Kris Jenner . . . And All Things Kardashian (17 page)

Once, when we were walking together, Nicole told me about a woman who she had become attached to who was having domestic violence problems. She was troubled that this woman was living in a shelter and couldn’t afford things for her children. Nicole was trying to raise money for her and her kids. I thought,
How did she even hook up with this lady?
To this day that conversation haunts me, because on later reflection I realized that Nicole was trying to raise money for a woman she had clearly met in a domestic abuse shelter. I don’t know if Nicole left in the middle of the night one time and ended up at one of those places or what happened, but I would soon be thinking of this conversation often. It haunted me, because I thought,
Wow, she was in
that
much trouble
.

At the time, though, I just thought the women’s shelter was just another charity she was involved with, because as a celebrity wife you get asked to do things from time to time. I thought she was still
working with contacts that she had met when she was married to O.J., and now that they were separated, she was going to continue her charitable work, which I thought was really admirable.

It seemed that O.J. was in a calm place. Then he would return to the ugly place. Of course, I wouldn’t ever know when he would go to the ugly place until after the fact. After Nicole and my walks down San Vicente Boulevard, I would get into my car in front of her town house and say good-bye to her. I wouldn’t know what would happen in the next twenty-four hours. Some mornings she would be really agitated and really, really upset. Once she told me something that would be seared forever into my memory:

“He’s going to kill me,” she said. “And he’s going to get away with it.”

She said this on several occasions, always during one of our walks or runs along San Vicente Boulevard after we’d dropped off our kids at school. She went on to say that he just wouldn’t accept the fact that she no longer wanted to be with him. Wouldn’t accept that they were divorcing. Wouldn’t accept that she would have custody of their kids. Wouldn’t accept that Nicole had her own house and that the kids were happy. Sydney was really into dance and Justin was doing his thing in school. After their divorce in October 1992, Justin and Sydney were getting adjusted to a different life, without their father, away from his big house on Rockingham.

And because he wouldn’t accept it, Nicole was soon drawn back into O.J.’s orbit.

I
n the course of their separation and divorce in 1992, Nicole and O.J. started dating again. Not living together, just dating. They became more and more friendly, and before we knew it, they were kind of together. I was surprised, and because I didn’t know the full extent of things at that point, I was also excited.

O.J. and Nicole soon began entertaining as a couple again and having parties the way they had when we were all younger. For some reason, we were all obsessed with the Newlywed Game, and we liked to play the game at their parties. At one party I recall talking to O.J. about how he had become totally immersed in golf. All he could talk about was how his golf game was improving, who he played with, and which celebrity tournaments he was playing in. He was practically married to golf. That night we had dinner early. After dinner O.J. said, “I’ve got to go to bed early to get up at five o’clock and play a round of golf before I do anything else.”

We all went home early: Bruce and I back to our house, Nicole back to her town house. The next morning, when I talked to Nicole, she was a wreck. She was convinced that someone was looking in her windows and climbing through her bushes in the middle of the night. She was especially sure someone was looking in her kitchen window downstairs. Nicole was very careful about security. She never went in and out of her front door, because her town house was on a busy street. She always drove into her back alley and straight into her garage, which was attached to her house, and then went into the house from there. The only time she ever used the front entrance was when she and I went on our runs and walks. When we left, she would put her key under a pot, and then we would pick it up when we got back.

She was shaken up and certain that someone was spying on her. This went on for weeks. Then she became convinced that the person spying on her was either O.J. or someone sent by O.J., who was obsessed with what she was doing when he wasn’t with her. Nicole wasn’t the kind of person who was spooked by just anything. She was a very strong girl. She wasn’t typically scared of things. But this really concerned her.

Otherwise, she was doing well. She looked better than I had
ever seen her. She was in shape, she was healthy, she felt good. When she had been married to O.J., she used to bite her nails so much that her fingers would bleed. Now, after the divorce in October of 1992, she had long nails again. Her hair was thick. She was tanned and gorgeous. Being away from him was obviously much healthier for her. The stress of being with him had taken such a toll on her body, and now she was in such a better place.

