The Kardashians Read online

  When Robert began introducing Kris Houghton to the glamour of Beverly Hills in the mid-seventies, before they were married, the Luau was the first place he took her to dinner. The waiter brought what Robert told Kris was an exotic appetizer, coconut rolls, a Polynesian dish. The unsophisticated Clairemont High graduate turned junior stewardess was more accustomed to Pink’s Hot Dogs on La Brea than a hip eatery on Rodeo Drive. Long after, Kardashian would tell the story often, embarrassing Kris by revealing that the coconut rolls were actually warm hand towels.

  Many years later, after two heart bypass operations and dealing with diabetes, seventy-five-year-old Tom Kardashian reminisced in 2015 about those seventies glory days on the prowl in Beverly Hills. “On most evenings, unless it was one where I had to get up and go to the office early, as a single guy you would just go by the Luau and see who was there, and you’d run into girls who knew all these guys who were hanging out there, and you’d run into your guy friends, and then you didn’t even care about the girls. The girls came and followed the guys.”

  The Kardashians, both slick charmers—Robert in his mid-twenties, Tom in his late twenties—had become regulars and had befriended the Luau’s smooth maître d’, Joe Stellini, a native of the tough New York City borough of the Bronx, who happened to be married to Joni Migdal’s manicurist but who later reportedly dated the actress Jill St. John. It was Stellini, once described as “somewhat thin-skinned” and “macho,” who first introduced Robert and Tom to O.J. and his pal Al Cowlings.

  “O.J. would come in the Luau,” said Kardashian, “and Stellini told him you got to meet these other USC guys, the Kardashians. They are guys you should know.”

  Robert hero-worshipped O.J., once the god of the USC football team, and instantly bonded with him. The term “bromance” wasn’t invented back then, but that’s what existed between the Armenian-American and the African-American.

  “O.J. had charisma and he was just a very energetic guy that people enjoyed being around,” said Tom Kardashian. “And O.J.’s closest friend at that time was Al Cowlings [who had grown up with Simpson in the San Francisco–area projects], and Al was the same kind of charismatic guy. My brother was charismatic as well and he had things. He had girls around him that were attractive—and O.J. needed to associate with that.”

  Stellini also told O.J. that the Kardashians had a couple of wealthy friends, also brothers and Luau regulars, whose father was a multimillionaire oilman. Like the Kardashians and O.J., Harry and Peter Rothschild (both of whom died in 2015, in their seventies) had been USC alumni.

  “Harry and I were friends,” said Kardashian, “and we would go to the USC football games together, and I used to take tennis lessons at Harry’s house, and then O.J.—who had a Black Power ghetto-style Afro back in those days—started taking lessons at Harry’s house, and so it was another place for all of us to hang out and have parties and stuff like that.”

  Soon, Robert and O.J. and Tom and others were volleying together regularly on the Rothschild court. And the close bond between the pro football player, who favored being around affluent white guys over his black brethren, and the Armenian-American brothers, who idolized football players, black or white, took hold.

  Speaking of the parties at Harry Rothschild’s Beverly Hills mansion on Summit Drive—an estate later purchased by Priscilla Presley—Kardashian noted, “If there was anything there was alcohol and drinking, but never drugs. I was not a drug person. If you go by the statistics, the firstborn son [Tom himself] is always conservative, but the second-born son [Robert] gets away with whatever he wants to, and takes more chances.” He didn’t elaborate. But Joni Migdal swore she never saw Robert use drugs, and noted that he rarely ever even drank alcohol. He favored tea, she said. O.J., however, was rumored to have used cocaine when it was the go-to recreational drug in the swinging seventies, when he became a charter member of team Kardashian.

  Soon after bonding with the Kardashian boys, O.J.—then playing for the Buffalo Bills, and in an emotionally abusive and cheating marriage with his first wife, Marguerite—became like a third Kardashian brother, practically living with them at their house on Deep Canyon Drive in Beverly Hills when he was regularly on the outs with his wife, usually because of his womanizing, and usually with younger white women.

