Kim Kardashian West's boob is so soft it makes velvet feel like splinters. It makes the fur on a baby bunny's tummy feel like a plastic bag of syringes. It is so soft that touching it is like scooping up the delicate pink dawn sky with your fingers, or holding a ball of lotion in your hand. It is softer than the thick, warm, all-enveloping smoothness that caresses a globule of wax as it travels up a lava lamp. I know this because Kim Kardashian West has just put down her passion-fruit iced tea and peeled back her sleeveless Adidas x Kanye West bodysuit so that I could place my hand on it (the boob) while we eat dinner under the furious early stars at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
“Even though I'm an ass girl, Kanye always says my boobs don't get as much credit as they deserve,” Kim explained.
At the time that she invited me to touch the upper-left quadrant of her left breast, I was merely an unkempt person Kim Kardashian West had met one time. And yet, on just our second short meeting, I felt comfortable enough to ask her to “please describe what your boobs feel like.” That's how we got here.
“Really soft!” exclaimed Kim, seated primly in an out-of-the-way patio booth. She was eating half a salad. I was eating a hot dog and fries on her enthusiastic recommendation. (“I love the hot dog here,” she said with a sparkle, neglecting to mention I would have to order this item from the kids' menu.) (Real good hot dog.)
“You wanna feel?” she asked.
“Yup,” I said.
It is Kim Kardashian West's full-time job to make you feel privy to her secrets—that you are getting to see (or gently squeeze) a very special part of her enchanted world. She's the progenitor of a new kind of fame. While a celebrity, Kim doesn't have the luxury of an actor to request that her personal life remain private, because her personal life is what pays her bills. She deploys radical transparency about her life not just because she wants to, but because she has to; the continued viability of the Kim Kardashian West brand demands it. As a result, Kim is working wherever she is, whatever she happens to be doing, because being Kim is Kim's vocation. And she's very professional.
In recent years, she's gotten even better at being Kim. Things seemed to really take off for her around the occasion of her third marriage—this time to one of the most critically respected musicians of the modern era, a union that earned her cachet as an artist's muse. Kim's brand has always been unapologetically sexy—in an early Keeping Up with the Kardashians episode, she tells her sister Kourtney that she filmed her infamous sex tape “because I was horny and I felt like it”—but Kanye West's endorsement altered the public's perception. Her curves remained the same, but under Kanye's exuberant insistence, they transmuted from porny to arty. Her provocative selfies were no longer just attention-seeking; now they were also body positive.
At the time of her wedding to Kanye, Kim had already given birth to the couple's first child—a feat he touted in his remix of Beyoncé's 2013 single “Drunk in Love”: You will never need another lover / 'cause you a MILF and I'm a motherfucker. The rest of his verse is largely a testament to all the different ways and places he and Kim have sex, and a tribute to the furniture they have ruined while doing so.
This is the other element of Kim's new appeal: Marriage and motherhood didn't diminish her eroticism, but combined, they made it more palatable. Imbued it with a new élan, even. (It's difficult to slut-shame a 30-something mother of two when the man nuzzling her neck in photos is her husband.) It was as if, by fulfilling societal expectations of marriage and motherhood, Kim finally earned the right to take off all her clothes. Settling down allowed her to turn up.
To the outside world, Kanye West and Kim Kardashian West seem very much in love. In their own private world, they seem even more so—obsessively so. Over dinner, I pressed her to describe one habit of hers that bugs her husband, and after struggling for nearly a full minute, she pulled out her phone to call him and ask. Kanye picked up immediately, as if he had been waiting for the call.
“Hey babe,” she said. “I'm doing an interview, and I just want to know what I do to drive you crazy. Because I can't think of anything that I could possibly do that drives you crazy.”
