The Kardashians Read online

  FIVE

  Enter Kardashian

  Soon after Kris Houghton turned nineteen, Cesar Sanudo popped the question and gave her a diamond ring, and she said yes.

  “They were definitely engaged,” Cesar’s brother Rudy confirmed.

  In 2015, he still had a photo he had taken of young Kris back then at his house when she would hang out with him and his girlfriend, Marcia, as they waited for Cesar to come home from the Tour. “She always looked great, and you know what, to be honest, she still looks the same,” he observed.

  One of the first people Cesar told about the engagement was his pal Jack Spradlin.

  “He was madly in love with this girl and really wanted to marry her,” he recalled. “Cesar was overjoyed that she said yes.”

  Kris later acknowledged Cesar’s proposal, noting that she had been having “so much fun” with him that she believed saying yes to his proposal was “the right thing to do,” but then came to realize, “I didn’t love Anthony … I was too young to be engaged to anyone.”

  But there was more to Kris’s loss of interest in Cesar than their age difference.

  Another man, with more to offer this ambitious, striving young woman, was about to enter her life.

  His name was Robert George Kardashian. Beverly Hills and all the luxe that went with it was beckoning to shallow Kris Houghton, seemingly always hungry for more and greater riches and lots of expensive things. With Kardashian, she saw a chance to have it all.

  Kris Houghton had met her first known lover at a golf tournament. She’d meet her second known lover, the one she’d eventually marry, at a racetrack.

  It happened at the Del Mar Thoroughbred Club, the track to the stars, about twenty miles north of San Diego.

  Her mother, who had introduced her to the high-roller scene at the tony and then reputedly mobbed-up La Costa resort, had also opened her eyes to the fashionable racetrack scene that attracted moneyed L.A. bettors for thoroughbred events like the Bing Crosby Stakes and the Del Mar Debutante.

  One of the biggest and poshest in the world, Del Mar opened near the end of the Great Depression, built by some of Golden Age Hollywood’s greatest stars: Pat O’Brien, Oliver Hardy (of Laurel and Hardy fame), Gary Cooper, and the crooner Bing Crosby, among others.

  To covetous Kris, “going to Del Mar was exciting because it was such an example of wealth and high society,” she observed in her book. “The clothes were amazing and the fashion was over-the-top … I jumped at the chance to go to Del Mar with my mom.”

  Del Mar’s slogan had long been “Where the Turf Meets the Surf.”

  For this story, it’s where Kris Houghton, in her late teens, meets thirty-year-old Robert Kardashian, Armenian-American lawyer, budding entrepreneur, and self-styled Beverly Hills bon vivant and Rodeo Drive boulevardier.

  Kris herself would later call this chance encounter of the future patriarch and future matriarch of the contemporary Kardashian dynasty “fateful.”

  It happened on a sparkling La-La Land Saturday afternoon in the summer of 1974 when Cesar was traveling on the Tour. Dressed to the nines as usual, exhibitionistic Kris was trying to draw attention to herself with a Hollywood glamour-girl look—dressed all in white, with a big flamboyant hat and Marilyn Monroe–style sunglasses. But around her neck was a chain, the gold pendant on which was inscribed with the sophomoric novelty-shop exclamation “OH, SHIT.”

  Still, she recalled, “I looked pretty cute. I was on my game that day.”

  She had come to the track with her constant sidekick, Debbie Mungle, and Kris had just placed a two-dollar bet when a guy she thought looked like Tony Orlando hit on her, using the stale line, “You look exactly like a girl I used to go out with.… Where do you live? What’s your name?”

  He had slicked-back hair and a bushy mustache and sported a designer jacket and sharply creased slacks, probably from one of the fashion-conscious haberdashers he favored on Rodeo Drive, in Beverly Hills, where he lived and often hung out. For a day at the races, his dapper outfit was topped off with a pair of platform shoes. At just five-foot-nine, if that, Robert Kardashian would always wear expensive Italian shoes that made him look taller. His Gucci loafers, for instance, always had two-inch lifts.

