My neighbor and friend is Robin Schultz. In May of 2020, her grandson Hunter was diagnosed with Charcot-Marie-Tooth Disease (CMT4B3). Her family has started a 501(c)(3) non-profit to save children with this rare-life threatening degenerative neuromuscular disease. Please visit her website to learn more:www.cmt4b3research
Please support the research at University of Miami Miller School of Medicine to find a treatment for children suffering from CMT4B3. We hope we can count on you to help us find a cure for children with CMT4B3 and related neuromuscular diseases.
Many of our neighbors know Hunter, and see him dashing around in his orthotics.Children with CMT4B3 lose the ability to walk, the use of their hands and potentially their sight and/or hearing. Eventually the disease can compromise their breathing, leading to premature death.There is no cure or treatment for CMT4B3 or any form of CMT.
CMT is similar to Muscular Dystrophy and ALS. Untreated, CMT causes the nerves to deteriorate, which breaks down the communication between the brain and the muscles leading to muscle weakness, wasting, limb deformities and paralysis.
In less than 2 years, the Schultz’s have: launched a non-profit, hosted an International CMT4B3 Research Symposium, assembled a renowned Scientific Advisory Board, became a patient resource for the Peripheral Nerve Society, initiated 11 CMT4B3 Research Projects (8 of which we are solely funding), and raised over $1,000,000 funding universities worldwide.
The University of Miami Hussman Institute for Genomics is taking a leading role in their research efforts. They have granted the University of Miami over $340,000.00 for phase 1 of their CMT4B3 Research.These projects aim to develop a gene therapy and small molecule drug to stop the progression of the disease.
Their research efforts are highlighted in the current issue of The University of Miami Miller School Medicine Magazine, “DNA Detectives, a family’s journey to cure a rare genetic disorder.” To learn more please click here:www.cmt4b3research.org/funduofm
If you have any suggestions for us to spread awareness or fundraise for U of M research, please feel free to email or call: rbgschultz@gmail.com914-589-8047
The CMT4B3 Research Foundation is composed of volunteers, we work from home and all operational costs are covered by the co-founders, therefore 100% of donations go towards research.
In the summer of 1970, the painter Willem de Kooningwent on a curious afternoon date with Mimi Kilgore, a radiant young Houston heiress and fixture in the arts world. The outing, a public tour of notable Hamptons homes, was an unlikely way to spend an afternoon for de Kooning. As a titan of 20th-century art who had a house and studio in Springs, an enclave of East Hampton, he was something of a local attraction himself.
But he and Ms. Kilgore, 34 years his junior, had met at a party just weeks before, and already he was smitten. At one house Ms. Kilgore came upon a frog that had been flattened by a car tire. Finding that it reminded her of an abstract shape from one of his paintings, she presented it to de Kooning as a quirky gift. But he saw it as something more. He kept the frog for the rest of his life, a symbol of his devotion to a friend, lover and muse who would remain a source of inspiration for years and who would, by many accounts, help reinvigorate his career.
“It was a classic story of an older artist falling in love with a younger woman,” said the art critic Mark Stevens, who, with his wife, Annalyn Swan, wrote “de Kooning: An American Master,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning 2005 biography. “And in this particular case he seemed to fall in love with painting all over again when he fell in love with Mimi.”
Mimi Kilgore with Willem de Kooning in his studio in Springs, N.Y., in about 1975. “She was very passionate about ideas and connected a lot of artists,” her son Alexander said. Credit…Nancy Crampton
Ms. Kilgore, who died on Nov. 24 in Houston at 87, certainly didn’t need a relationship with a famous man to define her life or career, those who knew her said. Still, her powerful and lasting effect on de Kooning was a testament to the charm, drive and seemingly boundless energy that made her an influential arts patron with a knack for bringing together the art world elite and the moneyed class.
“What really set her apart was her vivacious spirit and sense of humor,” her son Alexander Kilgore, who confirmed the death, said in a phone interview. “She was very passionate about ideas and connected a lot of artists — she connected just a lot of people — that wouldn’t necessarily be connected.”
In Houston, Ms. Kilgore served on the boards of the Museum of Fine Arts and the Contemporary Arts Museum and was twice the commissioner of the Municipal Arts Committee of the City of Houston. On Long Island, she was on the board of Guild Hall, a vibrant arts center in East Hampton.