Kim and Kanye floundered for what can only be described as an excruciating amount of time, totally unable to think of one goddamn thing she does that drives him crazy. Kim offered suggestions: She moves his clothes. She chastises his messiness. She disagrees with him about what outfits she should wear. None of it drives him crazy. While Kanye tried to think of something on the other end of the line, Kim smothered a cracker with butter and popped it into her mouth. The waiting was boring. It was eerie. It was like, really? Finally, nearly two minutes into the call, a breakthrough: Sometimes a designer will e-mail Kim a sketch of an ensemble and Kanye will request to see it; on occasion Kim forgets to forward the e-mail, so Kanye must ask again and again. This drives him crazy.
“Okay,” she said. “Bye!”
According to Kim and Kanye, the only thing Kim does that drives Kanye crazy is something so over-the-top luxurious, yet oddly infinitesimal, that no one else on the planet could possibly share this problem. What did you expect them to say?
“All my friends and my sisters say, ‘You guys are so perfect for each other. There's no one that would want to sit in your closet for hours with you and try on clothes.’ ”
This winter, Kim Kardashian West's husband briefly upended her meticulously constructed tableau vivant of prosperous marital bliss by announcing to the world that he was “53 million dollars in personal debt.” He's probably not. But it is true that last year she landed the No. 33 spot on *Forbes'*s list of highest-paid celebrities, while he failed to crack the top 100. Kanye might be the artistic genius in the family, but Kim is the CEO.
I have tagged along with Kim to the part of her life most conventionally identifiable as work: a meeting. This one's for her paid app, Kim Kardashian West Official App. We are in West Hollywood, in the sunny conference room of a Lego-red office building. If you took The New York Times, made every single article, op-ed, picture, and letter to the editor about Kim Kardashian West, turned the production values up to 10,000, strained out 90 percent of the text, and sealed it behind a hermetic paywall, the result would be Kim Kardashian West Official App. Unlike her other app, Kim Kardashian: Hollywood (which is a game), or her other other app, KIMOJI (which gives customers access to more than 500 Kim-themed emojis and GIFs), Kim Kardashian West Official App is a true mobile repository of all things Kim: her beauty tips, her fashion tips, her photos, her memories, her street style, and also “Currently,” a status update-like feature in which Kim expresses herself in participle form. Together these apps generate revenue projected to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars—money that dwarfs Kim's E! paycheck.
Think about that: Kim has so thoroughly monetized the very act of living that the money she earns from being filmed going about her life constitutes a relatively small sum compared with the one she generates from allowing people to see pictures and cartoon drawings of the life she has already filmed. She has figured out how to spin the mundanity of being herself—something billions of people do every day for free—into a more lucrative business than being the most famous rapper in the world.
A large portion of Kim's waking hours is spent picking things out. Is it hard? Harder than not doing it. This process is known as “approvals”; it is slightly more difficult than choosing an appetizer off a lunch menu and considerably less difficult than harnessing the neutron source californium-252 to minesweep a tract of land, yet Kim does it with the precision of someone engaged in either task.
Kim begins flipping through a binder of photos, choosing ones to include in the approximately 14 billion collages (Kim loves collages) on her app, covering every page in a rash of approval hieroglyphs. This continues for nearly an hour, her face betraying no more emotion when she scrawls a giant X on a photo of herself on her wedding day cuddling her child than when she draws one over a retail image of a one-piece swimsuit. “Not that one,” she murmurs liltingly, as if singing a song about not that one. “Not that one, not that one.”
Next it's time to review a video for the app, in which she and a group of girlfriends (including her sisters) played a game of Fuck, Marry, Kill using combos of various celebrities. (Kim would Fuck Jimmy Kimmel but Marry Jason Priestley.) Everything was going well, approved, approved, approved, until the presidential round: Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush.
In the past, Kim has identified as a “liberal Republican,” fiscally conservative but socially progressive. She told me she now votes Democrat (“As I've grown up, I decided what I think is best for me instead of what my parents would have voted for”) and plans to vote for Hillary Clinton.
On-screen, we watch Kim's friend Malika: “I'm marrying Barack, I'm fucking Bill, and I'm killing George.”
