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It's a morning near the end of May, and I am ringing the bell of a private estate on Newport's Bellevue Avenue, one of America's most exclusive addresses. A granite wall, wrought-iron gate, and copper beech trees shield the house from the street.

Eileen Gillespie Slocum

The door opens and a uniformed maid with an east European accent escorts me to the drawing room, offers me a seat, then disappears. Sunlight through half-drawn drapes casts the room in pastel shades. My eye wanders, taking in the Carrara marble fireplace, Louis XVI furniture, leather-bound books, and life-size oil portraits of one of America's leading families.

I fear I've been forgotten when I hear footsteps descending stairs. The lady of the house crosses the front hall, past a grand piano and a marble bust in her likeness. I rise to greet Eileen Gillespie Slocum.

We have met on a journey I've embarked on through Newport society, a shuttered world that Vanderbilts, Astors, and Eileen's progenitors, the Browns of Providence, created more than a century ago. On this journey, I intend to experience the upcoming summer, the high season, and to explore Newport's past, where telling insights may be found. An outsider, I hope to discern Newport society's soul. I hope to learn what F. Scott Fitzgerald meant when he observed: "Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me."

A full-time or seasonal resident of Newport her whole life, Eileen is central to my quest, and so I have been visiting her since last autumn. I find her elegant -- a woman in her early 80s who favors pearls and pink lipstick, colors that complement her chocolate-brown eyes and gray hair, which falls toward her shoulders in girlish curls. If Eileen approves of you -- if she considers you "attractive," or better still, "terribly attractive" -- she is delightfully charming.

Eileen extends her hand and I take it. Her handshake is firm.

"So nice to see you again," she says. "Do sit down."

Eileen shows me to a seat by a window overlooking the canopied south terrace. The maid reappears and begs our command; a moment later, she returns with coffee for me, fresh carrot juice for Eileen.

After exchanging pleasantries, our conversation turns to my journey. Even among the very rich, says Eileen, Newport occupies solitary ground. I ask her to explain: How, for example, does it compare to Southampton, home of Hollywood movie stars and Wall Street wunderkinds?

"By being rather fastidious about the people in the clubs," Eileen allows, in a voice that projects the very essence of aristocracy, "we've managed to control the particular atmosphere of the community."

She means that regardless of wealth, not just anyone is welcome in Newport society -- you can't bully your way in. And it takes more than money and the right look: not every Gatsby knows how to properly host a dinner party, a failing with devastating consequences. "If you don't entertain attractively," says Eileen, "people just won't go another time. Why would they?"

Through open windows, I hear the sounds of mowing, clipping, and trimming: Eileen's gardeners are busy. Indeed, all up and down Bellevue Avenue -- and out onto equally exclusive Ocean Drive -- landscapers these days are feverishly readying estates for the high season. In this part of Newport, one does not abide weeds or misbehaved hedges.

"The minute the spring comes," Eileen declares, "there are a thousand things to do."

More so this spring of 1999. At summer's end, Eileen will host a wedding reception for her granddaughter, Sophia Augusta Brown Trevor, who is marrying the son of a Texas oil family. Already, the talk around town is of a sovereign event, even for Newport, which has hosted many presidents, royals, America's Cup challenges, and Tall Ships visits.

"If you come for dinner the 10th of July," Eileen says, "you will meet some of the Texans."

This dinner, to formally introduce Sophie's fiance to Newport society, will be a black-tie affair for nearly 100 -- an intimate gathering for Eileen, who has hosted parties for 1,000 or more. Eileen wishes me to attend, and begs my forgiveness should she not send a written invitation. The season hasn't officially started, but already she is busy beyond belief.

***********

A few days later, I call on John G. Winslow, president for three decades of the Spouting Rock Beach Association, more commonly known as Bailey's Beach. Of all Newport's private clubs -- the Reading Room, the Clambake Club, the Newport Country Club, the New York Yacht Club -- none compares to Bailey's, located near the point where Bellevue Avenue ends and Ocean Avenue begins. More than one person who's been blackballed for admission to Bailey's has sold his property and left Newport in shame, never to return.

