The Kardashians Read online

  One such case involved Marla Tafelski, an electronics salesman’s daughter, who arrived with her mother to register at Marston for the first time in the middle of her ninth-grade year, in 1969, when Kris was about fourteen.

  “It was so embarrassing because I was with my mom and my siblings and Kris was in the office and she was just super nice and introduced herself, and she volunteered to take me around the school and introduce me to people,” Marla recalled years later. “I met her friends and she showed me different areas of the school, and after that we just became super-good friends. She probably had an insight that I was feeling pretty uncomfortable. I was feeling lost and she just made me feel welcome.”

  In looks and style the two girls were very different. Marla was “more earthy”—jeans, boots, a peasant top—and Kris was “always more nicely dressed. I was more casual, she was always dressed up more—more adult-looking.”

  Marla saw that Kris was “very social, with a huge smile and friendly with everybody,” and they all seemed to like her. The two began hanging out “a lot” at each other’s homes, just the two of them. While Marla had made a few other friends, none were “as close” as Kris Houghton, and their friendship seemed like it would go on forever.

  They listened to music—Marla was more “hardcore rock ’n’ roll,” Kris “was more into the pop stuff.”

  They talked about boys, went to the movies, just hung out.

  Kris’s home was just like Marla’s, she recalled, and just like most of the others in University City—“your typical house in a development, and nicely decorated.”

  And whenever Marla was there, she remembered clearly, Kris’s mother, Mary Jo, was there, too.

  “To me, she always seemed to be home, was kind of petite but with really big dark brown hair, and she always dressed really fancy with high heels and tight pants, and a frilly blouse. Compared to other mothers I knew back then, Kris’s was more dressy, and just really kept herself up,” Marla noted.

  Sometimes a man would be present, “very stern-looking with glasses, wasn’t real friendly, and just a not real acknowledging-of-my-presence type,” Marla remembered. Kris never introduced him to Marla, and Marla never really knew what his role was in the house, “whether he was Kris’s father, or stepfather, or what. But he wasn’t a grandfather.”

  In those adolescent days, friendships come and go like teenage acne, while some people remain friends for a lifetime. In Marla and Kris’s case, their bond began to unravel, and Kris began to drift away about seven or eight months into their relationship.

  “I kind of thought that we were best pals,” said Marla, looking back years later. “But I just felt I was getting further and further out of the loop, and at the time I was feeling hurt, I guess, because I thought I was more special to her, and then I realized I was just one of kind of many people in her life. She was so much more extroverted and so popular, and maybe I wanted more intimacy. I think we both realized we weren’t each other’s type after all.”

  Marla had a sister, Vicki, two years her junior, who became close friends for about two years at Marston with Karen Houghton, Kris’s younger sister by three years.

  Vicki had gotten to know Kris when she was chums with Marla and thought Kris was pretty, but nowhere near as pretty as Karen. “Karen was just beautiful,” recalled Vicki. “Of the two sisters, Karen was the prettier one. She was just really pretty with long, dark hair, and big, dark eyes, and was really sweet.”

  Karen was in seventh grade and Vicki in eighth when they became friends, and they did the usual young teen girl stuff—go to the movies, parties, and hang out at Karen and Kris’s house, because, as Vicki recalled, no adults were ever at home in the afternoon after school. Like Kris, Karen always dressed smartly. “Her attire was very up-to-date, and she was very cool,” said Vicki.

  One of her fondest memories of Kris’s younger sister is the day the two of them, along with two other friends of Vicki’s, decided to crash a fortieth birthday party that the father of one of the two girls was having.

  “They were all drinking and having fun and partying, and we decided to sing for all of them at their party—give them a little concert, and we just had a blast, and one of the songs we sang for them was ‘Benny and the Jets.’ That’s like my favorite memory of Karen. She was just very perky, very fun.”

  Years later, Vicki began hearing stories that Karen had had a troubled life, that Karen had a drinking problem, and that Karen and Kris had been feuding, all of which would become fodder for the tabloids, gossip columns, and the celebrity weeklies.

