Kris Jenner . . . And All Things Kardashian (10 page)

The years passed quickly, almost in a blur. Robert and I continued in our strong faith and religious practice, both in our home and at church. We both loved the Lord. We went to church on Sundays. We had all our kids christened and took them every Sunday to Sunday school. Our home was filled with faith and love, and I was really proud of that. I started going to the Tuesday community Bible study in Santa Monica, which I loved. In Bible study, I met two of my closest friends:

Candace Garvey and Dru Hammer. Dru was married to Michael Hammer, grandson of Armand Hammer, and Candace eventually married the baseball great Steve Garvey. Through Bible study, I met these two lifelong friends and many others.

I had an amazing social circle at the time. We had girl luncheons for everyone’s birthdays, celebrations for
everything.
Joyce Kraines, Sheila Kolker, Shelli Azoff, Cici, Candace Garvey, Lisa Miles, and me—old friends and new. We were always having tennis parties, barbecues, concerts, dinners at Morton’s, Chasen’s and L’Orangerie. We were all having babies at the same time too. Our kids grew up together. It was like they had a whole bunch of cousins—the families were that close—and we all did the same things—like getting our boobs done.

It was 1988 by then, and a few of my Bible study girlfriends
were having their boobs done. Pretty soon,
everybody
was having boob jobs. Of course, I decided I needed a boob job too. I had four kids and the boobs were looking like they could use some perking up. So I scheduled the surgery.

I will never forget waking up a few hours later. My eyes opened and I could see my girlfriend Sheila Kolker hovering over my bed squealing, “You look like a supermodel!” I was so groggy.
I do?
I thought. But I couldn’t tell. I was still covered in bandages. After I healed, I realized that because my doctor had put the implants
under
the muscle, it didn’t even look like I had my boobs done at all. In those days, under the muscle was safer, but that didn’t give you those high, perky, fabulous boobs that you see on Playboy bunnies, which was what I was seeking. Staring in the mirror, I was like,
Hello? Where are my boobs?

I started talking to Nicole Simpson about it. “Well, I want to get my boobs done too,” she told me. By then, she and O.J. had had their two children, Sydney and Justin, so she was ready to perk up her boobs, just as I had been.

“Have him do your boobs first, and I will see how yours look and then I’ll do mine all over again,” I told Nicole.

Nicole went to see Dr. Harry Glassman and the surgery was scheduled. Of course, Nicole’s boobs were 2die4. I went by her house after the surgery and she took off her shirt and said, “Kris, look!”

My mouth fell open. They were
gorgeous.
I thought,
I want two of those, please!

O.J. was of course
so
excited about Nicole’s new boobs, because Nicole had that tall, lanky, gorgeous, athletic body. She was
so
beautiful. Looking back on it now, we both probably should’ve just kept our boobs the way they were. But in those years—the late eighties—everyone wanted to have big, enormous boobs. We were all obsessed, and after Nicole had hers done, I went to the same
Dr. Harry Glassman and had mine done all over again. This time I was very, very happy with the results.

R
obert and I were having so much fun with O.J. and Nicole back then.

We were always together, having dinner, playing tennis, having parties. By now, they had moved back into O.J.’s house on Rockingham Drive. They loved to have scavenger hunt parties. One time, they told us all to show up at their house wearing white. Everyone showed up in tennis whites, and O.J. lined us up in couples and handcuffed us to our partners. Then he gave us a list of household items, the craziest stuff: a toothpick, a mousetrap, yesterday’s newspaper, a steak, a pack of matches from the Beverly Hills Hotel. The prize would be an amazing piece of Lalique crystal. Everybody ran to their cars, and we had to all get in the same door and climb over the steering wheels because we were handcuffed together. Everyone was squealing and laughing. Robert and I drove to Uncle Jack and Auntie Dorothy’s house down the street, and we were able to get every single item. It was one-stop shopping. We won that year. It was so much fun.

