The offices of Kylie Cosmetics are situated in the gleaming blur of a California office park corridor just off the 101, in the no man’s land beyond Calabasas. This low-slung architectural cluster, nestled into the almost cartoonishly parched and beautiful foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains, is home to corporate support centers, strip malls and restaurants with beer-and-margarita happy hours.
Theirs is a world so art-directed and specific that it’s jarring to find a piece of the Kardashian-Jenner brand sprawl here, in this most anodyne of American landscapes. Indeed, when the double doors to the reception area glide open, I am taken aback. I tell the receptionist, a giant neon KYLIE sign glowing pink behind her, that I am here to see Kris Jenner, mother of Kylie, her sixth and youngest child, whose success landed her on the cover of Forbes at 20. The room has the feel of a luxe Tribeca loft—a long white sofa, fuzzy bouclé chairs, a coffee table piled with art and photography books. In case you still aren’t sure where you are, there’s a bank of video monitors soundlessly streaming images of Kylie at campaign shoots or Kylie interviewing her sister Khloé. The quiet storm of Sade’s contralto fills the room—a sign that Kris Jenner has, at least for the moment, control of the playlist.
And here comes Kris now, wearing a black-and-white Alexander McQueen military-cut maxi-sweater with black Prada combat boots. “I’m building a house,” she says, as she fetches me from reception, “and I was at the job site early this morning and I was freezing.” We head off on a tour of the joint, stopping first at her and Kylie’s matching side-by-side offices, each the size of a decent apartment. “Cozy,” says Jenner and laughs. A year ago, Coty named Kris Jenner chief executive officer of Kylie Cosmetics after buying a 51 percent stake in the brand for $600 million in 2019. She also negotiated Coty’s $200 million purchase of a 20 percent stake in KKW Beauty, Kim Kardashian West’s cosmetics line. While Jenner, 65, acknowledges that this is “definitely a great stage in my life,” she will also remind you that she’s been “CEO of my family for a very, very long time,” and “all the experience I’ve had over 30 years of being a full-time businesswoman has led me to this very spot.”
It is the stuff of legend that the housewife Kris Kardashian married former Olympian Caitlyn Jenner in 1991 and quickly turned a lackluster career as a motivational speaker into a corporate-engagement and infomercial juggernaut. She took everything she learned from that make-it-up-as-you-go, on-the-fly rebranding of a faded cereal-box hero and applied it to her entire family when reality TV came calling. She has long contended that, once Keeping Up With the Kardashians was a worldwide hit, her only goal was to not waste all that fame and to seize the opportunities it afforded her children. She became the “momager” (a portmanteau she coined and trademarked) to her unlikely brood, and managed them into multiplatform multimillionaires.
In WSJ. Magazine's "The One" interview series, the matriarch of the Kardashian-Jenners discusses the final season of 'Keeping Up with the Kardashians'. Directed by Barbara Anastacio
Today, she has her hand in all of their brands and endorsement deals (and gets a 10 percent cut): Kylie Cosmetics also includes skin care; Kim has her beauty and fragrance brands, plus Skims, her shapewear company; Khloé’s clothing line, Good American; Kourtney’s lifestyle platform, Poosh; Rob’s sock company, Arthur George, as well as his clothing company, Halfway Dead, and hot sauce company, Grandeza Hot Sauce; Kendall’s new tequila brand, 818; and a set of three new Kendall and Kim fragrances that come out March 25. Kris is about to launch Safely, a direct-to-consumer line of plant-based cleaning and self-care products with Chrissy Teigen and Emma Grede (the CEO of Good American), and has recently signed a multiyear deal with the streaming service Hulu, where upcoming Kardashian-Jenner television programming will now live.There is a sense that Kris Jenner has ascended to a new league, with real power—and respect among business leaders. “I think the people in the entertainment business, people in Hollywood, people who make products that fit the family for marketing, they realize that she is this incredible engine behind all of it,” says Ryan Seacrest, the co-creator of KUWTK. “They realize, actually, the power that she has.”
