Never Enough (2 page)

ROB KISSEL WAS NOT ONLY THE RICHEST AND BEST-LOOKING
kid in his class at Pascack Hills High School in Montvale, New Jersey, he was also the most unselfish and considerate. He never spoke ill of anybody. He was as sweet to the plainest girl as to the prettiest. He never kicked anyone when he was down.

But the quality for which he was best known was competitiveness. Rob did not merely have a will to win: he had a need that bordered on the desperate. Anyone who’d ever met his father knew where it came from.

Bill Kissel, a New Jersey native, had graduated from the Case Institute of Technology—now Case Western Reserve University—in 1951 with a degree in chemistry. For twenty years, he worked for Sun Chemical in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Then he realized his true talent was entrepreneurial. He left Sun in 1972 to start a company that manufactured dry toner for printing cartridges.

The dry toner field was one of the many whose lack of glamour defined New Jersey. The state was the dry toner capital of America, if not the world. Dry toner is composed of tiny plastic particles blended with carbon. The smaller the particles and the more uniform their size, the better the result from the copying machine. The conventional method of making dry toner was called pulverization. It involved grinding the dry plastic from which the toner was made into particles of the smallest possible size. But that size wasn’t small enough for a new generation of copying machines. Xerox spent millions of dollars in the 1960s trying unsuccessfully to produce a toner of smaller and more uniform particle size by chemical processes.

Where Xerox failed, Bill Kissel succeeded.

By jiggling a few molecules, he developed—and quickly patented—a means of creating dry toner particles chemically, instead of by brute force. His method created particles less than half the size of those produced conventionally. In the world of dry toner it was as if a new continent had been discovered. The companies who used toner-based print systems beat a path to Bill Kissel’s door. For a few halcyon years, his company, Synfax, was the name of the game. By the time the big boys caught up, his fortune was made.

Bill’s vigor was impressive. He played to win and he won. Acquaintances admired his tenacity and durability. He could be charming and gracious in social situations and he knew how to catch flies with honey, but he was not an easy man to grow close to. The moment he sensed a lack of acquiescence in a subordinate—and Bill considered almost everyone a subordinate—his eyes turned steely and his voice grew harsh. He was five eight, slim, and irascible. He had a reputation for vindictiveness. People said, “You don’t want to cross Bill Kissel.” He took pride in that.

He’d married a woman quite his opposite in every way. Elaine Kissel was warm and welcoming and a testament to the likelihood that Bill possessed virtues not readily apparent to outsiders. She was the velvet glove on Bill’s fist of steel. Elaine nurtured while Bill harangued. She offered safe haven and solace.

They had three children: Andrew, born in 1960; Robert, born in 1963, and Jane, born in 1968. Elaine made the family while Bill made the money that gave the family a standard of living he approved of.

For many years, the Kissels lived in a comfortable house on a quiet street in the pleasant northern New Jersey town of Woodcliff Lake. But when Bill struck it rich he wanted more. He bought a grandiose mansion in Upper Saddle River. It was built on two acres of land and contained 7,500 square feet of living space. It was so big that family members spoke to one another by intercom. Visiting friends got lost in its maze of corridors.

Richard Nixon lived around the corner. He would come down to the bottom of his driveway on Halloween and hand candy to trick-or-treaters through the gate.

Bill acquired a yacht, a Cadillac Seville, a Mercedes-Benz convertible—and the list went on. But they were mere toys. The possession he cared about most was his multimillion-dollar vacation house at the Stratton Mountain Ski Resort in Vermont.

Bill was a skier, so he determined that the family would ski. And they would learn to ski well enough to please him. Every winter weekend he put his wife and his children in his Cadillac and hauled them up to Stratton Mountain, whether they liked it or not. Except for Andrew, they learned to like it.

To Bill, no offense was minor. For reasons no one ever understood—he didn’t like to talk about his own childhood in a second-generation Austrian-Jewish immigrant family—there was more vengeance than forgiveness in his heart. He had come to believe early on that a man did things for money, not for love, and that he had better do them right the first time. Someone had taught him that second chances were for sissies. Someone had taught him that the father set the standards and that it was the job of the sons to measure up without complaint. Someone had taught him that failure must be greeted with contempt. Elaine tried to shield the children from Bill’s anger, but the oldest, Andy, bore the brunt.

