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In leaving the remote village of Karakale, where the family originated, they were heeding an extraordinary warning made by an illiterate and sickly boy who had visions about the future. Efim Klubnikin predicted, ‘Those who believe in this [prophecy] will go to a far land, while the unbelievers will remain in place. Our people will go on a long journey over the great and deep waters.’
Although he made the prophecy first as an 11-year-old boy in the 1850s, he repeated his warning 50 years later, just in time for some 2,000 Armenians to leave before the nation’s holocaust. Kim’s forebears were among the lucky ones. Accounts testify that ‘every soul’ in Karakale was murdered. The village is now an entirely Muslim settlement, near the city of Kars, in the harsh, snow-covered environment of eastern Turkey.
In an extraordinary twist, Klubnikin urged his ‘believers’ not just to flee to the United States, but to settle specifically in Los Angeles. Kim’s great-grandparents sailed independently to a new life, and met and fell in love on the boat from Germany. They were among some of the last to flee, not setting sail until 1913.
At the time of the massacres, Armenia was still in Russia. The First Republic of Armenia was formed in 1918 and became a founding member of the Soviet Union four years later. Strictly speaking, the Kardashian ancestors were of Russian-Armenian stock and the family name was Kardashcoff, which doesn’t trip off the tongue as well as Kardashian, although they could still have called their famous boutique DASH.
By the end of the First World War, the Kardashian family was beginning to establish itself at the centre of the new Armenian community in Los Angeles. Many had settled in a poor, slum-like neighbourhood known as ‘The Flats’ in Boyle Heights, East LA. The area was a gateway to the city for newcomers, and one that they aspired to leave. The Kardashians were no exception.
The displacement of some of a nation’s finest men and women bred great spirit and a desire for achievement. Friendships forged in adverse circumstances would last a lifetime, binding successful Armenian families together. A fierce loyalty was the hallmark of the community.
The rise in fortunes of the Kardashians began with a rubbish collection business and moved on to hog-farming. From there, it was a natural progression to opening a slaughterhouse for meat processing, as an outlet for their livestock concern. The Great Western Meat Packing Company started up in 1933 in the city of Vernon, 5 miles south of downtown LA. It’s a very unprepossessing, almost exclusively industrial area, full of warehouses and plants – and slaughterhouses. Vernon is not a place where you would want to live.
Arthur Kardashian, Kim’s grandfather, was born in Los Angeles in 1918 and married her beautiful grandmother, Helen Arakelian, who was a year older, when he was 20. He took over the family business with his brother Bob when their father retired and built it into one of the most successful Southern Californian enterprises, with a turnover of more than $100 million.
Art and Helen became pillars of a new prosperous Armenian community, settling in the affluent suburb of Baldwin Hills, a million miles away from The Flats. Former California Senator Walter Karabian, a frequent guest, described their home as ‘beautiful’ and ‘upscale’. In the space of a generation, the Kardashians had risen from hard-working immigrants to millionaires. They possessed an ideology of success and how to achieve it that they would pass on to their children and grandchildren.
Kim adored her grandparents. Particularly, she was close to Helen, who died, aged 90, in 2008. ‘Nana was seriously so much fun,’ she said. ‘She was your typical Armenian grandmother and always cooking the best Armenian meals. Our favourite when we visited was a breakfast dish called beeshee, which is a pancake topped with lots of sugar.’ Her grandparents eventually retired to Indian Wells, near Palm Springs, where they originally had a holiday home. When Helen died, she and Art had been married for 70 years.
The biggest influence in Kim’s life was her beloved father, Robert Kardashian, who was born in Baldwin Hills in 1944. She observed, ‘My father always taught us never to forget where we came from. We grew up learning so much about our Armenian ancestors that we will teach to our own kids one day.’ She is clearly giving North a head start in that regard.
2
Tower of Strength
Robert Kardashian is a name that sounds as if it belongs to a very serious person. In reality, Bob, or Bobby as he was known, was funny and fun-seeking, a young man with a reputation as a practical joker, who never wanted to be tied to the family meat-packing business. It didn’t suit his style at all. He would leave that responsibility to his elder brother, Thomas, known as Tommy, who was four years his senior. An elder sister, Barbara, pursued a successful career as a dentist.
