Kris Jenner . . . And All Things Kardashian (28 page)

The next day, I got the call: “He’s accepted!”

Mission accomplished.

“Happy birthday, baby!” I exclaimed when we woke up on Bruce’s birthday.

I told him that I was going to take him to a very special dinner that night and to be ready to leave at 5:00 p.m. sharp. After getting ready for dinner, we went to get into the car and Bruce hopped into the driver’s seat.

“You’re not driving,” I said, and I whipped out a blindfold.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“This is your birthday surprise,” I said.

Bruce got out of the driver’s seat. I put the blindfold on him and led him into the passenger’s seat. After driving around for ten or fifteen minutes to get him really disoriented, I was on my way to Sherwood Country Club. I had told the guard at the gate ahead of time not to ask any questions when I pulled up, because if Bruce heard the guard, he would surely know where we were. We
drove through the gates and I pulled into the parking lot at the golf course. I took Bruce onto the green, where a group of about twenty of our closest friends was waiting in silence.

When I got Bruce into position, I said, “Okay, honey, you can take your blindfold off now!”

Bruce whipped off his blindfold and looked around in a state of shock. Then a huge grin spread across his face. He was so happy to be standing on that putting green. I just screamed, “You’re a member! You’re a member!” and started jumping up and down. I think I was as excited as he was. We immediately had cocktails on the veranda to celebrate Bruce’s birthday and his new membership at Sherwood before walking down the stairs to the club’s wine cellar for a gourmet birthday dinner.

B
y this point, Kourtney was living with Taryll, Kim was married, Khloé wanted to move out right after her high school graduation, and Rob was living with his dad in Beverly Hills. Bruce and I started to feel like maybe The Haven was too much house for us. We had enjoyed the past eight years there, but now we had a nine-thousand-square-foot house and two babies, and we were wondering why we needed so much space. Bruce was dying to move near his precious Sherwood Country Club in Thousand Oaks, about twenty-nine miles from L.A.

Sometimes you need to take a breath and evaluate a situation. But back then, I was all reflex and little analysis. We had just finished decorating our whole Hidden Hills house: new fireplaces, new bathrooms, and new floors. We had redecorated every single room with the help of our dear friend and talented designer, Nancy Whaley. We had finally gotten it perfect, down to the china, when Bruce and I started talking about moving out. It all made sense on some level. We had all these rooms we didn’t use. Even though
family and friends were still coming over every night and I was still having big pasta dinners with salads and wine and huge board game parties with Monopoly and Scattergories, the truth was that we were only using half the house.

So one day Bruce and I looked at each other and said, “You know what, maybe we’ll start thinking about moving on to something a little smaller.” We decided maybe it wasn’t that we needed something smaller but that we just wanted to be in a different place. We got antsy when we saw our friends moving to Sherwood Country Club and buying these big lots and building new homes. We thought:
That’s exactly what we’re going to do. We’re going to buy a lot and we’re going to build in Sherwood.

We went to Sherwood and started looking around. A friend of ours told us, “If you’re going to build a house at Sherwood, then you also need a townhome.”

“We do?” I asked.

“Yes, in case you have guests, so they can stay near the golf course, inside the gates.”

A friend of ours called and told us about a townhome for sale at a great price, so we bought a townhome. We moved to Sherwood to live in the townhome while building our new house.

I’ll never forget the feeling I had driving out the gates of Hidden Hills and on to a new chapter in my life that day we moved to Sherwood. It was such an exhilarating feeling. I was so proud that I had the nerve to start another chapter. I’ll never forget what I asked myself that day:
At what point during your life do you stop evolving?
Driving out the back gate of Hidden Hills toward our new home in Sherwood, I had my answer:
Never.

I’ll never stop evolving, never stop dreaming, never stop wanting and never stop following dreams. Even though sometimes my dreams haven’t always worked out exactly as I’d planned, I’ve always
been determined to try something new. I’ve always believed that there’s a reason for everything, and it’s the journey that has gotten me to exactly where I am today. I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be because I know God has a plan for my life.

