Kris Jenner . . . And All Things Kardashian

by Jenner, Kris

  As you surely know by now, I’ve always been a perfectionist, type A personality. Everything has to be a certain way, and the world around me has to be in perfect order if I am to be relaxed and move on to do something new, different, or fun. That’s just who I am. I find joy in buying something new for my house, decorating, and dressing my kids. Back in the beginning years of my marriage to Robert, it was a good day if it ended with me bathing the babies in a bubble bath, filled with the cutest bath toys, and afterward dressing them in their pink satin Baby Dior nightgowns. I loved brushing their hair, turning on a movie, or reading them to sleep with a book. The biggest joy in my life was taking care of those babies. I knew I’d been blessed.

  On some nights, once the babies were in bed and the nanny was on the watch, Robert and I were able to have date nights. With babies tucked in, everybody safe and sound in our gorgeous house on Tower Lane, we’d tiptoe downstairs, where we would dress up and head out for a night in Beverly Hills. We were living la vida loca!

  Robert was quite the dresser. He would put on a gorgeous sports coat, great slacks, and beautiful Gucci loafers. His hair was always swept back perfectly and his nails were always manicured. Again, the perfect guy in every way. We’d get into one of his Rolls-Royces and hit the town. It was quite the life: everything was perfect, perfect, perfect . . . until imperfections began creeping in.

  It began with something strange. In 1982, for some odd reason my body broke out in this crazy, horrendous episode of psoriasis from head to toe. The rash was so bad, I looked like a burn victim. It was the first time I experienced any kind of physical disorder, and it was really life-changing.

  I was very lucky to be healthy and athletic. I just loved to be out in the sun in my bikini, swimming with my kids. Now I had this rash erupting all over my body with huge, red, angry sores. I panicked. I thought I had some obscure disease and was dying. I went to my doctor, the Beverly Hills cosmetic dermatologist Arnie Klein, and he took one look at me and said, “Wow, I think you have psoriasis!”

  “Psoriasis?! What is that?”

  “Haven’t you ever heard of the ‘heartbreak of psoriasis’?” he said.

  “Hell no, but I definitely have now!”

  I would soon learn that psoriasis can be caused by emotional stress. What stress did I have? Living a perfect life in a perfect house with a perfect husband and two perfect children? I wasn’t sure—at least, not yet. Arnie Klein sent me to his colleague Dr. David Rish, who specialized in the care of psoriasis. Dr. Rish put me on a regimen that involved pills and spending time in a sun bed every other day. Gradually, after a year and a half of treatment, my psoriasis healed. I still suffer from outbreaks from time to time and now use medication to help control it, but nothing as severe as I experienced then.

  After my psoriasis treatment was over, Robert and I decided to take a trip. My parents drove up and watched the kids, and we had the time of our lives traveling to Europe in 1983. We started in Rome and then went to Capri, Venice, and Florence. It was on the trip to Europe that Robert and I decided it was time to have another baby. We conceived again in Italy.

  Nine months later, in 1984, four years after the birth of Kimberly, our third daughter was born on June 27.

  I loved the name Chloe, but I didn’t know if I could change the C to a K. Sure, it would be easy to do, but would it be fair to the child? I wondered about it, because I had never seen “Chloe” spelled “Khloé” before. But of all the names I came up with, nothing else fit. From the moment I saw her, Khloé just looked like a Khloé.

  Like her name, Khloé looked different. Different from everyone else in the family, from the moment she was born. She had blond hair and these greenish eyes. She looked a lot like my maternal grandmother, Lou Ethel, and Robert’s mother, Helen. Kourtney and Kimberly came out dark and Armenian looking, and Khloé arrived looking nothing like them.

  Khloé learned really fast that it isn’t easy to be the third daughter. She was instantly funny; she knew how to get attention. She wasn’t going to be left in the dust. Growing up, Khloé always found a way to carve out space for herself, usually through humor. There was a time in Khloé’s life when she really thought she was a dog, and when people came over, she would bark and lick them and sometimes bite their legs. This was a standing gig for her; it was her form of stand-up comedy. It was so damn funny. She developed the most amazing personality and learned how to be strong and take care of herself.

