by Sean Smith
In the fourth episode, Playboy rang up to ask Kim to appear on the cover. The sex tape was forgotten as Kim hesitated about whether to do it or not, although there wouldn’t have been much of a plot if she hadn’t. Again, it was deemed ‘classy’. Kim explained, ‘It was something that I felt really nervous about doing at first … It’s not a nude photo shoot by any stretch. It is not as revealing as some people might want. I keep it classy and covered up. I do bare my whole butt. And a little bit of my chest. But that’s it.’
Kim looked sensational for the shoot. Her modesty was protected by a strategically placed large string of beads. When the issue came out, she was wearing a lovely red swimsuit on the cover. The headline wasn’t at all subtle, though, and declared: ‘Hollywood’s New Sex Star Kim Kardashian Takes It All Off’.
The strategy of promoting Kim in these first few episodes worked. E! said the programme had already reached 13 million viewers. Young women, aged 18 to 34, were hooked on the show. The vice-president of the television company who was in charge of series development, Lisa Berger, enthused, ‘The buzz around the series is huge.’ After just a month on air, Keeping Up with the Kardashians was renewed for a second season.
Kim did well in another poll in 2007. In December, the New York Daily News published a list of the ‘Top 50 Dumbest People in Hollywood’. Lindsay Lohan placed first and Kim was second. She would soon be proving everybody completely wrong.
13
Dancing Princess
For a man who could sprint 50 metres up a football field in little more than 5 seconds, Reggie Bush was slow out of the blocks with Kim. She couldn’t believe that the star running back with the New Orleans Saints didn’t ask for her number when they met at the 2006 ESPY sports awards.
In July, she accompanied Bruce Jenner for the evening at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood. She was definitely interested when she saw the handsome, well-muscled young man sitting with Matt Leinart. Kim knew Matt well, because he was dating Paris Hilton, and he was happy to introduce her to Reggie, who had been his college teammate at her father’s old alma mater, USC. Kim recalled that first meeting: ‘My first impression of Reggie was “This guy is so quiet. Why is he not taking my number?” Matt tried to set us up, but it took a while.’
It took months. Reggie was only 21, whereas Kim was a 25-year-old divorcee. Despite already being a millionaire, he might have been overawed by her. Eventually they agreed to a date, but it wasn’t the romantic experience she was hoping for. They arranged to meet at a car wash, before heading off for a meal at Chipotle Mexican Grill on Wilshire Boulevard.
After their relationship eventually went public in the spring of 2007, they quickly became one of the top celebrity couples in Los Angeles. Reggie maintained a bachelor apartment in Beverly Hills, where Kim was now living. She had bought a condo in South Clark Drive. So when Keeping Up with the Kardashians began, Kim was no longer in Calabasas, preferring to be nearer her friends, even though it meant a dull drive along the freeway to get to work.
Reggie had had a modest upbringing in the San Diego area. His mother was a deputy sheriff at a correctional centre and his stepfather was a security guard at a local high school. His biological father, Reginald Alfred Bush, Sr, had split from his mother before Reggie was born and had very little to do with him growing up.
Reggie was arguably the USC Trojans’ best-known player since O. J. Simpson. In 2005, he too won the Heisman Trophy and a host of other awards, but became a controversial figure following allegations that he and his family received improper benefits while he was an amateur player at the university. He returned the Heisman voluntarily in 2012 and sanctions were imposed on USC by the NCAA, the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Robert Kardashian would have been horrified.
Those off-field problems didn’t stop Reggie from becoming one of the richest young sportsmen in the country after he signed with the New Orleans Saints as a top NFL draft pick. He was a good role model for Kim in that he signed endorsement deals with Pepsi, Adidas, Pizza Hut, Subway and General Motors – making an estimated $5 million. In a three-year period with the Saints, 2007–2010, he earned a reported $27.5 million for starting 27 games. That was close to $1 million every time he put his helmet on. Forbes magazine didn’t consider him value for money and included him in their list of the NFL’s biggest salary flops.
