‘Melonie Haller’s Lost Weekend,’ a piece I wrote for New York magazine in the summer of 1980, centered on a party in a Southampton beach house.
It had been on the weekend of April 11 and the goings-on had involved a dealer’s choice of drugs and the erotic games that have since gone mass-market with Fifty Shades of Grey, but it culminated in ugliness: assault for sure, an alleged rape, and sheer, callous dumbness absolutely.
So it was a dark story at the time but, God knows, some time after the piece was published it grew richer, stranger and much, much darker.