He started out as a bright little boy but grew into an angry, sullen teenager, almost as hard to live with as his father was. Rob would be in the living room with a girlfriend when Andy would come into the house. Rob would say hello. Andy would say, “Fuck you,” and walk into his bedroom and slam the door. His favorite song in high school was Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle,” about a father who never had time for his son:
I’m gonna be like you, Dad. / You know I’m gonna be like you…

There had been no family meeting at which Bill announced that he was stripping his hopes and dreams from Andy’s chest and pinning them on Rob’s instead, but by the time Rob entered high school everyone in the family had no doubt that this had occurred. Somehow, Rob shouldered the burden. His competitive instinct—primal in its force—drove him on.

In the classroom, however, Rob’s killer instinct slumbered. Bill blamed the school. He withdrew Rob from Pascack Hills and sent him to the Saddle River Day School for senior year. Rob improved his academic record at Saddle River, but his transcript still lacked the preternatural sheen that might have caught the eyes of Ivy League admissions officers. At Bill’s urging, he went to the University of Rochester to prepare for a career in engineering.

Rob did well at Rochester. He pledged Psi Upsilon, which had been Horatio Alger’s fraternity. Even there, his competitiveness set him apart. He never did anything casually. If scores were being kept, Rob’s had to be highest. His favorite song was Neil Young’s “Old Man.”
Old man, look at my life, / I’m a lot like you were…

He graduated in 1986, having decided on a career in finance, not engineering. Finance meant Wall Street, which meant New York. For anyone who grew up on the Jersey side, New York was Xanadu. It was the land of hopes and dreams, the fast track, the big league, the epicenter. It was where you went to find out who you were and to discover what you might become. Rob looked across the river with longing. It was the late 1980s and Wall Street was overflowing with young men making millions before the ink on their grad school diplomas was dry. When the wind was blowing in the right direction, Rob thought he could actually smell the money.

He was the kid with his face pressed against the glass of the candy store window. But Rob didn’t just want to buy candy. He was Bill’s son. He wanted to own the store. In 1987, after a tense year spent working for his father at Synfax, he enrolled in New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business. Two weeks before classes started, he and a Psi U brother named Mike Paradise flew to the Club Med Turkoise in the Caribbean Turks and Caicos islands.

Turkoise was not for the prim and proper. Club Med’s brochures explained that it had been designed for “travelers in their twenties and thirties who enjoy making friends on vacation and value communal fun.” The message seemed to be: clothing optional, drugs permitted, sex guaranteed. Rob was twenty-three, handsome, and single. What could be better than that?

ON A WARM AND SUNNY SATURDAY IN THE SPRING OF
1966, a young couple from the nearby suburban town of Wyoming, Ohio, drove into downtown Cincinnati to have lunch, stroll a bit, and do some shopping.

Cigarettes had begun to carry warning labels, John Lennon had said the Beatles were more popular than Jesus, and the United States had started bombing North Vietnam with B-52s.
The Sound of Music
had just won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and
Bonanza
was the most popular program on television. In Cincinnati, despite another dazzling display from Oscar Robertson, the Royals had been eliminated in the first round of the NBA playoffs. In baseball, with young Pete Rose nearing his prime, the Cincinnati Reds were hoping for another first division finish.

Ira Keeshin and his wife, the former Jean Stark, were not much older than Pete Rose. They had met as students at Grinnell College in Iowa in 1960, when Ira was a sophomore and Jean a freshman. Jean got pregnant. They got married. They transferred to Michigan State, from which Ira graduated with a degree from the School of Hotel, Restaurant, and Institutional Management.

Jean Stark came from one of Cincinnati’s wealthiest families. Her mother was a Lazarus, as in Lazarus department stores, which dominated the retail market in the Midwest. Lazarus stores had been around for more than a hundred years. They were the first department stores in the country to install escalators. Later, they were first to become air-conditioned. In 1939, Jean’s grandfather, Fred Lazarus, Jr., persuaded President Franklin D. Roosevelt to fix the date of Thanksgiving as the fourth Thursday in November rather than the last, in order to assure a longer Christmas shopping season. Eventually, Lazarus would merge with the Federated chain, which would drop the Lazarus name in favor of Macy’s, but in the mid-1960s it was hard to find a department store in Ohio that the Lazarus family did not own.

