Kim

by Sean Smith

  Kim, like many teenagers, was swayed by what was ‘in’ and popular at school. They all watched Melrose Place so they could talk about it the next day. The popular prime-time soap followed the lives of young men and women living in an apartment complex in West Hollywood. It was the follow-on series from the hugely popular Beverly Hills, 90210, another Aaron Spelling-produced programme. Coincidentally, Kim was actually at El Rodeo School, which has a 90210 postcode, when that show aired.

  Even though she was only 11 when it finished, she also liked The Golden Girls, which she watched as reruns. Another favourite sitcom was Growing Pains, which featured a teenage Leonardo DiCaprio in an early role. It was the story of a family of two parents and four children and followed the dramas of their everyday lives.

  The most inspiring film for Kim was the cult success Clueless, because she loved the fashions and decided she was going to be the main character, Cher Horowitz, played by Alicia Silverstone. ‘I literally had at least 10 of the outfits Cher had,’ she confessed. In the film, the heroine is a rich and privileged girl living in a Beverly Hills mansion, like Kim was, and her father is a lawyer.

  The show that had by far the most significant influence on Kim began broadcasting on MTV in 1992. It was called The Real World and is widely acknowledged to be the model for the modern reality shows that followed, including Keeping Up with the Kardashians. It is no surprise to learn that the production company Bunim/Murray is responsible for both programmes. They also produced The Simple Life, with Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie.

  In the show, a group of seven or eight young adults are selected to share a house and interact – or, more precisely, fall out – with each other. It’s a simple formula that has worked well over the years, from Big Brother to the Kardashian blockbuster. It has always been hugely popular with a teenage audience in the US. Its themes include plenty of dysfunctional behaviour, addiction, drunkenness, eating disorders, sexuality, racism, politics, religion and, of course, an on-screen wedding or two – all the ingredients of classic reality television are here. Kim loved it.

  Jonathan Murray explained the thinking behind the ground-breaking show: ‘We’ve always been interested in what the people across the street were doing. We’re gossips. So, at the very beginning of Real World, it was like being a fly on the wall watching these people lead their lives.’

  He is most proud of the storyline in the third series that featured a gay man, Pedro Zamora, who was dying from AIDS. His inclusion brought the subject of HIV into millions of living rooms around the country. Even President Clinton told Jonathan that Pedro’s story made more of a difference than anything he could do from the Oval Office. The producer recalled proudly, ‘We got to deliver to our viewers entertaining television but also television that actually changed their lives.’ When Pedro died, the audience felt they had lost someone they knew. It demonstrated the positive effect reality TV could have. During its first season, an article in the New York Times said: ‘The series has been steadily evolving into the year’s most riveting series, a compelling portrait of twenty-somethings grappling with the nineties.’

  It’s easy to see how The Real World came to represent the standard to which other reality shows aspire. Kim Kardashian, watching in her father’s house in Encino, was so hooked on the show that she abandoned her ambition to be a housewife with a large family. Instead, she wanted to be on The Real World.

  A more pressing concern was the realisation that her elder sister was going away to college. Kourtney was accepted by Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, to study communications and journalism. It was not a happy time. She was homesick, and her family back in Los Angeles, particularly Kim, missed her terribly. After sticking with it for two years, she transferred to the University of Arizona, where she had many friends. Her new course of theatre studies suited her creative side much more. Part of the major involved acting classes and being filmed – skills that would serve her well in the future.

  Kourtney persuaded Kim to live full time with their father, who would have been on his own when his eldest daughter left. Kim enjoyed the settled nature of being in Encino. As well as working at Body, she started helping out at her father’s business, which was called Movie Tunes, Inc. It was proving to be another success story.

  The company provided music for cinemas, fulfilling a need for both movie theatres and record companies wishing to increase exposure for their performers. Originally, artists used Movie Tunes, Inc. as an outlet when they were unable to secure the radio airplay they wanted, usually because they were considered past their sell-by date. By the time Kim came on board, however, bigger stars, including the Spice Girls and Janet Jackson, were involved. Her job was principally to answer the telephones, do the filing and help burn the CDs.

