Kris Jenner . . . And All Things Kardashian

by Jenner, Kris

  I was instantly numb. “What?”

  “She’s been shot! She’s been shot!”

  “Oh, my God!! Where is she? I’m on my way.”

  “No, she didn’t make it.”

  “What!!?”

  All I could think of in that split second was that it was a drive-by shooting on her street.

  “Well, where was she??!!”

  “She was in front of her house.”

  My mind was racing, and I was thinking, Shot? Somebody just drove by and shot her? It didn’t make any sense. When you hear something that shocking, you can’t process it. I still hadn’t processed the fact that Judi had told me that Nicole hadn’t made it.

  I just kept saying, “Well, what hospital is she at?”

  And Judi kept answering, “No, you’re not listening, Kris. She’s gone.”

  Everything became a blur. We had just been with Nicole a few nights ago. And now she was dead? Everything just started spinning. The room was spinning. My mind was spinning. I was hysterically crying. Lisa, my assistant, didn’t know what to do with me. I was just inconsolable. Finally, I realized it wasn’t about me: Nicole’s mother was still on the phone.

  “Judi, should I come down there?”

  She told me not to, not yet. “Let me get some more information,” she said, because nobody had any information. Judi had just heard it herself, I guess, and had called me. Everybody was just waking up and getting this news, and I’m not sure what time Judi found out, but she was just so upset, obviously. She was just a mess.

  “Where are the kids?” I asked.

  She said they had been taken to the police station.

  “Stand by,” she told me.

  Eventually someone picked up Sydney and Justin and brought them to Judi’s house. I turned on the television, and all that was on was news about Nicole Brown Simpson being murdered in front of her house, on her steps on South Bundy. Hours later, it was revealed that she had been stabbed to death, and that her friend Ron Goldman, who was in front of the house with her, was dead too.

  I didn’t know Ron Goldman, but Nicole and I had a very close friend whose name was Ron Hardy, and at first I thought it was that Ron who was killed. So I was even more hysterical, because Ron Hardy was also one of my dear friends. However, I got ahold of my Ron and realized it was another Ron who had been with Nicole.

  That same morning, after I hung up the phone with Judi, I called the Chicago golf club where Bruce was playing in this tournament, not realizing that O.J. was also in Chicago playing in a golf tournament. Wow. To this day, I don’t even know for sure if they were playing in the same tournament. (Bruce doesn’t remember, either.)

  “I need to speak to Bruce Jenner. It’s an emergency. Please go get him,” I said.

  The director of the golf course found Bruce on the ninth hole and told him that his wife was on the phone, saying it was an emergency. Bruce’s first thought was that my grandmother had passed away. When Bruce said, “Hello?” I blurted, “You’ve got to come home. Nicole’s been murdered!!”

  Bruce had the golf course director drive him straight to the airport with a police escort. By then everyone had heard about the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson. When he arrived at the airline check-in counter and the attendants realized who he was (a friend of O.J.’s) and where he was going (back to the scene of the crime of the century), they bumped somebody out of a first-class seat to get Bruce home.

  What was interesting was that one of the airline gate agents told Bruce, “That’s really odd. We just did the same thing with O.J.”

  Meaning O.J. had also left Chicago and somebody had to be bumped off the plane to give him a seat.

  While Bruce was flying home, all hell was breaking loose. I had called my girlfriend Shelli Azoff and told her about Nicole.

  “Oh my God! Oh my God!” she said.

  Shelli called my ex-husband, Robert, all within minutes after Judi’s call to me. Robert called me, and he said something strange: “See, you better be nicer to me.” He was kidding. It was his way of joking, but it was just such a stupid comment. He was always a practical joker, but that went too far.

  “That’s not funny,” I said.

  Then I asked, “What do you think happened?”

  “I don’t know,” Robert replied.