After their brief stint of post-divorce dating, Nicole started pulling away from O.J. again. It just wasn’t working out. Then, before I knew it, it was March of 1994. I had been trying to have a baby with Bruce for the longest time, and I had just suffered a miscarriage, so I was really down and depressed. Nicole decided she was going to find a way to cheer me up.

“I’ve got the best idea,” Nicole told me on the phone one day. “Let’s take all the kids and go to Cabo.” She wanted to take Bruce, me, all of our kids, her sister Minnie, and our friend Faye Resnick to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, for Easter weekend.

And oh, yes, she was going to invite O.J. too.

“I’ll be in charge of renting a house down there,” she said. “And I’ll make sure we have the most incredible place ever. I’m going to take care of everything.”

Of course, that was usually my job: taking care of everything, especially on vacations. Now I wasn’t in the best place, and Nicole knew it. For her to take charge and rent a place for us really took a lot of weight off my shoulders.

“Great,” I said. “All I want is something on the water with a great sound system so we can have music and a place to have the kids and hang out.”

A few days later she called me back, all excited.

“Oh my God, I found the perfect place! I rented two houses together, right on the beach at Palmilla.”

Again, I was in the dark about her on-again, off-again relationship with O.J., a game that must have been a lot more devastating for her than I ever could have imagined. At the time I was happy to see Nicole with him, because it seemed to make her happy. If I had known then what I know now, of course I would have never encouraged her to allow herself to return to that kind of hell. But at that time, she seemed so full of life. It seemed they were always trying to make their relationship work.

So we all flew off to Mexico for a few days, which we had done so many times before. Nicole and O.J. went first. Then Bruce and I, along with Kourtney, Kimberly, Khloé, and Rob a day or two later. I remember arriving at Palmilla and being driven over to the house that Nicole had rented. Nicole was in our house, standing at the front door, so excited to see the look on my face when I saw the house she had rented for us. She was so proud of herself.

“Are you ready?!” she said.

“YES!” I screamed.

She opened the front door.

“I got your favorite music!” she said. All I could hear was Luther Vandross music blasting from inside. There was a chef who had just made fresh guacamole and chips and was serving margaritas, and Nicole was just beaming. I’ll never forget that smile on her face that said:
Look how great I did!
We were squealing like little schoolgirls. We were jumping up and down, so excited to be there, so excited to kick our heels up and just relax.

Nicole and O.J. were staying in the house next door with her sister Minnie and her guest, and also our friend Faye, her boyfriend, Christian, and her daughter, Francesca. In the house that she had rented for us, my kids scattered, looking for their bedrooms. It was Easter weekend, and I had gone out and bought Easter baskets for all the kids. I brought Easter plates, Easter napkins, and supplies to have a big Easter egg hunt on the beach.
I must have had four hundred plastic eggs filled with jelly beans. We were all so, so excited.

We were listening to the music, eating the chef’s delicious guacamole, and drinking our margaritas. The kids were running around in their bathing suits. I remember that Nicole brought the tape of the movie
Pretty Woman
with her, and every day we had
Pretty Woman
on the TV. Every time I walked into her house, she was back in her kids’ room, watching
Pretty Woman
over and over again.

My kids were still pretty young. Kourtney was thirteen, Kimberly was twelve, Khloé was ten, and Rob was seven. The girls were old enough to take care of themselves. They could all run up and down the beach and play with one another. Of course, they had all grown up with Nicole and O.J.’s kids and Faye’s daughter, Francesca, so everyone got along and had a great time playing together.

It was one of those glorious trips, for the most part. Then one night we all decided to go into town and have dinner at a local restaurant. We were having a drink at the bar before we sat down at the table. I was sitting next to O.J, and I remember thinking how fabulous everything was. Then, five seconds later, right after Nicole left to go to the bathroom, O.J. started majorly
flirting
with two girls at the bar.

