Men who ripped fortunes from the grasps of competitors built the Newport mansions. Cornelius Vanderbilt, who stitched the face of America with rails and ties. Big Jim Fair, who dug silver out of Nevada’s Comstock Lode. Edward J. Berwind, who fueled American industry with Appalachian coal. They were doers, and they built these forty-, sixty-, and eighty-room monstrosities as retreats, playgrounds, and monuments to themselves.
But that was generations ago. Today, those who live in the mansions are scions of the doers, living on somebody else’s money in somebody else’s dream. They try to keep the Gilded Age alive in a blaze of crystal chandeliers, the scent of lilies drifting over elegantly attired dinner guests. And they keep the likes of me out with ivy-covered walls, hand-wrought iron gates, and a vigilant local constabulary.
Except tonight. Tonight, I had an invitation.
Just past Beechwood, the Astors’ Italianate summer cottage, I slid behind a shimmering silver Porsche in a line of cars drifting toward the gilded iron gate to the grounds of Belcourt Castle. One by one, they turned into the torch-lit, crushed-stone drive: a Maserati, a Bentley, a Ferrari, a Lamborghini, a Maybach, another Bentley, and something sleek that may have been a Bugatti, although I’d never seen one before. Trailing them was a poverty-stricken sad sack in a mere Mercedes-Benz. I wondered if Officer Phelps had hassled him, too.
Up ahead, liveried valets opened car doors, grasped bejeweled hands to help ladies from their fairy-tale carriages, climbed in, and floated away to distant parking lots. Then a nine-year-old Bronco with rust pocks on the hood, a crushed passenger-side fender, and a diseased muffler rumbled up, and I got out.
“Be careful with it this time,” I said as I flipped the keys to a valet. “Look what happened the last time you parked it.”
I strolled through the courtyard to a heavy oak door where an emperor penguin with a clipboard was checking the guest list. He studied my engraved invitation and scowled.
“Surely you are not Mrs. Emma Shaw of the Providence Dispatch.”
“What gave me away?”
“Do this job as long as I have,” he said, “and you develop a sixth sense about this sort of thing.” He looked me up and down. “I can see that your eyebrows haven’t been plucked lately.” He paused to rub his chin with his big left wing. “And your perfume is a little off. The last dame to walk through here was wearing Shalimar. You smell like Eau d’Cigars.”
“You don’t know any women who smoke cigars?”
“Not the kind made out of tobacco,” he said. From his snicker, I could tell he took special pride in that one. “I’m sorry, sir, but I can’t admit you.”
“Oh yeah? Well, this isn’t the only mansion in town, buster.” I turned away to retrieve Secretariat, my pet name for the Bronco.
I’d drawn the assignment to cover the annual Derby Ball after Emma, our society reporter, quit last week, taking a buyout that trimmed thirty more jobs from a newsroom already cut to the marrow by last year’s layoffs. Ed Lomax, the city editor, had pretended he was doing me a favor.
“I can guarantee you the cover of the ‘Living’ section,” he said.
“Let me get this straight,” I said. “We can no longer afford to have our baseball writer travel with the Red Sox. We don’t have a medical writer or a religion writer anymore. Our Washington bureau is down to one reporter. And this is a priority?”
“The ball is the final event of the weeklong Newport Jumping Derby,” he said. “It’s one of the biggest hoity-toity events of the year.”
“So they say, but who gives a shit?”
“Other than the horses?”
“I’m a little busy with real stories right now, boss. I’m trolling through the governor’s campaign contribution list to figure out who’s buying him off this year. I’m looking into the toxic waste dumping in Briggs Marsh. And I’m still trying to figure out how that little girl’s arm ended up as pig food last week.”
“Look, Mulligan. Sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to do. It’s part of being a professional.”
“And I have to do this particular thing because…?”
“Because the publisher’s seventeen-year-old niece is one of the equestrians.”
“Aw, crap.”
But if I couldn’t get in, I couldn’t be blamed for not covering it. Lomax didn’t need to hear how readily I took no for an answer. I’d almost made it out of the courtyard when I heard high heels clicking behind me and a woman’s voice calling my name. I quickened my pace. I was asking a valet where I could find my car when the high heels clattered to a stop beside me and their owner, a tiny middle-aged woman who’d had one face-lift too many, took me by the arm.
“I am so sorry for the confusion, Mr. Mulligan. Your Mr. Lomax called to say you would be taking Mrs. Shaw’s place, and I neglected to amend the guest list.”
“And you are…?”
“Hillary Proctor, but you can call me ‘Hill.’ I’m the publicity director for the Derby, and I am honored that you are joining us this evening. I do hope my lapse hasn’t caused you any embarrassment.”
Aw, crap.
“Look, Hill,” I said as she escorted me past the shrugging penguin and into the mansion’s antechamber, “I’m supposed to write about the important people who are here and describe what they are wearing, but I can’t tell the difference between a Vanderbilt draped in a Paris original and a trailer park queen dressed by J. C. Penney.”
“Of course you can’t. You’re the young man who writes about mobsters and crooked politicians. I love your work, darling.”
“So you’re the one,” I said.
“Oh, I do love a man with a sense of humor. How would you like to be my escort for the evening? I’ll whisper the names of the worthies and what they are wearing in your ear, and the gossips will be all atwitter about the mysterious man on my arm.”
“That’s a very gracious offer, Hill, but I like to work alone. Do you think you could just jot everything down while I wander around and soak up a little color?”
“Certainly,” she said, not looking the least bit disappointed.
I handed her my notebook, strolled across the antechamber, and stepped into a huge dining room with a mosaic pink marble floor and a wall of stained glass windows that bristled with Christian iconography. Men in tuxedos and women in ball gowns were loading china plates with shrimp, roast beef, and several dishes I couldn’t identify, all of it tastefully displayed on a sixteen-foot-long walnut trestle table. The room was illuminated by nine crystal chandeliers. The grande dame who owned the house liked to boast that the largest of them had once graced the parlor of an eighteenth-century Russian count. The hunky plumber she had impetuously married and then divorced tattled that it had actually been scavenged from a dilapidated movie house in Worcester, Massachusetts. I made a mental note to include that tidbit of Newport lore in my story.
The Dispatch’s ethics policy prohibited reporters from accepting freebies, but the roast beef looked too good to pass up. I scarfed some down and then followed the sound of music up a winding oak staircase to the second floor. There, four chandeliers blazed from a vaulted cream-colored ceiling that arched thirty feet above a parquet ballroom floor. A fireplace, its limestone-and-marble chimneypiece carved to resemble a French château, commanded one end of the room. The hearth was big enough to roast a stegosaurus or cremate the New England Patriots’ offensive line. At the other end of the room, a band I wasn’t hip enough to recognize played hip-hop music I wasn’t tone-deaf enough to like.
I snatched a flute of champagne from a circulating waiter and circumnavigated the dance floor, spotting the mayors of Newport, Providence, New Haven, and Boston; the governors of Rhode Island, Connecticut, Vermont, Kentucky, and New Jersey; one of Rhode Island’s U.S. senators; both of its congressmen; three bank presidents; four Brown University deans; twelve captains of industry; two Kennedys; a Bush; and a herd of athletic-looking young women.