He followed them both to USC – the University of Southern California – in Los Angeles where he studied business administration from 1962 until 1966 and, like his brother, was the senior manager of the student American football team, the formidable USC Trojans. Both brothers were keen on sport, particularly football, and could play to a high, if not professional, standard.
Robert decided to continue his education at the University of San Diego, where he graduated in 1969 with a law degree. Tommy observed that his younger brother went to law school to avoid going into the family business. The elder Kardashian already had a Rolls-Royce and Robert was determined that he would have one too. On his return to Los Angeles, aged 25, he joined the firm of two USC law graduates, Richard Eamer and John Bedrosian. After two years, he became a named partner in Eamer, Bedrosian and Kardashian of Beverly Hills.
Bedrosian, a fellow ‘hye’ (the Armenian word for an Armenian), developed the firm’s interest in healthcare, while Robert found entertainment law more to his taste. One of his friends, George Mason, who founded the Armenian newspaper The California Courier, observed, ‘He’s not the kind of man who wants to be chained to a desk and take a briefcase full of work home with him every night.’
If Robert had stuck with his partners, he would have ended up considerably wealthier. They established National Medical Enterprises, which became one of the top healthcare providers in the US before it was sold in the 1990s. As a result, they moved into the realms of the super-rich.
Robert, though, enjoyed the world of celebrity more than the boardroom. He met the man who would change the future for him and his family on a tennis court in Beverly Hills one Sunday morning in the spring of 1970. A game of doubles was set up by the maître d’ at the Luau, which was a popular local place for young playboys on the prowl.
Robert and his brother Tommy were a formidable pairing, but they were concerned they had met their match in O. J. Simpson and Al Cowlings. These two had both won sporting scholarships to USC, but did not enrol there until after the Kardashians had left. Orenthal James Simpson, known as ‘The Juice’, was the most famous college footballer in the US and the winner of the prestigious Heisman Trophy as the most outstanding player of the year. In UK terms, it would be the equivalent of discovering that your weekend tennis game was against David Beckham.
O. J. was already a celebrity. Robert and Tommy were well known in the fashionable bars and restaurants of Hollywood, but they mixed more with professional people. O. J. would change that.
To their surprise, experience narrowly won the day for the Kardashian brothers. The four all became friends and the one-off game became a weekly ritual. Robert and O. J. got on particularly well, despite their very different backgrounds. O. J. had been brought up in a poor area of San Francisco, belonged to a street gang and served time in a youth detention centre. When he moved from college into the professional game, he became one of the most sought-after names in the celebrity world and, by 1971, was said to have earned enough money from endorsements to retire.
Robert recognised the selling potential of his new friend. O. J. would be perfect as the public face of some business ventures. Robert had the ideas and O. J. had the fame, and together they started several stores and restaurants.
They both still had a strong affinity with USC and one of their more successful enterprises was a fashion boutique on the campus called jag O. J. – a play on the popular student cocktail of orange juice and Jägermeister. It sold top-of-the-range jeans and casual wear and they made a tidy profit when they sold the shop after a couple of years.
One of Robert’s policies where his start-ups were concerned was not to hang on to a business for too long, whether it was successful or not. He formed a corporation with O. J. called Juice Inc. and opened a frozen yoghurt shop in Westwood Village, which they called Joy and, once again, sold after a couple of years.
The association with O. J. opened up a new world for Robert Kardashian and his brother. They moved into a house in Deep Canyon Drive, Beverly Hills, which they turned into a bachelor’s playground. O. J. was always around, helping to attract a constant stream of guests for tennis and pool parties. In the mid-seventies, he even stayed with the brothers for six months during an off-season as the star running back of the Buffalo Bills. There were three Rolls-Royces parked in the driveway then. Robert had finally acquired one – and he was still in his twenties. O. J. also rented space in Robert’s offices to oversee his growing business concerns away from football. Robert’s legal secretary, Cathy Ronda, became O. J.’s personal assistant. The connection between the two men was a very strong one.
