The Kardashians Read online

  A “Complex” Lie

  In early 2007, the freelance writer Nate Denver had never heard of Kim Kardashian, like most everyone else. It was some months before the premiere of Keeping Up with the Kardashians and just before the pornographic Kim Kardashian, Superstar was released, that Denver, in Los Angeles, received a call from his editor, Noah Callahan-Bever, at Complex magazine, in New York, assigning him to interview her.

  “I remember asking who she was, and they said she was a friend of Paris Hilton, and I kind of joked, ‘So now we’re interviewing Paris Hilton’s friends?’ But they told me who her biological father was, and some of the men she was involved with. That gave me some context. But that’s the first interview I’d ever done with someone I truly was unfamiliar with,” he said, looking back in 2015.

  For Kim, this interview with Denver and the photos that were going to be taken were a big deal because Complex, billed as the “men’s guide to consumer culture,” was the first magazine ever to approach her and put her on the cover and make her a pin-up girl. She appeared in the February-March 2007 issue in a breast-enhancing black bra, black panties, and peep-toe stilettos, with a headline that read: “WHO IS KIM KARDASHIAN? PARIS HILTON’S B.F.F. ON SEX, LIES, AND VIDEOTAPES.”

  But readers of her mother’s memoir would never have known that. To Kris, the only men’s magazine that meant anything in Kim’s blossoming career was Playboy, and during the first season of KUWTK, and after Kim did her first TV talk show appearance on The Tyra Banks Show, and after Kim became known as a porn star, Playboy called and wanted to do a spread, and got the green light with Kris’s exuberant approval.

  Not nearly as naked—and nowhere nearly as raunchy as she was in her sex video—Kim, in a plunging red negligee, posed sublimely in the December 2007 issue of Playboy. Kris raved about Kim’s Hugh Hefner adventure in her book. But Kim’s dealings with Complex were completely ignored.

  While Hefner gave Kim and her people the royal treatment for the shoot at the Playboy Mansion, Nate Denver, then thirty-one, met twenty-six-year-old Kim for her interview and the Complex photo shoot in a far less glamorous venue. They arranged to meet in a West Hollywood bar in the middle of the day when she was still a virtual unknown.

  He was “not surprised” when she arrived and he found her to be one hot number. “If I hadn’t been married to my beautiful wife at the time,” said Denver, “I would have been interested. Kim was attractive and extremely friendly.”

  The idea for the cover story, said Denver, “was to kind of introduce her to readers, because this was her very first magazine interview and first cover. She had a really nice kind of optimistic feel to her about the world and where her career was going, and it seemed like she knew this was probably going to be a nice stepping stone for her, and it was a really easy interview. She had a lot of energy and I felt she was going to turn it into something.”

  Kim openly talked about herself, or so her candor seemed in that bar, revealing at one point that sometimes she referred to herself as “Princess Kim,” claimed she was an “outdoorsy sports person,” and that she and her then–bosom buddy Paris Hilton referred to themselves as seniors of a fictional “Hollywood High,” meaning they knew their way around La-La Land. “I go to parties and hang out,” she said when Denver asked her what she did for fun. But there was something very important about her past that was missing from her answers.

  After Denver finished the interview, his editor telephoned and queried whether he had, by chance, asked her if there was any truth to a rumor that was circulating in media and gossip circles that she had made a porno with her lover, Ray J, and that it was soon to be released commercially.

  “At the time, I had no idea that it existed,” acknowledged Denver, “so I called her back, and we set up a second interview for on the phone. She was very friendly, she said it [the tape] existed, ‘but I need to talk to my lawyer first.’

  “She called me back the same day and completely denied that it existed. She said, ‘There’s no such tape. It doesn’t exist.’ She had been completely coached and was ready to deny that it existed, and gave me a completely rehearsed answer. It was silly because we had just talked a couple of minutes before and she had said she wanted to talk about it. I think the next week the tape came out.”

  In the published interview, a Q and A, Denver asked her about the sex tape rumors, and she was directly quoted as saying, “There is no sex tape! Ray J’s not the kind of guy who would do something for revenge. There is no amount of money that could ever convince me to release any tape, even if I had one. I don’t need the money!”

