The Kardashians Read online

  “He really felt that the house would be a good support system and a good foundation for his kids so that they would have a place that wasn’t Mandalay, that wasn’t Denice, that wasn’t O.J., that wasn’t anyone except him and them in that house,” observed Migdal. “It was very cute once he moved in. He would get up in the morning and he would pretend like he was going to work—he’d shower, dress, and then head into his dining-room office. He loved that house.”

  And it would be the last house he would ever buy. He didn’t know it at the time, but he had less than five years to live.

  At the same time that Kardashian was buying, Jan Ashley was selling her home in the same neighborhood. Kardashian was shown it, and during a walk-through he saw Jan’s photograph in a frame and decided on the spot that he had to meet that woman. He soon contacted her. They hit it off and dated for seven months. And on a romantic getaway in Hawaii, Kardashian proposed and recent widow Jan accepted on the spot.

  Just like lonely Kardashian, “Jan didn’t want to be by herself,” said Kraines, who got to know her as a couple with Kardashian. “She was very charming, and she wanted to win over all Robert’s friends and family, and she really wanted to marry the guy. She wanted to be with a guy who was fun, personable and that’s what Robert was.

  “All of a sudden she’s inviting Robert’s friends over to a barbecue, and she’s saying, ‘Bring the kids, too!’ Everything’s going great, and somehow Robert feels he should marry this gal, but keep in mind he was lonely.”

  And he also was in bad shape financially and he “assumed through her that she was very wealthy—because she told him so,” said Kraines. “She was wealthy to a degree, but I don’t think she was as wealthy as she told him, and her money came from the death of her husband.”

  About a year before Jan Ashley tied the knot with Robert Kardashian, she had been widowed. A tall, slender beauty in her day, she had been voted Miss Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1966. Born in Texas, she grew up in a modest Tulsa family, the daughter of James and Monnie Glass, and had been the actor-producer John Ashley’s third wife. Before she married Ashley in 1978—the same year Kardashian married junior flight attendant Kris Houghton—Jan had been the attractive executive secretary to the nation’s then-youngest corporate leader, “Boots” Adams, president of Phillips Petroleum Company.

  Jan’s husband, John Ashley, was sixty-two when he died suddenly of a heart attack in New York City in 1997, while working on a new film. Discovered by John Wayne because of his boyish good looks, Ashley played in low-budget American International Pictures horror films and fifties drive-in movies such as Dragstrip Girl. He starred in a TV series called Men of Annapolis, but didn’t make the cut when he auditioned for a mid-fifties classic, I Was a Teenage Werewolf. He later coproduced such popular eighties TV series as The A-Team, starring the tough guy Mr. T.

  As Kraines recalled, Jan had gotten the impression that Kardashian had big money, which was another incentive for marriage, and Kardashian had the impression that she was loaded, too. She was constantly pitching her supposed wealth to Kardashian, who needed money, and he was eating up her stories about how they could live the high life.

  “‘We can go to Palm Springs. We can get a house. I’ll get you a membership in the country club,’” she cooed to Kardashian. “And he bought into that hook, fucking line, and sinker,” maintained Kraines. “Robert told me, ‘I think I can marry this girl.’ I said, ‘Do you love her?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know what love is anymore. But I know I don’t want to be by myself anymore. I know she’s great with the kids, and she loves the whole family, and she loves you guys.’

  “But when I got to know her,” noted Kraines, “I didn’t feel the love.”

  Still, as an observer, Kraines felt that before Kardashian tied the knot, his new love had put herself out to make friends with Robert’s friends, and was always pleasant and nice.

  “But just about as fast as they got married and got back and settled in, the party stopped,” he said ominously.

  “She didn’t like the kids, the kids didn’t like her. And the house for both of them, there was not going to be any house. Robert wanted to have a house big enough for all of his kids and for him and Jan, but her whole tune changed.”

  And even worse, she hated Kardashian’s dog, his beloved, closest, and most loyal companion, a Doberman pinscher.

