Out & About
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We know who built and lived in the Newport, R.I., mansions now maintained by the Preservation Society of Newport County, but who supports them now?
At the society’s annual summer dinner dance, held at the Breakers, the crowd of 499 guests included living descendants of the Gilded Age titans, old-money Newporters, and their friends from near and far. There were also prominent coaching enthusiasts and a few strangers. Names on the dinner dance committee included Ballard, Comstock, Dangremond, Hunnewell, Leatherman, Prince, Slocum, and Winslow.
The Vanderbilts looked at home in the grand settings. The family still lives on the third floor of the Breakers, which was built by Richard Morris Hunt for Cornelius Vanderbilt II and his wife Alice in 1895.
It was appropriate that the first event chairwoman on the reception line was Cornelius’s great-granddaughter, Gladys Szapary, who spends her summers at the house. Later on, I met Alfred Vanderbilt, named after his grandfather, whom he reveres. “My grandfather was a hero,” he told me of the railroad baron. “He died in the sinking of the Lusitania before giving up his life jacket on the Lusitania.” Earlier in the day he had been a passenger on his grandfather’s coaches, the Viking and the Venture.
The heart and the soul of the event belonged to the Newport residents who are not simply admiring of a bygone lifestyle but are living it in their own way. For them, Newport is part of the present. It is their home, their community.
“Anything that you do for any single one of the great causes of Newport is worth it,” a year-round resident and the daughter of a former deputy mayor of New York, Nannette Herrick, said. This summer, Ms. Herrick served as co-chairwoman of the Redwood Revel, a benefit for the Redwood Library, the oldest continuously circulating library in America, founded in 1797.
Of all the cultural institutions in town, however, the preservation society is the largest and has the most expansive mission: maintaining and opening to the public 10 house museums filled with delicate furnishings and artwork and surrounded by expansive gardens.
“I know what it’s like to run a 15-room house,” Ms. Herrick said in the Great Hall of the Breakers, one of the mansion’s 70 rooms. “A house like this and all the others, they do not stay like this by themselves.”
The guests floated through the first floor rooms during the cocktail hour, then proceeded to a tent erected on the terrace. The orchestra drew dancers to the floor of the Great Hall after dinner — a first course of shrimp and scallops, a main course of beef and corn soufflé, and a dessert of chocolate layer cake and berries.
The event raised $275,000 for the society — at $500 a ticket, the night seemed like a bargain by New York standards. One doesn’t have to wait until next August for the privilege of attending a benefit in one of the mansions. In July, the society is organizing its inaugural William K. Vanderbilt Jr. Concours d’Elegance, honoring racing legend Sir Stirling Moss. The event will include a parade of cars on scenic routes around town.
