The Kardashians Page 7

  She said that, yes, they knew Cesar, “but not well,” and added, “The chances that I would have even offered this to a total stranger [Kris] when all we cared about is winning would never have happened.”

  It didn’t matter in the end because Kris had no intention of tying the knot with her golf pro; she had been stringing him along. She used as her excuse for not marrying him in Merry Olde England the fact that her family wasn’t there to bear witness.

  In fact, she claimed in her book that when Kardashian had called and invited her to his housewarming party she had told him about “my plan to break up with Anthony … and told him, yes, I would be his date to his big, important party.”

  When the day of the bash rolled around, Robert Kardashian was at LAX expecting to greet Kris with “two dozen red roses,” she later claimed. But she never showed; she was still across the pond with Cesar. She further stated that Kardashian was so disappointed that he “walked to his car alone and cried all the way home.”

  At the party, she professed, Kardashian “looked like a fool” because he “didn’t have a girlfriend, he didn’t have a date … and I had blown him off.” She said she called him the next day to say she was sorry and “I could hear him crying on the other end of the line.”

  If anything, she made Kardashian, who would one day be the father of four of her six chidren, seem like the ultimate wimp.

  As a close friend of Kardashian’s, a prominent Los Angeles attorney who also knew Kris well and had read her book (twice) because he was “so shocked” by what she had written that “I had to take another run-through,” declared, “She is so full of shit, it’s un-fucking-believable. If Bob was around he would have sued her and her publisher. He’s probably turning over in his grave.”

  SIX

  An Affair to Remember

  Kris Kardashian Jenner claimed in her book—published when she was still married to second husband Bruce Jenner—that her relationship with the pseudonymous “Anthony”—Cesar Sanudo—ended when she discovered that he had cheated on her.

  Like Robert Kardashian, Sanudo is dead, so her account was once again one-sided, and there are always two sides to every story. In this instance, the other side of the story came from the late golf pro’s family and his friends.

  And they all contended in candid interviews in 2015 that Kris’s declaration that Cesar was a philanderer was false.

  In fact, it was Kris, they assert, who had played around on Cesar, that she was the cheater.

  It had all started coming to a head sometime in 1975 when Kris was back from her trip to England with Cesar. She was still putting him off about marriage, knowing full well that she never really had any intention of becoming his wife. She wanted more than what he had to offer. She wanted Beverly Hills and everything that came with that glitzy, one-percent lifestyle. Robert Kardashian could offer her that.

  By then she had come to realize that Cesar Sanudo wasn’t the well-heeled sugar daddy she probably thought he was when she first mesmerized him at the Hawaiian Open.

  Initially, she was captivated by the handsome charmer who introduced her to the glamorous, international world of professional golf, played rounds with several commanders-in-chief, and broke bread with golf-crazy Hollywood celebrities.

  As Cesar’s close friend Jack Spradlin observed, “Kris met those guys with Cesar. It was exactly the kind of scene she was looking for.”

  But Sanudo, to Kris’s displeasure, was never a big-money winner, and when he wasn’t playing he didn’t pursue the kind of high-life pleasures she desired or bestow upon her the luxury goods she wanted. While he played in some 250 events in the fourteen years that he was on the PGA Tour, Sanudo’s career total earnings between 1970 and 1989 amounted to a mere $159,973.15.

  According to Spradlin, “Kris saw a far better financial opportunity with Kardashian than with Cesar.”

  After “blowing off” Robert for so long with tantalizing telephone chat but no action, Kris finally decided to get involved with him, on the sly, and behind Cesar’s back, while he was on the road.

  She called it “our big, long-awaited first date,” which ended up in the bedroom she shared with her fiancé, Sanudo.

  Known many years later for airing her family’s scandalous lives on their reality TV show, which kept addicted viewers, the weekly tabloids, celebrity magazines, and gossip columns coming back for more, Kris did the same for readers of her book, telling her titillating but very questionable version of what happened that night.

