Kris Jenner . . . And All Things Kardashian

by Jenner, Kris

  In the meantime, Bruce had been asked to star in a new prime-time reality TV special for ABC called I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here! It had been a huge hit in Europe and they now were bringing the TV show to the United States. Bruce and several other celebrities traveled to Australia to live in a jungle with absolutely no communication with the outside world. So off Bruce flew for three and a half weeks, leaving me all alone in Sherwood. Yippee!

  While Bruce was gone, my mom and my dad, Harry Shannon, came up to stay with me the first week because they knew I was new (and not very happy) in this new neighborhood, and they didn’t want to leave me alone for almost a month. Plus, I had never been away from Bruce for that long before. The first week was great, because I had my independence and I had some room to myself, living in the smaller quarters. After that, though, I got lonely, and I really missed him. I missed my kids, my friends, and my wonderful life in Hidden Hills. To make matters worse, Kendall and Kylie, who had zero friends in Sherwood, kept asking me a single question: “Mommy, when are we going home?”

  Pretty soon, I felt I was marooned in my own reality show: I’m a mother, friend, neighbor, I kept thinking, all alone in a town house in Sherwood. Get Me Out of Here!

  I found myself working out of my town house with nothing really going on, and I would go to lunch at the clubhouse just for something to do, thinking maybe I’d run into . . . somebody. I found myself having extensive conversations with the personable waiters. I had no one else to talk to. Within two weeks, I was crying myself to sleep.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Bruce said when he returned from the jungle.

  “I’ve got to get out of here,” I said. “I think we’ve made a big mistake.”

  It wasn’t like when I was unhappy in my marriage with Robert Kardashian years before. This time my marriage was wonderful. I had just landed in the wrong place. I never knew my environment could have such a powerful impact on my happiness until that moment. I came to realize that I had disrupted my mojo with that move. All of the people I loved were at least thirty minutes away. I didn’t have the same cleaners or the same drugstore. I had a new market. It was a whole different environment. I thought that, living in such a glorious place, none of that would matter. But it did. I liked being stuck in my old routine and my old ways. I suddenly realized how important that was to my life.

  My older kids were telling me, “Mom, what happened? You moved to Sherwood, and it’s just weird.” We were all really unhappy, and Kim was struggling in her marriage, and I felt like I needed to be closer to her. Hidden Hills, Hidden Hills, Hidden Hills. All I could think about was getting back to my old wonderful life in Hidden Hills. I had made a huge mistake and I needed to admit I was wrong. I had made a mess of our environment. My kids had left all of their friends behind, and we were driving an hour each day just to get to and from school. I felt so guilty and horrible that I had done this to my kids. Now it was up to me to fix it. I was determined to make everything right again.

  No big deal, right? Just move back? Not so easy. I went looking for houses again in Hidden Hills, but by then the home prices had skyrocketed. There was nothing for sale under $15 million that was big enough for the large family I now knew I still needed in my every day life. I needed my kids to be there every day, or at least have the space for it to be an option.

  In the end, I put our Sherwood Country Club townhome on the market and sold it as fast as possible. I was probably the only person in the history of real estate to lose money that year, because it was a really good year for real estate. I scrambled out of Sherwood with my tail between my legs and a lesson burned in my brain: Don’t ever discount your environment. Where you live, work, and play has a powerful effect on your happiness and productivity.

  Since we couldn’t find anything remotely affordable in Hidden Hills, I expanded my range to Calabasas. There was absolutely nothing. Then one day I suddenly got a call from my real estate broker, Marc Shevin. “Kris, there’s a house up off of Parkway Calabasas,” he said. “It’s in one of the new communities, and it’s beautiful. Somebody just fell out of escrow today. Do you want to look at it?”

  “I’m on my way.”

  I drove straight to the address, walked in the house, looked around, and as I walked out the front door, the broker said, “Well, what do you think?”

  I had seen enough crap by that point to know that this was the perfect house at the perfect time. I said, “I’ll take it.”