  Each month, Movie Tunes, Inc. produced a 14-song, hour-long music show for cinemas, which, according to Robert, reached more than 75 million theatregoers. The captive audience that had come out to watch a film was encouraged to buy a disc of the music from a concession stand. Robert had identified another essential marketing tool for the music business, just as he had done 20 years earlier with Radio & Records.

  Her work experience was preparing Kim for life after Marymount. Before she left high school, when she was 17, her parents had to write a letter with advice about her future. They both said very similar things about demanding respect and being respectful in return, treating others how you would want to be treated, having a strong head and not succumbing to peer pressure. Robert’s phrase was the most memorable: ‘Know your self-worth.’ It could have come from one of Bruce’s motivational speeches. Always the doting father, Robert couldn’t resist adding that she should know what a pretty girl she was.

  She looked forward to her senior prom. She managed to persuade her father that she needed a dress by her then favourite designer, Mark Wong Nark. She still loves his dresses. This one was white and floor length, with a square neckline and a slit up the front. T. J. was on hand to accompany her, looking immaculate and suave in a black tuxedo. Kim wore her hair up and the two of them looked like a very glamorous young Hollywood couple, which, of course, they were. They even managed two of the cheesiest grins for the official photographer, revealing pearly smiles that even the most expensive Beverly Hills dentist would have been proud of. They looked very happy together.

  Sadly, however, they broke up soon afterwards. The relationship had been winding down, as the demands of touring with 3T took T. J. away more and more. He remained popular with Kim’s family, though. In the very small world they inhabited, the Kardashians didn’t sever links with the Jackson clan. In fact, Kourtney started dating T. J.’s elder brother, Taryll.

  Kim, meanwhile, was soon to make a dramatic life choice. She would leave the safe cocoon of her Beverly Hills upbringing in favour of the real world.

  Part Two

  Kim Kardashian

  8

  Mrs Thomas

  Kim looked at pictures of interracial couples in the teen magazines she bought as a schoolgirl and thought they looked cute together. Very occasionally she has gone out with white guys. When she was 19, for instance, she went on one date with the actor and former child star Joey Lawrence, but it was nothing. She knew from an early age the type she liked and has never made a secret of her attraction to black men.

  Damon Thomas wasn’t cute. He was flash and edgy and came into her life like a whirlwind the moment he walked into Body one Saturday afternoon. He was much cooler than the safe celebrities of Beverly Hills with whom she had grown up. He was 10 years older than her, for a start, and that was flattering.

  In 1999, Damon was a record producer going places. He told Kim that he had just started a production team called The Underdogs and that he personally worked with Babyface. That got her attention, because Kenneth ‘Babyface’ Edmonds was one of her favourite artists and wrote some of the most memorable songs of her teenage years, including the Boyz II Men classics ‘End of the Road’ and ‘I’ll Make Love to You’. />
  He helped Damon learn about production, while they worked together on a number of songs, including co-writing and producing ‘These Are the Times’, which was a top five Billboard R & B chart hit for the vocal group Dru Hill in the autumn of 1998, and ‘Never Gonna Let You Go’, which made number one in the same chart for the singer Faith Evans in 1999.

  Less auspiciously, Damon had a run-in with the rapper Dr Dre (Andre Young). The two had apparently got into a fight at an apartment in Woodland Hills, just up from Calabasas. Dr Dre faced assault charges after Damon suffered a broken jaw in the row. A spokesman for the city attorney said ‘the incident stems from an inappropriate remark that Mr Thomas had made to Mr Young’s girlfriend.’ Dr Dre subsequently was fined $10,000 and sentenced to 90 days’ house arrest.

  For The Underdogs project, Damon teamed up with former college basketball player Harvey Mason, Jr, who had spent a lifetime among the musical elite of Los Angeles. His father, Harvey Sr, was a jazz drummer who played with outstanding performers, including Herbie Hancock and Quincy Jones. He used to take his son along to recordings.