Robert wanted to pursue interests in music, one of his great loves. His fortunes were transformed in 1973, when he set up a magazine, Radio & Records, with his brother Tommy and a new partner, Robert Wilson, who had many music contacts. They had spotted a gap in the market for a weekly trade publication for radio and the music industry in general. At least a third of the pages were charts and statistics. Record company executives could see what radio stations in Alabama or Iowa were playing that week. The idea was to turn it into something that was an essential read for anyone working in the world of music and, to that end, it succeeded brilliantly. It became widely known as R&R, a sister to the famous Billboard, and an industry bible.
Eventually, the success of this and some of the ventures with O. J. allowed Robert to reduce his law commitments until, in 1979, he was able to stop practising altogether. By that time, he had fallen in love.
When Robert George Kardashian met Kristen Mary Houghton, he was a lawyer, an entrepreneur and a very eligible bachelor living in Los Angeles. She was an 18-year-old girl from San Diego growing accustomed to the finer things in life, thanks to a relationship with a professional golfer 12 years her senior.
They bumped into each other at the renowned Del Mar Thoroughbred racetrack, which boasted the famous slogan ‘Where the Turf Meets the Surf’. In the summer months, Hollywood stars would mingle with the cream of moneyed society in a beautiful setting by the ocean. A consortium of famous actors from the golden age, including Gary Cooper and Oliver Hardy of Laurel and Hardy, had clubbed together to build the course. They were led by Bing Crosby, who was on the gate greeting racegoers when it opened in 1937.
The meeting in July was a little like Royal Ascot, in that the wealthy and well-connected would travel from San Diego, 20 miles south, or Los Angeles, 100 miles to the north, to be seen and to show off their new hats. It was definitely a place to interest an aspiring socialite.
According to Kris, Robert barrelled up to her outside the exclusive Turf Club and said that she was someone he knew, even though he kept getting her name wrong, insisting she was called Janet. She thought he bore a striking resemblance to the pop singer Tony Orlando, who memorably sang ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree’. With his big, heavy moustache and slick black disco hair, he might also have been mistaken for a seventies porn star. She was a shapely brunette with great sex appeal. She had oomph.
He persisted with his corny chat-up lines and asked for her phone number, which she refused to give him. He trailed after her for the rest of the day and even introduced her to his elder brother Tommy, who was with him that afternoon. Naturally, her reluctance to give him her number lit the blue touch paper of his enthusiasm. At the time, she thought he was too old, although, at 30, he was four months younger than her boyfriend.
In her autobiography, she refers to the golfer only as Anthony. That wasn’t his name, of course. Much later, he was revealed to be a forgotten, if handsome, face on the PGA tour called Cesar Sanudo, who was from a modest Mexican family. He had been a caddie before graduating to playing golf himself. He was on the tour for 14 years at a time when great names like Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer and Tom Watson ruled the fairways. The irrepressible ‘Super Mex’, Lee Trevino, was one of his best friends on tour.
Although Cesar won only one tournament, the 1970 Azalea Open Invitational at the Cape Fear Country Club in North Carolina, he was a popular figure, always at ease with ordinary golfers and film stars like Bob Hope and Clint Eastwood. He also played golf with presidents, including Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and George Bush, Sr.
After they started dating, when she was just 17, he gave Kris the perfect introduction to the world of celebrity, and took her to golf tournaments all over the world. His brother Carlos maintained that it was Cesar who provided Kris with the connections she was able to use throughout her life.
Cesar installed his teenage girlfriend in his townhouse near the ocean in Mission Beach, an area of San Diego rather similar to Malibu or Santa Monica. Kris moved in, with her best friend from high school, Debbie Mungle, for company, as Cesar spent so much time on the road at golf tournaments. It wasn’t Beverly Hills, but it was a step in the right direction.
Kris may not have enjoyed the privileged upbringing that plenty of money gave Robert Kardashian, but she was comfortably middle class. Her father, Robert Houghton, had a good job as an engineer with the now defunct aircraft company Convair in San Diego. Her grandparents ran a candle store called Candelabra in fashionable La Jolla and her mother, Mary Jo, was their part-time assistant. When she was old enough to be a help and not a hindrance, Kris worked in the back room too.
