The Kardashians Read online

  “But she says, ‘He’s got to rest. He doesn’t need to see anybody right now.’

  “And I said, ‘I’m not asking you, Ellen, I’m telling you I’m coming in. Whether you stop me or not, that will be your decision. And I’m walking through you if you don’t move aside.’ And that’s exactly what I did. She may not have been a very nice gal, but Robert was weak and sick and Ellen was a companion, and her daughter was helping to care for him.”

  When Kraines finally got in to see Kardashian, he said, “It was horrible, just horrible.”

  Joni Migdal also managed to get in the house one day when Ellen was out, and had a chat with Robert on the patio of the swimming pool. “He knew he was very sick. He knew he was going to die, and I said, ‘Robert, what are you going to say to your children?’ And he said he was going to tell them that he was dying, and ‘to look for signs’ that he’s around after he was gone, because ‘I will always be with them.’ I thought that was one of the nicest things that he could say. That’s who Robert Kardashian was.”

  While Kardashians friends complained of being blocked from seeing Robert, his children were there at his side. According to Kris Jenner in her book, as “Robert was going downhill fast.… Kimberly and Kourtney spent practically every waking moment” with their father, “taking care of him and feeding him.… Kourtney read to Robert, and Kim would make him Cream of Wheat, oatmeal, or a cup of tea.”

  When Kardashian was dying, Priscilla Presley, whom he had wanted to marry and have children with years earlier, telephoned him and gently told him she loved him.

  It brought tears to his eyes.

  * * *

  KRIS JENNER CLAIMED THAT in her ex-husband’s last hours, she went into his bedroom and saw that he wasn’t conscious but that his heart was still beating. She said some last words to him, but “felt like he just wasn’t there anymore,” and that when he passed part of her “died with him.… I was, by then, Kris Jenner, but in some way I would also always be a Kardashian.”

  Weighing about eighty pounds, Robert Kardashian, whose only real fame ever came as being a famous football player’s sidekick and defender, died on a hospital gurney in the bedroom of his home on September 30, 2003, almost five months before his sixtieth birthday.

  His funeral service was held at Inglewood Park Cemetery, also the final resting place of Johnnie Cochran, the attorney who played the race card and won O. J. Simpson’s acquittal in the trial of the century. Cochran died at sixty-seven, two years after Kardashian’s passing.

  Ronald Reagan’s minister, Reverend Donn Moomaw, who had gotten embroiled in the Bel-Air Presbyterian Church sex scandal in the early 1990s, and who had been Tom Kardashian’s friend and pastor, officiated at the funeral. Besides Moomaw on the stage, eulogies were offered by Kim Kardashian, representing the family, and Larry Kraines, who was asked to represent Kardashian’s friends “because we went back a long, long way.”

  The eulogies dealt with Kardashian’s sense of humor, and his loyalty. “And all his old girlfriends, going all the way back, were there,” Kraines recalled. “Even though he had lots of dates when he was younger, he kept good relationships and friendships with every single one of those gals, which said he was a good guy, and he thought they were good people, and he never wanted bad feelings with anyone.”

  At the funeral, Kim approached Joni Migdal and told her about an odd experience she had had on her way to the cemetery. “‘You’ll never guess what happened,’” she said. “‘I was driving down the Ventura Freeway to get to the funeral and there was like a rainbow of seagulls that flew over.’ The strange thing about that,” noted Migdal, “is that the Ventura Freeway is in the Valley, and seagulls do not go to the Valley. I asked Kim what she thought it meant, and she told me, ‘It’s a sign my father was there with me.’”

  After the funeral there was a country club reception. Friends of Kardashian who had abandoned him because of his role in the O.J. trial and his participation in Lawrence Schiller’s book suddenly did an about-face and showed up to honor his memory.

  But Migdal recalled that “no one—no one—talked to the widow,” Ellen Pearson Kardashian. “She was like sitting all by herself.” She was blacklisted by everyone, just as her late husband had once been.

  There was so much to Robert George Kardashian’s complicated and turbulent life, but the world would mostly only remember him and his name as connected to his daughter Kim’s sex tape and to a reality TV show starring his family with the Kardashian name in the title, but mostly to the O.J. murder case and trial.