  “I’d watch the Kardashians on TV, and kind of pay attention to see if they ever mentioned Karen. She was such a nice person.”

  * * *

  ANOTHER GIRL WHO BONDED MORE closely than Marla Tafelski with Kris Houghton at Marston and stayed friends with her through much of high school until there was a drastic change in Kris was Joan Zimmerman.

  The Zimmermans had moved to University City in 1966 from New Mexico, where Joan’s father had been editor of a trade magazine dealing with nuclear weapons. His new job, in public relations for a company that built nuclear power plants, brought him to San Diego and the family into a home in University City, close to where Kris lived, and in walking distance to Marston, which is how the two met—walking to school.

  “It wasn’t an affluent area by any means,” said Joan. “We all lived pretty much the same kind of lifestyle. But Kris’s house was newer, and was one-story, and was more contemporary than the rest of the homes, and had more modern things.”

  Joan had never forgotten the shag carpeting that seemed to be everywhere in Kris’s house, “and we used to have to rake it before we left. We’d go there after school and we had to get this carpet rake out and rake the carpet so that it looked fresh and neat. None of the rest of us had shag carpeting,” she recalled, laughing about it years later. “There were four or five of us that were girlfriends, and we just laughed and had fun, and it was just very pure and very innocent.”

  Of Kris’s tight-knit circle, Joan was the favorite and soon bonded with Kris’s grandmother, Lou Ethel Fairbanks, and her husband, who ran the little candle shop in La Jolla. And Kris and Joan began working there. “It was my very first job,” said Joan, “and the grandma just kind of mentored us and helped us to learn how to work in a store.”

  The shop, she recalled, was “tony and very quaint,” and sold ordinary candles and also some fine gifts—candelabras, ceramics, candle stands, a lot of glass items. “All nice stuff. There was so much tourist traffic that would come through, so we did a lot of packaging and mailed things for people. Her grandmother had so much patience in teaching us the art of packing so things would not get broken. There were so many good things that came from that period. Looking back now, it was really impressionable on my life.”

  It’s Joan’s memory that Kris’s grandmother was running things, while Kris’s mother was rarely around, or somewhere in the background, unlike how it was when Marla Tafelski was palling around with Kris and Mary Jo always seemed to be a presence.

  “I knew there was a mom,” Joan said, “and I know she had rules in the house for Kris, but she never interacted with us. When she was there, we had to be quiet. We’d go there after school when she wasn’t there. The family was just very private.

  Joan had the impression from Kris that her mother “wasn’t around all the time, but Mom’s in charge of things—just not interacting. It does seem weird. I didn’t want to say it was odd, but it was different from anybody else that I knew. Kris’s home life was just very private and not approachable. I later realized I never really knew her mother at all. Kris’s grandmother, though, was very nice and gentle and generous.”

  Later, however, Joan would come to realize that Mary Jo Shannon had much influence on her daughter in terms of men and how to meet them.

  Besides Joan and Kris working in her grandmother’s shop, Lou Ethel and Jim Fairbanks began inviting Joan to accompany them, Kris, and someti
mes her sister, Karen—who seemed mostly always in the background—on overnight camping trips to a place called Butterfield Country, which was a blue-collar RV and mobile home park and resort about sixty miles from San Diego.

  The grandparents had a house trailer for getaways, and once at the destination, Kris and Joan rode little motorbikes and hiked in the woods. “Sometimes her sister, Karen, would come along and maybe bring a friend, but Kris and I would go our separate way. I never had to bring anything on those trips. They took care of me, and I was a friend tagging along. The grandma was awesome and she took a genuine interest in us.”

  Back at Kris’s house, Joan often hung out in her chum’s room, and found it to be decorated much differently than her own.

  “Where I had pictures of the Monkees”—a Beatles-like sixties American rock band with a British member, Davy Jones—“stuck up on my wall, Kris didn’t have any of that. She would have had a poster of the Eiffel Tower. Everything about her room was very neat, and very tidy, and it was definitely feminine. Everything always felt like it was in its place.

