Harvard vs. Harvard

Drugs! Greed! Kinky sex!— how this match made in heaven turned into the breakup from hell.

by John Sedgwick
November/December 2007, Page 56

Steve Rubell, Halston, and Margaux Hemmingway at the Palladium in New York, January 1977.

By then, Kim was into a new phase of his career; deciding to step off a conventional career path, he had given up performing music and left McKinsey. After taking a summer course at NYU, he’d written a Diner-like script about a group of friends, sold it, and was set to direct, with Anjelica Huston to star. Rubell was about to publish Real Life Entertaining, and between her hotels and her writing, she seemed an up-and-coming Martha Stewart. “Becoming a domestic diva isn’t something I set out to do, but it just might be my destiny,” she told Vogue.

Rubell was the one who pushed the relationship briskly along, Kim would later say. Just weeks after they met, she took him to a grand reopening of the family museum. There, to Kim’s surprise, she glowingly introduced him to everyone as her boyfriend. “Daniel approached this relationship with Jennifer with openness and optimism,” one friend of the couple explains. “Maybe he should have been wary.”

A month later, Rubell told Kim that she wanted to have a child with him. “I was a bit taken aback,” Kim admitted in court documents. But he was game. By the end of January, some three months after meeting Kim, Rubell was pregnant. In November 2005, just a year after her parents had met, Stevie Kim-Rubell—named after her great-uncle—came into the world.

The new parents were deliriously happy with their daughter. “She is all Daniel talks about,” a friend says. “What she did at the park, his plans for her in the evening, who they met in the playground.” Rubell was equally infatuated. For the girl’s first birthday, Rubell would compose a series of cards that read like a children’s book. “Hi Stevie. /It’s me, Mama/wishing you a very happy 1st birthday/I’d like to tell you about everything you did this year/You began by being born/(a very impressive way to begin) … ”

Soon before Stevie’s first birthday, the couple, now sharing the Lexington Avenue townhouse Rubell owned, had decided to make their union permanent. At about the same time, pictures of the lovebirds appeared in the first issue of this magazine. The images showed Kim playfully nuzzling Rubell’s neck at Bond St. in the East Village as Rubell expounded on ways to improve the tempura sea bass. In the photos, Rubell is talking, laughing, working the room, while Kim seems focused on Rubell in an almost worshipful manner.

Rubell had a questionable history with engagements; she had broken off two of them, to magazine journalist David Samuels and music producer Andrew Feltenstein, the son of a wealthy L.A. restauranteur, in her post-college years. “That’s what she’d do,” says a friend. “Get involved, then pull back.” Nor was her dating history encouraging, according to Matthew Lee, a chef and cookbook author who dated Rubell at Harvard. That relationship didn’t last long, and after they broke up, Rubell “insinuated” that Lee had gotten her pregnant, Lee asserted in a court document. He paid for an abortion and “grieved with her”—only to discover that, given the timing of the pregnancy, he couldn’t have been the father. “I am aware that Jennifer has since boasted about this deceit to at least one other individual and taken pleasure in it,” Lee claimed. Why she might have acted so manipulatively, he could not explain.

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Keywords:

• Jennifer Rubell,
• Scandal

Mentioned:

• 
  Jennifer Rubell : College Class of 1993
• 
  Daniel Kim : College Class of 1997
• 
  Yo-Yo Ma : College Class of 1976
• 
  J. Michael Friedman : College Class of 1997
• 
  David Samuels : College Class of 1989
• 
  Harold Beeler : HLS Class of 1974