Kris Jenner . . . And All Things Kardashian (27 page)

K
ourtney and Kimberly both got new cars as soon as they got their driver’s licenses, and soon it was Khloé’s turn. Initially, Robert just gave Khloé one of his cars, and definitely not a Rolls. It was an old jalopy. Khloé felt like the odd sister out: her sisters had both received brand-new cars, but Khloé got Robert’s hand-me-downs. I finally talked Robert into giving Khloé a new car for Christmas that year. It was so cute. On Christmas morning, Robert came over to our house and snuck in the back door before the girls woke up. We all gave her the keys to her brand-new Mercedes together. She was thrilled.

As each child took turns living with Robert, I would buy each of them all new bedding and redo the bedroom in Robert’s house so that they felt at home in her or his own space. When Kourtney moved in with Robert, we decorated her new bedroom at his house in all new Ralph Lauren sheets and décor. When she moved out to go to college, I redecorated the same room to fit Kim’s tastes and style. Khloé didn’t go that route and stayed with me, but Rob decided to move in with his dad when he was fifteen. He was going through some tough years in school, along with puberty, and he needed his dad. So each of them had that time there with him.

My oldest girls, Kourtney and Kimberly, grew up fast and began to date very seriously very early. Back in 1992, when Kim was around thirteen, she began dating TJ Jackson, Tito Jackson’s son
and Michael Jackson’s nephew. At that time we were still living in our Beverly Hills rental. I knew all the Jackson boys—Michael’s nephews—because Kourtney and Kimberly had started going to the Buckley School with them in preschool. The girls made most of their lifelong friends at the Buckley School, and they had known the Jacksons forever. So when Kim started dating TJ, I was thrilled, because he was so great and our families really liked each other. TJ became one of my own and I adored him.

Tragically, right after we lost Nicole is the summer of 1994, TJ’s mom, Delores “Dee Dee” Jackson, was also brutally murdered. Dee Dee was an amazing person and such a good mother. The Jackson kids all loved their mother so much. After the murder, TJ moved in with us briefly and healed a bit at our house. He and I really bonded. We all just kind of held each other close, as all of us were healing from various things. We became like one big family.

For Kim’s fourteenth birthday, Michael Jackson invited all of us up to the Neverland Ranch for her birthday party. Kim invited all her friends, and I rented a Mercedes bus. Bruce and I came with all the kids, as well as TJ, Taryll, and Taj Jackson, and we all spent the night at Neverland. We had the time of our lives. I can only imagine how much fun Kim had and what a memory it was for her, because it was one of the most magical places I had ever been—and I was an adult!

When you walked into Neverland, you felt like you were in a very magical place. The house, amusement park, carnival rides, flowers, and the petting zoo . . . all were too astonishing to believe.

We never saw Michael. I was told he was there that night, but he never came out to say hello. However, we couldn’t miss seeing his generosity and the love and the passion that he put into his home. The people who worked there were so accommodating and sweet, and the whole ranch had such good energy. We watched
movies, we ate candy, we rode go-karts, we had a water balloon fight in the fort, we went horseback riding, and we played with the monkeys.

Kim and TJ dated for several years, and TJ would come along on family ski vacations with us. We all became extremely close and felt like TJ was part of our family. Eventually, though, Kim and TJ’s relationship ended. We were devastated when they told us. I felt like
I
broke up with him. I was in my bathroom when the two of them told me, and I just became inconsolable. I felt so bad for TJ, because he had to try to make
me
feel better about their breakup as I was bawling in my bathroom.

“It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay,” TJ kept repeating.

I think that, somehow, everything that I had been through in the previous couple of years just kind of manifested in the breakup of Kim and TJ. He was her first true love. They went to the prom together and had so many memories. We love TJ. To this day, I feel like he’s one of my kids.

Several years after they broke up, he called me out of the blue. “Hi, Kris, where are you?” he asked me.

“Running an errand,” I said.

“Can you come home? I have a surprise for you.”

“You do?!”

“Yeah, but you have to come home right now.”

So I rushed home to the house in Hidden Hills.

“Where’s TJ?” I asked Bruce.

“He’s in Khloé’s room,” he answered. I walked into Khloé’s room, and TJ was standing there, hiding something behind him.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

He stepped to the side, and this tiny toddler was sitting on the floor.

“Who’s that?” I asked.

“This is my baby,” he said. “I just wanted you to meet him.”

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.

U
nfortunately, 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 amazing 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.”