Seacrest has known Jenner since the summer of 2007, when he first hired a crew to film her family at a barbecue at their Hidden Hills home to make a 15-minute sizzle reel to pitch a reality show about a complicated, almost-impossible-to-believe family that might approach the success of The Osbournes. Four weeks later they began filming the first eight episodes of a show that would last 14 years, the 20th and final season of which debuted this past week. “I knew she was clever,” Seacrest says of the woman he met back then, “and I remember seeing it, thinking, There is something magical to this.” But what he did not see coming was that Jenner was capable of managing KUWTK into a global franchise with hundreds of hours of shows, sold to over 200 territories around the world, plus 11 spin-offs. “I’m not so sure anybody else could have done that,” says Seacrest. “She’s one of the best dealmakers that I’ve ever seen deal. And I’ve sat with the Merv Griffins and Dick Clarks of the world and watched them negotiate deals, watched them on television and be the most congenial, affable, wonderful host and then sit down at the table at the Beverly Hills Hotel and be a tough dealmaker. She has both of those qualities, which is rare.”
“ “She’s one of the best dealmakers that I’ve ever seen deal.” ”
She is also one of the great entrepreneurs, marketers and talent managers of a generation. “If you think about it,” says Seacrest, “she’s executive-producing the show; she’s leveraging the momentum of the show and all the products for the family and all of their different deals; and she’s Mom. She’s, you know, at the center of the family as well. And it’s remarkable to see how well she has balanced all of it, how well she has parlayed it into major enterprises.”
Seacrest will be involved in the Kardashian-Jenner Hulu future, but only “in the initial stages,” he says. “The initial concept, ideas of what the universe will look like and feel like and be like. But it is not a hands-on, laborious job. The machine runs itself.” Jenner is very tight-lipped about what they’ve got in the pipeline, saying that nothing has been conceptualized and no producer has been chosen (even as she shot a Hulu promo the day before one of our interviews). “I’m guessing that we will start filming in a couple of months,” Jenner says. “When we first got the show, many years ago, I remember signing the deal with E! and I think we were shooting 30 days later…. I think this will be the same way. We’re dying to go do things together. We all had a really nice break. And if the world opens back up it will be a lot of fun.”
“Morning, guys!” Jenner says brightly to a cluster of employees, all socially distanced and wearing masks in a vast open-plan office. We head into the product room, where all of Kylie Cosmetics’ collections are displayed, and stand over some packaging with the now iconic Kylie logo image, one that is emblazoned on the double doors into reception, of slightly parted, very full lips, baring teeth, dripping in what could easily be mistaken for blood. “This was the very first thing we did,” she says, of the three lip kits that launched Kylie’s brand in November 2015. Eventually we settle in a conference room to eat lunch and talk. Kris’s assistant appears and quietly sets down a Cobb salad from Health Nut in front of me and something much more exotic looking for Jenner. “I’m doing a plant-based thing,” she says. “This is from Kim’s chef.” Is it a grilled-cheese sandwich? “Kiiind of. I think that’s the idea. But it’s got a lot of vegetables in it.”
Next to the place setting for my lunch is a Kylie notepad and a pink Kylie pen. There are bowls of candy set out here and there, reminding you that this direct-to-consumer business, which had $200 million in annual revenue in 2019, was started by a teenager. “Kylie really disrupted the beauty business,” Jenner says. “She knew exactly what she wanted to do, and exactly how she wanted to do it. She dictated the entire thing, from soup to nuts, and she used her own money…. I said, ‘Well, you better pick really good colors for your three lip kits because you’re either going to sell out in a couple of minutes or you’re going to be wearing this lipstick for the rest of your life.’”
