by Jenner, Kris
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.)
We 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!
One 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.
My list of things to achieve had a lot of boxes to check off . . . and I started working hard to check them off one by one.
First, the show, which was the vehicle for everything that would follow. We never took a break after filming the first season; we just continued filming the second season immediately. And then a third. And a fourth.
I knew we were onto something big. And I loved the business side of all of this. That’s what drove me, that’s what excited me: the possibility to make this into something so much more than a TV show. Every time we renewed for another season, I would think to myself: How can I take these fifteen minutes of fame and turn them into thirty? How can I get paid to do what I love? I felt like I had a responsibility to not only turn out a really good show season after season but to use the show for a springboard for something permanent, something lasting for the kids. I was, after all, now the manager of my kids. I was responsible for their futures. I took my job very seriously. So while I was producing that television series, I also had to find some time to think about what would come next.
Throughout my personal life, I’ve had to be the mom, the wife, and the daughter. Now I had to be the manager, the businesswoman, the television host, and the leader of the pack. I was the one that my family was looking to, asking, “Okay, Mom, what’s next?” I had to be so on top of it all, because I didn’t want to let anybody down. I had spent my entire life taking care of my family, and the last thing I wanted to do was waste this amazing opportunity.
I felt that if the girls were going to work this hard and show me that they could be this responsible and this devoted to something, then why not let them try their hands at whole new levels in the business world? Every six months, Kim and I would sit down and ask each other, “Okay, what are our goals?”
I felt like this was what I was born to do. I loved this process. First of all, I felt like the luckiest girl in the world, because I got to wake up every morning and work with my family. But even more, I loved being able to figure out what business opportunities suited which person, which person could handle what. It had to be a good fit. It couldn’t just be “Oh, we’re going to endorse this, do that, and make this appearance”; everybody has a different personality, so each person was going to have a different path, from which passions to pursue to which products to endorse. When you are doing a television show, you not only have eighteen-hour days of filming; you also have all the press and travel that go along with promoting the show . . . Before you know it, the show leads to other things . . .
The first thing that happened was our show went international. One after another, countries around the world started watching Keeping Up with the Kardashians. When audiences in the United States were watching Season Three, audiences in Brazil, Argentina, and Australia were watching Season Two. Soon audiences around the world were having the Kardashian experience. Little by little, the rest of the world was falling in love with the family. It was crazy. We were like, What?!
I remember going to Mexico and turning on the TV, and there I was on the screen. I thought, Wow, this is crazy. I’m in another country and I’m watching myself on TV.
I think that foreign audiences fell in love with the same things people fell in love with in the States: our spontaneity and our willingness to let everything hang out for the cameras. It was definitely a universal acceptance, which was a very heady feeling.
I was able to check another goal off my wish list. International television show? Check!
The next goal was a lifelong one: to have a talk show or to be a television host. As I mentioned earlier, one of my best friends is Kathie Lee Gifford. For thirty years I watched her work as a TV host and was always so proud of her. I loved that she had this amazing career, and I really admired her and the fact that she always did so much, both professionally and personally. I always dreamed of having a great full-time TV job like hers someday. But who goes after dreams like that at the age of fifty? Who would think that anyone over thirty-five could re-create herself on television?
In 2008, Kim was asked to do Dancing with the Stars for ABC. I encouraged her to do the show because I thought it was an amazing opportunity to attract people who don’t watch E! Dancing with the Stars could tap into a whole new audience. If Kim could gain some favo
r and win some hearts on Dancing with the Stars, maybe viewers of that show would wander over to our network.
Kim was a little nervous. She’s not a dancer. She doesn’t have any moves on the dance floor. She was never the kid who went to tap or ballet lessons. That wasn’t Kim. But it was my thing—I loved to dance—and I persuaded her to do it. I would have loved to have done Dancing with the Stars, and here, as with things before, I was able to live vicariously through Kim.
Kim will listen to what I have to say, really think about it, and she will often take my advice. She commits herself 150 percent to whatever it is I ask her to do. It is amazing to have a kid who, as an adult, really sees the same vision and has the same goals that I do. Kim really gets it; and she’s a trouper.
