The Kardashians Page 2

  PART I

  The “Momager”

  ONE

  Stay Classy, San Diego

  Forget about the big homes, the designer clothes, the fancy cars, the private jets, the millions of dollars’ worth of diamond jewelry famously stolen from daughter Kim in Paris in 2016, the celebrity lifestyle, and the immense riches. Nouveau riche Kris Houghton Kardashian Jenner’s predominate family roots are buried deep in the poor, mostly unschooled Deep South, and the simple blue-collar Midwestern folk of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century heartland America. Hillary Clinton might have used the term “deplorables” to describe them.

  Kristen Mary Houghton, the future ambitious momager of the Kardashian-Jenner clan, who came into the world on November 5, 1955, was essentially brought up by her down-home, domineering, all-business maternal grandmother, Lou Ethel Wyatt Campbell Fairbanks.

  She was Kris’s “hero” and “most instrumental” in her upbringing.

  Kris’s mother, Mary Jo Campbell Houghton Shannon, was Kris’s “pillar of strength,” but in a far different way.

  There was, however, little or no paternal influence. Kris’s father, Robert True Houghton, was an alcoholic who abandoned the family when Kris was seven and her sister, Karen, was four.

  Lou Ethel would have very little fame, unlike her granddaughter and great-granddaughters, a bit of fortune with a small business, and a troubled time with men. She was born in Jackson, Missouri—scene of two fatal cholera epidemics that struck in the nineteenth century—ten days before Halloween in 1913. She was the only child of native Mississippian Walter Wyatt, said to be a physician’s son, and Mary Wyatt, known as “Tiny.”

  Hope, Arkansas, where Lou Ethel reportedly was raised, was famous as the birthplace of William Jefferson Clinton, governor of Arkansas and president of the United States. Like Lou Ethel, Clinton’s mother, Virginia Clinton Kelley, had man trouble, too, and had four marriages. Lou Ethel would have at least two.

  Her first husband was one Gordon Lowe Campbell, a native of tiny Tulsa and Sapulpa, Oklahoma, a burg called Mounds, in Creek County, a tiny dot on the map that never had a population of much over a thousand—and that was only when the oil boom struck Oklahoma during the Roaring Twenties. But the poor Campbells never had a gusher, let alone a trickle of the black gold.

  Their town was once called Eufaula, but in the late 1800s the whole place—lock, stock, and barrel—was moved five miles away—why is unclear—and was oddly renamed Mounds, because of the nearby twin hills, and not because of the popular coconut candy bar that came in two chocolate mounds but still hadn’t as yet been invented.

  No one known to be famous had ever come out of Mounds.

  On September 4, 1932, with the Great Depression ravaging the nation, Lou Ethel married Campbell, and two years later, in October 1934, she had her one and only known child, a daughter.

  The Campbells called her Mary Jo—a good old down-home name. “M.J.,” as she also was known, was the future mother of the momager Kris and the future maternal grandmother of Kourtney, Kim, Khloé, and Rob, from Kris’s first marriage, to Robert Kardashian, and Kendall and Kylie, from her second, to Bruce Jenner.

  But the Lou Ethel Wyatt–Gordon Campbell union bit the dust sometime after Mary Jo’s birth: Lou Ethel discovered that Gordon was allegedly cheating on her—cheating being a familiar theme in Kris Jenner’s biography—so her grandmother packed her bags and, with Mary Jo in tow, left Kris’s maternal grandfather.

  About six years after M.J. came into the world, and not long before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entry into World War II, her philandering father remarried, taking as his wife one Juanita Ethel Patton, a Missouri telephone operator and a Baptist. They had a daughter, Carolyn Sue.

  Gordon Campbell died at the age of forty-two in 1951, according to an obituary.

  When Lou Ethel left him, she had hightailed it to sunny Southern California, and the lively military and tourist town of San Diego—home in contemporary pop culture to the fictional goofy TV news anchorman Ron Burgundy, whose ironic signature sign-off was “Stay classy, San Diego.”

  There, Lou Ethel, who was business-minded, got a job supposedly doing some sort of accounting at San Diego’s sprawling U.S. Navy and Marine Corps base.

