Kris Jenner . . . And All Things Kardashian (33 page)

Here’s how the show title goes: the camera bounces between close-ups of our faces and individual shots of us while we attempt to arrange ourselves as a family in front of a backdrop of Hollywood. There’s a lot of shuffling and elbowing and nudging involved as we fight for the best angle and shot of each of us. Bruce and I are
in matching plum colors (my dress, his shirt). Kendall and Kylie are dressed in glittery miniskirts and animal prints. Khloé towers above the rest of us in glamorous, sparkly gold sequins. Kourtney is in a little pewter dress. Rob says, “I need someone to make me laugh.”

“Where’s Kim?” I ask.

“Kim is always late,” says one of the girls off camera.

Finally, Kim rushes up and inserts herself in the shot, hands on hips and filling out a ruby red Herve Leger dress, looking fabulous as always. When we are finally assembled, little Kylie pulls on a rope and the backdrop of Los Angeles falls to reveal a shot of the front of our Cape Cod dream house.

“That’s it, we’re done,” says a crew member off camera.

“Money,” says another.

E
verything and everyone was in place, but we were having trouble coming up with a name for the show. All of us were trying to think of the perfect name: our family, Ryan and Eliot’s company, everyone at Bunim/Murray. In the meantime, our show runner, Farnaz, was running in a hundred different directions trying to catch us all on film. Kim was in Vegas, I was running down to San Diego to visit my mom, Kourtney was in Malibu, and Khloé was running around Beverly Hills . . . crises, comedy, and cameras following us everywhere we went. We would go to meetings, and then Kim would need to rush right out for a different meeting—at the Playboy Mansion, for example. Bruce was driving carpool for Kendall and Kylie while juggling his own career and his regular golf game. We each had our own crazy schedule. The crew was like, “Oh my God, these people are driving us crazy! There’s so many of them and they all go in different directions!”

One day Farnaz was late to a meeting. She came rushing in and
said, breathlessly, “I’m sorry I am late. I’m just having a really hard time keeping up with the Kardashians.”

Everyone stopped talking. There was total silence. Everyone turned and stared at her, and she said, “What?!” Then she got it. “Oh my God, that’s it:
Keeping Up with the Kardashians
!” Farnaz said.

I wasn’t in the meeting. When they told me the name, I loved it, but I said, “But what about Bruce Jenner?”

“Oh, it’s going to be fine,” they said, and of course, Bruce being Bruce, it was.

We wanted the show to be mostly about the girls. That their family just happens to include a stepdad who has his own name and celebrity, well, the producers thought that was just an added bonus.
Keeping Up with the Kardashians and the Jenners
just didn’t have the same ring to it. So we went with
Kardashians
alone. Everyone, including Bruce, knew it was the perfect name. Bruce is such a good sport, and he would never let ego get in the way of something like that.

The producers were counting on our lives being interesting enough to be entertaining. We knew that for our reality show, we needed to show our life in full. In order to set that up, the producers needed to know all about our life. They were asking us questions: “What’s going on? What are you guys doing? What do we need to film?” They needed to know all our comings and goings so they could get production clearance for any restaurants, clubs, hospitals, hotels, office buildings, and more. If we had a doctor appointment they thought might be interesting, they needed to make sure they could shoot it.

One day I called a family meeting.

When we were all together at Hidden Hills, I said, “Look, guys. We have to make a decision right now if we are going to go on this journey together and let everything hang out. I think the only way
to make this show successful is to really be real about it, and if stuff happens—and I don’t have a crystal ball, so I don’t even know what that could mean—we have to be able to roll with it and let them tape it and show it, no matter what. Okay?”

I looked around the room. They all stared at me at first, surely thinking,
What has she gotten us into now?
But then everyone said yes; they all agreed to let the cameras keep rolling, no matter what. What did we have to fear? Nothing. We have no skeletons; everything about us is out in the open anyway. We all thought,
Why not?
We were now off to the races, ready to face the cameras, waiting for something wild, crazy, funny, dramatic, and exciting to happen. We didn’t have to wait long.