  “Jan said, ‘You gotta get rid of the dog,’ and she had all kinds of complaints—‘it’s this, it’s that, and it doesn’t like me, and it’s shedding,’” recalled Kraines. “The dog was a sweet dog, and Robert had it for five or six years, and it was a real companion, but because of Jan, I think he gave the dog to one of his cousins.

  “When they were dating,” continued Kraines, “Jan had barbecues at her house and the dog came, the kids came over—no problem. Then all of a sudden after they married it was different, and Robert quickly realized that he made a bad decision marrying her. So within a short period of months he wanted to have the thing annulled on whatever grounds he could get it annulled on.”

  He chose the oddest reason.

  According to a sworn declaration he filed with his lawyer, Neal Hersh, he claimed that childless Jan wanted to have a baby with him, and that he initially agreed, but then changed his mind and as a result he wanted the marriage nullified.

  While it worked and the marriage was ended, none of it made any sense for a couple of reasons: For one, Jan was already in her early fifties and had never before had a child, and the odds of her having one at her age was a long shot. But moreover, her getting pregnant with Kardashian was impossible because he had had a vasectomy, or at least that’s what he claimed to Kraines and Migdal.

  In any case, the former Miss Tulsa and the patriarch of the Kardashian clan went their separate ways.

  On October 1, 2015, sixty-seven-year-old Jan Ashley, who had returned home to Oklahoma, died.

  “She left us too early and went to be with the Lord,” her obituary read. There was no mention of her tumultuous, brief, annulled marriage to Kardashian.

  She was buried next to her husband, John Ashley, in the final resting place for a multitude of Hollywood stars, Forest Lawn Memorial Park, in the L.A. suburb of Glendale.

  * * *

  THROUGH HIS CONTACTS IN THE music business, Robert Kardashian had become chums with Ken Roberts, who in the seventies and eighties owned one of L.A.’s most popular and influential rock stations, KROQ-FM, a once debt-ridden, little-listened-to operation headquartered in Pasadena, home of the “Little Old Lady (from Pasadena),” made famous in a mid-sixties tune by surfer rockers Jan & Dean. Turning KROQ into a powerhouse, with deejays like Freddy Snakeskin and Jed the Fish spinning alternative tunes, Roberts, also a concert promoter, gave new entertainers and unknowns like Prince and Culture Club, Billy Idol and the Go-Go’s, big play, lots of publicity, and national attention.

  In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Roberts, then in his mid-to-late-sixties and divorced, was throwing elegant parties at his sprawling 112-acre ranch in Mandeville Canyon, part of Brentwood, for his well-to-do, older male friends, and he was inviting lots of attractive, younger women, most of them professionals—bleach-blond Bel-Air real estate agents, Redondo Beach redhead mortgage bankers, surgically enhanced Barbie-like Beverly Hills divorcées, that sort—who were there for one reason and one reason only—to meet, greet, and marry rich older men.

  As Larry Kraines observed, “Ken Roberts wasn’t an attractive guy, but if you have a lot of dough and put on a good show you get surrounded by younger gals. He wasn’t my kind of guy at all. None of the women were sleazy, nor was he. The women were all basically divorced looking for some guy through some guy through some parties. Ken Roberts was flamboyant, throwing all those parties, but it looked to me like too much show and not enough go.”

  Roberts would later lose it all, including his party house, when he defaulted on a multimillion-dollar loan from a hedge fund in Connecticut. He died, reportedly broke, at seventy-three, in July 20
14.

  Kardashian had become a regular at Roberts’s parties, usually held on Monday nights, when a dinner was served and the dapper older men mixed with the invited glamorous younger women. In early 2002, through one of those women, Kardashian was fixed up with the latest woman of his dreams. She would become his third wife—and his controversial widow some eighteen months later.

  Her name was Ellen Pearson, a blue-eyed, tall, and leggy blond divorcée with a knockout smile, who was at least a decade his junior.

  “She wasn’t my favorite,” stated Larry Kraines.

  But she was Kardashian’s favorite, and virtually overnight they fell in love, or seemed to.

