Fourteen and in high school. The surge of hormones that turns gangly adolescents into comely young women had done its covert work, and Jennifer had blossomed, grown graceful and more poised. She no longer stooped and slumped, no longer tried to hide her height or her ample breasts. Indeed, she showed off her new, almost womanly, figure, wearing skin-tight jeans and shirts. She also changed her coiffure, shaving and spiking her hair into an up-to-the-minute punk cut. In part she altered her hairdo for fear of looking too suburban. She had heard, she told her old Port Washington friends, that kids in the city made fun of kids from the suburbs, calling them “B and T’s”—the Bridge and Tunnel crowd—and she dreaded being viewed as an outsider by her new classmates.
Still, despite her fears, she had a coterie of friends by the time she had been at Baldwin only a few weeks. Carl Morgera, who hoped to be an actor or a playwright, was one of the first. He introduced Jennifer to his friends, and after classes went with her and the gang to nearby Central Park, where they let off steam by playing Frisbee or engaging in mock fights. The park was filled with autumnal light. The leaves were red and copper. Carl would heft Jennifer onto his shoulders and give her racing, tearing piggyback rides, her voice shattering the park’s tranquillity with shrieks of feigned terror. He was very fond of her, but she didn’t become his girlfriend. Not long into her first semester at Baldwin, she met another boy upon whom she conferred that privilege.
He was Brock Pernice, a slender boy with an animated, mischievous face. A grandson of the famous Broadway producer Alexander Cohen, Brock went to York Prep. On the day he met Jennifer he was visiting friends in the Baldwin gym. She was sitting on a wooden gym horse, her black-jeaned legs dangling over the sides. Her lips were painted a vivid pink, and on her head was a big jaunty hat. Transfixed by her dramatic good looks, Brock invited her to go with him to a Billy Idol concert.
She accepted. He took her to the concert and then to the lively Peppermint Lounge. There he danced with her and kissed her, and after that he began dating her regularly.
Robert, who had turned sixteen that fall, was often surrounded by girls. They flocked to him, attracted by his extraordinarily handsome face and tall, long-limbed body. At parties or in Central Park—where his friends, too, generally gathered after school—girls came up to him, encircled him, and pressed their attentions on him. He did little, just passively accepted their giggles and embraces, and reaped envious stares from less favored boys.
He was in the park constantly. After the trip to the Louisiana clinic, he’d gone right back to drinking and drugs. And his favorite place to get stoned was the park.
He had his preferred spots, a grove of trees behind The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where as a little boy he’d congregated with his St. David’s friends, and a grassy slope at the side of the Museum, where the ancient glass-encased Temple of Dendur stood eerie guard over the drug-dazed, sparking their fantasies with visions of mystery and science fiction.
When he himself was drug-dazed, he sometimes hallucinated, talking aloud to a tree or a lamppost. A handful of girls were so struck by the sight that they dubbed him “The Boy Who Talks to Lampposts.” But nevertheless they found him cute.
Not so his father. Bob, who had returned sober from the clinic to which he’d gone, had been taking a fresh look at his life. He saw with sudden clarity the trouble his son was in.
Phyllis refuses to, Bob told his AA group. She refuses, even though the parents of some of Robert’s friends have told us he’s no longer welcome at their homes. She just keeps denying his problems and saying he’ll straighten out soon.
Phyllis was no doubt counting on college to do the straightening out. Certainly she was turning a blind eye to Robert’s failings and pretending to herself and the outside world that he was still the promising child of her daydreams. When York sent her a junior-year questionnaire asking her to which colleges she would like to see her son apply, she wrote down, “Dartmouth, Brown, Duke, and Columbia”—all of them colleges with very high admission standards. She also mentioned on the form that she had “pull” at three of those schools. For Columbia, she noted, she had a friend who was a big contributor. For Duke, she could count on the good word of General Robert Arter, commander of the Military District of Washington, D.C. And for Brown, why, “the Kennedy Family.”
That same autumn—it was 1982—Jennifer, Carl, and some of their Baldwin friends started going in groups to Studio 54. Fourteen-year-olds from all over the city were there. Studio, as its regulars called it, had once been the most fashionable disco in town, a place where celebrities and jet-setters rocked and rolled on a strobe-lit dance floor dominated by a neon man-in-the-moon snorting cocaine through a giant spoon. But Studio had fallen on hard times. Its original owners had been jailed for tax fraud and its doors had been shut for a year. In 1981, it had reopened under new management, but its former habitués had moved on to other pleasure palaces. Realizing that a new clientele was necessary to fill the cavernous premises, the new management had begun distributing free or discounted passes at the city’s high schools, hoping that the club’s former association with the Beautiful People would attract young, and therefore authentically beautiful, people.
By the time Jennifer’s group began going to Studio, so many young people were begging for admission that doormen fierce as Cerberus guarding the gates of Hades blocked the mob behind wooden barriers. The doormen picked and chose among the young people, or at least gave the impression that they were picking and choosing, letting in only a few at a time while the rest of the crowd groaned or growled. Those who got in felt honored, assumed they’d been chosen because they looked better than the others, looked like the club’s real insiders.
The insiders—generally they were the children of families whose names had publicity value—never had to wait on line. They got into the disco as soon as they arrived. They also got invitations to the club’s private parties. And they got free drinks—the management permitted teenage drinking provided teenagers had IDs that falsified their age. The insiders constituted Studio’s A-list, and the rest of the crowd, no matter their discounted or free passes, a gigantic, clamoring B-list.
Jennifer was, in her first forays to Studio, a B-listed girl. She didn’t complain. It was exciting just to get in.
You felt like a grown-up there, she and her agemates said. But of course that meant you had to dress like one. Wear fancy clothes. And good shoes. Preferably heels. Definitely not sneakers. The bouncers could tell a lot about people from their feet. If your shoes were wrong, you’d never get in.
