The Kardashians Read online

  On one page of his diary, he had written, “Imagine, if you can, a couple happily married for over 10 years, with 4 gorgeous children, and then to the husbands horror, he discovers that his wife is having an affair … Imagine his hurt, frustration, and anger, not only for himself but for their children. Imagine what effect this behavior ultimately will have on the children’s future morals … a real nightmare, isn’t it?”

  At another point, Kardashian wrote that Kris’s lover, Todd Waterman, “slept in my bed” while cuckolded Kardashian’s daughter Khloé and son, Rob, were in the house. “She doesn’t care! She left [the] kids & screwed all nite.” Regarding the Christmas holiday of 1989, he claimed he “was home alone with 4 kids. I put them to bed & played w/them.” In still another entry, Kardashian claimed that Kris pulled Kourtney’s hair and twisted her arms, and that both Kourtney and Kim were “scared and nervous, have been beat up several times before and are very, very intimidated.”

  His “dear diary” references about what a horrific life he had with Kris went on and on.

  Not surprisingly, the publication of Kardashian’s angry words did not go over well with the momager, who, on April 4, 2013, had her Hollywood attorney, Marty Singer, sue Pearson.

  He claimed that the diaries and photos belonged to Kris and her brood, that by selling them for “tens of thousands of dollars” the widow had infringed on the copyrights owned by the Kardashians. Moreover, he alleged that the Kardashians weren’t even aware of the materials, that Pearson had held the “private writings” and photos “in secret,” until all was published. Singer claimed that all Kardashian’s tangible personal property was meant to go to his children, and that Pearson had kept the writings and photos “with the express intent to one-day capitalize on and exploit the valuable property and celebrity of the famous Robert Kardashian, and/or deprive the Kardashian Siblings of the benefit of private information, and memories about their father.”

  The lawsuit went into Pearson’s own financial situation, claiming that after “years of unchecked spending living off of her inheritance and amassing significant debt, including to her country club” she had filed for chapter 7 bankruptcy in March 2011, but never listed that her assets included “the Diary and Photograph and Family Albums as valuable assets” in her possession, as required by law.

  Singer charged that with all Pearson’s “financial woes,” she tried to “sell (often false) tabloid stories and Kardashian family photos to exploit and cash-in” on the Kardashians’ celebrity. His suit cited In Touch Weekly and Life & Style magazines as the publisher of the stories.

  Pearson fought back.

  Legal papers filed by her lawyers in federal court in Los Angeles on August 12, 2013, alleged defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and civil conspiracy to defame. As part of its request to file a countersuit, the Beverly Hills–headquartered Peter Law Group took note of the Kardashians’ reality TV program, describing it as the “often sordid, decadent and scandalous lives of the Kardashians,” and said its success was based on a “basic premise embraced [by] … Kris Jenner in particular—to expose their outlandish and controversial activities to world-wide television viewers for commercial profit.”

  And Pearson’s lawyers claimed that the series was “predicated entirely on the revelation of private information of the most salacious variety.” Pearson claimed the Kardashians had filed their lawsuit against her because it would be part of a “carefully orchestrated aspect” of episode two from season eight of Keeping Up with the Kardashians.

  In that episode, according to Pearson’s lawyers, “the Kardashians repeatedly attribute highly incendiary and provocative statements about Kris Jenner’s fitness as a mother to Ellen when they were in fact made by Robert Kardashian about his ex-wife and their mother.”

  Pearson’s lawyers further claimed that Robert Kardashian’s revelations in his diaries “are inconsistent with Kris’s portrayal as a loving and caring mother who puts her children first. Robert’s diaries and notes exposed Kris as a manipulative and devious mother and ex-wife who simply used and exploited her children and family.”