  As the headline over The New York Times obituary quietly summed up his life: “Robert Kardashian, a Lawyer for O. J. Simpson, Dies at 59.”

  PART III

  The “Miscreants”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  “Kim Kardashian, Superstar”

  Robert Kardashian’s death was hardest on his children.

  Kim, always closest to him and the favorite of his three daughters, was just three weeks away from turning twenty-three when her father passed, and she was the most affected emotionally. Her behavior that horrific year underscored her anger and pain that she would soon lose him. Around the time Kardashian became terminally ill and had little time left, Kim joined with her boyfriend, a Mississippi-born young black man by the name of William Raymond “Ray J” Norwood Jr., in an act that forever would change her life.

  He came from a musically talented family; Norwood’s older sister was the popular singer and actress known as Brandy. Using the name Ray J professionally, he had talent, too, and would become an actor, singer, and record producer. Before he was ten, and after the family had moved to Los Angeles, the cute, cuddly kid was being cast in commercials, and soon he had roles in two sitcoms popular with young blacks—The Sinbad Show, in which he played the orphaned son of the African-American comedian. The other was his sister’s series, Moesha, about a high school girl who, by coincidence, lived in the Leimert Park neighborhood of L.A., where Robert Kardashian’s pal Phil Pennino had lived when they were in high school together, and which was then still predominately white.

  But Ray J’s biggest claim to fame—or rather infamy—in the early 2000s was his costarring role in an interracial sex romp with Kim Kardashian, the real scene-stealer and a genuine exhibitionist, the year her father fell ill and died. It was supposed to be a private video, but it would later gain Kim international fame (and millions of dollars) when it suspiciously became public and was boffo at the registers of adult shops everywhere and downloaded on PCs around the world.

  Kim followed in the stiletto-heel footsteps of her close friend Paris Hilton, whose heavily publicized triple-X-rated romp—1 Night in Paris—had launched her outrageous career. Kim’s, too, would lead to her very questionable stardom.

  Robert Kardashian’s name and fame and the Kardashian family became known as a result of his ill-fated, ill-advised on-camera defense of an accused black killer. Kim’s became known for her ill-advised but successful on-camera sex with her black lover.

  The first decade of the 2000s was the era of the spoiled, wild girls of L.A.—the Hilton “celebutantes” Paris and Nicky; the emotionally troubled and diabetic Johnson & Johnson Band-Aid heiress, Casey; the difficult Mean Girls actress Lindsay Lohan; singer Lionel Richie’s rail-thin daughter, Nicole, who denied having an eating disorder; pop sensation and rehab veteran Britney Spears, and the then known for little or nothing Kim Kardashian—until her video surfaced. They were the “It” girls, whose raunchy behavior, documented in the tabloids, gossip columns, and celebrity magazines earned them TV shows, lucrative movie and recording deals and sponsors, and, in some instances, jail time.

  But Kim was far less visible, and more behaved. Her daddy had always taught her to be a little lady.

  As a veteran female senior tabloid editor who specialized in celebrity news and gossip observed in 2015: “Paris Hilton was a bad girl and the public was interested in her when she behaved badly. She had the society thing and people looked at her style
and her money, but she just wasn’t as fascinating as Kim Kardashian. Until Kim’s sex tape, she wasn’t considered a bad girl. She didn’t do drugs. She didn’t stay out all night boozing. And she didn’t have blond hair and blue eyes. She was more relatable.”

  From 2003 onward, Kim’s sex tape remained hidden and undiscovered, and it did not surface until 2007—curiously in the same year that her mother, Kris Kardashian Jenner, cut a lucrative deal for a reality show with E! to air all of their bizarre behavior as a family. Around the same time, either by coincidence or by shrewd planning, Kim and Ray J’s lusty on-camera romp was purchased by a major producer and purveyor of adult films. Vivid Entertainment, which paid a mysterious someone a reported one million dollars, released it publicly in stores and on the Internet shortly after Valentine’s Day 2007, with much fanfare, controversy, and, for Kim Kardashian and her family, free publicity worth untold millions of dollars.

