Mary Jo "MJ" Shannon was the grandmother millions of television viewers came to know before they ever learned her full name, the dry witted matriarch behind Kris Jenner and the six grandchildren who built the Kardashian-Jenner family businesses. She died on July 16, 2026, at 91. Kris Jenner announced her mother's death that day in an Instagram tribute, confirmed by ABC News.

Born Mary Jo Campbell on July 26, 1934, in Arkansas, she enrolled in a charm school called Fashionality at 15 and went on to model before marrying young. Her first marriage, to a high school boyfriend, ended after about two months. Her second marriage, to Robert True Houghton, produced two daughters, Kris and Karen, and ended in divorce around 1962, when Kris was seven. She later married businessman Harry Shannon; the two were together for roughly four decades until his death in 2003, according to Rolling Stone.

In 1980 she opened Shannon & Company, a children's clothing boutique on Girard Avenue in La Jolla, California, stocking clothes for boys up to age seven and girls up to fourteen. The shop's leopard print motif, adopted by 1985, later turned up throughout the wider family's wardrobe. A teenage Kris Jenner worked behind its counter, and years later granddaughter Kim Kardashian did too. Both credited the shop with teaching them the retail instincts they carried into the family's later ventures, according to E! Online. "Kids tear the place apart!" she told the Daily Beast in 2012, describing the grandchildren who grew up playing in its aisles.

She became a recurring, understated presence on Keeping Up with the Kardashians after it premiered on E! in 2007, and kept appearing after the show moved to Hulu as The Kardashians in 2022. The affection ran in both directions and showed up in small, lasting ways: in February 2016, granddaughter Kylie Jenner tattooed "Mary Jo" on her forearm, written in her late grandfather's handwriting, to honor them both. In May 2022, Shannon was one of only two witnesses, alongside Travis Barker's father Randy, at the courthouse wedding of granddaughter Kourtney Kardashian and Barker in Santa Barbara.

She outlived her younger daughter, Karen Houghton, who died in March 2024. In her tribute this July, Kris Jenner wrote that her mother "was the heart of our family" and had "taught me everything that truly matters... to love your family fiercely, to be kind, to show up for the people you love, and to never take a single moment together for granted." Kim Kardashian, who often called her grandmother her "gossip buddy" and "forever twin," wrote that Shannon had "always believed in me, championed me, and were my safe place."

Shannon is survived by her daughter Kris Jenner and by six grandchildren and a wider circle of great-grandchildren who grew up in and around the boutique she ran for decades. The store on Girard Avenue, the leopard print she made a family signature, and the name now inked on a granddaughter's arm are what remain of a life spent, by her own preference, mostly out of the spotlight her family built.