Newport's Mansions by Mary Cable

Author:Mary Cable [Mary Cable]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History/United States/19th Century
ISBN: 9781640190108
Publisher: New Word City, Inc.
Published: 2017-01-30T16:00:00+00:00

For men, too, dressing was demanding. Here, for example, is what Mr. Henry C. Clews Jr. wore to the international tennis tournament in Newport at about the turn of the century: a suit of purplish cheviot; a double-breasted waistcoat of brocaded purple satin; a long, flowing scarf of a bit brighter shade of purple; a white felt hat banded with heavy folds of purple corded silk; and, as a boutonnière, a lavender hydrangea.

As the twentieth century was born and grew to its teens, life in High Society became more complex. It was still important to be seen at Newport every season (“as imperative for a social aspirant’s claims” declared a book called The Ultra-Fashionable Peerage of America in 1904, “as it was for a potentate of the era of Charlemagne to go to St. Peter’s, Rome, for coronation”).

But it was also important to be seen (and recognized and invited to parties) in Paris, London, Vienna, the leading German spas, and New York. The society leader, Mrs. John R. Drexel, remarked that this business of having to maintain this lifestyle all year was enough to make society women “drop down in harness.”

And so the behemoth cottages along Bellevue Avenue became less and less lived in. After O. H. P. Belmont died in 1908, Alva moved back into Marble House, but she rarely entertained as she had in the nineties. She even opened it to commoners for women’s rights rallies. In July of 1914, when her daughter, the Duchess, was visiting, she gave one last, old-fashioned, hang-the-expense ball. In honor of a Chinese Tea House newly constructed on the grounds, the motif of the ball was Chinese. The hostess wore a 300-year-old ceremonial robe said to have belonged to an empress of China, and the Duchess wore embroidered silk pajamas. But that was the last of the great Marble House parties. The coming of World War I, scarcely a month later, put a damper on the partying. But more devastating to Marble House and The Breakers than any war was the legal bomb that had been dropped in Congress the year before: the adoption of the Sixteenth Amendment, allowing Congress to levy an income tax.

After the war ended, Newport’s old grandeur returned for a while but never on the scale of the nineties. Marble House was boarded up during most of the twenties. In the thirties, when it was owned by Frederick Prince of Boston, its lights twinkled periodically, only to die again with the death of Mr. Prince. The Breakers eventually became the property of the youngest daughter of Cornelius II and Alice Gwynne Vanderbilt, who had been a little girl when it was built. This was Countess Gladys Szechenyi (she, like many American heiresses of the time, had married a foreign nobleman).

The Countess died in 1965 at the age of seventy-eight. Seven years later, the Preservation Society of Newport County purchased the Breakers for $365,000 from the Countess’s heirs, but Gladys’s daughter kept an apartment on the third floor. Until

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.