  His favorite pair of shoes back then, his pride and joy, however, was a collectible he had picked up at a celebrity auction and wore on special occasions: Elton John’s white patent-leather loafers with obvious lifts in a big square heel, according to her friend.

  Between Kris’s outfit and Kardashian’s getup, both clearly savored drawing attention to themselves.

  Robert had come to the track with his older brother by four years, Tommy. They and their older sister, Barbara, were the three grown children of swarthy Armenian-American businessman Arthur Thomas Kardashian and blond, blue-eyed Helen Jean Kardashian, a popular, well-respected, and relatively affluent couple in Los Angeles’s tight-knit and provincial Armenian community. While Robert had graduated from the University of San Diego School of Law and was in a small Los Angeles practice, Tom had followed in his father’s footsteps, who had followed in his father’s footsteps, and joined the Kardashian family’s relatively successful business, Great Western Packing, one of the several largest Los Angeles meatpacking operations, serving supermarkets in Southern California. Safeway, Ralphs, all the big ones bought Kardashian meat.

  Years later, Tom recalled that when Robert spotted Kris for the first time at Del Mar he didn’t remark about whether she looked hot, or how fashionably she was dressed. “He and I never used to say things like that,” he remembered. “When you’re single and you’re both in your thirties, you didn’t have to say that. He ran into her, got her phone number, and they followed up. They did hook up pretty quickly after that.”

  In her memoir, Kris said she gave Kardashian her name, even spelling it for him, and made fun of his juvenile pickup line, but refused to give him her telephone number—the phone at her boyfriend, Cesar’s, house. The last thing she needed was for Cesar to find out she was seeing other men. The next thing Kris claims happened was that Kardashian telephoned her, saying, “My friend Joni Migdal works for the telephone company. She just looked up your records and saw that you have a brand-new number and she gave it to me.”

  But in 2016, Migdal, who, like many interviewed for this book had never before spoken publicly about their Kardashian connection, gave an entirely different account. She emphatically denied she had ever worked for the phone company, and she didn’t have a friend who worked there. At the time, Migdal said she was a teacher with a double master’s degree in administration and was in charge of the gifted students’ program in the Culver City School District in Los Angeles County. So Kris’s phone company assertion was from out of left field. “I don’t know why she said I worked for the phone company,” stated Migdal. “I never asked her why, but it wasn’t true.”

  Migdal, who had been Robert Kardashian’s best girl friend since they were kids and was later a close confidant and, for a time, his lover, said the telephone number exchange had actually happened later at the Riviera Country Club in Los Angeles, where Kris had gone with Debbie Mungle to watch Cesar play in the Los Angeles Open.

  After Robert Kardashian saw Kris for the first time at Del Mar and was smitten, he couldn’t wait to share the exciting news with Joni. “He said, ‘I saw the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen and I want to see her again, and I want her phone number.’ I said, ‘Well, do whatever you need to do.’ And he said, ‘No, no, no—she has a boyfriend who’s a pro golfer.’ I said, ‘Okay, what do you want me to do?’ Robert said, ‘He’s playing golf at Riviera Country Club, and I assume she’s going to be there. Let’s you and I go together and I want you to meet her and get her phone number for me.’ I said, ‘If it’s really important to you, we’ll do it,’ so we went to Riviera.

  “Kris was watching her boyfriend play golf,” continued Migdal. “We walked up to her and started talking, and she said to me, ‘Oh, if you ever come to San Diego, I
’d love to see you. Here’s my phone number.’ She believed that Robert and I were boyfriend and girlfriend. But I gave her number to him. He was standing right there. Robert knew she was living with the golfer, but he started to woo her. He was totally determined to get her, to win her over and away from Cesar. He was a man on a mission. Robert was very comfortable around women, confident but not overpowering. He could be very charming.”

  Larry Kraines, one of Kardashian’s closest friends along with Joni—all three had been classmates at Dorsey High School in Los Angeles—said that Robert had given him the impression that he had first met Kris when she was working as a stewardess.