Ben Love, the chief executive of Texas Commerce bank, hired Ms. Kilgore to build an art collection for the company’s newly built 75-story office tower, which opened in 1982. And for decades she managed the art collection of Fayez Sarofim, a billionaire Houston money manager.
She was also a presence in theater. As a board member of Stages repertory theater in Houston, she helped save its building from developers by arranging for it to be declared a landmark.
And following the death of her sister Susan Smith Blackburn, an actress and writer, from breast cancer in 1977, Ms. Kilgore and Susan’s husband, Bill Blackburn, created a prize in her name, given to English-speaking female playwrights; 10 of its finalists have won Pulitzer Prizes for drama. “She believed that society urgently needed more help from talented women,” her son Alexander said.
Emilie deMun Smith was born on Nov. 13, 1935, in Houston, one of three children of C. Cabanne Smith, a banker who served in Gen. George S. Patton’s Third Army during World War II, and Lucy (Thompson) Smith, an arts patron.
Ms. Kilgore grew up in the wealthy Houston neighborhood of River Oaks, made her debut at the Houston Country Club and attended the private Kinkaid School before heading to Smith College in Massachusetts, from which she graduated magna cum laude in 1957 after a year abroad in France.
Following college, she moved to New York to pursue a career in the art world, taking a job as an art librarian at the Frick Collection. “She studied art at Smith and was wildly excited by the art happening in all mediums in New York,” Mr. Kilgore said. “It was the place to be.”
In 1958, she married William S. Gilbreath III, a financier, and had a son with him, Cabanne Gilbreath, in 1959. The marriage ended in divorce in 1963. Two years later, she married John E. Kilgore Jr., a lawyer from Wichita Falls, Texas, and had her son Alexander with him. In 1970, her father decided to start an oil royalty business in Texas, and she and Mr. Kilgore, along with her two sons, moved to Houston. (The couple divorced in 1985; Mr. Kilgore, who remarried, died in 2005.)
Summering in East Hampton as well as in Pointe aux Barques, Mich., an affluent cottage community on Lake Huron that her great-grandfather had helped found, Ms. Kilgore seemed the embodiment of what Mr. de Kooning called a “classy dame,” Mr. Stevens and Ms. Swan wrote in their biography.
The two met at a party at the Bridgehampton home of the Iranian painter Manoucher Yektai in August 1970. “I was sort of transfixed,” Ms. Kilgore recalled in an interview with Mr. Stevens. “I think I was unaware of anything else going on. And we just talked, looking straight at each other for a long, long time. And then he was leaving, and he said, ‘Am I ever going to see you again?’”
He would, frequently, for decades. She visited him until his death in 1997, even after he had slipped into dementia in the 1980s. While the two were never a couple in the formal sense (Ms. Kilgore lived primarily in Texas), they attended art fairs, like the Venice Biennale, and mingled with other artists in New York at the nightclub Max’s Kansas City and Fanelli Cafe, a venerable pub in SoHo.
In the Bohemian art world of postwar New York, appetites for self-indulgence tended to be large, and sexual mores loose, with relationships and romantic partners ever shifting.
For de Kooning, the relationship with Ms. Kilgore proved transformative. Prone to melancholy and given to epic benders, he was in a difficult period in life when he met her, Mr. Stevens said in a phone interview. For starters, he was entangled in stressful relationships both with his wife, the artist Elaine de Kooning, and Joan Ward, the mother of his daughter, Lisa.
Ms. Kilgore provided an escape. “He loved show tunes,” she said in an interview with Mr. Stevens. “We would sing songs together. I loved dancing, so I would dance. And do cartwheels outside the studio near a gazebo.” She tried to teach him to tango, she said, but “his feet were too big.”
Her joie de vivre mesmerized de Kooning. “I love you wherever you are forever,” he wrote in a letter to Ms. Kilgore. “You made me over …. You’re with me all the time even when you’re not with me.”
His joy soon became evident in his work. After a foray into sculpture, de Kooning returned to painting in the 1970s, producing works that were uncharacteristically buoyant and colorful, even lyrical. “They were remarkable for being so rich, luscious and sumptuous — everything you should not have been doing at a time when conceptual art and minimal art were in vogue,” Mr. Stevens said.