O
ur show premiered on October 4, 2007. The first episode began with Bruce and my sixteenth wedding anniversary. But the show opened with me talking about Kim’s ass. The opening shot showed Kim from behind, looking in my fridge, and me commenting on the “junk in her trunk” to the other family members in my family room. Khloé immediately called me out. “Mom, she’s always had an ass,” she said. “Where did this come from?” Kourtney called me “catty.” “I hate you all!” Kim declared.

Then we cut to voice-overs and a montage of scenes about the main characters: our family.

“Welcome to my family. I’m Kim Kardashian. My sisters say I’m a bitch. But I always have their best interests at heart,” Kim said.

“I’m Kourtney. I’m the oldest and the most mature.”

“I’m Kris Jenner. I’m the mom and Kim’s manager. Say what you want, but I know what’s best for my kids . . . and my husband.”

“I’m Bruce Jenner, and I am a pushover for my family . . . up to a point.”

Me again: “And then Bruce and I together have Kendall and Kylie Jenner.”

“So it’s six kids and two crazy parents,” said Kim. “We’re the modern-day Brady Bunch with a kick. There’s a lot of baggage that comes with us. But it’s like Louis Vuitton baggage . . . You always want it.”

The first season went by in a blur, beginning with our sixteenth anniversary party. One guest was our dear friend Robin Antin, creator and the choreographer of the Pussycat Dolls, whom Kim took into my bedroom to show her the anniversary gift she had given us as a gag: a stripper pole. If you remember, stripper poles were all the rage back then; even Oprah had Teri Hatcher on her show to demonstrate the newest exercise craze: pole dancing. It wasn’t meant to be strip-club sexy; it was just meant to be an exercise tool to go along with the newest exercise craze. Robin started demonstrating a new routine on the pole, when Kylie, then ten, walked in and began imitating Robin’s routine. It turned out to be a little more salacious than intended, and clearly Kylie was just being a kid. But when Bruce found her in there, he hauled her out quickly.

The cameras kept rolling. When the episode aired, people were absolutely outraged that I had my ten-year-old daughter on my stripper pole. If it had happened without cameras there, nobody would have flinched. Everyone was just talking in my bedroom, and Kylie was only trying to be included. It just looked scandalous when taken out of context.

During that first season, Kim made her first live television talk show appearance on
The Tyra Banks Show
. Not long after that, we got a call from
Playboy
: they wanted Kim to model for a spread. My instinct was to say yes.
Playboy
is iconic and historic. Marilyn Monroe was on the very first cover. Farrah Fawcett, Janet Jackson, Cindy Crawford, Ursula Andress, Jayne Mansfield, and Linda
Evans all did
Playboy
. It was an honor for Kim to be among the list of spectacular, beautiful women who have posed for
Playboy.
Kim was hesitant at first, but I assured her that she would not have to take all her clothes off. After the pictures came back, Hef was very pleased with them, but he wanted more photos of Kim—this time wearing less. Hef invited us to the Playboy Mansion and, camera still rolling, convinced Kim to do a second shoot, this time wearing nothing but a dozen long strands of strategically placed pearls. Determined to show me how it felt to be naked in front of the camera, Kim as a joke arranged for me to have my own photo shoot wrapped in American flags, wearing nothing but Bruce’s gold medal.

Here my daughter had posed for
Playboy
, which was a controversial move. But for her to follow that by playing this joke on me spoke volumes and set the tone of the show. Kim came back at me with humor, because we love each other, and that photo shoot was yet another milestone for me. It showed me that no matter what we went through and no matter how much pain it caused, we could always overcome any kind of adversity through humor, laughter, and our love for each other. It also showed me that our show didn’t need to be a train wreck. It could be funny! It could be about our family and how we get through things with laughter and love. It could show audiences that we’re a real family, with real problems and real happy endings. This incident—Kim posing for
Playboy
, followed by me posing with the gold medal—taught us not to be afraid to make fun of ourselves. We were having a great time; why not show it? I knew right then that everything was all going to be okay.

