Kris Jenner . . . And All Things Kardashian (9 page)

The pregnancy was an absolute joy. I was spending all my days with Kourtney, who was of course still an infant. On October 21, 1980, our second daughter was born. Naming her was easy, because I had a girlfriend named Kimberly, and she was so beautiful. I loved how “Kourtney” and “Kimberly” sounded together. And, of course, I loved the letter
K
.

From the moment she was born, Kimberly Kardashian was
absolutely breathtakingly beautiful. In the first weeks that she was home from the hospital, I remember walking downstairs to find Robert and Kimberly, who was lying in her bassinet. Robert had her dressed in Baby Dior with a pink satin bonnet. I looked at her face and thought,
She is so beautiful!
She was just stunning from the beginning and had the most adorable personality—curious, sunny, playful,
adorable
—and she was a gift from heaven for Kourtney, who thought Kimberly was born solely as a friend for her. It was love at first sight between Kourtney and Kimberly—just as it was love at first sight with Kimberly for all of us.

N
ow I was twenty-four and had two babies, and I had no idea it would be so hard. Everyone told me that life would change with a second baby. Let me tell you: change it did! I tell new moms now that one is like one, but two is like twenty. I was overwhelmed, but life went on. My mom and dad came up to visit as much as possible, and Robert’s parents, Helen and Arthur, and his extended family were a huge part of our lives.

The definition of happiness for me is spending time with family, and we did so much of it back then. Robert’s aunt Dorothy and her husband, Jack—who we always called Auntie Dorothy and Uncle Jack—would come and take Kimberly and Kourtney to Douglas Park in Santa Monica while everyone else made dinner. Robert’s cousin Cici, who was by now one of my closest friends and confidantes, was always the first one in the kitchen. We had this huge Armenian family, and everyone helped with the cooking and the kids. Those years were fabulous.

From 1980 to 1983, I was all about being the perfect wife and mother: raising babies, forming traditions, and settling into my life’s dream. I found so much joy in creating routines—especially holidays and special occasions—and keeping my house the way I loved
it. I loved potting plants. I loved creating the schedules. I loved everything about the life I had with Robert and our two children.

Every morning, after Robert went to work, I would have the whole house to myself. We had amazing people working for us, and I would make sure the house was picture-perfect. I made breakfast for the babies, I played tennis with my friends, I met friends for lunch. I went shopping for the most adorable clothes for our two girls, who were always perfectly groomed, with big bows in their hair. Then I would come home and play with the babies some more.

I obsessively cleaned my house, straightened the drawers, swept the floors, and threw loads and loads of laundry in the washing machine, even though I had a housekeeper. If I walked past a table and it was dirty or dusty, I had to grab a bottle of Windex or Pledge and make it shine. It gave me great satisfaction just to clean out the refrigerator. If you opened my refrigerator door, everything was pristine and perfect inside. (Funny enough, all my kids today do the same thing. The inside of Kimberly’s refrigerator looks exactly like mine did thirty years ago, everything perfectly clean and organized.)

As you surely know by now, I’ve always been a perfectionist, type A personality. Everything has to be a certain way, and the world around me has to be in perfect order if I am to be relaxed and move on to do something new, different, or fun. That’s just who I am. I find joy in buying something new for my house, decorating, and dressing my kids. Back in the beginning years of my marriage to Robert, it was a good day if it ended with me bathing the babies in a bubble bath, filled with the cutest bath toys, and afterward dressing them in their pink satin Baby Dior nightgowns. I loved brushing their hair, turning on a movie, or reading them to sleep with a book. The biggest joy in my life was taking care of those babies. I knew I’d been blessed.

On some nights, once the babies were in bed and the nanny
was on the watch, Robert and I were able to have date nights. With babies tucked in, everybody safe and sound in our gorgeous house on Tower Lane, we’d tiptoe downstairs, where we would dress up and head out for a night in Beverly Hills. We were living
la vida loca
!

Robert was quite the dresser. He would put on a gorgeous sports coat, great slacks, and beautiful Gucci loafers. His hair was always swept back perfectly and his nails were always manicured. Again, the perfect guy in every way. We’d get into one of his Rolls-Royces and hit the town. It was quite the life: everything was perfect, perfect, perfect . . . until imperfections began creeping in.

