Kris Jenner . . . And All Things Kardashian (32 page)

“What’s up?” he said.

“I just bought you a present,” I said, and gave him the big box.

He opened the box and saw all of the USC paraphernalia, and we all started crying and screaming and congratulating him. Wow. I knew Robert was smiling, just as we all were on that amazing day.

Rob went to USC, to the business school, and he became a straight-A student. I know that part of his motivation was that he
knew he needed to do his best for his dad. He wanted to make his dad proud, because they had talked about USC so many times. That was the mission; that was the goal. Mission accomplished. I am so proud of my son.

A
fter living on Cordova Drive in Calabasas for about eighteen months, I was still on a never-ending search for the perfect house for my family, bugging my real estate agent, Marc Shevin, on a daily basis. Even though we had a beautiful house on Cordova Drive, I was bound and determined to get back into Hidden Hills. Every day I called Marc. “Is anything for sale? Is anything for sale?” I would ask him. But there was nothing on the market.

Then, right after we shot the pilot for the reality show, Marc called me. “Kris, there’s a house that might be coming on the market,” he said. “I want to drive you by it.”

I jumped in the car and met him in front of Hidden Hills, where I hopped in his car and we drove through the gate. He started driving me down one particular street, and my heart started racing. “Oh my God . . .” I said to Marc. “Could we possibly be going to my favorite house?”

As we drove closer and closer, I could barely breathe.

“I don’t know,” said Marc. “Which one is your favorite house?”

There was one particular house that I used to drive by all the time in Hidden Hills. If you were going to write a fairy tale about a cottage in the woods, this house would be that cottage. It was set back from the street, a Cape Cod–style home with a long driveway over a stream with a big wraparound porch with rocking chairs and a porch swing. It had beautiful pink roses all over the place.

Sure enough, we pulled into the driveway of my fairy-tale house. I knew instantly: this was
the
house I had been searching for for so long. This was the perfect house for our crazy Hollywood
family, a modern-day Brady Bunch, in an adorable, Cape Cod, all-American dream. We had found that house for a reason, and I would discover that reason soon enough.

“Oh my God, oh my God!” I screamed “This is the house I have been walking and driving by. I love this house!”

“Well, the owner wants to sell it,” Marc said.

“I’ll take it!” I said.

“You haven’t even seen the inside yet.”

“I know, but I love this house. I
have
to have this house.”

I had Marc make an offer immediately. I didn’t even go inside of the house until after we’d made the offer. When I saw the interior, I loved the house even more. By that evening we had a signed contract. It was the craziest thing, but it was also the perfect thing. Once again, I had to tell Bruce. This time he was excited! He actually sat up with me all night with the negotiations back and forth. By midnight we were moving, this time back into my beloved Hidden Hills.

Yet again I had the feeling:
This is exactly where I’m supposed to be.
Finding my dream house after such a long and winding search was almost surreal. I realized it had all been part of a long journey on which I had to take every single step. Every move and everything we had gone through had led us to this incredible house, and even one step not taken—no matter how painful—might not have brought me here. I knew it was God who had taken me on a path and I had to put one step in front of the other—to live in house after house after house—for a very important reason.

This house was more than a house. This house was a stage. This was the house that everybody would fall in love with. This was a house
dying
for an audience. I never could have dreamed of how large that audience would become.

L
ife was so good. Kim was thriving in her styling and closet organization business, styling and organizing the closets of friends like Bernadette and Sugar Ray Leonard, and Nicole Richie. Kourtney and Khloé were completely absorbed in their stores. Bruce’s business was booming. And I had finally found what I felt at last was my dream house. Things began to fall into place in an incredible way. Thirty days after we unpacked and we were settling in, our dear friends Jerry and Deena Katz came over for dinner. Deena was the casting director for Bruce’s reality show,
I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here!
and she had been a good friend ever since. When she visited us in our new house in Hidden Hills, she had become the casting director for
Dancing with the Stars
.

Deena was sitting in my kitchen of my Cape Cod dream house, watching the chaos of our life swirl around her.

