Kris Jenner . . . And All Things Kardashian (15 page)

“What did you have in mind?” I asked.

“‘Jenner’ sounds good,” he said.

That’s when I knew: we were going to be together forever. I had already put my kids through this horrendous divorce. Whoever was going to come into my life to fill that role would have to
be a very special guy, and I just knew: Bruce Jenner was it. Bruce loved them—and me—from the start.

Bruce and I decided to move to a house in Malibu, which was a nice transition for me at the time. It got me out of Beverly Hills, where I was uncomfortable anyway, with all my girlfriends still seemingly mad at me and where I was still ashamed of what I’d done. I was so happy to start a new life with Bruce, and I needed a fresh start. It felt good and clean to move to Malibu.

We leased a beautiful house right on Malibu Road and the Pacific Coast Highway. We signed the papers. I remember being quiet that afternoon on the way home as the enormity of the new life I was launching for me and my kids began to sink in. Bruce and I had dinner plans at Saddle Peak Lodge in the Santa Monica Mountains, right off Canyon Road in Malibu, with Candace and Steve and our girlfriend Mary Frann. We were driving back to Tower Lane to change clothes.

“You’re awfully quiet,” Bruce said.

“I know,” I said. “I’m taking my kids on this journey with me and it scares me a little bit. We’ve leased this house together. We’re not married, I’ve got four kids. It’s a little bit weird. I love you, but this feels a little crazy. I’ve got a big responsibility to my kids.”

That night, February 10, 1991, at dinner at the Saddle Peak Lodge high up in the hills of the Malibu Canyon, Bruce ordered a bottle of champagne while waiting for our friends to arrive. I thought that was a little strange, since Bruce always drank beer. After the champagne was poured, Bruce suddenly got down on one knee in the middle of the Saddle Peak Lodge. Everyone was watching us; I could feel the weight of a hundred stares.

Bruce looked at me as if I were the only one in the room, even though he must have known everyone was staring at us too. “Kris, will you marry me?”

“Are you serious?!” I said.

“Yes, of course I am serious. I have already told your ex-husband I am going to marry you. I want to marry you. Let’s get married. Let’s just do it. Why not? What are we waiting for?”

“Oh my God,” I said, and I started to cry. “This is crazy. Yes, okay, yes.”

All of a sudden, we were engaged.

Now we had the job of telling everybody we were going to get married, and it was really exciting. I remember our friends got to the table—Steve and Candace and Mary—and we shouted, “We’re engaged!” And they were like, “Oh my God!”

We went home that night and told the kids. Bruce’s four kids were having a sleepover with my four kids, and we walked into the living room and there were eight kids there waiting for us. We told them the news, and they were all happy—even Kourtney—and jumped up and down, yelling and screaming, hugging one another.

We started to tell my parents and his family, and our friends, and except for a few people who were really Robert’s closest friends (and those still unhappy with me), everybody was really, really excited. I was on top of the world. The commitment alone felt good. It was so crazy how things fell into place in such a short amount of time. I was still so young, and I had four small children, and this was crazy and perfect all at the time same.

The next day, Bruce had to play in a golf tournament in Los Angeles. He did a lot of the celebrity tournaments. It was so much fun to be there and to tell everybody, including the reporters at the tournament. The press got excited, and it was a really fun day. That afternoon we flew up to Bruce’s house in Lake Tahoe in his small private plane, which Bruce piloted himself. I was in the copilot’s seat, and I had the headset on. I still felt horrible for what I had done to Robert, but happy that I was able to make peace with him on some level. All I really cared about anymore was that Robert thought I was a good mom. After all, I was still the mother of his
children. I had told him a million times how sorry I was for what I’d done, and in my prayers I apologized to God and to my family. Now I had done all I could do. Now I had to start my life over.

Up in the air, I looked out the window at the clouds and I remember thinking,
Thank you, God. Thank you for taking me through that storm of craziness and having me come out the other side as a whole, happy girl without too much damage.

B
ruce and I were engaged five months after we met. Our wedding came two months after that. So from “Hello” to “I do” was exactly seven months. Quick, yes, but as Bruce told me on the night of our engagement, what were we waiting for?