Ira and Jean moved to Cincinnati in 1966 so Ira could join the family business. They made an attractive couple. The Lazarus family had high hopes for them. Ira was revitalizing the department store restaurants and Jean, despite what the family considered some worrisome liberal tendencies, was about to become the first Jewish member of the Junior League of Cincinnati. They had two young daughters, Laura and Nancy, and they saw no clouds on their horizon.

On this particular Saturday, Ira and Jean were shopping at Closson’s, a Cincinnati institution almost as integral to city life as were the Lazarus stores. For almost a hundred years, Closson’s had housed the city’s finest art gallery. Among Cincinnati’s moneyed classes, there was a feeling that if it didn’t come from Closson’s, it wasn’t art. Ira and Jean were looking for a Mother’s Day present for Ira’s mother. They were drawn to a grouping of lead statuettes created by a local artist named Lattimer. One, in particular, caught their eyes.

It was eight inches high, weighed eight pounds, and portrayed two young girls sitting face to face, as if in a garden. Rising from a two-inch base of solid lead, the figurines suggested both the closeness of sisters and the innocence of childhood.

To Ira and Jean, the two girls on the statuette represented their own two daughters, Laura and Nancy. They bought the statuette and gave it to Ira’s mother for Mother’s Day. It became the object she cherished most for the rest of her life.

Like a lot of marriages begun with an unplanned pregnancy, Ira and Jean’s eventually ran aground. They divorced in 1977. Laura was fourteen and Nancy was twelve, and the divorce sent the two girls tumbling out of the world of privilege and stability, the only one they’d ever known.

By then, Ira owned the Wheel Café, which was even more of a downtown Cincinnati landmark than Closson’s. The Wheel Café had anchored Fountain Square for longer than anybody could remember. Generations of politicians had clustered around its varnished tables to share their dreams and plot their schemes. Although Ira was proud to own this piece of Cincinnati history, after the divorce he worried that Jean’s family might cast a pall on its future. He sold the restaurant and went to Minneapolis to become concessions manager at the new Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome.

Jean felt liberated by the divorce. Despite her Junior League membership, she had the heart of a hippie. Her family’s wealth oppressed her. She found Cincinnati society suffocating. She yearned for space in which she could develop her artistic sensibility and her inner self. She moved to California with Laura and Nancy, eventually settling in the small town of Piedmont, in the hills just beyond Berkeley. She left behind all the Lazarus family money and support.

Jean’s first problem as a single mother was finding work. It was not one she ever fully resolved. She had not graduated from college, nor had she ever developed marketable skills. Women in the Lazarus family had not been encouraged to do either. Aware that she could not support herself and her daughters as an artist manqué, she tried repeatedly to plug herself into the workforce. She either quit or was fired from countless office jobs. She had a brittle nature not well suited to the give and take of an office environment. She quarreled easily and often. She was intelligent and articulate, but neither equanimity nor resilience was among her strengths.

She developed an anxiety disorder. She slumped into debilitating periods of depression. She came to recognize that she was not a very good mother. Her own mother had been so disabled by alcohol and had collapsed in so many public places that the family had put the word out that she was epileptic. Jean herself had never experienced mothering, and found that she had little aptitude for it.

Despite her best efforts, she didn’t cope well with Laura and Nancy’s teenage years. In search of stability herself, she wasn’t able to provide it for her daughters, and her attempts to bond with them never got beyond smoking pot in the kitchen. The girls started building their own lives. Laura married young and moved away. Nancy had a hard time at Piedmont High. She acted out. She snorted coke. She slept around. She was effusive one minute, angry the next. She found it difficult to channel her energies. She was bossy and loud, lewd and crude. She was either the leader of a group or she quit it. It was her way or the highway.