  Bruce was on the road and was coming home that night. By the time he got home, I had made an offer, gone back and forth with the seller, agreed on a price, and signed a contract. All I could think now was: Bruce is going to shit when he gets home, because I just bought a house. Without telling him! He didn’t even know what it looked like. What have I just done? I thought.

  If you’ve watched our show, you know Bruce is so easygoing, just a really chill guy. He’s so laid-back, he’s practically horizontal. But even the chillest guy in the world might not take this so well. He came home that night, and I waited until the next morning to tell him.

  “Well, you want to go see our new house?” I asked him.

  “What?” he asked.

  “I bought a house.”

  “What?!!” he said. Nothing shocks Bruce Jenner. I was a little worried. Then he shifted and said, “Okay,” with a raised eyebrow, surely thinking, What is she going to do next?

  Maybe he thought I was kidding. Then I showed him the house with the broker. I waited for his response. The house was empty, because the sellers had left already and moved to Seattle. It was beautiful and clean, and it didn’t need one thing done to it. Bruce had brought a video camera with him. I was watching him as we toured the house, trying to read his mood. Was he upset? Or just exhausted from being on the road? When we were done, Bruce turned the video camera on me.

  I said into the lens, “Well, what do you think?”

  He turned the camera back onto himself.

  “I love it!!” he said. He started jumping up and down and acting all silly and happy. It made me cry. I stood there and cried because he was so happy and I was so happy. That is when I knew I had married the absolute greatest guy in the world. I mean, who else would put up with all of my nonsense and move here—no, move there, do this, repack, move that table, plant those rosebushes? The guy would have done anything for me. He just wants everyone to be happy, and he knew moving from Sherwood into this new house would make me happy.

  Things got worse, however, before they got better.

  Around this time, my dad Harry’s health went into a rapid decline. The first signs had come when he and my mom came to stay with me in Sherwood while Bruce was away on I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here! My mom and I had gone shopping for Shannon & Co., the children’s store she owned in La Jolla. On our way home, we called Dad to tell him we would meet him at the Sherwood clubhouse for dinner, but he didn’t answer the house phone or his cell phone. We didn’t know where he was.

  I called one of the guys at the country club and asked him to go to my house and check on my dad. He called me from outside my house and said, “I’m ringing the doorbell and nobody is answering, but your dad’s car is in the driveway.”

  I started to panic. “Pound on the door,” I told him. “Walk around the back and look through the windows!”

  He could see Dad napping on the couch inside, and the poor guy had to pound on the door for a long time before he finally woke him up. Dad was totally disoriented when he came to the phone. “I was just napping,” he insisted, but it was unlike him to take naps in the afternoon, and I thought it was weird that it was so hard to wake him up. Red flags.

  As he had grown older, Harry had started having health issues, specifically with diabetes. He started to get more tired, and we had to start reminding him to eat so his blood sugar would not drop. One day that April, after my parents left my house, I don’t know what happened, but I got up and had the biggest urge to go see my dad. He had been calli
ng me regularly, saying how much he missed me, which was very powerful for me to hear. I just felt like I needed to go visit him.

  I remember thinking back, many, many, many years ago, to when my biological dad passed away in his terrible car accident. Right before he died, he had wanted to get together with me, and I had told him I was too busy. I always felt guilty about that because I never saw him again. I also remembered visiting my mom when she was undergoing chemotherapy for cancer and sitting in the parking lot with Ryan. I had so much guilt for not being there for my mom. This was my chance to make amends for that. My instincts were trying to tell me something: if you feel like you need to go visit your loved one, then go! My instincts would prove to be right.

  One day when Dad called, I decided to visit him immediately. I called Kourtney. “I’m going to drive to San Diego today just for the day to go see Papa. He’s not feeling great. Why don’t you go with me?”

  She said, “Great.”

