It's a Wednesday afternoon outside the five-story brownstone at 139 Lexington Avenue in midtown Manhattan, time for the midweek handoff. A normally serene 31-year-old, Daniel Kim, stands on the sidewalk in from of the elegant townhouse, his 19-month-old daughter, Stevie, in a stroller next to him. Kim and Stevie are ready to head to his apartment in Brooklyn's Park Slope neighborhood. But Kim's ex-girlfriend, a pretty, vivacious woman named Jennifer Rubell who is five years Daniel's senior, can't bear to part with their little girl. She's yelling, gesticulating, making a scene. Kim is answering carefully, doing his best to remain calm. Finally, Rubell turns her back on Kim, races up the stairs, jerks open the heavy oak door, and slams it behind her.

That encounter last April was just one of many such scenes in the sometimes public, frequently vicious, and ultimately heartrending custody fight between two turbocharged Harvard grads. Even as their bitter quarrel spilled into the tabloids, the battle for custody of Stevie has made its way up the judicial ladder. Jennifer Rubell v. Daniel Kim has moved from the New York State Civil Supreme Court to the state appellate court and will eventually return to trial. But this is more than a fight between former lovers over custody of a young child; it is a clash of money, society, and changing gender roles, all set against a very modern Harvard backdrop. It’s Love Story, 2007 style: Rather than uniting despite their social and financial differences, these two lovers from differing backgrounds have been torn apart by money, New York Post headlines, and high-priced lawyers.

Of the two, Jennifer Rubell may be more accustomed to such tabloid drama. Now 36, she grew up amid a heady New York mix of glitz, cash, and drugs. Her parents, Don and Mera, were conventional enough: Don was a gynecologist, Mera, a teacher. The couple had collected art since the early 1960s, when they bought a piece for $50 during a European vacation, and from the time Jennifer and her older brother, Jason, were little, the Rubells were constantly going to museums and touring galleries. Other “people with their kids, they talk about sports,” Jason Rubell once told an interviewer. “We talk about art.” It was one reason why the family was so close, Jason explained—“because we share that.” The drama came from Jennifer’s uncle, Steve Rubell, co-founder of infamous New York disco Studio 54, which he and friend Ian Schrager opened in 1977. Guarded by muscleman bouncers and filled with thumping music, swirling lights, exotic women, piles of cocaine, and the most glamorous celebrities, Studio 54 was the height of decadence in late-’70s New York. Rubell, who later went to prison for tax evasion (despite hiring legal bulldog Roy Cohn to defend him) and died of complications from AIDS in 1989, once said that the only institution more profitable than Studio 54 was the Mafia.

Childless himself, Steve Rubell doted on his young niece. According to the biography on Jennifer’s website, JenniferRubell.com, Steve Rubell “treated Jennifer like his own child … inviting her to every major event at Studio 54, starting at the age of seven.” Jennifer grew up surrounded by Steve’s single-name friends—Calvin, Liza, Bianca. After one party, the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat left his coke straw in Jennifer’s bathroom. Steve took Jennifer to another bash at the house of fashion designer Halston, whose long, flowing dresses were worn in abundance at Studio 54. “I remember Halston saying to his butler, Bring us napkins and markers,’ Jennifer once told South Beach magazine. (Neither Rubell nor Kim would be interviewed for this story.) “He brought them on a silver tray. Andy Warhol drew Farrah Fawcett’s eye and Ryan O’Neal’s nose. He looked at me and said, ‘Your family, they collect art, right?’ And he drew my whole face.” Jennifer treasured another gift, a plaque made by the painter Jenny Holzer bearing the kind of truism that made Holzer famous: “Protect me from what I want.”

When Steve Rubell died, Don received much of his brother’s fortune, and he and Mera expanded their art buying, collecting thousands of pieces—neoexpressionist, minimalist, pop, and neorealist work by such artists as Cindy Sherman, David Salle, and Damien Hirst. The Rubells moved to Miami in the 1990s, and the Rubell Family Collection, as it is known, now resides on public display in a Miami warehouse that formerly housed cocaine and drug money seized by the Drug Enforcement Agency.