“But I love George,” Kim says quietly on the video.
“OH…” Back in the conference room, every face blanches and Kim pauses the video.
“Wait, can I say that?” Kim asks, studying the expressions in the room. “I don't know if I should edit that out.”
“I think you should edit that out,” someone advises.
“With Kanye's history with George…,” Kim says, trailing off.
Solutions are offered. They could cut the president section entirely or remove just that line. “I love George, though,” Kim says sadly. “I just think he's cute. Like a cute little president.... And the [Bush] kids sent us a baby gift. Let me think about it.”
A few days later, the video goes live on Kim's app, with that line removed. The cute little president was not approved.
Because Kim Kardashian West's entire existence serves as a source of cross-platform entertainment, it might be helpful to think of those places she visits most often as “sets.” Kim Kardashian and Kanye West's 11,000-square-foot Bel Air home is the set where the bulk of her Snapchat videos are recorded. (Her mother's home, in Calabasas, is the set most recognizable to TV viewers; although Kim is frequently depicted hanging out in the kitchen, she no longer lives there.)
Kim's house is less secluded and private than you'd imagine. Rather, it's just one easily-walk-up-to-able house in a honeycomb of cul-de-sacs of easily-walk-up-to-able houses, all surrounded by a carefully guarded community gate. The neighborhood functions as a sort of free-range pen for celebrities to wander around in without hurting themselves or anyone else; within those confines, it's an absolute free-for-all. Recently, her neighbor Gordon Ramsay swung by and helped her play a prank on her chef. (They told him he was fired.) Another neighbor crashed the private baby shower she hosted for her friend, the supermodel Chrissy Teigen. (Kim said diplomatically that she believed the uninvited guest—Stevie Wonder—“wanted to stop by to say hi to John [Legend] and Chrissy.”)
Inside, the house is serene and church-like in its soft echoes, though the walls are adorned with nightmarish paintings by George Condo, the artist who made Kanye's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy album art. It's also faintly sweet-smelling. The day I visited, the pink and magenta roses covering a bench that Kanye had given Kim for Mother's Day were just starting to wilt.
Kim and I sat down in the living room on one of two matching white couches, both massive enough to accommodate a giants' orgy. (“I know, right?” Kim said when I noted their preposterous size.) I wanted to know about Caitlyn Jenner—or, more specifically, how the family prepped (as a cast) to reveal her stepfather's gender transition to the world.
When Kim was 21, she told me, “I walked in on Bruce” wearing women's clothing in the family garage, “and I went over to Kourtney's, and Kourtney was the only person that I told. We had no idea what it meant. So we went and Googled stories and found this, like, Oprah episode of this girl who had gone through a transition. But we still didn't know a lot.” Ahead of season ten's “About Bruce” special, they enlisted help. “We did meet with someone a few times when Caitlyn was—[when] that was what was going to happen. A counselor that taught us terminology—explained things to us.”
Suddenly, Kim's daughter, North, almost 3, walked into the living room, back from a trip to the park, clad in a cowgirl costume worn over purple pajama pants.
“I'm making purple noodles,” explained North, mostly to herself, throwing her small body over the couch, her arms collapsed in front of her, as of someone who has spent all day making purple noodles and now is exhausted.
“What are purple noodles, silly girl?” Kim asked.
“I'm good,” said North to the cushion.
“You want to take a nap in Mommy's bed?” Kim asked, rubbing her back.
North did not. She wanted to take a nap on top of her mother.
“Okay,” said Kim. “But I still have to talk, okay?”
In one fluid motion, Kim maneuvered the floppy toddler into a sheltered cuddle, positioning North's head behind her ear.
Madonna-and-child tendencies aside, the real-life Kim has slightly sharper edges than her celebrity character. She's frighteningly organized: She tells me that before bed she deletes every single text message and e-mail from her phone, unless it's something she still needs to respond to. Her go-to sense of humor is dry irony, used sparingly.
