Halperin Ian - Kardashian dynasty : the controversial rise of Americas royal family

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To Jackie Collins,

The most noble, selfless, whip-smart, do-gooder author ever. One runaway bestseller after another. You dared to define another side of Hollywood.

There will never be another you. RIP!!!

CHAPTER ONE

S hortly after 5:00 p.m. on June 17, 1994, an unknown businessman with bushy eyebrows and salt-and-pepper hair stepped to the microphone before a throng of reporters and a TV audience of millions to read a prepared statement on behalf of his longtime friend and former roommate O. J. Simpson.

As the man read O.J.s statementinterpreted by most observers as a suicide notehis name flashed on the screen. It was the first time most people had heard the name Kardashian.

Five days earlier, Simpsons ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and a waiter named Ronald Goldman were found brutally murdered outside her Brentwood condominium. Suspicion immediately focused on former football star Simpson, whose on-again, off-again relationship with Nicole had been tumultuous.

Robert Kardashian first heard about the murders on the morning of June 13 from a friend, who had heard about them from her hairdresser. Stunned, he immediately drove to Simpsons Rockingham estate. During the ten-minute drive, he placed a call to his ex-wife Kris Jenner.

Did you hear Nicole was killed? he asked.

Kris told him she had heard the news from Nicoles mother.

I was supposed to have lunch with Nicole today, she informed him, still reeling from the shock.

In the days to come, O.J. would quietly move into Kardashians home to escape the media circus. Together, they put together a legal team and planned a strategy. It was from Kardashians Encino home, in fact, that O.J. took off in a white Bronco SUV with his friend Al Cowlings, beginning the most famous police chase in history.

Simpson had been scheduled to surrender himself to authorities that morning at 11:00 a.m. but had failed to appear, prompting Los Angeles police to declare him a fugitive. Shortly after Kardashian read his friends statement, law enforcement authorities zeroed in on Simpsons Bronco on Interstate 5, setting off a worldwide frenzy that ended hours later in O.J.s arrest for the murders of Nicole and Goldman.

For the duration of the subsequent nine-month trial, Kardashian would sit silently next to O.J. on the defense bench every day as a member of his vaunted Dream Team. In the process, he became a household name. For almost a year, the world was riveted by the trial, while a large segment of the population obsessed over the minute details of the case and the personalities of its many players. After the verdict, the media and the public eventually turned their attention to other matters.

Few could have predicted that two decades later, the case would inadvertently give rise to a celebrity phenomenon that would eventually occupy more column inches and magazine covers than even the Trial of the Century.

W hen Robert Kardashian was born in 1944, America was still fighting a world war. And while the war heralded an economic recovery from the Great Depression, which had ravaged the economy, most Americans were waiting until the war ended to start families because of lingering economic uncertainties. The Allied victory in 1945 eventually gave rise to the countrys largest ever baby boom. However, unlike most Americans who had suffered through the Depression, Roberts parents, Helen and Arthur Kardashian, didnt need to worry about their financial future.

By the time Robert came along, Arthur was one of the wealthiest businessmen in Los Angeles. His vast fortune, however, wasnt a result of the Horatio Alger, rags-to-riches, immigrant-made-good story that the American public liked to feast on. Arthur hadnt pulled himself up by his own bootstraps. It was his father, Tatos, who had arrived in America three decades earlier and started a garbage-collection business that would eventually see Robert Kardashian born into the lifestyle that would come to be associated with his family name.

For his part, Tatos Kardashian owed his success as much to superstition as to hard workand to a mystical prophet that helped his family escape genocide.

In the mid-nineteenth century, a group of Protestant Armenian religious rebels known as the Molokans were given permission by Tsar Nicholas II to escape religious persecution in Armenia and move to the Russian village of Karakale, which is today a part of Turkey. The Molokansroughly translated as milk loversearned the title because they often ate and drank milk and other banned foods on religious feast days. Their defiance of Eastern Orthodox customs earned them the scorn of their fellow Armenians, who would often shun them or violently attack them as heretics. A smaller sect of Molokan religious zealots were known as Jumpers because of their tendency to leap in the air and raise their fists in worship during church services, in a religious fervor similar to that displayed by Pentecostalists.

One such Jumper family was Sam and Hurom Kardaschoffthe Russian version of Kardashian who gave birth in Karakale to a boy named Tatos in 1896.

Four decades earlier, another boy from Karakale named Efim Klubinikenan illiterate twelve-year-oldwas said to have issued an apocalyptic prophecy:

Those who believe in this will go on a journey to a far land, while the unbelievers will remain in place. Our people will go on a long journey over the great and deep waters. People from all countries will go there. There will be a great war. All kings will shed blood like great rivers. Two steamships will leave to cross the impassable ocean.

The prophecy was ignored. But in the early years of the twentieth century, Klubinikennow a respected village eldercalled a meeting of church leaders from the region and reminded them of his boyhood prediction. He warned them that the time was coming for them to escape Russia and that soon they would be barred from leaving. He pointed to a map of the West Coast of the United States and declared that his people should settle in Americathe land of the livingbefore it was too late.

He prophesied this was the time for them to leave Russia as there were terrible times coming, especially for the Armenians, researcher Joyce Keosababian-Bivin later told the London Daily Mail .

Over the next ten years, more than two thousand ethnic Armenians heeded the warning and fled to California, even as their friends and neighbors taunted them for believing such superstitious nonsense.

In 1913, Tatoss parents made their way to Bremen and boarded the SS Brandenburg to Philadelphia. A month later, seventeen-year-old Tatos followed on the SS Kln . On board the cramped ship, he met another fleeing Jumper, Hamas Shakarian, whom he would later marry.

Four years later, as the First World War raged and Russia became engulfed in revolution, Turkish forces stormed the region, massacring Armenians, including virtually every inhabitant of Karakale. Eventually more than 1.5 million Armenians would perish in a genocide that was said to have inspired Hitlers Final Solution. Today, Armenians refer to the slaughter as the Great Calamity. If the Kardashians hadnt heeded the warnings of the prophet Efim Klubiniken, they would almost certainly have been counted among its victims.