Eileen Slocum, center, and her summer houseguest, Loraine McMurrey, attend a luncheon at the Marble House in Newport. Loraine is the mother of Louis Girard, heir to a Texas oil fortune who will marry Eileen's granddaughter Sophia Augusta Brown Trevor at the end of the summer.

"It seems ridiculous that [being] president of the beach is important, but in Newport it's very important," says John, a man of Eileen's age who walks slowly and with a slight stoop. We are sitting in the coolness of his study, which has a dry bar, soft cozy furniture, and many old maps and books.

"Why does it seem ridiculous?" I say.

"Well it is ridiculous -- it's a beach club!"

John laughs, but in truth his position brings solemn respect: along with his board of governors, he decides who gets into Bailey's. A candidate needs seven endorsements from members in good standing to even be considered.

"They have to be good letters, too," John says. "You don't say, 'I've been asked to write a letter for so and so.' You don't do that -- you write a nice letter or you don't write at all. For an outside person to come in is very difficult because they don't know seven people."

John expounds on the history of Bailey's, founded in the 1890s after new trolley service gave mill workers from Fall River ready access to Easton's Beach, a wide expanse closer to downtown Newport that the well-to-do had claimed as their own. Not wishing to associate with people who took their lunches in buckets, high society relocated several miles to Spouting Rock, smaller and often seaweedy but safely beyond the reach of trolleys. Today, approximately 500 families belong, and for the most part, new members are added only when old ones die. This, says John, is a matter of simple logistics.

"There isn't a bathhouse left and there isn't a parking space left," he declares.

Noontime approaches; John invites me to lunch with him at his club, which you can see from his bedroom. A retired banker, and husband of Helen, a woman of considerable influence and means, John could afford any vehicle but he drives a Mercury Tracer. Some of his friends drive similarly ordinary cars, and many drive Volvos, BMWs, or Mercedeses -- but none a Rolls Royce or, heaven forbid, a Ferrari or Lamborghini, as frequently seen in Southampton. We arrive at Bailey's, and John parks in his space, best in the lot. Every space is reserved, its owner identified by initials painted on a marker, and woe to him who takes someone else's. The story is told of the woman who staged a snit after seeing strange tire marks where only hers should have been.

***********

Viewed from the street, Bailey's fails to impress. Gray and white cabanas and bathhouses extend fan-like from the clubhouse; a flag snaps in the breeze; couples play tennis on the courts; and the Atlantic Ocean shimmers in the distance. From the outside, this could be almost any beach club.

Jane Pope Ridgway, Popey to her friends, is the daughter of John Russell Pope, famed architect of the Jefferson Memorial.

Inside finds comfortable old furniture and a relaxing color scheme of yellows, pinks and whites. John signs for me at the front desk, where today's pool and ocean temperatures are posted, and we walk to the bar. I order an iced tea, John orders a Coke, and then we head to the restaurant.

Lunch is cafeteria-style, with a salad bar and generous selection of soups, sandwich ingredients, sweets, and today's special, lamb chutney stew. As we move through the line, John notices that someone has mixed the sugar packets with the tea bags; after John instructs the help to restore order, we proceed with our trays to the dining room. Joining us at our table is Claiborne deB. Pell, a Newport resident who served six terms in the United States Senate before retiring, and who finds distinction at Bailey's by being one of its few Democratic members.

Through open doors, we see grownups on the porch, and beyond, children building sand castles in front of the cabanas (which members pronounce "ka-ban-yas"). Everyone appears to be Caucasian, most are attractive and thin, many are blond, and none wears loud clothing; this is old money, not the sizzling fortunes created overnight with a dot-com IPO. The Bailey's set inherited money or married into it, and sometimes both: Senator Pell, for example, whose family was well-heeled, and whose wife is related to the founder of the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co. -- A&P.