Our dear friends Terry Semel, then chairman and CEO of Warner Bros., and Jane, his wife, hosted our wedding in the backyard of their Bel Air home on April 21, 1991. We had the most amazing ceremony. Both of our families were there and it was the most glorious setting. Jane had gorgeous white tables out on her veranda with beautiful white flowers and a white berry cake from Sweet Lady Jane.

Everybody was thrilled, especially our kids. All eight of them lined up and performed this little skit, which they had written themselves, and I couldn’t believe they all got along so well and could pull that off without a single one of them getting shy. Even my little boy, Rob, was really good in it, and he was now four. They were all so cute and sweet. The girls had on white dresses and party shoes, and the boys had suits.

Everybody we loved was there. It was the perfect day. All that had happened in the preceding years had really stressed out my mom and my stepdad and my grandmother. They were such a huge part of my life, and I’m sure they, like everyone else, thought I had gone more than a little crazy. It’s hard to tell your adult daughter
what to do. (Believe me, I know that now.) And I can only imagine the pain that they were all in after I basically torpedoed my marriage and my family in the process. I think my parents were so happy that I was able to put it all back together and that my kids felt good again.

After the wedding, Kourtney had a really hard time with Bruce for the first five years or so. She didn’t want anybody to take the place of her father. She felt this anger toward Bruce and was a little confused. She even dressed in black during those days whenever Bruce was around. But once she realized that Bruce wasn’t going anywhere and that he really did love her and all of us, Kourtney came around. Bruce is smart: he didn’t come in as this authoritative-crazy dad figure. He just came in and showed them that he would be there because he loved me. Bruce’s idea of raising kids is like a day at summer camp. He took the time to play with each of my kids and teach them things, especially sports—tennis, golf, water and snow skiing—and sometimes help them in school. Like the time he suggested that Kim do her school research project on
him
.

“Who are
you
?” she asked.

“Let me tell you,” said Bruce. Kim wrote her paper on Bruce. Of course her female teachers had a crush on Bruce, and of course Kim got an A.

Eventually my kids came to love Bruce as much as I did. Rob was so young, he didn’t know the difference. Khloé was young as well when Bruce and I were married. As for Bruce’s kids, their dad had been single for ten years, so it wasn’t like he was in the middle of any nonsense by the time we got married. They were happy to see him happy.

We settled into married life in Malibu, and Robert moved back into the big house on Tower Lane. We shared visitation 50 percent each, and pretty soon Robert was coming to dinner with me, Bruce, and the kids once a week. Robert wanted to be with the kids as
much as he could be. He loved seeing them and he was the greatest dad. “It’s the upside of divorce,” I would tell people. I had the kids every other weekend, and Bruce and I didn’t have any kids of our own. So every other weekend we had all this time to ourselves.

Our first job, though, was making a living. We went to work rebuilding Bruce’s career, with me as his manager by default. Suddenly, I went from being a housewife to having a job. It wasn’t just any job, either: I had to buckle down and figure out a way to make a life for Bruce and me. I had walked away from any substantial money from Robert, and although Bruce was doing motivational speeches and product endorsements, I could see that his work wasn’t going to be enough to keep our life afloat.

The best symbol of where Bruce’s career was at that time was in his sock drawer.

That’s where he kept the gold medal he had won for the decathlon in the 1976 Bicentennial Olympic Games. Granted, there’s only so much juice you can pump out of one Olympic career. Two great days in July 1976 were not going to get us through the rest of our lives. But there was far more to Bruce’s talent and success than those two days in 1976. He was an ordinary kid with dyslexia who worked his ass off and became someone to look up to after winning the Olympics.

I knew we had to tell his story to a world that had forgotten it. We took Bruce’s gold medal out of his sock drawer and dusted it off and framed it in his office, and that became our motivation. We wanted to be champions again.

“We’re going to take the moment that you shined brightest in your life and make sure no one will forget it,” I told Bruce. “There should be Bruce Jenner clothing, Bruce Jenner exercise products, Bruce Jenner endorsement deals, Bruce Jenner vitamin supplements,” I said. “We’ll build this house one speech and one endorsement at a time.”