You also needed makeup. Plenty of it. And that could be a problem if your parents thought you’d gone out just to sleep over at a friend’s house. But it wasn’t insurmountable. You could always just bring your makeup with you and put it on once you arrived. Or even leave your makeup at home and use the expensive brands that were available free in the bathrooms. Studio had these great bathrooms, with big mirrors and pretty cloth-covered vanity tables. The really cool people stashed their coats under the vanities so they didn’t have to pay for checking them.
Outside, the music was so loud that you didn’t so much hear it as feel it throbbing through your body. And there were sights! Boys wearing jewelry and blond wigs. Older men—a lot of them looked like lawyers—smoking grass or snorting coke. Sometimes they’d offer you some. And then try to pick you up. But if you stuck with the people you came in with, you were okay. You could dance.
Jennifer and her friends knew, of course, about the private parties. How could they not? Calvin Klein’s daughter, Marci, had her sixteenth birthday party at Studio and invited scores of Manhattan prep school girls. The invitations were adorable. Little Plexiglas boxes holding sixteen bright red candles, delivered by a messenger in a limo. And at the party there were candles six feet high and dancing girls in fishnet tights and tuxedo jackets, and a raft of celebrities—among them Mick Jagger, Timothy Hutton, and Treat Williams. Jennifer and her friends knew girls who’d gone. And they knew, at fourteen, that at Studio 54, there was glamour and real glamour.
Steve Levin didn’t like Jennifer staying out late. But he was aware that nothing started in New York until after eleven at night. He gave her rules. No going out on school nights, period. And when she went out on weekend nights, she was to take taxis, no public transportation. He also insisted that if she said she was going to sleep over at some friend’s house and then changed her plans, went to someone else’s place, she call and let him know where she was.
She always called. And on the few occasions when he had something to tell her and telephoned her at the place she’d said she was going to be, she was always there. She was an honest kid.
As the December date for the Gold & Silver Ball approached, Phyllis was far from happy. For one thing, Robert hadn’t gone to even a single planning session of the Junior Committee. He hadn’t wanted to be with a bunch of charity-minded kids assigning each other chores. He’d stayed away from the meetings and hung out with his own circle—York boys or street kids he’d met in the park who were heavily into drugs. For another thing, Bob didn’t have a proper job. MCA had let him go, and he hadn’t been able to find another suitable position. Strapped for money, he’d started working as a deliveryman for a local liquor shop.
The ball was held that winter of 1982 in the ballroom of the brand-new Grand Hyatt Hotel. Phyllis’s fellow executive committee member, Donald Trump, owned the hotel and had made it available for the charitable event. Phyllis dressed beautifully and tried to have a good time. But Robert didn’t come. And although Bob did, he’d been out ringing doorbells and collecting tips practically up to the moment they left for the great affair.
By Christmas, Phyllis’s neighbors were gossiping about the irony of her circumstances. But she kept up a bold front. She purchased a shop-decorated Christmas tree for her apartment from an expensive neighborhood florist. She also got the florist to provide holiday flowers for the lobby. They were not run-of-the-mill small potted poinsettias but two enormous poinsettia trees.
How can she afford them? the neighbors asked one another. Her salary as a nurse, even a nurse to the wealthy, can’t be very high. But they decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth—particularly as the lobby needed perking up. The intricate bronze chandelier and sconces that had once been its high point had disappeared. They’d been stolen, a few people in the building feared, by Robert and his friends.
On New Year’s Eve, Bob Chambers worked for the liquor store, and Phyllis saw friends. When she returned to her apartment that night, she was greeted by a horrendous sight. The apartment had been burglarized and many things she cherished had been stolen. Jewelry, cameras, and a typewriter were gone. Even some of her clothes.
The neighbors, learning about the burglary, suspected Robert of having committed it. But Phyllis, who wore hand-me-downs for several weeks afterward, told them she believed she’d been robbed by the superintendent or else by some cat burglar who had scaled the back walls. She lobbied to get the super fired and she bought a mercury vapor light for the back of the building. “It’s as powerful as a streetlamp,” she told the neighbors. “It’ll keep any future burglars away.”
“It’s finished. It’s really over,” Phyllis said to Barbara Dermont over tea sandwiches at the elegant Carlyle Hotel a few months after her apartment was burglarized. She was speaking about her marriage. Bob Chambers was moving out. A moment later tears welled up in her eyes.
Barbara was astonished. She’d never seen Phyllis cry before, had always imagined her as a tower of strength and a fortress of guarded emotion. She felt embarrassed and tried to comfort Phyllis, but Phyllis was inconsolable. “I didn’t want much. All I ever wanted was for Bob to take me for a walk on a Sunday afternoon and hold my hand,” she cried. “Or just take me out for a cup of coffee.”
He can’t, Barbara thought, because you always take control over everything when you’re with him. But she didn’t say this to Phyllis. Phyllis doesn’t see herself as controlling, Barbara mused. She doesn’t see herself clearly at all. She lives in a kind of fantasy world. Suddenly Barbara felt tears in her own eyes.
Toward the end of that winter’s ski season, Brock Pernice made his way to Robert’s house on East 90th Street. Brock wasn’t at York any longer. He’d transferred to another school. But he’d known Robert at York, and when they’d run into each other recently, Robert had mentioned that he had some terrific skis to sell. Brock had been interested.
At Robert’s, Brock went down to the basement with him. There he saw numerous pairs of skis.
“They’re old family skis,” Robert said, although in fact he and some friends had stolen them from a ski chalet in upstate New York.
“How much do you want for these?” Brock asked, selecting a pair.
“Two hundred dollars.”
“I’ve only got a hundred.”
“That’ll be okay,” Robert said.
Brock took the skis.
Several days later, he saw Robert again. It was at his school cafeteria. He was sitting there when suddenly he looked up and noticed Robert standing over him. He wasn’t alone. He had two black guys with him. Strangers. “We came for the money you owe,” Robert said.
