The Kardashians Read online

  She called the surgery a “complex decision” and observed that her late penis had “no special gifts or use for me other than what I have said before, the ability to take a whiz in the wood.… I am also tired of tucking the damn thing in.”

  She would soon learn that women have the ability to take whizzes in the woods, too.

  Epilogue

  For all the Kardashian business acumen and successes and the immense fortune they had derived, there were a number of failures. And by the close of 2016, with the tenth anniversary of Keeping Up with the Kardashians incredibly looming in 2017, there were dire warning signs that the Kardashian economy was beginning to slow down.

  Their reality show itself even appeared to be losing traction with viewers, who were once glued to each and every episode. In the spring of 2016 it was reported that it had the lowest ratings in its long run. The first episode of season twelve had anywhere from just over two million viewers, to just over three million, and by episode two, a half million of the Kardashians’ couch potatoes had left to do other things, according to press reports.

  Experts wondered whether the Kardashian phenomenon was a bubble about to burst, despite the fact that a conservatively attired Kim, a rarity for a woman who often bared all, was on the cover of Forbes in July 2016, and was number forty-two on its list of the world’s one hundred top-earning celebrities, with $51 million. But she was far behind Taylor Swift, who was number one with $170 million.

  Because of the momager’s successes with the E! reality TV show and her immense fame derived from her family’s on-camera antics and all their side businesses, the Fox network had offered Kris Jenner a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: her own talk show, or at least a test to see how she would do.

  As a close family friend observed, “It’s interesting that she got that deal, because Kris always, always, always watched those programs on TV, and she used to go on and on that she could be a host of any one of them—only better. She once bragged to me, ‘If given a chance I could be the next Oprah. I can bullshit with the best of ’em—and people love me. They really do.’”

  The Fox Television Stations Group thought so, too, or at least hoped so.

  In the summer of 2013, a six-week test run was initiated. The program was called Kris. It was given huge publicity before it aired. Fox announced that the matriarch’s daytime show would air “in select test markets” and would focus on a “daily jolt of celebrity guests, fashion and beauty trends, plus a mix of lifestyle topics—all through the distinctive and unpredictable perspective of Kris Jenner.”

  Naturally, Kris was thrilled.

  “This is something I have wanted to do all my life so it’s definitely a dream come true,” she declared in a Fox-approved press release.

  A survey was done asking people whether they would watch. The results were rather dismal: 12.05 percent of online voters said they were interested in watching her show. But 87.95 percent of the respondents voted, “I don’t think so.”

  The latter group, as it turned out, was spot-on.

  Kris premiered on July 15, 2013, on Fox stations in Dallas, Minneapolis, Phoenix, Los Angeles, New York, and Charlotte, North Carolina. She had a variety of B-list cohosts, but on the show’s fifth airing, her infamous daughter Khloé sat with her on the set. Even the Kardashians’ biggest booster and backer, Ryan Seacrest, the E! executive who discovered the Kardashians, was on one episode, playing the role of Kris’s sidekick. By then Seacrest was aware that Kris needed help badly if Fox was going to green-light the show for a full season.

  But after the six-week test, Kris disappeared from the airwaves. There were months of silence about what plans, if any, Fox had for the show. But it wasn’t until a year later, in the summer of 2014, when Frank Cicha, the senior vice president and president of programming for Fox Television Stations, revealed that the show and the momager didn’t work and was gone for good.

  While giving kudos to Kris for working hard, Cicha voiced rare criticism in a business where one has to be diplomatic and politically correct. He told The Hollywood Reporter, “I think she was pretty uninteresting [on camera].… That was one where [sister company] 20th Television tried to capitalize on a name.… When the camera was on she looked not just like a deer in the headlights, but like a deer that already got hit.”

  It was over for Jenner when she brought her son-in-law Kanye West on as a guest to show pictures of his baby with Kim. Cicha claimed that ratings became subpar and that some stations even got hate mail for airing Kris.

  “When you added it up,” observed the executive, “it wasn’t a show that made sense for us.”