Well, after Kim accepted the job with Dancing with the Stars, the producer Linda Bell Blue, the producer from Entertainment Tonight and The Insider, called me and asked me for a meeting. At the meeting, Linda said, “Will you be a correspondent on our show for Dancing with the Stars while your daughter is in the competition?” Life was just getting better and better by the day. Now, not only was my daughter going to be on Dancing with the Stars, but they were asking me to be a cohost on The Insider. I was over the moon. I literally couldn’t believe that a dream that I’d had for my entire life was coming true.
I worked alongside Lara Spencer, lifestyle editor of Good Morning America, who later became a dear friend. At first I had no idea how I could make it work. I was already shooting my own television show eighteen hours a day, seven days a week. I also had to attend every rehearsal and every performance for Dancing with the Stars because I was Kim’s manager. How could I take on another show?
Luckily, Entertainment Tonight and The Insider taped at 5:00 a.m. A car picked me up at around 3:15 in the morning and drove me, in the dark, to Paramount’s Radcliffe studios in the San Fernando Valley. By the time I arrived at the studio, it was about 3:45 a.m. and I would go into hair and makeup and be on set by 5:00. When I drove home after taping it was only 8:00 a.m. I was already in hair and makeup and I was able to walk right onto the set of Keeping Up with the Kardashians, which of course was being filmed in my house. I did that for nine months. It was a real test of my energy, my dedication, my passion, and my work ethic. And I pulled it off.
Next goal on my wish list, to cohost a major network television show: Check!
Kim did three episodes of Dancing with the Stars before the judges ended her run. Dancing is just not her thing and she is confident enough to admit it. But she challenged herself to do something outside her comfort zone and worked her ass off while making some lifelong friends in the process. I remember her first dance with Mark Ballas (who now, years later, is giving her dancing lessons for her wedding). It was a fox-trot, and Kim was so gorgeous with a flapper hairstyle and a long beaded gown. She looked elegant and confident, and took the judges’ critiques very professionally.
Kim learned a lot from this experience, and I did too. It taught me a lot about my ability to work hard, get up early, and expand my horizons. It also taught me that you never know when or how one experience will lead to the next opportunity. After Dancing with the Stars ended, The Insider sent me to cover the Super Bowl in January 2009. As it turned out, it would be an extremely fateful Super Bowl for me businesswise.
Leaving my hotel for the game, I rushed into the elevator. I had to get to the stadium before a certain time or they wouldn’t let me onto the field. Bruce Springsteen was performing, and I didn’t want to be late. There was one other person in the elevator on that day. He was a big guy with white tube socks and a beach chair in his hand and binoculars around his neck, wearing a Super Bowl T-shirt and some crazy shorts that didn’t match and were too short. I noticed that he had white legs and a sunburned face. A true fan ready to go to the Super Bowl.
“Hey, you’re Kris Jenner!” he shouted as the elevator doors closed and we headed down to the lobby. He started telling me how much he loved the show, and, well, since I was in a hurry, I sort of brushed the guy off. Suddenly the elevator made a funny sound . . . and then stopped.
I started pushing buttons like crazy. Nothing. We were stuck between floors, and I was really upset. I wasn’t in the best of moods anyway, because I was under a ton of stress and a deadline, and I couldn’t get the elevator to take me down to the ground floor.
The stranger in the bermuda shorts started pushing the elevator buttons, too, and talking a mile a minute.
Soon I was practically yelling at him: “Stop! Don’t push the button again! Stop it!”
I was giving him orders. Finally, the elevator lurched to a start and opened on the seventh floor, where I got off. I was trying to get to the lobby and didn’t want to get stuck on that damned elevator again. He got off there too. I got back on another elevator, and he followed me back onto that one.
“Don’t touch the buttons,” I warned him, and he did exactly as I said, like a little boy. When we finally got down to the lobby, I was already fifteen minutes late, and I needed to make up the time. I started running toward the BMW limousine waiting for me outside.