  The copyright claim was settled in 2014. Pearson returned the diaries and photos to the Kardashians, and the Kardashians were awarded about $84,000. Tabloid hell also broke loose for Kris and her children in the fall of 2014 when Kardashian’s short-time second wife, Jan Ashley, claimed publicly that the Kardashian siblings had caused the marital problems between her and Kardashian. She told a celebrity magazine, “Did the kids have anything to do with it? Of course, they did! All I know is he was upset all the time. Not with me, [but] with his kids and his ex-wife.… They were after him for money, money, money. I don’t think he could handle them.” She also claimed that Kardashian “pretended” he was wealthy, and that his children “acted like a bunch of spoiled brats.… He didn’t have any money,” she asserted. “He always pretended he had money.”

  Even in death, Robert Kardashian, who always tried to be a good Christian, couldn’t catch a break.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  It’s Reality

  According to Kris Jenner, everyone who knew her and Bruce and their five daughters and one son thought they were all “so crazy” that they deserved their own reality TV show.

  The man of the house, the secretly cross-dressing former Olympian who considered himself a woman trapped in a man’s body, had already experienced reality TV as part of the first-season cast of the nightly U.S. version of the British-made game show I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! in which he lived for weeks with ten other B-listers (Robin Leach, Alana Stewart, Melissa Rivers, and Cris Judd, among others) in a difficult (but scripted) jungle environment in the Australian outback. Tessa Jowell, Britain’s minister of state for culture at the time, described the cast of Jenner’s show to the Financial Times as “has-been celebrities.”

  Jenner’s reality appearances aired in that same strange year, 2003, that Robert Kardashian died and his beloved daughter performed sex acts on camera with her lover.

  Jenner didn’t like the reality TV gig at all, but needed the money and adored being in the public eye. Like his stepdaughter Kim Kardashian, Superstar, he was an exhibitionist.

  In any case, reality television, as the free world now knows, was the Kardashians’ platinum future. As Kris observed, “I always thought our family was certainly entertaining enough—or maybe just crazy enough—to make a good reality show.” Ryan Seacrest thought so, too.

  If anyone should take the blame, or the praise, for bringing the Kardashians to the world’s stage, it should be the handsome, boyish bachelor wunderkind of television land, who had been discovered years earlier by the closeted homosexual talk show host Merv Griffin. Once described in a profile as “an asexual icon for traditional cultural conservatism,” Seacrest became a power as the host of one of television’s most popular shows, American Idol, which premiered in 2002.

  Before that, he had a history of hosting other reality and game shows, and even did radio. When Dick Clark—long billed as “America’s oldest teenager,” of American Bandstand fame—had a stroke in 2004, Seacrest stepped in in 2005 to host the popular New Year’s Eve Times Square ball-dropping show, and when Clark died Seacrest signed a deal to host and be the executive producer. He also had his own fashion line and had his hand in numerous other lucrative media endeavors.

  In 2007, Seacrest and his two-year-old company, Ryan Seacrest Productions, were on the lookout for a family that a reality show could be built around. His model, one that he regularly watched, was The Osbournes, starring the heavy metal star Ozzie Osbourne and his family—his wife, Sharon, their son, Jack, and daughter, Kelly. It began airing on MTV in March 2002—it was one of the network’s most popular programs—and ended its successful run in March 2005. Jack and Kelly would later reveal that some of the family’s off-the-wall antics were staged, which was no great secret in the world of reality TV. Much of what would be filmed when the Kardashians hit the airwaves was set up by the
producers, according to news accounts.

  Seacrest approached casting directors in Los Angeles and said, “‘We’re interested in meeting families who want to be on a series or are interested in being in the world of television.’”

  The Kardashians, led by Kris, were first in line. She would call her family a “modern-day Brady Bunch,” probably not realizing that some cast members of that iconic early-seventies family sitcom had serious issues. Mike Brady, the father, was played by Robert Reed, who died after contracting HIV. Maureen McCormick, who played daughter Marcia Brady, had serious drug issues. And Mike Lookinland, who played Bobby Brady, had a drunk driving record.

  The real-life Kardashian bunch were far from the TV model Brady Bunch, but Kris saw parallels, and she had even gone so far as to buy a new home, a Cape Cod style that she felt resembled the one the fictional Bradys occupied on television. It was “the perfect house,” she called it, “for our crazy Hollywood family.” Moreover, she saw her new address as “a stage … a house dying for an audience. I never could have dreamed of how large that audience would become.”

