Feature

Boy, Interrupted

Chase first met Bingham at a Super Bowl party in 1993. As their relationship progressed, friends say she fell into a pattern of shielding and protecting him, deflecting attempts by his friends and family to take a harder line on his excesses.

After dating for five years, Chase complained that she had been a bridesmaid six times and seven meant "spinsterhood." After one wedding, Bingham went into a tirade about how marriage was for idiots and he'd never be played for a fool. "She sat down on Greene Street next to garbage bags and cried her eyes out," recalled Bingham in an essay. "I cannot fight Vanessa's tears."

They married in front of a historic Princeton mansion on a clear day last May. It was a relatively small wedding, considering the number of friends each had, but at least a dozen people were in the wedding party. The bridesmaids wore shimmery dresses the color of the sky. Guests included a man from Southeast Asia whom Bingham introduced as "my Russian friend from Saigon who deals arms." Following a reception in a large tent, the party moved to an empty barn on the edge of the property, where Pavement performed, Tom Beller played the drums, and Bingham, overwhelmed but joyful, sang a drunken, playful rendition of "You're So Vain."

Around midnight, he and Vanessa took a helicopter to the airport, where they'd fly first to Italy for their honeymoon, eventually ending up in Cambodia. "I was so sad when Rob flew off," says Nancy Begley, a photographer, the editor of Washington Life magazine, and heiress to the Reynolds Wrap fortune. "I think we all felt, 'If you're not here, then what's the point?' "

For a while after the marriage, Bingham slowed his drug and alcohol intake. He no longer fell down stairs or threw up in public. "Rob could be an ugly, violent drunk," says one acquaintance. "The real tragedy is that his friends, even those who weren't users, thought it was kind of great that he was so fucked-up, so close to the fire of life, so raw, so real."

Cheered by his marriage and the imminent publication of his book, Bingham made a Herculean effort to stay clean. A friend close to the family says that Joan Bingham talked about the improvements her son had made. "He seemed to be drinking a lot less," she said. "He had gone back to see his shrink, he seemed much happier and more productive. Things were finally looking up for him. But I guess he had to try and touch the flame one more time."

On the Wednesday after he died, Bingham was buried in Louisville, next to his father. His memorial at the Cavalry Episcopal Church on Park Avenue South took place on an unseasonably warm afternoon three days later. The crowd of nearly 700, which included Caroline Kennedy, Sid Blumenthal, and Charlie Rose, was a cross-section of the disparate worlds that Robert Bingham had straddled in the course of his short, fast life. For three hours, guests sat solemnly as nine speakers took the podium. His older sister Clara addressed the congregation in a loud, clear voice. "Rob craved the edge," she said. "He was haunted by his father's death and his own struggle with addiction." She took a pause, then added, "I am sorry I couldn't save you, Robbie! Life without you is two-dimensional. The lights in New York have dimmed."

By the time mourners left the service, the sun had moved to brighten the front steps of the church. Benzes with Connecticut plates and tour buses hired by the family whisked guests up to a reception at the New York Racquet Club, where everyone ascended a winding marble staircase to the second-floor sitting room, all dark-green paneling and oak furniture. A fire roared in the library, where coffee was served amid bookshelves organized by categories like "beagling," but this room remained nearly empty.

Instead, the hundreds of guests gathered in a room with three full bars, chatting with old colleagues and friends from prep school, laughing at memories of Rob, drinking scotch, chain-smoking cigarettes, and trying to make sense of his sudden death. "He was a master tactician, a master gambler," said his friend Hunter Kennedy. "I never thought he'd get beaten by the odds."

It was, as one friend noted later, a very good party. Rob wouldn't have wanted it any other way.