The week I met with her was a particularly scrutinized time, even by Kardashian Panopticon standards. If you have never seen any of the 162 episodes of Keeping Up with the Kardashians—or watched helplessly as some combination of the eldest sisters “take” the Hamptons (Khloé and Kourtney), New York (Kim and Kourtney), or Miami (Kim—or Khloé—and Kourtney)—you probably assume the general plot is as follows: Family members ham their way through staged situations, reacting to artificial drama with the subtlety of Kabuki theater. The show is 85 percent that. But the other 15 percent deals with unusual (for TV) candor about marital cataclysms, transgender identity issues, cycles of substance abuse, and the effects of crippling depression on the self and the family. Keeping Up with the Kardashians has done much more to raise awareness of the Armenian genocide than Mad Men ever did, and Mad Men is an Emmy-winning drama no one was embarrassed to admit they watched.
A few days before Kim and I sat down, a peripheral Kardashians personage named Blac Chyna (a model, dancer, eyelash-salon owner, and former friend of Kim's, née Angela White), who had previously had a son with Tyga (a rapper, né Micheal Stevenson), who was widely believed to be the current boyfriend of Kim's youngest sibling, Kylie Jenner, had just announced she was pregnant with the child of Kim's younger brother, Rob Kardashian, making any subsequent children born between the foursome a little more than kin and less than kind. (Also, Chyna had reportedly taken steps to trademark the name “Angela Renee Kardashian,” which would insinuate her not only into the family but also into the lucrative family enterprise.)
The family's collective response to this news remained largely inscrutable—it took several days for word to bleed out that Kylie and Tyga had split weeks earlier—possibly because they wanted to preserve the reveal of their emotions for episode three of their TV show (“Significant Others and Significant Brothers”), filmed months before, in which they begin to make peace with Rob and Chyna's relationship.
Whatever the family's prior feelings about the sudden engagement of its most reclusive member—the only Y chromosome in an avalanche of X's; the only one capable of carrying on the family name—the message when we meet is clear: Family love Chyna now.
“We're all on board,” Kim declares. “We definitely see that my brother is happy and getting healthy, and whatever gets him to that place, you know, we're happy for him. Chyna's a sweet girl, and I think we all have so many things going on in our lives that we just want my brother to be happy. Has there been so many crazy things that happened? Yes. Is the whole situation, you know, just…? I think people want to feel like we're all beefing and have this crazy fight, and we're really not. I think the drama naturally follows us.”
So, at this moment in time, the Kardashians, who are very busy with a lot of things going on, are definitely allowing for the possibility that they are happy that Rob is happy, if indeed he is, despite the additional level of scrutiny his slightly incestuous choice of partner has brought upon all of them. Okay.
How does it feel, I ask Kim, to hear your husband rap about having sex with other women?
“That doesn't bother me at all,” she answers with a laugh so winning even the Russian judge would give her a 10 out of 10. “I'm usually sitting there in the studio when he's writing it. I'm not offended. I could care less.”
It's a rare brush-off, and the message is clear: Kim didn't fly all the way to Italy to stand next to a wall of flowers inside a 16th-century military fortification just to marry some guy from Chicago. She signed on to marry Kanye West, the volatile creative genius, a man famous for telling very vivid stories about his sex life in rhyme. She did that on purpose.
Which brings us to the time he rapped about Taylor Swift.
I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex, West muses in the first verse of his The Life of Pablo track “Famous.” Why? I made that bitch famous.
Prior to Pablo, West and Swift appeared to have caulked up the rift in their famously fraught professional relationship. She presented him with an award at the MTV VMAs last summer. He sent her a large cube of flowers. Things remained harmonious for almost a full half year, until the release of “Famous.”