  A casting director set up a meeting with Seacrest, Kris, Bruce, and the gang. “I had met the girls before, but I didn’t know the family well,” said Seacrest in 2015. “So I said to a guy in my office, ‘Why don’t you buy a video camera and go out to their house on a Sunday when they’re having a family barbeque, shoot it, and then we’ll watch it and see what we think.’”

  After spending a bit of time with the Kardashians, Seacrest got a call from his man on the scene: “‘It’s absolutely golden,’” he joyfully reported. “‘You’re going to die when you see this tape. They’re so funny, they’re so fun, there is so much love in this family and they’re so chaotic—they throw each other in the pool!’”

  Seacrest watched the tape first thing Monday morning, was knocked out, saw a hit on his hands, and rushed the material over to E! As Seacrest told Haute Living in January 2015, “That was the beginning.”

  Of all of them, he admired Kris, the momager, the most. “She has done an amazing job,” he believed, “at taking what was just a television show and building it into a massive empire for the family.”

  Kris had a somewhat different take on how the idea for the show came about. A friend, Deena Katz, had sparked the idea after spending an evening with the Kardashian-Jenners. Katz was in the TV business, was a casting director, saw how crazy the family’s lifestyle was, and suggested she talk to the Ryan Seacrest crowd over at E! “Get me a meeting,” Kris claimed she told Katz. The next morning Kris was in Seacrest’s office. She felt she was in good company because two of her daughters’ pals, Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie, had done their time on E! with reality shows. At the meeting she told Seacrest’s partner, Eliot Goldberg, that her idea for the show would be a “blow-by-blow look at our crazy, loving, fun, and incredibly close family.”

  And her big pitch was that her daughters would be the show’s stars, especially Kim and all the controversy that was swirling around her—“both positive and negative.” But her sex tape was not mentioned by Kris in her book as the reason for all that controversy.

  The producers, Seacrest and Goldberg, surely aware of Kim Kardashian, Superstar and its XXX rating and all the buzz attached to it, bought the show on the spot.

  It was a “magical moment” Kris had never forgot.

  When she told the family that night, Bruce was “dumbstruck,” but went along. But he had to be wondering how much he might have to reveal about himself.

  Meanwhile, Kris was about to merge her roles as mom and manager.

  She called herself Momager.

  People who knew Kris from way back when—when she really was a Kardashian through marriage to Robert—perceived that she had the kind of ambition and drive and ego that would one day bring her to this point.

  Robert’s lifelong confidant Joni Migdal, pondering Kris’s success in 2016, maintained, “This was her vision of what she always wanted to do. She had a plan. She had a goal. Look what she did with Bruce. When she first met him he was a nothing. Yes, he was an Olympian, but she really turned his whole life around. What she’s doing now is creating her own dream. I am not surprised. I am not shocked at all. She always had the capabilities, and she just went with it.”

  A 2015 profile of Kris in The New York Times had a similar take about her and her family. “[W]e have reached the point at which the Jenners and the Kardashians are not famous for being famous: They are famous for the industry that they’ve created, the Kardashian/Jenner megacomplex, which has not just invaded the culture but metastasized into it, with the family members emerging as legitimate businesspeople and Kris the mother-leader of them all.”

  A month after the deal for the Kardashian show was signed, filming started.

  One last detail was left to be finalized—what to name it.

  The producer and showrunner, a woman by the name of Farnaz Farjam, had been all over the place with her camera crews trying to document the varied real and staged activities of the Kardashian bunch.

  Showing up exhausted and late once to a meeting early on in the process, she said, “I’m just having a really hard time keeping up with the Kardashians.”

  Ka-ching!

  Keeping Up with the Kardashians had its premiere on October 14, 2007, a date that will live in television and pop culture infamy.

  It became a gold mine. A Hollywood fairy tale come true.