  While Damon was a protégé of Babyface, Harvey Jr was working with another leading producer, Rodney Jerkins, and his Darkchild crew on projects involving Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson and Toni Braxton.

  When Damon and Harvey decided to work together, they were a dream team. They joined forces initially to write a track called ‘I Like Them Girls’, which they went on to produce for the album 2000 Watts for the male model-turned-singer Tyrese.

  There’s no doubt that Kim found Damon exciting, especially as she had lived a comparatively sheltered life and was, after all, a Catholic schoolgirl. She had been a big fan of ’N Sync at school, and this new man in her life was actually friends with Justin Timberlake. He was also writing a song for Pink, one of the hottest new acts. T. J. was lovely, but Damon was different. He was a man making his way in the world purely on the basis of his talent.

  She was swept away by it all and decided to leave the comfort of her father’s house and move in with Damon. He had an apartment in Romar Street, Northridge – a Valley neighbourhood that wasn’t the least bit fashionable and was even more remote than Calabasas. Neither of her parents knew she was sharing her new home with a boyfriend, although Kris was suspicious when Kim arrived in Hidden Hills one day behind the wheel of a top-of-the-range Jaguar sports car. How on earth could she afford that while she was still working at Body? Kris even phoned up Robert to find out if he had anything to do with it. She didn’t know that her daughter was involved with a music high-flyer.

  Damon took Kim to Justin’s twentieth birthday party in Las Vegas in January 2000. While they were there, it seemed like the perfect time to get married. She became Kimberly Thomas on 22 January 2000. It wasn’t the fairy-tale Beverly Hills wedding Robert Kardashian or Kris Jenner had wanted for their beautiful daughter. Their own big day had been perfect and, naturally, they hoped for something similar for Kim. As it turned out, Robert Kardashian would never have the opportunity to walk any of his daughters down the aisle.

  Kim didn’t know how to tell her family, so she didn’t. Instead, Mrs Thomas returned to Northridge and kept her secret for three months. She did tell her friends, however, and swore them to secrecy. That didn’t work, because one of them rang Kourtney to tell her the news. She went online and found her younger sister’s marriage certificate from Vegas. Kourtney did what any big sister would do in these circumstances – she told her mother.

  Kris rallied round. She may not have been happy about the situation, but she wasn’t a hypocrite. After all, she had been younger than Kim when she became engaged for the first time, and she was only 22 when she got married.

  Kim’s father wasn’t as philosophical about the situation. He refused to speak to his daughter, perhaps more through disappointment than anger. When he finally met Damon, he didn’t like him and he didn’t care for the relationship. He would have preferred her to have waited and, according to friends, was happy to tell her what he thought. He didn’t want her to be with Damon. He wasn’t as understanding as her mother.

  Kris reveals in her memoir how, when she first met him, she tore into Damon for taking advantage of her teenage daughter, but she accepted they were married and did her best to include Damon in family gatherings. He remained a bit of an outsider, however. In her book, he isn’t even afforded the privilege of a pseudonym. He isn’t named at all. He is just ‘the husband’.

  Kim gave up her job at Body less than two months after her marriage. She would later state, in an astonishing court declaration, that she did so because Damon told her to. ‘He said that he did not want me to have contact with my old boyfriends, who would be able to reach me at the clothing store. He said that he wanted to know where I was at all times.’

  If all the allegations in the divorce papers are to be believed, this was the start of an unhappy period in Kim’s life. She claimed that Damon preferred her to stay at home and wanted her to prepare meals for him, even if he arrived home at 4.30 in the morning after a long session in the studio.

  Damon, she alleged in August 2003, wouldn’t allow her to leave the house unless he knew exactly when and where she was going. She claimed that she couldn’t go to the mall by herself, or dine with friends she had known since she was a child and that he even tried to poison her mind against her family, calling her mother and sisters ‘evil’. She said, ‘Damon decided what we would do and when we would do it. He was very much the “King of the Castle”.’