  Kim had been caught in a major, embarrassing lie.

  Soon after, Denver watched Kim and Ray J’s porno when it went online. “My curiosity drove me to find it and take a look,” he recalled. “It was interesting to see a person I met and interacted with in a production like that. At the same time it was a strange voyeuristic thing to watch.”

  But Complex, blatantly lied to, wasn’t through with Kim Kardashian.

  Joe La Puma of the magazine’s staff did a follow-up interview with her in the spring of 2007 and confronted Kim about her denial, and she gave a rather convoluted answer, to wit:

  “Well at that point I really didn’t think that one was coming out. I heard rumors of things as degrading and disgusting as a golden shower … that never even happened in my lifetime, so I didn’t think that what everybody was talking about had any truth to it. So I apologize for not publicly being honest, but no one wants to hope that that’s the truth and you hope that will never come out so I felt like at the time that’s all that I could have said.”

  Asked whether she thought the tape would never surface even though she knew “Ray J was filming it,” Kim admitted, “I knew that we had one tape, but it was a few different times throughout the few years in our relationship. I obviously knew that that existed, I just never thought that it would happen.”

  She also denied that she ever had any intention to see it made public, or thought that it was a good idea to see it commercially released as a career enhancer as it had been for her pal Paris.

  “Never once have I thought that … My dad would’ve been mortified and I’m not happy about it. You know, I thought I was gonna marry this guy; we were in a three-year relationship. I didn’t think that our personal business would be for the world to see.”

  * * *

  THE WORLD, HOWEVER, DID SEE Kim Kardashian again in the buff—then married for the third time, and soon to be a mother of two—when she “broke the Internet” by posing seven years later on the cover of the winter 2014, ten-dollar edition of Paper magazine—her big, bold, inflated, shiny, naked ass front and center for all to see.

  The infamous Kim Kardashian derriere had even caught the attention of the respected British actress Helen Mirren, who was quoted in the UK’s Telegraph as musing, “I’m not into the Kardashians, it’s a phenomenon I just don’t find interesting, but—and this is the big word: B-U-T-T—it’s wonderful that you’re allowed to have a butt nowadays! Thanks to Madame Kardashian … It’s very positive.… I love shameless women. Shameless and proud!”

  In promoting the Paper magazine issue, the magazine’s advertising declared, “There is no other person that we can think of who is up to the task [to Break the Internet] than one Kim Kardashian West. A pop culture fascination able to generate headlines just by leaving her house, Kim is what makes the web tick … All we can say about the images inside … holy fucking shit.”

  It was not the first time that Kim had been featured in the trendy magazine. A few years earlier, when it did a social media issue, Paper featured Kim and Khloé inside—a photo of the sisters with their eyes glued to their mobile phones, “and it was a huge success online,” said Paper editor Mickey Boardman, looking back in 2015.

  The idea to do the Kim cover and use the image of her to break the Internet was the brainchild of the magazine’s then-new chief creative officer, Drew Elliott, who had spent a year in Los Angeles wo
rking for a social media company—one that had done work for President Obama and many celebrities. “One of Drew’s mandates was to do people who have a much greater reach digitally, so that’s why Kim was the ultimate in a way because she is really the most famous woman in the world, especially if you go on the Internet.… The story has to live online, create interest and traffic, and get people talking,” said Boardman.

  Curiously, when Kardashian West’s name was brought up at an editorial meeting, Boardman said they weren’t thinking of doing a nude cover with her. Their thinking was that she was among a very tiny list of celebrities who have “a gigantic following, and everything they do creates news.” Besides Kardashian, that elite group included Rihanna, Justin Bieber, and Miley Cyrus.

  “But Kim is gorgeous. And she’s become very fashion,” said Boardman. “Her metamorphosis is kind of fascinating. And we just thought she was super right—the most important celebrity in a way right now.”

  By using a naked Kim on the cover, maintained Boardman, “We were purposefully trying to get as much attention, as much traffic, as much press, as much everything.