His 1976 painting “East Hampton Garden Party,” for example, captured a summery optimism, with its deeply saturated blues and yellows and exuberant brush strokes. It was one of many works that de Kooning would present to a woman he beatified over the years as “Santa Emilia.” With one such gift, he included a letter that said, “I dedicate all my paintings to you.”
In 1975, de Kooning asked her to marry him. Ms. Kilgore, who was still married, demurred, telling him that “so many lives would be affected” and pointing out that their time apart had actually enriched their relationship.
In addition to her son Alexander, Ms. Kilgore, who died in an assisted living facility, is survived by her son Cabanne, who is known as Cab, and two grandchildren.
“The relationship lasted because of what it was,” she told Mr. Stevens. “He could have me the way he wanted me, in his head.”
Alex Williams is a reporter in the Style department. @AlexwilliamsNYC
Photo by Eliot Hess who states,”This is very much a real Buddha, possibly Indonesian or Thai. It is the Calling the Earth to Witness or earth-witness pose (bhumisparsha mudra). It depicts the moment of Buddha’s enlightenment, sitting under the bodhi tree.”
A short interview with the artist Yornel Martinez. He lives in Havana, Cuba. Eliot and I bought the Buddha in Paris at the home of Isabelle Saltiel-Nahum, an art collector and art advisor. She and her husband exhibited the project “Cuba is in!” in their art filled Parisian home in partnership with Galleria Continua during Art Basel Paris. Thank you Kathryn Mikesell of FountainheadArts and Sarah Bartesaghi Truong of Venividi Paris for the introduction.
I reached out to Yornel on Instagram. I asked if I could interview him.
Yornel: “Hello, yes we can talk.”
Lois: “What’s with the Chiclets chewing gum?”
Yornel: “Yes, chewing gum is an unusual material for a sculpture. The Buddha refers to meditation and is a cultural element of Asia. Chewing gum is something of our contemporary culture and of many activities. These two elements generate opposing forces. However, the opposing forces generate a certain harmony in the sculpture. It is exciting to see a sculpture with unusual materials.”
Found this on YouTube. A more in-depth interview about Yornel’s work.
Selected recent solo and group exhibitions include: 2016 Mi mano derecha no sabe lo que escribe mi mano izquierda, Biblioteca Nacional José Martí. La Habana, Cuba; Transhumance, Beyond Cuban Horizons, CAB Art Center. Bruselas, Belgium; Intersecciones, The Hoffman Gallery. Portland, USA; Nano, (Remake), Centro de Desarrollo de las Artes Visuales CDAV. La Habana, Cuba; Puente abierto, Galería Evolución. Lima, Perú; Line up, Galería La Acacia. La Habana, Cuba; Poesía para ver. Expo de poesía visual cubana, Casa de la Poesía. La Habana, Cuba; 2015 Intervención en la librería, Librería Fayad Jamís. XII Bienal de La Habana. La Habana, Cuba; 2014: El arte es nuestra última esperanza, Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona, USA.
Education: 2007 Fine Arts Faculty degree at Instituto Superior de Arte ISA. Havana, Cuba; 2001 Painting and Drawing degree at Academia de Artes Plásticas José J. Tejada. Santiago de Cuba, Cuba.
Bio / Statement:
Yornel Martinez is a post-conceptual artist who subverts the function of discursive elements – books, fonts, texts, archives – in order to alter their meaning. Creating a connection between words and image plays a leading role in his practice. Martinez’s interests reside in “visually transcending limits of language.” Inviting other artists to participate in the deconstruction and reconstruction of textual objects and their related environments is another focus. For the XII Havana Biennial in 2015, he collaborated with Damian Ortega and other artists in a project comprised of interventions in the Fayad Jamis bookstore in Havana, as well as featured “books as art” objects by contemporary Cuban artists.
Support: Yornel Martinez’s work is made possible with support from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Cuban Artists Fund. .
The words “Utopian” and “Dystopian”always fascinated me. Do they really exist? My art collector friend, Leslie Weissman, who I know through Fountainhead Arts, is also an artist. I kind of knew that but I never really explored her art. Then we went to Paris together with Fountainhead in October, and I had the opportunity to look at it on Instagram. I was hooked immediately. Every aspect of her art made me feel like she was inside my head hearing my thoughts. Each piece reminded me of subjects that I have repeatedly thought about over the years. That doesn’t happen very often. I bought four paintings on the spot. They are the first four below. The remainder are either owned by other collectors, or are still available. I can’t hog all of Leslie’s work, but I would, if I could. —LWH
It’s also very unusual that an artist can verbalize what his or her work is all about. Leslie has no trouble doing that. All the copy below was written by Leslie to explain her paintings.