The problem for Kim and Reggie as their relationship developed was the most common one faced by celebrity couples: how to survive long absences brought about by conflicting schedules. Kim was tied to Keeping Up with the Kardashians and he was living in New Orleans for six months of the year.
She did her best to fly in regularly, and particularly enjoyed their domestic time together, when they played board games or lay in bed watching television. Kim isn’t a woman who wants to dress up and look fabulous all the time. She was content just to relax with her boyfriend. She would have been quite happy to have stayed at home and raised a family with her first husband and that remained an aspiration.
Kim, it seemed, has a nurturing spirit. Even with Ray J, when they weren’t having sex, she kept a clean and tidy house and made sure his clothes were immaculate. She was impressed with Reggie’s fashion sense, but that didn’t stop her from taking him shopping and picking out what he should wear. Being a stylist was what she did best.
Kim once made the plaintive observation that she had too often been cheated on and had her heart broken. She wasn’t including Reggie in that list and was looking forward to settling down with him. When Tyra Banks asked her, in a 2008 interview, if she would marry Reggie if he asked her tomorrow, she replied without hesitation, ‘Of course I would … We have such a good relationship. He gets along with everyone in my family.’ She was in love.
She did her best to be the dutiful WAG to her high-profile boyfriend, but admitted, ‘I’m not really a sports girl. But I sit with all the wives and they know everything and I don’t, so they are teaching me … I don’t really watch if he’s not playing. I’m not that big of a football fan yet.’
The trade-off for Kim taking an interest in football was that Reggie had to appear in her reality show. He wasn’t especially keen on having the cameras follow him around, but he did it because it was important to Kim. He had been on television before, playing himself in the series The Reggie Bush Project, in which his biggest fan sets off on a mission to meet his idol.
Inevitably, Reggie was asked about the sex tape. He was philosophical: ‘We don’t talk about it, and we don’t think about it. With Kim, and with anybody in life, it’s not my place to judge, no matter what they’ve done – good, bad or indifferent.’
The couple seemed like the perfect fit when they were out together, usually smiling and holding hands. The media decided that only the Beckhams generated more star power as a sporting/celebrity couple. This interest meant that Kim had to counter the usual pregnancy and wedding rumours: ‘I am not pregnant. I am definitely going to wait until I am married before I get pregnant. Marriage is soon, but I would say five years away. I have to get engaged first. I would say in about a year. You know, we are taking our time and he’s young and I don’t want to rush into anything.’
Kim was keen to embrace every new opportunity that came about because of her television exposure. It is a tried and trusted route for reality stars – one season they are on The X Factor and the next on I’m a Celebrity; they appear in Celebrity Big Brother and then try Celebrity MasterChef; a good run in Strictly Come Dancing leads to a part in a West End musical. One opportunity provides a window for another.
Kim, encouraged by her mother, was determined to exploit her status as the star of Keeping Up with the Kardashians. The first thing she wanted to try was acting. As she made clear, it wasn’t a prospect she relished: ‘I promised myself that this year I would do things that are kind of outside of my comfort zone.’
She was true to her word when she appeared in a bizarre video for the Fall Out Boy single ‘Thnks fr th Mmrs’, taken from their number one US a
lbum Infinity on High. Understandably, after the sex tape, she had received plenty of offers to play the hot girl riding in a car with a cool singer. She turned them all down, but her interest was piqued by the rock band’s storyline: it was about the making of a video in which every character other than Kim and the band was played by a chimpanzee.
She was very nervous about performing her scenes. The closest she had got to an ape previously was at Neverland and now she had to act with a whole gang of them. It didn’t help when their trainer told her not to look them in the eye or call them by name. She sat alongside them and was told not to move, which was ‘basically freaking her out’. ‘It was really scary because they are so strong and you don’t know what they are going to do.’
In the video, Kim was the love interest of the band’s resident heart-throb, bassist and songwriter, Pete Wentz. She already knew Pete, which made filming a little easier, but she had never met the chimpanzee who was playing the director. She explained, ‘We had to have a make-out scene and the director, played by the chimp, kept on saying that Pete was doing it wrong. He tried to step in and show him how to kiss me. He touches me and Pete gets angry and runs off.’ Kim, looking ravishing in a Marilyn Monroe-style frock, follows him to the dressing room, where they have a proper kiss, which she found almost as nerve-racking as the chimp’s.