But what was the dream? In this case, I was following my husband’s dream of moving to Sherwood. I thought,
He’s done so much for me, and now it’s my turn to do things for him and to try it his way. That’s grown-up, right!?
Not only was I trying it his way, but also I was moving to one of the most beautiful paradises on the planet.

To drive through the gates of Sherwood is like entering heaven. It’s decadent; it’s gorgeous. When I drove through those gates, I could feel the sense of extravagance and power envelop me. When we moved in, Tiger Woods was hosting his annual golf tournament there, and anybody who was anybody in that neck of the woods was living in Sherwood Country Club.

So we left our nine-thousand-square-foot dream house in Hidden Hills for a four-thousand-square-foot town house in Sherwood, which meant that half our stuff ended up in storage. I thought that was a good place to park it until we built our dream house. I had no idea when that would happen, but I was pretty confident that it would happen soon. We put only our favorite things in this beautiful townhome.

The first two weeks we lived there, everyone came to see the new digs. All my friends came by. The kids were obviously there. Everyone said they loved Sherwood as they helped me unpack. Then, a few days after we moved in, it was Halloween—and things got a little scary, at least for me.

As I’ve said repeatedly in this book, I love holidays, and the big holiday season begins every year at Halloween. In Hidden Hills, Halloween is the most fabulous event. There are kids running
around trick-or-treating on foot or on their golf carts and everyone has parties. Every Halloween, I hosted a complete extravaganza. We all dressed up in costumes with a family theme. One year we were all baseball players; another year we were all the characters from
101 Dalmatians
. I was Cruella De Vil in an actual Cruella costume lent to me by a friend who worked at Disney, and I dressed up all my kids as white fluffy Dalmatians. If you pressed their hands, the costume would bark. One year we dressed as characters from
The Wizard of Oz
. I was Dorothy, Bruce was the Scarecrow, my dad was the Cowardly Lion, my mom was the Wicked Witch, and Kendall and Kylie were both Dorothy, too, just like me. We’ve done the same thing for our holiday cards year after year. Everyone in matching and coordinating outfits. We do a full-on photo shoot and have the best time making yet another memory out of it.

Halloween in Sherwood on the year we moved in was . . .
dismal.
Nothing happened! Absolutely no one was even on the streets! Our older kids scattered and did their own thing in L.A., and Bruce took the little girls out trick-or-treating. Sherwood had its annual fabulous Halloween party the week before, and Kendall and Kylie had a ball at the party. But on Halloween night, it just wasn’t the same.

After we had lived there about a week, Robert Kardashian drove up to see our new house. He parked in front of the townhome and came inside.

“You live on a cul-de-sac” was the first thing he said, matter-of-factly.

“Yeah, I know, isn’t it great?” I said.

“Not really,” he said. “There’s no parking.”

He was right. We lived in a place where there was no parking on the street. There were actually signs that stated
NO PARKING
. If you didn’t have your car in your driveway or in your garage, you were shit out of luck. Well, we had a lot of kids with cars at that
point. It was not the best configuration for visitors. Or for guests at a party. Or for friends to drop by.

“This is really pretty,” he said, looking around. “Really, really nice . . . and a little small for you guys.”

“Hey, don’t rub it in!” I said. “We’re building a house!”

He listened to my grand plans, skeptically, while I was wondering,
What have you gotten yourself into now?
But Robert knew me well enough to know that I was very stubborn and determined to make it work. He teased me, but he didn’t push.

Two weeks later, I was getting really lonely. Sherwood was farther north than Hidden Hills, and nobody wanted to visit me way out there. My friends wouldn’t come to visit. They all had excuses. Nobody had the time to drive out to Sherwood. To show you how bad it was: Soon after we moved in, I had bunion surgery on my toe. I was flat on my back and unable to even go downstairs for two weeks, and not one person even came to see me. I knew then: I was officially living in the boondocks.