  * * *

  IN THE EARLY SUMMER of 2003, the happy couple decided to take a luxury vacation. Their destination was Italy, and Kardashian was feeling like a young man again, joyous and in love. They took lots of photos of their trip, and when they returned Robert and Ellen had dinner with Robert’s divorce lawyer and friend, Neal Hersh, and his wife, at Mistral, a French restaurant on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks. Robert couldn’t stop talking about how much he loved Italy, and he showed the Hershes the photos he and Ellen had taken.

  Neal and his wife so enjoyed Kardashian’s show-and-tell that they decided to go to Italy, too. “We had almost mirror-image trips,” he said.

  Shortly after Hersh got back, he was having coffee with his daughter at a Starbucks in Brentwood.

  “I got a call from Robert and he told me that he was feeling sick, and he also told me that he hadn’t been feeling well when he was in Italy. Then he went to the doctor and got the news—cancer. It was devastating. It was horrible. I went to see him at his house in Lake Encino, where he was living with Ellen, and he looked bad. He was tired. He had trouble keeping food down, or even swallowing food. He was struggling.”

  In mid July 2003, Robert heard that Larry Kraines was ill, too, and bedridden, that he had had an emergency appendectomy, that there had been postoperative problems, and that he was recuperating at his lush get-away home in the arid California desert. While feeling lousy himself, Kardashian decided to pay his close friend a visit.

  “And I’m sitting all messed up with complications, and I looked at him and said, ‘You don’t look so good. You’ve lost a lot of weight.’ He was always trying to keep thin, but always eating too much of that Armenian good food. He says, ‘We just got back from Italy and I ate like a pig over there, but I don’t know what happened because I’ve lost twelve to fifteen pounds, and I’m still losing weight.’

  “I said, ‘Forget about me, go check out what’s going on with you. This doesn’t sound right. You’ve never lost weight like that in your whole life, let alone in two weeks.’

  “And then two or three days later he called and said, ‘You won’t believe this.’ I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘Are you sitting down?’ And then he said, ‘I have esophageal cancer.’ And I said, ‘What the fuck!’

  “And that was the beginning of the end.”

  There was nothing new about Kardashian’s throat problems, according to his brother, Tom, who claimed throat issues related to acid reflux had even kept Robert out of the military draft many years earlier. “He always had problems swallowing, and he did not enjoy going to doctors,” asserted Kardashian. “He probably should have done some research earlier on about what was going on with his health, but he just didn’t want to go in and get a checkup. He might be alive today if he had.”

  He said that what quickly became cancer had started “more like an ulcer, and then he didn’t go in to see the doctor until it was too mature.” He noted that his brother’s type of cancer, esophageal, “is worse than others.”

  Like Hersh, Tom Kardashian said it was during his brother’s trip to Italy with Ellen Pearson that Robert began feeling very ill.

  “That’s where he came up with more issues and he felt he needed to get checked. When he saw the doctor, they found out there was a blockage, a tumor, and I think it was fifty-seven days from when they did diagnose it to the moment he passed.”

  In part, Tom Kardashian blamed his brother’s participation in the O.J. trial and all that went with it as the reason for why he “died prematurely. I’m not a doctor. I can only say that my brother was one who carried stress, and it [the O.J. case and the aftermath] could not have been a positive thing for him.”

  Larry Kraines said that Kardashian always kept “things to himself, bottled up, and when people keep things to themselves so much, well, we used to say in yiddish, ‘you eat your kishkes out.’ Robert always had acid reflux—always, always, always. He would eat a pound of Tums a week. He had boxes of it, and when he did go to the doctor, the doctor would go, ‘Oh, it’s just the way your system is.’ But that later developed into something more than just his system. Robert was never a proactive guy with his health. We always thought, ‘We’re healthy guys,’ so we didn’t take care of ourselves.”

  Kardashian’s ex-wife Kris, however, would have a far different story to tell about the end of the life of the father of her first four children. Kardashian, she asserted, showed up at a basketball game in which their son, Rob, was playing in the gym at the Buckley School, approached Kris, and began literally “crying” as he told her he had cancer.