The video was different and refreshing, though it was hardly likely to further her ambition of starring in a James Bond movie. Kim wanted to film a love scene with Daniel Craig. As she pictured it: ‘I would be drowning, wearing a bikini with a gun in a sachet, and he would dive in and get me.’ She evidently saw herself as a mixture of Ursula Andress and Halle Berry.
Kim didn’t get Bond, but she did make her first film, which, with supreme irony, was called Disaster Movie. It came fourteenth in an Empire online poll of the 50 worst films ever. Kim auditioned and was cast as Lisa Taylor, one of the main female roles, by the writer/director partnership of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, who were responsible for other parodies, including Date Movie and Meet the Spartans.
The basic plot was that a number of reality television stars, including Kim, play characters who, while trying to deal with an end-of-the-world meteor strike, keep bumping into characters from other films, as in ‘Look, it’s Indiana Jones’. The highlight for male Kim fans was a spurious wrestling match with Carmen Electra, the former star of Baywatch, who was also a cover girl for Playboy. Kim’s character survived the busty bout, but is subsequently killed when she is hit by an asteroid, which looked suspiciously like an enormous cheese boulder, falling unexpectedly out of the sky. The scene is actually very funny.
The reviews were poor. Nobody seemed to get the joke. The Observer reviewer said: ‘it would be the Worst Movie Ever Made were it actually a movie at all.’ He thought there wasn’t a single laugh in it. The Independent commented, ‘Disaster Movie isn’t so much a film as an insult to moviegoers everywhere.’ The New York Times said the film had a shelf-life of five minutes, ‘which may be longer than it took with most of its gags.’ The film, which cost $20 million to make, grossed an estimated $31.7 million worldwide, so it wasn’t a complete box-office flop, though obviously a disappointment.
Kim received her first award nomination – not for an Oscar but a Razzie for Worst Supporting Actress in 2008. She took it with good humour: ‘There is steep competition in my “worst supporting actress” category, I have to admit, including my fantastic co-star Carmen Electra (you go, girl!).’ In the end, the award went to Paris Hilton for Repo! The Genetic Opera.
Undaunted by the failure of her acting debut, Kim moved on to dancing. Family friend Deena Katz was now the senior talent producer on Dancing with the Stars and she picked Kim for the new series. Initially she wasn’t too keen, but it seemed a great opportunity to be showcased on one of the big networks. At the time, the ABC blockbuster was the top-rated show on American television, pulling in more than 15 million viewers. Keeping Up with the Kardashians was the most popular on E! with just 1.6 million.
Kim and her reality series were set to receive many weeks of extra publicity. The challenge confronting her was that she had never really danced before and wasn’t a natural. She wasn’t one of those stage school graduates who found remembering their dance steps easy. Kim had never had lessons and had to practise day and night so she wouldn’t embarrass herself. On the very first show, she revealed her problem was that she had terrible balance. It couldn’t have helped wearing such high heels. She observed, ‘Elegance and clumsiness don’t mix. It isn’t easy for me.’
She did gain some advantage, however, by being paired with the reigning professional champion, Mark Ballas. Their opening dance was a foxtrot to the Pink Panther theme. It was perhaps not the best choice of number, as it is normally associated with the bumbling Inspector Clouseau rather than anything smooth and sexy. She looked surprisingly slim in an elegant purple dress, with her hair in a 1920s Coco Chanel bob. She had worn it in a similar style at her eighth-grade graduation, when she was 13. The leading fashion commentator Alison Jane Reid said, ‘I really like Kim in retro mode. Her hair in a bob accentuates her cheekbones and amazing doe eyes. The dress is classic showgirl – very elegant, with a liberal sprinkling of sequins and side splits, so she can show off her fabulous pins.’