  When future momager Kris Houghton first became romantically involved with Robert and was spending more and more time at the Kardashian brothers’ bachelor pad, she saw that O.J. was constantly there, was practically one of the brothers, and she likened them to the Three Musketeers.

  “O.J. admired and looked up to Robert. O.J. enjoyed the fine things in life. He wanted to be successful. He saw how Robert and Tom lived, in that beautiful home, and he wanted it,” Kris later observed to a writer. And her perception of O.J. and Robert was a startling projection of her own desire to have Robert, be successful, and live the high life. “O.J.… really respected Robert’s opinion in his personal life,” Kris continued. “When O.J. needed somebody, Robert was there. O.J. would always stop by Robert’s law office. Robert acted as his attorney.”

  When O.J. decided to buy his English Tudor mansion at 360 Rockingham, in the very affluent, fast-lane West Los Angeles neighborhood of Brentwood, made famous during his later murder trial, it was Robert Kardashian who inspected the house with O.J. and gave him the high sign to buy it. And it was Robert who introduced O.J. to the man who would become O.J.’s business manager and financial guru, Leroy “Skip” Taft.

  Hanging out with Robert at his house, Kris was once approached by O.J., who walked her to the phone and prodded her to dial a certain number and ask to “speak to Jennifer.” Kris made the call, and when Jennifer got on the line, O.J. grabbed the phone. Kris later understood that O.J. had asked her to make the call because the white girl was very young, possibly still in high school, and O.J. didn’t want her parents, who might answer the call, to hear his older, masculine, black voice.

  “I never asked too many questions in those days,” Kris, then married to Bruce Jenner, said later. “I was so young, I just watched. But I did think it was strange that O.J. was always over at the house with Robert and Tommy, and always calling these girls. I mean, wasn’t he married? I remember thinking, ‘Boy, if I ever get married to someone who travels, I’m never going to let him travel without me. Look what happens!”

  That from the woman who cheated on her first lover, Cesar Sanudo, with the man she then married, Kardashian, and then would also cheat on him before he divorced her.

  * * *

  IN THE EARLY MORNING hours of June 13, 1994, the brutally butchered bodies of Kris Jenner’s close friend Nicole Brown Simpson, thirty-five-year-old mother of two, and her occasional friend, twenty-five-year-old Ronald Goldman, who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, were found outside Nicole’s town house, where she had moved after separating from O.J., then forty-seven.

  With Simpson as the prime suspect, the case riveted the nation, and then fractured it racially. The murder, trial, and aftermath would make the Kardashian name, for the first time, both famous and infamous, and a part of history. It would also lead to Robert Kardashian’s emotional, physical, and financial fall, which would escape the media and the public.

  Kardashian would play a key role as O.J.’s loyal friend and defender in the almost nine-month nationally televised trial, and he would—like many across the country, and in particular the prosecutors, Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden—express shock and horror when, on October 3, 1995, the predominately black jury, after just four hours of deliberations, returned a verdict of not guilty.

  Whites were seen crying, and blacks cheering.

  Just before the verdict was returned, early that morning, Kardashian, the born-again Christian, spent time in the visitor’s cell with O.J. and led him in prayer. “I prayed to God, not that this man be set free, but that ‘thy will be done.’ Only you know, God, what has happened here.’”

  In fact, by the time of that brief prayer meeting
, Kardashian had lost all faith in his friend’s innocence, felt betrayed, and was devastated. That whole loving Kardashian-Simpson brotherhood would end.

  Unknown to the public and to those in the media and to the principals who wrote millions of words, or made or appeared in films and television programs about the case through the years, Kardashian’s life would become a living hell over the next seven years and eleven months, culminating in his death from esophageal cancer just three days before the eighth anniversary of Simpson’s acquittal.

  Kardashian thought he would exit the case as a national hero, as the ultimate loyal friend. Instead, he would be demonized as much as the acquitted defendant whom he had stood by. There would be anonymous midnight calls, threatening his life and the lives of his children, and he would be virtually blacklisted in the Beverly Hills society in which he ran.