I have heard that the best food in Newport is prepared by private chefs, and so I am not disappointed that the Bailey's fare is less than five-star. Although the club originally had no restaurant and servants carried their employers' refreshments in wicker hampers, bringing food or drink in today is forbidden -- and violators risk harsh reprisal. As we eat, John tells the story of one member who was found with a well-stocked refrigerator in his cabana; rules are rules, and so John summarily unplugged the machine.

But he notes that his old friend Claiborne Pell, a penurious sort who chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during his 36 years in Washington, is allowed to bring a sandwich in a brown bag. The senator nods in agreement. His speech and movement are slowed by Parkinson's disease, but he can still spin a respectable yarn. Today he tells of the time a wasp stung him when he was giving a speech. He cannot remember the headline in the paper, but he says: "It should have been 'Wasp stings WASP.' " Everyone chuckles.

The afternoon wears on as we and many others linger over dessert. No one watches the clock; no one shows evidence of having anything on his calendar, except perhaps for swimming or tennis. So I take the opportunity to explore. I find the pool (80 degrees) inviting; the ocean (65 degrees) cool; the cabanas small, with room for but a few chaise longues; and the beach spacious, smooth, and uncrowded. Looking east, I spot a handful of non-club members on "Reject Beach," that sliver of Bailey's that's open to the public.

Back inside the clubhouse, I am drawn to the many photographs of Bailey's members, past and present, that adorn the walls. One especially captivates me: a faded black-and-white portrait of several young men and women in bathing suits, from August 1939.

An International Press photographer took it, then wrote a caption proclaiming it the first-ever photo inside Bailey's by a member of the working press. How he got it remains a mystery, because, as John informs me, photojournalists have always been banned from Bailey's. Years ago, before TV, when society pages were big in newspapers, photographers did the next-best thing: they stood on the public road outside and shot people as they came and went. Pictures of beautiful young heiresses were particularly in demand.

And pictures of the women in this shot -- women John grew up with -- were coveted. For these were Glamour Girls, as society writers dubbed them: a dozen or so friends who came of age before World War II in a whirlwind of dances, parties and romance that enthralled the masses. The woman holding a cigarette in this photograph, Jane Pope Ridgway, daughter of famed Jefferson Memorial architect, John Russell Pope, was a Glamour Girl, as was the young woman next to her: Betty Blake, daughter of a woman who survived the Titanic. Although she missed this photo, Eileen Slocum was considered a Glamour Girl, too.

***********

The monied neighborhoods of Newport comprise no more than about 2,000 acres and lie outside the city's harborside commercial center, on Narragansett Bay. They include Bellevue Avenue, a promenade lined with estates like Eileen Slocum's; Ochre Point, a seaside area east of Bellevue; Ocean Drive, a more sparsely settled section that forms the southern shore of the city; and Harrison Avenue, which heads back north toward the harbor. The coast that has drawn Newport society is one of the most scenic in New England, a mix of steep cliffs and rock-strewn shore with breathtaking views of the open Atlantic.

Betty Brooke Blake, also known as Betty Boop, plays a role during a party thrown by the Newport Art Museum that re-created the Masque of the Blue Garden given by the Arthur Curtiss Jameses in 1913. Dancing with her is Roderick O'Hanley.

Even amidst such splendor, the estate I visit the weekend after lunching at Bailey's is beyond compare. Here, on a remote stretch of Ocean Drive, situated on several dozen partly landscaped, partly wild acres, lies a Mediterranean-style residence built a century ago in imitation of a Moorish castle. Roughly rectangular in shape, the house lies east-to-west, assuring all-day sun -- but its elongated midsection, including the ballroom, was constructed only one room wide, so that windows on both sides may be opened in hot weather to exploit the ocean breeze. Like most Newport mansions, Eileen Slocum's being the rare exception, this one is named: Avalon, after the mythical island where King Arthur was taken when he died.