Kris paid tribute to her grandmother in her autobiography Kris Jenner … and All Things Kardashian. She ‘taught me the value of hard work’, she explained. That ethic is very much in keeping with the philosophy of Robert Kardashian and one that they passed on to their children, especially Kim.
Her childhood, however, was very different from Robert Kardashian’s. His parents were married for 70 years, but Kris’s parents split up when she was seven. It was a traumatic time for Kris and her four-year-old sister Karen. Mary Jo had to sell the family home and go out to work full time. Eventually, Kris’s mother met a reformed alcoholic called Harry Shannon, who gave up booze for life when they married. Kris loved Harry’s entrepreneurial spirit and thought he was a ‘great guy’.
Mary Jo believed in bringing up her daughters to follow strict household rules, but that didn’t stop her from agreeing to let her eldest go to Hawaii with Debbie to watch a golf tournament, which is where she met Cesar. Robert Kardashian didn’t know at first that, while he was pursuing her, Kris had accepted her boyfriend’s proposal of marriage.
Robert wasn’t the least put off by her initial refusal to give him her phone number. He promptly found it via a friend who worked for the telephone company and boldly rang her up. She explained to E! that despite her initial hesitation and annoyance at his perseverance, they eventually realised there was a spark between them.
The path of true love didn’t run smoothly. On their very first date to the movies, they went back to the house she shared with Cesar, who was away playing in a golf tournament – or so she thought. Just as they were getting down to things in the bedroom, the door burst open and in charged Cesar. He made sure that Robert didn’t hang around to chat. Kris maintains they were still in their clothes. Cesar’s brother verified that they were discovered in the bedroom. He alleges that his brother was suspicious of Kris and had deliberately missed the cut in the tournament so that he would be home early. If that were the case, then his suspicions were confirmed, and it marked the beginning of the end of their relationship.
As well as the problems in her love life, Kris had to deal with a family tragedy that year, 1975. Her father, with whom she had been enjoying a much better relationship in recent years, was killed in a road accident in Mexico at the age of 42. The evening before he planned to marry for the second time, he was driving his Porsche when he hit a truck head on. Kim never knew her maternal grandfather.
Two decades later, Star magazine in the US ran a story that Bob Houghton had been an alcoholic and had been drinking margaritas on the night of the crash. A girlfriend after his divorce, Leslie Johnson Leech, claimed, ‘I broke up with him because of his drinking.’
Kris and Cesar didn’t split immediately and technically remained engaged for a few more months. The end occurred with a counter allegation of cheating, which gave Kris the opportunity to leave her golfer once and for all. Cesar became a club professional in El Cajon, a suburb of San Diego, when he quit the main tour, but resumed tournament golf on the seniors’ circuit when he was over 50. He never spoke about Kris while he was alive, although his brother revealed some salacious details after his death in 2011. She has never responded, preferring her first serious lover to remain enigmatically as Anthony.
She didn’t waste any time and rushed into the arms of Robert, who was living the high life in his swanky new home in Deep Canyon Drive. She was trading up. He was clearly besotted with Kris and proposed within three weeks of her finally ditching Cesar. After she turned down his first proposal, Kris decided she needed her independence and wanted to see more of the world, so she trained as a flight attendant with American Airlines.
Robert responded to her rejection by dating Priscilla Presley, the ex-wife of ‘The King’, who was still alive and the biggest star in the world. He didn’t just phone her up and ask her out. Her best friend, Joan Esposito, was dating and would eventually marry his brother Tommy, so it wasn’t too surprising when Robert and Priscilla got together.
Joan was a former Miss Missouri who had been married to Joe Esposito, the larger-than-life road manager for Elvis. She forged a bond with Priscilla when they were both part of the mad Elvis world in the mid-sixties. Joanie, as she was known in those days, was a Vegas showgirl called Joan Roberts when she married Joe. As a couple, they went everywhere with Elvis and Priscilla. Joe was best man when the Presleys married at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas and Joanie was matron of honour. Both women settled in Los Angeles in the early seventies after their marriages ended.
The Kardashians were very popular. Susan Stafford, the original host of the game show Wheel of Fortune, described her friends Tommy and Joan as ‘decent and terrific people’. More interestingly, Susan had no idea that Robert Kardashian, fun and sociable, would eventually become famous in his own right. She observed, ‘The longer you are in Hollywood, you find yourself rubbing shoulders with people who become headline news.’ That would be particularly true of Kim Kardashian and her extraordinary family. Hollywood is indeed a very small world.