“Representing a thought, a moment in time or a relationship that needs exploration, my work balances the Utopian and Dystopian environments that surround us. Constantly trying to balance the dichotomy in our world; anonymity and extreme presence, broken and perfect parts, personal histories and current circumstances, my work evolves from an initial view of my environment to an abstract depiction of relationships.
Leslie, her husband Michael and her sons. They live in Chappaqua.
“Currently exploring the suburban landscape and the real and imagined boundaries that prevail in our daily life; a thought about social, economic and political status. Approaching this from two vantage points; through the abstract and ghost like figures and the boundaries of our landscapes I am hoping to initiate a dialogue about how we relate to each other and function as a community. I am interested in personal intrigues and how those struggles and background stories impact our reactions and relations to those around us.
“The use of trees, natural landscape elements and forms are my way of depicting the boundaries we erect for ourselves and how we need to constantly adjust them to perform, survive and grow beyond. Our boundaries are often self-imposed or obtained from a desire to be part of a collective group. So long as we know our boundaries, we can live within them or push beyond.
“Life is rife with individual struggles of belonging and wanting to standout. No longer does our world provide anonymity derived from a standard way of life and uniformity. In the midst of neighborhoods and developments is a modern social revolution where individuals are looking to be known for something greater than being part of the whole.
“The dichotomy of many of us face is rich with age old questions regarding our place in the universe and what entails a perfect model for truth in our lives.”
The new Pelican Hotel and Restaurant , the new restaurant at Tiffany’s in the Design District, Burlesque, The Underline – The Three Tomatoes
💋💋💋💋💋💋💋💋💋💋💋💋💋💋💋💋💋💋
Our usual Saturday afternoon outing to the Miami Design District. I had a uni caviar sandwich ($30), the size of a White Castle 70 cent burger and a steak tartar ($29). Eliot had a short rib panini that was so big he took half home. Pricey but super delicious.
Re-entering the world as a single person after the death of a spouse is definitely a test of resiliency. Everyone reacts differently, and no one should be judged on how they want to conduct their future. It’s a very personal decision.
I would like to explore with Susan her experiences because what she experienced was very difficult and Susan had to overcome two devastating events, the loss of her son six months before the death of her husband. No one has to tell Susan how defeated a person can feel, and how overwhelming it was to move forward with her life. But she did it. Now I want Susan to share it with you. Let’s explore how you jumped into the social world.
Everyone wants a piece of Jayda Knight. We grabbed the first two. If you want to be a star, you need to own one. #celebrity #StarsEverywhere #hollywoodThe four Leslie B Weissman paintings finally arrived. We love her ghost like images. So surreal. They speak to me.I was always fascinated by the many personalities of Kate Moss. That’s why we immediately bought Alex Nuñez’s interpretation of this international star a few years ago. Now Graydon Carter’s Air Mail reports….Kate Moss Reinvents Herself as a Businesswoman with Kate Moss Agency – Air https://airmail.news/issues/2022-12-3/business-model
Mel Schlesser, one of the four early real estate developers in Miami, along with Tony Goldman, Craig Robbins, and Saul Gross, hosted an art party last night at one of his many buildings, Lincoln Center. He told the crowd that the plans for South Beach will keep it the number one paradise destination on planet Earth. Love you Mel.
Happy Thanksgiving from Rene, Howard, Eliot and Lois at the most amazing place to celebrate the holiday. #BartonG puts on a show like no other. We are forever grateful. Join us next year. We already reserved a long table in the garden. @Barton Weiss
How Kris Jenner Made The Kardashians Famous, Rich And Insanely Influential
At age 51, she landed her family a reality TV show that would change everything. Fifteen years later, the “momager” still gets a cut of her kids’ 15 businesses and, more recently, is striking out on her own.
Kris Jenner is art directing her own Forbes photo shoot.
