Four tiny bottles, each with a secret code name, sit on a shiny white table in front of Kim Kardashian, awaiting inspection. Inside the vials are versions of her latest fragrance, Glam, which is being tweaked to appeal to Japanese consumers. Whatever the 32-year-old beauty chooses today will be sold overseas under her name, so she is taking this smell-off seriously.
She waves each test strip in front of her perfect, pert nose. Opulence is too heavy for Asian tastes, she proclaims. Sequins? Too soft. "I don't even smell Glitzy anymore," she says, before settling on her choice: Geisha Garden. "Something tells me that's it," she tells the woman across from her, the brand president of her fragrance empire, who takes a note.
It's a lazy Sunday afternoon in Los Angeles, but Kardashian is hard at work. Pregnant but not showing, she's dressed in a filmy, gray-pink Lanvin top, a formfitting skirt, and pointy-toed Balmain heels. The Glam for Japan meeting is the first of three today; next up is a look at marketing materials for an upcoming fragrance (her sixth) and a strategy session with the heads of her online shoe company, ShoeDazzle.
This is probably not how you expected Kardashian's weekend to unfold. She is, after all, a girl who is famous for having fun—sometimes too much of it. On Keeping Up With the Kardashians, she's forever trying to drag her sisters, Kourtney and Khloé, out clubbing. While her 2006 sex tape with singer Ray J feels like ancient history, her 72-day marriage to basketball player Kris Humphries and her subsequent romance with singer Kanye West keep her constantly in the tabloids. It's hard not to assume that's by design.
But if the role of business mogul seems an unlikely fit, Kardashian is pulling it off. During the several hours we spend together in the offices of Jenner Communications, a familiar setting to anyone who watches E!, she stays on task and on time, rejecting a photo concept in a grassy meadow as "too bohemian for me" and insisting that her shoe website improve customer service ("There's nothing more annoying than when I'm trying to return something but I can't find somebody to talk to"). If the Kardashians are a corporation—reportedly the family has made up to $65 million a year—Kim is its CEO. And she has the schedule to prove it.
The day before our interview, she had flown home from Paris to L.A. The day after our sit-down, she will be on a 5 a.m. plane to New York to do press for the reality series Kourtney and Kim Take Miami. She and her sister Kourtney will appear on Today, The View, and the Late Show With David Letterman, where Kim, under attack from Dave, will explain that Humphries was "suing me for an annulment based on the fact that I frauded him into marrying [me] for publicity," and Kourtney will swiftly come to the rescue. "I think if she were going to do it for publicity," Kourtney will say with a smirk, "she'd pick someone that people knew." A day later, Kim will jet home to spend 24 hours with West in Beverly Hills, then hop on another plane to Africa's Ivory Coast to launch a cell phone, then fly back to Paris for Fashion Week, where she will do a photo shoot for her fragrance. In the coming days, she and her sisters will pose for ads for Khroma, their makeup company, and the Kardashian Kollection, a clothing line that sells in 16 countries. And on March 29, she's costarring (as a matchmaker!) in Tyler Perry's Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor.
Nonetheless, she tells me: "2013 for me is about scaling back. I want to focus on the few projects that I'm super passionate about and not spread myself too thin." To which I can only ask myself the same question that has nagged me since I first shook her hand: Is this girl for real?
Full disclosure: This is not the first time I've met Kim Kardashian. Our first encounter occurred five years ago on L.A.'s 101 Freeway when, inching along in bumper-to-bumper traffic, I rear-ended the woman famed for her bodacious backside. It was my fault completely. Which is why it seemed fitting that after slamming my aging Subaru into the tail end of her white Land Rover, it cost me $4,700 to fix my front end.
I tell you this not because I've been eating out on this story ever since (although I have), but because what sticks with me is how nice Kardashian was about the whole thing. Standing there on the narrow shoulder in her velour tracksuit, she could've been pissy or freaked out as we exchanged insurance information. Instead, she was sweet. No one was hurt. No big deal.
"In situations like that, emergencies, I'm super calm," she says, laughing when I reveal that I am the distracted driver who hit her in 2008. "Especially with material things, I feel like it's not the end of the world as long as everyone's safe. I'm like that in any stressful situation. Even when my father passed away, I sat down and I said to everyone, 'Okay, guys, what are we supposed to learn from this? We all need to grow up.'"
For more of Kim's exclusive interview with Cosmopolitan pick up the new issue on newsstands March 5.
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