O.J. and Nicole had tennis parties, too, and they would give all their guests new tennis racquets and tennis balls. O.J.
loved
giving parties and he was always extremely generous. Nicole loved to put together barbecues, and every Fourth of July they had a huge one. The Fourth of July was O.J.’s holiday. They would have people over from the entertainment industry, everyone from the Jackson brothers to the singer Bill Withers. And there were women. Young women everywhere. All of the girls would come to O.J.’s Fourth of July parties dressed to the nines in their little dresses and high heels with their hair and makeup done. It was a big joke between O.J. and his buddies A. C. Cowlings and Marcus Allen. They would
get all the pretty, perfectly coiffed young women to the party, where they would throw them in the pool. They thought that was really funny.

Nicole would have people barbecuing ribs and steak and chicken, and her mom and dad, Judi and Lou, would come with all of her sisters. Nicole was really close to her parents. They were always at the house on Rockingham, helping with their kids, Sydney and Justin. I always took Kourtney, Kimberly, Khloé, and Robert to the barbecues too.

It was 1988 and everything was still right with the world. I had a wonderful husband and four gorgeous children. Everything was perfect. I was blessed in so many ways; even my psoriasis was gone. But something was growing inside of me—something worse than the heartbreak of psoriasis.

I had no idea that within a year I would come close to losing everything—including my mind—in what can only be described as my year from hell.

CHAPTER FIVE

Unfulfilled

F
eelings are interesting things. You can’t control them, or at least I can’t control mine. You feel what you feel, and usually I understand why. If I’m feeling sad, I know why. If I’m feeling bored, I know why. If I’m feeling excited or blessed or thankful, I know why. But in 1989 I started to feel really gloomy and really depressed and really unhappy. And I couldn’t figure out why.

My son was almost two. I had the best life in the world. I didn’t work and I thought that it was a gift from God to have my babies and be able to raise my kids and give all of my attention to my family. I had the best friends a girl could ever want: supportive, beautiful, smart, independent, strong women who were great mothers, great friends, and a great support system. As always, Robert’s cousin Cici was a really important friend in my life. She was around for all the Armenian parties, and the wedding showers, and through the whole process of our marriage. I had parents who adored me. I had in-laws who loved me and would do anything for
me. I had a husband who was absolutely devoted to me and four adorable children who loved me.

Yet, I was
unhappy
.

I was selfish and restless and bored.

My feelings for Robert had changed. I still loved him after ten years of marriage, but I soon began to realize that I wasn’t
in love
with him. I struggled with this for months and months. I would sit there and ask myself,
Why am I feeling this way? Why aren’t I feeling frisky toward my wonderful husband? Why aren’t I more lovey-dovey?
I had an amazing guy who everyone loved and admired.
Why don’t I feel attracted to him? Why don’t I feel in love with him anymore? What’s happened?

Nothing—and everything. Our emotional bond, which had once been so tight, had loosened and seemed to be slipping away. I had started to change inside, and I felt extremely troubled about it. I would cry myself to sleep at night trying to figure out what was happening to me. I was more than just unhappy; I was miserable. I would struggle to get through my day without breaking down in front of Robert or the kids.

We would often go to Palm Springs for the weekend, where Robert’s parents, Helen and Arthur, had a house. I remember being in Palm Springs and being with Robert watching a movie called
The Thorn Birds
, the famously romantic TV miniseries starring Richard Chamberlain and Rachel Ward. It turned out to be a monumental movie for me. At the end of the movie I just broke down and cried because it was so passionate and sexy and so all these things that you’re supposed to feel when you’re really in love. We all have cold-water or “Aha!” moments in our lives. For me, it was watching
The Thorn Birds
and feeling like:
Wow. That’s how I want to feel about somebody. That’s how I want to be for the rest of my life
.
That passionate, that romantic
. . . All of those feelings that I didn’t have with Robert anymore.

As my feelings toward Robert began to rapidly decline, I think O.J. and Nicole could sense what was happening. We were spending a lot of time together. Every year on my birthday, November 5, Robert, O.J., Nicole, and I would go back to New York City. O.J. was working for NBC and he and Nicole bought a beautiful apartment right on Central Park, where the four of us would stay together.