  Our friends loved our three girls. They were always entertaining, doing little skits and dances. They would show off and they were never shy. We had a loud, excitable, fun family. We had such an amazing group of friends, so my social life was really rich and full, but the family life was equally as wonderful. Again, I felt really lucky—and blessed.

  Yet, something was missing.

  A boy.

  From the first time I gave birth, Robert’s parents and all of his Armenian family members were praying for a boy. But first I had Kourtney. Everyone was excited about Kourtney. Then I had Kimberly, and everyone thought, Oh, so cute to have two little girls! Meanwhile, they all kept praying for a boy. Then came Khloé, another girl, and of course everyone was still happy. But it felt like something was still missing. Robert and I talked about it for a really long time, and we decided to give it one more try. We wanted another child, and we decided that if it was a fourth girl, it would still be great, but we really wanted to go for that boy.

  I started reading up on how to conceive a boy. There was no Internet at that time, so I read a lot of books on the subject. I became this expert on how, when, and where to have sex to achieve a baby boy.

  “Oh my God, we have to have sex right now!” I would tell Robert over the phone. “This is it, this is the boy! This is the boy!”

  Robert would race home and it was wham, bam, thank you, ma’am. We didn’t have sex frequently, but just enough, because sex had become all about conceiving the boy. You had only one shot at it. You had to do it just the right way. We tried all these crazy positions: upside down and sideways, me lying there with my feet in the air, drinking special juice or tons of iced tea.

  It was pretty funny and we would laugh about it. Sure enough, I got pregnant. We tried to stay calm, because we wouldn’t know what sex the baby was until I gave birth.

  I went into labor the night before St. Patrick’s Day, 1987. All of my girlfriends showed up at the hospital. Shelli Azoff brought Fatburgers for everyone. It was a huge party at two a.m. in the waiting room with all my friends and family and Robert’s family there, everyone thinking and praying, Let it be a boy! Let it be a boy!

  If it was a girl, we would name her Kelly—with a K, of course. If it was a boy, we were going to name him Robert Arthur Kardashian after Robert and his father, Arthur, in the Armenian tradition.

  In the delivery room, my doctor, Paul Crane, who delivered all my kids, warned me, “I don’t want you to be upset, but I am pretty sure this is a girl. I’m just saying that because when the baby comes out, I don’t want you to freak out on me if it is a girl.”

  “I’m going to be fine,” I said.

  I screamed when the baby came out and Dr. Crane said, “Oh my God, it’s a boy!” I think he was as shocked as I was. But lo and behold, it was a boy—Robert Arthur, although we would come to call him Rob—followed by a celebration like no other. My best friend, Joyce Kraines, heard the commotion. She had her ear up against the door the entire time I was giving birth. I was staring up at the big metal operating room fixtures when I heard Dr. Crane yell to Joyce, “Put on some scrubs!” Joyce came running into the operating room, a mask thrown over her face, and she came to me and started kissing my face and giving me huge hugs.

  My mother-in-law came in with jewelry—the most beautiful diamond and sapphire brooch you have ever seen in your life, which had been handed down for generations—and a thank-you note for me. It’s a boy, it’s a boy, it’s a boy! When I gave birth to Kourtney and Kimberly and Khloé, I didn’t get anything, but I ha
ve this boy and she’s suddenly giving me her jewelry! There were flowers every where. God, I should have had four sons! I thought, kidding, of course. But it was a day I’ll never forget. In those days, a mother would spend a few days in the hospital after giving birth, and I really enjoyed it, with friends and family stopping by constantly.

  Now we had four children and no worries when it came to our lifestyle. Robert’s career was booming. He had kept his bar membership active, but was working on a company he owned called Radio & Records, or R&R. It was the newspaper for the music industry, and it was huge. He had sold the company to an even bigger company in Dallas, but he had stayed on to run it for another five years. Once that contract expired, he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do next. He ended up working with our good friend Irving Azoff at one of the companies he was running, MCA Radio Network, and Robert went to work at Universal Studios, where the company was based.

