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07.23.2000
23 bathrooms,
27 fireplaces, 1,000 questions
 Endless stream
of tourists puts mansion guides to the test
By BOB
WYSS
Journal Staff Writer
NEWPORT
-- Time was running out. All week, Laura Mancuso had worried about The Great Hall.
By Thursday evening, even a Ben & Jerry's chocolate fudge brownie frozen yogurt
was no solace. Mancuso pulled out her script, thrust it at her roommate, Corey
Delaney, and began to recite it.
The Breakers was built between 1893 and 1895 by Mr. and Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt
II. The 70-room house replaced an earlier wooden house bought from Pierre Lorillard,
destroyed by fire in 1892. . . The Breakers was fashioned after the 16th-century
palaces of Genoa and Turin. . .
The great hall is reminiscent of the open - air courtyards of Italian palaces.
The hall measures 50 feet in almost any direction. . . . .The hall was first used
in August of 1895 for the Vanderbilts' daughter Gertrude. It was filled with palms
and roses and Miss Gertrude led the cotillion while guests watched from the grand
stairs and galleries above.
On she went, reciting facts about the bedrooms, the library, the music room, the
morning room, the dining room, ending with the pantry and kitchen.
Forty-five minutes, later she was done.
It sounds as though you know it, said Delaney.
For the moment, Mancuso was relieved. But would she remember it all during tomorrow's
test?
THE 13 MANSIONS and historic structures run by the Preservation Society
of Newport County are the biggest tourist draw in Rhode Island. Each year, more
than 875,000 visitors troop through the buildings, generating more than $10 million
for the nonprofit organization and tens of millions of dollars more for Newport
and Rhode Island.
The Preservation Society's 165 guides are critical in bringing these palaces to
life.
But in this booming economy, workers are scant and the Preservation Society struggles
to hire enough guides. It is further hampered by a pay scale that starts at $7.70
an hour, its insistence on a strict dress code and the requirement that guides
work at least one weekend day.
Would-be guides, such as Mancuso, begin by learning a 34-page script for the Breakers,
the Preservation Society's biggest attraction and --for guides -- most demanding.
Groups of 8 to 12 new hires are assigned mentors who help them over four days
of training.
On the fifth day, the mentors test their pupils.
Not everyone passes.
That system has been been in place for years but its end may be in sight. The
Preservation Society is planning to dramatically change how visitors tour the
Breakers and other mansions in the future.
Visiting the Breakers is overwhelming. Learning to be a guide at the mansion is
intimidating.
At least that's how it felt one Tuesday morning when eight would-be guides began
trailing their two mentors, Alberta Picozzi and Patricia Ludwig, on tours of the
Breakers.
Picozzi, who has been a guide for 13 years and has been serving as a tour mentor
for 8 years, rattled off facts with aplomb: the Breakers' marble bathtubs offer
hot and cold fresh and salt water; it has 27 fireplaces and 23 bathrooms; and
the size of the family fortune in the 1880s, $200 million, was as great as the
U.S. treasury.
The trainees wondered how they could ever remember so many facts. But by the fifth
tour of the day they were beginning to feel better.
Then came the first sign of trouble.
Arnold Frucht, sitting in the former nursery that still has security bars on the
windows and is now used as a training room, wondered out loud how he was going
to remember how to find such rooms as the library and loggia.
The question surprised Picozzi.
Frucht is courtly and dignified, a retired psychiatrist, who lives alone in a
house in the historic district of Newport. He'd applied to work at the Preservation
Society because he treasures antiques and collects old books. But he realized
that since his retirement, he was sleeping almost until noon in his empty house.
"Usually everything is a right turn," Picozzi told Frucht, looking puzzled. "You
basically go around the house in a circle, two times, upstairs and then downstairs."
Over the next two days, the guides continued on tours with their mentor and were
freed in mid-afternoon to practice their lines on each other in various rooms.
Then, on Thursday afternoon, another warning sign. Six trainees had entered the
billiard room. Everyone was tired, but especially Frucht, who wearily sat down
in the English weighing chair, the room's chief novelty, designed to measure one's
weight in English stones.