  “People always have some kind of reaction to her. Either they love Kim or they think she’s a symbol of everything that’s wrong with society. There are very few people who elicit that strong of a reaction.”

  * * *

  BY THE TIME KIM was being considered by the Paper people as the only celebrity in the world who could break the Internet, she had had a second turbulent marriage, and was then hoping to have a successful third.

  Her second husband, after Damon Thomas, was the professional basketball star Kris Humphries, the six-foot-nine, 235-pound son of an interracial couple. But before she tied the knot with him, her baby sister Khloé gave her a dire warning, in her typical classy manner, not to. As she revealed in 2016 to Snoop Dogg on his online show, “I was like, ‘He’s a fucking loser. Why are you marrying this fucking dog?’”

  And Khloé knew from losers as her roller-coaster marriage to her own black basketball star, the six-foot-ten Lamar Odom, would amply and very publicly demonstrate.

  Odom had fathered three children with his first wife, and married Khloé in September 2009—they had dated for only one month after meeting at a party. Their wedding was given big play on E! They even had their own E! spin-off, Khloé & Lamar, a two-season flop.

  Odom would later have a DUI arrest, alleged drug problems, and just before Christmas, in 2013, Khloé filed for divorce, but she later withdrew the papers. In 2015, Odom was found unconscious at the Love Ranch brothel in Nevada, igniting headlines and still another Kardashian scandal and more drama. They eventually did divorce.

  Khloé apparently had a real thing about romancing giant-size African American hoop stars, as underscored in the fall of 2016 when she began seeing the six-foot-nine Cleveland Cavaliers player Tristan Thompson, who is seven years her junior. Khloé’s momager, Kris, was introduced to her daughter’s new beau and called him a “wonderful guy … he’s great.” She termed her third-born a “delicious girl” and declared, “I just want her to be happy, having a good time.” Khloé had begun seeing Thompson after breaking up with the six-foot-five Houston Rockets star James Harden, an Olympic gold medal winner, just like her stepmother, Caitlyn.

  * * *

  BUT BACK TO KIM, who would “break the Internet,” courtesy of Paper magazine.

  She disregarded sister Khloé’s sage advice in 2011 and at thirty wed twenty-six-year-old Humphries. It was a lavish affair in Montecito, California, with tons of publicity, and with the ceremony once again aired on the Kardashian family’s reality show network, E!, as Kim’s momager, Kris, and her handsome husband, Bruce, proudly looked on.

  But their ill-fated union lasted just seventy-two days, at which time Kim filed for divorce on the grounds of irreconcilable differences, one of which may have been that at a little over five feet tall, she was at least three heads shorter than the NBA giant. Their split was finalized in 2013.

  “For once, Kim should have taken Khloé’s advice,” was the assessment of commenters—haters and acolytes—on the many Kardashian online forums.

  Kim also had a turbulent relationship for three years, this one on and off, with Reginald Alfred “Reggie” Bush Jr., who, like her “Uncle O.J.” was an African-American football player who, like O.J., had won a Heisman Trophy at USC, and would even go on to play in the NFL for the Buffalo Bills like O.J.

  During their relationship she reportedly tried to initiate an affair with the man who would become her third husband and the father of her two children, the rapper Kanye West.

  While Kim was still with Bush, West was believed to have declared his love for her in the lyrics of one of his songs, “Knock You Down,” in which he referred to her as the “cheerleader of my dreams.” A woman he was involved with at the time, the biracial, bisexual model and actress (and one-time teenage stripper known as “Paris”) Amber Rose, would later claim that Kim had sent pornographic photographs of herself to West. Rose, who wrote a book entitled How to Be a Bad Bitch, called Kim a “home wrecker,” and she was quoted in Complex magazine as stating, “They label me a bisexual freak stripper who fucks Kanye on a daily basis.”

  In May 2014, Kim extravagantly married Kanye with a showy pre-wedding affair in the Paris mansion of the fashion designer Valentino Garavani—better known as Valentino. The couple tied the knot in Italy—Kim wore a gown of custom design by Givenchy and had a much-publicized ride in a carriage in the gardens of Versailles.