As one might expect, Jennifer Rubell learned how to throw a party. “I’ve been entertaining at home since I was nine years old, and I’ve never stopped,” she said in a recent Internet ad for Blackberry. After graduating from high school, Rubell spent a year in Paris, then worked as a concierge at New York’s then-chic Royalton Hotel, of which Steve Rubell was part owner. After Harvard, Jennifer Rubell would help develop boutique hotels in Florida: the Albion and the Greenview in South Beach and the Beach House in Bal Harbor. She worked hard and displayed a flair for thoughtful touches such as placing bedtime stories she wrote on the pillows of hotel guests and including a gentle apology on the recorded wake-up call. “Our vibe,” she told Fast Company, “is a direct antithesis to the spirit of exclusion that prevailed at Studio 54. But at a deeper level, my uncle had a deep understanding of hospitality, which he passed on to me.”

It was probably inevitable that, after studying art history at Harvard, graduating in 1993, Rubell would choose entertaining as a career. In addition to working on the hotels, she attended the Culinary Institute of America, wrote magazine columns about entertaining, and, last year, published a book called Real Life Entertaining: Easy Recipes and Unconventional Wisdom. The book is a guide for working women who live “whirlwind” lives and want to throw parties but can’t realistically devote themselves to the art of full-time entertaining. “Forget the full bar, the four-course meal, and all the fussy little details that supposedly make parties divine,” Rubell’s website explains. “Who has the house, the money, or the time to throw that kind of party, anyway?” Rubell did, but she was smart enough to know that her lifestyle was hardly typical.

Tall, slender, with an intelligent, angular face, Daniel Kim comes from a very different culture than does Rubell, but has racked up similarly high achievements. The son of a nuclear engineer and his wife, both Korean immigrants, Kim grew up in a Los Angeles suburb called Agoura Hills. From a young age, he showed a gift for the oboe, and at 16, he became the youngest member of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute, toured Asia with the International Winds ensemble, and performed with Yo-Yo Ma. A history and literature concentrator at Harvard, Kim played music only sparingly there, but he was impressive. “His musicianship was unparalleled,” says classmate Michael Friedman, a composer. “He really had the goods.”

In college, Kim also wrote a successful piece of legislation, ultimately known as the Kim Bill, for the Massachusetts House of Representatives. House Bill 5170 incorporated an arts curriculum for public high schools into the 1993 Education Reform Bill. As co-director of Phillips Brooks House, he directed the only student-run homeless shelter in the nation; Kim would play in concerts for the shelter residents. When he applied to become a Rhodes Scholar, Kim wrote, “Just because instrumental classical music can’t address social problems doesn’t mean it can’t speak directly to the people who struggle the most with these problems.” After Oxford, he signed on as a consultant at McKinsey & Company, the next logical step on a well-trod path: Harvard, Oxford, private-sector riches.

Rubell had arrived at Harvard worried that her cosmopolitan tastes would not fit with students who thought the height of fashion was a Volvo. Kim, whose parents had worked to achieve a solid upper-middle-class life, was more worried about fulfilling expectations than rejecting them. In that Love Story era of the late '60s, Rubell and Kim would have been on opposite sides of the tracks, a romantic union unlikely. In that era, it was unlikely that you’d even find many people like Rubell and Kim at Harvard. But Harvard has replaced the notion of a social hierarchy with that of a meritocracy, and by the time they finished school, Rubell and Kim were well on their way to assembling résumés that would have been the envy of many graduates twice their age.

They did not meet at Harvard; Kim graduated in 1998, five years after Rubell. Instead, fixed up by friends, the couple met at a Bette Midler concert at Radio City Music Hall in October 2004. Kim was 28, Rubell 33. Friends say that the pair became almost immediately inseparable. “When you saw them, they always read like a happy couple,” says says Michael Friedman.

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