Working with and for my children was a huge step in this experience. I realized that if I was going to tackle this whole situation and be there and manage my family, I had to commit emotionally, physically, and intellectually 150 percent. There was no way to do
this half-assed. I knew I could not do this as a hobby, or part-time, or for just a couple of hours a day. This job required that I live, breathe, eat, sleep it 24/7, and once I decided to do that and make that emotional commitment to myself and to my family, there was no turning back. I was not only a mother, daughter, and wife but also a producer, a manager, negotiator, a publicist, a business manager, a stylist, and at times a caterer and a set decorator. Suddenly, I had to keep track of everyone’s schedules and even tell the girls when to work out.

I was developing a brand, managing all these people who were practically living under the same roof, and what I didn’t realize was that when things went wrong, which was inevitable, the natives would get restless. We knew how to deal with each other on the mother-daughter level, but adding the business element had its challenges. I had to learn how to deal with each child and his or her needs individually. They each have different goals, expectations, and personalities. It was a dance, and I had to dance differently with each one. Of my daughters, Kourtney is a tango, spicy and difficult at times. Khloé is a salsa, sassy and all over the place, perpetually changing directions. Kim is a waltz, easy, smooth, and beautiful.

Then, in our first season, Kim thought about firing me as her manager and finding someone else. I was devastated. Kim and I are like twin souls. So for me not to feel what she was feeling at that moment was unusual for us. It was a deeply raw moment. The cameras were rolling. I got upset and headed straight to the spa, leaving a message on my phone with Kim’s cell number and instructing callers to call Kim directly. (She received hundreds of calls in an afternoon.) That was one of the several times when I did feel the urge to turn off the cameras—times when we went through deeply raw and personal issues—but I chose not to, and I am glad.

In the end, she and I got back on the same page. It was a reminder
to me that although these are my daughters, they are also clients, and they need respect and consideration. And I think Kim saw how very deeply I cared not only about her but also about this job, and she had new respect for me too.

We taped a segment mourning the anniversary of Robert Kardashian’s passing and did our best to come to peace with his loss while still desperately always missing him. In the aftermath of the anniversary of her father’s passing, Khloé made a huge mistake and got a DUI. She had to face the consequences, which included a night in jail. At another point in the season, the girls and I were flown down to
Girls Gone Wild
creator Joe Francis’s house in Cabo in Joe’s private jet for a swimsuit photo shoot—without telling Bruce the truth about where we were going or why. (When he found out, he showed up furious in Cabo to confront us even as we posed on the beach in bikinis.)

W
e kept rolling through everything—the good, the bad, the crazy, and the scandalous—and
Keeping Up with the Kardashians
struck a nerve. People began talking about our family around the water cooler at work. We exceeded the hopes of our producers and the network in the ratings.

The bottom line was that our first season was ratings gold, and we knew we had a hit on our hands. We didn’t have time to even celebrate because the network signed us up for Season Two. We immediately began filming our
E! True Hollywood Story
and Season Two of
Keeping Up with the Kardashians
without even taking a break.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Building the Brand:
Check!

O
ne of the challenges as I get up and go to work every day is that I know I will live longer if I can try on some level to keep stress to a minimum (LOL). My dear friend and Robert’s cousin Cici and I have an amazing, long, and beautiful relationship. I don’t know what I would have done without her in my life. We met when I met Robert and I was just a teenager, and we just bonded like sisters. We have a long-standing routine that whenever something iconic or BIG happens, or if we mark something off of our “bucket list,” we just e-mail each other with “This just happened to me,” or “I just did this, I’m so excited!” And we end the e-mail with the word “Check!” As in “Check that off the list!”

Sometimes I will email her some good news and she will simply write back “Check!” and I always laugh. I laugh because she is the most supportive and upbeat person I know and yet she fights for her life every day. She has taught me about what a positive attitude can do as she struggles daily with her battle with cancer. Cici will
squeal with delight when she knows I have accomplished a goal of mine, or accomplished the impossible for the day. I have learned more from her than she will ever know. But the biggest thing I have learned from her is how to have laughter in the midst of adversity, and love in the midst of uncertainty. Her belief in God and her positive attitude get her through, and her selflessness and unflappable strength are something I admire and I strive to achieve. She helped to make me the woman I am today and has encouraged me to set goals and aspirations and given me the freedom to be my true self. She has never judged me, and she is the best friend I have ever had.