  Kris was probably hoping for a romantic and very expensive dinner at Chasen’s, with drinks later at the Polo Lounge or the swinging Luau, Robert’s usual haunt in Beverly Hills. Instead, their first date involved nothing more than a movie, popcorn, and sodas. Beneath his patina of sophistication, Kardashian was basically a down-to-earth guy with pretty simple tastes.

  In any case, they did wind up back at Cesar’s house, and Kris Houghton turned out to be one hell of a hot first date.

  “We made our way upstairs. We were messing around and heading in the direction of some major hanky-panky when we heard the front door open. Anthony was home!”

  They were, as she noted in millennial parlance, “so busted,” and added, “Thank God we had our clothes on.”

  Others would later contradict her assertion that they were, in fact, still dressed based on Cesar’s furious recounting of events.

  At the front door, he angrily confronted his cheating fiancée and her new love. According to Kris’s rendition, he grabbed Robert by his expensive Gucci sweater. “‘Don’t touch the sweater!’” Robert screamed, she claimed. “‘It’s my brother’s!’”

  But Cesar “didn’t give a damn … and ripped it … ruining it.” It was at that point, Kris stated, that she realized “Robert was not a fighter.… Robert just broke away and went hauling down the street, running for his life.… He had probably never been in a fight in his life before that night.”

  But Kris’s published account was far different from what Cesar Sanudo had told family members and friends about what transpired that night.

  Jack Spradlin recalled that his furious, cuckolded pal had always maintained to everyone, “I was out of town and I came home and I caught Kris and Kardashian in bed.”

  In a jealous rage, he had “thrown them both out of the house.” At one point, he even bragged that he had actually tossed Kardashian out of a second-floor window, an exaggeration made by an outraged lover.

  Another of Cesar’s golf buddies recalled getting a telephone call from him at three in the morning on the night of the explosion.

  “He was so crazed and upset I thought something had happened, like an accident, but he told me, and I’ve never forgotten the words, ‘I found that bitch in bed with a sleazy Armenian. I could have killed the motherfucker.’ I never heard such language from Cesar because he was a pretty clean-cut guy. He called her a whore and a slut and kept using the C-word and everything else in the book. I thought he was going to burst a blood vessel. I really felt sorry for Cesar because he was a really great guy, and she was lucky to be with him, and she just fucked him over.”

  Kris later maintained that it was she who had actually ended it with Cesar, declaring that he had cheated on her. She based that on a hotel receipt she said she had mysteriously gotten in the mail and phone calls she had received from “a young woman … looking for Anthony.… He wasn’t returning her phone calls. She was pissed, which is why she called me.”

  He denied that he was seeing anyone else, but Kris told him, “‘I’m out of here.’”

  She had found her excuse to end it with him and to start up with well-heeled Robert Kardashian.

  * * *

  LOOKING BACK YEARS LATER, Cesar Sanudo’s daughter, Amber Carrillo, was still saddened and upset by how her father had been treated, and angry about how Kris had turned the story around in her favor.

  “I know my dad was pretty adamant that he had caught Kris in his bed with Robert Kardashian, and that he had kicked
her out of the condo, and that they had broken up at that point. She says in her book that my dad took her back, but he says that he kicked her out immediately, and for good. My dad was very, very hurt by what Kris did to him, by her cheating. He was pretty messed up about it for a long, long time.”

  In fact, Kris Houghton’s carrying on and her claim that Cesar cheated had angered the whole Sanudo clan and his close friends.

  “Cesar never cheated on Kris,” Jack Spradlin maintained. “She said it to make herself look good! With Kardashian, she went for it—that he was going to make her life so much better. But if you looked at Cesar and you looked at Kardashian and you gave them both a million dollars and the same Beverly Hills house, you’d go after Cesar because he was a much nicer guy, and far better looking than Robert Kardashian.”

  Amber’s uncle, Rudy Sanudo, was still boiling years later about Kris’s shabby treatment of his brother.

  “That bitch was a snake,” he declared in 2015. “My brother thought their relationship was serious. He thought they were going to get married until he caught her with Kardashian.”