  “‘I’m sure it’s going to be okay, but I am really scared,’” she quoted him as saying. A week later, according to her account, he telephoned her again. This time he was joyous. “‘Guess what? I don’t have cancer. It’s a miracle. I am okay. It turned out to be a bad test.’” But then, she maintained, a few months later he called her again—with the bad news. “‘I do have cancer.’”

  He informed her, she stated, that he planned to fly in a “healer” from China who would help him beat his terminal illness. As a born-again Christian with close ties to the Pentecostal Shakarian family—Demos Shakarian preached about miracle healing—Kardashian was hoping there was some authenticity to the stories he had heard over the years about cancer victims being miraculously made well through the power of prayer and a healer’s touch. Decades earlier, his grandfather and an associate had even announced plans to build a temple in Los Angeles for an Armenian faith healer who had arrived in the United States to heal the sick son of a wealthy Armenian wine merchant.

  But none of what Kris Jenner wrote in her 2011 memoir about the tragic last months, weeks, and days leading up to Kardashian’s death fits with the chronology recounted by those who were much closer to him at the end than Kris, who was busy building her own life and future career with Bruce Jenner. If Kris is to be believed, Kardashian had gotten sick and gone for tests much earlier in 2003 than any of his closest friends and confidants knew about, and that is very doubtful.

  Oddly, in her memoir, Kris made no mention of Ellen Pearson by name, stating only that, “Four weeks before Robert died, a woman he had only been dating a short time married him.” But there would be more about her after Kardashian died and Kris and her brood became famous.

  * * *

  ON JULY 27, 2003, in the living room of his home in Encino, a teriminally ill Robert Kardashian, looking like a concentration camp victim because of all the weight he had lost, and dressed in just a pair of shorts, a T-shirt, and slippers, wed Ellen Pearson in a very private ceremony attended by his daughters. No one present recalled Kris being there.

  What is remembered is that the dying groom was so weak he was barely able to say the words “I do.”

  “Ellen convinced him in practically his last weeks alive to marry him,” said Kraines, who heard about the wedding in a telephone call from the doomed groom and later saw photos of the depressing affair.

  Kraines subsequently telephoned the new Mrs. Kardashian and she told him that Robert was too sick to take his call. He finally got him on the phone, “but it was terrible,” he’d never forgotten. Kardashian sounded incoherent, mumbling his words. In a later conversation, Kardashian, his voice weak, complained to Kraines, “If I don’t die from cancer, I’m going to die from starvation.”


  At that point he was “going down very quickly,” said Kraines.

  Still recuperating from his surgery, Kraines returned to L.A. to see his terminally ill friend of four decades, and that visit, he says, occurred only with “complete force” by him because the third Mrs. Robert Kardashian tried to block his way.

  Looking back in 2016 to that horrific time, he and Joni Migdal both asserted that Ellen Pearson Kardashian had “sequestered” her dying husband from his closest friends who wanted to spend time with him.

  “I talked to Kim several times then and she told me that as soon as Robert found out he was going to die that Ellen kept him apart from any of his friends,” said Migdal. While Robert’s friends and family were upset regarding Ellen’s very protective stance, it is possible that Ellen thought that Kardashian needed his privacy and was only trying to help rather than hinder his life in his final days.

  According to Migdal, Larry and Joyce Kraines were the only people from Kardashian’s social group who “really stuck with him [in the wake of the O.J. case] and stayed friends with him.”

  Kraines was determined to see his dying pal. When he drove up to his Encino home one afternoon uninvited, he could see that Robert’s parents, Arthur and Helen Kardashian, and his brother, Tom, were in the backyard.

  “I rang the doorbell and Ellen comes out and she’s acting like a guard,” recalled Kraines. “She asks me, ‘What do you want?’

  “‘What do you mean, what do I want? He’s been sick for three months. I haven’t been able to talk to him. I want to say hello.’ I said, ‘I see Helen and Arthur are here, and I’m not in any mood to argue with you.’