  Life was great and getting greater all the time.

  On February 2, 1985, our friends O.J. Simpson and Nicole Brown were married. Before the wedding, O.J.’s buddies—Robert, his brother, Tommy, A. C. Cowlings, football great Marcus Allen, and Donald Moomaw, pastor of Bel Air Presbyterian, who was going to perform the ceremony—decided that O.J. could use a little marriage Bible study to prepare for the major step of matrimony. They thought that O.J. needed a little counseling, just to talk about what it meant to be in a monogamous relationship and how to be a good husband. They wanted O.J. to give this, his second marriage, a really good shot.

  He had been married to an amazing lady, Marguerite. She was beautiful and they had gone to school together. He walked away from that relationship when he fell in love with Nicole, and I think all of us were afraid of his wandering eye. We were hoping for the best. We were hoping this would be a solid relationship and that they would be together forever, because they were so much fun to be around as a couple.

  O.J. and Nicole were married in a tent in the backyard of O.J.’s house on Rockingham Drive. OJ was thirty-seven; Nicole, pregnant with their first child, was twenty-five and never looked lovelier. I remember being so happy for her. I felt like they had both been through a lot, and sacrificed so much for each other to be together. I thought Nicole was finally going to have her happily-ever-after.

  The years passed quickly, almost in a blur. Robert and I continued in our strong faith and religious practice, both in our home and at church. We both loved the Lord. We went to church on Sundays. We had all our kids christened and took them every Sunday to Sunday school. Our home was filled with faith and love, and I was really proud of that. I started going to the Tuesday community Bible study in Santa Monica, which I loved. In Bible study, I met two of my closest friends:

  Candace Garvey and Dru Hammer. Dru was married to Michael Hammer, grandson of Armand Hammer, and Candace eventually married the baseball great Steve Garvey. Through Bible study, I met these two lifelong friends and many others.

  I had an amazing social circle at the time. We had girl luncheons for everyone’s birthdays, celebrations for everything. Joyce Kraines, Sheila Kolker, Shelli Azoff, Cici, Candace Garvey, Lisa Miles, and me—old friends and new. We were always having tennis parties, barbecues, concerts, dinners at Morton’s, Chasen’s and L’Orangerie. We were all having babies at the same time too. Our kids grew up together. It was like they had a whole bunch of cousins—the families were that close—and we all did the same things—like getting our boobs done.

  It was 1988 by then, and a few of my Bible study girlfriends were having their boobs done. Pretty soon, everybody was having boob jobs. Of course, I decided I needed a boob job too. I had four kids and the boobs were looking like they could use some perking up. So I scheduled the surgery.

  I will never forget waking up a few hours later. My eyes opened and I could see my girlfriend Sheila Kolker hovering over my bed squealing, “You look like a supermodel!” I was so groggy. I do? I thought. But I couldn’t tell. I was still covered in bandages. After I healed, I realized that because my doctor had put the implants under the muscle, it didn’t even look like I had my boobs done at all. In those days, under the muscle was safer, but that didn’t give you those high, perky, fabulous boobs that you see on Playboy bunnies, which was what I was seeking. Staring in the mirror, I was like, Hello? Where are my boobs?

  I started talking to Nicole Simpson about it. “Well, I want to get my boobs done too,” she told me. By then, she and O.J. had had their two children, Sydney and Justin, so she was ready to perk up her boobs, just as I had been.

  “Have him do your boobs first, and I will see how yours look and then I’ll do mine all over again,” I told Nicole.

  Nicole went to see Dr. Harry Glassman and the surgery was scheduled. Of course, Nicole’s boobs were 2die4. I went by her house after the surgery and she took off her shirt and said, “Kris, look!”

  My mouth fell open. They were gorgeous. I thought, I want two of those, please!

  O.J. was of course so excited about Nicole’s new boobs, because Nicole had that tall, lanky, gorgeous, athletic body. She was so beautiful. Looking back on it now, we both probably should’ve just kept our boobs the way they were. But in those years—the late eighties—everyone wanted to have big, enormous boobs. We were all obsessed, and after Nicole had hers done, I went to the same Dr. Harry Glassman and had mine done all over again. This time I was very, very happy with the results.

