The Kardashians Read online

  The Tijuana club had been the setting for two major golf tournaments, the Agua Caliente Open and the Tijuana Open Invitational, drawing big-name players on the PGA Tour, vying for big money. One doesn’t think of Tijuana, with its long history of wild bars, sleazy dance halls, violence, and vice, as having an actual formal and proper country club, but it had been there since before the Great Depression, attracting moneyed Mexicans and high rollers from close-by San Diego.

  Scoping out the fancy club and sleek course, Cesar ran into someone who suggested that the strong, handsome, personable kid should think about applying for a job as a caddie, and told him that caddies made good money and met the right kind of people. He soon got the job.

  A lefty, he also quickly learned how to play the game with a set of right-handed clubs that someone had given him. One of the players he caddied for would later become one of his best friends on and off the green, the golf legend Lee Trevino, known as “Super Mex” and “Merry Mex,” who also came up the hard way, raised on the outskirts of Dallas, the family living in a run-down shack. Like Cesar, he started out as a caddie, when he was just eight.

  As the San Diego Union-Tribune once pointed out about Sanudo, “Such was the improbable indoctrination into a game that would make Sanudo a professional champion and a friend to presidents and celebrities,” among them Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, George H. W. Bush. He also dined and joked with the likes of Bob Hope and Clint Eastwood.

  He met them on golf courses while playing in high-stakes tournaments. And that’s how he met the Houghton girl.

  The setting was the 1973 Hawaiian Open.

  Kris was soon to become the kept nubile mistress of a golf celebrity. Her dream of being with a mature man with power and money who fell for her was already coming true.

  The Hawaiian trip had been a graduation gift from Debbie Mungle’s mother. The pro golfer Phil Rodgers, for whom Beverley Mungle worked, was their escort to Hawaii. “Debbie and I had been to many golf tournaments with Phil,” said Kris. She recalled Rodgers, almost two decades older, telling her and Debbie, “You’ll stay at the hotel and it will be lots of fun.”

  But, in 2015, seventy-eight-year-old Rodgers maintained that Kris’s account involving him was “not true.” He said that he had been telephoned by “the person who wrote the book [Kris Jenner’s memoir], and I said, ‘No, I don’t know anything about any of this. I don’t think it happened.’”

  In her book, Kris identified her new lover as being “tall, dark-haired, funny, and successful, and he represented this glamorous world of golf. Maybe I was just a golf groupie.”

  But she didn’t use Cesar Sanudo’s real name, instead calling him “Anthony,” presumably to avoid legal problems for herself and her publisher by using his real name.

  While none of her friends interviewed for this book could recall her ever seriously dating or being involved with any boys in high school, Kris had a different story, noting that Anthony “made all the boys I’d hung out with in high school seem like, well, boys,” and describing him as “my first grown-up, non–high school boyfriend.”

  In 1973, when he met Kris at the Hawaiian Open, Cesar was a hot-blooded and smitten pro golfer and envisioned the two of them spending the rest of their lives together. He would be sadly mistaken.

  Sanudo’s daughter came to believe that the desirable seventeen-year-old had actually seduced her earnest twenty-eight-year-old father, rather than the other way around.

  “He never went into detail how they met, but I do know that she was a groupie who was following the golf scene,” Amber said. “She was in Hawaii, and my dad was there. I don’t know if it was meant to be that way.”

  Kris, however, contended in her book, “Anthony courted me.”

  Since Cesar was a popular San Diego celebrity golfer, it’s believed by the Sanudo family and Cesar’s friends that the handsome golf star had long been on golf groupie Kris Houghton’s man-hunting radar by the time she met him in Hawaii.

  Cesar, in fact, soon became a project for her whole family. Kris’s stepfather, Harry Shannon, and his brother, both golf nuts, were said to have promoted a tournament at San Diego’s public Torrey Pines golf course, where Cesar often played, and where Kris’s mother and Shannon even maintained the scoreboard on the eighteenth hole. As Kris asserted, her mother and stepfather “actually came to love Anthony, as did my grandmother. In my family, if the matriarch says something is okay, then it is okay. And everyone falls in line.”