That upset several trainees. One of the cardinal rules visitors are quickly told
is not to touch any objects in the house.
"Arnold, get up," several exclaimed sharply at the same time.
Frucht's future as a guide appeared to be in question.
THE TOURISM INDUSTRY employed 35,092 people statewide last year, making
it the second-largest industry in Rhode Island, behind health care, according
to the state Economic Development Corporation. While it generated an estimated
$559 million in wages last year, the industry is often criticized for having too
many low-paying, seasonal jobs.
But the tour guide positions at the mansions fit a need for students, retirees
and for spouses at the Naval War College.
Janice Wiseman, director of visitor services, says the Preservation Society spends
a lot of time training and testing guides because it wants to insure a high-quality
tour. The aura of the mansions attracts lawyers, doctors, school teachers and
other professionals to be guides.
It enticed her.
Six years ago Wiseman was burned out after years in the corporate world as an
accountant. Searching for a temporarily respite, she applied to the Preservation
Society to become a guide.
"I just wanted to get out of the rat race," said Wiseman. "My intent was to stay
six months and what happened is I just fell in love with the organization. I just
love it here."
Now Wiseman directs a staff of 165 full- and part-time tour guides.
Even with that number, Wiseman has toiled to staff the houses through the busy
Newport summer.
College students are only available for three months, but Wiseman has hired five
in this latest training group. She cannot offer them wages even close to what
they could earn downtown in the restaurants and the bars, so she counters by emphasizing
how the job can be both fulfilling and rewarding on one's r sum . That's what
drew Mancuso, a humanities and art history major at Providence College, who last
summer interned at Christies, the New York art auction house.
The other students are Sorboni Banerjee, Judyth Charnock, Carina Schoenbarger
and Michael Spillane.
Wiseman also hired Charlotte Daniel, a college professor available for the summer;
and two retirees, Susan Millis and Frucht.
While most of the training is handled by the two mentors, Picozzi and Ludwig,
Wiseman talked to the new recruits one day about how to deal with such crises
as screaming children and fainting guests.
"This is your first house and your first house always stays with you," said Wiseman.
"Once you get it, it stays in your blood. Don't let the script intimidate you.
We've been doing this since 1945."
FRIDAY MORNING. Test Day. Shortly after 10 a.m. each of the trainees was
handed a written test in the training room. When they were finished, Frucht and
Picozzi trooped down the wooden stairs reserved for the staff for the last century
and headed toward the gentlemen's reception room.
That's where tours begin and it is where Frucht began his oral exam.
He talked about how gentlemen callers were ushered into the room when calling
on their hosts.
"The Breakers was built in 1895 after an earlier house had burned down," continued
Frucht. "Commodore Vanderbilt was alarmed at the burning of this house. He insisted
that it be made as close to unburnable as possible."
Vanderbilt was not the commodore; that was his grandfather's title. Picozzi also
prompted Frucht at some points. Further, he was slow in his delivery. But by the
time they were through the great hall, Picozzi was relieved.
"Obviously you know your facts," she told him, "but you've got to hold back on
some things. Your problem is that you know too much, which is better than not
knowing enough."
Frucht had passed; the only question was whether he could move tours through the
house rapidly enough.
"You don't want to back up the house," Wiseman previously had warned the trainees.
"You don't want to develop a reputation."
On a crowded weekday, there are about 1,800 visitors. That number swells to 2,400
on a Saturday or Sunday and more than 3,000 on a holiday.
To keep the tours moving, guides are free to delete information from the script
or to vary its presentation.
But guides are warned not to embellish, not to go beyond the script.
Wisemen recalled the guide who had noticed an embroidery outside the music room
that said Andrea Doria. The music room had been designed and built in France,
dismantled, and shipped to Newport where it was reassembled. The guide began telling
guests that the room was transported by the Italian ocean liner the Andrea Doria.
The problem was that the music room was completed in 1895 while the Andrea Doria
was commissioned in 1953.
Such mistakes are the exception, says Wiseman.