  * * *

  BY 2016, THE KARDASHIAN-JENNER franchise and empire would have a a reported net worth of more than $191 million, a mind-boggling and seemingly impossible success story for a dysfunctional family with little or no discernable talent besides self-promotion.

  Along with the show, their empire included clothing lines, skin-care products, fragrances, lines of jewelry, cosmetics, and more.

  Kris’s bundle came mostly from her company, which involved the Kardashian show, reality TV spin-offs, and the development of products by her daughters—such as Kourtney, Kim, and Khloé’s “Kardashian Beauty” line and Kim’s Collection Fragrance. Sears would commission Kris to manage a global lifestyle line, and she would have the “Kris Jenner Kollection for QVC.” And much more.

  The Kardashian sisters would have their own lucrative brands and businesses, together and separately.

  Kim alone would have a net worth of $51 million, and was the richest and most powerful. From the main show, she received a reported $80,000 per episode, and has received as much as a gossiped-about $1 million for a personal appearance. One report stated that people who want to be in her presence were actually charged a fee. At her birthday party in 2014, guests were charged as much as $2,500 each. And she was making huge deals for exclusive rights to events in her life like bridal showers.

  Kourtney, the eldest and the least scandalous, and the only sister who didn’t marry, although she had three children out of wedlock, would be worth as much as $15 million. From the reality show, she would be paid as much as $50,000 per episode, receive $125,000 for a personal appearance, and for tweeting a product endorsement, she would be paid $15,000. And she had spin-offs from the main show—Kourtney and Khloé Take Miami, and then New York.

  Khloé, whose birth as a biological Kardashian has been seriously questioned—even by her father of record, the late Robert Kardashian, reportedly had a net worth of $11 million. From the family program, her take-home was $40,000 per episode, and when she made a personal appearance she took home another $75,000. Asked to make a product endorsement on Twitter, she would get a check for $13,000. From a fragrance line, she earned an estimated $20 million.

  Kris’s daughters with Caitlyn Jenner, formerly known as Bruce, would become overnight fashion stars. Kendall and Kylie were far more attractive physically than the Kardashian sisters, and developed a hugely successful clothing line with PacSun. For their participation in the show, they each earned about $5,000 per episode. And Kendall would become a much-publicized fashion model. At fourteen she was signed by the presti
gious Wilhelmina agency, and she would begin showing up on the covers of such fashion bibles as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar.

  And in the spring of 2017, the Kardashian’s reality television empire and brand expanded to include the youngest of the Kardashian-Jenner clan, Kylie, to the schedule with her own spin-off—eight episodes called Life of Kylie, set to begin airing that summer on E! “Kylie’s beauty, business savvy, and fashion icon status have made her one of the most famous and successful young women on the planet,” boasted an E! v.p. “Kylie has achieved so much at such a young age, and we know the E! audience will be thrilled now that she is ready to share an inside look at her everyday life.” The momager, Kris, was billed as executive producer.

  The least famous—but a constant tabloid figure—would be Robert Kardashian’s namesake and only son. Robert Arthur Kardashian’s net worth was almost $3 million, and he would be paid $20,000 per episode at the top of his game. He was cast in a season of Dancing With the Stars, and would serve as a judge in the 2012 Miss USA pageant—paid a reported $25,000. There would be other deals, too.

  “All those millions and very little talent says something terrible about our culture,” observed a member of the Kardashian team. “But, hey, take it while you can.”

  The many seasons of Keeping Up with the Kardashians would be seen in 160 countries. There would be countless reruns and countless critiques by respected cultural critics. The Kardashians were the zeitgeist of the early decades of the 2000s, love ’em or hate ’em.

  The opening sequence of the first episode was classic. The camera zeroed in on Kim’s signature body part, her enormous ass, as she scanned the contents of the Kardashians’ fridge.

  “Junk in her trunk,” commented Kris.

  “Mom, she’s always had an ass,” declared Khloé.

  Kourtney called her mother “catty.”

  And Kim replied, “I hate you all.”

  TWENTY-SIX