“That’s cute!” Jenner, 66, beams at one of her shots on a nearby monitor, while pointing out the area she wants retouched (her neck). The “momager” of the Kardashian empire–a word to which Jenner holds the trademark–expertly poses, shifting angles for the photographer. Her face is meticulously done in the family’s signature makeup of inky eyelashes, nude lips and impeccable contour, a look the New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino called “Instagram face” for its ubiquity and popularity.
It’s an early September day, still summer, and this midtown Manhattan studio provides a cave-like respite from the heat. Good thing. Jenner came with her “glam squad”—her two on-call hair and makeup people—along with her PR person and two security guards, one whose job seems to be holding her designer bag. She’s in a black suit and bodysuit (from Good American and Skims, companies run by her daughters, natch), topped off with black leather gloves (which she never takes off), Chanel platform loafers and massive sparkling hoop earrings. She radiates the same power and glamor exuded by her celebrity daughters: Kim Kardashian, Khloe Kardashian, Kourtney Kardashian, Kylie Jenner and Kendall Jenner.
The directing, the styling, the constant photo-readiness: it’s all part of the careful choreography surrounding Jenner and her daughters. In town for Fashion Week, Jenner spent it hobnobbing with Dee Ocleppo Hilfiger (spouse of Tommy Hilfiger), Sex and the City creator Candace Bushnell and earlier that day, lifestyle doyenne Martha Stewart. She squeezed in this photo and video shoot plus a 20-minute interview with Forbes—granting us a total of one hour of her time—before jetting off on a private plane headed back home. It’s a rare up-close look inside Jenner’s highly calibrated world, a level of coordination that’s evidence of not only the matriarch’s authority, but also the machinery that has helped her turn the Kardashians’ fame into a multi-billion-dollar empire.
“I’m the one who can help them [her kids] identify what it is that they want to do, help them create a business, build an infrastructure and help them focus,” Jenner says.
“Kris Jenner is an unstoppable force,” says Ryan Seacrest, who green-lit the family’s reality TV show. He adds that she “led her family to succeed in creating an empire bigger than anything we could have ever imagined when we came up with the show’s concept 15 years ago.”
Back then Jenner, at age 51, forever changed the reality TV landscape with the October 14, 2007, premiere of Keeping Up With The Kardashians on the E! network. It delivered an insider’s view of the family’s trials and tribulations, along with some outrageous moments, including when Kourtney and Kim came to blows in the season 18 premiere, leaving Kim bleeding. The show ran for 20 seasons, airing 285 episodes in total and ended in 2021.
“The Kardashians are human brands.”Markus Wohlfeil
This year it rebooted on Hulu, its new streaming home, with a zippy new name: The Kardashians. Hulu claims the show’s April debut was the most-watched series premiere in the U.S., but didn’t disclose viewer numbers. According to streaming analytics compiler Entertainment Strategy Guy, however, the Hulu premiere didn’t break into the top ten of any major trackers for hours watched, including Nielsen. But the fact that Jenner turned the family into a household name and her kids into entrepreneurs, all after she turned 50, earns her a spot on Forbes’ second annual 50 Over 50 List celebrating women who prove that success has no age limit.
Although she usually provides behind-the-scenes support, putting her daughters out front (in their TV show’s first season, Jenner attained instant meme status by telling Kim, “You’re doing great, sweetie!” as her daughter posed nude in a Playboy shoot), she’s emerging as the face of her own brands. Her Safely cleaning products company, for example, was born of her insatiable drive to keep her home spotless. Setting it apart from the Methods and Windexes of the world, Jenner says, are the products’ plant-based formulation, which she says are a first in the category. “Kris is such an incredible partner because she’s truly a fully immersed participant in every component,” Safely cofounder Emma Grede tells Forbes. The two women created Safely with model and cookbook author Chrissy Teigen in March 2021, though Teigen left several months later, following revelations on social media that she’d bullied TV personality Courtney Stodden, who was a teenager at the time. (Teigen publicly apologized.) Jenner owns an estimated 7% of the company, which raised an undisclosed amount of funding from investors led by venture capital firm Imaginary Ventures (also a backer of Kim Kardashian’s wildly successful Skims). In February, Safely rolled out its products in 1,700 Walmart stores; it’s also available through Bed Bath & Beyond and Amazon. Neither Grede nor Jenner would comment on its revenues.