Jenner has a tendency toward a kind of relentless positivity, but one gets the sense she’s genuinely enthused about her new role as beauty mogul. “I’m like a kid in a candy store,” she says. “And I think beauty is definitely my niche. I love all of it.” She only just trademarked a bunch of things related to her own name: “Kris Jenner Beauty,” “Kris Jenner Skin” and “Kris Jenner Skincare” among them, sparking buzz about her having her own skin-care brand in the works, which she confirms. “I’m obsessed with my skin and have always taken really good care of it,” she says. “I had my first facial when I was a very young girl and just never stopped, really. It was always a priority…. About four or five years ago, I decided to formulate a skin-care line…. I had some samples done up. So I do have a skin-care line that I love that’s ready to go…. When the time is right, a year from now, maybe two—I just think it’s really important for older women to realize that if they just take care of their skin, it’s not complicated…. So, I just did something that emulates exactly what my daily routine is. That will be my line.”
This is Jenner’s first proper office outside of her home in 10 years, which means that she has created this empire almost entirely from home. But this office space is also a physical manifestation of how this family has blurred the line between work and life (and real life and social-mediated life) so completely that it’s impossible to tell where one begins and the other ends. There is a YouTube studio, permanently lit and sound-checked, “so if Kylie gets inspired she can come in at any moment…. She pushes a button and it’s go,” Jenner says; there are also two glam rooms and an all-white seamless photography studio.
When I first arrive at Kylie Cosmetics and am waiting for Jenner in reception, I notice that the giant area rug is a perfectly manicured shag—as though someone had just vacuumed it. Or were those rake marks? There’s a passage early in Jenner’s memoir from 2012, Kris Jenner…and All Things Kardashian, where she recounts a story about working part-time jobs as a kid in the late ’60s—at her family’s candle store and at a doughnut shop in the mornings before catching the bus to school: “Our new house had red shag carpeting, gorgeous in those days. On Fridays, my mom would make me rake the rug to fluff it up before I could go out with my friends.” At the end of my tour of the new office space—after passing a giant piece of art leaning against a wall with Kris Jenner’s likeness made by a fan and fashioned entirely of crystals—we finally come to the end of a loop and head back through the double doors to arrive where we started, back in reception. Kris enters the room, hesitates for a split second and then decides to take a circuitous route around the shag rug. I follow directly behind her, as she carefully avoids walking on the carpet. “I don’t know why I do that,” she says to me over her shoulder, “Sorry. I do it every time.”
Kristen Jenner (née Houghton) comes from a long line of chin-up and get-it-done entrepreneurial women who preferred to be their own boss. Her grandmother Lou was born in Hope, Arkansas. Kris’s grandfather cheated on Lou, so she packed up her daughter, Mary Jo, and moved back home to Mississippi, where she opened a beauty parlor with her mother, Kris’s great-grandmother. Lou eventually moved to San Diego, where she remarried and with her new husband opened a candle store, the Candelabra, which they ran together for years.
Mary Jo Shannon, whom everyone calls MJ, is 86 and recently moved to Calabasas to be closer to her oldest daughter. But she had several of her own shops in the San Diego area. “I was very independent, too,” MJ says. “I started at 15 working at a department store. And I thought, This is it for me: I love the fashion, I love retail, but I can do this myself. So, I was brave, too.” She lets out a laugh. “But Kris took it beyond.”
Kris met Robert Kardashian, a lawyer from L.A., at the Del Mar racetrack when she was 17. She was already dating a pro golfer who was 12 years older—with Lou and MJ’s blessing. “In my family, if the matriarch says something is OK,” she writes in her book, “then it is OK. And everyone falls in line.” A few months after she met Kardashian, also 12 years older, she ran into him at a golf tournament at the Riviera Country Club in Los Angeles. They dated for four years, and she married him at 22. During more than a decade of marriage, and having Kourtney, Kim, Khloé and Rob, her husband controlled all the money. “I had never paid a bill,” she wrote.