  A few days after nineteen-year-old Kris Houghton accused her fiancé of cheating on her and then stormed out of the condo they shared, she immediately drove to her mother’s for consolation and advice. Then, she called the new man in her life and made arrangements to be picked up at LAX.

  Waiting at the curb, thirty-one-year-old Robert Kardashian was at the wheel of Kris’s kind of car, a spiffy Mercedes-Benz, painted green, a color that literally and figuratively screamed money. Riding shotgun with him was his best friend, law firm client, and partner in some small business enterprises, the handsome, rugged twenty-eight-year-old black NFL celebrity player Orenthal James “O. J.” Simpson, who Kris would get to know well socially and, as some would later claim, intimately.

  As she stated years later in her memoir, “I absolutely loved O. J.”

  Having left Cesar, Kris had finally arrived at the Beverly Hills address of the house that Robert Kardashian owned with his brother, Tom. She was knocked out by how luxurious it was and instantly concluded that these two boys were “stylin,’” as she later put it in the jargon of the black rappers with whom she and her daughters often partied after they all became famous. They were definitely “living the life.” And the brothers Kardashian, she deemed, were “two of the most eligible bachelors in Beverly Hills.”

  Years later she’d reminisce about that first visit to the Kardashians’ chic manse with the very special 90210 zip code, which would later become her home (just as Cesar Sanudo’s mundane condo became hers for the duration of their relationship).

  “I rushed into the guest room and closed the door and called my mother and whispered, ‘You’re not going to believe this place! This is incredible … a tennis court. A swimming pool. And Mercedeses and Rollses in all different colors!’”

  Mary Jo Shannon, who had trained her daughter well regarding men and the finer things in life, was down with it.

  * * *

  MEANWHILE, BACK IN SAN DIEGO, the first thing furious and distraught Cesar Sanudo noticed after booting Kris out was that his thirty-thousand-dollar cache of gold—mostly coins gifted to him over the years by his millionaire sponsor, George Straza—was mysteriously missing from its hiding place in his Point Loma condo.

  “My dad had gold bullion, gold coins, and one day, a couple of weeks after Kris left, my dad went to look for them and they were gone,” asserted Amber Carrillo. “Sometime later he said he had run into Kris’s mom and he saw that she was wearing a bracelet that had gold coins on it, and my dad thought they were from his collection. How much of that is true, though, I really don’t know.”

  Amber’s uncle Rudy also believed that Kris was the culprit, but that was only based on what his brother Cesar had told him. “To top the whole thing off when she left Cesar,” Rudy Sanudo maintained, “she took those gold coins he was saving with her, too. At least that’s what Cesar told me, but I never saw the gold.”

  Jack Spradlin had long heard from Cesar that he owned thousands of dollars in gold coins, but also had never actually seen the collection. “But I heard Kris took them,” he said. “On more than one occasion, Cesar said he called Kris and asked for the money [the missing gold coins] to be returned.”

  Still, one has to wonder whether his anger at being cheated on by Kris had led him to wrongly accuse her.

  * * *

  THE LAST TIME JACK SPRADLIN saw Kris before he spotted her in a TV infomercial with her future second husband, Bruce Jenner, pitching workout gear, was aboard an airliner bound for San Diego from Dallas.

  She was then working as a flight attendant, serving the well-heeled in first class, naturally.

  “I was in coach and she was walking down the aisle of the American Airlines plane and she goes, ‘Jack, how ya doin’?’ And I go, ‘Kris, it’s good to see you,’” Spradlin had never forgotten.

  “She says, ‘I’m doing well, how’s Cesar?’ And I said, ‘Cesar’s doing really, really well, thanks. He’s actually engaged to be married to a really nice girl,’ and she goes, ‘No kidding, gosh, good for him. Come up to first class and I want to introduce you to my boyfriend.’

  “So I went up to the front of the plane and she introduced me and said, ‘This is Robert Kardashian.’”

  When he stood up, Spradlin noticed how much shorter he was. “And that’s why he probably was so standoffish to me, because I remember Kris said, ‘This is a friend of Cesar’s who he plays the Tour with.’

  “I thought, this guy’s a weasel.”