  It wasn’t just Kris’s apparent lack of talk show talent that caused Kris to be canceled. The celebrity weekly Star quoted a purported staffer as claiming, “Working with Kris was absolutely unbearable. She would show up on the set hung over and demand her beauty team to fix her up and make her look stunning.”

  Kris later claimed her program was not canceled. In a tweet, she firmly stated, “Rumors flying are false but glad everyone is still buzzing about our 6 week summer run!!!!”

  She was even able to make failure seem a success.

  * * *

  A DEAL THAT SEARS had to mass-market Kim and a clothing line called the “Kardashian Kollection” also ended dismally at the end of 2014 after a four-year run.

  The “Kollection” had showed up in some four hundred Sears stores in the late summer of 2011 and generated a reported $600 million by 2013 for the iconic low-brow department store chain, and added some $30 million to the Kardashian coffers. But the revenue wasn’t enough, sales began trailing off, and the struggling retailer, which was closing hundreds of stores in a poor retail economy, pulled the plug. Things got so bad that at one point a Kardashian Kollection sheath dress, sticker priced at $189, was on sale for $29.99, less than the cost of a decent sweatshirt.

  As the business magazine Fortune declared in a headline in May 2015, “Sears and the Kardashians Have Broken Up.” It called the deal a “fashion collaboration of bargains and bling.” The chain, it noted, “doesn’t have to try to keep up with the Kardashians anymore … [it] flopped with customers.”

  * * *

  DESPITE KIM KARDASHIAN WEST’S more than 90 million Instagram followers, almost 50 million Twitter devotees, and huge army of Snapchat pals, there was an even darker cloud over the Kardashian empire as their tenth anniversary on television neared.

  Reports surfaced that the Kardashians’ influence in print was beginning to fade. The trade publication Women’s Wear Daily revealed that national print magazines featuring one Kardashian or another on the cover were selling less on newsstands in 2016. Examples included Cosmopolitan, which usually averaged little more than 531,000 in single-issue sales, but a major cover billing the Kardashians as “America’s First Family” appeared with great expectations but sold only 436,500 copies. And a Glamour cover with Kim on it was a total disaster, selling just 164,918 copies, compared to the magazine’s average of 193,108.

  One online news site, reporting the fewer sales of Kardashian magazine covers, bellowed in a headline: “Is This the Collapse of the Kardashian Economy?”

  By the fall of 2016, even the Kardashians’ long, lucky streak of striking it rich was under a dark and questionable cloud.

  Near the end of Fashion Week in Paris, where Kim and her posse were a major presence, she reported that masked gunmen had broken into her exclusive suite, tied and gagged her, and rode off on bicycles with some $11 million of her diamond jewelry that was just lying around. The media, which had built up her and her clan for years, now jumped on her true crime story like white on rice, asserting that her account was suspect.

  As the respected fashion writer Robin Givhan noted, “What has bubbled up … is a geyser of schadenfreude, as well as a healthy dose of skepticism that the robbery truly unfolded as described.” The talk in Paris, she noted, and in the U.S. media—a New York Post headline blared, “How Kim’s Story Just Doesn’t Add Up”—and in
the rest of the free world was that it was all a stunt, a way to generate publicity at a time when the Kardashian economy was giving hints of tanking. But if it really did happen, if Kim’s account was the whole truth and nothing but the truth, then thank heaven she was not hurt, and that insurance would cover her loss. But Givhan wrote, “Could it [the robbery] be part of the lucrative reality show that is Kardashian’s life? There has been dark humor. And outright mocking.”

  In the wake of the heist, there were rumors, duly reported by some news organizations that were obsessed with the Kardashians, that the Kardashians’ show was being suspended and that if such a catastrophe occurred it would cost Kim as much as $1 million a month. But an expert on financial matters claimed that if she positioned herself correctly in a return to social media, she could clean up again. There was lots of speculation, none of it actually panning out.