  As Kris later described it, her “very strong-willed and stubborn” grandmother had the “gumption to leave,” deciding “she didn’t need a man in her life.”

  Many years later Lou Ethel’s granddaughter, Kris, would make it onto Wikipedia’s long list of famous San Diegans, among many of her other unexpected and very surprising achievements.

  Despite Kris’s claim, Lou Ethel found that she did, indeed, need a man in her life, and married another blue-collar fellow, by the name of James Edwin Fairbanks, originally from Arcola City, Illinois, birthplace in the late nineteenth century of John Barton Gruelle, creator of Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy.

  In San Diego, Kris’s step-grandfather, Jim Fairbanks, was a menial-labor truck driver who hauled panes of glass for San Diego Glass and Paint, and was, as Kris later described, “pure working-class Middle America.” In other words, he was a mensch, at least compared to Lou Ethel’s philandering first husband.

  Fairbanks became the male figure in Kris’s life, and Lou Ethel was the matriarch.

  Kris’s mother, Mary Jo, and Kris herself would both follow in Lou Ethel’s footsteps, each having at least two marriages and marital problems. A couple of Kris’s daughters would, too.

  In that family, history definitely repeated itself.

  Mary Jo, tall and slender, was a very attractive girl, and Lou Ethel apparently saw money-making potential in her looks, so when M.J. was fifteen, she was enrolled in a San Diego charm school called Fashionality, where hairdos, makeup, posture, and hemlines were taught. A representative of the school often traveled around lecturing to women’s groups, such as the Chula Vista Woman’s Club. Mary Jo later claimed that she had done some modeling, but there’s nothing that could be found by the author in the public domain to support such an assertion.

  Known for her hype, exaggeration, and image-creation, Kris would later compare her mother’s looks and fashion sense to none other than one of America’s most glamorous first ladies, Jacqueline Kennedy, claiming that Mary Jo always looked like she was wearing “some fabulous Chanel ensemble.”

  Like her mother, who married an adulterer the first time around, Mary Jo also clearly didn’t make the greatest choices in men, and married at least two who were alcoholics.

  The first, Robert True Houghton (pronounced Ho-ton), was the biological father of Kris and her younger sister, Karen.

  Mary Jo knew Bob Houghton, three years her senior, when they both attended Herbert Hoover High School in San Diego—he was in the class of 1949, she in the class of 1952—and he always thought she was the prettiest girl in school. But it wasn’t until later that they became an item. He was then working as an aeronautical draftsman in the aerospace field—Kris described him as an “engineer”—employed at San Diego’s big airplane manufacturing company, Convair.

  Mary Jo and Bob were married in the white-bread Eisenhower era of the early 1950s—but the Houghtons were nothing like the fictional middle-class Andersons of Father Knows Best TV fame, the fifties program that exemplified happy, middle-class, morally upright American family life.

  The Houghtons were more the Andersons’ dysfunctional next-door neighbors.

  Bob and Mary Jo were living in a working-class section of San Diego called Point Loma, a seaside community and home to several military installations, when Kris was born, a month after her mother’s twenty-first birthday. If one believes in the Zodiac signs of astrology, Kris turned out to be a true Scorpio, good and bad—sexual, secretive, manipulative, independent, resourceful, and dynamic, she was all of them and more.

  Her father was tall, handsome, and slim with striking very dark brown, almost pitch-black eyes, which his daughter Kris would inherit, and which would be the only good DNA of his
that was handed down to her, except for an aggressive ability he had to pitch and sell anything to anybody. Because of her eyes, people who knew Kris would say she looked like Natalie Wood. Her first husband, Robert Kardashian, especially was mesmerized by them, but other men would be, too.

  Three years after Kris was born, Mary Jo gave birth to another girl, who the Houghtons named Karen. (Kris would later carry on the tradition of naming her own daughters with the first letter K, but it had nothing to do with the name Kardashian, as would be claimed.)

  In 2013, Mary Jo gave a curious and very superficial interview to a fashion writer for The Daily Beast. It took place in the children’s clothing boutique she owned in La Jolla, where a large framed photo of her famous—and infamous—granddaughter Kim Kardashian hung on the wall, appropriately enough behind the cash register, for customers to ogle.