It began with something strange. In 1982, for some odd reason my body broke out in this crazy, horrendous episode of psoriasis from head to toe. The rash was so bad, I looked like a burn victim. It was the first time I experienced any kind of physical disorder, and it was really life-changing.

I was very lucky to be healthy and athletic. I just loved to be out in the sun in my bikini, swimming with my kids. Now I had this rash erupting all over my body with huge, red, angry sores. I panicked. I thought I had some obscure disease and was dying. I went to my doctor, the Beverly Hills cosmetic dermatologist Arnie Klein, and he took one look at me and said, “Wow, I think you have psoriasis!”

“Psoriasis?! What is that?”

“Haven’t you ever heard of the ‘heartbreak of psoriasis’?” he said.

“Hell no, but I definitely have now!”

I would soon learn that psoriasis can be caused by emotional stress. What stress did I have? Living a perfect life in a perfect house with a perfect husband and two perfect children? I wasn’t sure—at least, not yet. Arnie Klein sent me to his colleague Dr. David Rish, who specialized in the care of psoriasis. Dr. Rish put me on a regimen that involved pills and spending time in a sun
bed every other day. Gradually, after a year and a half of treatment, my psoriasis healed. I still suffer from outbreaks from time to time and now use medication to help control it, but nothing as severe as I experienced then.

After my psoriasis treatment was over, Robert and I decided to take a trip. My parents drove up and watched the kids, and we had the time of our lives traveling to Europe in 1983. We started in Rome and then went to Capri, Venice, and Florence. It was on the trip to Europe that Robert and I decided it was time to have another baby. We conceived again in Italy.

Nine months later, in 1984, four years after the birth of Kimberly, our third daughter was born on June 27.

I loved the name Chloe, but I didn’t know if I could change the
C
to a
K
. Sure, it would be easy to do, but would it be fair to the child? I wondered about it, because I had never seen “Chloe” spelled “Khloé” before. But of all the names I came up with, nothing else fit. From the moment I saw her, Khloé just looked like a Khloé.

Like her name, Khloé looked different. Different from everyone else in the family, from the moment she was born. She had blond hair and these greenish eyes. She looked a lot like my maternal grandmother, Lou Ethel, and Robert’s mother, Helen. Kourtney and Kimberly came out dark and Armenian looking, and Khloé arrived looking nothing like them.

Khloé learned really fast that it isn’t easy to be the third daughter. She was instantly funny; she knew how to get attention. She wasn’t going to be left in the dust. Growing up, Khloé always found a way to carve out space for herself, usually through humor. There was a time in Khloé’s life when she really thought she was a dog, and when people came over, she would bark and lick them and sometimes bite their legs. This was a standing gig for her; it was her form of stand-up comedy. It was so damn funny. She developed the
most amazing personality and learned how to be strong and take care of herself.

Our friends loved our three girls. They were always entertaining, doing little skits and dances. They would show off and they were never shy. We had a loud, excitable, fun family. We had such an amazing group of friends, so my social life was really rich and full, but the family life was equally as wonderful. Again, I felt really lucky—and blessed.

Yet, something was missing.

A boy.

From the first time I gave birth, Robert’s parents and all of his Armenian family members were praying for a boy. But first I had Kourtney. Everyone was excited about Kourtney. Then I had Kimberly, and everyone thought,
Oh, so cute to have two little girls!
Meanwhile, they all kept praying for a boy. Then came Khloé, another girl, and of course everyone was still happy. But it felt like something was still missing. Robert and I talked about it for a really long time, and we decided to give it one more try. We wanted another child, and we decided that if it was a fourth girl, it would still be great, but we really wanted to go for that boy.

I started reading up on how to conceive a boy. There was no Internet at that time, so I read a lot of books on the subject. I became this expert on how, when, and where to have sex to achieve a baby boy.

