Sean Smith - Kim Kardashian

After the divorce, relations between Robert and Kris settled down for the sake of the children. Kourtney still had a problem with Bruce taking her father’s place, but they saw plenty of Robert. He had moved back into Tower Lane and was in charge every other weekend, a time when he played the devoted dad.

Robert tried to keep everything as normal as possible. As always, he took the children to church at weekends and, if they were with him during the week, he made sure he drove them to school. He was very popular with Kim’s friends and would entertain them with a variety of spoonerisms – if he was going to take a shower, he would tell them he needed to ‘shake a tower’ – the sort of harmless sense of humour he had always had.

Nikki Lund, whom he insisted on calling Dicky, recalled that Robert was always stricter than Kris: ‘He was a fun kind of guy, but he had a responsibility as a man to daughters as beautiful as these. He would take us to church. He prayed and read the Bible. He was a really good dad. Kim was a sensitive girl and definitely spiritual.’

Robert gave Kim a Bible, which he signed, and it became her most treasured possession. The word Bible is one of her favourite expressions, said at the end of a sentence to indicate that she swears it’s true. She, Nikki and her other friends were young Christian girls, although they possibly liked church more because they could wear jeans there on a Sunday.

Kim was one of those girls who could fit into any group. She had her circle of friends, like Kimberly Stewart and Nikki Lund, but she was equally as happy mixing with Kourtney’s group – the nerds, as she called them. With her closest pals, she devised a special sign language that they all learned so they could ‘talk’ about people who were in the room or class with them. Nikki recalled, ‘It was a way of being in a group. It was our little thing. We were obsessed with it.’

Kim was becoming fascinated by clothes. She and Kourtney barely had time for breakfast in the mornings, because it took them so long to get ready. They would grab a vanilla sandwich cookie on the way to Pam’s car for the morning school run from Malibu to Beverly Hills. Pam, who wrote a book called Malibu Nanny , was thrilled to discover the house they were then living in used to be home to Sean Penn when he was courting Madonna.

Kourtney was definitely the boss, perhaps because she was older and a little brighter; certainly, she was the fastest reader in the household. The two sisters used to play fashion games together. One favourite, at least with Kourtney, was when she pretended to be the leading fashion designer Donna Karan, creator of the DKNY label, and poor Kim was her beleaguered assistant. Kourtney used it as a means to make fun of her. Kim recalled, ‘She would just make me do anything she said. She would do it on purpose and embarrass me in front of her friends.’ Despite the natural sibling rivalry, the two girls were very close.

At their new home, they had use of the obligatory pool and Jacuzzi, as well as a magnificent view of the ocean from the patio. Kim preferred to spend a lot of her free time in her room, however, indulging her passion for making things, particularly jewellery. She had every conceivable size, shape and colour of bead and would carefully sort and select them to make the right necklace, earrings or bracelet.

One of the jobs of the nanny was to make sure the children were tucked up comfortably in bed at night. Kim would often talk in her sleep. Sometimes she would even have a conversation with Pam, even though she was in a deep slumber. On one occasion, she shouted out, ‘There’s an elephant on my desk.’ Pam told her to get it off the desk, whereupon Kim, still fast asleep, replied, ‘Help me. Help me. Get it off.’ Pam had to leave the room before her laughter woke up her young charge.

Kim may have been a quiet girl when she was 10, but she had blossomed into a much livelier teenager by the time of her eighth-grade graduation from her junior school El Rodeo in Whittier Drive, Beverly Hills, in 1994. She was filmed at the party afterwards by another student eager to make a movie of the night. There’s always one home-movie maker who wants to be the next Spielberg.

The already curvy 13-year-old Kim is excited and enjoying herself, dancing madly, in a white blouse, perfect make-up and a shorter than usual bob haircut. She is talking straight to the camera, ‘Is anyone getting a tape of this? I hope you do, because when you see me when I’m famous and old, you’re gonna remember me as this beautiful little girl.’

She continues to lark about as the cameraman starts to walk away: ‘Excuse me, are you leaving? My name’s Kim Kardashian. I’m the dopest of the ropest person in this class. I’m dope on a rope.’ When someone off camera interrupts, ‘Define “dope”, Kim’, she answers, ‘Dope is Kim.’ She seems to be displaying a confidence she says she never had as a girl. She ends the clip by comparing herself to a classmate: ‘I’m more popular than she is … everyone loves me. I’m so popular and everyone loves me …’

She’s just a schoolgirl having fun on a big night out, but it’s interesting that she should be using ‘dope’ as hip-hop slang for excellent or wonderful. Perhaps she picked it up from her first serious boyfriend, Michael Jackson’s nephew T. J.

From a young age, Kim preferred black men. She wasn’t brought up in the Deep South like Britney Spears, where racism was still rife. This was Beverly Hills, where black families had just as much money and prestige. Lionel Richie and Sugar Ray Leonard were good friends and neighbours of the family. Lionel was the father of Nicole Richie, whom Kim was at school with. Sugar Ray was so close to the Kardashians that he was Khloé’s godfather. Most of the Jackson clan lived in the area. And there was Uncle O. J., too, of course. He lived on North Rockingham Avenue, in exclusive Brentwood, with his wife Nicole, whom he had married in 1985. The sociable Nicole had become very much part of Kris’s wide circle.

By 1994, the Kardashian family had undergone much change. Kourtney had started high school at an all-girl Catholic school called Marymount, on Sunset Boulevard, and Kim would be joining her at the start of the next academic year. Kris and Bruce had decided that travelling to and from Malibu was becoming too much of a logistical challenge and had rented a house in Benedict Canyon.

The most dramatic change was that Kim’s father had a new woman in his life. He had sold Tower Lane and leased an enormous 15-room house 10 miles away, in the pretty suburb of Encino. He was making a fresh start with his fiancée, Denice Shakarian Halicki, a graceful blonde, who wore very short skirts and was generally described as a ‘knockout’. She also happened to drive a Rolls-Royce, which had been left to her by her late husband. She was Armenian on her father’s side, but didn’t have the exotic features of the Kardashians. Instead, she had inherited her Norwegian mother’s looks. When she was 16, there had been talk of an arranged marriage, but that had come to nothing and she was able to pursue a career as a model and actress.

In 1983, she met Toby Halicki, who had become a multimillionaire thanks to his stunningly successful cult film Gone in 60 Seconds . He was a larger-than-life character, one of 13 children, who, in a great Hollywood story, came to Los Angeles, aged 15, with nothing but an extensive knowledge of automobiles and the salvage business that his family ran in New York.

His hit movie cost under $100,000 to make, but grossed more than $40 million at the box office. There was little in the way of a script, but there were lots of cars. For the film’s finale, Toby performed an amazing 39-metre jump, which resulted in him compacting 10 vertebrae and walking with a permanent limp.