by Linda Wolfe
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 Flanag
an. 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.