  The Journalist Maureen Callahan, who had been covering the Kardashians’ fame, observed in the tabloid New York Post that the “off-screen Kardashians seem mere avatars of their television personas, willing to manipulate anyone, contrive anything, to advance a narrative they can bounce back to the show.”

  And a snarky commenter on the British Daily Mail news Web site darkly offered the following: “It’s unfortunate the robbers didn’t do the world a favor and put us out of our misery.”

  But the Paris heist was the real deal, carried out out by a veteran gang. Kim even sued a celebrity Web site that had reported otherwise and a retraction was run.

  * * *

  ONE HAS TO WONDER whether the Kardashians were starting to follow in the Louboutin heels of Paris Hilton, who fell from the heights of international “It” girl fame to virtual media has-been. It could happen.

  But wait.

  After E! pulls the plug, which is inevitable at some point, Kris Houghton Kardashian Jenner and her crew have a plan and see a bright future. Voters, get ready to cast your ballots: The Kardashians may next be in politics.

  Ever since Donald Trump entered the political arena, Kris has been “seriously talking about running for office. It’s a little crazy, I know, but she keeps privately saying, ‘If Mr. Weird Hair can do it, so can I. We have the same DNA,’” revealed a close source.

  And a well-placed confidant recalled Kris saying over dinner while watching one of the 2016 presidential primary debates that she believed she can start what she called “a powerful and influential movement.” She believes there are “millions of single moms out there” like her who, if elected, she can help to overcome adversity. One of the things on her agenda is to deal with divorce laws and benefits for single mothers and gay partners. “She really is firm,” said the source, “when she says that she can ‘give needy women goals and programs’ based on her own life experiences, and that they can ‘become rich and successful’ like her. It’s so odd because she even sounded like Trump when she revealed all this. Her words were on the order of, ‘I can make America’s moms feel great again! And everyone else, too.’”

  According to this source, Kris might enter a congressional race in California or New York once KUWTK ends its run. “She has so much confidence,” said the advisor, “that talking about the presidency some day, running for it and winning it, isn’t out of the question for her. Kris always thinks big, always has.”

  And it could well happen, even in Kris Jenner’s alternate universe where anything is possible. Aside from actor-businessman-entrepreneur-politico Trump who was elected president, just look at the celebrities who made the successful transition to politics—former Hollywood stars Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger, singer Sonny Bono, comedian Al Franken, and one of the few actresses, Shirley Temple Black.

  Like Trump, Kris has all the right (or wrong) stuff, depending on whether one is a liker or a hater, and there are so many of the latter, just like with The Donald. They both come from reality television—and like Trump, Kris has an unparalleled reality TV pedigree—and neither had had any national elective political experience, which was considered an attribute in the minds of a large segment of the country, tired of the old establishment. Like Trump, who ran profitable businesses, so has Kris—clothing stores that she opened with her daughters which were successful. Like Trump, who starred in and executive produced The Apprentice franchise on NBC, Kris led the merry-go-round on the Kardashians’ hugely successful show and spin-offs.

  And there are even more similarities between the New York real estate mogul turned commander-in-chief and the momager.

  Like Trump, whose Slovenian wife once posed partially nude in a European men’s magazine, Kris’s insanely exhibitionist second-born, Kim, is internationally infamous for publicly showing it all. Like Trump, Kris has had multiple marriages and affairs, and none of that seemed to bother voters, even some evangelicals, in the 2016 presidential race, at least until Trump was heard uttering the word “pussy” on an old videotape that became public. That ignited a tsunami of women claiming all sorts of sexual misdeeds by the GOP presidential candidate, along with accusing him of making rude comments about women, including but not limited to Khloé Kardashian, who he allegedly called “a fat piglet” when she was in the cast of The Celebrity Apprentice in 2009.

  “And Kris is not bothered,” asserted the advisor, “by any of the Kardashian family scandals of the past. She says ‘people don’t give a shit and they just eat it up.’”