Following an Internet-borne convulsion about the song's content, West issued a series of tweets in which he stated he “called Taylor and had a hour long convo with her about the line,” that she “thought it was funny,” “gave her blessings,” and even “came up with” the lyric. A representative for Swift quickly released a statement crisply denying West's claim: “Kanye did not call for approval, but to ask Taylor to release his single ‘Famous’ on her Twitter account. She declined and cautioned him about releasing a song with such a strong misogynistic message. Taylor was never made aware of the actual lyric, ‘I made that bitch famous.’ ” A day after the album's release, Swift accepted the Grammy for album of the year for 1989, and one portion of her speech—“I want to say to all the young women out there, there are going to be people along the way who will try to undercut your success or take credit for your accomplishments, or your fame...”—was widely interpreted as a dig at West.
Kanye and Taylor (or Kanye and Taylor's rep) may both be telling the truth here—as they see it. Maybe the duo talked “sex” but not “bitch.” Maybe he misinterpreted her noncommittal politeness as implicit accord. Maybe they both hung up pleased they were finally on the same page.
But Kim says Taylor's deep emotional wound is nonsense—okay, she says it's a lie—and that there's video proof, because a videographer was actually filming their phone call. Why? Because Kim's husband commissions videographers to film everything when he's recording an album, for posterity (and possibly, one day, a documentary). And this is where it gets sticky.
“She totally approved that,” Kim says, shaking her head in annoyance. “She totally knew that that was coming out. She wanted to all of a sudden act like she didn't. I swear, my husband gets so much shit for things [when] he really was doing proper protocol and even called to get it approved.” Kim is on a roll now, speaking faster and more animatedly than at any other point during our time together. “What rapper would call a girl that he was rapping a line about to get approval?”
Let's stipulate here that Kim Kardashian West is not the kind of person who forgets that the tape-recorder light is blinking. But just because a rant is carefully chosen for its audience doesn't mean it isn't genuine.
Swift, Kim insists, “totally gave the okay. Rick Rubin was there. So many respected people in the music business heard that [conversation] and knew. I mean, he's called me a bitch in his songs. That's just, like, what they say. I never once think, [gasping] ‘What a derogatory word! How dare he?’ Not in a million years. I don't know why she just, you know, flipped all of a sudden.… It was funny because [on the call with Kanye, Taylor] said, ‘When I get on the Grammy red carpet, all the media is going to think that I'm so against this, and I'll just laugh and say, ‘The joke's on you, guys. I was in on it the whole time.’ And I'm like, wait, but [in] your Grammy speech, you completely dissed my husband just to play the victim again.”
Were they in touch after that?
“No. Maybe an attorney's letter she sent saying, ‘Don't ever let that footage come out of me saying that. Destroy it.’ ”
She sent one?
“Yeah.”
I ask Kim how Taylor Swift's people could have known about the footage, if Swift didn't even realize she was being recorded in the first place. Kim tells me she isn't sure, but she thinks someone from Team Kanye might have called someone from Team Taylor.
“And then they sent an attorney's letter like, ‘Don't you dare do anything with that footage,’ and asking us to destroy it.” She pauses. “When you shoot something, you don't stop every two seconds and be like, ‘Oh wait, we're shooting this for my documentary.’ You just film everything, and whatever makes the edit, then you see, then you send out releases. It's like what we do for our show.”
GQ later contacted Kanye's reps to inquire about the possible video footage and threat of legal action from Swift's team. While Team Kanye asserted that Kanye and Taylor's conversation had been filmed and that they had heard from her lawyers, they declined to provide further proof.
A spokesperson for Taylor Swift declined to directly answer questions seeking clarification on the matter and instead provided the following statement, printed here in radiant completeness:
“Taylor does not hold anything against Kim Kardashian as she recognizes the pressure Kim must be under and that she is only repeating what she has been told by Kanye West. However, that does not change the fact that much of what Kim is saying is incorrect. Kanye West and Taylor only spoke once on the phone while she was on vacation with her family in January of 2016 and they have never spoken since. Taylor has never denied that conversation took place. It was on that phone call that Kanye West also asked her to release the song on her Twitter account, which she declined to do. Kanye West never told Taylor he was going to use the term ‘that bitch’ in referencing her. A song cannot be approved if it was never heard. Kanye West never played the song for Taylor Swift. Taylor heard it for the first time when everyone else did and was humiliated. Kim Kardashian's claim that Taylor and her team were aware of being recorded is not true, and Taylor cannot understand why Kanye West, and now Kim Kardashian, will not just leave her alone.”
