Kris Jenner . . . And All Things Kardashian

by Jenner, Kris

  He explained that he had a new girlfriend, to whom he would soon be married. I cried like a baby myself when he showed me his child. It was the sweetest thing. TJ and his wife have a couple of kids now. He’s living his dream of being a dad and a husband, and I still feel like he is one of my own children.

  Unfortunately, all of Kim’s boyfriends wouldn’t be so dear to my heart.

  In 1999, when we were in our new house in Hidden Hills, Kim, nineteen at that point, started going through a phase. At first, I wasn’t sure what was going on. She was acting a little funny, but she had been living with her dad, and I didn’t know if she was just getting ready to spread her wings or what. At that time she was working at a high-end clothing store in Encino called Body, and she was very independent. Kim has always had an amazing love of fashion, and when she figured out I wasn’t going to buy her everything she wanted at the drop of a hat, she took it upon herself to make it happen on her own. So she got the job at Body, where she shopped herself, and she started building a client list of people she would buy for and style. She was really good at it, and she started to earn commission on top of her salary. Everyone fell in love with Kim, and she began making a good living.

  About this same time, Kim started dating an older man. She started acting really funny, and one day I said to Kourtney, “Your sister is acting really suspicious and odd.”

  Shortly after that, Kim told me she wanted to get her own apartment.

  “You mean you don’t want to live with Daddy anymore?” I asked her.

  “No, I need my own place now,” she said.

  I took her to Bed Bath & Beyond and bought her all new things, and then I found out where she was living: Northridge. That was a really odd choice for her, way north of the city and even north of Hidden Hills.

  “Why would you want to live in Northridge?” I asked her. “You’re not going to school there. There’s no reason for you to live there.”

  “Oh, I just like it over there,” Kim answered, but I didn’t buy it. It got even odder. Another day, she pulled up to my house out of the blue in a brand-new Jaguar. How did she buy herself a brand-new car, and a Jaguar no less, without my help?

  I called Robert.

  “Did you buy Kim a new car?” I asked.

  “No, I didn’t buy her a car,” he said. “How did she get a car?”

  Kim suddenly had all these new things and she was acting really weird about them, never explaining where she was getting all the stuff. Kourtney and I became very suspicious. She started doing some research, fishing around on the Internet. We did know that her apparent boyfriend was friends with Justin Timberlake. Justin Timberlake had just celebrated his birthday in Las Vegas, and Kim had gone to the celebration.

  So Kourtney went onto an Internet search engine and typed in “Kim Kardashian,” and lo and behold, and to the utter shock of all of us, up pops a marriage certificate for Kim and the older man.

  Kim had gotten married!!

  For three months, she had been fooling all of us.

  We were all devastated. I immediately called Kim.

  “Kim, first of all, you better get your husband to give me a call,” I said. “Second, you have twenty-four hours to tell your dad before I do.”

  “You married my teenager,” I said when I finally spoke to Kim’s new husband. “You married my teenager!”

  In the end, there wasn’t anything I could do about the situation. Kim was nineteen and legally an adult. She could marry whomever she wanted. What was I going to do? I didn’t like it, but I realized I would have to learn to live with it.

  I made Kim tell her dad herself. Robert didn’t speak to her for two or three days afterward, but I knew I needed to take a different tack. I had come to the conclusion that if I wanted to remain close to my daughter and keep our family together, I had to be the one to set the tone. Everyone was going to take my lead. It was up to me to be a mature, calm, loving parent and wrap my arms around her, let her know how much I loved her and that she would always have my unconditional love. That is what being a mom means: unconditional, all of the time.

  I asked Kim to come over. One thing I know about Kim: she always wants me to be okay with her decisions. So she walked through the door, looking happy and hopeful. She wanted me to be on Team Kim, no matter what, and, of course, I always am. Kim is no quitter. What was done was done, and I knew she wasn’t one to admit defeat quickly.