Owe? Brock felt confused. “I thought you said a hundred dollars would be okay.”
“No.” Robert shook his head. “It’s two hundred.”
Brock realized he must have made a mistake about the price and said he’d pay up. “But not now,” he explained. “I don’t have the money on me.”
“You got a bank account, don’t you?” one of the strangers suddenly interjected.
Brock nodded unhappily.
“So let’s go to the bank.”
Brock hesitated. But the stranger who had spoken was broader and more muscular than he. So was the other one. So was Robert for that matter. Getting up from the table, Brock left school and headed for his bank.
Robert and the other two young men went with him. And the whole time he was drawing out his money, they stood ominously at his shoulders.
In the summer of that year—it was 1983—Jennifer went for the second time to the Adirondacks camp. Canoeing, sailing, and struggling up winding wilderness trails, she was, like adolescent campers everywhere, hungry all the time. One weekend Steve and Arlene visited her and, taking her grocery shopping, allowed her to buy thirty-five dollars’ worth of snacks. The largesse, the attention made her so joyous that she described the shopping expedition in a letter to one of her old Port Washington girlfriends. She also mentioned in the same letter that she was going out with a boy at camp. “His name is Jeremiah,” she wrote. “He is fifteen. Blond hair, blue eyes! Gorgeous!”
“If only I could be like her,” a young Colombian woman named Julia Zapata said about Phyllis Chambers to several of her friends that August. Julia’s English was poor, her clothes were shabby, and she was perpetually anxious, but she had landed a job as cook for an extremely rich but elderly and ailing couple, Samuel and Irene Coyne, who lived on Park Avenue. Phyllis Chambers was managing the household, supervising Julia and a staff of several nurses, but her principal job was to serve as companion to old Mrs. Coyne, who had had a debilitating stoke. Phyllis attended her with devotion, talking to her, bathing her, and even painting her lips and cheeks and wiggling her into a girdle and dressy clothes so she could go out to lunch to the Carlyle.
Mrs. Coyne’s son and daughter-in-law didn’t altogether approve of Phyllis. They felt she was extravagant and domineering, rather as if she were the lady of the house, not an employee. But Julia adored her. Sure, Phyllis acted like a lady, not a servant, was the way Julia looked at it. But what was wrong with that. Nothing said that because you scrubbed floors or washed pots or emptied bedpans, you couldn’t be a lady. Julia wanted to be one, too. So did all her friends who worked as servants to the rich.
Julia was thrilled when Phyllis began to tutor her in the essentials of ladydom—gave her advice about clothing and hairstyles and lectured her about improving her personality. “You must learn to celebrate yourself,” Phyllis told Julia. “You must say to yourself, ‘This is Julia, and I’m beautiful.’” Phyllis had learned to say things like this about her own self in a self-help group called The Pursuit of Excellence. She attended numerous self-help groups—among them Freedom Institute and Scientology.
Julia was also thrilled when Phyllis invited her to accompany her and Mrs. Coyne to the Carlyle.
Phyllis had been working for the Coynes for a long time when Julia met her at their home in the summer of 1983. But in the fall Phyllis was fired. Years later a member of the Coyne family would tell a public official that she’d gotten into trouble because, try as the family did to point out to her that her elderly charge no longer could appreciate gourmet dining, she had refused to listen to them and persisted in going to costly restaurants with her.
Losing her position with the Coynes was a blow to Phyllis. But she soon received a nursing assignment that made up for the disappointment. She was hired to care for New York’s beloved prelate Terence Cardinal Cooke, who was suffering from leukemia. She looked after the cardinal until his death in mid-October with a devotion and attentiveness that did not go unnoticed among his friends in the Church’s hierarchy.
“I miss you terribly. I’ll die if I don’t see you,” Jennifer said over the phone to Marjorie Harvey, one of her old Port Washington friends, late in October 1983. “Promise me, swear to me you’ll come and visit me in the city.”
At Halloween, Marjorie accepted Jennifer’s invitation. So did several other Port Washington girls whom Jennifer had been imploring to come. The group took the half-hour train ride into the city, went downtown to Jennifer’s loft in SoHo, and donned their costumes. One girl dressed as a rabbit, another as a bum, several as black cats. Then they went to Washington Square Park, bought a couple of bottles of Riunite red, and sat drinking on a stoop near the park.
They had a wonderful time until the black tights and twisting tails of the girls impersonating cats caught the eye of a group of rowdy young men. “Here pussy, here pussy,” the men sniggered. Alarmed, the Port Washington girls scattered and began to run away. But Jennifer turned on their tormentors with an obscene comeback.
“Don’t do that,” Marjorie said, grabbing Jennifer’s arm. “One of these days you’re going to get yourself killed saying things like that.”
Jennifer shrugged. “This is New York. You have to know how to handle yourself here.”
Marjorie bristled. Jennifer’s telling me I’m unsophisticated, she fretted. Her irritation lingered, and later she decided that all evening Jennifer had kept implying that her old friends were too provincial and tame for her.
They may have been. By the night of the Halloween visit Jennifer was not just going to the occasional disco but to lively and at times turbulent parties. At one, she and two city girlfriends consumed a bottle of vodka. Afterward they got sick and hurried into the bathroom. There Jennifer made them all laugh by lying down in the bathtub with her feet and arms sticking out.
She drank a lot. One night she came home from Studio so drunk her father grounded her.
Despite her flirtations with self-help groups, Phyllis counted most on God to see her through her troubles with Robert. She was very pious—“perhaps even overly pious,” a priest who counseled her would one day tell an interviewer. Her beliefs were stern and narrow. One night toward the end of 1983, John Dermont, who was also a Catholic, became aware of this. He and Phyllis were at dinner together, and he had just waxed philosophical and said, “I believe in God. But sometimes I wonder. I mean, where was God during the Holocaust?”
Phyllis said, “What do you mean?”
“Well, you know,” Dermont replied. “All those people died.”