The guy from the elevator ran after me, calling out, “Hey, Kris, I just wanted to give you my card before we part.”
I turned back to him impatiently, as if he was the last person I’d ever want to call.
Big mistake.
He handed me his card and said, “My name is Tom Dowd. I’m the senior vice president of GNC.”
Instantly, my face switched into the biggest smile I could muster. I went straight from bitch to businesswoman.
“Oh my God, Tom, why didn’t you say so?” I purred.
Ever since Bruce and I had launched our infomercial television career in exercise equipment back in the ’90s, I had wanted to get into the nutrition and diet business. It was yet another dream, and GNC is the leader when it comes to vitamins and supplements. I wanted to jump back into the stalled elevator with Tom Dowd. I took another two or three minutes to talk to him and I said upon leaving, “I would love to talk to you more.”
“We would love to have somebody like you on our team,” he said.
Long story short, within ten days I was back at my house in California and Tom Dowd was sitting in my office. No shorts or white tube socks this time; he was in a suit and tie. I was ready to do battle with the supplement business. And as our relationship grew, Tom brought in a colleague of his, Keith Frankel. To this day, Keith Frankel is my business partner in our vitamin and weight-loss business, called Quick Trim. I was able to turn a near miss into what is now a very lucrative business. All of my children are involved in it—even Scott Disick got a job working for Keith—and Keith Frankel is now my business partner and collaborator in all things diet and nutrition.
This is something to remember: you never know what opportunity is going to present itself—or where. It’s a lesson Robert Kardashian used to tell me on a regular basis. Business 101: Be nice to everybody. Never take anyone at face value. These are life lessons I needed to remember. I could’ve blown off Tom Dowd—and almost did!—but being stuck in that elevator with him was just meant to be.
Nutritional supplement business: Check!
As we added all these titles to my résumé and to my kids’ plates, I realized that there were a lot of categories out there yet to conquer. The television show became my day job, and everything else became a passion, one move at a time. I had always had the energy and motivation and passion to pursue all these dreams, but it took a show like Keeping Up with the Kardashians to be the vehicle that could channel all my energies and turn them into viable opportunities. I started to look at our careers like pieces on a chess board. Every day, I woke up and walked into my office and asked myself, “What move do you need to make today?” It was very calculated. My business decisions and strategies were very intentional, definite, and—other than chance encounters in elevators—planned to the nth degree.
Every day, I had to answer a laundry list of questions: Where does this chi
ld need to be and how is she (or he) going to get there? It was work: filming the show and then traveling to events and appearances, all of which required intense coordination and scheduling.
On the day I am writing this, for example, Kim is doing Project Runway in New York. When she walks on set, I’ll be on the phone with her. “Did you sign your contract?” I’ll ask. “How’s everything going? Did your hair and makeup go well? Don’t forget, your car’s picking you up at such and such a time to take you over to the television station to do another talk show.”
On and on it goes. The coordination of the girls’ schedules is like the engine that keeps everything running. It soon became insurmountable by myself. I had to begin building a team, starting with our agents, who began to diligently build the girls’ calendars and run their master schedule with me. That, in and of itself, soon became a full-time job.
In 2009, I had an idea to tape the girls by themselves and give them a spin-off show instead of just featuring them in Keeping Up with the Kardashians.
It began one day when they said, “Mom, we want to open a store in Miami.”
“You do? That’s a great idea!” I replied.
Kourtney loves Miami. When she was younger, she and Kim and Khloé would go to Miami to celebrate New Year’s Eve. If we were opening a store there, why not add a television component? The show would be about the girls moving to Miami for the summer, where they would design and stock the store, hire the employees—or “Dash Dolls,” as they called them—and get ready for the store’s launch, which Kim flew in to attend.
We took it to Ryan Seacrest and the E! execs, and they said, “Let’s do it.”
Kourtney & Khloé Take Miami was born.
It ran two seasons. Kourtney revealed her pregnancy on the show, and the second season finale had 3.6 million viewers.