  The next thing I knew, I was watching the news and seeing Robert Kardashian picking up O.J. Simpson from the airport. It already felt like years had passed since I had taken the kids to school that morning. It was so odd and surreal. I was in my kitchen, paralyzed, because I was watching O.J. arriving at his house on the television and Robert was driving the car. Robert was holding a Louis Vuitton bag, O.J.’s garment bag—the garment bag—and walking onto O.J.’s property. There to greet them was Howard Weitzman, our longtime friend and now O.J.’s criminal attorney. As this surreal scene was unfolding, all I could think was: What the fuck is going on here?

  I had a crack addict’s need for information, so I called Robert, asking what was going on and begging him to call me back. He eventually called me when he got home and said, “Everything’s fine. I’m going to help him through this.”

  I didn’t know what to think, didn’t know what to believe, didn’t know what to do. None of us could really believe what was happening. One night we went to bed, and life was pretty normal, and the next day we woke up and our entire universe had changed forever.

  O.J. and Nicole were two of my best friends. Now Nicole was gone and life as I knew it was over. I grew up very fast that day. It was life changing. Heartbreaking. Devastating. Tragic. Surreal. Emotional. Paralyzing. I couldn’t even find the energy to take care of my kids. Everyone was paralyzed—from Nicole’s parents to her family to all of our friends. Everybody was calling one another, saying, “What happened?” “Oh my God!” “What’s going on?”

  I was distraught and there was nowhere to go and nothing to do. No action to take. No way to help Nicole’s parents, or her children, or, most important, Nicole herself. It wasn’t like she was injured; I couldn’t go visit her at the hospital. I was going crazy with grief. Then I remembered the lasagna. A few days before the murder, on one of our walks, Nicole and I had been talking about lasagna. Nicole had told me that there was a way to make lasagna without cooking the noodles first. We both made our lasagna from scratch, and she said there was a way to make it where you would put the noodles in raw and then they would just cook themselves while the lasagna was cooking. I thought that was just crazy.

  “Nicole, that’s impossible, you can’t do that,” I said.

  But she insisted that it wasn’t just doable, it was great.

  I asked my assistant to go to the grocery store and get all the ingredients for lasagna. I would’ve gone to the market myself, but I knew I couldn’t hold it together.

  I could not get over the feelings of anguish and pain I had about the way Nicole died. I instinctively knew that in some way O.J. had something to do with her death, and I truly couldn’t believe she had been so betrayed by the person who she had once loved most. That O.J. would be so destructive and selfish and jealous that he would do that to her was just mind-blowing to me. All these thoughts were running through my mind: This can’t be true. This can’t be true.

  That’s when I started cooking lasagna, which would take three hours to make. In the kitchen I had the TV on, and the only thing on every channel across the country was this story about the Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman murders. I would listen to it over and over and over and over, just hanging on to every little piece of information that came across the screen. As I made the lasagna, I was just bawling over the stove, crying, crying, and crying, using the lasagna recipe Nicole had just told me how to make. The weekend before, we had thrown a barbecue at my house, and Nicole had brought a salad in this big, gorgeous Lucite salad bowl. I pulled out the salad bowl and made a salad in it in some sad little attempt to be closer to her.

  It’s silly how you behave when somebody passes away. You just don’t
know how you’re going to react. My reaction was to cook. So I made this big lasagna, Nicole’s way—and, as with everything Nicole had done, it was great. Soon my friends started to come over. Candace Garvey came over, and Cici came over. One by one, everybody showed up.

  Nicole’s parents were in Laguna, trying to figure what to do and to get the kids organized, and I couldn’t get ahold of A. C. Cowlings, one of Nicole and O.J.’s best friends and O.J.’s former teammate, who we had all known forever. I couldn’t find anybody. I felt like we had this big group of friends, but suddenly I was on this isolated island, and no one was talking to one another. It was almost as if immediately the line in the sand had been drawn, and it was Nicole’s side against O.J.’s side, but subliminally.

  Not so subliminally, I discovered that my ex-husband, Robert Kardashian, was on O.J.’s side.