  It was called Kim Kardashian, Superstar.

  But how did it get from the confines of Kim’s very private possessions to Vivid?

  Blame—or credit—the momager.

  “Kris knew people who knew people,” said a close Kardashian business insider who was aware of the clandestine sex tape transaction. “She’d learned much from Robert and much from Bruce through the years. She knew her way around town, and had the connections. Kris saw the value in that tape, knew how a sex tape had made Paris Hilton a sensation, and figured it could do the same for Kim. Either directly or indirectly, that tape got to the folks at Vivid. Kris knew what she was doing, and Kim went along for the ride. It was all about money and fame.”

  Generating even more publicity and visibility, Kim made headlines by suing Vivid for distributing Kim Kardashian, Superstar, seeking all profits from its sale and asking for unspecified damages along with attorney fees.

  She issued a statement to People in February 2007, claiming: “This tape, which was made three years ago, and was meant to be something private between myself and my then-boyfriend is extremely hurtful not only to me, but to my family as well.… It is being sold completely without my permission or consent.”

  Steven Hirsch, Vivid’s co-chairman at the time, said his company had “the legal right to distribute” the tape, was “comfortable” in releasing it, and noted, “We would like Kim and Ray J to be a part of it and hopefully we can work that out.” Ray J, not named in the suit, had nothing to add.

  But his mother, Sonja Norwood, later suggested that Kim was the likely source for leaking the tape. “As a mother, I was very upset,” she declared on Wendy Williams’s TV talk show (while promoting her family’s own reality show on VH1). She claimed that Kim and her son had dated for five years and “were in love,” and she noted, referring to the tape, “What you don’t want people to see, you don’t do.… Somehow it [the tape] surfaced.” And she was furious that Ray J was being gossiped about and blamed for leaking it to Vivid.

  It all ended amicably, however, when Kim, after generating headlines, dropped her lawsuit.

  “We met with her several times and finally reached a financial arrangement that we both feel is fair,” stated the Vivid Entertainment Group’s co-chairman, Hirsch, who noted, “The DVD has become a best seller in adult video stores and online.… It is also a popular download.”

  Other than her role in a sex tape, Kim had no other fame at that point, as underscored by Hirsch’s press release, which described her only as the “daughter of O. J. Simpson lawyer Robert Kardashian and a close friend of Paris Hilton.” It further noted, “As part of her commitment to drop the suit, Ms. Kardashian agreed to a lump sum financial settlement for the sale of the DVDs.”

  It was later reported that she got nearly $5 million for her sex play with Ray J, with whom she had broken up in 2005.

  Six years after the release of the tape and her daughter’s big financial settlement, Kris Jenner spoke publicly about Kim Kardashian, Superstar for the first time in a chummy chat with Joan Rivers on her gossipy and very strange show, appropriately called In Bed with Joan, which was taped weekly from Joan’s bed in her Malibu home and aired on iTunes and YouTube.

  Kris, air-kissing Rivers, boasted that her daughters had “star quality on some levels … they had a passion about something,” like fashion. When asked by Rivers what her reaction had been to her daughter’s sex tape, Kris stated that she “literally fell apart” knowing that the public was seeing her second-born doing the nasty. Calling herself “somewhat religious,” she claimed, “I had to go into a room and cry for a couple days and say, ‘okay, pull yourself to-fucking-gether because you have to be here for all these kids and your family, and you have to show them as an example how to get through this.”

  * * *

  LARRY KRAINES, BETTER KNOWN as “Uncle Larry” to Kim and her Kardashian siblings, firmly believed that his late close friend Robert, the patriarch, would be “proud as punch that his girls had initiative and that they got success and riches on their own. Would Robert have liked Kim’s sex tape, and all that horseshit? Probably not. But would he have liked the fact that they have made a tremendous amount of money? Definitely! Robert wasn’t here to do it for them, but he had a lot to do with their work ethic. And I’m proud of what they all did.”

  Kardashian’s brother, Tom, agrees with Kraines’s assessment.

  “The girls got their business acumen and entrepreneurial spirit from Robert. Kris, to her credit, just kind of kept a firm hand on all of it. How did all their success come about? It was my brother’s influence at home, and how he thought.”