  Of the many men in his daughters’ lives, Robert Kardashian, had he lived, would have most respected and liked West, for his award-winning musical career, his entrepreneurial successes, and for fathering Kim’s two children, pretentiously named Saint West and North West. But he sometimes referred to himself as “Mr. Kardashian,” which would not have gone off well with the bride’s late father, who prided himself on his Armenian heritage.

  Along with his music success, West would have his own fashion line like the Kardashian-Jenner women. In a snarky September 2016 New York Times story about his show for New York Fashion Week, Times fashion editor Vanessa Friedman described West as “musician/impresario/mad tweeter/Adidas collaborator.” She declared that his show in blazing Indian summer heat on Roosevelt Island, in the middle of the East River, “cast a pall,” and she noted that his clothing line wasn’t “original or risky enough” to even be terrible. “They were just boring. Not ambitious or eclectic or even surprising. Yawn.… For a man known for his rambling, far-reaching riffs, in his fourth fashion season, it turned out Mr. West had nothing to say.”

  * * *

  BUT KANYE’S WIFE’S “BREAK the Internet” photo on the cover of Paper would have much to say about her and the culture and race in America in the second decade of the new millennium.

  Boardman had decided to do the shoot in Paris with the seventy-three-year-old French experimental fashion photographer Jean-Paul Goude, whom the magazine considered a legend. “We thought who better to pair up Kim with. We wanted something that took her to a new place that wasn’t a traditional approach to a fashion magazine cover.”

  Long before Photoshop and digital enhancement of photos, Goude was taking oddball photos of iconic figures such as stretching the neck of his then-lover, Grace Jones. He termed his style the “French Correction,” a play on the French Connection movie title. His work was soon exhibited in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.

  A master of photography had been assigned to shoot the narcissistic mistress of reality television and the queen of the Internet.

  But that cover shot of Kim, giving very special attention to her huge ass, would spark accusations of racism—along with getting so much attention online that it appeared to break the Internet, in terms of millions and millions of hits.

  Goude based his cover shot of Kim on an iconic nude photo he had taken in the mid-seventies of the skinny, small-breasted black model Carolina Beaumont, in which she is standing naked holding a champagne b
ottle and shooting an ejaculation-like stream of the bubbly into a champagne glass standing upright and firmly on her large, extended ass.

  As the respected deejay and social observer Rich Medina asserted on his Web site, “Paper magazine used Kim Kardashian as a means to reincarnate [the Beaumont photo] and simultaneously appropriate Kim’s possession of what’s been stereotyped as Black women’s physical attributes (that big ole ass) … for financial gain and shock value fame.”

  Goude, who is white, declined to be interviewed for this book. He once told People, “Blacks are the premise of my work.” His book of photography was entitled Jungle Fever, and he’s therefore been accused of objectifying and eroticizing black women’s bodies. Goude’s Beaumont and Kardashian shots have been compared to images of a black woman, Saartjie Baartman, dubbed the “Hottentot Venus,” who became a “sexual freak show attraction” in Europe in the nineteenth century because of her immense Kim Kardashian–like buttocks.

  With all of the black men in their lives and with their look and lifestyle, the Kardashian women—especially Kim and Khloé and even Kylie Jenner—were soon the targets of some prominent African-Americans accusing them of cultural appropriation—of lifting black style for their own purposes, financial and otherwise. The Paper cover, which emphasized Kim’s huge ass, only added to the furor and controversy.

  One later Kardashian critic was a leading activist with the controversial Black Lives Matter movement, which came to prominence because of the questionable shootings of a number of black men by white police officers across the nation. Shanelle Matthews, who handled communications for BLM, criticized Kim Kardashian for wearing cornrows—later called “boxer braids.”

  She asserted that Kim was misappropriating the style of African-Americans, and by doing so, was showing a lack of respect for the black community.

  “Banking on blackness,” Matthews declared, “is a shameful enterprise, and the Kardashians are no better than racist judges, prison officials and corporations who make money off the incarceration of black bodies.” She suggested that the Kardashians knew nothing about being black, “all the while trying to be black, such as Kim showing off her huge ass in tight clothing and using black nomenclature.