“Those were Jews,” Phyllis said.
Dermont didn’t see the relevance of her answer. “I’m not talking about what religion people had,” he said, “but about God’s concern for humanity.”
Phyllis had no problems with the topic. “Oh yes, John,”, she said. “But those people had turned their backs upon Christ.”
Jennifer, nearly sixteen, fell in love with the rock star Billy Idol in the spring of 1984. Billy had blue eyes. A pouty mouth. A tattoo. She adored his music, the way he scowled, the way he swaggered. BILLY, she wrote in big block letters in her friend Joan Huey’s journal, and drew hearts with his name and hers entwined.
She and Joan talked about boys all the time, and daily they went on what they called “guy-searching” walks, strolling eagerly among the crowds of young people on 8th Street in Greenwich Village. They also planned a trip to Florida, a trip which, Jennifer scribbled in Joan’s journal, would net them “Tan guys! Epcot Center! Disco! Everything! Sex, sex, sex!”
“I know we would have the best time with blonds,” Joan scribbled back. Blonds with “bluish-green eyes.”
But Billy Idol was their ruling passion, and at last they managed to find out where he lived. For weeks afterward, the two teenagers spent hours in front of his Village apartment. And soon they began writing each other letters in which they fantasized romance with the surly singer. “Can you believe we got Billy’s real name-n-address?” Jennifer wrote. “I happen to love him… . Billy Idol rules!”
“I happen to love him also,” Joan wrote back. “A lot.” Then she spiced up her correspondence. “You and I will get Billy Idol and we will have massive sex with him, okay?” she suggested. Then, later, “All right. We’re gonna go back there and Billy will be by himself and we’re gonna have a threesome right away.”
One day Jennifer told Marjorie Harvey, her old Port Washington friend, that while shopping in Tower Records she’d actually met Billy, and what’s more, he’d kissed her. “That’s not all,” she said. “The best part was that after he kissed me, the manager told him he shouldn’t have done it, not with all these diseases going around, and Billy just sneered and gave the manager this look like, Hell, it was worth it!”
It may have been true. But it may just as well have been a fantasy. Marjorie believed it. But she didn’t know that Jennifer was busily inventing a new life for herself that spring, a star-studded, stud-starred life in which she was no commonplace schoolgirl but a creature irresistible to handsome tanned guys and even to celebrities.
She was also writing poetry. Her poems, awkward rhymed verses, were generally about love, especially love gone sour or awry. One, written about the boy she had found “gorgeous” at camp, went:
I loved to look into his eyes,
To hear his voice,
Or even just to see him smile.
Another, written to a boy she felt had mistreated her, mourned:
That playing games
Is for little boys.
Girls were never meant
To be treated as toys.
When she wasn’t composing verses, she scrawled giddy letters and notes to her girlfriends. “I love you so much!! We are the closest two buddies can ever get,” she wrote to one. “I know we’ll remain friends forever!!” “I love ya,” she wrote to another, “for good times and bad. I’ll be on your side forever more ’cause that’s what friends are for.”
She was increasingly preoccupied by love—or, rather, being loved. As her sixteenth birthday approached, her longings crystallized around the notion of losing her virginity. It was a burden carrying around her virginity, fighting off boys who wanted to relieve her of it, hearing girls she knew who’d given up theirs when they were fourteen and fifteen start to exchange secrets about their experiences, then clam up when she said she hadn’t had sex yet. But more important to her than social acceptance was the idea that she would at last, once she had sex, truly experience love.
The guy she had in mind, she told a school friend, wasn’t Brock. “Brock’s always fighting with me,” she said. “He doesn’t really love me. And for the first time to be good, the partners really have to be in love.”
Soon afterward she and the boy she had chosen had sex. It was her sixteenth birthday present to herself—a present even more exciting than the one Arlene gave her, which was a trip to the Bahamas. She was exultant about giving up her virginity. “I’m so happy,” she bubbled over the phone to one of her old Port Washington buddies. “I’ve done it, and it was great. I’m so glad I planned it, didn’t just get drunk at a party and end up in bed with some guy, like happens to a lot of girls.”
But for all her planning, her first sexual experience brought her misery as well as happiness. Only a few days after the event, she arrived at a party and saw the boy with whom she’d made love greeting another girl with a hug. She sobbed with jealousy and stormed and screamed at him.
She never fully forgave him. Not long afterward she went back to seeing Brock again. And to seeing other boys, too.
“Robert does not do his work nor does he deal realistically with his situation. There is a possibility, therefore, that he will not graduate with his class,” York headmaster Stewart informed Phyllis Chambers toward the end of that school semester—Robert’s senior term. It was but one of many discouraging notes he had sent to Phyllis. He hated having to write it, because Mrs. Chambers was such a concerned parent. Always volunteering to serve on school committees, always helping out on parent-teacher days. But although he liked her, there was a limit to what he could do for her. Ultimately Robert would have to pass his courses to be entitled to a diploma. And no one could assume he’d pass. As he always said to his kids, never assume! Assume makes an ass out of you and me.
Of course, part of the problem was the way parents these days didn’t control their kids. They let them hang out all night doing God knows what, and the kids came to class more asleep than awake. As he always told the parents: If you lose control of your kids, you’re running a hotel, not a home.
Still, it was his job to try to get Robert through high school, and he made up his mind to get really tough with him. He’d keep him after school, give him detention. Maybe then he’d recognize the seriousness of his situation.
Day after day that spring of 1984 Robert stayed late after school while much of the rest of the senior class, cans of beer or paper cups of mixed drinks in their hands, made their way to the park and lazed in the sun, smoking pot, playing Frisbee, and listening to music. Only weeks before, he’d been one of them. And now he was a prisoner. Despising Stewart’s efforts at disciplining him, he, too, wrote a poem:
This detention is not working.
I no longer care.
I’m going insane, slow but sure.
My condition is terminal.
There is no cure except … let me out!
But Stewart wouldn’t let him out. And his parents, he complained to his friends, wouldn’t get off his back. It was shape up or nothing. They’d even told him that unless he got into some good college, they wouldn’t give him financial support. The problem with parents, he charged, was that they were always pushing, pushing, pushing you.
One day, inspired, he wrote another poem, this one entitled “Our Parents.” In it he painted a romanticized portrait of a generic mother and father, a portrait in which self-pity and mockery were hidden behind lines of card-shop sentimentality:
Strength and security, laughter and fun,
He’s a prince to his daughter, a pal to his son.
A storyteller to girls and boys,
She’s seldom dismayed by the family noise.
He’s an “everyday Santa” who brings home surprises,
The man to consult when a problem arises.
The truest of friends in times of need,
She’s eager to help her child succeed.
He’s a living instructor who struggles to teach,
All the goals his child someday can reach.
They know deep in their hearts that day after day,
It was all worth the bother
Just to hear their children say,
“I love you, Mother and Father!”
Then, at last, graduation time arrived. Robert, dressed in a cap and gown, went to the ceremony, which was held in the auditorium of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. He strode up to the podium to receive his diploma case and shook Stewart’s hand as he reached for it.
But the diploma case was empty. He hadn’t, despite the detention, completed all his course work and wouldn’t be getting the actual diploma unless he made up the work at summer school.
That night Robert celebrated with his classmates at a graduation party. It was held in a loft, where a reggae band entertained the graduates. Robert got drunk. But that didn’t bother his admirers, the flocks of tittering, dewy-eyed girls who hugged, kissed, and cuddled him as if he were a pasha with a harem.
Phyllis knew that girls sucked up to her son. “It’s girls that are at the root of his problems,” she had several times told a friend. And, determined to see to it that Robert didn’t spend his summer dallying with girls, she went out and found him a job. It was with a woman she knew who owned a yacht and gave parties on it. “Robert’s strong,” Phyllis told the yacht owner. “And energetic.”
The boat, spanking white and 120 feet long, was anchored at a marina in the East River. Robert reported to work and spent several days readying the yacht for the first parties of the summer. He scrubbed the decks, polished the woodwork in the cabins, loaded the pantries till they were full of expensive wines and exotic delicacies.
The setting and luxury inspired him. “Maybe,” he said to a friend one evening, “I’ll make a ton of money one of these days and buy Malcolm Forbes’s yacht. Give parties on that!”
But his daydreams came to an abrupt end. After he’d been employed on the yacht only briefly, the owner noticed that bottles of champagne and cases of liquor were disappearing. She began to suspect Robert of being involved in the thefts. She didn’t want to confront him with her suspicions. She knew his mother. But on a weekend when a full round of parties had been scheduled and Robert failed to arrive for work, she fired him.
He didn’t have a job after that. But he did go to York’s summer school, did sit in hot classrooms and struggle to make up his missing work.
A girl who met him at summer school thought he was great fun to be with. And because of that, and because all the girls she knew oohed and aahed when she said she had a class with him, she went bar-hopping with him several times and one night told him boldly that she wanted to make love with him.
“You’re too young for that sort of thing,” he chided her.
The girl—she was only sixteen and he was nearly eighteen—accepted his rejection and, like other girls before her, figured it showed how much he respected her. But afterward she began to think that he wasn’t, when you got right down to it, as interested in sex as other boys were. He talked about it just the way they did. But he held back. Maybe that’s why so many girls like him, she decided. He’s safe.
Marilei Lew Lee, twenty-four years old and as petite as a doll, had been a nutritionist back home in her native Brazil; but when she came to America in 1984, the only work she’d been able to find was as a domestic. That spring she took a job as a live-in maid for Dorothy Hammerstein, widow of the famous lyricist. Mrs. Hammerstein, who was in her eighties, had been an interior decorator when she was younger, and her Park Avenue apartment was stuffed with a pirate’s ransom of treasures. She had museum-quality portraits from England, lacquered screens from China, hand-painted secretaries from Venice, and myriad exotic knickknacks that required constant and meticulous dusting and cleaning. Marilei threw herself into the work, Mrs. Hammerstein praised her for her application, and after she had worked there for four months, Marilei almost ceased wishing that she knew English well enough to go back into the field of nutrition. She was happy, at least for now, with what she was doing. And she liked the rest of the staff, liked Mitchell, the valet and cook, and especially Phyllis Chambers, the new nurse. Phyllis wrote a letter to the Department of Immigration for her, saying that she too had once been a stranger in America, but had worked hard and made a success of herself and was sure that Marilei would, too.
Not everyone connected to the household liked Phyllis. Mrs. Hammerstein’s other nurses didn’t. Nor did Mrs. Hammerstein’s doctor. But Phyllis didn’t care. She told Mrs. Hammerstein that she ought to fire the other nurses and switch to Dr. Kevin Cahill, a prominent physician who had treated the late Cardinal Cooke and even Pope John Paul II, and whose office had frequently found Phyllis jobs. Mrs. Hammerstein did it.
The old lady always does whatever Phyllis asks her to do, Marilei thought. Me, too. Because Phyllis takes such charge of things that after a while everyone around her thinks they can’t even take a breath without her at their side.
Forty-room houses and two-passenger cars. A wealth of broad beaches, chic little restaurants, and gorgeous suntanned guys. Long Island’s Southampton enchanted Jennifer, who was staying at Joan Huey’s country home and working in a store that sold Moroccan jewelry and fabrics.
She and Joan spent a lot of time together, but she made new friends, too. One was Leilia Van Baker a wealthy, WASPy girl with blond hair, a lean body, and long, gazellelike limbs. She’d been an A-listed girl at the discos ever since she was a little kid, she told Jennifer, and frequently entertained her with stories about her adventures on that A-list. She knew a girl who’d snorted coke with a famous movie star at one disco party, she said. She knew another who’d lost her virginity to a world-renowned rock singer twenty years her senior. “Do you realize,” she trilled, “that there are girls our age who live in the Midwest and read in Seventeen about the kinds of people me and my friends actually know? Do you realize there are girls who would give their eye teeth to be part of our scene, to go to the parties we turn up our noses at?”
Jennifer knew.
One day Leilia told Jennifer that she’d been feeling a bit jaded with the scene before they’d met, but that now, seeing things through her new friend’s eyes, it had become wondrous and new again. Jennifer had a rare gift, Leilia marveled, the ability to make life seem fresh.
They palled around often, and when the summer began drawing to a close, Leilia swore to Jennifer that she’d remain friends with her in the city. “We’ll go to Studio together,” she said. “And to the other discos. I’ll introduce you around.”
Leilia knew everybody. She knew the men who managed the discos. She knew the doormen who guarded the gates. She knew Amy Lumet and Cosima von Bülow and all the teenage girls who got written about in society columns. And she knew, and was good friends with, the teenage boys who were the most talked-about escorts, guys like Nick Beavers, whose family owned a lively disco, and John Flanagan, who was forever throwing the most wonderful parties, and Robert Chambers, who was the best-looking in the bunch and terrifically popular.
“You’ll meet them all,” Leilia promised.
“Would you mind ironing some shirts I bought for Robert?” Phyllis asked Marilei one day toward the end of that summer. Marilei said she wouldn’t mind. She’d become good friends with Phyllis, and she’d met and become fond of her handsome, polite son. She liked doing favors for Phyllis and the boy, whose name she could never quite pronounce. “Hrobert,” she always called him.
She took the shirts from Phyllis. They were soft cotton broadcloth from Brooks Brothers. Phyllis, she noted, buys Hrobert only the best. Laying them lovingly on her board, she made sure to press them both on the inside and on the outside, so that they would be perfectly smooth.
The next week Phyllis gave Marilei some more of Robert’s shirts to iron. She did those, too, and soon it was taken for granted that she would always do Robert’s laundry.
At the start of the fall, she did a great batch of laundry for him. Robert was leaving for college. He’d gotten into Boston University’s School of Basic Studies.
Leilia was true to her word. By the late fall of 1984, Jennifer started turning up at private parties at Studio 54. She always seemed to be having a good time, a young man who hosted some of the parties noticed. Well, why not, he confided to an interviewer. His parties were wondrous, if he did say so himself. Everything went. Drinking, drugging, girls fellating their boyfriends right out in the open, up in the balconies. And the clothes! There was this one woman, she was worth a fortune, she used to go home in her limo every hour and change her clothes and come back in a different outfit.
He was always throwing parties. Well, he had to, he always said. He had no money. His father had cut off his trust fund. But he got paid by the discos. They paid him for bringing in the right kinds of people.
Jennifer wasn’t the right kind of people, though she was, you know, okay. His people were, like, Courtney Duchin and Carter Burden, Jr., and Al Uzielli and John Flanagan. They attracted the others.
What times those parties were! The boys would get so drunk they wouldn’t know what they were doing. And the girls would fight over them. At least they’d fight over the ones who were status symbols. The girls were terribly immature. They always screwed things up. Like the time he invited Prince Albert of Monaco to a party, and Prince Albert took a fancy to one of the girls, and then she wouldn’t sleep with him. If he were a girl and a prince asked him to bed, well, he certainly wouldn’t have stood on ceremony. But these girls, you couldn’t rely on them.
Parents? Personally, he’d never noticed any parental supervision of the kids who came to his parties. The parents were blasé. They were parents who were out all night themselves. Or else they were the kind who were afraid that if they told their kids they couldn’t go, the kids would have no social lives. You had to be one sonofabitch of a parent to tell your kid he or she couldn’t go to these parties and risk that your kid would grow up unpopular.
Jennifer? He wasn’t impressed with her. She looked like a lot of other girls. Just another Madonna clone.
Why did he have to read Hamlet, Robert sulked at his family’s Thanksgiving dinner. Hamlet was boring. And he’d read it already at St. David’s or York or someplace. That was what was wrong with Boston University’s School of Basic Studies. The curriculum was dull, repetitious.
He’d started the semester full of enthusiasm, happy to be up in Boston and pleased by the program, which had seemed designed for people like him.
“Many young people glide through high school at half-speed,” the college’s brochure had blazoned in big heart-warming type, “never realizing the promise of their own potential, seldom feeling the pride of having done their best. There is a college that exists for no purpose other than to help such students become the best that they can be.” He’d enrolled for his classes—a smorgasbord of psychology, rhetoric, humanities, science, and social science—and tried to keep up with them. But he couldn’t. He was partying a lot, drinking, doing coke. Sometimes he’d spread the white powder out on his hand in the shape of his initials and snort away his identity. By the time mid-term exams came around, he’d fallen so far behind in his assignments that he’d been warned that unless he quickly made up his work, he wouldn’t be allowed to continue at the school.
He didn’t tell the assembled relatives of the warning. He just said he didn’t like B.U. and didn’t want to go back.
Several days after the dinner, Phyllis called John Dermont and asked him, “Do you think Robert could get into Oxford?”
Dermont was astounded. He’d always viewed Oxford as the intellectual capital of the world and Robert as totally muddle-headed. “I don’t really think,” he said, speaking measuredly as if breaking bad news, “that Robert has what they look for.”
Phyllis was undaunted. “What about for a summer session?” she asked.
Dermont thought, Of all the mothers I know, Phyllis is the one with the most undying optimism about her offspring. He shook his head. Then he said, “I think the only way kids get into Oxford for the summer is through a program sponsored by their schools. Maybe his school has such a program.”
Dermont didn’t know that Robert was about to be a man without a school. Nor did he know until long after the phone call about the Thanksgiving trashing of Hamlet. When he did hear about it, he said to his wife, “Can you imagine? Phyllis wanted to pack Robert off to Oxford. Oxford, where he’d never have to be troubled with English literature again!”