To Kim’s relief, she kept her feet and made few errors. The audience was cheering afterwards, especially Bruce and Kris. The judges were not so enthusiastic. Len Goodman thought the dance cold and said there was no chemistry between her and Mark. Bruno Tonioli told her, ‘You have to make it more available’, and that she needed to bring the audience with her. The more charitable Carrie Ann Inaba said she needed to move her neck more, because keeping it so still was preventing eye contact. She scored 19 points out of 30, which was enough to keep her in for another night.
The next evening, she and Mark were the last couple to dance the mambo. She admitted that everyone was going to expect her to be sexy, but that wasn’t really her, particularly where her shapely rear was concerned. ‘Everyone thinks I know how to shake my butt and I really don’t!’ Kim looked to be concentrating so hard that she forgot to feel the music. She found it difficult to find a rhythm to ‘Baby Got Back’ by Sir Mix-a-Lot. Mark danced frenetically to compensate for Kim’s uneasiness, but the judges liked it even less than the foxtrot.
She needed to improve the following week for the rumba. Her friend Robin Antin, the choreographer of Pussycat Dolls, was brought in to try and cajole her to move more sexily. Once more, she looked fabulous in a white dress that highlighted her curves, but the judges were unimpressed. Bruno unkindly said she was colder and more distant than Siberia. Both Dancing with the Stars and the UK equivalent, Strictly Come Dancing, are more about forging a connection with the audience than the ability to look sensational in a frock. It’s not just about trying hard, but showing improvement. Kim wasn’t doing that, and the viewers voted her out.
She was the third contestant to be eliminated, but in real terms had lasted only one week on the show – a huge disappointment. It was still a surprise, because she came across as genuinely nice and modest. She had the natural charm of a girl enjoying her prom night. The producers must have been seething, because she brought so much glamour and interest to the show. Afterwards, she was gracious: ‘Every dance was a huge accomplishment for me, and I did the best I could.’
One of the show’s hosts, Samantha Harris, said, ‘Everyone told me that getting to know her outside of the tabloids and the reality show has been so refreshing, since Kim is such a sweetheart. I feel the same way.’ Mark also said she was a great girl, while observing that ‘dancing was not her thing’. Her family obviously rallied round, but the best comment came from Bruce: ‘She had a lot of guts to say yes to do this show with no dance background at all. Success is not measured by heights attained, but by obstacles overcome.’
After her disappointing debuts as an actor and a dancer, it seemed inevitable that Kim would try her hand at singing. Her first hu
sband, Damon Thomas, had frequently told his beautiful wife that she should give it a go, and he wasn’t the only record producer keen for her to make a disc. She didn’t rush into anything, but waited for what she hoped would be the right project.
One way for the Kardashians to release information is for certain websites to carry a rumour. In this case, TMZ, one of the preferred outlets, started the whisper in the autumn of 2010 that she was in the studio working with the superstar producer known as The-Dream (Terius Youngdell Nash). He had co-written two of the biggest hits of recent years, ‘Umbrella’ by Rihanna and the Grammy-winning Beyoncé track ‘Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)’. An anonymous insider helpfully said that Kim had a really good voice.
At first, the stories suggested that she was recording an album. They gained credibility when Kanye West was seen entering the building in Culver City, where they were shooting the video for the first single. Nobody knew the title yet, but apparently it was written by The-Dream. The acclaimed director Hype Williams was brought in to oversee the filming.
Hype had worked closely with Kim before. He had shot the photograph for her 2007 Playboy cover and had made her look sensational. He also worked closely with Kanye West, winning a BET (Black Entertainment Television) Video Director of the Year Award for ‘Gold Digger’. He made so many of the rap artist’s videos, they were practically a team. He was also responsible for the videos of a who’s who of modern pop culture, including Jay Z, Babyface, Nicki Minaj, Beyoncé and John Legend.
Kim couldn’t have had three bigger hitters on her team than The-Dream, Kanye West and Hype Williams. As a bonus, the recording adventure was filmed for her spin-off reality series Kourtney and Kim Take New York. Kim had trouble with her vocals and at one point had to leave the studio to compose herself. The resulting single ‘Jam (Turn It Up)’ was played on the radio for the first time during Ryan Seacrest’s morning show on KIIS FM, which was practically keeping it in the family.