  She explained that this was what she wanted for her life, but she wasn’t very convincing. She was very, very young. I thought to myself, Well, I was really young when I got married the first time, and maybe she does know what she wants, but she just doesn’t know how to articulate it. But the words coming out of her mouth just didn’t sound passionate enough to me to be believable. Still, I had to see it through with her, because I’m her mother. I had always told her that my job was to be there for her, through thick and thin. I knew she depended on me for that.

  What I didn’t realize at the time was that this was a real turning point in my relationship with Kim. She knew, from then on out, that we were family and it was the real deal. Our bond could never be broken.

  I was happy when Kim moved into a house close by. I helped her stock her kitchen and do all the shopping. Kim didn’t need much help; she was already divine when it came to design. I was so impressed by her innate domesticity. She was a nester, just like me. She loved making her house into a home, from the décor to the way she had everything organized. The closets were perfection, and I was so proud of Kim, because homemaking is not an easy thing to do.

  During this time, Kim also started working hard building a business on eBay, buying and selling clothing. She started to design clothes herself and worked as a stylist too. She eventually became a closet organizer, and she would go to people’s houses and completely restyle their closets and organize everything to make it beautiful.

  One Mother’s Day, Kim restyled my entire closet. That was something I will never forget. She knew by now that I needed my environment to be just so, because I am so much more productive when things are organized and perfect. Kim understands this perfectly because she’s exactly the same way. She came over and worked on my closet, and it made her happy to help me. It was so nice to see her happy, because I could tell that she was pretty miserable in her marriage. I really didn’t know where it was going to go, but I sensed the relationship wasn’t going to last much longer.

  Tensions came early. On the first Easter after Kim got married, I remember sitting in Bel Air Presbyterian Church. Our family took up the entire pew, with Robert Kardashian and Bruce sitting at one end of the pew and Kim and her husband at the other. I was smack dab in the middle. I looked down and waved at Robert and Bruce, then looked down and waved at Kim and her husband, and they seemed strangely distant and so far away from the rest of us. I wondered: How in the world are we going to get through this day? Still, I was there to support my daughter. Her decision to marry wasn’t popular, but I had to do my best to keep the peace.

  We all went back to the house and had a big Easter dinner and an Easter egg hunt. That was our family’s way of wrapping our arms around Kim and saying, “No matter what, we love you, and we’ll accept whatever you decide to do.”

  Meanwhile, Kourtney had come home from college newly single, and she started dating Taryll Jackson, TJ’s brother. Taryll is just as amazing and special as TJ. They are just really good kids. Kourtney and Taryll adored each other and made a really cute couple. I had known the Jacksons forever, and everybody felt safe with everyone else in that situation. We both had high-profile families. Kourtney and Taryll moved in together, and they became like a little family. They lived in Taryll’s house, and his brother, Taj, lived with them. Khloé wasn’t dating anyone at the time, and Rob lived with his dad.

  Life settled down a little for us during the last years of the 1990s. Bruce was still traveling around the world, giving motivational speeches, and our life still had a lot of moving parts. But it was an am
azing life. Those years were spent making huge pasta dinners at the Hidden Hills house and watching the boys play basketball outside nonstop. Bruce enjoyed his putting green. Life was idyllic.

  Until, as always, things began to change.

  It started with something I did. For Bruce’s fiftieth birthday on October 28, 1999, I wanted to make one of his lifelong dreams come true. A half hour north of our house in Hidden Hills was the most amazing, beautiful, exclusive golf course and tennis club called the Sherwood Country Club. Located outside of the community of Thousand Oaks, Sherwood also has an exclusive residential community where we had many friends living and loving the Sherwood lifestyle. Bruce often talked about golfing with friends there, which gave me an idea for a surprise: a membership to the Sherwood Country Club. “There’s no better country club than Sherwood,” Bruce kept telling me.

  When you want to become a member at Sherwood, you are supposed to attend a board meeting. Obviously, since it was a surprise, Bruce couldn’t go. Instead, I had to figure out a way to represent him at the meeting. So I came up with a great idea: I delivered a Wheaties box with Bruce on the front along with the little Bruce Jenner dolls that Hasbro had produced and little Bruce Jenner race cars from Ford. I wrote a letter to each board member as if it was from Bruce, saying, “Dear Board Member, I can’t be at the meeting today, but enjoy these Wheaties. I’ll be a fantastic member and I would appreciate your vote.”