  The bottom line: They saw Cesar Sanudo as a good catch for Kris, at least for the moment.

  Soon after Cesar and Kris became an item, the very ambitious teen began accompanying him on lavish golf trips to tournaments around the world—Europe, the Far East, Latin America.

  One of Cesar’s close friends, the professional golfer Jack Spradlin, who was seven years younger and viewed Cesar as his mentor, believed that Cesar was bowled over by Kris mainly because she was young and, therefore, considered hot—attractive arm candy for an older man in the public eye. Moreover, she “took a liking to him, and, God, she was like seventeen or eighteen,” Spradlin noted. “I thought she was like twenty or twenty-one. But her looks weren’t anything that blew me away.

  “She was attractive, but she wasn’t like, oh my gosh attractive. But she was much younger, and to him it was like, wow, I’ve got a nice young girl on my arm, so how much better can it be? And they both lived in San Diego, too, so how much better can that be? But I think he truly loved her. Cesar wasn’t a womanizer. He was pretty much a one-girl guy.”

  Spradlin believed he met Kris for the first time around 1974, some months before he got on the Tour, and not long after Cesar became involved with her.

  “They were heating up, and Cesar was taking her on tour with him,” he recalls. “She was traveling with him. I didn’t go to Europe, but I went to Mexico City when she was there with him.

  “I was with her and Cesar so much that I didn’t think, ‘Oh, there’s Kris again.’ She was just part of the picture.

  “I’m sure Kris saw Cesar as Mr. Moneybags; then look at her future track record, look at her success.”

  At seventeen and eighteen, as Cesar Sanudo’s girl, Kris was mixing with some of the top money-winners in golf and their glamorous women, and she was socializing with wealthy men who enjoyed being in the circle of professional athletes. One such multimillionaire was Cesar’s first sponsor, the Southern California industrialist George T. Straza.

  The head of a company called Jet Air Inc., a major U.S. defense and space program contractor, in El Cajon, with such clients as Rolls-Royce and Pratt & Whitney, the big money was rolling in, and Straza, who was politically well-connected, was living like royalty with a spectacular estate in Rancho Santa Fe, where he threw parties and fund-raisers.

  “I was at his house for a party with Cesar and Kris,” recalled Spradlin. “George, who was phenomenal, just pretty much doled out money to Cesar for him to play. I remember he had little displays with gold ducats built into the walls of the house. I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is the greatest house I’ve ever been in,’ and so did Kris.” During the course of their close relationship, Straza is said to have given Cesar tens of thousands of dollars in gold pieces, which the golfer was socking away. When it disappeared, Cesar would suspect Kris.

  The wealthy Straza owned the kind of luxury yacht that even Aristotle Onassis would have envied. “Kris was on the yacht with us,” said Spradlin, “and I remember she’s really excited and she’s going, ‘Wow, this is great! I can’t believe I’m on this huge yacht. I’m so happy! This is the life! This is the life I want!’”

  * * *

  AFTER DATING BESOTTED CESAR Sanudo for a time, Kris Houghton took the relationship up a notch and moved in with him.

  And so did her friend Debbie Mungle.

  They were like a real-life Three’s Company, the popular mid-1970s and early 80s TV sitcom, about two desirable young women and a cute guy living together, with a lot of sexual innuendo, starr
ing, when it first aired, John Ritter, Joyce DeWitt, and Suzanne Somers.

  However, Spradlin, who asked Mungle out but was rejected, doesn’t think there was any hanky-panky involving the threesome of Cesar, Kris, and Debbie, even though it was the swinging seventies, and anything went. “If there was something happening I would have known,” Spradlin asserted, “but there was never a mention. Cesar was not that type of guy.”

  With his early winnings, Cesar had purchased a modest town house condominium in Point Loma, close to the Pacific, in San Diego. By coincidence, Point Loma was the same district where Kris had lived as a child, which she thought of as “a really tony area of San Diego.”