In 2016, the Kardashian family received a distinction typically reserved for iconic American brands like Batman, Star Wars characters, and Abraham Lincoln: a prequel. Theirs came in the form of FX's retelling of the O. J. Simpson trial, in which Kim's father, Robert Kardashian, played a dramatic role.
For the record, Kim (and Kanye) “loved” The People v. O.J. Simpson. She was especially exuberant in her praise of Friends star David Schwimmer, who portrayed her late father.
“There were times I was watching it and I was like, ‘Oh shit, this is dead-on,’ ” said Kim. “Like, ‘That looks like my dad. It feels like my dad.’ It was eerie to watch sometimes.”
Simpson's murder trial began in the fall of Kardashian's freshman year at Marymount High, an all-girls Catholic school in Bel Air. She and her elder sister, Kourtney, once skipped class to sit in on a court session; the focus that day was the ins and outs of alarm codes and security systems. Her father, who died of esophageal cancer in 2003, was brought on to Simpson's defense team at the behest of Simpson's lawyer Robert Shapiro, even though his field was entertainment law and, at the time of O.J.'s arrest, Kardashian had not practiced for two decades; in the interim, Kardashian had launched a business called Movie Tunes, responsible for supplying theaters with the movie trivia and music that used to run on screens between films.
“I know people said at the time that he [joined Simpson's defense team] so he couldn't be called as a witness, because he had that Louis Vuitton bag that supposedly had the [murder] weapon and stuff like that,” said Kim. The day the victims' bodies were discovered, Kardashian was filmed removing what The New York Times referred to as a “bulging” garment bag from Simpson's house; the bag was later introduced into evidence empty. “But that bag was sitting at my dad's house. I remember I went through it. The news was like, ‘Where is this Louis Vuitton bag?’ And I'm like, ‘Oh, it's upstairs.’ ”
Did you really go through it?
“Totally.”
What was in it?
“Just toiletries and clothes and golf clothes. Just random stuff. I'm pretty sure it's, like, still in—probably in my dad's storage.”
Over the course of *The People v. O.J. Simpson'*s ten-episode arc, the Kardashian kids were conveniently shoehorned into a handful of scenes, their current renown apparently justifying a slight refocusing of the historical lens. (The children of prosecutor Marcia Clark, whose personal life was a vital part of the series, remained largely absent.) Kim was less enthusiastic about her and her siblings' portrayal.
“I don't think those parts were accurate,” she says. “I think our ages were off and our looks were off.” Also: “[The show] said [O.J.] tried to kill himself in my bedroom and it was Khloé's bedroom, not my bedroom.”
The thing about Kim it's ignoble to admit is that not only does she live the American Dream; she has also managed to re-invent it. Fame found her a few years shy of 30, when she lived in a modest condo and her full-time job was helping to run a small clothing store with her sisters. Less than a decade later, she's one half of one of the most famous couples on earth, a glamorous poster child for a post-racial future, an ex-club kid who's made being a teetotaling homebody aspirational. If you bristle at the designation, remember: Someone who lives the American Dream is not, strictly speaking, an American hero. They're just someone who turned less into more. And who among us could have taken Kim's tools—murder, a sex tape, spray tanner, and an ass that simply refuses to quit—and accomplished more?
As I prepared to leave her home, I joked that I hoped I'd remembered to turn on my recorder before beginning our conversation. “If you didn't, don't worry,” Kim whispered. “I remember everything.”
I believe her.
Caity Weaver is a GQ writer and editor.