  “My other friends had incense burners and stereos and bongs; Kris didn’t have any of that. She had cosmetics and perfumes and all that kind of personal stuff. It was a straightforward girly room.”

  Aside from Kris’s room, her look and style was different from the other girls in her small circle.

  As Joan observed, “Kris always had flair, good manners, and was always well-groomed. She had really good hair, and good skin, where a lot of us were fighting acne. I don’t remember issues with her like that. She just had good traits, and it didn’t seem she had to work at it.

  “Back then you didn’t accessorize. We all wore bell-bottoms and went barefoot. But looking back, Kris dressed like someone who was older than the rest of us. She would wear scarves and jewelry. She had a definite sense of style.

  “Back then, I would not have been surprised if she had gone into some fashion and design career path. She had the flair for that. She seemed absolutely more mature than the rest of us.”

  In her own mind, she was a princess.

  * * *

  KRIS AND JOAN BEGAN TENTH grade at Clairemont High School, which later earned a very special pedigree.

  Life there was the basis for the 1982 teen hippie-dippie screen classic Fast Times at Ridgemont High, starring such young, new stars as Sean Penn, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Judge Reinhold.

  Ironically, one of the film’s coproducers was music industry power broker Irving Azoff, chairman of MCA Records in the 1980s, and through the years personal manager of Christina Aguilera, the Eagles, Van Halen, and many other music legends and monster hit-makers and moneymakers. The irony was that Azoff also would become a close friend and business associate of Robert Kardashian, and Azoff’s much younger socialite wife, Shelli Azoff, would become one of Kris’s best friends and party buddies after Kris married Kardashian and became a charter member of the platinum Beverly Hills wives club.

  Fast Times characters included a surfer pothead, Jeff Spicoli, famously played by Penn. And Leigh had even taken a job at a pizza parlor in Sherman Oaks, the heart of Valley Girl country, to get into her character.

  But Joan Zimmerman says life for her and Kris at Clairemont was nothing like the big-screen story of the school when they matriculated there, a decade earlier, in the class of 1973.

  The late sixties and early seventies was an entirely different era, one of turmoil abroad in the land, with anti–Vietnam War protests, with the controversial election of Richard Nixon and the corruption scandals that brought down Vice President Spiro Agnew and the Watergate scandal that ended Nixon’s presidency. And it was a nation still recovering from the late-sixties assassinations of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy.

  “But Clairemont wasn’t a school that had a lot of protesting,” Joan Zimmerman recalled. “You saw bumper stickers on cars that said, ‘Don’t Blame Me. I Voted for McGovern,’” a reference to Senator George McGovern, the failed Democratic presidential nominee in 1972.

  There were a few Spicoli types, who smoked pot, but it wasn’t quite as extreme as the Fast Times story portrayed life there a decade later. As Joan noted, “There were folks who had vans out front in the morning and would tap into a keg and go to class, and the whole hippie thing was an influence as well, but none of us got into trouble with any of that.”

  As for smoking dope, dropping acid, or even getting high on a six-pack or a bottle of cheap wine with her friends, Kris was always squeaky-clean, Joan said.

  “She had a discipline, I will say that. She had a very good discipline about everything, like keeping her room clean and tidy, being very well-composed, never getting into any trouble, or even testing the limits. Nothing ever happened to actually make me mad at Kris. She was never confrontational with anyone. That just wasn’t her style. She would just disappear. If something started to get heated, you’d look around and she just wouldn’t be there. She’d be gone.

  “Kris didn’t have any boyfriends that I can remember, and we did things socially in a group back in high school,” continued Joan. “We went to dances at the YMCA, ball games, we’d hang out at the theater, we’d go to the beach. It was our parents thinking that we were safe in numbers.”

  Kris’s only interest, even back then, was the opportunity to make money.

  “Sometimes if we had days off from school or on weekends, Kris and I would work in her grandmother’s candle store and get paid whatever the minimum wage was then,” recalled Joan Zimmerman. “With her grandmother, she would always give us opportunities to work and let us run with it or not. And so we did.”