  But Cesar’s was a plain and simple two-story place with two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a family room, and a kitchen. “It was not fancy at all,” said Spradlin, who spent much time there when he and Cesar weren’t on tour. For Cesar back then, it was just a layover place to crash and chill, but it was far more luxurious than his childhood abode down in Tijuana.

  While Cesar’s home wasn’t the kind of palace in which Kris envisioned herself living—she wanted a mansion something like the one Cesar’s sponsor, George Straza, occupied—she and Debbie happily took over the place and practically made it their own.

  “Debbie and I convinced Anthony,” Kris wrote in her book, “to let us live in the town house … free of charge, of course. I have to admit, we were little con artists. We told Anthony that since he was on his way to being a truly big-time golfer, he needed us to live in his house and watch his plants and take care of things for him. So while Anthony was on the road, Debbie and I lived in his house. I was able to save money by continuing to work at my mom and grandmother’s candle stores, as well as a little dress shop in La Jolla.”

  “I was,” the future momager boasted, “already multitasking.”

  The two girls took full advantage of Cesar’s hospitality.

  Kris put in her own private phone line, and the two were throwing parties and entertaining friends while he was away.

  Cesar’s brother Carlos Sanudo, who had been to one of Kris’s bashes, recalled how she came on to male guests. “Whenever a bunch of us would be partying over at Cesar’s condo while he was out on the road,” he claimed, “Kris would hit on any number of guys. She even made a move on me.”

  But all that would seem quite innocent and inconsequential compared to what Kris eventually did in the house: cheat on Cesar. And she cheated on him with Robert Kardashian.

  Kris wasn’t as serious about Cesar as Cesar was about her. She was just taking advantage of the situation, while he already was contemplating marriage.

  As she would observe years later, “The Anthony thing seemed serious, but I think I loved the lifestyle more than the man.”

  But he considered her responsible and even thought that one day she would make a good wife and mother. As a result he had her look after his little daughter.

  Amber was only about four years old when her father became involved with Kris Houghton, but she would hear much about her from her dad and Sanudo family members through the years, none of it nice.

  But Amber does have a pleasant, distant memory of her father’s teenage lover who sometimes babysat for her.

  “I lived with my mother about twenty-five minutes from where my dad’s condo was, so Kris would pick me up quite often, so I’d be at his house to see him when he came home from the Tour, because when he was traveling I didn’t see much of him,” Amber said, looking back. “From what I remember of her, she was always very sweet to me. A couple of times when I would go to sleep she would lay with me and tickle my forehead. Those were the kind of intimate things that she would do. I never remember her being mean to me, and my mom said she was nice. She would save my mom the trouble of having to drive me down there to my dad’s. She was happy to pick me up.”

  * * *

  IT HAD BEEN OVER a decade since Kris’s alcoholic father, Bob Houghton, had packed his bags and left the family, severing all ties when he divorced Mary Jo. By the time Kris was involved with Sanudo, her father was living with Leslie Johnson Leach, who was fourteen years his junior and had already been twice divorced.

  “I kind of knew he was an alcoholic, but I didn’t want to face it,” Leach said, looking back years later. “He would just get really, really drunk, mostly on beer, and then he would attack verbally. I never saw him attack anyone physically, but they were nasty, nasty verbal attacks.”

  In late 1973 or early 1974, Houghton and his girlfriend moved back to San Diego because he wanted to be closer to his daughters.

  “Kris was involved with the professional golfer Cesar Sanudo, so we used to go out with them,” said Leslie Leach. “We used to go and have dinner with them, and they came over for dinner. It was very nice, and Cesar was a lovely guy.”

  For Kris’s age, then about eighteen, she seemed very mature, or at least played at being mature.

  As Leach observed years later, “Kris was good at acting mature. She knew all the things to do and say. But I’m not sure it was truly who she was, or because she’d been hanging around the golf scene for so long she kind of knew what they were all about, and how to play the role.”

  Leslie also had trouble coming to terms with Sanudo’s relationship with Kris, and noticed that Kris’s father looked the other way.