Her six children (there’s son Rob, plus five daughters) harnessed their reality TV show fame and tremendous social media influence—they have a billion followers combined—to help start 15 businesses. “They’re human brands,” says Markus Wohlfeil, a marketing professor at De Montfort University in Leicester, England, who studies celebrity fandom and consumer behavior. “You [the fans] basically see them as an ideal friend, ideal mate, ideal partner. So all of your projection of your own desires [onto the Kardashians] is basically how they appear to you,” he tells Forbes, describing the connection they form with fans through their TV show and constant use of social media. “It just gives the illusion they’re very close,” he says, adding that the Kardashian brand then expands through their products. Jenner, Wohlfeil says, is like a modern-day Steve Jobs or Walt Disney. “She’s one of those people who sees individual parts and can actually put them together.”
According to multiple industry sources, Jenner, who sits on the board of each of her kids’ businesses, gets 10% of gross revenue from every product, TV show or modeling gig in which her family participates, in exchange for helping build out staffing and supply chains. “Each one of our businesses has an individual infrastructure and a team built around the company,” she says. It’s an arrangement she made with them at the start. “I said to my kids, ‘Look, I’m going to put my heart and soul into this—I’m going to work hard. And I’ll take 10%, because that’ll make it worth my while,’” Jenner says, adding that it was a better deal for them than what a typical manager would charge. One entertainment attorney whose roster includes A-list clients says the 10% cut is actually pretty standard. So how much does she pull in? Jenner would not disclose any financial information about the businesses’ revenues or her personal earnings.
She has received equity in some cases. Forbes estimates her stakes in the businesses include 1% of Kim’s shape wear and loungewear firm Skims, which was valued by investors at $3.2 billion in January; 5% of Kylie Cosmetics, 51% of which was sold to Coty in January 2020 in a deal that valued the business at nearly $1.2 billion; and 10% of denim and fashion firm Good American (cofounded by daughter Khloe), in addition to the 7% in Safely. She had an estimated 10% stake in Kim Kardashian’s KKW Beauty and got an estimated $20 million when they sold a 20% stake in the business, also to Coty, in January 2021. That brand no longer exists and Kim and Coty have replaced it with SKKN by Kim, a skin-care line that debuted in late June; Coty owns 20% of the business. It’s not clear, though, how much either mother or daughter own in this venture. She does invest some of her personal fortune in some of the family’s ventures, too, but is cagey in sharing just how much. “I’ll give you one,” she says, revealing she put some of her own money into 818, daughter Kendall’s tequila.
Altogether, adding in multiple homes plus earnings from the TV show and dividends from her daughters’ companies, Forbes estimates Jenner’s net worth at $200 million. Not as much as Kim’s $1.4 billion or Kylie’s $600 million estimated fortunes, but pretty impressive given where she came from a decade and a half ago.
“I have to have everything in my life completely organized and perfect—otherwise, I am a complete mess,” she wrote in her 2011 autobiography, Kris Jenner . . . and All Things Kardashian. That control stemmed from her 1991 divorce from high-flying lawyer Robert Kardashian (d. 2003), known for serving on the defense team for O.J. Simpson during his 1995 trial for the alleged murder of wife Nicole. (O.J. Simpson was found not guilty.) Complicating matters were her friendships with both Simpsons prior to Nicole’s murder. And there was the fact that she was not an equal partner in her marriage. “I had no money—not one dollar—to my name. He controlled everything,” Jenner wrote. “It never occurred to me before that moment in this dark time that I had no power. Later in life, I would decide it was a situation I would never be in again.”
Born in 1955 in San Diego, Jenner grew up in a family of retailers who owned some of the first candle stores in the area. Following high school and a stint as an American Airlines flight attendant, she married Robert Kardashian. They began divorce proceedings in 1991. Shortly afterward, Kris began dating Bruce Jenner, a gold medal Olympian in the decathlon. They were married soon after Kris and Robert finalized their divorce. The newly blended Kardashian-Jenner family meant the new spouses would have eight kids to support: two of Bruce’s from a prior marriage, four from Kris’ marriage to Robert, and, later, the two children they had together. They needed income, so Kris decided to turbocharge Bruce’s public appearances and motivational speeches. “We took Bruce’s gold medal out of his sock drawer and dusted it off and framed it in his office, and that became our motivation,” she wrote in her book. “We wanted to be champions again.” (In 2015, Bruce Jenner transitioned from male to female, and now goes by Caitlyn Jenner; the couple divorced that year.)
