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Kim Kardashian. Sean Smith
Читать онлайн.Название Kim Kardashian
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780008104504
Автор произведения Sean Smith
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство HarperCollins
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.
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