Gilded Age Playground of Newport

“The Breakers,” summer residence of Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt – “There is a revival of the use of various wines with different courses and the rarer and more expensive the vintage the greater the glory. This champagne and scotch whiskey, which is held the favor of fashion for some years are being relegated to the background of the wine closet.” – New York Times,1899

For the Gilded Age Four Hundred, the Newport season was mandatory. Ward McAllister suggested that Newport was “the place... to take social root in.” Elizabeth Lehr was frank: “So much prestige was attached to spending July and August at the most exclusive resort in America that to have neglected to do so would have exposed a definite gap in one's social armour.” 

The armor reflected an impeccable pedigree, irreproachable comportment, and wealth. The “gap” was to be avoided at all costs. Each rival hostess, the queen of her palace, jealously guarded her guest lists, the armament of social power. Mrs. Lehr recalled that the six or seven summer weeks were “crowded with balls, dinners, parties of every description, each striving to eclipse the other in magnificence.” In “the spirit of rivalry. ... colossal sums were spent.”

If elegance was the watchword, novelty was the stimulant. Elizabeth Lehr hinted at the tedium: “Another season, the same background of dinners and balls, the same The same set, the same faces.” Added May Van Rensselaer, splendours. “The restlessness of the summer colony is well known. All amusements pall after a couple of seasons.” In a kind of entertainment arms race, at “Rosecliffe,” one summer, two hundred dinner guests of Mrs. Hermann Oelrichs were treated to a performance by the Russian Ballet, imported from the city for the occasion.

At William K. Vanderbilt's cottage, “Marble House,” the visiting Duke of Marlborough (spouse of the former Consuelo Vanderbilt, now the Duchess of Marlborough) found the indoor fountain surrounded by three hundred live hummingbirds. One especially memorable ball prompted McAllister to record the “brilliant effect” of “two grottos of immense blocks of ice” with a “jet of light thrown through each of them, causing the ice to resemble the prisms of an illuminated cavern, and fairly to dazzle one with their coloring.” As the ice blocks melted, McAllister continued, the effect was a “charming glacier-like confusion, giving you winter in the lap of summer.” “All Newport,” McAllister concluded, “was present to give brilliancy to the scene.”— From 2018’s, “What Would Mrs. Astor Do?”

Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia