by Linda Wolfe
Dates weren’t, however, what her group was really into. Not then. Not yet. Mostly, everyone just got together and hung out. During lunch period they met and ate their sandwiches in a secluded place they called “the dungeon,” a stairwell alongside a local church. After school they gossiped and told jokes in the playing field bleachers. And once in a while they cut classes, parked themselves in someone’s basement den, and smoked marijuana.
The day Jennifer tried it, she enjoyed it at first, laughed and kidded around. But afterward she acted confused, began running up and down a staircase, and cried that she was looking for something she’d misplaced. She couldn’t find it, or even explain just what it was.
“My pocketbook’s gone,” a primary-grade treacher at Browning told Dr. Smith one afternoon. “It was in my desk, and somehow it’s vanished.”
The teacher was agitated, and Smith tried to comfort her. “Don’t worry. We’ll find it,” he said. “I’ll help you.”
But although they searched high and low, the pocketbook didn’t turn up.
A week later, Dr. Smith picked up his office telephone to hear Phyllis Chambers’s voice. “I was going through Robert’s things,” she said, “and I found some credit cards. With the name of a teacher at the school.”
Smith called Robert into his office. “Did you steal that teacher’s pocketbook?” he demanded.
“No,” Robert said. He sounded polite and composed. “A friend of mine did. But I know where it is. I helped him hide it.”
“Where is it?”
“I’ll show you.”
Unabashed, Robert led the way to the fourth floor. There he pointed to an air-conditioning duct. Smith reached to the top of the duct and found the pocketbook.
What was going on in Robert’s mind? The headmaster, regarding him with curiosity, couldn’t tell. This boy’s got the quality of being behind plate glass, he thought. And he looks blank, looks as if he feels no anger at being implicated in the theft, no surprise, no emotion of any kind.
He didn’t hesitate. He expelled him.
Robert took the news casually. “Aw, preppies, the hell with them,” he told a friend. “Fuck the whole scene.”
It was different for Phyllis. Prep school was what she had always wanted for Robert. Prep school, and then the Ivy League. Now who knew what prep school would take him in. Certainly not the old established, highly competitive ones like Choate and Browning. Not anymore. What was to be done? That Robert had stolen in order to buy drugs must have been apparent to her, for she decided to send him to a drug rehabilitation clinic. No doubt she was hoping that once he was clean she would find a way to pick up the shards of her shattered dreams.
She didn’t want her friends to know about Robert’s drug use. She kept it quiet. But she packed him off to the Chemical Dependency Unit in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
By February 1982, Robert was back from Louisiana. Early that month, Ronald Stewart, the founder and headmaster of York Preparatory, a coed school on the Upper East Side, received a telephone call from David Hume, the headmaster of St. David’s. “We had this really nice kid here,” Stewart heard Hume say. “He’s been at Browning. But he’s been unhappy there. Would you take him?”
Stewart, a garrulous and cheerful schoolmaster given to thoughts and pronouncements of Dickensian airiness, wasn’t surprised that his friend and colleague was asking him to take in a boy who was doing poorly at another school. York, which Stewart had founded only thirteen years earlier, did it all the time. If we only took the surefire successes, was the way Stewart looked at it, what good would we be doing mankind?
“David,” he said to Hume, “you got it.”
Of course, Stewart also interviewed Robert, met his mother, learned about the explusion from Browning, and looked over the boy’s transcripts from both Browning and Choate. They were unimpressive. But the IQ was adequate. It was 120. And Robert’s mother had a satisfactory enough explanation of why her son had run into difficulties at Browning. “He had trouble adjusting,” she said. “Because it was an all-boys school.”
Stewart accepted Robert.
After he did, he was glad he’d done so. He liked the way the boy regularly arrived at school dressed in a white shirt and blazer, the way he never seemed to need prodding to rise to his feet when adults entered the classroom, and the way he quickly joined the soccer team, becoming a star player.
Still, the new sophomore wasn’t entirely satisfactory. “Robert is a capable student,” Stewart wrote to Phyllis toward the end of the school term. “But he must learn to make a consistent effort.”
Jennifer finished her last term of junior high with a drama of betrayal and rejection. A classmate of hers had been flirting with one of her boyfriends, and on the last day of classes Jennifer got furious with her. “You’re a fat, slutty bitch,” she yelled, even though their teacher was present. Then she confronted the boy. “Did you fool around?” she asked him. “With her?”
“No,” he said.
But after that he started avoiding Jennifer, and she became convinced that he had lied to her. Rejection. It haunted her. She couldn’t put her hurt feelings out of her mind and wrote bitterly about the incident to a friend.
Summer arrived, hot and muggy. Phyllis got Robert a job with the Wall Street law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell. She telephoned one of the firm’s partners, a lawyer she knew because his son had been in the Knickerbocker Greys during her presidency. “Robert’s looking for a summer job,” she said. “Can you help him find one?”
The lawyer called the office manager, put in a good word, and soon Robert was running copying machines and delivering messages.
Jennifer went to summer camp in the Adirondacks. When camp was over, she moved once again—this time out of her mother’s house in Port Washington and into the home of her father and stepmother in Manhattan. Steve and Arlene were living now in SoHo, one of the city’s hot new real estate areas, a region where long-neglected cast-iron mercantile buildings were rapidly being converted into dramatic apartments, trendy boutiques, and avantgarde art galleries. Steve was managing numerous SoHo properties. And he had purchased and renovated an enormous loft for himself and Arlene, decorating it with exciting art and expensive furniture.
Jennifer’s move to SoHo was abrupt, and it surprised some of her junior high friends, who had always thought her fond of her mother. But years later she would tell other friends that her mother hadn’t looked after her properly, hadn’t given her the security and guidance she’d needed.
In Manhattan, Steve and Arlene created an area for Jennifer in the loft—a balcony room that looked down on the vast space below. They let her choose the colors and hang posters, and they got her her own telephone and answering machine. They also went with her to investigate city high schools. Visiting several, they settled on Baldwin. It was a West Side private school that was known for providing special help to students with learning disabilities. Jennifer had had difficulties keeping up with Port Washington classmates. The new school, the Levins hoped, would give her the kind of academic boost she needed.
2.
Coming of Age
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 th
e 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.