  While Kris claimed in her book that she got good grades in school, Joan asserted diplomatically, “I had a couple of other friends who were exceptional. I wouldn’t put Kris in that category.”

  When Kris turned sixteen, her stepfather, Harry Shannon, gave her the dream Sweet Sixteen present of every teenage girl—a new car right off the lot, a red Mazda RX-2, which she still boasted about years later in her memoir. Oddly, though, Joan Zimmerman had no memory of Kris having such a flashy car. “I remember when Kris got of age they bought her a car, and I remember thinking, wow, that was really a big deal. But I don’t remember that it was anything special. I think I would have remembered a brand-new red Mazda.”

  By senior year at Clairemont, Joan had started going to school half days because she had enough credits to graduate and was working the rest of the time, so she saw less of Kris. “And I had a boyfriend, a guy who played baseball, so my time was spent following the team around.”

  After she graduated, she worked for a few years, then enlisted in the Air Force, and lost track of Kris. A marriage, a divorce, and a second marriage followed.

  It wasn’t until years later that she heard people talking about a new reality TV show, tuned in to it, and was shocked to see her old friend Kris as the momager of the whole deal.

  “I just couldn’t believe it,” she said. “It is strange to think I knew somebody when they were young and pure and innocent, and there she was, and I thought, ‘Who puts themselves out there like that?’ I was surprised that she would do that. It’s just so foreign to me. And I didn’t see any real talent in any of her kids, and thought, ‘Why are they celebrities like they are?’ I think most people are puzzled by it, but somehow they gravitate to it, and I guess that’s why the Kardashians are so successful.”

  * * *

  BY THE TIME KRIS was a senior at Clairemont, and while other girls in her class were excitedly planning for the senior prom and possibly college, she had ruled out any further schooling and was already looking for a man.

  Even then, the future momager’s mantra was “dreaming big, working hard, and setting goals.” Very aware of her mother’s and grandmother’s dysfunctional marriages and hurtful relationships with men, number one on Kris’s agenda was to find a good one, and one who could give the girl with the princess mentality everything she felt she deserved and desir
ed in life.

  With her mother as her enabler, she had set her sights on finding a rich guy.

  Looking back years later, her then-close pal Joan Zimmerman observed, “The way I knew Kris, she was a good person, and then something happened. She changed and we weren’t seeing much of each other. She was pursuing something else. I don’t want to use a bad term, but I think her mom was kind of pimping her out.”

  Zimmerman acknowledges she wasn’t literally suggesting that Mary Jo Shannon was a procurer for her favorite daughter, only that she was likely tutoring her on how to find a man with money, and pointing her in the right direction of where to find one.

  In that same era, other mothers of certain young women like Kris Houghton, who later would become rich, famous and, in some instances, infamous, took the same track—pushing their daughters toward men with big cars, big homes, and big bank accounts.

  When later married to Robert Kardashian, Kris became close friends with the Los Angeles socialite Kathy Richards Hilton, whose daughters, hard-partying “celebutantes” Paris and Nicky, were best pals and schoolmates with Kris’s narcissistic, spoiled, and glammed-up daughter, Kim.

  Kathy Hilton’s mother, the overbearing, ambitious Kathleen Mary Dugan Avanzino Richards Catain Fenton (she had four marriages, all hellish unions because of her outrageous behavior) had groomed her to marry a wealthy scion.

  Known as Big Kathy, her constant mantra to Little Kathy and her sisters, Kyle and Kim, was “Marry rich men,” and they did. She had even taught Kathy how to please a man sexually. Kathy, for instance, tied the knot with Rick Hilton, the wealthy grandson of billionaire Hilton Hotels czar and playboy Conrad Hilton. Her sister the child star and dysfunctional reality TV actress Kim Richards had a short-lived marriage to the son of the billionaire oil man Marvin Davis, goaded into it, once again, by her mother. And Kyle, featured on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills with Kim, would also marry into money; her husband was an executive with the Hilton family’s booming Beverly Hills real estate firm.