The Kardashians Read online

  It was while Kris was learning to schlep a drinks cart up and down a narrow aisle above the clouds that Robert Kardashian was on cloud nine, having put Kris mostly out of mind and fallen hard for another woman, and not just any woman, but rather a gorgeous divorcée with a daughter and an internationally known pedigree.

  To Kris’s deep regret and extreme jealousy, the man of her current dreams was suddenly head over heels in love with the ex-wife of “the King,” Elvis Presley.

  As Kris noted in her book, “When I flew away, he began dating someone else right away: Priscilla Presley.”

  The begrudging italics are Kris’s.

  As she so crudely put it, “Payback is a bitch.”

  While Robert Kardashian wasn’t a kiss-and-tell kind of guy and stayed below the radar in the years before he became O. J. Simpson’s well-known mouthpiece, he couldn’t wait to tell his friends that he was involved with the former Mrs. Presley, a big-time romantic and sexual trophy for him.

  “He calls me and he says, ‘Do you want to have dinner? I have a new date.’ I said, ‘Yeah, who’s that?’ He says, ‘Priscilla Presley.’ I said, ‘Yeah, go fuck yourself. What are you talking about, Priscilla Presley?’ He says, ‘No, seriously, we met, we hooked up!’ So, we went and had dinner, and Priscilla couldn’t have been sweeter, couldn’t have been nicer,” recalled Larry Kraines, one of Kardashian’s closest friends.

  Kraines, his wife, Joyce—his second marriage—and Robert and Priscilla became an instant fun foursome.

  “We went to football games, Sunday football games regularly. We went to dinner. She was such a normal person, you’d never know who the hell she was—that she had been Elvis fucking Presley’s wife,” Kraines said, still seemingly awed years later.

  Priscilla’s father was an ex–Air Force guy like Kraines’s dad, and he loved playing with CB—Citizen Band—radio, so Larry Kraines sent him a present: a state-of-the-art CB rig, one of the many products of his company, Kraco. “Priscilla graciously thanked me,” said Kraines proudly. “She was very gracious, very polite. You’d never know who the fuck she was.”

  * * *

  ACCORDING TO JACK SPRADLIN and members of the Sanudo clan, it was Cesar Sanudo who had actually helped Kris get the stewardess job. “This was while they were still together, and Cesar knew someone at American Airlines,” Spradlin said. “She didn’t have money and she needed a job. She felt she could travel around and still be with Cesar. But all of a sudden they were no longer an item.”

  But in her book, Kris gave no credit to Sanudo for helping her get the job, crediting only herself, asserting that applying to be a stewardess was a way to “take control of my life.”

  It helped for Kris to have a sponsor like Sanudo because the airlines back then had been doing very little hiring, and reportedly only one out of a hundred who applied got jobs as flight attendants. Still, she had to have several interviews, meet the height and weight requirements, and undergo drug testing before being accepted into the training program.

  The sixties through the seventies were the golden decades of the stewardess—“When they were uniformly young, single, slim, attractive, and female. A good smile (all teeth, no gums) and some ability as a conversationalist were further prerequisites,” according to the writer Bruce Handy, in Vanity Fair. And Kris Houghton, who another flight attendant remembers was “stunningly beautiful, like a tall Natalie Wood, who turned heads everywhere she went,” fit the profile perfectly. “[F]lying was an adventure in and of itself at a time,” observed Handy, “when the average woman got married at the age of twenty and when opportunities outside the home were limited to teaching, nursing, and the secretarial pool.”

  There’s an old joke, however, that underscores the vibe of the era: A stewardess enters the cockpit of a commercial plane and asks the pilot, “Coffee, tea, or me?” The pilot says, “Whichever is easier to make.”

  For a young, sexually experienced stunner like Kris with no formal education beyond high school, it was the perfect job, at least until she could convince Robert Kardashian to really pop the question.

  At the American Airlines training center in Texas, twenty-year-old, five-foot-six Kris bonded with twenty-three-year-old Cindy Spallino, also a gorgeous five-foot-six brunette with brown eyes, much like Kris’s look. Unlike Kris, with just a high school diploma, Cindy was a very bright UCLA graduate with a degree in physiology who had spent some time doing medical research and had worked for a while as a paralegal for a gilt-edge Century City law firm, but decided to become a stewardess as a way to “shake up my life.”

