Kardashians had risen from hard-working immigrants to millionaires. They possessed an ideology of success and how to achieve it that they would pass on to their children and grandchildren.
Kim adored her grandparents. Particularly, she was close to Helen, who died, aged 90, in 2008. ‘Nana was seriously so much fun,’ she said. ‘She was your typical Armenian grandmother and always cooking the best Armenian meals. Our favourite when we visited was a breakfast dish called beeshee, which is a pancake topped with lots of sugar.’ Her grandparents eventually retired to Indian Wells, near Palm Springs, where they originally had a holiday home. When Helen died, she and Art had been married for 70 years.
The biggest influence in Kim’s life was her beloved father, Robert Kardashian, who was born in Baldwin Hills in 1944. She observed, ‘My father always taught us never to forget where we came from. We grew up learning so much about our Armenian ancestors that we will teach to our own kids one day.’ She is clearly giving North a head start in that regard.
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Robert Kardashian is a name that sounds as if it belongs to a very serious person. In reality, Bob, or Bobby as he was known, was funny and fun-seeking, a young man with a reputation as a practical joker, who never wanted to be tied to the family meat-packing business. It didn’t suit his style at all. He would leave that responsibility to his elder brother, Thomas, known as Tommy, who was four years his senior. An elder sister, Barbara, pursued a successful career as a dentist.
He followed them both to USC – the University of Southern California – in Los Angeles where he studied business administration from 1962 until 1966 and, like his brother, was the senior manager of the student American football team, the formidable USC Trojans. Both brothers were keen on sport, particularly football, and could play to a high, if not professional, standard.
Robert decided to continue his education at the University of San Diego, where he graduated in 1969 with a law degree. Tommy observed that his younger brother went to law school to avoid going into the family business. The elder Kardashian already had a Rolls-Royce and Robert was determined that he would have one too. On his return to Los Angeles, aged 25, he joined the firm of two USC law graduates, Richard Eamer and John Bedrosian. After two years, he became a named partner in Eamer, Bedrosian and Kardashian of Beverly Hills.
Bedrosian, a fellow ‘hye’ (the Armenian word for an Armenian), developed the firm’s interest in healthcare, while Robert found entertainment law more to his taste. One of his friends, George Mason, who founded the Armenian newspaper The California Courier, observed, ‘He’s not the kind of man who wants to be chained to a desk and take a briefcase full of work home with him every night.’
If Robert had stuck with his partners, he would have ended up considerably wealthier. They established National Medical Enterprises, which became one of the top healthcare providers in the US before it was sold in the 1990s. As a result, they moved into the realms of the super-rich.
Robert, though, enjoyed the world of celebrity more than the boardroom. He met the man who would change the future for him and his family on a tennis court in Beverly Hills one Sunday morning in the spring of 1970. A game of doubles was set up by the maître d’ at the Luau, which was a popular local place for young playboys on the prowl.
Robert and his brother Tommy were a formidable pairing, but they were concerned they had met their match in O. J. Simpson and Al Cowlings. These two had both won sporting scholarships to USC, but did not enrol there until after the Kardashians had left. Orenthal James Simpson, known as ‘The Juice’, was the most famous college footballer in the US and the winner of the prestigious Heisman Trophy as the most outstanding player of the year. In UK terms, it would be the equivalent of discovering that your weekend tennis game was against David Beckham.
O. J. was already a celebrity. Robert and Tommy were well known in the fashionable bars and restaurants of Hollywood, but they mixed more with professional people. O. J. would change that.
To their surprise, experience narrowly won the day for the Kardashian brothers. The four all became friends and the one-off game became a weekly ritual. Robert and O. J. got on particularly well, despite their very different backgrounds. O. J. had been brought up in a poor area of San Francisco, belonged to a street gang and served time in a youth detention centre. When he moved from college into the professional game, he became one of the most sought-after names in the celebrity world and, by 1971, was said to have earned enough money from endorsements to retire.
Robert recognised the selling potential of his new friend. O. J. would be perfect as the public face of some business ventures. Robert had the ideas and O. J. had the fame, and together they started several stores and restaurants.
They both still had a strong affinity with USC and one of their more successful enterprises was a fashion boutique on the campus called jag O. J. – a play on the popular student cocktail of orange juice and Jägermeister. It sold top-of-the-range jeans and casual wear and they made a tidy profit when they sold the shop after a couple of years.
One of Robert’s policies where his start-ups were concerned was not to hang on to a business for too long, whether it was successful or not. He formed a corporation with O. J. called Juice Inc. and opened a frozen yoghurt shop in Westwood Village, which they called Joy and, once again, sold after a couple of years.
The association with O. J. opened up a new world for Robert Kardashian and his brother. They moved into a house in Deep Canyon Drive, Beverly Hills, which they turned into a bachelor’s playground. O. J. was always around, helping to attract a constant stream of guests for tennis and pool parties. In the mid-seventies, he even stayed with the brothers for six months during an off-season as the star running back of the Buffalo Bills. There were three Rolls-Royces parked in the driveway then. Robert had finally acquired one – and he was still in his twenties. O. J. also rented space in Robert’s offices to oversee his growing business concerns away from football. Robert’s legal secretary, Cathy Ronda, became O. J.’s personal assistant. The connection between the two men was a very strong one.
Robert wanted to pursue interests in music, one of his great loves. His fortunes were transformed in 1973, when he set up a magazine, Radio & Records, with his brother Tommy and a new partner, Robert Wilson, who had many music contacts. They had spotted a gap in the market for a weekly trade publication for radio and the music industry in general. At least a third of the pages were charts and statistics. Record company executives could see what radio stations in Alabama or Iowa were playing that week. The idea was to turn it into something that was an essential read for anyone working in the world of music and, to that end, it succeeded brilliantly. It became widely known as R&R, a sister to the famous Billboard, and an industry bible.
Eventually, the success of this and some of the ventures with O. J. allowed Robert to reduce his law commitments until, in 1979, he was able to stop practising altogether. By that time, he had fallen in love.
When Robert George Kardashian met Kristen Mary Houghton, he was a lawyer, an entrepreneur and a very eligible bachelor living in Los Angeles. She was an 18-year-old girl from San Diego growing accustomed to the finer things in life, thanks to a relationship with a professional golfer 12 years her senior.
They bumped into each other at the renowned Del Mar Thoroughbred racetrack, which boasted the famous slogan ‘Where the Turf Meets the Surf’. In the summer months, Hollywood stars would mingle with the cream of moneyed society in a beautiful setting by the ocean. A consortium of famous actors from the golden age, including Gary Cooper and Oliver Hardy of Laurel and Hardy, had clubbed together to build the course. They were led by Bing Crosby, who was on the gate
