Pen Pals: Cynthia Weiner

Revisiting '80s Manhattan and the Preppy Killer case

photo credit: Nina Subin

I’ve long been fascinated by the Preppy Killer case, the 1986 Central Park murder of eighteen-year-old Jennifer Levin — especially after the 2019 documentary surfaced new interviews and archival footage. What might’ve been an open-and-shut case bloomed into a thirteen-week trial, inextricable from the backdrop of mid-’80s Manhattan, crack and Wall Street, AIDS and new wave, Koch and Cuomo and Trump.

Central Park was the bucolic intersection of seemingly irreconcilable elements; the murder prompted New Yorkers to revisit assumptions about neighbors, safety, and privilege. All this is dramatized in Cynthia Weiner’s debut novel A Gorgeous Excitement, out now via Crown. As a teenager on the Upper East Side, Weiner was a regular at Dorrian’s and acquainted with Robert Chambers, who was convicted of the murder in 1988.

A Gorgeous Excitement considers darkness at the heart of polite society, centering on Nina, a prep school grad from the East 80s. An only child surrounded by old-money opulence, she falls in with Gardner, a popular neighbor whose substance abuse and petty crime presage latent violence. It’s a good hang nevertheless, recommended reading for the Sheep Meadow or the grotto in Carl Schurz Park. In our email exchange, Cynthia and I discuss her UES adolescence and the genesis of her novel.

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I was wondering if we could start with a bit of biographical context — I understand you had remarkable proximity to the Levin murder as an adolescent on the Upper East Side. Can you tell me a bit about your place in that community? Do you remember your reaction to the news? Has time changed your impression of the event, or the folks involved?

Like the book’s main character, I grew up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and spent much of the summer of 1986 at Dorrian’s (Flanagan’s in the novel), the bar Robert Chambers frequented and where he and Jennifer Levin left from the night of the murder. I’d known him socially for years and even smoked hash with him and some friends behind the Museum of Natural History just a week or two before he killed Levin. He was extremely handsome and seductively quiet. My reaction to the news was utter shock and horror mixed with the chilling realization that it could have been me. Earlier that summer, a friend had mentioned that Rob had been pulling a credit card scam; and he had once gotten furious with me when I threw away a joint before it was done; but nothing that gave me a clue how violent and full of rage he’d turn out to be. There was an anger there that, if anything, enhanced his bad-boy appeal.

Today, I hope I’d see those behaviors as red flags (he was later charged with burglarizing friends’ apartments of $70,000 worth of jewels and furs, and after he got out for the Levin killing, he went back to prison for dealing cocaine from his apartment).

I’ve been to Dorrian’s a few times, and I admit a lot of the appeal for me is the ignominious history. Late in A Gorgeous Excitement, Nina notices the bar’s turned into something of a tourist destination, drawing rubberneckers after the murder. Based on your experiences, what role did the bar have in that scene and the eventual headlines?

In 1986, Dorrian’s was a family bar that transformed into a preppy hangout on weekends. It was owned by Jack Dorrian, who was often on the premises and ran the place with his sons and daughters. It had, and still has, a cozy, familial feel: brick walls, black-and-white photographs, red and white checked tablecloths. All of which is to say, if you met someone there, you felt they must be safe, a member of the same club. Because of the homogeneity, the bar became a symbol of privilege and elitism. When interviewed after the Preppy Murder, young patrons bragged about how much money they expected to make and how they avoided mixing with the ”bridge and tunnel crowd.”

Also, the drinking age had only just been raised from 18 to 21 that year, and it was still ridiculously easy to get into bars with a fake ID or to get in without one if the bouncer knew you. That’s how I and my friends used to get in, anyway. Robert Chambers was nineteen that summer and had been a fixture at Dorrian’s for a couple of years at least. In fact, after the Levin killing, the NY Times quoted Jack Dorrian saying that ”Mr. Chambers was such a regular at the bar that this mother often called to check on her son’s well-being.” Mr. Dorrian even put up his townhouse as collateral for Chambers’ bail.

These days the bar seems more down-to-earth, with sports nights and Tuesday karaoke.

How did you decide to write a fictional account of the murder? Did you have any suspicions or theories that made the fictional format imperative?

Nothing nearly so shadowy! I wanted the novel to be about more than just the murder, and I wanted the freedom to write characters and plot lines that felt true to me. Although much of the book is ”real” in its portrayals of places, music, attitudes, and acts of violence against women in that summer of 1986, a fictionalized treatment allowed me to explore themes and plot points that would not have been available to me otherwise, such as the relationship between a young woman and her profoundly depressed and volatile mother and how a troubled home life can drive young people to make terrible, life-threatening decisions.

source: Crown Publishing (Instagram)

Reading your book, I sensed early on that Gardner was the killer — but the identity of the victim kept me guessing, and was ultimately a pretty big shock. How did you arrive at that setup and structure?

I’m glad you were surprised! That was my aim. To be honest, the victim was something of a surprise to me as well—at least until quite late in the writing process. For the longest time, I thought the victim would be someone else, but ultimately, it didn’t feel right. I wanted the reader to be afraid for the eventual victim, even if they weren’t necessarily sure who it would be (or precisely because of that), which is why I started the book with a prologue, disclosing that a murder of a young woman would take place at the end of the summer, in Central Park, at the hands of a popular, handsome guy after he and the victim left Flanagan’s bar together.

What I find compelling about Gardner — and his real-life analogue — is that he was surrounded by money but actually came from a working-class household, and had a bit of an inferiority complex about it. Do you find that makes him sympathetic at all?

It certainly makes him sympathetic to Nina, who also struggles with feeling like an outsider. In my research, I learned that Gardner’s real-life counterpart had an absent alcoholic father, and his mother was an Irish immigrant who worked as a private nurse for some very wealthy families—Hearst, Hammerstein, Kennedy—which she viewed as aspirational role models for her very handsome, American-born son, who chafed at the pressure. She got him on the junior committee for the Gold & Silver Ball; he didn’t show up for a single planning session. I once heard he was caught stealing from a neighbor, and she had him write an apology note on Tiffany stationery. He became heavily involved with drugs and alcohol at a young age and was kicked out of several schools for stealing. It seems pretty clear that living in a moneyed world without wealth or status, with a socially ambitious parent, was difficult for him.

One of my takeaways from your book is that — between the underage drinking, drug abuse, and overall affluence — there was a pretty general lack of consequences facing the kids in this scene. Do you feel this contributed to the sexism and antisemitism you write about, or the murder itself?

As Fitzgerald said about Tom and Daisy in Gatsby: “They were careless people.” When you are told from the outset that you and your family are special and that wealth, privilege, and power are your birthright, the corollary message is that others are inferior and undeserving, even expendable. The rules for these ”regular people” don’t apply to you, so there are no consequences for bad behavior. Ironically, even Gardner learns this lesson when the old guard, under threat, circles the wagons, blames him for the misdeeds of one of their own (Gardner’s best friend—or so he thought—gets caught dealing drugs), and freezes him out. Even so, as a white Catholic male in the 1980s with powerful friends, he, like the real-life Preppy Killer, is given the benefit of the doubt over his female Jewish victim, who is viciously slut-shamed in the press.