No matter how prepared guides become, and some like Picozzi are virtual encyclopedias
of knowledge about the Vanderbilts, Astors and others of Newport's Gilded Age,
they can't know the answers to all of the questions that pop up during a tour.
Some favorites:
How much does the Breakers weigh?
How long has the ocean been there?
There is no answer to either question.
IT WAS JUST before noon on testing day when Patricia Ludwig came into the
training room and asked Laura Mancuso if she was ready to be tested.
Trailing her was Michael Spillane.
Spillane was the youngest and the quietest of the trainees. He is 18 and had just
graduated from Middletown High School. In practice sessions in some rooms he had
rattled off facts and dates that impressed the other guides-in-training. But he
was reserved and he often held back in other rooms, allowing his fellow trainees
to pitch their lines. Hardly anyone knew the pressure Spillane was under this
week -- he was also studying for the ACT college entrance exam, which was only
a few days away.
Ludwig had just discovered that Spillane was too nervous to take the guide's test;
she had done this enough to know she should give him more time studying in the
training room before completing the test. A former school teacher, she had been
a guide for eight years and a tutor for the last four. Among her pupils was Trudy
Coxe, who went through the exercise last year shortly after being hired as the
Preservation Society's executive director.
When Mancuso began in the the gentlemen's reception room she quickly rattled off
the key facts about the room.
She was fine, except for one problem.
"Slow down," said Ludwig.
Mancuso nodded. She knew she talked too fast when she got nervous. The great hall
was next and by the time she reached the fourth room, Mrs. Vanderbilt's bedroom,
her confidence was building and her pace was slowing.
Nervousness was rampant today.
When Sorboni Banerjee began her test, she braced her legs tight and stood rigid,
a trick she learned doing plays in high school. Learning the script felt a lot
like practicing lines for a play. But there was one difference -- the audience
could ask questions.
Judyth Charnock got better as she went along. She told Ludwig that it was just
a matter of looking from object to object to trigger her memory.
"Once you learn the points, things just click," said Charnock. "This is the way
I learned molecular chemistry."
Fifty minutes after she began, Mancuso wrapped up her test with Ludwig among the
copper pots hanging from the rack in the center of the kitchen.
Ludwig gave her a quick hug. She'd passed.
"Welcome to the club," she said. "Now let's find a tour for you."
Mancuso returned to the training room to discover the written tests had been graded.
She'd gotten every answer correct, even the ones she guessed on.
EACH SPRING, when the Breakers reopens, tour guides notice a few small
changes in the script.
But five years ago, the changes were more substantial. That was the year John
Tschirch, director of academic programs and architectural historian for the Preservation
Society, significantly rewrote the script, changing its emphasis from the building
and the furnishings to the people.
"We put in a lot more of historical information about the family and the people
who lived there," said Tschirch. "We tried to put it more into the context of
the parties, and the lifestyle of the family that lived there."
From the new text, visitors learned how Commodore Vanderbilt abandoned the family
farm and created his fortune from steamships and railroads. In the music room
they were told that this was the setting for Gertrude Vanderbilt's wedding in
1896 and the debut of a Vanderbilt grandaughter, Sylvia Szechenyi, in 1937.
Tschirch said one discovery has been that "These houses were built for the presentation
of women."
The Preservation Society increasingly is also talking not just about the Vanderbilt's
but their servants. A tour at the Elms takes visitors down to the laundry room,
the boiler room, the ice room and describes how, in 1902, the servants, tired
of working 18-hour days, 7 days a week, staged a strike led by the butler ,
Dooley.
Telling some of these stories is not easy -- a silence has enveloped Bellevue
Avenue for decades.
"There has always been a reluctance to talk," said Trudy Coxe. "For 60 to 80 years
the people who worked in these buildings did not talk out of school. Everything
was left inside the building. But lately the grandchildren of many of these people
have begun to come forward."
This summer Tschirch and three researchers are developing new material for the
Breakers and two other mansions, Marble House and Rosecliff. A specialist in architecture
is reviewing the buildings' old plans and blueprints, a second is searching for
oral histories and a third is scouring publications at the turn of the century
written about the three mansions.