  Very quietly, as the day and the phone calls and the news reports wore on, we realized she had been stabbed. All of a sudden my head was reeling, because being stabbed, repeatedly and angrily and brutally, is much different than being shot.

  The police came to my house and started asking us questions, because my voice and my messages were on Nicole’s answering machine, since we were supposed to have lunch at noon on the day after her murder. The police knew about our plans and wanted to question me immediately to find out what our meeting was all about. I couldn’t give them much information, because Nicole had left me a pretty cryptic message about why she had wanted to have lunch. She needed to talk to me and wanted it to be very private, just her and me, and it had to be out of her house. She had stressed that nobody could be around, and my house was full of people, and her house was full of people, which was why she wanted to meet at a restaurant where we could wear our sweats, be alone, and hopefully be anonymous.

  Later on the day after the murder, Nicole’s sister Denise called me.

  “It’s really important we talk,” she said. “I need to know what you know.”

  I wasn’t sure what she meant.

  “Nicole said she was going to see you yesterday,” she said.

  “No, we made it for lunch today because I couldn’t go yesterday,” I said.

  “Well, she had something really important to talk to you about,” she said. “She wanted to show you the pictures.”

  “What pictures?”

  “The pictures in her safety-deposit box.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Denise explained that Nicole had been beaten up by O.J., and she had been keeping this physical proof in the form of photographs and, it would turn out, other evidence, in which she had documented seventeen years of abuse. Nicole really wanted someone close to her to know what was going on, so that somebody—namely me—could be a witness. I could tell from my conversation with Denise that she had talked to Nicole about sharing the photographs with me. Apparently, Nicole thought this was a good idea. Denise had seen the pictures and she was hoping I had seen them too.

  “Oh my God! It’s too late! It’s too late!” I cried.

  The realization that she had wanted to confide in me like that hit so hard. Right before I was divorced, O.J. and Nicole had asked Robert and me to be Justin’s godparents. I knew that Nicole looked up to me a little bit; I felt she thought that I was somebody in her life who was stable, somebody who went to church and loved God. Somebody who she could depend on. Somebody with four kids who was a good mom. She apparently felt like she could finally tell me what was going on behind closed doors with her and O.J.

  And I let her down.

  The news from Denise devastated me. I felt that if Nicole and I had talked on the day when she wanted me to meet her, things might have been different. I’ll never be able to change what happened that night when she went to Sydney’s recital and then went to dinner with her family and then went home to be so brutally murdered. But at least I would have known the truth, and I would have learned it firsthand from her. Maybe I could have at least been more helpful to the prosecution during the trial.

  In the end, Nicole wasn’t able to tell anybody about the abuse she had suffered. She took those pictures of her battered and bruised face and neck and put them in that safety-deposit box for a reason, and thank God she did. They would turn out to be very helpful, especially in the civil trial against O.J.

  Still, it haunts me that she wasn’t able to tell me about the pictures—and that I wasn’t there to allow her to tell me. One thing I learned from this horrendous experience is something I would tell anybody going through something like this: Act on your feelings and share your thoughts rather than hold back, even if it means crossing a privacy line. When you feel like something is really wrong, it’s usually wrong. Follow your instincts; you might just change someone’s life.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Backstage at the Trial of the Century

  We were beginning to see the trial of the century take shape, with talk of evidence, attorneys, gossip, and innuendo. It was “a modern tragedy and drama of Shakespearean proportions being played out live on television,” as Tom Brokaw described the trial on NBC. Soon, everything was Nicole and O.J. all the time, 24/7. If I turned on the television, it was all I saw. If I stepped outside, there were packs of paparazzi in front of our house.

  The media figured out quickly who Nicole’s friends were. The most famous newscasters and journalists in the world were calling us for interviews, and people were sitting in front of our house, screaming out questions to us whenever we left. We were followed everywhere. It was a media frenzy.