What Nancy had going for her were her looks. She was a knockout. She stood a full-breasted five foot four, dyed her hair blond, and made ample portions of her firm and shapely legs available for viewing. Her manner fluctuated between brash and insouciant. She was quick, sharp, and funny. She did not shy from attention and she paid attention to the impression she made. She had a provocatively dirty mouth and talked as if there was nothing she was afraid to try.

She had artistic talent but little discipline. She was no more likely to last through four years of college than she was to fly to the moon. She made a pass at junior college, followed by a halfhearted attempt to enroll in a Los Angeles art school. She and her mother reached the conclusion that they’d both be better off if Nancy left home. She moved to Minneapolis to live with her father. He’d remarried and had a five-year-old son. His new wife welcomed Nancy with genuine warmth.

Ira encouraged her to try college again. Without enthusiasm, she enrolled at the University of Minnesota, where winter arrived on the heels of Labor Day. Students wrapped in parkas and scarves walked through tunnels to get to class because it was too cold aboveground. Bob Dylan had lasted only a semester at the University of Minnesota, and Nancy did not outdo him. She disliked her classes, her classmates, the darkness, the cold, and the snow. Midway through her second semester, she put together a portfolio of her artwork and sent it to the Parsons School of Design in New York. To her surprise and delight, she was accepted.

Parsons, with its campus in Greenwich Village, is one of the top design schools in the world. Nancy arrived in the fall of 1984, when she was twenty. She brought with her an inquiring mind, an adventurous soul, swelling ambition, and a body that was nothing short of luscious. What more did a newcomer need?

Bored by routine, she quit Parsons after a year. It had served its purpose—introducing her to New York City. She got a job at Caliente Cab Company, a trendy Tex-Mex restaurant on Waverly Place. Her first job was as a “border guard,” a hostess who escorted customers from the Mex side to the Tex side and vice versa.

It was a business where quitting time was after midnight in a city where a lot of people considered that late afternoon. Though the work pace was hectic, it couldn’t compare to the cocaine-fueled after-hours social life.

Nancy had the looks, the energy, and the attitude to flourish, and she did. When she called home, her mother detected a hard new edge in her voice, which Nancy said was the sound of street smarts. She was flamboyant. She dyed her hair red, then blond, then red again, then back to blond. She partied fervidly. She attracted attention and reveled in it. New York didn’t faze her. She felt it was the stage she’d been born to perform on.

Many of her dates were out-of-work actors. One had appeared briefly in
Full Metal Jacket.
Another had an intermittent role in a soap opera. They struck her as glamorous, but at least one of them actually struck her. It may have been two. Nancy seemed to enjoy telling friends that she could provoke men to the point of violence.

She had not yet mastered her own short temper. Often, it showed itself at work. Like her mother, she was frequently hired and fired. She’d win a quick promotion with her charm, then provoke a spat and get sent packing. From Caliente Cab Company she went to El Rio Grande on Thirty-eighth Street, from there to brief stints at three or four other places, and finally to Docks on the Upper West Side (where, to her delight, she once catered a birthday party for Imelda Marcos).

Wherever she was, Nancy came alive at closing time. She moved with what in earlier times might have been called a fast crowd: men with more plans than money, but always enough for cocaine; women who were smart, sexy, and unattached. In New York in the mid-1980s, she was living
Sex and the City
before it was born.

Although she tended to pick up and drop companions as often as she changed jobs, Nancy maintained her friendship with her ex–Parsons classmate Alison Gertz. Alison was the genuine article—a Park Avenue socialite and an heiress. She came from a department store fortune, too—and her relevant parent had not been disinherited. Gertz (later Stern’s) had been the Lazarus of Queens and Long Island. Eventually, like Lazarus, the Gertz/Stern’s chain was absorbed by Federated, leaving Ali’s father even wealthier than Nancy’s mother might have been.

In late summer of 1987, Nancy decided to take a vacation. She’d seen a Club Med brochure. The spot that caught her eye was the Turkoise in the Turks and Caicos. She persuaded Ali—not that Ali needed much persuading—that the two of them should fly down for a week of uninhibited fun. They arrived on a separate flight but on the same day as Rob and Mike Paradise.