  So Kourtney and I got in the car and we went down to La Jolla. We stopped by my mom’s store to visit her, and then we drove over to their house in Clairemont and saw my dad. We spent some time with him and we had a great visit with him, then drove back to Los Angeles.

  Not forty-eight hours after we left, my mom called me—I remember I was working at my house—and she said, “I don’t want you to be worried, but your dad was in an accident today.”

  My heart stopped.

  “He went to go see your sister and he must not have eaten lunch,” Mom continued. “He got off the freeway and was coming up to a red light and he kind of had a little blackout and bumped the car in front of him lightly. His air bags went off.”

  He was in his brand-new Mercedes, a very safe and heavy car. Still, the air bags inflated, so he was taken to the hospital for an examination. “We’re here at the hospital and he’s fine, and everything’s good. I’m going to take him home in about an hour,” my mom explained.

  I offered to drive down the next day, but she wouldn’t hear of it. “No, we’re fine,” she said. “He’s going to be great.”

  About an hour later, she called me to say, “We’re still at the hospital.” Apparently, when they tried to put my dad in the car, he was in excruciating chest pain. X-rays showed he had suffered a broken sternum in the accident.

  Eventually Harry went into the intensive care unit. Mom traveled back and forth from her home to the hospital in Palomar, and then later Scripps Hospital in La Jolla. After a few days and the next time I saw my dad, he was in bad shape. We all realized that he wasn’t going to get out of there anytime soon. Now he was having a hard time breathing and they were putting him in an oxygen tent. The news got worse: he was suffering from a staph infection that would literally eat him alive. We always thought he would come home from the hospital. He had been in a minor car accident; it wasn’t a big deal. It was the staph infection that was killing him, not the accident.

  While my dad was in the ICU, my mother was at his bedside twenty-four hours a day. She was faced with the decision to shut down her beloved children’s clothing store, Shannon & Co., which she had run for thirty-five years and which was a La Jolla institution, so she could devote all of her time to Dad.

  “I’m going to close the store for a while,” she said.

  I wouldn’t hear of that. It was her livelihood. She didn’t have any employees; it was just her. I said, “You can’t close your store. You just bought all your stuff for spring and Easter.” This was April, which was the beginning of their biggest season in La Jolla. I said, “I’ll tell you what: I’ll come down and run the store for you while Dad’s in the hospital, and you can go to the hospital every day. That’s that.”

  “I’ll take care of the kids,” said Bruce, ever supportive. “You take care of your mom.”

  So, for sixteen weeks, I drove down to La Jolla every week to run my mom’s store. I would spend four or five days in a row there, then come back home for a few hours, then return to La Jolla. I just kept going back and forth from my kids and my husband to my dad and my mom. Sometimes I would come home for five hours and then go back for five days; sometimes I would come home for a day and return to my mom’s for ten days. I just kept going back and forth while my dad and my mom were in this horrible limbo. My dad wasn’t getting any better.

  I knew I was losing my dad, and almost more difficult was knowing that my mom, the love of my life, was losing the love of her life. Our family was so close, and I was heartbroken for my mother. Mom and Harry had been married for four decades, and she was losing him. She was devastated and didn’t know what to do. I was grief-stricken, too, but I knew I had to rally to help my mom and dad.

  Every day for those sixteen weeks, I got up and I made Mom breakfast. We went to the hospital together, and I would say good morning to Dad, who was using an oxygen tent to help him breathe. Watching that staph infection take his life one day at a time was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. After leaving my mom at the hospital, I headed straight to the store, keeping any problems I had at the store to myself. I could tell that my mom was really grieving, so I never, ever wanted to complain or tell her I wanted to go home. I just wanted to be there for her and help get her through this.

  Dad was not the only person I worried about during that time period. Earlier that year, I had gone to see my son, Rob, play in a basketball game at the Buckley School. Robert Kardashian was there, too, and in the middle of the game Robert asked me, “Can I talk to you outside? It’s really important.” Bruce, my kids, and I all exchanged glances that showed we wondered what was up, but I followed him out of the gym and around the side of the building.