  * * *

  CESAR SANUDO EVENTUALLY FOUND love again with Jacqui Schenz, a cute, petite cocktail waitress with a teaching degree, who was nine years his junior, and just a few years older than Kris.

  “He told me he had a girlfriend before me and that her name was Kris and that she really cheated on him and brought some guy, or guys into his condo when he was out traveling, and that she was kind of babysitting the house,” she said in 2016. “And the one statement he said to me that I’ll never forget was, ‘Don’t you ever do that to me!’ I said, ‘Well, that isn’t my plan.’” He told her, “‘I don’t want to talk about her ever again,’ and I went, ‘Okay.’”

  They tied the knot in April 1978. She was twenty-six and he was thirty-five. Three months later, in July, Kris Houghton would marry Robert Kardashian.

  During Jacqui’s marriage she gave birth to two sons, and one of them, the firstborn, was given the name Anthony—curiously, the pseudonym Kris had used for Cesar in her book, and members of Jacqui’s and Cesar’s family had wondered whether that was purposeful on Kris’s part, because, as one of them asserted, “She was a total bitch who would actually do something like that.”

  Jacqui’s marriage to Cesar ended in divorce in 1987; Kris’s with Kardashian would end in 1991. While Jacqui says hers was an amicable split, the Kardashian final breakup was far from that.

  * * *

  IN 2007, WHEN KEEPING UP with the Kardashians debuted, all the dark memories that Cesar Sanudo had of Kris Houghton Kardashian Jenner came flooding back, according to his daughter, Amber.

  “Oh, yeah, when the Kardashians came on the scene as far as the show, my dad started watching it, and he always had things to say about it, how she fabricated things. He didn’t like the way she portrayed her daughters, that she was more interested about making money than caring about the kids. He was upset about that.”

  But what really infuriated him, she said, was the interracial vibe that ran through the show.

  “My dad would say, ‘Why would Kris let her kids date black men?’ I said, ‘Dad, this is not the 1920s. Come on, you have to get that fifties and sixties mentality about race out of your head, it’s not where it is today.’

  “But that racial mixing angered him. And that’s why he used to say that Kris was sexually involved with O.J. How real that is, and did my dad witness it, I don’t think so. He said he was pretty sure that she was seeing O.J. along with
Kardashian, that she had an affair with O.J., too. How true that is I don’t know. He thought more or less that Kris would be with O.J., and I always had to correct him. I said, ‘Dad, this is not the Middle Ages.’ I said, ‘Dad, you’re a Mexican. Let’s be real here. You can’t say that people didn’t stereotype you when you were younger. So you can’t say that about Kris’s situation.’”

  On August 28, 2011, just around the time Kris Jenner’s memoir was published, Cesar Sanudo, suffering a number of health problems, died. He was sixty-seven.

  SEVEN

  Coffee, Tea, or Me?

  Kris Jenner claimed that she had actually turned down Robert Kardashian’s first proposal of marriage made just “three weeks” after they had finally gotten together following her inglorious breakup with Cesar Sanudo.

  She asserted that Kardashian was “devastated” when she told him “no,” and that he felt she was “slamming his character” by rejecting him. She maintained that she rebuffed his proposal because she had just ended that “crazy thing” with Sanudo and supposedly wanted some space.

  And out of the blue, the way she tells it, she decided to become a flight attendant for American Airlines.

  Her whole account was laughably outlandish—a truth-stretcher, if not an outright fabrication—for there were other genuine, far more serious reasons why she was forced to table her longtime dream of marriage to a well-to-do man-about-town with a Beverly Hills address and instead assume the dreary labors of a lowly stewardess trainee, living in a drab, barracks-like corporate dormitory for six weeks with strangers near the Dallas–Fort Worth Airport.

  The truth is Kardashian had ended it with Kris, not the other way around. And he gave her the brush-off because he had become romantically involved with someone else.

  Moreover, he felt that Kris was still too young for marriage, at least at that moment in time, and didn’t have enough worldly experience, despite her affair with Sanudo, which had started when she was just seventeen, and that Kardashian himself had helped break up.