  That time was incredibly horrible for multiple reasons, one of which was that my ex-husband was in the O.J. camp and I was in the Nicole camp, and my kids were stuck in the middle. My kids were old enough, by this point, to know what was going on. Kourtney was fifteen when Nicole was killed, Kim was fourteen, and Khloé was ten. They went from being teenagers to young adults overnight as a result of this murder and the ensuing trial. This was Uncle O.J. and Auntie Nicole. These were people they had known their entire lives. When Kourtney was born, O.J. came to the hospital the next morning to see her. O.J. was always part of our life. Now they were hearing horrible stories about Nicole and horrible stories about O.J., and they were devastated. I decided that I would have a long talk with Robert about doing what was best for the kids. He agreed.

  “We have to try to keep it together for the kids,” he said.

  I agreed, but soon things got difficult. As the two sides were clearly drawn in the sand with a big white line, it became tougher for me to see Robert’s point of view. It became tough for me to be nice to him. Because I couldn’t understand in a million years how Robert couldn’t see what I was seeing, how he didn’t seem to even bother to look at the evidence.

  Of course, O.J. Simpson as a murder suspect was tough for most people to grasp. It was just unbelievable to anybody that O.J. Simpson—everybody’s hero, the all-American athlete sprinting through the airport in the Hertz commercials, the wholesome hero selling Dingo boots, the smart sportscaster at all the football games and the Olympics, the superstar whom everybody had put up on this pedestal—could have committed capital murder.

  I knew him as a bigger-than-life, amazing personality. A guy who could have a conversation with anybody. Someone outgoing and effervescent and savvy and seductive and manipulative and charismatic. Someone who loved to talk and was so good with people and great at capturing their attention. Someone who could have said anything and you would believe him because he was so captivating. He had this incredible, magnetic personality. That’s why he was so good at being a spokesperson for different companies: people wanted to be around him. To quote a Newsweek story that was published just after the murders:

  Simpson was more than another storybook American success . . . Orenthal James Simpson was the prototype of the modern athlete as total package—a record-shattering running back with a luminous personal charm that attracted advertisers and film producers by the limousine-full. Before Magic, before Bo, before Michael and the
Shaq, there was The Juice. While other great players faded from view as memories of their competitive feats slipped into the past, O.J. Simpson sustained a lasting bond with his public . . . He was aging with an uncommon grace that seemed destined to place him in an elite circle of sports figures like Palmer and DiMaggio.

  People loved O.J., and, I would soon discover, people believed O.J.

  O.J. told Robert that he didn’t kill Nicole. O.J. told him that it was a horrible thing that had happened to Nicole. O.J. told Robert that he didn’t know who had killed Nicole, but that it for sure wasn’t him. Robert really wanted to believe the best of O.J. He was somebody he had known for most of his life.

  So Robert believed O.J.’s story that he was innocent.

  I didn’t believe O.J., not for a second.

  The morning after the murder, the police dusted Nicole’s house for prints and dissected and searched the front lawn, the back garage, and everywhere else, over and over again. The whole process was captured on television, because the news crews were parked across the street from Nicole’s town house, which faced the street. They captured every pathetic moment of the police gathering their evidence, which apparently didn’t amount to much.

  Watching all of this on television, I called up my dear friend and Nicole’s neighbor Ron Hardy and told him, “Ron, get over there quick.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  “I am watching TV, and the police are done with their investigation,” I said. “The police have taken down the yellow caution tape, and nobody has washed Nicole’s blood off of the steps.

  “I’m sitting here watching this, and I can’t take it anymore. Go over there and wash the blood off the steps!”

  Again, I would have done it myself. Again, the media still had us surrounded.

  “Okay, okay, I’m on my way,” said Ron.

  Today, I can’t believe I asked him to do this. I really wasn’t thinking clearly about his feelings, and I still feel badly about that. How could I have asked him to go wash someone’s blood off the stairs? I just blurted it out: “Go over there and wash the blood off the steps!”