  “He called me and he was excited that he met this gal on an American Airlines flight and told me, ‘She’s a lot of fun.’” Shortly afterward, Kraines and his wife, Joyce, went out to dinner with Kardashian and Kris, “and we all hit it off. Kris realized how close I was to Robert, so I remember Kris saying to Joyce something like, ‘I just love him. I would love to be his wife.’

  “Kris had an eye for this guy, and that was what it was going to be. I think Kris loved Robert right from the get-go. He was fun. He was personable. He was quick, smart, and Kris needed that stimulation because I got the impression she was that way, too—very much so, although people maybe didn’t get it about her at that point.

  “People like Kris just don’t become smart overnight,” observed Kraines. “They don’t become ambitious overnight. They aren’t visionaries overnight. But Kris had had that in her genes forever. And she was good at it—not just good; she was great at it. She’s very clever. She learned how to put herself with the right group of people. She was a sharp young gal with lots of personality and funny as shit. She was the belle of the ball.”

  The most off-the-wall and bizarrely false recounting of the merger of Kris Houghton and Robert Kardashian came from none other than their adult daughters, Kourtney, Kim, and Khloé. “Our mom and dad first met in San Diego. She was seventeen and working as a flight attendant. He was eleven years older and studying law,” they stated as fact in a bestselling fan magazine–style, ghostwritten 2010 book, Kardashian Konfidential, published by St. Martin’s Press, the publisher of this book.

  Joni Migdal recalled that Robert “thought Kris looked like Natalie Wood, but that was just in the eye of the beholder. I didn’t think she looked like Natalie Wood. I thought she was pretty, but if he thought she was beautiful and looked like Natalie Wood, that was the most important thing to me because I was his best friend. But was she the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen? I don’t know. But if he thought she was—she was. That’s it.”

  Migdal didn’t pass any judgment on Kris’s looks or personality at the time, and she could never have imagined in those still-innocent days in the early 1970s that her pal and the cute teenage girl whose number he so desperately wanted would eventually marry, igniting an unending and turbulent drama played out in private and in public.

  “My relationship with Kris was a respectful one in that she knew that Robert and I were very good friends,” said Migdal. “But Kris was almost uncomfortable—not with me, but with the relationship between Robert and me, and she wanted to have that kind of relationship with him. She wanted to be that person—the buddy, his confidant, not just a pretty object.”

  * * *

  BY THE TIME OF Kris Houghton and Robert Kardashian’s second face-to-face meeting at the Riviera Country Club, she had been in the golf world with Cesar Sanudo long enough to have emulated the fashion style of the other players’ glamorous girlfriends and well-coiffed wives—wearing the same kind of little sweaters, spiffy golf shoes, and Ray-Ban sunglasses and carrying the Gucci bags that they all sported. And she and Debbie, courtesy of Cesar, had VIP passes just like all the other pros’ women. With the golf get-up and the free passes, she was convinced, “I looked like I had been out on tour for ages.”

  For Kris, it seemed to be all about fantasy, image, and lifestyle. And now, with Robert Kardashian in the wings, she saw her chance to move on up to the big time.

  Since there were always plenty of gorgeous women in the Beverly Hills world Robert Kardashian inhabited, one had to wonder why he was so enthralled with the teenage Kris Houghton, who, while fresh-faced and cute in a common sort of way, was no total knockout in the looks department.

  A close friend, however, would later suggest a reason: “He always kept his eye on having his life ‘look right.’ Well, Kris looked right, like the kind of girl he should marry.”

  Moreover, he was a family-oriented kind of guy—some say even a mama’s boy—and he wanted a big family to carry on the Kardashian name. And that wish would definitely come true, in a manner he never could have imagined in a million years.

  For Kardashian, however, Kris Houghton was a perfect match because, as she knew back in high school, she wanted to get married and have lots of kids.

  But with Kris and the other women in Kardashian’s life through the years—and he would be with some real beauties, literally and figuratively—he would have a number of troubled and curious relationships. He wouldn’t always make the best choices in women, or in marriage. Kris Houghton would be the first of three such questionable choices.

