Last week was a perfect time to be in Newport, Rhode Island. A steady ocean breeze moderated the stifling heat and the July 4th invasion of outsize recreational vehicles from New York City had yet to appear on the horizon, writes Anna Mundow
Mainly, though, Newport was the perfect place to catch hourly news updates on the latest corporate catastrophe and to hear habitually buoyant economists mumbling that the worst was yet to come. Enron, Tyco, WorldCom - corporations that sound like hostile planets from a bad Star Trek episode - turn out to have accounting practices so fanciful that they might have been invented on the starship Enterprise. Four billion dollars overlooked here, another couple of billion buried there.
Stuck in traffic on Thames Street, Newport's designer shopping row, watching tanned blonde couples stroll hand in hand, I slipped on a pair of imaginary X-ray goggles and saw Enronitis blasting its way through the nation's economic intestines, causing first an ominous rumbling in the national bowel, then an emergency evacuation of stocks.
Newport triggers such epiphanies, particularly now. The elegant seaport is, after all, the ultimate shrine to American capitalism - a monument to the Gilded Age of the late 19th century when Vanderbilts, Astors, Rockefellers and other tycoons caused summer palaces to be built along its shore, prompting Henry James to conclude that "Saratoga is a hotel. Newport is a realm." (James's family lived briefly in Newport and it was here that the young writer, while serving as a volunteer fireman, suffered the "obscure hurt" that has preoccupied certain psychologists ever since.)
Outlandish temples
A shrine, however, is also a graveyard of sorts and, viewed through today's cloudy lens, Newport's mansions look like the outlandish temples of an exotic tribe that could never imagine itself becoming endangered.
The introduction of a US federal income tax in 1914 took its toll on some leading families and officially ended the Gilded Age. But the tribe survived and, as tradition dictated, continued to spend its summers in Newport, enjoying the usual round of parties. It was difficult, of course, to top the excesses of mid-1890s Newport, when a single ball typically cost over $100,000.
Edith Wharton bought a modest Newport house in 1893 and advised restraint in her 1897 Decoration of Houses while portraying the era's flamboyance in her novels. Restraint, however, did not stand a chance. Excess was the preferred aesthetic of men who had made stratospheric fortunes on railroads or mining, the 19th-century equivalent of today's high-technology stocks.
The Breakers, for example, a vast marble Renaissance-style palace built for Cornelius Vanderbilt between 1892 and 1895, is a wonder. Gold leaf competes with mosaic, marble with mahogany and art with art in a gargantuan display of taste surrendered to wealth.
The mature Henry James was ultimately forced to dismiss Newport's palaces as "white elephants. . .queer and conscious and lumpish. . .really grotesque". Walking down Bellevue Avenue last week, I had to agree therewas something elephantine and out of scale about this palatial 19th-century housing development, where a French hunting lodge sits next door to an Italian villa on land that seems to have shrunk around its occupants.
Competitive impulses
The interiors also reveal the competitive impulses of the owners. Mrs Alva Belmont of Belcourt Castle, for example, noted on a European tour that most old English libraries had warped floors and promptly ordered her architect in 1894 to make Belcourt's library floor bulge in the right places. I was reminded of the bed and breakfast inn where I had spent the previous two nights surrounded by walls of exquisite but fake books which, when pressed in the right place, swung open to reveal a gigantic whirlpool tub.
It turns out that the difference between old money and new money - or, more correctly, between old vulgarity and new vulgarity - is not as great as those Merchant-Ivory films would have us believe.
Having seen enough of the instant lifestyles created in the 19th century for Mrs Belmont and her neighbours, I crossed the nearby border into Connecticut, the nation's wealthiest state, and immediately ran into today's equivalent: MacMansions, as they are popularly known, built for young high-technology billionaires who made outrageous fortunes in the 1990s boom and whose "homes" are stage sets perfected by teams of designers and "lifestyle consultants". The magazines on the coffee tables and often the family pictures in the silver photograph frames complete an image that the owner may inhabit for one summer or for a long weekend before moving on to something more interesting.
"Healthy correction"
Boredom, however, cannot account for the "For Sale" signs I saw outside so many of those trophy houses. Driving past them, I heard a Wall Street analyst on the radio rejecting gloomy predictions with his reassurances that this is a "healthy correction. . .the fundamentals are sound." Seventy-three years ago, Newport's wealthiest tribe read similarly comforting words. On June 26th, 1929, the Financial World journal harrumphed that "Deflation is a disquieting word and has been bandied about rather recklessly of late until it has assumed the form of a threatening bogeyman." On August 7th, when elders of the tribe opened their copies of the Outlook and Independent financial newspaper, they were reassured by the following: "In many ways this has been the most remarkably cheerful summer in recent financial history. The stock market speaks for itself. After the serious decline in May, prices. . .have been marching steadily upward."
The summer of 1929 in Newport was the last of its kind. Two-and-a-half months later, the tribe watched helplessly as Wall Street crashed and the Great Depression threatened even their kind with extinction.