  “I liked Cesar, but I also thought, whoa, Kris was only a teenager, so much younger than him,” she said. “I did get the feeling that Cesar really did care about her, even though there was a tremendous age difference. But once she started screwing him over that changed.”

  What threw Leslie off balance and took her completely by surprise was Kris’s extracurricular social activities.

  “She always came across to me as being an incredible social climber. And she and her girlfriend—all I ever knew about was Kris and her one friend; I never saw her with any other girlfriends—would dress up fit to kill and they would go out to a golf course wherever there was a tournament anywhere and follow the pro golfers around, and I remember thinking, now this is pretty wild.

  “Her one girlfriend [probably Debbie Mungle] had this big crush on Lee Trevino, so they were going out to the golf tournaments, and that was their primary socializing.

  “They would say to each other, ‘Well, let’s get dressed up and let’s go be social.’ And they would dress up and they would go.”

  Knowing teenage girls, Leslie thought that “maybe” there was a sexual connotation to the code words “go be social,” but she knew it clearly did mean “Let’s go, and let’s party, let’s link up with some golfers, let’s see what they are up to. Let’s see what it leads to. I think that it was really open-ended. They were definitely headed in the direction of party time.”

  Bob Houghton watched Kris’s socializing with her girlfriend and their golf groupie activities but said little.

  “He definitely was concerned,” Leach said. “I think he was surprised because he hadn’t seen Kris in so long, and I think he was surprised that she was running around the way she was at her age.”

  But in Kris Jenner’s memoir, she painted a brief but glowing picture of her father. She made no mention of his alcoholism and abusive behavior. Instead, she stated, “My dad was a lot of fun. He liked to have a good time. He was very social.”

  Vicky Kron Thomsen thought so, too.

  Not long after Leslie Johnson Leach broke up with Kris’s father because of his excessive drinking and emotional and verbal abuse, he came on to Vicky around September 1974 when both were filling their tanks at a service station in the San Diego neighborhood of Pacific Beach.

  She was a well-educated one-time model who at the time had been divorced for two years from a Lutheran minister’s hard-drinking, rebellious son, and had two boys, ages four and ten. Vicky was a slender, very pretty five-foot-three, thirty-one-year-old brunette with big brown eyes. And like Leslie Leach, Vicky was about a decade younger than Bob Houghton. People who knew her thought she looked like Natalie Wood, just
as Robert Kardashian thought Kris did.

  It was just a short time after they met that Houghton moved in with Vicky, and about six months into their relationship they decided to tie the knot on Easter weekend, 1975, by the Pacific in Rosarito Beach in Mexico.

  En route in his fast Porsche, they stopped for dinner and drinks at a restaurant in Baja California, Mexico, and Houghton got soused on margaritas. Back on the road, Vicky fell asleep and the inebriated Houghton tried to concentrate on the dark, twisting road high above the coastline, and, just outside the village of San Vicente, he hit a sudden curve and slammed head-on into a truck carrying vegetables. Vicky, in critical condition, had to be pulled from the wreckage but survived. The truck driver was killed instantly. Houghton, forty-two, died shortly afterward.

  In her 2011 memoir, Kris Jenner remembered being called by Houghton’s father, True Houghton, her paternal grandfather, with whom she was said to have had little contact, informing her that her father had died in the crash. “I screamed, dropped the phone, and was just crying, crying, crying, hysterically crying.”

  But Kris never contacted Vicky Thomsen, nor did any other member of her family, including Houghton’s ex-wife, Mary Jo, to offer their condolences and sympathy.

  “They knew about me,” said Vicky. “They also chose to ignore me.”

  Only one Houghton family member came to visit her when she was convalescing—Houghton’s father. Vicky claimed that he had had a few drinks and before he left tried to kiss her and fondle her breasts. She ordered him to leave.

  As for Kris’s father, Vicky called him “irresponsible, and looking back on that relationship and that horrible accident I feel that I was saved from getting involved in a very dysfunctional family—the Kardashians. I can’t imagine being a part of their ballyhoo that’s been going on for so many years. I can’t stand them.”