In December, Phyllis told Marilei that through no fault of his own Robert had been asked to leave Boston University. “He got into trouble,” she said. “They found drugs in his room. Marijuana. He didn’t put it there. Some girl did. She was jealous of him because he wouldn’t pay attention to her, so she played that trick on him.”
Poor Hrobert, Marilei thought. It’s not his fault girls find him so attractive.
Phyllis didn’t tell Marilei that Robert had stolen a roommate’s credit card and used it to buy dinners for himself.
“Did you see that girl in the Maidenform ad that ran in the New York Times Magazine?” Bob Chambers said to John Dermont one day at around the time Phyllis told Marilei about the marijuana. Bob was doing all right. He had a place of his own—an apartment on the West Side—he was still on the wagon, and he had landed a job in the credit department of HBO.
“Sure I saw her,” Dermont said. “She was a real pistol.”
“I know her. She’s a girlfriend of mine.”
Was it true? Dermont wasn’t sure. But he said, “Not bad!”
“I showed the picture to Robert,” Bob went on.
“You showed it to Robert?” Dermont looked askance.
“Yeah. I was visiting. And I had the magazine with me. I told him, ‘Here, take a look at your father’s girlfriend.’”
“How come?”
“Just wanted him to know.”
What had Bob wanted Robert to know? Dermont wondered afterward. That he was a macho guy? Or that he was no longer under Phyllis’s control.
During Christmas week, Julia Zapata came to Mrs. Hammerstein’s to do some work. Through Phyllis’s recommendation, the former cook had been hired as a seamstress. She chalked and pinned Mrs. Hammerstein’s skirts, then toured the apartment with Phyllis. In the kitchen she met Marilei who, with her shabby clothes and halting English, reminded her of herself just a few years ago, when she had first come to America. Marilei had tears in her eyes and, drawn to her, Julia asked worriedly, “Why are you crying? What’s wrong?”
But Marilei wasn’t sorrowing. “I’m crying happiness,” she said.
“What do you mean happiness?” Julia said.
“Phyllis gave me a fur coat for Christmas,” the girl explained. “All my life I wanted a fur coat and Phyllis went to a thrift shop and got me the nicest one and now I’m crying for three days.”
Just like Phyllis, Julia thought. Always so thoughtful. So generous. She’d just negotiated for Julia a far higher price for her sewing than she herself had intended to request of Mrs. Hammerstein. Leaving the kitchen, Julia went into Phyllis’s room—it was filled with fresh flowers—sat down, and began telling her what a good soul she was. But Phyllis was glum.
“I’m having trouble with Robert,” she said, and explained that he’d gotten into a scrape having to do with money and credit cards. “Ever since Robert was a little boy,” she went on angrily, “I’ve done so much for him. But nothing makes any difference to him.”
Poor Phyllis, Julia grieved. She’s always worked so hard, so many hours, for that boy. She’s the kind of mother like my own, who washed me and bathed me and took the lice from my hair, the kind who, if she had only one jewel, would give it to her child. How could Robert not see this? How could he not say to himself, My mother works so hard to give me the things I want that I am going to be good because of her sacrifices.
Should she speak her mind to Phyllis? At last Julia decided she would. “Maybe you give him too much,” she said. “I grew up with nothing, and it made me a decent person. It taught me to want to learn, to work, to become somebody. But children that have everything, they don’t learn this.”
Perhaps it was because of Julia’s words, or perhaps it was on the advice of one of her self-help groups, or perhaps she was just finally fed up with Robert, but toward the end of 1984 Phyllis banished Robert from their apartment on East 90th Street and sent him to live in the basement. There was an empty apartment down there, a two-room flat that sometimes served as superintendent’s quarters but was presently empty. It was a dreary place, the bedroom windowless and the living room damp and dark, but it was habitable. Robert would have to live down there, Phyllis told him, until he found himself a job and started paying his own way.
One day a neighbor noticed the door to the basement apartment ajar and peeked inside. He saw the open-out couch that served as a bed, and the posters that decorated the dismal walls—a Modigliani, a turn-of-the-century Gibson Girl print, and a pin-up of two women making love, one of them with her legs spread wide apart and her vagina fully exposed. In the semidarkness, he also saw Robert sitting on a chair. He was staring into space.
At a Christmas party in the SoHo shop of the sportswear chain French Connections, Connie Davies, who was in charge of merchandising and buying, chatted with Jennifer. She was happy that Jennifer, who had worked in the shop briefly earlier in the year, had come. She had enjoyed training the young girl, who seemed to have a flair for selling and an innate sense of style. She dressed like a little newspaper boy, with cropped denim pants, oversized sweaters, and a peaked cap turned backward on her head, or she’d twist a scarf just so around her neck, or she’d turn up with the funniest jewelry, like her long black earring that said, like Madonna’s belt buckle, “Boy-Toy.” Connie had started teaching her the ropes of the fashion business, and Jennifer had been such a willing pupil that Connie had begun to feel as fond of her as she did of her own nieces.
Today Jennifer asked Connie to give her a piece of the white lace with which the shop’s Christmas tree was decorated.
“What for?” Connie asked.
“To wear,” Jennifer said. “White lace is the look of the eighties.”
Connie was struck by the words, but she wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was because the teenager was so clued in, or maybe just because the phrase “the look of the eighties” sounded so amusing and portentous coming from her young lips.
Phyllis couldn’t stay firm with Robert. Early in January she let him stop living in the basement. He’d caught the flu down there, she told Marilei. She put him in his bedroom once again and, because he’d gotten nowhere with finding himself a job, she began reading want ads, preparing resumes, and telephoning her contacts for him. “Do you know of any jobs that Robert might qualify for?” she asked a woman she’d known on the executive committee of the Gold & Silver Ball. “He’s taking a year off from college. To find himself.” She didn’t mention that he’d been asked to leave Boston University.