It infuriated me that the second Nicole went to the ladies’ room, he was immediately putting the moves on the closest targets.

“Stop it!” I snapped.

That took him aback. “What?” he asked.

As far as I knew at that point, this wandering eye was O.J.’s only real problem. I didn’t really realize that abuse was going on at the time or how bad it was. Still, I wasn’t going to let him get away with flirting.

“Cut it out, O.J.,” I said, practically screaming. “What’s wrong
with you? We’re on vacation as a family, your kids are sitting right over here, Nicole’s in the bathroom, and you can’t handle being here for five seconds while she is gone without doing this?”

He knew I was really upset. After screaming at him, I walked away and joined Nicole in the ladies’ room. I just had to breathe for a minute because what O.J. had done was so obnoxious.

“What’s wrong, what’s wrong?” Bruce kept asking when I came back to the bar.

“I’ll tell you later,” I said.

That night I realized that Nicole and O.J.’s relationship was over, because O.J. just couldn’t help himself. He felt almost entitled to flirt. It was just so stupid, and I felt so bad for Nicole. I felt like he was never going to get past this, and she was just going to continue to be disappointed and upset over and over again. I knew O.J. wasn’t going to change. I knew she had to cut him off, to end it forever. It was a powerful night for me. I didn’t tell Nicole about O.J.’s blatant flirting, but I did tell my other girlfriends who were there.

After that night, the trip went dark. We did have a good time on Easter Sunday, when we had the big Easter egg hunt. For our kids, O.J. and Nicole were still, as they called them, Uncle O.J. and Aunt Nicole. We were that close. That vacation, as always, all of our kids had a ball. They watched movies, they went swimming, and they went into town and had dinners together. Sydney and Khloé were close friends, and Justin got along with everybody. It was like one big happy family.

Our Easter egg hunt was done in the backyard, around the swimming pool, and in the sand. Nicole had stuffed all the eggs with candy, and she and I prepared the whole scene and gathered Easter baskets for everyone. Bruce and O.J. hid all the Easter eggs. Once we hid all the eggs, we got the kids all together.

“All right, guys, one, two, three . . . go!”

It was so much fun. But on Monday morning, O.J. got up and announced that he was going to leave. He was going to go play in a golf tournament. He left by himself, leaving the rest of us to continue our vacation. A few days later, it was time for us to leave. On our way to the airport we stopped for a bite to eat. It was cool that day, and the little restaurant we went to was on a hill. Nicole got so cold that she took a tablecloth from the next table and, joking around, put it around her shoulders. I took a picture of her that way, smiling, standing in the wind with a tablecloth around her shoulders.

Later, somehow, that became the first picture of Nicole that was released to the media after she was murdered.

B
ack at home, Nicole turned quiet. There wasn’t much communication for a few days. Then she called and said, “Kris, it’s over. I just can’t do it anymore.”

We started taking our walks again, and she once again expressed her fears that somebody had been looking into her kitchen window, crawling through her bushes, and following her as she went about her day. She told me that she thought she was being stalked. And she believed it was O.J. She felt like he was angry that she no longer wanted to try and make things work between the two of them. Soon it became clear: O.J. was indeed stalking her. He was calling her and trying to find out where she was all the time.

A month after we got home from Cabo, Nicole gave me an album with pictures of all of us from the trip. It was the nicest thing, so sweet. She was always like that. She loved her photo albums, and she always kept track of everything.

Just after that, Nicole suddenly got really sick, which was unusual for her. She was always healthy and strong and athletic and beautiful, always took care of herself, always exercised. But she got
really, really sick. It turned out to be pneumonia. She was at home, stuck in bed with this horrible sickness. I would drop soup off at her house, but she just could not seem to get well for the longest time. She was sick for about six weeks. Finally she started to come out of it a little bit. By that time we hadn’t seen each other to hang out or anything for a while, so we talked mostly on the phone. Eventually, we were able to start our walks again.