  * * *

  IN THE LATE SPRING OF 1975, with nineteen-year-old Kris planning to accompany her fiancé, Cesar Sanudo, to the British Open—he had received an invitation, but there’s no official record of him actually competing—she got yet another call from her frustrated suitor, once again pleading with her to get together.

  But this time Robert Kardashian threw out some bait that he hoped would finally lure her in.

  His news was that he and his brother, Tom, had just bought a new house, to be their bachelor pad, in fashionable Beverly Hills, with O. J. Simpson as a frequent guest. The one-time football great was considered “the black Kardashian brother,” recalled a friend from that time. While Robert and Tom’s place was in a far less ritzy section—few if any of the area properties were gated—their house on Deep Canyon Drive, north of Sunset Boulevard and south of Mulholland, did possess the iconic 90210 zip code, giving it some seductive allure.

  To Kris it sounded like nirvana, especially compared to her lover Cesar Sanudo’s boring condo. To be clear, the Kardashian boys’ new abode was no Hollywood movie mogul’s estate—far from it—but it did have the requisite La-La Land swimming pool and tennis court, and Tom, an astute businessman who had an accounting degree from USC, had been able to negotiate a good price of several hundred thousand dollars, considered a steal back in the day. They had even retained a popular Beverly Hills interior decorator, Judy Wilder Briskin, to give the place some panache.

  “They were very conservative in the decorating,” recalled Joni Migdal. “It was decorated almost in a Ralph Lauren kind of look. And was very well done, very tasteful. Robert always had very good taste. At that time, Tommy was the flashy one and Robert was the quiet one—almost like the little brother. He was the little brother who looked up to Tommy.”

  But that would all change.

  Well paid at the time, working as general manager of his family’s meatpacking business, Tom Kardashian noted years later, “I had enough money so I could buy a house in Beverly Hills, and I always felt it was good if my brother and I could make such an investment. I paid for two-thirds and he paid for one-third.”

  Before they partnered on buying Deep Canyon, Robert had moved into a home Tommy had on Hidden Valley Road, just south of Mulholland, and Tommy made baby brother Robert stay in the servant’s quarters over the garage while he took the master bedroom suite for himself. “Tommy treated Robert like a little brother who was never going to do any good or be important. And he treated him that way for years,” asserted Migdal. Larry Kraines recalled that when Tommy was wheeling around town in a slick Corvette, Robert was driving a lowly Chevy Corvair, a high school graduation gift.

  At the time Robert was doing pretty well, too, working in the law offices of two shrewd Armenian-American attorneys and entrepre
neurs, John Bedrosian and Richard Eamer. Besides handling routine client business matters, Kardashian was always looking to make investments in some of his entrepreneurial clients’ business deals. At least one, a music tip sheet called Radio & Records, would have a big payoff when they sold it to the tune of about $12 million, split between the brothers and the fellow who came up with the idea, a law firm client of Robert’s.

  Excited about his new Beverly Hills address, Robert called Kris on her private phone at Cesar Sanudo’s to invite her to be his date at the housewarming party he and his brother were planning. Having gone in circles attempting to get her to go out with him, he demanded a quick and positive answer.

  But he had no need to be concerned. The idea of a guy who seemed to have big money—underscored by owning a home in 90210—was a veritable turn-on for the materialistic Miss Houghton.

  Kris gave him an immediate yes.

  And then she took off with Cesar for Great Britain and the British Open.

  It was right then and there that Cesar decided they should get married.

  In her book, Kris claimed that a fellow golfer, who she indicated was a friend of Cesar’s, the champion player Tom Watson, and his wife, Linda, had suggested that the wedding be held on the grounds of the home they had rented while he played in the legendary tournament.

  “‘How much fun would that be!’” Kris quoted the Watsons as saying, with Cesar agreeing that it was a “‘great idea.’”

  But queried in 2015 about the scene painted by Kris in her memoir, Linda Watson, long since divorced from Tom, said it never happened.

  “I have a great memory, and that information is just off the charts,” she asserted. “When we were at the British Open, Tom and I were there for one reason, to win. We would never have endeavored to host or allow the hosting of a wedding when he was playing in the Open. None of that happened.”