  He noted, surprisingly, that his mother, the late Helen Kardashian—the Kardashian girls’ paternal grandmother—“would encourage everything the girls are into, and what they do. My brother could do no wrong, and the girls could do no wrong. But my dad might not have been pleased with their choices. Yes, Kim did a sex tape, but who in the family is going to talk to her about it, and how would you talk to her about it? Would you say, ‘Oh, Nana, what do you think of my sex tape?’ It would be my mother’s lady friends who would want to throw in shit like that. ‘Helen, did you see that tape with Kim and her boyfriend? Did you just see what Kim did?’”

  * * *

  IN HER 2011 MEMOIR, Kris Jenner made absolutely no mention of her daughter Kim’s very lucrative venture into the porn world—shot in 2003, released in 2007—and how it made her so famous—and a millionaire at least five times over.

  For Kris’s readers, it was as if Kim Kardashian, Superstar had never happened.

  Instead, Kris noted that her daughter was “getting some attention” for another completely unrelated reason by going out and being seen by the paparazzi and gossip writers with her friend, the scandalous Paris Hilton. Making no mention of Hilton’s own sex tape, which made her a household name, Kris stated that somehow the Hilton girl “took off in the public eye and became very, very famous.”

  Kim had become Paris’s sidekick—both with sex tapes on their résumés—and the two of them, according to Kris, began “traveling to places like Vegas or the Hamptons together.… Paris started asking Kim to go everywhere with her” and “the media started noticing Kim because she was always with Paris.”

  They were being noticed, in fact, mainly because they were two young, exhibitionistic, narcissistic, fame-hungry hotties who had become celebrities by doing it on camera and being generally outrageous.

  * * *

  IN HER BOOK, KRIS curiously described her second-born as the “hopeless romantic among my girls.”

  By then Kim was long divorced from her first husband, the African-American music producer Damon Thomas, with whom she had eloped in 2000 when she was nineteen and he twenty-nine. They divorced in 2003 after a very stormy three years together.

  In divorce papers that were later leaked to a tabloid, Kim alleged she had been both emotionally and physically abused by Thomas, that he had slammed her against walls, thrown her across a room, and battered and bruised her, or so she had alleged. The divorce papers quoted her as clai
ming that on one occasion “He became enraged and punched me in the face. My face was bruised and swollen as a result. I thought about calling the police but was afraid and decided not to do so.”

  Thomas opened up to another celebrity weekly, denying all Kim’s allegations, and charged that she had made them up in order to get “a lot of money” in their divorce.

  He reportedly was ordered to pay her $56,000.

  He said he was the one who filed for divorce—shades of Robert and Kris—when he discovered she was allegedly cheating on him. He claimed that her alleged philandering had occurred with “multiple guys.” One of them was identified as actor/dancer Cris Judd, ex-husband of Jennifer Lopez. Kim denied the accusations of adultery.

  Moreover, Thomas claimed he paid for Kim’s extravagant shopping sprees, along with her breast implants and liposuction. He had complaints about the same kinds of expenditures that Robert Kardashian had had about Kris when he dumped her.

  Kim was clearly following in her mother’s footsteps, marriage-wise. The cliché “Like mother, like daughter” fits well when comparing the two. From their history, Kim was clearly a chip off the old block. Kris even acknowledged in her memoir, “Kim and I are like twin souls.”

  And as Thomas asserted, “Kim is obsessed with fame. She can’t write or sing or dance, so she does harmful things in order to validate herself in the media. That’s a fame-whore to me.”

  * * *

  JUST AS WITH KIM’S sex tape and the scandalous divorce, there was more tabloid drama when, a decade after Robert Kardashian’s death, his angry and emotional words about his marriage to Kris and her roles as wife, mother, and adulterer became candidly and publicly known. They ignited an explosive legal war between the Kardashians, led by Kris, against Robert’s widow, Ellen Pearson, who sold excerpts from his 1989–90 private diaries and some family photos to the publisher of several celebrity weeklies.

  It was as if Kardashian were speaking from the grave.