This is the home of Eileen's friend Candace Van Alen, wife of the late Jimmy Van Alen, poet, publisher, bird-fancier, financier, hunter, musician, former Navy officer, Cambridge University graduate and all-around sporting man who founded the International Tennis Hall of Fame, saved the Newport Casino, invented tennis's tie-breaking system -- and then died at the age of 88, here at Avalon on a lazy summer afternoon in 1991 after tumbling off the front terrace while playing his beloved custom-built guitar. Jimmy was descended from real-estate magnate John Jacob Astor (said in 1835 to be the richest man in the world), and when he died, Candace was left with not only their Newport estate but one in New York, and residences in St. Croix and Madrid.

Like Claiborne Pell, Candy, as friends call her, married wealth but was also born to it, through a Midwest family that made its fortune manufacturing stoves. We met at a fine-arts symposium earlier this year, and immediately hit it off: a Vassar graduate, Candy was an overseas correspondent for the Hearst wire service and then an executive with the New York Herald-Tribune before accepting Jimmy's proposal of marriage five days after they met, in 1948.

"He was so interesting and so dear and extremely attractive," says Candy. "Women -- I wasn't the only one -- fell for him all the time. We were a wonderful match, really. I still think he's the most attractive man I ever met and he had so many facets."

Candy is terribly attractive, as Eileen Slocum would say, and her intelligence and wit make her a formidable conversationalist who is much in demand in Newport. Today, she is hosting a lunch in honor of Sophia Augusta Brown Trevor, Eileen's granddaughter, and Sophie's Texas fiance, Louis McMurrey Girard.

I enter Avalon's drawing room, filled with some three dozen guests whom Candy has carefully selected in hopes of an entertaining mix; in Newport, nothing offends like a gathering of duds, just as nothing impresses like a party that's talked about all season. Mary Dunne, the live-in archivist Candy has hired to put her late husband's papers in order, is here, along with Gladys V. Szapary, great-granddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt II, who built The Breakers, the most opulent of Newport's mansions. The great-grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, a tennis fan, has shown up, as has the great-great-grandson of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, a young preservationist who is touring America.

Candy introduces me to the fortyish Miss Szapary, with whom I attempt small talk; whether from shyness or disdain for a writer seeking to discern her world, Miss Szapary manages civil responses but nothing more -- no warmth nor the slightest interest in me or my project. An instant failure with an actual Vanderbilt, I head to the bar, tended by a man in a butler's uniform. Mixed drinks are available, but chilled white wine and iced champagne are the favorites today. Beer is not served. I order champagne and mingle with friendlier folks, including a jolly older man who regales me with tales of court tennis, an obscure indoor version of the game. Now I've migrated to the terrace where Jimmy Van Alen met his end. A maid circulates with silver trays of hors d'oeuvres -- water chestnuts wrapped in bacon.

Like any accomplished hostess, Candy does not rest with her invitation list; she personally seats her guests, even at a casual luncheon. She puts Tolstoy with Gandhi's great-grandson, and Eileen and Eileen's granddaughter with her at the head table, next to the bar. I wind up with the elderly court-tennis player. A maid freshens my champagne and my new friend teases of the memoir he claims to be writing about his career as a spy. Then Candy summons everyone to the buffet table, set inside the main dining room, where she takes most of her meals, using a buzzer to summon the help between courses. Today's lunch is cold poached salmon with cream sauce, tossed salad with raspberry vinaigrette dressing, a rather daring corn salad, and sliced fruit and chocolate cake for dessert.

Back at our table, my new friend prattles on about his nanny and how he was sent to boarding school when he was only 6. He talks about the Far East, where, he hints, the CIA employed him -- for what, exactly, he coyly declines to reveal. I can't get a word in edgewise, but I scarcely complain. The food surpasses Bailey's, the champagne flows, and the afternoon is delightfully warm with a refreshing salt breeze. Fog obscures our view of the Atlantic, but otherwise everything is perfect.

***********

A thriving port since pre-Revolutionary times, Newport began to attract wealthy summer visitors in the years before the Civil War. Many of these early colonists were southern planters who transported their cotton to northern mills on Rhode Island ships; blessed with prevailing winds that keep temperatures down during even the dog days of August, Newport provided escape from the heat and humidity back home, and so business led to pleasure. Newport's gentle climate also drew well-to-do residents of Providence, Boston, and New York for the summer season.