  Cindy arrived at the flight attendant training school in February 1976, a week after Kris. And they soon became bosom buddies, a friendship that would endure for years.

  And she found Kris in an entirely different state of mind regarding Robert Kardashian than the scenario painted years later by Kris in her memoir, which she expected readers to take at face value and believe.

  It was clear to Cindy that Kris was “desperate” to marry Kardashian— “I knew she wanted to marry him, but I also knew from her that Priscilla Presley was there in the background.” Cindy also was aware from Kris that Kardashian thought she was too young to take a chance on her to be his wife and the mother of his children, because he wanted a big family.

  “Kris talked nonstop about Robert when we were in training,” Cindy said. “She told me he was very funny, very charming, very classy, just rock solid, but she never mentioned his looks, never mentioned that he was handsome, or sexy.”

  Nor did she disclose anything about her relationship with Cesar Sanudo and how it had scandalously ended when he had caught her with Kardashian. “She was probably too embarrassed to reveal that,” Cindy believed. “But she told me she was immediately drawn to Robert. She didn’t use the word ‘attracted.’ But she used the word ‘drawn.’”

  And even though Kardashian was involved with Priscilla Presley, Kris was constantly calling him long-distance.

  “We didn’t have phones in our rooms, and the phone was a pay phone in the hall, and Kris would call Robert every night, feeding quarters into the phone,” Cindy recalled.

  Kris’s biggest concern, was Elvis’s ex-wife. “Kris would just say, ‘He’s seeing her. He’s awfully close to her. I really don’t know the nature of the relationship.’ But she was very concerned. She was more threatened by it in terms of their potential future together. She felt that even if they weren’t together, if Priscilla was free, Robert would choose to go there. She just felt Priscilla Presley was a potential threat to any future Kris would have with Robert. And Kris knew that if Robert could have a life with Priscilla that he would choose that over her.”

  The other issue that caused Kardashian to cool it with Kris, Cindy understood, was Kris’s age. While Kardashian was sexually attracted to Kris, he thought she was too young—almost a dozen years younger—to get serious enough about to marry, at least then, and especially with Priscilla Presley in the picture.

  “Kris said that Robert had been taking it too slow with her,” recalled Cindy. “Kris was twenty, twenty-one, and her youth was part of the problem with Robert. Kris told me, ‘He’s taking it so slow, too slow,’ and I said, ‘Kris, you’re only twenty, twenty-one, you’re in airline school, you haven’t lived as much as he has.’ We had this conversation, Kris and I, that ‘maybe Robert feels that you need to live a little bit more before you’re ready to settle down.’ But she thought she was ready.”

  It was also clear to Cindy that Robert Kardashian represented a whole new way of life for Kris—a moneyed way of life, one that she desperately wanted.

  “Kris’s mom was a single mom who, until she remarried, struggled to support the family, and Kris knew what that meant,” observed Cindy. “And Kris never wanted to struggle like her mom struggled. Kris wanted financial security. She knew that she was beautiful enough to have that, that wealthy men were very drawn to her, so that the dating pool included financial security for her. She liked nice things in life, an
d wanted them. She wanted romance and she knew she could be wined and dined. Cesar had done it, Robert had done it, and she loved that.”

  While the only man she ever talked about to Cindy was Robert Kardashian, with whom she wanted marriage and lots of kids, other men desired her, too.

  When the opportunity arose, Kris would accept a dinner date with an attractive, well-heeled stranger on a plane.

  “We didn’t have any money,” said Cindy, “so if somebody wanted to take us out to dinner, it was just fine. Men would definitely flirt with you, men would ask you out. But I never felt, for lack of a better word, icky. I always felt in control, and I think Kris did, too.”

  Cindy didn’t think Kris’s dinner dates ever went further than a free meal, pleasant talk, and maybe some flirting. She didn’t view Kris as a slutty Rachel Jones or Trudy Baker of Coffee, Tea, or Me? infamy. Nor did she believe Kris had ever joined the mile-high club.