Kim rushed in and announced, “I’m spending the night.” Kourtney came over, changed into her bathing suit, and said, “Can I use your pool?” Our two little girls, Kendall and Kylie, were running around the house—all while I tried to make us dinner with the phone ringing off the wall. We were laughing and talking and I was booking speeches for Bruce even while all this was going on. Someone called for Kylie, and I pushed the intercom button and said, “Kylie, line one!”

Then: “Kim, line two!”

And: “Khloé, line three!”

When Kylie didn’t answer, I hit the intercom again. “Kylie, line one!” I said.

Then I went back to cooking dinner.

Afterward Deena stared at me in bewilderment. “Did you just intercom your ten-year-old?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said nonchalantly. There was nothing unusual about that to me. This was my life.

“You are hysterical,” said Deena. “This is the craziest house I have ever been in! You really need a reality show!”

“Oh, that’s funny,” I said. “Why are you the thirtieth person to say that to me this week?”

“Because it’s true,” she said. “Just being around your life and the people you hang out with and the way you guys all are together. Don’t you see how unique that is? You, your daughters and your son, and your husband, and the little girls . . .”

She stopped in mid-sentence.

“You know, I really think you should talk to Ryan Seacrest’s people,” Deena said. “He is over at E! producing shows, and this is right up his alley. He would love this.”

“I’m all ears,” I replied. “Get me a meeting.”

The next morning Deena called me and said, “Can you get over to Ryan’s office?”

“When?” I asked.

“Now!” she said.

I jumped in my car and drove right over.

Ryan Seacrest had an office over at E! in this ginormous, gorgeous, sort of modern brick building on Wilshire Boulevard. I drove down Wilshire and couldn’t believe I was going to talk to Ryan Seacrest about doing a reality show about our family. I pulled up and gave my car to the valet, then went up in the elevator to the lobby and this enormous area where you wait until someone comes down to get you. I sat in that room for five minutes or so, looking around at pictures of the iconic people who had done shows on E!, including Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie.

An assistant came down and took me to Eliot Goldberg’s office. Eliot was Ryan’s producing partner and the president of Ryan’s company. He asked me to tell him what our show might be like. I winged it the best I could, saying that it would be a blow-by-blow
look at our crazy, loving, fun, and incredibly close family. By the time Ryan walked in, it felt like I actually might be onto something.

I told them that it would be a show about Kourtney, Kimberly, Khloé, Kendall, Kylie, Bruce, Rob, and me. I was hoping to get some extended family members, too—including my mom and hopefully some of our friends.

“The family dynamic is what would make this a special show, and it is what we need to focus on,” I told Ryan and Eliot. There was so much media coverage swirling around Kim then, both positive and negative, that we knew that we had to act fast and take advantage of the moment. “Timing is everything in entertainment and pop culture,” I remember saying. “The Osbournes were so successful in their show,” I added, “and we think we could have the same kind of success. The girls would be the stars of the show, but all of us around the girls will be the ones that people can relate to. We will be able to broaden our demographic and our audience because, together, we span all kinds of age groups. We could cover ten to one hundred.”

They were nodding agreement, which I took as a good sign.

“This sounds like a project that could be really, really fun,” Ryan and Eliot told me.

Just goes to show: passion can be as powerful as preparation. Other than the informal pilot that I shot, I had never done anything remotely like a reality TV show before. But I knew that if we could come up with a format, we would have ourselves a TV show. And it would be a hit. I thought about the show in terms much bigger than just the girls. I thought this could definitely be a family show, because anytime you do a show with that many personalities, you are bound to have both the funny and the dramatic elements that can appeal to more people.

Ryan is one of those guys who get very excited and animated—he has great energy—and I could tell he “got” it. He had a vision.
When you are pitching a show to someone, you want them to get on your bandwagon and see the same thing you are seeing in your head. It’s organic. And Ryan and Eliot GOT it. They just did. It was one of those magical moments where everything clicked.

I was feeling so positive about the meeting, I pressed my luck a bit.