  “No one ever turned their back on someone like they did on Robert over the O.J. thing,” recalled his longtime confidant Joni Migdal. “We would be driving in his convertible and people would spit on him—oh, it was terrible. Many of his friends wouldn’t even talk to him. No one wanted to do business with him. When he would walk outside he would wear a baseball cap so no one would recognize him with that streak in his hair.

  “He really believed that by doing what he was doing with O.J. that he would have opportunities to become a paid public speaker and talk to audiences about friendship, about faith, but that opportunity never arose. It was very sad for him, and he was very depressed that none of his good intentions were ever honored or recognized. And they were good intentions. Robert was never an opportunist—never. What truly devastated him, what I think truly was a factor in killing him, was the fact that everybody, instead of appreciating the fact that he was a good friend and that he supported O.J.—everybody turned their back on him. Everyone.”

  And indirectly, Migdal became involved in the O.J. case herself when Kardashian hired her daughter, law school graduate Nicole Pulvers, from Migdal’s first of two marriages to a lawyer, to babysit O.J. after his arrest and during the lengthy trial. None of the media covering the trial had ever connected the dots—that the young woman with the last name of Pulvers, who spent eight hours a day with O.J. as his babysitter and, as the lawyers joked, “O.J.’s Jewish mother,” was the daughter of Kardashian’s close friend Joni.

  Pulvers had come to like O.J., and when the trial was nearly over and the verdict was to be announced, she decided to wait for the outcome at O.J.’s home with Al Cowlings and others in the Simpson inner circle.

  When he arrived at his Tudor estate on Rockingham in ritzy, leafy Brentwood, free at last, after passing angry crowds of whites shouting “murderer, murderer … go home, murderer,” he was greeted outside his home by hundreds of blacks who were thrilled with his acquittal, brought about by his shrewd black lawyer, Johnnie Cochran, who had played the race card to the hilt.

  Getting out of the van, finally home, O.J. looked around, puzzled at seeing all the black faces there to greet him. His reaction? “What are all these niggers doing in Brentwood?” a white friend said he asked.

  In the house, Nicole Pulvers, with tears streaming down her face, gave O.J. a big hug. Robert Kardashian, with a drink in his hand, appeared in a daze, a bland smile painted on his face, as he stiffly stood and watched the homecoming celebration, as a documentary film team shot the scene.

  “In the beginning,” said Migdal years later, “the O.J. case was my daughter’s first job, and she thought it was the best job in the world. But it ended up to be the worst job in the world. The whole case was just very disappointing to her because we all believed O.J. was innocent, but that changed. People were asking her for a comment and for books and she just shied away from the whole thing, as did I.” Pulvers left the law and became a stockbroker.

  Kris, then married to Bruce Jenner for three years, was furious with Kardashian for defending O.J. because Kris knew how physically abusive O.J. had been to her pal Nicole. Kris and Nicole had had their last chat on the day of the murder, and the discussion centered on making lasagna. The next thing Kris heard about Nicole was a call from O.J.’s mother-in-law, Juditha Brown, saying that her daughter had been murdered.

  In her memoir Kris wrote about her relationship with Nicole, but after the book was published, Nicole Brown Simpson’s family claimed that what she wrote was strictly with profit and publicity in mind and that her account was not accurate. “Kris Jenner is pathetic,” Nicole’s sister, Denise Brown, declared in an interview with the National Enquirer. In her book, Kris detailed a phone call she received from Denise a day after the murder involving a stash of photographs. But Denise told the tabloid she had never made such a call, and knew nothing about such photos. “I think most people will question her intentions of writing about my sister’s murder,” said Brown. “Nicole has been dead for seventeen years. Please, Kris, don’t profit off of my sister’s horrible death.”

  After learning of the murders, Kris immediately suspected that O.J. was somehow involved, and she quickly learned that her ex was, as she later put it, “on O.J.’s side.”

  Kardashian knew—and feared—that his involvement in the O.J. defense would create an even bigger chasm between himself and his ex-wife and especially their two eldest children.

  In hopes of staving off the animosity he was certain would be directed at him, Kardashian penned a mea culpa to Kris and all four of his children, explaining why he had gotten involved. It was dated January 22, 1995.