  But she noted: “All men were drawn to Kris because she was so beautiful. Wealthy men who could have their pick of women were attracted and drawn to her. But so were poor men, so were pilots, so were other flight attendants. They were attracted to her, and wanted to get to know her. ‘Hitting on her’ is not a word that I would use, but probably they did. Men would flirt with her. I saw that, oh, yes. I would walk through an airport with her and heads would turn because she was totally stunning, and photographs did not do her justice. Men were attracted to her always.”

  After Kris and Cindy finished their month and a half of training and got their wings as flight attendants, they were based together in New York. Kris moved in with a group of stewardesses in a small two-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan near Spanish Harlem, and Cindy moved in with a group of stews in Midtown.

  Because of their friendship, however, they volunteered to fly the same flights together, but Kris flew back to L.A. as often as she could in order to try to win back Kardashian from Priscilla Presley.

  EIGHT

  Kardashian and Presley

  At twenty-eight, Priscilla Presley came out of her famous and tumultuous Graceland union a relatively wealthy woman, with shared custody with the King of Elvis’s only child, Lisa Marie.

  She reportedly had a brief affair with the British photographer Terry O’Neill. Priscilla met him when he came into Bis & Beau, a Beverly Hills boutique she had invested in. O’Neill, actress Faye Dunaway’s future husband, later criticized the way Priscilla dressed as a “fashion disaster,” but was turned on by her sexuality, which was underscored by her kinky master bedroom, with a four-poster bed, special dimmed lighting, and a mirrored ceiling—definitely Elvis’s Las Vegas style.

  Their relationship lasted about sixty days.

  Then, as one observer noted, Priscilla was on the hunt “for a replacement” and “settled” at the time for Robert Kardashian.

  Having come from a headline-making marriage to one of the most idolized rock ’n’ rollers of his time, some wondered what Priscilla saw in the somewhat nerdy-looking Kardashian.

  “She liked him because he had a magnetic personality,” observed Joni Migdal. “Robert wasn’t particularly attractive, but he was funny, personable, and very nice. Priscilla liked that about him.

  “Elvis was Robert’s music idol. He loved Elvis,” continued Migdal. “Robert and I knew all the words of Elvis’s songs, and we would drive around with the top down singing our heads off, just knowing every word, and that was in the early 1970s [before he met Priscilla]. Then Robert started dating Priscilla and that made him very happy. He wanted to marry her and have children with her. That was definitely his hope, his plan.”

  And that was Kris’s biggest fear when she was in stewardess training, and later when she was flying the friendly skies.

  The Robert Kardashian–Priscilla Presley love connection actually began with Robert’s older brother, Tommy, around 1975.

  He had been dating a woman for a couple of years whose close friend was Joan Esposito, a pretty blond former Miss Missouri beauty queen, who was the ex-wife of Joe Esposito, Elvis’s longtime road manager and charter member of the King’s so-called Memphis Mafia.

  When the woman Tom Kardashian had been dating ended it to marry another man, she graciously introduced him to Joan, divorced, with two young daughters. The ex–Mrs. Esposito had abandoned Memphis and Graceland and was then living in Los Angeles and working as an assistant to Susan Stafford, a devout born-again Christian and Hollywood insider, who had been the original hostess and letter-turner on the popular TV game show Wheel of Fortune, before Vanna White and Pat Sajak became the longtime talent.

  As Esposito’s wife, the future Mrs. Tom Kardashian was a trusted and close member of Elvis’s posse, the one who Elvis had assigned to escort teenage Priscilla Beaulieu from Germany, where she had been living with her military family, to Graceland for a Christmas visit with the King. But the plan fell through at the last minute and Priscilla flew alone. But Joan soon became a mentor to, and close confidant of, Priscilla, and was her advisor regarding her Presley wedding plans and was Priscilla’s maid of honor. Priscilla would later write in her 1985 bestselling memoir, Elvis and Me, that the ceremony had gone off without a hitch because of her “good friend” Joan, who was “great that way. Joanie knew all the social graces along with the proper etiquette.”

  From Joan, Tom Kardashian learned the scandalous reason why her marriage to Esposito had fallen apart, and why Priscilla’s to Elvis had, too.

