Kris Jenner . . . And All Things Kardashian (3 page)

I remember how special my grandmother used to make our holidays—big, perfect, and glorious, a tradition that I would eventually assume and take to an even bigger level. We celebrated everything endlessly. At Easter, for instance, there were Easter cupcakes and Easter cookies and Easter eggs. She always entertained as if she were expecting a party of fifty guests, even when she was having only my little sister and me. I grew to love that quality, and I think she passed it on to me. When I grew up and
got married and had kids of my own, I wanted to do all the same kinds of things for my own kids. Of course, I ended up carrying on the traditions my grandmother taught me, except on steroids. Doing everything for my kids is something I learned from my grandmother. She sparked a dream in me early on: to someday have a ton of kids and become a wonderful mother.

G
randma also taught me the value of hard work.

The Candelabra was right in the middle of La Jolla, just across from the ocean. She just
loved
candles. A great deal of my childhood was spent in that store. My mom often worked there with my grandmother. The older I got, of course, the more often they would drag me along with them to work. I would be in the back room, doing my little chores: wrapping gifts for customers, making candles, and doing whatever else needed to be done.

The Candelabra did so well that my mother opened up her own shop in 1976, called the Candles of La Jolla. So there was the Candelabra on Prospect Street and the Candles of La Jolla on Gerard, next to John’s Waffle Shop.

Candles became our family business. I grew up working in both shops. When I was old enough to drive, I drove myself to work there. My whole childhood, beginning at age ten, was spent working in those two stores. By the time I was thirteen, I was getting a little paycheck and really contributing to the business by being there at Christmastime. During Christmas vacation, I spent my days at the candle store, wrapping gifts as fast as I could.

My grandmother actually did so well at her candle store that she was able to keep her home decorated in a just-2die4-style, as did my mother. They liked beautiful things, and everything had to be just so. They were both perfectionists. “As soon as you finish using the sink, wash it out with Comet,” my grandmother would tell me.
“Clean the sink and polish it.” It was the era of “Cleanliness is next to Godliness,” and that was how I was raised: with a “Whistle while you work” mentality, like in
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
.

Because of all of that, I never complained about hard work; I thrived on it. From a young age I learned that if I wanted to get ahead in life, I needed to work. It was a pretty perfect world: hard work, beautiful candles, and lots of love.

A few years after my parents had divorced, my mother met Harry Shannon. Harry was a great guy, and he quickly became
her
guy. They fell completely in love. It started off great, but for a while the candles in our lives began to flicker and came close to blowing out.

H
arry was a drinker and he loved to party. It was the era of the Rat Pack, of course, and everybody went to cocktail parties on the weekends. Even my grandmother would have her friends over regularly. But Harry Shannon took it to an extreme. He was an alcoholic. Still, my mom loved him, dating him on and off, but always breaking up with him because she had two little girls to take care of and would lose patience with his problems with alcohol.

Harry had money. He was a yacht broker and taught his clients how to sail. He was an excellent sailor, and he was definitely a businessman. He walked around in fabulous white linen slacks, jackets, and fabulous loafers. He was the coolest, most beautiful dresser. He always looked like a Ralph Lauren ad.

He was in love with my mother. But when Harry drank, he misbehaved. Once when they were dating, my sister and I were sleeping in my mom’s bed because she had gone out that night and left us with a babysitter. When she came home, she crawled into bed with us and we all fell asleep. An hour or so later, we heard banging
at the bedroom window. Harry Shannon was trying to get into the house. He was drunk as a skunk. We went to the front door and peeked through the curtain to see him pounding on the door and screaming, “Let me in, Mary Jo! Let me in!”

“Go home, Harry, and come back when you sober up!” she screamed through the door. “You’re in no shape to be here.”

“Let me in!” he continued.

My sister and I were, of course, scared. We crawled into my mother’s bed and sat there shivering under the covers, wondering what was going to happen next. Every once in a while, we would get out of the bed and peek out the window. He kept banging and he was banging so hard, we thought he might knock down the house. It was that bad. Finally, he went home.