The money from Bruce’s speeches, along with commercials and product endorsements, began to flow. “I had no idea that my family, my home, would someday be an entertainment empire,” Jenner wrote. In 2004, she went back to her retail roots and opened children’s clothing store Smooch in Calabasas, California.
Getting to the airwaves was a surprisingly fast process. In 2007 the whole Kardashian-Jenner clan moved into a new, sprawling home in Hidden Hills, California. A friend who worked as a casting director came to visit and surveyed the chaos. Jenner buzzed her daughters over the intercom when the phone rang for them while she made dinner as Kendall and Kylie, then preteens, bounced off the walls with energy. Amused, the casting director told Jenner she should pitch her family as a reality TV show to Seacrest. “Get me a meeting,” Jenner replied. She pitched to Seacrest the very next day; in 48 hours, the show was sold.
“I said to my kids, ‘Look, I’m going to put my heart and soul into this—I’m going to work hard. And I’ll take 10%, because that’ll make it worth my while.’”Kris Jenner
A 2014 Glu Mobile smartphone game helped solidify the relationship between the Kardashians and their fans. Kim Kardashian: Hollywood let users role-play as models and actors and build their reputations to land on the A-list. It was extremely successful. Kim pocketed$45 million through the game from 2015 to 2016, while developer Glu Mobile credited the game with boosting its 2020 financial results due to a “resurgence” of interest. “Kris understood a decade ago that the future of her childrens’ brands needed to be trans-media,” says Niccolo de Masi, the former Glu Mobile chief executive who pitched the game idea to the Kardashians. “What I love about Kris and Kim is that they are both very disciplined, turn up on time and do what they say they’re going to do,” he adds. “It sounds simple, but there is a short list of Hollywood people who do that.”
In 2019, Forbesnamed Kylie Jenner a billionaire after the family showed financial documents, a process that included visits to Kris Jenner’s Hidden Hills home. Our estimation was based on Kylie Cosmetics revenues and dividends paid by the company. When Coty snapped up a 51% stake in the makeup brand the following year for $600 million, it was a huge coup for Kylie. But the deal’s fine print revealed something else entirely: that Kylie Cosmetics wasn’t as large or as profitable as the family had earlier claimed to Forbes. Kylie was droppedfrom the billionaires’ list in 2020, with Forbes positing that Kylie’s tax returns had been doctored, a claim that representatives for Kylie and Kris Jenner denied. Kris was apparently upset about the story. But when asked about it at the photo shoot, Jenner replied, “I have no idea. But thank you.”
Not every Jenner-managed production is a win. In 2012, Kourtney, Khloe and Kim entered a licensing deal to launch Khroma Beauty, but were sued for alleged trademark infringement of the company name by the EU-based owner Kroma Makeup. The two parties reached a settlement. Khroma changed its name to Kardashian Beauty, but it never took off. In 2017, the family was criticized after Kendall Jenner’s Pepsi commercial was derided as trivializing the Black Lives Matter movement. Pepsi ended up apologizing to Kendall Jenner.
Private equity is the next frontier for the family. In September, Kim launched SKYY Partners with former Carlyle Group bigwig Jay Sammons, the dealmaker behind acquisitions like red hot streetwear brand Supreme. As a partner in the firm, Jenner will be involved in fundraising efforts and selecting what to invest in. Hundreds of businesses have pitched the company already, Jenner claims.
In September Jenner also released her second product drop with Kylie Cosmetics, called the Kris Collection. The limited edition lineup consists of Jenner’s “must-haves,” including pressed powder, lip crayons and cooling under-eye patches. Reviews so far are sparse, with few verified TikTok and Instagram influencers posting about the products.
Having built a hugely popular entertainment business in her sixth decade, Jenner thinks there’s room at the table for more entrepreneurs like her. “I think people are finding their own power and their own way of doing things. And I think that that in and of itself is very powerful,” Jenner says about finding success after 50. “And you know what? It gives a lot of other people hope that there is no rush.”
Keeping Up With The KidsA breakdown of who does what in the Kardashian empire.
Kim Kardashian
• Cofounder, Skims (shape wear)
• Founder and CEO, SKKN By Kim (skin care)
• Cofounder and managing partner, SKYY Partners (private equity)
• Licensor, Kim Kardashian: Hollywood (mobile game)
DigiDame 