When I bring this up—the irony of Kris Jenner being so clueless about money—she says, “One day, my friend Shelli Azoff said to me when I was going through my divorce [from Robert], ‘How much is your gardener?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know.’ And she said, ‘You don’t know?’ That was the turning point for me: I was embarrassed that I didn’t know. I woke up one day to responsibilities that I hadn’t had the day before. And I needed to figure it out. And the good news is, I pay attention…. I’m a quick study and I knew I had to get it together. And I felt such an enormous sense of accomplishment to be able to figure it all out and pay my own bills and make my own money and do my own taxes. And there were times when I didn’t have a lot of money, but I was very organized.” Today, she is a very wealthy woman with an estimated net worth of $190 million, according to Forbes, and a seasoned investor. “I’m interested in different ways that people make money—and in what’s happening around the world. And I’m interested in different businesses and how they evolve and how they become successful,” Jenner says. “I just enjoy the business world.”
In the summer of 1990, she met Jenner at a golf tournament, also at the Riviera, and they were married seven months later. Kris found out she was pregnant at the outset of the O.J. Simpson trial in early 1995. (The Kardashians were supporting cast members in the trial of the century: Robert Kardashian was Simpson’s best friend and one of his defense attorneys, and Kris Jenner was best friends with Nicole Brown Simpson.) Kendall, whose middle name is Nicole, was born exactly one month to the day after the verdict. The following summer, they moved into a six-bedroom house in the gated community of Hidden Hills in Calabasas. On their first Christmas in the new house, Kris discovered she was pregnant with her sixth child, Kylie.
One way to understand the success of KUWTK is that it depicts a big, roaring, argumentative family. Despite the not very relatable environs of Hidden Hills, the show projects some pretty old-fashioned family values: hard work, forgiveness, loyalty to the group above all else. “We were just raised that family was everything,” says Cynthia Bussey, whom everyone calls Cici, at her condo in Calabasas. (She is Robert Kardashian’s first cousin and has known Jenner since she was 17.) “Those girls—they respect [Kris] 150 million percent. You know? They can’t live without their mom. They call her for everything. Everything.” Kris herself, despite being a late-capitalist girlboss feminist, is old-fashioned, with genuinely conservative tendencies. She went to Bible study every week (at Pat Boone’s house!) for 15 years, and made lifelong friends there. “My faith is probably the most important thing in my life besides my family,” she says. “I pray every single day. That’s how I start my day, that’s how I end my day. I say my prayers when I’m on the treadmill.”
Even the way she talks can sometimes make her sound like a housewife from the ’50s. One day, Jenner told me a story about wanting to jump-start Kendall’s modeling career (Kendall would go on to become the world’s highest-paid model for a couple of years in a row, according to Forbes) and how she cold-called the fashion photographer Russell James. He agreed to come to the house in Hidden Hills to meet Kendall when she was a teenager. “I said, ‘Kendall, go upstairs and put on your cutest party dress and a bow in your hair because Russell James is coming over,’” Jenner recalls. “The doorbell rings… the house with the double staircase and black-and-white floors, and here comes Kendall, and she starts down the stairs and she’s wearing black skinny jeans with a crop top and her hair flowing, major heels, and I thought: That’s not a party dress! But she knew exactly how she wanted to present herself.”
“I think with six children, Kris has to—especially when she’s the manager—accept a lot of what’s going on in the modern world,” says MJ. “And I think she accepts what her children do graciously…. I think she’s very tolerant, but she is old-fashioned.”
Jenner is, arguably, now the most famous mother of her time. But she has somehow managed to avoid the fate of being labeled a stage mother, which Jenner certainly is. Stage mothers are almost always depicted as nightmares, living vicariously through their children. In the early years of KUWTK Jenner seemed to be in danger of tipping over into this gruesome cliché but pulled out of it, partly because her kids are such willing participants. “We will scream at her for having her mom hat on when we need the manager hat on,” says Kim, 40. “I feel so bad for her. She deserves every award on the planet for just having six kids who have really full lives. And torturing her the way that we do.”