That night, my mother promised us that she would never subject us to anything like that again. Harry Shannon was out of her life until he sobered up. A day or two later, Harry came crawling back on hands and knees, apologizing profusely. A short time after that, he proposed. My mother finally gave him an ultimatum: quit drinking and we’ll get married.

That very day, he quit. He wouldn’t have another drink until the day he died. Just like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, Harry and Mom flew to Puerto Vallarta and got married, taking a few friends along for the ride. It was June of 1968, and I was thirteen. My sister and I stayed with my grandparents. We were standing there with my grandparents when Mom and Harry returned, thinking,
Wow, we have a stepdad!
From that day forward, I called Harry “Dad.” He embraced my sister and me as if we were his own. Harry taught me a big lesson in life: if you want something bad enough, and are willing to change your life for it, you can do anything. Harry taught me how to find inner strength.

Soon after their marriage, Harry announced that he was going
to invest in a new company. “We’re going to move to Oxnard, California,” he said. “And we’re going to harvest abalone.”

“Abalone?” I asked. “What’s abalone?”

He explained: abalone is a big, red, edible sea snail.

Ugh!

I had lived in the San Diego area my whole life. I was in junior high, and we were all very happy. But here was Harry Shannon talking about giving it all up for sea snails, abalone, something we had never heard about before, and my mother telling us it was a done deal. Harry, my mom, Karen, and I were all moving to Oxnard—the strawberry and lima bean capital of California, 155 miles north of San Diego—where Harry could invest in something called the Abalone Processing Plant. Mom put her candle shop on hold—she had someone work there for the summer—and we moved up to Oxnard. We moved into this small apartment. We had no friends. We didn’t know anybody.

I
hated
abalone.

I hated the idea of abalone harvesting: of fishermen catching abalone and bringing abalone back to Harry and his partners’ plant. He had people there pounding and preparing the abalone for sale. We would go to these restaurants and eat abalone burgers. Again,
ugh!
Why couldn’t he have bought a McDonald’s franchise?
That
would have been a great idea to a girl of thirteen. Burgers, yes. But abalone?
What?
The whole move was just a big hot mess.

That same year, I started my period. I was away from my friends, away from any family, stuck up in Oxnard, surrounded by abalone. I was yearning for my grandmother, missing my old life and that part of my family. I wrote her probably three hundred letters during that miserable Oxnard summer. I cried my eyes out every single night, missing her. I could have said, “Oh, I’m getting the next train to La Jolla.” I guess I could have lived with my grandmother.
But that was my mother’s first year of marriage, and I was part of a family unit. Still, all I could think about was getting out.

The only highlight of this time was when a girlfriend from San Diego called and said she and her dad were going into Los Angeles to a big sale at Judy’s. Now, Judy’s I loved. Judy’s was famous. Shopping there was fantastic. So I met my girlfriend at Judy’s in L.A. with some cash that my grandmother had sent me, and I had the best time. I felt like such a big girl, such an independent woman, who could go into a big city all by herself with a girlfriend and go shopping.
I could get used to this,
I thought. I liked the independence of making my own decisions.

But when I got back home it was still Oxnard. And abalone. In some ways, the move to Oxnard was my first step toward me being independent. I thought,
Okay, life isn’t going the way I expected it to. I’m stuck up here
. It made me think that I never wanted to be “stuck” again. I couldn’t wait to be able to make decisions for myself after that. I never forgot the things I learned in Oxnard, most important that I never again wanted to be in the position of being completely powerless to do something about a situation I didn’t want to be in.

T
hen the unthinkable happened: three months after our move to Oxnard, Harry’s partner took all of the money in the company—$15,000—and skipped town, never to be heard from again. My parents kept it quiet at first. We were young and they didn’t want to worry us.

I was happy when I found out. Not for the loss, but I was
so
excited to be going home. We were packing up and moving back to San Diego almost immediately. I couldn’t pack fast enough.