The weekend of the New York Marathon of 1989 was significant for a couple of reasons. Number one, it was the year that I noticed a tremendous change in O.J. and Nicole, or at least in Nicole. O.J. remained the same, always. But Nicole really started to change. She became more withdrawn and private and seemed anxious. She was biting her fingernails down to the quick and just seemed to be on edge all the time.

Second, there was my deepening sense of distance from Robert. On our first night in New York, I had a really hard time being intimate with him. I just wasn’t feeling it. It was just like somebody had turned off a switch. I knew on that trip that it was going to be difficult for me to continue in the marriage. I wanted so much more . . .
passion
! I had four kids, but I was only thirty, and I was craving passion. Looking back on it now, I was only just coming into my own sexuality. I felt like I was married to my best friend, who, like any friend, I was happy to see and spend time with some days, but other days too much was too much. I’d had these four kids and had been a good wife, and I was feeling,
It’s my turn. I need to have somebody be there for me.
I wanted to be madly, passionately in love with somebody. Again, I was really young . . . and really bored. Not with my life, because I had a lot going on, but it had become monotonous. Of course, I didn’t breathe a word about any of this to Robert, who didn’t seem to notice that my feelings toward him had changed. Or at least he didn’t tell me he noticed anything.

W
hile I was struggling with my relationship with Robert in New York that weekend, Nicole was struggling with her relationship with O.J. One day she asked me to join her for a long walk through Central Park, which was filled with runners training for the marathon. We must have walked for two hours. All the while, she talked about how she was really struggling with O.J. and her stepson, Jason. Jason and Arnelle were O.J.’s kids with Marguerite, and Nicole and Jason were having a really hard time getting along.

What Nicole was really struggling with, though, was that she had discovered O.J.’s infidelities. She was also having a hard time with the way O.J. treated her, and she told me about him getting physical and roughing her up. She didn’t go into much detail, but she was just really having a hard time. She never came out and said “I’m being abused by O.J.” I so wish I would have asked her for specifics. But I didn’t want to cross a line if she didn’t want to talk about something, which would become one of my biggest regrets. All she told me on our walk was “I want to leave him, but I don’t know how. I don’t know if I can stay. He’s really hard to live with.”

She told me about four incidents on four different occasions. Here is one of them: She was going through one of O.J.’s underwear drawers, and she found a jewelry box with gorgeous diamond earrings and a diamond necklace inside. She didn’t say anything to him because she thought she had found a surprise gift meant for
her
. Months passed. She had an anniversary and a birthday. No jewelry. When she went back to look again, the jewelry box was gone. Then she saw a picture of an actress—I won’t mention her name—in a magazine and the actress was wearing the jewelry. Nicole was devastated and said she needed to talk about it.

The next day was my birthday. Nicole and I got up early, had breakfast at the apartment, and then went shopping at Bloomingdale’s. We were on a mission: Nicole wanted to buy O.J. a pair of leather gloves. No occasion: she just wanted to bring him home a
present and thought a pair of gloves would be the perfect gift. We went to the glove counter and she picked out a pair of beautiful leather gloves, bought them, and had them wrapped. I’ve often wondered:
Were these the same leather gloves found bloodied at the crime scene after Nicole was murdered years later?

After she bought the gloves, Nicole told me, “Go off and do some shopping and let’s meet up a little later on the first floor.” She went to the lingerie department and bought me this entire beautiful Christian Dior lingerie extravaganza. She was so beautiful and sweet, thinking that this would spice up my sex life with Robert because I’d given her this whole “I don’t feel sexy” sob story. I still have that lingerie to this day. I don’t have the heart to ever put any of it on, but it was just so special that I saved it. It was just who Nicole was. She was always thinking about everybody else.

Nicole looked so beautiful that day. After we finished shopping, O.J., Nicole, Robert, and I went out for lunch. Then we returned to the apartment for a quick nap before going out that night. We had big plans: a fabulous new restaurant for my birthday, then out dancing at a nightclub. We were so excited. Nicole had even bought a new dress.