  Now that she no longer had her wage from Body, she needed to find other ways of supplementing the income she had from helping her father at Movie Tunes, Inc. Working in the boutique had given her the opportunity to meet clients whom she could advise on their wardrobe choices. It was an upmarket store, so customers invariably had some money to spend and were happy to pay Kim extra for her help. That revenue was now lost as well.

  She needed to find something she could do at home or a sideline she could work on during the quieter moments at her father’s office. It was while there that she started taking an interest in eBay. The ubiquitous online auction site seems to have been around for many years, but it only launched in September 1995. Kim spotted its potential. Arguably, the most useful attribute she inherited from her mother and father was their entrepreneurial spirit – the ability to identify a way to earn money and to exploit the opportunity fully.

  She was a huge fan of Manolo Blahnik shoes. They were the must-have fashion footwear for celebrities and well-off women. Their appeal greatly increased when they featured heavily in Sex and the City. In the third series, broadcast in the autumn of 2000, the lead character Carrie Bradshaw, played by Sarah Jessica Parker, is mugged for her pair of Manolos, as they are popularly known.

  Kim became aware of them when J.Lo wore them. She still absolutely adored J.Lo and couldn’t stop singing her breakthrough hit ‘If You Had My Love’ around the house and in the car. She checked with a store and they had five pairs similar to the ones J.Lo sported, but they were $700 each.

  She did what any young entrepreneur would do under these circumstances. She borrowed the money from her father, who, as usual, demanded that she sign a contract agreeing to repay the money with interest. She bought all five pairs and then put them up for sale on eBay. It was her first real business success. Each pair sold for $2,500; altogether, she made a profit of $9,000. From that moment on, if there was anything in her wardrobe that she wasn’t wearing, she would sell it on eBay. She was very unsentimental about it.

  Meanwhile, her husband’s fortunes were also on the up. The new millennium began the golden years for Damon and The Underdogs. They produced many tracks for Tyrese and old friends, such as Babyface and Brian McKnight, but also branched out to a more mainstream audience, by working with Lionel Richie and with Victoria Beckham on her solo album. Most of their recordings for Kim’s teenage favourite ended up as B-sides to singles, but one track, ‘Girlfriend’, made the final cut. The album wasn’t the succ
ess everyone had hoped for, though.

  Much more successful was a collaboration with Justin Timberlake. The singer was passionate about basketball and had idolised Michael Jordan growing up in Tennessee, so he formed an easy friendship with Harvey Mason, who had played practically at professional level. Brian McKnight, one of the smoothest R & B vocalists, was also mad about basketball, so recording often took a back seat while the four friends went outside to shoot hoops.

  The Underdogs wrote and produced ‘Still on My Brain’ for Justin’s debut album, Justified. It was a slow and soulful number about lost love. Beautifully sung, it is a stand-out track and one that hasn’t dated. While, as fans thought, the song might be about Justin’s break with Britney Spears, it could just as easily reflect any painful split.

  In her divorce papers, Kim claimed that an appalling incident occurred on a day when she and Damon were going skydiving with Justin. She alleged: ‘Before we left our home, Damon hit me in the face and cut my lip open. I fell onto the bed frame and banged my knee hard. I was limping when we went skydiving.’

  Her declaration states that Damon started hitting her a few months into their marriage. She points out that she is 5ft 3in tall and weighs 107 pounds. Damon, she says, is 5ft 10in and 175 pounds. In one incident at her mother’s house, she claimed that he became angry after learning she had paged someone on her beeper: ‘I told him the name of the friend. He became enraged and punched me in the face. My face was bruised and swollen as a result. I thought about calling the police, but was afraid and decided not to do so.’

  It was a relief for everyone when they separated in early 2003. After she was no longer living with Damon, she claimed she experienced the worst of his violence against her. She recalled in the papers how she went back to the house to collect some personal items on the night before the rest of her belongings were due to be moved. She described what allegedly happened when she went into the bathroom to collect some toiletries: ‘Damon screamed that I should get out of his bathroom immediately. He came at me and slammed me against the closet wall. He held me up against the wall with his hands around my neck and threatened to choke me. He then took one hand and punched the wall right next to my head.