Fortunately for the history of the Kardashian clan, Robert’s dalliance with Priscilla was short-lived, although he did move into her house on Summit Drive for a short time. When it ended, Robert resumed his pursuit of the woman with whom he was clearly very much in love.
After completing her training, Kris was based in New York, but flew the route to Los Angeles every week. Robert, always dapper and expensively dressed, would meet her at LAX in his Rolls-Royce and whisk her back to the house, where they would play tennis or relax by the pool. He kept two Rollers in the garage now: one black and one white (and a convertible Mercedes for sunny days).
Robert could easily have continued living the life of the Hollywood playboy, but he was determined to marry Kris. He introduced her proudly to his close-knit family and friends, like O. J. Simpson and Al Cowlings.
Kris tells an amusing story of how she and Robert joined O. J. and the Bond actress Maud Adams on a trip to the Montreal Olympics in 1976. By now O. J. was even more famous, thanks to a blossoming movie career, with roles in The Klansman and the blockbuster The Towering Inferno. Everybody recognised him wherever he went, but nobody, including Kris, had a clue who Bruce Jenner was … until he won the decathlon gold medal.
Eventually Robert and Kris married at the Westwood United Methodist Church on Wilshire Boulevard in July 1978, five years after their encounter at the racetrack. It was a big, opulent wedding with a reception for 300 at the Bel-Air Country Club. Tommy was best man, O. J. was the principal usher and the massive Al Cowlings, known as A. C., was ring-bearer. Her younger sister Karen was the maid of honour.
Kris returned from an idyllic honeymoon in Europe, free from her job as an air hostess, happy and pregnant. She would later observe, ‘The Armenian women watched and counted the weeks until I gave birth to make sure I wasn’t pregnant before I got married.’
To the relief of the matrons, she wasn’t, and gave birth to her first child, Kourtney Mary, on 18 April 1979. She was 23. At 24, she had her second. She had conceived again on a skiing trip to the fashionable resort of Aspen, Colorado, with O. J. and his new beautiful blonde girlfriend, Nicole Brown.
Kimberly Noel Kardashian was born in Los Angeles on 21 October 1980.
It was time for the growing family of four to move to a house of their own. With perfect timing, in 1979, Robert pulled off his biggest business deal to date, when Radio & Records was sold for an estimated $12.5 million. He was thought to have made about $3 million on the deal – a sum worth $10.5 million in today’s money. Unsurprisingly, he stopped working as an attorney and relinquished his licence to practise law.
As a result of his windfall, he was able to buy a dream home four miles away. Tower Lane is a cul de sac that is so private it contains only three massive, luxurious mansions. 9920 Tower Lane would be the house where Kim and her siblings would enjoy an idyllic childhood. All three properties were behind massive iron gates to avoid the prying eyes of star-hungry sightseers.
Nobody knew who the Kardashians were at this point, of course, although they soon became renowned for throwing the best parties in the neighbourhood. The mansion had a large swimming pool, a tennis court, a Jacuzzi and a bar by the pool. To buy it in 2015 would cost something like $6 million. There was nothing a thousand other homes in the gilded nirvana of Beverly Hills didn’t enjoy. A housekeeper took care of the shopping and the washing, allowing Kim’s mother the time to go out to lunch with her friends. Uncle O. J. would stop by every week to play tennis, and there would always be a big barbecue for friends and family at weekends.
As there were so few houses in their little enclave, they decided to call theirs Tower Lane, the same name as the street, so Kim was brought up in Tower Lane, Tower Lane, which must have confused the postman. Anybody who found themselves wandering up Tower Lane would have been looking for a glimpse of either Madonna or Bruce Springsteen, who occupied the other houses during the 1980s. Bruce made it his permanent home, while Madonna was just renting for a short time. This is Los Angeles, however, so you would never walk, even to chat to a neighbour like the famous talk show host Jay Leno, who lived in the next road. The drive at the Kardashian house was almost too long to walk in any case.