Kim Kardashian for Harper’s Bazaar March 2011

Kim Kardashian covers the March 2011 issue of Harper’s Bazaar. In the same issue, Elizabeth Taylor sits down for an interview with the reality star. Yes, you read that correctly. People Magazine’s intro for their piece on this interview is hilarious, ‘Call it the meeting of the mighty: The legendary screen beauty Elizabeth Taylor sits down for an interview with reality TV superstar Kim Kardashian.’ Thank you, but no, People. ‘You are my idol. But I’m six husbands and some big jewels behind,’ Kardashian, 30, tells Taylor, who turns 79 the end of this month, for the issue on sale February 22. ‘I never planned to acquire a lot of jewels or a lot of husbands,’ Taylor tells Kardashian. ‘For me, life happened, just as it does for anyone else.’ I actually thought I was seeing things when I stumbled on this magazine cover showing Kardashian as photographed by Uncle Terry Richardson through his molester lens. Aside from the fact Uncle Terry can’t take a professional-looking picture to save his life, leaving every cover looking like it’s someone’s slightly more glamorous than need be driver’s license photo, this is a passable cover. I guess. It’d be better if it weren’t a remix of a very recognisable Christina Hendricks cover for the same magazine from November 2010, also shot by Richardson. It’s similar down to the same one hand on hip pose. Do you remember? Well, it was better. And the pages didn’t stick. And every issue wasn’t lightly misted with the scent of desperation. There’s a Cleopatra-themed photo shoot shown below along with outtakes, snippets from Kardashian’s actual interview with the magazine, and a behind-the-scenes video.

On her conflicted eating habits: ‘I’m on a diet,’ she says, looking glum but resolute. ‘I need to be. I love to eat Kit Kats or cookies-and-cream ice cream. I need sugar like five times a day.’
On her recent weight gain: ‘I worked out once [when in New York]. I gained like 10 pounds. All the papers were like, Kim’s pregnant! I ate the nuts on the street corner, the hot dogs, the street meat. It was not a joke,’ she says, stabbing her salad with resignation.
On getting stuff for free: ‘Once I tweeted, ‘Oh my God, I just tried a Golden Oreo. I’ve never in my life had something so amazing,” she remembers. ‘Then Oreo sent me crates of them. To my door.’ She amuses herself, ‘Hmm, I like Bentleys, flat-screen TVs, diamonds.’
On the appeal of herself and her sisters: ‘We have the glitz and the glam, and people want to live vicariously through it. Personally, though, I’m the first to say I have to work out extra hard, and it’s such a struggle for me to eat healthy. I have sister issues and parent issues and all sorts of things.’
On where she learned her ‘head for business’ (Harper’s Bazaar’s words, not mine): ‘I would absolutely characterize myself as ambitious,’ she says. She credits her late father, lawyer Robert Kardashian, who died of esophageal cancer in 2003, with instilling a work ethic in her. ‘I put myself on a budget. My parents raised us saying that at 18, we’d be cut off,’ she explains. So while ‘we had tennis lessons twice a week and we would complain about it,’ the girls were kept on a short leash: no going out on Saturday nights, and church on Sundays. ‘If we wanted this lifestyle, we had to work extra hard to get it. All of our friends had credit cards and cell phones, but that wasn’t even a possibility.’
On no longer being a cumdumpster, I guess: ‘As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned so much from relationships. My tolerance level is so different. So after years of being in not the best relationships, you grow up.’
On not basing her fame on her sex tape, hmm: ‘I never made a business off of the tape,’ she continues in the manner of one used to mounting a swift defense. ‘I made a business off my family and our TV show. Before the tape came out, we were in the works to do our TV show, but people don’t know that. I thought there would be a lot of misconceptions about me, so it was not even a question that it had to be a family show.’ She’s also quick to point out that she’s not as ‘wild and crazy’ as people might think. ‘I don’t drink. I just started at 30. A white Russian. I hate the taste of alcohol. White Russians or Midori sours; that’s it.’
On no longer being friends with Paris Hilton: ‘We don’t really talk. As I always say, everyone comes into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime. And she was in my life for a long time.’ So Paris is so last season? She smiles. ‘I’ll let you say it. There comes a point in life where you just grow apart and you realize you’re not as similar as you thought. And I never run into her anywhere. Isn’t that so weird?’
On how hard it is to date when famous: ‘What if I want to go on a date with someone in New York, and then I come home to L.A. and I go on a date? I could have slept with none of them, but I would be known as being’ she lowers her voice for gravitas ‘a ‘slore’: a slut and a whore. But I’ll do what I want. I have such a different outlook now.’
On getting botox: ‘All my friends had done it, and I was curious. But I saw such a change in what my face looked like. It didn’t work for me. Someone told me yesterday that I needed it. That is so ridiculous.’
On not having any plastic surgery: ‘Some people say, ‘You’ve definitely had your nose done.’ If I had, I would say, ‘Here’s the doctor, he’s amazing, and I’ll make the appointment for you.’ Sometimes I’ll see pictures that say I’ve had my nose done, and the before pic is after the after.’ She adds, ‘Someone saw me last night and my nose was so contoured. And they were like, ‘You’ve had your nose done?’ And I was like, ‘No, wait until I wash my face.”
On thinking she can sing: ‘I can carry a tune, yeah. I have a cute little voice. I talked to people in the business, and they said, ‘This is what we do for fun. You go to the movies, you go shopping, why don’t you try what we do?’”
On Kanye West: Has Kanye ever come courting? She smiles again. ‘We are good friends.”