In the meantime, Bruce had been asked to star in a new prime-time reality TV special for ABC called
I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here!
It had been a huge hit in Europe and they now were bringing the TV show to the United States. Bruce and several other celebrities traveled to Australia to live in a jungle with absolutely no communication with the outside world. So off Bruce flew for three and a half weeks, leaving me all alone in Sherwood.
Yippee!

While Bruce was gone, my mom and my dad, Harry Shannon, came up to stay with me the first week because they knew I was new (and not very happy) in this new neighborhood, and they didn’t want to leave me alone for almost a month. Plus, I had never been away from Bruce for that long before. The first week was great, because I had my independence and I had some room to myself, living in the smaller quarters. After that, though, I got lonely, and I really missed him. I missed my kids, my friends, and my wonderful
life in Hidden Hills. To make matters worse, Kendall and Kylie, who had zero friends in Sherwood, kept asking me a single question: “Mommy, when are we going home?”

Pretty soon, I felt I was marooned in my own reality show:
I’m a mother, friend, neighbor,
I kept thinking,
all alone in a town house in Sherwood. Get Me Out of Here!

I found myself working out of my town house with nothing really going on, and I would go to lunch at the clubhouse just for something to do, thinking maybe I’d run into . . .
somebody
. I found myself having extensive conversations with the personable waiters. I had no one else to talk to. Within two weeks, I was crying myself to sleep.

“What’s wrong with you?” Bruce said when he returned from the jungle.

“I’ve got to get out of here,” I said. “I think we’ve made a big mistake.”

It wasn’t like when I was unhappy in my marriage with Robert Kardashian years before. This time my marriage was wonderful. I had just landed in the wrong place. I never knew my environment could have such a powerful impact on my happiness until that moment. I came to realize that I had disrupted my mojo with that move. All of the people I loved were at least thirty minutes away. I didn’t have the same cleaners or the same drugstore. I had a new market. It was a whole different environment. I thought that, living in such a glorious place, none of that would matter. But it did. I liked being stuck in my old routine and my old ways. I suddenly realized how important that was to my life.

My older kids were telling me, “Mom, what happened? You moved to Sherwood, and it’s just weird.” We were all really unhappy, and Kim was struggling in her marriage, and I felt like I needed to be closer to her. Hidden Hills, Hidden Hills, Hidden Hills. All I could think about was getting back to my old wonderful
life in Hidden Hills. I had made a huge mistake and I needed to admit I was wrong. I had made a mess of our environment. My kids had left all of their friends behind, and we were driving an hour each day just to get to and from school. I felt so guilty and horrible that I had done this to my kids. Now it was up to me to fix it. I was determined to make everything right again.

No big deal, right? Just move back? Not so easy. I went looking for houses again in Hidden Hills, but by then the home prices had skyrocketed. There was nothing for sale under $15 million that was big enough for the large family I now knew I still needed in my every day life. I needed my kids to be there every day, or at least have the space for it to be an option.

In the end, I put our Sherwood Country Club townhome on the market and sold it as fast as possible. I was probably the only person in the history of real estate to lose money that year, because it was a really good year for real estate. I scrambled out of Sherwood with my tail between my legs and a lesson burned in my brain: Don’t ever discount your environment. Where you live, work, and play has a powerful effect on your happiness and productivity.

Since we couldn’t find anything remotely affordable in Hidden Hills, I expanded my range to Calabasas. There was absolutely nothing. Then one day I suddenly got a call from my real estate broker, Marc Shevin. “Kris, there’s a house up off of Parkway Calabasas,” he said. “It’s in one of the new communities, and it’s beautiful. Somebody just fell out of escrow today. Do you want to look at it?”

“I’m on my way.”

I drove straight to the address, walked in the house, looked around, and as I walked out the front door, the broker said, “Well, what do you think?”

I had seen enough crap by that point to know that this was the perfect house at the perfect time. I said, “I’ll take it.”

Bruce was on the road and was coming home that night. By the time he got home, I had made an offer, gone back and forth with the seller, agreed on a price, and signed a contract. All I could think now was:
Bruce is going to shit when he gets home,
because I just bought a house. Without telling him! He didn’t even know what it looked like.
What have I just done?
I thought.