  The next day, I got the call: “He’s accepted!”

  Mission accomplished.

  “Happy birthday, baby!” I exclaimed when we woke up on Bruce’s birthday.

  I told him that I was going to take him to a very special dinner that night and to be ready to leave at 5:00 p.m. sharp. After getting ready for dinner, we went to get into the car and Bruce hopped into the driver’s seat.

  “You’re not driving,” I said, and I whipped out a blindfold.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “This is your birthday surprise,” I said.

  Bruce got out of the driver’s seat. I put the blindfold on him and led him into the passenger’s seat. After driving around for ten or fifteen minutes to get him really disoriented, I was on my way to Sherwood Country Club. I had told the guard at the gate ahead of time not to ask any questions when I pulled up, because if Bruce heard the guard, he would surely know where we were. We drove through the gates and I pulled into the parking lot at the golf course. I took Bruce onto the green, where a group of about twenty of our closest friends was waiting in silence.

  When I got Bruce into position, I said, “Okay, honey, you can take your blindfold off now!”

  Bruce whipped off his blindfold and looked around in a state of shock. Then a huge grin spread across his face. He was so happy to be standing on that putting green. I just screamed, “You’re a member! You’re a member!” and started jumping up and down. I think I was as excited as he was. We immediately had cocktails on the veranda to celebrate Bruce’s birthday and his new membership at Sherwood before walking down the stairs to the club’s wine cellar for a gourmet birthday dinner.

  By this point, Kourtney was living with Taryll, Kim was married, Khloé wanted to move out right after her high school graduation, and Rob was living with his dad in Beverly Hills. Bruce and I started to feel like maybe The Haven was too much house for us. We had enjoyed the past eight years there, but now we had a nine-thousand-square-foot house and two babies, and we were wondering why we needed so much space. Bruce was dying to move near his precious Sherwood Country Club in Thousand Oaks, about twenty-nine miles from L.A.

  Sometimes you need to take a breath and evaluate a situation. But back then, I was all reflex and little analysis. We had just finished decorating our whole Hidden Hills house: new fireplaces, new bathrooms, and new floors. We had redecorated every single room with the help of our dear friend and talented designer, Nancy Whaley. We had finally gotten it perfect, down to the china, when Bruce and I started talking about moving out. It all made sense on some level. We had all these rooms we didn’t use. Even though family and friends were still coming over every night and I was still having big pasta dinners with salads and wine and huge board game parties with Monopoly and Scattergories, the truth was that we were only using half the house.

  So one day Bruce and I looked at each other and said, “You know what, maybe we’ll start thinking about moving on to something a little smaller.” We decided maybe it wasn’t that we needed something smaller but that we just wanted to be in a different place. We got antsy when we saw our friends moving to Sherwood Country Club and buying these big lots and building new homes. We thought: That’s exactly what we’re going to do. We’re going to buy a lot and we’re going to build in Sherwood.

  We went to Sherwood and started looking around. A friend of ours told us, “If you’re going to build a house at Sherwood, then you also need a townhome.”

  “We do?” I asked.

  “Yes, in case you have guests, so they can stay near the golf course, inside the gates.”

  A friend of ours called and told us about a townhome for sale at a great price, so we bought a townhome. We moved to Sherwood to live in the townhome while building our new house.

  I’ll never forget the feeling I had driving out the gates of Hidden Hills and on to a new chapter in my life that day we moved to Sherwood. It was such an exhilarating feeling. I was so proud that I had the nerve to start another chapter. I’ll never forget what I asked myself that day: At what point during your life do you stop evolving? Driving out the back gate of Hidden Hills toward our new home in Sherwood, I had my answer: Never.

  I’ll never stop evolving, never stop dreaming, never stop wanting and never stop following dreams. Even though sometimes my dreams haven’t always worked out exactly as I’d planned, I’ve always been determined to try something new. I’ve always believed that there’s a reason for everything, and it’s the journey that has gotten me to exactly where I am today. I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be because I know God has a plan for my life.