  Once we were outside, Robert started to cry. “I don’t know how to tell you this,” he said, “but I have cancer.”

  “What?!” I said. “What?!”

  “Yeah,” he said, “I have cancer. I’m sure it is going to be okay, but I am really scared.”

  I don’t remember him telling me what kind of cancer. All I knew was that he had said the C word, and I felt the whole world spin. We cried and cried, then pulled ourselves together and walked back inside. He said he was going to get a second opinion.

  The next week Robert called with the greatest news: “Guess what? I don’t have cancer! It’s a miracle. I am okay. It turned out to be a bad test.”

  A few months later, though, Robert called again. I was working in my mother’s store in La Jolla.

  “Are you sitting down?”

  I sat down. I felt a bombshell coming. Just in case, I got up, put up the CLOSED sign, and locked the door.

  “I do have cancer,” he said.

  He had just returned from a trip to Italy, and he literally couldn’t swallow. His throat had been bothering him for a while. He had seen a doctor again, and he was diagnosed with stage IV esophageal cancer. I stood up and started pacing around the store, which wasn’t easy, because it was a tiny place. I was walking around in tight circles, talking to him and trying to listen to what he was saying, but I really didn’t hear anything. The room was spinning and my ears were ringing. It was a very difficult conversation to have with someone I loved so much. Still, Robert really didn’t think cancer was going to beat him.

  “I’ll get treatment,” he said. He told me about a healer in China whom he was going to fly into L.A. He was so confident he could beat it. That night I told my mother about Robert’s cancer. The next day I got up in the morning and I said, “Mom, I have to go home and do something. I’ll be back tonight, but I just need to go home for the day.”

  I drove all the way back to Los Angeles, and I locked myself in my bedroom, and I wrote a letter to Robert. I told him everything I felt about him. I don’t know what possessed me to do that, but I felt like I needed to just talk to him in a way that was tangible, and that he could read in his own time. I needed to tell him how much he meant to me and how sorry I would always be for hurting him.

  July 19, 2003

  Dearest Robert,

  I know you are
going to think I am crazy, but for the longest time, probably for years, I have wanted to write you a letter expressing some of the feelings I have for you and for the family we have together. I always put off such a letter because for one it’s painful to think about, and very emotional. Secondly, it just never seemed like the right time, but something I told myself I must do before anything ever happens to me, and then it’s left unsaid. Well, when my dad got sick, I promised myself that when it was finally “over,” I would sit down and write the letter I have been wanting to write . . . And now, with the news last week of your illness, I just don’t want any more time to go by.

  Where do I possibly begin? I find myself in awe of how quickly so much time has gone by since we first met. Sometimes, when I think back, it seems like only yesterday that you were picking me up at the airport from one of my trips on American Airlines. And it seems like only yesterday my dad was walking me down the aisle at the Westwood United Methodist Church and I was so scared with all of those people watching . . . It seems like only yesterday that we were on Tower Lane with our babies. I owe you an awful lot for the wonderful and amazing life that you gave me. You allowed me to grow up with incredible privilege, in a beautiful home, in beautiful surroundings, with amazing friends, a loving husband and precious children. I remember being pregnant . . . and being pregnant . . . and being pregnant . . . and being pregnant. I have so many wonderful memories, and I am grateful to you for being such an incredible man. For loving me the way you have since I was seventeen years old.

  I very foolishly threw all of that away, and for that I will always be sorry. I was a very stupid and foolish girl. If I could turn back the hands of time, I would change it all. But I can’t. The only thing I will ever be able to do is apologize for the pain and misery I put you through. I am so sorry to have ever hurt you in any way. I hope you will one day understand it really had NOTHING to do with you, but obviously something inside went terribly wrong with me. I can’t explain my emotions or actions back then. I can’t explain how tortured I was inside. I just know it was wrong of me and I am truly sorry.