“ “She was so strict with us on so many things but then so much fun. So she taught us so much of our work ethic. That was all her.” ”
But Jenner’s kids point to the balance she maintains in her life that keeps her sane. “I’ve never met someone who knows how to have such a good time but also have it so together. That’s why I get up at 5:58 every morning,” Kim says. “If it was 7 a.m. and we weren’t up and our beds weren’t made, she would be on the intercom screaming and waking us all up. On a Sunday, we were so embarrassed because all my friends would sleep in until 10 and she was like, ‘Till…what? Like, past 7? This doesn’t make sense.’ She was so strict with us on so many things but then so much fun. So she taught us so much of our work ethic. That was all her.”
“Every hour is accounted for,” says Khloé, 36. “I think that really gave us all a great foundation. And she always says her 5 p.m. vodka martini doesn’t hurt. So it’s a little bit of both. The structuredness, and then having the vodka.”
“I beg her to write a parenting guide,” says Jen Atkin, the hairstylist-turned-entrepreneur who has worked with and known the Kardashian-Jenners for over a decade. “We’ve joked about it for years. It’s going to be called It’s 6:30. Wake the F— Up.”
Jenner’s time-management skills are legendary—she wakes on Eastern time, often by 4 a.m., but goes to bed on Pacific time. She is also freakishly organized. “You can really tell a lot about a person if you look in their car,” says Jenner, who often drives a black Range Rover. “My car is…fantastic. I have the most perfectly organized car in the entire universe. It’s like a little office, and I know where everything is. So if I go dip in here with my right hand, I’m going to get a lozenge; here, on the left, I’m going to get a glasses wipe, or here, I’m going to get this little patch for my neck, a Salonpas…. I know where everything is and I can just—drive.”
Even her empire—modern in many respects—is built on some rather retrograde ideas of what women love: lipstick, perfume, undergarments. She has, with her children, transformed what were, in some cases, staid, even fusty old products. Her latest venture—one that has nothing to do with her family—is a line of cleaning products. Safely, featuring chemical-free home cleaning and self-care products, launches at the end of this month. “Kourtney has been talking about this with me for decades because she just doesn’t like the way products smell, and my house smelled very intensely sterilized at all times,” Jenner says. “She would really get on me for that. And I thought, Well, if it doesn’t smell like this then it’s not clean. That was my understanding of clean.”
Jenner has come around—and woken up about “wanting to get involved with and really make an investment in something that I think would be great for the future and for the planet,” she says. Jenner, Teigen and Grede put a lot of work into the scent and the packaging (minimalist design, mint-green bottles). “It was born out of the desire to keep our families safe from all of these [chemicals],” she says, “but here we are in the middle of a pandemic. It couldn’t have come at a better time.”
Atkin is one of the many people who turns to Kris for advice. “The biggest thing I brag about is that I have Kris Jenner’s cellphone number,” says Atkin, founder of the hair-care line Ouai. “I started to ask her questions about representation and contracts and branding—before I even created my own hair-care brand. And, you know, on top of that she’s also been a shoulder for me to cry on when I’ve had hardships in navigating the business world for the first time…. The boardroom can be ruthless, and you need to be able to really stand your ground and be confident. And I think that she really has helped me to know my worth.”
One Sunday morning at 8 a.m.—a week after my visit to Kylie Cosmetics—someone on Jenner’s team texts me Jenner’s phone number and tells me she’s expecting my call. She and her boyfriend, Corey Gamble, are packing the car to drive to the desert—Jenner’s house in Palm Springs. She does not want to say too much about her six-year relationship with Gamble, a 40-year-old talent manager. “He’s the greatest guy, and he’s just an amazing support system for me, and he really gives me a lot of strength and insight,” she says. “He’s a great sounding board. And he loves my kids and my mom, and they love him.” (For all of their success in business—and family building—the women in this matriarchy have been less successful at choosing partners. Indeed, Kim and Kanye West’s divorce, which is ongoing, is the only topic that is off-limits. “But I think it’s such a private time for them,” Jenner recently told The Kyle & Jackie O Show. “Kim wanted to deal with this her own way with her own family in her own time. So I think that’s going to be for her to work through and process and when she feels like it I’m sure she’ll say what she needs to say.”)