Bruce didn’t have a press kit, a business card, or even a piece of stationery with his name on it. He didn’t really have an office or a proper business system set up to support what should have been a thriving enterprise. Along the way, somebody missed the boat on an opportunity that could have had legs and longevity and given Bruce a life of more stability.

He was living paycheck to paycheck from his personal appearances and speeches. I had to roll up my sleeves and figure out a better way. I had been around businesspeople my whole life, from my mother and grandmother in their candle shops to Robert Kardashian, and I had ideas about how to improve Bruce’s business. I hired a young woman who had once worked as Robert Kardashian’s assistant, Lisa Frias, and together we set up an office that was very quickly rockin’ and rollin’. We brought in a new computer system to replace Bruce’s twenty-year-old typewriter and hired a production company to assemble a highlight reel of some of his greatest moments as an athlete, speaker, and product endorser. Soon we had a press kit and gorgeous business cards. We put the iconic images of Bruce crossing the finish line in a flash of red, white, and blue at the 1976 Olympic Games on everything. We knew Bruce was good at what he did; we just had to make sure everyone else realized that too.

I sent his press kit to every speakers’ bureau in the United States. It was a huge undertaking, but with my little team of elves, including Lisa, my girlfriend Stephanie Schiller, and a few others, we made Bruce a superstar again. Bruce really knows how to motivate people. He really has a story to tell. He’s great at meet and greets. Everybody loves him. We just had to get him out there in front of the world again. That became my primary focus, eighteen hours a day. Lo and behold, it worked. The speech requests started rolling in, the business changed, we upped his fees, and we got him back on the road again.

At one of Bruce’s speeches, David Heil, who worked for a men’s clothing company called David Rickey & Company, came up to us and said, “I would like to treat your husband to a whole new wardrobe.” He had seen Bruce in a really bad tuxedo and decided we needed help. “Thank you, God!” I said.

David came over to the house and, sure enough, gave Bruce a whole new wardrobe. He spent hours designing a new look for Bruce, complete with really amazing ties that set his new suits apart from anything I had ever seen before. Soon, Bruce looked the part of the superstar that he truly was. He was an icon, an Olympic champion, a motivational speaker, a dad, and now he was a husband—my husband—and we needed to get to work and get him going again. One day at a time, we did.

We did a lot of traveling. Bruce was working for companies like Coca-Cola and Visa and all these major organizations that required him to travel. We would do corporate entertaining for Coca-Cola and travel to different parts of the world: the Olympics in Barcelona, Spain, or Lillehammer, Norway. We just ran around the world doing different things for different companies and having a blast. Soon, we had solid endorsement deals with different companies. We were on our way as a couple, both in love and in business.

A
fter living in Malibu for a year and a half, I decided it required too much driving. My girls were going to Marymount, the private all-girls school right on Sunset Boulevard, and it was a little silly to live so far away. So, in the middle of 1992, we leased a house in Beverly Hills. That way the kids were closer to their dad in Beverly Hills, and the whole transition and custody switches were a lot easier. When we were gone, Robert would take care of the kids. He was dating an amazing woman, Denice Halicki, whom I’m sure he
was in love with. She was really, really cool, but especially amazing to my kids.

Our business continued to thrive. We started doing infomercials. We got a call from Jack Kirby, who ran an infomercial company. “How would you like Bruce to do an infomercial about sunglasses?” he asked.

Bruce flew to Catalina and did that infomercial for Eagle Eyes, and it ended up running on television for ten years. Next, Bruce and I did an infomercial for the Super Step, a home aerobic step program. This one was different because we were going to shoot the infomercial together—and I had never been on television before.

It was the first time we had ever been asked to do a project together, and I really wanted to do a good job. I stood next to Bruce in my little turquoise spandex shorts and a matching turquoise sports bra. Bruce was cool and collected as always, the seasoned pro; I was shaking like a leaf, so nervous I could barely get my name out.

“Hi, everybody, I’m Bruce Jenner,” he said.