Their work will be incorporated in a drastically different type of script for
the Breakers, one the guides will not have to memorize.
Instead the new script will be featured on an audio tour that will debut next
year at Marble House and the following year at the Breakers and Rosecliff.
A similar audio tour of the Elms has been extremely popular with visitors. They
hear from a range of speakers from the Preservation Society, such as Wiseman and
Tschirch, and others such as John Drexel, who visited the mansion as a young man
decades ago. Drexel tells listeners about the most popular drink at the Elms,
a White Lady, and he even provides the recipe: a frothy drink made with lemon
juice, egg whites, orange liqueur and lots of gin.
The audio tours were intended to cut staffing. But the mansions will still
need as many guides and employees to handle security and help with questions or
technical problems with the portable tapes.
The Preservation Society pays the company providing the audio equipment a cut
of each admission ticket but Coxe is not worried. While the traditional guided
tours will end, new guided tours of other parts of each mansion are planned, which
Coxe believes will generate additional revenue.
BY MID-AFTERNOON on test day, five of the trainees, Schoenbarger, Frucht,
Mancuso, Charnock and Banerjee had passed their tests and were giving tours. Another,
Susan Millis, was being tested and would soon pass.
The training room was almost empty except for two. Charlotte Daniel, a teacher
for many years , most recently at Rhode Island College, was working with
Spillane. She had him recite the lines, room by room.
He was only on the second room upstairs, Mrs. Vanderbilt's bedroom, when Ludwig
walked in.
"OK, Michael, you want to try again?" Ludwig asked.
Michael nodded.
They left.
Daniel was worried. "I don't think he's ready," she whispered.
This time Ludwig did not stop the test. They moved from room to room, at one point
pausing to catch a glimpse of Charnock, who had passed her test and was giving
her first official tour. All but Spillane and Daniel had passed at this point.
By 3:30, Janice Wiseman had sliced into the chocolate cake, with "Congratulations"
spelled in frosting. She handed a piece to Banerjee. Charlotte Daniel got one
too, even though she had yet to be tested by Picozzi.
Then Spillane returned with Ludwig.
Someone yelled congratulations to him.
He smiled.
But all was not well. Ludwig whispered to Janice Wiseman and looked worried. Ludwig
shook her head. The small knot of tour guides tried to ignore the two.
"Well, we'll talk about it upstairs in a few minutes," said Wiseman. "Have some
cake."
A few minutes later Spillane and Ludwig joined Wiseman in her office.
Wiseman asked Spillane how much he thought he knew of the tour.
He said he knew 70 to 75 percent.
Ludwig nodded vigorously in agreement
"I think you are a bright guy and having this job will look good on your r sum
," said Wiseman. "What I'm willing to do, if you are, is to have you come in and
work with me. You could come in on Sunday, I'm going to be here, and we could
work together for a couple of hours."
In the meantime, she said she had an immediate opening for guides out at the Breakers
stable. The script was only a few pages, and he could practice on the longer one
for a few days and take the test again.
Spillane agreed to the plan.
"Just put the problems of today out of your head." Wiseman said. "This will be
a stepping stone to the big house."
Everyone looked relieved, especially Ludwig. "I just couldn't let him go out in
that house," she said. "He wasn't ready."
CHARLOTTE DANIEL was in the kitchen. It was after 5 and she was wrapping
up her first tour as a guide, about 45 minutes after passing her test.
She explained that the kitchen had been built as an annex because of the Vanderbilt's
fear of another fire. She mentioned that the copper pots hanging were replacements,
the originals had been given for scrap during World War II. Daniel thanked the
visitors for coming and revealed that this had been her first tour. Several congratulated
her; A man in muscle shirt and jeans said jocularly: "I thought you were one of
the family."
Postscript: Five weeks after their test , all eight of
the guides remain on the staff at the Breakers. Nine days after initially taking
the test, after studying with Wiseman, Spillane took the test a second time. He
passed.
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