  The born-again Christian stated that “God allowed this horrible tragedy to occur for whatever reason,” and he claimed, “I just happened to be in the ‘wrong place at the wrong time.’ I am not a public figure and really do not enjoy the horrible invasion of privacy of you, me and my family.” He further told them that he didn’t want “our family torn apart” by the very public trial and the headlines, and he asserted that he felt “trapped in the position I am in and can’t get out.”

  Still, he showed his loyalty to his longtime friend. “I truly believe in O.J.’s innocence and unless they find him guilty, I will continue to support him.”

  He concluded by writing, “I love you all and just want the best for our family. Please be understanding.”

  He ended, “Love, Robert.”

  But the case would have an immense impact on his children, despite his plea for forgiveness.

  When his firstborn, Kourtney, applied to the University of Arizona, the ultimate party and stoner school, from where she earned a degree in theater arts and hung out with another L.A. celebrity brat, Nicole Richie, her application essay was entitled “My Parents Were on the Opposite Sides of the O.J. Simpson Case,” their depressed father had told Joni Migdal. “So not only did the O.J. case tear Robert apart, but it tore his family apart, too,” asserted Migdal. “That whole backlash was not what he had planned, and it was devastating.”

  Moreover, when his second-born, Kim, got married in 2000 to music producer Damon Thomas—the first of her three African-American husbands—she was still so angry at her father over his defense of O.J. that she kept the marriage a secret from him until Kourtney revealed all to their father. “That was devastating to Robert, too,” maintained Migdal. “Robert was a traditionalist and really believed that his children had his confidence, and he had theirs. But he didn’t.”

  When Kardashian learned about Kim’s marriage, he confided in a friend that he was upset and concerned about their interracial relationship. “I know these black guys and I’ve known them all my life, and I know they love white pussy,” the source recalled Kardashian angrily saying. “O.J. always brags about how much he and those guys get. The problem is my kids are liberal, maybe too liberal, and I have no one to blame but myself because I introduced them to Uncle O.J. and others, and they always felt comfortable with them.” And the friend noted, “It was my sense, my perception that Robert would have preferred Kimmy to be with a white guy.” By the close of 2016, first-born Kourtney was the only one of Kardashian’s three dau
ghters who hadn’t married an African-American. But she did have three children—Mason, Penelope, and Reign—outside of marriage with the Jewish Scott Disick, a nine-year relationship that ended in 2015.

  One of the few friends who, along with Joni Migdal, stuck by Robert Kardashian through the O.J. trial and up until his death eight years later was Larry Kraines. Like Kardashian, Kraines, who had closely socialized with O.J. when Kris was still with Robert and O.J. was with Nicole, believed in the Juice’s innocence, always considered him a fun-loving, good-hearted guy who would “sign a football for a nephew, who’d remember to do it and have it done.”

  Just four months before the murders, in February 1994, around Valentine’s Day, Kraines, his wife, Joyce, O.J., Nicole, and Kris Kardashian had dinner together at a restaurant in San Pedro owned by a former USC football player, and throughout the meal and drinks O.J. was “the same old friendly guy, and you’d never know anything was wrong between them. It was just good ol’ O.J. and Nicole being Nicole.”

  Kraines believed that when O.J.’s physical abuse of Nicole was later revealed, “I’m not sure Robert was all that aware of that stuff because there was always O.J.’s side of stuff.”

  But after the acquittal, Kraines, like Migdal, witnessed the living hell Kardashian was experiencing.

  “People would key his car frequently, and throw shit and break his windows,” Kraines recalled sadly. “There was a lot of resentment. It did really boomerang the wrong way for Robert. He had problems trying to make a lot of money again. He wasn’t doing great financially. He didn’t get millions and millions of dollars [in legal fees to defend O.J] like [lead defense attorneys] Robert Shapiro and Johnnie Cochran got.”

  Practically every night during the trial, Kardashian and Kraines had dinner together. It was during those meals that Kraines got an earful and Kardashian revealed O.J.’s and his own displeasure with some of his “Dream Team” attorney colleagues.