  Robert and I were having so much fun with O.J. and Nicole back then.

  We were always together, having dinner, playing tennis, having parties. By now, they had moved back into O.J.’s house on Rockingham Drive. They loved to have scavenger hunt parties. One time, they told us all to show up at their house wearing white. Everyone showed up in tennis whites, and O.J. lined us up in couples and handcuffed us to our partners. Then he gave us a list of household items, the craziest stuff: a toothpick, a mousetrap, yesterday’s newspaper, a steak, a pack of matches from the Beverly Hills Hotel. The prize would be an amazing piece of Lalique crystal. Everybody ran to their cars, and we had to all get in the same door and climb over the steering wheels because we were handcuffed together. Everyone was squealing and laughing. Robert and I drove to Uncle Jack and Auntie Dorothy’s house down the street, and we were able to get every single item. It was one-stop shopping. We won that year. It was so much fun.

  O.J. and Nicole had tennis parties, too, and they would give all their guests new tennis racquets and tennis balls. O.J. loved giving parties and he was always extremely generous. Nicole loved to put together barbecues, and every Fourth of July they had a huge one. The Fourth of July was O.J.’s holiday. They would have people over from the entertainment industry, everyone from the Jackson brothers to the singer Bill Withers. And there were women. Young women everywhere. All of the girls would come to O.J.’s Fourth of July parties dressed to the nines in their little dresses and high heels with their hair and makeup done. It was a big joke between O.J. and his buddies A. C. Cowlings and Marcus Allen. They would get all the pretty, perfectly coiffed young women to the party, where they would throw them in the pool. They thought that was really funny.

  Nicole would have people barbecuing ribs and steak and chicken, and her mom and dad, Judi and Lou, would come with all of her sisters. Nicole was really close to her parents. They were always at the house on Rockingham, helping with their kids, Sydney and Justin. I always took Kourtney, Kimberly, Khloé, and Robert to the barbecues too.

  It was 1988 and everything was still right with the world. I had a wonderful husband and four gorgeous children. Everything was perfect. I was blessed in so many ways; even my psoriasis was gone. But something was growing inside of me—something worse than the heartbreak of psoriasis.

  I had no idea that within a year I would come close to losing everything—including my mind—in what can only be described as my year from hell.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Unfulfilled

  Feelings are interesting things. You can’t control them, or at least I can’
t control mine. You feel what you feel, and usually I understand why. If I’m feeling sad, I know why. If I’m feeling bored, I know why. If I’m feeling excited or blessed or thankful, I know why. But in 1989 I started to feel really gloomy and really depressed and really unhappy. And I couldn’t figure out why.

  My son was almost two. I had the best life in the world. I didn’t work and I thought that it was a gift from God to have my babies and be able to raise my kids and give all of my attention to my family. I had the best friends a girl could ever want: supportive, beautiful, smart, independent, strong women who were great mothers, great friends, and a great support system. As always, Robert’s cousin Cici was a really important friend in my life. She was around for all the Armenian parties, and the wedding showers, and through the whole process of our marriage. I had parents who adored me. I had in-laws who loved me and would do anything for me. I had a husband who was absolutely devoted to me and four adorable children who loved me.

  Yet, I was unhappy.

  I was selfish and restless and bored.

  My feelings for Robert had changed. I still loved him after ten years of marriage, but I soon began to realize that I wasn’t in love with him. I struggled with this for months and months. I would sit there and ask myself, Why am I feeling this way? Why aren’t I feeling frisky toward my wonderful husband? Why aren’t I more lovey-dovey? I had an amazing guy who everyone loved and admired. Why don’t I feel attracted to him? Why don’t I feel in love with him anymore? What’s happened?

  Nothing—and everything. Our emotional bond, which had once been so tight, had loosened and seemed to be slipping away. I had started to change inside, and I felt extremely troubled about it. I would cry myself to sleep at night trying to figure out what was happening to me. I was more than just unhappy; I was miserable. I would struggle to get through my day without breaking down in front of Robert or the kids.