  But what was the dream? In this case, I was following my husband’s dream of moving to Sherwood. I thought, He’s done so much for me, and now it’s my turn to do things for him and to try it his way. That’s grown-up, right!? Not only was I trying it his way, but also I was moving to one of the most beautiful paradises on the planet.

  To drive through the gates of Sherwood is like entering heaven. It’s decadent; it’s gorgeous. When I drove through those gates, I could feel the sense of extravagance and power envelop me. When we moved in, Tiger Woods was hosting his annual golf tournament there, and anybody who was anybody in that neck of the woods was living in Sherwood Country Club.

  So we left our nine-thousand-square-foot dream house in Hidden Hills for a four-thousand-square-foot town house in Sherwood, which meant that half our stuff ended up in storage. I thought that was a good place to park it until we built our dream house. I had no idea when that would happen, but I was pretty confident that it would happen soon. We put only our favorite things in this beautiful townhome.

  The first two weeks we lived there, everyone came to see the new digs. All my friends came by. The kids were obviously there. Everyone said they loved Sherwood as they helped me unpack. Then, a few days after we moved in, it was Halloween—and things got a little scary, at least for me.

  As I’ve said repeatedly in this book, I love holidays, and the big holiday season begins every year at Halloween. In Hidden Hills, Halloween is the most fabulous event. There are kids running around trick-or-treating on foot or on their golf carts and everyone has parties. Every Halloween, I hosted a complete extravaganza. We all dressed up in costumes with a family theme. One year we were all baseball players; another year we were all the characters from 101 Dalmatians. I was Cruella De Vil in an actual Cruella costume lent to me by a friend who worked at Disney, and I dressed up all my kids as white fluffy Dalmatians. If you pressed their hands, the costume would bark. One year we dressed as characters
from The Wizard of Oz. I was Dorothy, Bruce was the Scarecrow, my dad was the Cowardly Lion, my mom was the Wicked Witch, and Kendall and Kylie were both Dorothy, too, just like me. We’ve done the same thing for our holiday cards year after year. Everyone in matching and coordinating outfits. We do a full-on photo shoot and have the best time making yet another memory out of it.

  Halloween in Sherwood on the year we moved in was . . . dismal. Nothing happened! Absolutely no one was even on the streets! Our older kids scattered and did their own thing in L.A., and Bruce took the little girls out trick-or-treating. Sherwood had its annual fabulous Halloween party the week before, and Kendall and Kylie had a ball at the party. But on Halloween night, it just wasn’t the same.

  After we had lived there about a week, Robert Kardashian drove up to see our new house. He parked in front of the townhome and came inside.

  “You live on a cul-de-sac” was the first thing he said, matter-of-factly.

  “Yeah, I know, isn’t it great?” I said.

  “Not really,” he said. “There’s no parking.”

  He was right. We lived in a place where there was no parking on the street. There were actually signs that stated NO PARKING. If you didn’t have your car in your driveway or in your garage, you were shit out of luck. Well, we had a lot of kids with cars at that point. It was not the best configuration for visitors. Or for guests at a party. Or for friends to drop by.

  “This is really pretty,” he said, looking around. “Really, really nice . . . and a little small for you guys.”

  “Hey, don’t rub it in!” I said. “We’re building a house!”

  He listened to my grand plans, skeptically, while I was wondering, What have you gotten yourself into now? But Robert knew me well enough to know that I was very stubborn and determined to make it work. He teased me, but he didn’t push.

  Two weeks later, I was getting really lonely. Sherwood was farther north than Hidden Hills, and nobody wanted to visit me way out there. My friends wouldn’t come to visit. They all had excuses. Nobody had the time to drive out to Sherwood. To show you how bad it was: Soon after we moved in, I had bunion surgery on my toe. I was flat on my back and unable to even go downstairs for two weeks, and not one person even came to see me. I knew then: I was officially living in the boondocks.