  “Elvis didn’t want the women around, so Joan and Priscilla wouldn’t be allowed to go on all the tours,” revealed Kardashian in 2015. “Elvis was far and away the biggest woman-getter in the world. He was the King, and all these women were at his beck and call. Joe [Esposito] also had girls in all these places, and Joan didn’t believe that he would cheat on her, but it was inevitable. Elvis kept Priscilla and Joan and the other wives away from what was going on, and that’s why the relationships failed.”

  The way Tom Kardashian told it, Robert and Priscilla’s meeting came about “because Robert knew that Joan and Priscilla were close, and there’d be times the four of us would go out, and then they kind of went out on their own.”

  But Migdal, who later got to know both Priscilla and her sister, Michelle, remembers a different scenario.

  “Tommy met Joanie Esposito, but he really wanted to date Priscilla. But when Tommy and Priscilla finally met, it was Priscilla who decided—‘Well, why don’t we double date and I’ll just go out with your brother.’”

  Some members of the very private and low-key wider Kardashian family were appalled when they learned that Robert had become romantically involved with Priscilla Presley. To them, it was like he was involved with scandalous royalty, and that he’d end up plastered all over the tabloids. And there was more than a hint of jealousy and envy in the family, too.

  One of those was one of Robert’s cousins, Joan Agajanian, daughter of the auto-racing impresario J. C. Agajanian of Indianapolis 500 fame, and sister of Robert and Tommy’s closest cousin, the motor sports attorney, promoter, and race car owner Cary J. C. Agajanian. Joan claimed the only reason Priscilla went out with Robert was because “she had no one else to go out with.” She and Priscilla met at a trendy Beverly Hills health club, and the two bonded. Priscilla came to view her as her mentor on how to become a Beverly Hills socialite. “She’d never been anywhere. She knew nothing.… I don’t think she was demure,” Agajanian once told a Priscilla biographer. “I think she was intimidated by anyone who was socially adequate. She was socially inadequate to the point of pain, of just shutting up. But she’s a very smart girl. Street smart.”

  When Robert and Priscilla became an item, Tom Kardashian was a bit jealous.

  “Pissed doesn’t even cover Tommy’s reaction when Bob won the Presley prize,” observed a longtime friend of both brothers. “It caused sibling tensions, the old brotherly rivalry.”

  Looking back to that time in 2015, however, Tom Kardashian, happily married to the former Joan Espos
ito for going on four decades, had long ago resigned himself to the fact that Priscilla had chosen his brother over him. He thought she could be too controlling.

  “Priscilla really changed a lot of my brother’s thinking of how he should dress, how he should even drive, and what he should do—and she changed him easily because she was so attractive, and so she had a lot of influence on him,” he maintained. “She could tell him something and he would listen. But I also realized that the women in my brother’s life were strong, and he listened to Kris, and to some of the other girls he was involved with, or he would play second fiddle to them.”

  In her book, Kris noted that Robert was “instantly smitten” with Elvis’s ex, and Priscilla “apparently was smitten with him.”

  All that was true.

  What wasn’t true was Kris’s assertion that Kardashian and Presley “quickly moved in together.”

  In fact, they never actually lived in the same house during their year-long, sometimes rocky relationship. Some believed it was because Robert’s best friend, O. J. Simpson, then playing for the Buffalo Bills, often camped out and partied at the Kardashian brothers’ Beverly Hills bachelor pad—friends called them “the Three Musketeers,” especially when the Juice was on the outs with his wife of twelve years, Marguerite Whitely Simpson, mother of three of his children, Arnelle, Jason, and Aaren.

  Still, Robert Kardashian and Priscilla Presley were having some great times together while stewardess Kris Houghton literally stewed, believing she had forever lost him to Elvis’s ex.

  Of Priscilla, Kris enviously observed, “She was gorgeous, of course, petite and perfect … I would see pictures of her and just die … [but] deep in my heart I was still hoping that Robert would end up being the guy for me.”

  A couple of times when Robert was out and about with Priscilla they were spotted by the paparazzi, and photos of them appeared once or twice in one of the weekly supermarket tabloids, causing Kris to “avoid the National Enquirer,” her favorite form of weekly reading matter at the time. Back then she lived vicariously, buried in the tabloids, reading about celebrities and their glamorous and scandalous lives.