Jenner bought the house in Palm Springs from friends a few years ago and enjoys spending time there. “It’s very calming here. It’s not really about the house, it’s about the surroundings, the beauty and how it feels. It’s hard to explain. It’s about a feeling… and I get a lot of work done when I’m there,” she says. “And, of course, the minute I say I’m going to go, all the kids start telling me they’re coming to join.”
Jenner sold her house across the street from Kim in Hidden Hills a year ago and has put all of her stuff in storage while she builds a new house, almost from the ground up, this time next door to Khloé. “All of my material possessions have been in storage for a year. And I have realized, in a very interesting and surprising way, that I don’t miss anything…. I’m feeling proud of myself because I’m growing. Trying to breathe,” Jenner says. “These things we have surrounded ourselves with in life are not as important as I once thought they were.”
In many ways, the story of Kris Jenner’s life—indeed, the story of so many reality-TV shows—is a story of houses. Jenner’s memoir is threaded through with deeply sentimental stories about all of the houses she spent time in as a child and the houses she lived in with Kardashian and then Jenner. The house in Beverly Hills on Tower Lane gets pride of place, representing the almost mythical time when she was married to a successful lawyer, with four young children. “I still wish I could go back to my Beverly Hills house. That’ll be my heart for the rest of my life…. When you’re my age—you look back on your life and you think, Where was my heart?” (“She’s very sentimental,” says MJ. “Very sentimental. I mean, she saves everything. Of course, she calls me the hoarder, but…she has storage full of old pictures, and she won’t throw anything away…. I mean, gowns—an old piece of rag that I used to wear, or Lou used to wear.”)
A week earlier, I asked Kris how many houses she has lived in as an adult. She points to an imaginary map of Los Angeles County in the space above her head. “OK…so…Tower Lane…let’s see…one…two…three…four…five…. Five is my first house in Hidden Hills in ’96. Five. Then it’s six…seven…. Eight is the Jed Smith [Road] house, where we first started filming. Nine is Eldorado Meadow with the black-and-white floors where my son now lives. Ten was the last house.” She is building number 11. “And I have the house in the desert: an even dozen!”
Shooting a season of a reality show during a global pandemic presented challenges. “For the first couple of episodes, when Covid happened,” Jenner says, “we were shooting by ourselves on our cellphones. The crew would drop off the equipment that we needed, or the lights that we needed, like literally in plastic bags at our front door. They wouldn’t even come in and set it up because we were so frightened of catching that virus.” Eventually, things loosened up a bit, and the family rented a beach house in Malibu to film the final season. “It was some of the best quality family time. We are always going in so many different directions, and we all have 20 jobs. But this really gave us a chance to settle and appreciate the time we were spending together, knowing it was our last season. And it was such a beautiful house and atmosphere.”
It was also, for some, fraught with mixed emotions. “You know, it was definitely a family decision. I think it was the hardest for me because I get so attached to my production crew…and I’m not a big change person,” Khloé says. “But did we all think it was time to just elevate and evolve and, you know, take ourselves out of cable and move on? Yes. I think we all knew it was time. And I think we would rather be the ones to say goodbye than someone kicking us out the door…. Leave them wanting more.” Jenner is, after all, a grandmother—of 10. She says she’s not planning on managing all of their careers, but she’s also not counting it out. Is this the last house? “I’m 65 years old,” she says, “and I start thinking…I don’t think I have the energy—as much as I’d love to think I do—to keep moving around, changing houses, creating something new…starting over all the time. But I think that process makes me really happy. I think I really have to try to be calm and settled—finally at some point.” She laughs. “And live vicariously through the kids.”
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