  M.J. offered some biographical data about herself and her children and grandchildren, but oddly never once mentioned that she had been married to Bob Houghton, father of her two daughters, Kris and Karen, and paternal grandfather of Kim and her Kardashian siblings, and with whom Mary Jo had lived for a decade, stormy though their union may have been.

  Instead, under the headline “Keeping Up with Granny Kardashian: Meet Mary Jo Shannon,” she questionably claimed, and it was duly reported, that she “married her high school sweetheart at the age of eighteen,” not identified by her, and that “they divorced after two months.” That marriage would have taken place around the time she graduated from Herbert Hoover High School. Two years later, she said, she had Kris. She said she then “remarried twice”—no names mentioned—and remained with the last guy, one Harry Shannon, “for forty years,” until his death. Depending on who’s keeping score, the momager’s mom may have had three or four husbands based on the statistics she offered, but she made no mention of the man who actually fathered her famous daughter.

  As a close family source who read the story later observed, “What M.J. says is really strange. It just doesn’t compute.”

  In any case, the year Kris was born, the number one album in the United States was Love Me or Leave Me, an Academy Award–nominated Doris Day soundtrack from the romance film of the same name.

  In 1962, when Kris was seven and Karen four, Bob Houghton and Mary Jo split after a decade of rocky marriage with much bickering and fighting regarding his drinking and verbal abusiveness. They didn’t love each other anymore, and he decided to leave, just like in the lyrics of that Doris Day number.

  Mary Jo filed for divorce in San Diego in October 1963, citing “extreme cruelty,” and received custody of her two daughters, and their father severed all contact.

  As Kris later stated, “The divorce was tough for me and had lasting effects.”

  Kris and Karen would not reunite again with their father until more than a decade later, when Kris, about eighteen, was living with a golf pro, the Mexican-born Cesar Sanudo, and was being chased by the Armenian American lawyer Robert Kardashian.

  Bob Houghton had by then returned to San Diego from Los Angeles, where he had moved after the divorce, and was living with a woman by the name of Leslie Johnson Leach.

  The two couples, Kris’s father and his girlfriend, Leslie, about a decade his junior, and Kris, a dozen years younger than her lover, Sanudo, would actually double date, and Kris would be witness for the first time to her father’s drunken rages and abusiveness.

  Houghton was an irresponsible alcoholic who didn’t even carry insurance on his classic red-orange Porsche coupe. He would later die after drinking and then driving that sports car, slamming into a truck head-on and leaving his passenger, the mother of two young boys he had planned to take as his second wife, almost a cripple. But all of that was far in the future.

  Several years after Houghton had walked out on Kris’s mother, Mary Jo, she had a new man in her life.

  His name was Harry Shannon.

  Like Bob Houghton, Harry was an alcoholic.

  M.J. could certainly pick ’em.

  During the three years they dated on and off before marrying, Shannon showed his hard-drinking persona. Once, in the middle of the night, for example, he showed up banging on Mary Jo’s bedroom window and her front door, waking her daughters, causing a major commotion in his effort to see her, and frightening Kris, then about ten, and Karen, about seven. Neighbors were said to have complained, and probably wished that that rowdy bunch next door would move.

  Mary Jo finally put her foot down and ordered Shannon to sober up if he wanted to get serious with her, or get lost. She used the old “my way or the highway” to force him to stop drinking if he wanted her, and he actually did quit.

  Harry’s mantra, according to Kris, was: “If you want something bad enough, and are willing to change your life for it, you can do anything.”

  Like her mother, Kris would have the ability to manipulate and influence men, as her future would hold.

  Harry Shannon was a character and a hustler, hawking yachts at one point, and even had gotten into the abalone—that’s a fish—processing business at another point, but lost a bankroll when a partner took off with it. Unstoppable, and always able to find a way to make a buck, Shannon turned up for a time across from SeaWorld, in San Diego, as the proprietor of a used-car rental business called Ugly Duckling Rent-A-Car, and still later he was known in the San Diego automobile dealers’ trade as the guy who pinstriped new cars. He also found a moneymaking calling installing television antennas, crawling up on people’s roofs like Spider-Man.

