Kris Jenner . . . And All Things Kardashian (18 page)

Suddenly it was summer. My kids were in camp, Nicole’s daughter, Sydney, was in a dance camp and Justin was doing summer activities too. Bruce and I were still trying really hard to get pregnant again, but we were having trouble for some reason. Nicole was always so supportive of our unending and thus far unsuccessful attempts to have a child.

“Come over to my house, we’re going for a walk,” she would say. “We’re going to get you in shape because you’re going to get pregnant!”

One day she came over and brought me a huge box of clothes.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“My maternity clothes from when I had Justin,” she said, explaining that our friend Allen Schwartz from ABS had made all of these maternity dresses for her. “I want you to have them, because I
know
you’re going to get pregnant. I know you’re not pregnant yet, but you are going to get pregnant and you are going to wear these dresses.”

Late one night Nicole called around ten. Bruce and I were already in bed.

“We’ve got a problem,” she said. “Faye is getting really bad with the drugs, and I want to have an intervention.”

She wanted to do it that night. Immediately. That was Nicole. No time to wait when it came to helping someone out.

“Get your ass out of bed and get over here,” she said.

“Okay, great, I’ll bring the coffee,” said Bruce.

We all met at Faye’s boyfriend Christian’s house. And while we waited for Faye to arrive, Nicole asked me, “Do you have my key?”

“What do you mean, do I have your key?” I asked.

She was missing the key she always left under the pot during our early morning walks.

“Somebody’s taken my key,” she said. “I think it was O.J.”

“Let’s go through your bag,” I said, and we took every last thing out of her purse and rummaged through it, looking for her missing key. Nicole was in a panic while we were waiting for Faye. We couldn’t find that damned key anywhere. When Faye walked through the door to find all of her friends waiting in an intervention, she was, of course, shocked, then scared. We wanted her to go to rehab. After Nicole promised Faye that she and I would take turns visiting her every day so she wouldn’t be alone during visiting hours, Faye finally agreed to go. Her boyfriend, Christian, immediately took her to rehab and we all went home. The next couple of days Nicole and I called each other and met at the rehab facility to visit Faye, just as we had promised.

One day Nicole said she needed to switch visiting days. Sydney’s dance recital was that weekend and, of course, she would never skip that. I said certainly we could switch days, and we changed the schedule. There was something else, Nicole said.

“I really have something important to talk to you about,” she said.

“Okay,” I said.

“Can you come over today after rehab?”

“Sure.”

At the rehab facility, Faye and I decided to call Nicole. I couldn’t attend Sydney’s recital because Bruce had to fly to
Chicago and I had to take care of the kids that night. Faye and I wanted to say hi and tell Sydney good luck at the recital.

“I have to go to Sydney’s rehearsal in two hours,” Nicole told me. “Can you get over here before then? I need to talk to you. It’s really important.”

I told Nicole that I had to go to the market and knew I couldn’t get there in time.

“That’s okay,” said Nicole. “Can you meet me tomorrow for lunch? I really have to talk to you about something really, really important.”

“Of course,” I said, and she said, “Great.”

Then Nicole told Faye that she was sorry she couldn’t be with her that day, due to the recital, but she was looking forward to seeing her the very next day.

After I left the rehab facility I went to the market, because all of the going back and forth to the rehab facility was taking a toll on our family life. We needed groceries. But Nicole needed me to come over right then and there, and I couldn’t. She said she needed a couple of hours to talk to me, and I just couldn’t pull it together that day. That decision would haunt me forever.

It was June 12, 1994, and it would be the last time I would ever speak to Nicole.

I
woke up early the morning after Sydney’s dance recital. Bruce had gone to Chicago to play in a celebrity golf tournament, so I took the kids to school down the hill. On my way to the school, I called Nicole and got her answering machine.

“Where are you?” I asked. “See you at noon! Can’t wait. Bye!”

When I got back to the house at around 8:30, my assistant, Lisa, came in and told me that Judi, Nicole’s mother, was on the phone. Bruce and I had been planning a trip and we were using Judi as our
travel agent, and I thought she was calling about flights or some other travel detail.

“Can you tell her I’ll call her right back?” I asked.

I heard Lisa tell Judi I would call her right back, but then Lisa walked right back into the kitchen, her face ashen.

“I think you want to take this call,” she said.

“Why?” I asked.

“Kris, get on the damn phone!” Lisa exclaimed. “It’s an emergency!”

Oh, shit.
I picked up the phone.

“Hello?”

Judi was hysterical.

“Nicole’s been shot,” she said. “Nicole’s been
shot
!”

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.