It was a major failure for Mom and Harry. He’d lost everything
he had invested. We weren’t broke—we still had the candle store—but Mom and Harry were essentially starting over. That was scary. But still, I was thrilled to be going back home and my parents were ready to make something wonderful happen for them again.

We rented a house across the street from my grandparents’ in Clairemont. I was not only back in San Diego, I was also living across the street from my beloved grandmother. I spent time with her every single day. It took Harry a while to financially recover from his Oxnard/abalone fall. First he went to work for his brother, who had a very successful car dealership in San Diego. Harry was very entrepreneurial. He bought a car rental franchise called Ugly Duckling Rent-A-Car and started renting out cars across the street from Sea World. It was in a little run-down building, but he and my mom fixed it up. Eventually they opened an antenna installation company as well, and Harry would crawl up onto people’s roofs like Spider-Man and install television antennas.

After that, Harry heard about a new business: car striping. People were taking tape and striping their cars with pinstripes. Remember that? That became Harry’s newest venture. He became the best car striper in San Diego. He went from car dealership to car dealership, becoming “the Car Striper Guy” and striping five cars a day at dealerships all over the area.

Harry taught me that if someone says no, you are talking to the wrong person. It’s a mantra I have made my own. Just like my grandmother, Harry showed me how to do whatever it takes to get the job done and make a living. Nobody handed him anything on a silver platter. Harry thrived on hard work.

The whole experience—Harry’s alcoholism and recovery/Oxnard/abalone/car rental/car striping—was a kind of wake-up call for me. It taught me how fast your life can turn around on a dime. I learned a lot of lessons I was able to use later. One minute I was with my grandmother, my mom was off getting married in Puerto
Vallarta, and life was dandy. I went to school, I got good grades, I had lots of friends. I was a very stable kid, really responsible. The candles were burning bright. So when my life became so unorganized and messy, it made me uncomfortable. The years after the debacle in Oxnard were wonderful for all of us, and highlighted what a wonderful man Harry Shannon really was. My biological dad, at that point, was gone. He was a really good guy, but we had lost touch with him. He moved back east and then to the Midwest, moving all over, trying to find work. I didn’t even know where he was or what he did at that point. He called or sent letters periodically, but he was really just doing his own thing.

Harry, meanwhile, treated us as if we were his own kids. He showed us unconditional love. He redefined for me what family means. He showed me what it meant to be a good husband and contributor. When my mom wanted a new patio for the backyard, for example, he went out and brought home a truckload of bricks and laid my mom a gorgeous new patio for her new backyard. He was just a
doer.
If my mom needed something ironed, he did it. He was the family ironer. He was the best at ironing in the world. He would make it look like a professional job! He taught us by example what it meant to be an active part of a happy family.

Mom and Harry’s businesses were doing well, and soon we were moving into a beautiful house in University City, a brand-new neighborhood where an entire area had been leveled—acres and acres and acres—to create a new development. Everything was new. It was a neighborhood full of kids with brand-new schools, brand-new houses, brand-new everything. Our new house had red shag carpeting, gorgeous in those days. On Fridays, my mom would make me rake the rug to fluff it up before I could go out with my friends.

By that time I had a second job, other than the candle business. I worked in a doughnut shop. I would report to work at five a.m.,
where I would literally scrape the glaze off the floor and sell coffee to customers. Then I would walk across the street and catch the bus to school. After school, I would work in the candle shop. When I came home, I would rake the carpet before I was allowed to go out with my friends. I never complained about the work. By the time I was a teenager, I knew that I had a beautiful life in La Jolla and I wanted to keep it going. I was determined to make something of myself one day. But in those days my idea of success was getting married and having babies. Six babies.

Boyfriends? Sure, a few. Just like any normal teenage girl, I loved hanging out with my friends. But mostly in groups. Weekends at the beach. Surfing at La Jolla Shores. Every day during the summer. But no real serious relationship yet. I always saw myself as being with an adult. I was biding my time.