Robert had made it clear to her he didn’t want a dull job, or a poorly paying one. He wanted something in television or the fashion industry. Maybe he could be a model, he suggested. Phyllis agreed, asked a friend who was in the business to recommend him to photographers and agencies, and sent him to an expensive dentist to have his teeth prettified. And all the while that she worked at helping him get a job, she continued to try, just as she had when he was a little boy, to expand his social connections. The actress Mary Martin was a friend of Mrs. Hammerstein’s. One day Phyllis suggested to the actress that Robert and her grandson ought to meet and go out together. They’d like each other, she insisted, and pressed to arrange a date.
But all her efforts came to naught. Robert and Mary Martin’s grandson didn’t hit it off, and none of her contacts came up with a proper job. After a while she decided the best thing would be to enroll him at Hunter College in the upcoming semester.
Far-out hairstyles were in, that early winter of 1985. Leilia Van Baker shaved off a chunk of her butterscotch locks, then bleached the rest sheer white, and Jennifer streaked her brown hair with flashes of blond. On weekends the two of them went out on the town with a third girl, Kitty Schoen, who was a year older than they were. They went not just to Studio but to West Side bars like MacGowan’s and the West End Cafe, and the new downtown club, Area, where the elaborate decor was changed every few weeks and the bathroom stalls were often used for quick sex or quicker drug fixes. At Area, Kitty and Jennifer had the most startling experience of their young lives. Someone offered them heroin. It was a shock. They were used to people offering them coke and pot and Ecstasy. Those drugs were middle-class. But heroin!
Kitty and Jennifer didn’t smoke cigarettes, but occasionally they sampled some of the middle-class drugs that were offered to them. Still, for the most part they preferred to get high on liquor. And on attention. They got plenty of that. Wherever they went, they made sure to dress eye-catchingly.
Jennifer was the most eye-catching of the three of them. She wore tiny miniskirts or ripped jeans—bought them long before Kitty and Leilia did. And she dangled a big cross around her neck, just the way Madonna did. The cross didn’t go over too well with her Jewish family, but she wore it anyway.
But no matter how many compliments girls and boys alike paid Jennifer for her trendy outfits, she didn’t feel altogether attractive. Often she’d stand in front of a mirror and bemoan her face, her figure. “God, I’m getting so fat,” she’d say. She was five feet seven and weighed about 140 pounds. Staring at her stomach, she’d promise herself she’d go on a diet to get rid of the little bulge beneath her belly button. Thin was what those East Side boys she’d been meeting lately really liked. Thin was what all their girlfriends were.
Kitty felt Jennifer’s obsession with being thin had something to do with her being jealous of Leilia. Or of her stepmother. She told Jennifer to forget about being thin. “Plump is in your genes,” she said. “You’re Jewish. Me, too. We’ll never look like lanky Christian girls. Anyway, even if you were thin as a rail, those preppie guys would never really accept you. They fool around with girls like us, but they don’t fall in love with us.” Still, Jennifer started to diet, shunning meat and gobbling carrots, celery sticks, and lettuce leaves until she felt like a rabbit. You had to be skinny if you were going to really make it on the scene.
“Yo, Jennifer!” a girl named Sally Hopper, who hadn’t seen Jennifer since camp two summers before, called out to her excitedly when she ran into her in MacGowan’s shortly after the start of 1985. Jumping up to greet her old camp friend, Jennifer accidentally knocked over the drink of a boy she was sitting with, and the liquid went spilling into his lap. Sally’s first thought was My God, if I did that, I’d be so embarrassed. But Jennifer wasn’t embarrassed. She was cool. “I’m really sorry,” she said to the boy. “Do you want me to buy you another drink?” Sally admired her for that, and afterward she took to hanging out with Jennifer.
One night at the West End Cafe, Sally and Jennifer got drunk and pretended to be having a fight, pantomiming being cats about to scratch. They got so into the game, they didn’t realize how loud they were being until a bartender objected and one of their friends made them go ouside. But what the hell. It was so much fun they just carried the pretend fight out onto the street.
Sally loved goofing around. So did Jennifer. One weekend Jennifer went on a ski trip with a bunch of friends and goofed around in front of a fireplace, posing for outrageous photographs. Lying on the floor alongside one of the guys, she held the fireplace tongs to his genitals and smiled a silly gleeful smile.
Tables with red and white checked clothes. A fireplace with a roaring fire. An old-fashioned wooden bar and behind it a display of cunning little toys—dolls and cars and brass knickknacks. Dorrian’s Red Hand was one of the homiest, coziest bars Jennifer had ever been in.
It was Brock who had first suggested they go there. He and she had gotten back together again, and he’d been taking her out to little French restaurants and even to a couple of shows. He knew she liked to do sophisticated things. And Dorrian’s was, no doubt about it, sophisticated. Her girlfriends had been talking about it for weeks. They said you had to dress up to go there. Wear nice shirts, good leather boots, and your best ripped jeans, because there were girls there who came in fur coats. Minks. Maybe their mothers’, but maybe their own. They were loaded, those girls. They carried hundreds of dollars of cash in their wallets, and some of them even had their own credit cards. Jennifer had been curious to see the place.
Then, the first time she went, she didn’t like it all that much. At least not at first. She felt uncomfortable, because she didn’t know anybody, whereas everyone else seemed to know everyone else. They’d been friends since grade school, had met each other years ago in fancy East Side schools like Spence and St. David’s. Some of the people she met said they’d never even heard of Baldwin, and treated her as if she was a nobody, a “wannabe.” That’s what people there called girls who wanted to get into their set.
But in the end she had a good time. She met a few girls with whom she clicked, recognized a couple of guys she’d seen at other bars, and told Brock she’d like to go to Dorrian’s again.
They did go back. They went again and again. They went so often that Brock tired of Dorrian’s, and sometimes he’d say, “Let’s do something else. Let’s try a new bar.” But they always wound up at Dorrian’s.