  Kris has an immense following, and a huge voting bloc—the millions of fans of the Kardashian reality show, and the millions of consumers of her and her daughters’ various brands, and like Trump, the Kardashians can show they’ve made jobs for Americans. And like Trump, Kris and her daughters have written bestselling books about their lives and successes.

  Also like Trump, they’ve been involved in lawsuits and litigation. In a battle over the Kardashian sisters’ cosmetics trademark—an infringement case—they had accused the major investor in their beauty brand of not compensating them or getting their approval on products prior to production. A federal judge ruled in their favor. But in another matter, the nonprofit Truth in Advertising organization charged that the Kardashians had violated Federal Trade Commission guidelines by failing to disclose that they were being paid for many social media posts for supporting products or services for which they were linked, in violation of Federal Trade Commission guidelines.

  Kris and the Kardashians also have a big following among young African-American men, a bloc that eluded Trump, and have huge support among millennial women eighteen to thirty-four, and support in the transgender community—especially if Caitlyn, a staunch Republican, plays ball and stumps for her ex-wife if she, indeed, runs for elective office as she’s suggested.

  As self-important Kris was said to have remarked to a confidant, “I have great depth on social media. They are mine in any campaign I jump into.” And like Trump, who hired the media genius and founder of Fox News, Roger Ailes, as a consultant, it’s certain that Kris would use the media savvy and programming brilliance of Ryan Seacrest to help her in any race that she ever chose to enter.

  In any campaign, Kris wouldn’t need Donald J. Trump’s support, because she has Hillary Rodham Clinton in her corner. Because of past Kardashian support, especially from Kim, Clinton was one of the few famous names who publicly showed compassion in the wake of Kim’s multimillion-dollar diamond heist in Paris. “I felt really bad for her. It’s horrible. I’m just glad nobody was hurt,” Clinton declared just before her second presidential debate with Trump in October 2016. Of Kris’s son-in-law Kanye, who left a concert when he heard about the robbery, Clinton said, “Bless his heart.”

  “Kris sees herself as a role model for women and girls. She sees herself as a feminist and a brand. She’s an A-list international name along with being a loving and dutiful mother who turned nothing into an empire. As she told me, ‘I am what America’s voters need.’ Kris Jenner for president,” added the close advisor. “I can see it now! And can you imagine that first family in the White House?”
/>   Robert Kardashian, the patriarch of the reality TV Kardashian brood—Kim, Kourtney, Khloé, and Rob—was a social and academic star in his class at Dorsey High School, in Los Angeles. In his friend, Donna Tom’s yearbook, the future lawyer and entrepreneur wrote “best of success.” (DORSEY YEARBOOK)

  Robert Kardashian was one of his Dorsey High School class’s most popular, and was considered a jokester by some. Others worshipped him as best looking and most athletic. Later, he would become close pal and confidant of O. J. Simpson, and one of Simpson’s lawyers in the “murder trial of the century.” (DORSEY YEARBOOK)

  Kristen Mary “Kris” Houghton, the future “momager” of the Kardashians’ immense success, fame, and infamy, clowns it up at sixteen with Clairemont High School pal Joan Zimmerman, in a 25-cent photo booth, in their cookie-cutter University City development, in Clairemont, California. (COURTESY OF JOAN ZIMMERMAN)

  The future Kris Kardashian Jenner’s Clairemont High School yearbook graduation photo. She was uninvolved in school activities and couldn’t wait to get out in the world and meet and marry a wealthy man, with her mother, Mary Jo, as her enabler. (COLEMAN-RAYNER, LLC)

  Scandal and shame rocked the Kardashian family in 1974 when Robert Kardashian’s older brother, Tom, as this newspaper clip documents, was indicted and soon made a plea deal for bribing federal meat inspectors as an executive of his family’s business, Great Western Packing. A long-held family secret, he lived under a dark cloud for two decades before he was granted a pardon by President George H. W. Bush.

  After living under a dark cloud for some twenty years, Tom Kardashian, brother of Robert Kardashian and uncle of the current generation of famous and infamous Kardashians, received a pardon from President George H. W. Bush for his bribery conviction. (U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE)