On a cold and rainy evening on the Upper East Side, inside Dorrian’s Red Hand, the bar that was the real-life backdrop to the infamous 1980s “Preppy Murder,” the writer Cynthia Weiner is sitting before a platter of french fries, recalling her misspent youth. Rick Springfield’s “Jessie’s Girl” is playing on the sound system, hearkening back to an era that seemed innocent until, all of a sudden, it didn’t.
At 4:30 a.m. on August 26, 1986, the smolderingly handsome 19-year-old Robert Chambers exited the bar with the wealthy 18-year-old Jennifer Levin in tow and the pair went into Central Park. Less than two hours later, Levin’s half-naked, bruised body was found behind the Metropolitan Museum by an early-morning jogger. Chambers pleaded guilty to manslaughter and served 15 years in prison. “The story always stayed with me,” Weiner says.
She was not alone. With its mix of sex, money, and violence, the crime became a symbol for an era defined by wealth, drugs, and parental permissiveness, quickly spawning a virtual cottage industry. There have been nonfiction books, a TV movie starring Billy Baldwin as Chambers and Lara Flynn Boyle as Levin, even a 2019 documentary mini-series.
But now, thirty-seven and a half years after the event, comes Weiner’s debut novel, A Gorgeous Excitement, which is notably different from those other true-crime treatments, in part because Weiner knew Chambers.
They were part of the same social circle: Weiner went to the all-girls Chapin School; Chambers went to the all-boys school Browning. “Two very close friends of his were close friends of mine,” she says. One was her best friend; the other, a boy she was crazy about. “I was so in love with him,” she says. “He was so good-looking, but he was fucked up, too. And like, I would have gone to the park with him.”
Set on the Upper East Side during that pivotal summer of 1986, Weiner’s retelling centers around Nina Jacobs, who has just graduated from her all-girls school and is obsessed with trying to lose her virginity, hopefully to elusive bad boy Gardner Reed. Nina’s challenging but touching relationship with her mentally ill mother is a leitmotif of the novel, as is Nina and her friends’ frequent use of cocaine.
We know from the start that things will not end well, at least for one girl, but Weiner’s absorbing prose, combined with her detailed evocation of 1980s New York—the era of Area and the Quilted Giraffe, Tab and SlimFast—will keep you reading and, if you’re of a certain generation, reminiscing.
Weiner went to the all-girls Chapin School; Chambers went to the all-boys school Browning. “Two very close friends of his were close friends of mine,” she says.
Like Levin, Weiner is Jewish, and though today the Upper East Side is one of the most Jewish neighborhoods in Manhattan, it wasn’t always so. “I went to a very Christian school, not religious, but we said prayers three times a week,” she says. “Everybody knew each other from either the Hamptons, which of course were very different back then, or Maine, or skiing together in Vermont. It was very interconnected.”
Weiner’s father was a psychiatrist, and her mother, a volunteer. “I think my parents, looking back, probably wanted to assimilate,” she says. “That was the thing: to aspire to antiques. You wanted everything in your house to be an antique, as if it had been passed down for generations.”
After attending Duke, Weiner got her M.F.A. in fiction, worked in a P.R. firm, and became addicted to heroin. In 1994 she got clean, a subject she fictionalized in an incisive and beautiful short story called “Aftertaste.” The title of her new novel is a reference to drugs as well, a partial quote from Freud, who described, in an essay called “Über Coca,” the effect cocaine produced in him as “the most gorgeous excitement.”
According to Weiner, the irony about Chambers is that he wasn’t an old-money WASP, either, even though “everyone thought he was.” He was Catholic and lived on East 91st Street, in a small town-house apartment with his Irish mother, who worked as a nurse. They didn’t have much money, Weiner says, “but because he was so good-looking, and because he had gone to all those schools [Saint David’s, Browning, and Choate], even though he’d gotten kicked out, he was very popular and a really good athlete, and guys all really looked up to him.”
One night, in the weeks before he killed Levin, she says, she bumped into Chambers behind the American Museum of Natural History. “I don’t know how, why, what I was doing there, but there was a group of people there at night. I smoked hash, and I was so stoned out of my mind I could barely walk, and I could swear I remember him carrying me to a taxi, which seems insane, but I know I remember that. So he probably could also be really nice.”
Another night, months earlier, in her parents’ apartment, she glimpsed a very different side of him. “My parents must have been away,” she says. “I remember we were smoking a joint out the window, and it had gotten so little that I just threw it out the window, like it was just too little for me to hold. And he started screaming at me: ‘Why did you do that? What are you doing?’ He was really mad, and I remember him grabbing my arm.”
Today, Weiner has It’s MY story, I’ll tell it HOW I WANT tattooed up the inside of her right forearm. She says she turned to it frequently throughout the nine years it took her to complete the book, fearing that others who were in the scene might say, “‘Who is she?’ Like, ‘She wasn’t in our circle’ or ‘She didn’t know him that way.’ And I kept trying to remind myself: it’s my story—I’m allowed to tell it.”
“I pictured her in those moments before he strangled her,” Weiner says of Levin. “She was probably feeling really sexy. She was with this guy she’s got a big crush on, feeling free, and just those moments when he put his hands—what that must have been like … I related to her a lot, and that was one of the reasons it haunted me.”
Johanna Berkman is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL. You can read her profile of Jumi Bello, which won the 2023 Deadline Club award for Arts Reporting, here