“Oh my God, we have to have sex
right now
!” I would tell Robert over the phone. “This is it, this is the boy!
This is the boy!
”

Robert would race home and it was wham, bam, thank you, ma’am. We didn’t have sex frequently, but just enough, because sex had become all about conceiving the boy. You had only one shot at it. You had to do it just the right way. We tried all these crazy positions: upside down and sideways, me lying there with my feet in the air, drinking special juice or tons of iced tea.

It was pretty funny and we would laugh about it. Sure enough, I got pregnant. We tried to stay calm, because we wouldn’t know what sex the baby was until I gave birth.

I went into labor the night before St. Patrick’s Day, 1987. All of my girlfriends showed up at the hospital. Shelli Azoff brought Fatburgers for everyone. It was a huge party at two a.m. in the waiting room with all my friends and family and Robert’s family there, everyone thinking and praying,
Let it be a boy! Let it be a boy!

If it was a girl, we would name her Kelly—with a
K
, of course. If it was a boy, we were going to name him Robert Arthur Kardashian after Robert and his father, Arthur, in the Armenian tradition.

In the delivery room, my doctor, Paul Crane, who delivered all my kids, warned me, “I don’t want you to be upset, but I am pretty sure this is a girl. I’m just saying that because when the baby comes out, I don’t want you to freak out on me if it is a girl.”

“I’m going to be fine,” I said.

I screamed when the baby came out and Dr. Crane said, “Oh my God, it’s a boy!” I think he was as shocked as I was. But lo and behold, it was a boy—Robert Arthur, although we would come to call him Rob—followed by a celebration like no other. My best friend, Joyce Kraines, heard the commotion. She had her ear up against the door the entire time I was giving birth. I was staring up at the big metal operating room fixtures when I heard Dr. Crane yell to Joyce, “Put on some scrubs!” Joyce came running into the operating room, a mask thrown over her face, and she came to me and started kissing my face and giving me huge hugs.

My mother-in-law came in with jewelry—the most beautiful diamond and sapphire brooch you have ever seen in your life, which had been handed down for generations—and a thank-you note for me.
It’s a boy, it’s a boy, it’s a boy!
When I gave birth to Kourtney and Kimberly and Khloé, I didn’t get anything, but I have this boy and she’s suddenly giving me her jewelry! There were
flowers every where.
God, I should have had four sons!
I thought, kidding, of course. But it was a day I’ll never forget. In those days, a mother would spend a few days in the hospital after giving birth, and I really enjoyed it, with friends and family stopping by constantly.

Now we had four children and no worries when it came to our lifestyle. Robert’s career was booming. He had kept his bar membership active, but was working on a company he owned called
Radio & Records
, or
R&R
. It was the newspaper for the music industry, and it was huge. He had sold the company to an even bigger company in Dallas, but he had stayed on to run it for another five years. Once that contract expired, he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do next. He ended up working with our good friend Irving Azoff at one of the companies he was running, MCA Radio Network, and Robert went to work at Universal Studios, where the company was based.

Life was great and getting greater all the time.

O
n February 2, 1985, our friends O.J. Simpson and Nicole Brown were married. Before the wedding, O.J.’s buddies—Robert, his brother, Tommy, A. C. Cowlings, football great Marcus Allen, and Donald Moomaw, pastor of Bel Air Presbyterian, who was going to perform the ceremony—decided that O.J. could use a little marriage Bible study to prepare for the major step of matrimony. They thought that O.J. needed a little counseling, just to talk about what it meant to be in a monogamous relationship and how to be a good husband. They wanted O.J. to give this, his second marriage, a really good shot.

He had been married to an amazing lady, Marguerite. She was beautiful and they had gone to school together. He walked away from that relationship when he fell in love with Nicole, and I think
all of us were afraid of his wandering eye. We were hoping for the best. We were hoping this would be a solid relationship and that they would be together forever, because they were so much fun to be around as a couple.

O.J. and Nicole were married in a tent in the backyard of O.J.’s house on Rockingham Drive. OJ was thirty-seven; Nicole, pregnant with their first child, was twenty-five and never looked lovelier. I remember being so happy for her. I felt like they had both been through a lot, and sacrificed so much for each other to be together. I thought Nicole was finally going to have her happily-ever-after.