  The lovebirds tied the knot in style in June 1968 in beautiful and romantic Puerto Vallarta, on Mexico’s Pacific coast.

  They were, Kris later pointed out, “just like” Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton (also an alcoholic), who put Puerto Vallarta on the map as a sublime and very private getaway for the rich and famous and lovers of all persuasions.

  Burton and Taylor, each married to someone else, established a love nest there called Casa Kimberly, which was the name of a villa owned by the director John Huston. Years later, Casa Kimberly and Puerto Vallarta held such fond memories for Mary Jo that when Kris gave birth to her second child on October 21, 1980, it was M.J. who suggested that the baby be named Kimberly—as in Casa Kimberly, in honor of the clandestine Burton-Taylor hideaway in Puerto Vallarta littered with Burton’s liquor bottles, where infant Kimberly “Kim” Noel Kardashian’s grandmother and the newborn’s grandfather took the vows of holy matrimony. Kris however, would later claim that she named Kim after a girlfriend named Kimberly.

  In any case, Harry made Mary Jo an honest woman by marrying her.

  In her memoir, Kris Jenner boasted about what a great guy the once liquored-up, high-energy salesman Harry Shannon was, who she now called “Dad.” After developing what was said to be a staph infection in the hospital following an auto accident, Shannon, in his mid-seventies, died in 2003, the same year Robert Kardashian passed away.

  While Harry Shannon was trying to find the right moneymaking proposition back in the early 1960s, he and Mary Jo and the kids, Kris and Karen, moved like Okies from one Southern California location to another. Kris was unhappy, later revealing, “I never again wanted to be in the position of being completely powerless to do something about a situation I didn’t want to be in.”

  They finally settled down, moving around the mid-1960s to a relatively new development of cookie-cutter single homes, duplexes, and apartments called University City in the San Diego community of Clairemont.

  Financially, Kris’s family was in better shape and seemingly more stable. Stepfather Harry Shannon was bringing in money, and Kris’s maternal grandmother, Lou Ethel Fairbanks, had opened a small business called the Candelabra, selling candles and other decorations in La Jolla, with her husband, the truck driver, helping her out on his off-time. Kris and Karen’s mom, Mary Jo, was working a variety of jobs—she had even purchased a flashy Ford Thunderbird convertible, circa 1956, and much later opened her own candle shop, Candles of La Jolla, located ne
xt to a waffle shop. Still later, she was the proprietor of a small children’s clothing store in La Jolla, but by then her daughter Kris was a high-living housewife of Beverly Hills, married to Robert Kardashian.

  TWO

  School Days

  Schooling was never a big priority for Kris Houghton, as schooling had never been of great importance for her forebears up to and including her maternal grandmother and her mother, neither of whom ever went beyond high school. Two of Kris’s daughters, Kim and Khloé, would follow the same path, but Kourtney would attend and get a degree from the University of Arizona, a noted party school, and Kris’s troubled son, Rob, would follow, somewhat, in his father’s footsteps and attend USC, graduating in 2009 from the Marshall School of Business. He was later reportedly caught lying when he tweeted that he had been accepted at a law school.

  In Kris’s three-hundred-page memoir, she sums up her twelve years of public school education in very few words; to wit: “I went to school, I got good grades, I had lots of friends.”

  But shining a spotlight on that important period of her life reveals much about the persona of the budding momager.

  At the age of twelve, in seventh grade at Marston Middle School, located on Clairemont Drive, in Clairemont, fresh-faced, congenial Kris Houghton had volunteered to work as an office aide, telling one of the ladies there that she planned to be either a schoolteacher or a secretary when she grew up, and that she believed being around the school office would be good experience for her.

  But she may have had another reason for volunteering: by working in the office, she was able to skip gym class, which she hated.

  Kris had a vivacious personality even back then and could easily charm people and make them feel comfortable, so she anointed herself the school office’s unofficial greeter, welcoming anxious parents and helping nervous new students in the school, which served seventh, eighth, and ninth graders.