“I’d like to be an executive producer,” I said. “I need to have my hands in this. I need to have some control.”

“Let’s do it,” Ryan and Eliot said.

The next day, Ryan took the show idea to E!, since that was where his company had a production deal.

A few hours later I got the call from Ryan and Eliot.

“Congratulations!” they said. “We have a show.”

T
hat night, I invited the entire family for dinner in Hidden Hills. When everyone was at the dinner table, I stood up. “Family, you’re not going to believe this,” I said, “but we got our own reality show, and it’s going to be on E!.”

Kim and Khloé jumped up from their chairs, they were so happy.

Kourtney was a little quiet, because she was somewhat hesitant. She had just met her new boyfriend, Scott Disick, at that point. But she’s a team player, and she eventually said, “Okay, Mom, I’ll do it.”

“You don’t have to do it,” I reassured her. “Nobody
has
to do it, but this is what I really, really want to do.” Every single one of them said yes, they would do it.

Bruce was still sitting in his chair, dumbstruck.

“What?” he said. “We’re going to do
what
?!” He shook his head. “I am a motivational speaker. I am an Olympic athlete! I am going to do a reality show about my family?”

“You won’t regret it, honey, I promise you. You won’t regret it.”

Bruce is such a chill guy. He just shook his head.

“Oh, God,” he said, preparing for another roller-coaster ride. “You guys are crazy. Okay, why not? I’ll try it.”

The morning after we sold the show, I woke up with butterflies in my stomach.
Buckle up, it’s going to be a bumpy ride!
I thought to myself. I didn’t know what to expect. I also knew I was going back to work on a whole different level than I had been at the store. I knew I was going to be running everyone’s careers.

I was about to meld my roles as Mom and Manager: I was about to become a Momager.

Up until that point, Kim had been doing club appearances on her own, and she was very popular in that scene. The clubs were clamoring for her. She was also getting offers for deals with clothing manufacturers. The positive attention was thrilling for all of us. But I knew that once all the girls were on a television show, these opportunities were going to multiply exponentially, and quickly. That meant I needed to gear up for handling something very big, because I knew this was going to take 150 percent of my energy, effort, and creativity. Whatever it took, I wanted this venture to be a huge success.

First step? Meet our new producers at Bunim/Murray productions. Bunim/Murray was the production company partnering with Ryan and Eliot and E! to actually film and make our show.

The first person from Bunim/Murray who came walking into my house was Farnaz Farjam, our new show runner and producer, whose résumé included
The Simple Life
. She brought her entire crew, along with Jeff Jenkins and Jon Murray. Jon Murray is one of the owners and founders of Bunim/Murray, and Jeff Jenkins helps run the company.

I was so nervous meeting all of them that night. I made drinks and my famous guacamole and chips and we put out a little spread for all of them. I loved Farnaz the minute she walked into my
house, but I was a little taken aback: she was so young, beautiful, and sweet.

This is the girl who is going to run our show?
I thought. She would come to be one of my closest friends.

I didn’t really understand how important that first meeting was, but because of our chemistry and the connection we all felt that first night, it turned out to be a great thing. We had a great night: we talked about our lives, where we lived, our Hidden Hills dream house. They asked us our thoughts on what the show could be. It was a really special night. We felt like a team already.

Next, we went to the Bunim/Murray team’s offices—and their drawing boards—and started putting together the necessary camera crews and sound teams and pulling together the actual people who would make our show possible. They started talking to us about how the daily work would go: hair, makeup, microphones on every morning. They asked for one promise from us: no matter what happened, the cameras would continue rolling.

The first day of filming came a month later. Thirty days after we signed on with Ryan Seacrest and E!, a camera crew was at my house. On Day 1, we shot our show titles. Show titles are the iconic images that open every episode of a show. We stood in front of our house and there were cameras, booms, jibs, microphones, and 150 or so production people milling about—and all of us in full hair and makeup and dressed to the nines. We still have the same show title—the scenes that play before our theme song, a whimsical, whistled tune—the perfect reflection of the usually chaotic energy around us.