense need for closeness and the approval of others,” while Kris appeared to have “less need for others’ approval, but a greater need that her sense of specialness be mirrored.” The profile went on to state that Kris had a “Cinderella attitude where situations resulted in everyone living ‘happily ever after.’” And Kardashian was viewed as “impulsive when overwhelmed.”

  Along with child support, the deal Jenner and Kardashian hashed out at that Sunset Boulevard burger joint was that Kris and the children could remain in Kardashian’s Tower Lane estate—his prize bought with the several million dollars he had made from the sale of Radio & Records—for a period of six months, until she could find other housing. But Jenner, who had little money of his own, who was living in a dumpy little house and “was no Rockefeller,” according to Kris, also moved into Robert’s beloved domicile. To steam Kardashian even more, Jenner brought with him as temporary tenants his own parents, Esther and Bill Jenner, to enjoy all the Kardashian luxury.

  Simply put, Kardashian was “very pissed off,” according to friends.

  While Kris didn’t mention in her book where Robert settled after she, Jenner, his folks, and Kardashian’s children became the sole temporary occupants of Tower Lane, it was his childhood friend, close confidante Joni Migdal who gave her emotionally wounded one-time lover shelter from the marital storm.

  “When she asked him to move out of Tower Lane and he moved into my house, and Bruce Jenner moved into his house with his parents, Robert was devastated,” said Migdal. “And he turned from being the sweet, wonderful friend I had for a lot of my life to being an angry, unsettled, depressed human being. I have always adored Robert. He and I have always been best friends, but he just changed with that whole thing with Bruce moving into his house.”

  When the move happened, Kris had also asked Robert for a “lot of money,” and, as Migdal recalled the situation, Kardashian told her he’d give her not a penny. “She needed lots of money to support the kids. I said, ‘Robert, you’ve got four kids, and now she has the kids and you’ve got to support them,’ and he finally gave it to her, but he gave it to her unwillingly and with anger.”

  Migdal believed the stress, anger, and anxiety Kardashian felt was a factor in his cancer and his death a decade later. “And that’s when he first started getting sick with his esophageal stuff, with serious acid reflux.… He had never been an angry man, but with the divorce with Kris he became an angry man.”

  For about three months, Kardashian stayed in the guest room of Migdal’s Marina del Rey home with a view of the Pacific, but the beauty of the setting did nothing to alleviate his depression and anger. Migdal tried as best she could to help him through. After breakfast, she would run with him on the beach, and they would have long talks “for many, many hours,” she’d never forgotten. “We’d talk about his anger, how Kris could do this to him, how she could have Bruce move into his home. Robert was not happy. He was very angry. He was devastated. He lost it.”

  Kardashian couldn’t take it anymore and decided he wanted his house back and vacated—with Kris, with her lover Jenner, with her lover Jenner’s parents, and even with his own beloved kids, out of there. He just wanted to be back in the home he loved—his Beverly Hills version of Manderley, and with all his possessions, but without all the gothic drama.

  But he was in for still another depressing shocker.

  Kris and the gang had trashed the place.

  “When they eventually left that beautiful, beautiful house, it was a mess,” asserted Migdal. “I was there when Robert was walking through after they all left. The kitchen was trashed. There was food everywhere. They had this quilte
d wallpaper and there was paint on it and crayon markings. They had just done everything they could to trash the place.

  “Robert had spent so much money fixing it up when he bought it, so he was amazed—because it now looked like a squatter had come into the house and just written on the walls, damaged the place. It was horrible. There was writing all over the walls. The kitchen was burned. When Robert moved back in, the house was a mess, and that made him really angry.”

  Looking back to that time and the heated atmosphere between Robert and Kris, Migdal believed that the vandalism “was purposeful” and done because Kardashian had told them all “they needed to move out. They had been there for a few months.”

  Kardashian’s other close friend, Larry Kraines, part of the same clique going back as many years as Migdal, was shocked when he heard about the damage, mainly because he had known Jenner far longer than Kris had and couldn’t comprehend him participating in any form of vandalism. “Bruce was an outgoing guy, an interesting, nice guy. I can’t imagine him doing anything like that.”

  The two had become acquainted in the late seventies, early eighties when Kraines’s company, Kraco, founded by his father, was sponsoring Indy 500 cars and Jenner was then covering the Indy car races as an announcer for NBC Sports. “I know Bruce knew that Robert and I were closest friends, and Kris made no mistake about that. When Kris met Bruce and they later got married, we didn’t communicate a lot. If I stayed close to someone it was my friend from high school, Robert.”

  In her book, Kris makes no mention of the mess she and Jenner left behind when they moved out of Tower Lane, as witnessed by Migdal and Kardashian. Instead, she simply states that she and Jenner leased a house in Malibu. She called the move a “nice transition … It got me out of Beverly Hills.”

  But once again she skipped over what had really happened.

  Kardashian, in fact, had put up all, or most of the required rental money for Kris’s new place after being convinced to help by his confidante Migdal. “I said, ‘You have to do it. Your kids are going to live there, and you want them to live in a nice place.’ His heart was so good. He was always generous in spirit.”