Former U.S. Sen. Claiborne deB. Pell, one of the few Democrats who belongs to Bailey's Beach, and his wife, Nuala, seated, mingle at a Redwood Library garden party.

"There is nothing surprising in the fact that Newport has become a 'Fashionable Watering Place,' " wrote the editor of a book John Winslow shows me, Newport Illustrated, published in 1854. "The wonder is that so many years were required to make its many attractions known to those who habitually leave the crowded cities, on the approach of summer's heat, in search of some favored spot where they may enjoy a cool and invigorating air, bathe on a beach washed by the ocean waves, ramble over verdant hills and vales and pleasant fields, or pause to rest on some bold cliff that commands a view far seaward."

Among the early summer colonists were Eileen Slocum's ancestors, the Browns of Providence, prosperous merchants, traders and manufacturers in the early days of the republic whose fortune has persisted through the ages. Browns endowed the Ivy League university that bears their name -- and one member of the family, John Brown, multiplied his wealth buying and selling slaves. One day while I am visiting Eileen, she tells me how her grandmother (Sophia Augusta Brown Sherman, whose painting hangs in Eileen's drawing room and whose name was given to Eileen's granddaughter) bought property on Bellevue Avenue at about the time of the Civil War, thus establishing Browns in Newport society for the next century and a half.

Daughter of a society lady (a Brown) and a banker (a Gillespie), Eileen grew up on Manhattan's Upper East Side in a house with eight stories, "six above ground and two below, and a beautiful little French elevator, white and gold." As a child, Eileen summered with her sisters in Newport, where she regularly visited aunt Georgette Brown -- who, with her late husband Harold, had built an ivy-covered house on Bellevue during Newport's so-called Golden Age: the late 1800s, when Vanderbilts, Astors and others erected museum-size monuments to their wealth. An undistinguished architect designed Georgette's residence, but the legendary Ogden Codman Jr. fashioned the interiors -- and the grounds were laid out by the firm founded by the father of American landscape architecture, Frederick Law Olmsted, designer of New York's Central Park.

When Aunt Georgette died four decades ago, Eileen acquired the house. She moved in with cherished memories -- and an abundance of furniture, silverware, china and objets d'art inherited from many branches of her extended family. The house suited Eileen's late husband as well, for it has two libraries and walls of built-in bookshelves throughout. Harvard classmate and confidant of David Rockefeller, diplomat, and gentleman scholar, John Jermain Slocum collected coins and books, and amassed perhaps the most extensive collection of James Joyce manuscripts and letters outside of Ireland before he became bedridden after a series of strokes and died, in the summer of 1997.

"This was perfect for us because, as my husband said, we didn't have to keep painting it -- it's stone." says Eileen. "This house has two furnaces and is a real winterized house. Aunt Georgette after she was widowed lived here 'round the clock for 60 years, you see." Like her aunt, Eileen remains a year-round resident, although she travels often, including trips in her capacity as Rhode Island's Republican National Committeewoman, a forum from which she promulgates her conservative views on such issues as abortion, Democrats, and traditional family philosophies. A keen student of politics, Eileen never fails to speak her mind.

We are sitting in her drawing room again, and I am struck anew by the grandeur of her house. The fireplace in this room, for example, is constructed of marble from the same quarry that brought forth Michelangelo's Pietà.

"Are these 12-foot ceilings?" I ask.

"Wouldn't they be about 14 feet?" Eileen says.

Not quite, I venture.

"Nine?" Eileen says. "No, that would be nothing, wouldn't it."

Unable to settle the issue, we move on to another. How many rooms does Eileen's mansion have? I guess more than 30.

"I just don't know," says Eileen. "It depends what you count as a room. Do you count that hall a room?" She means the front hall, which could swallow my garage. "And the little outside hall -- do you count that a room?"

The front hall, I say, surely qualifies as a room; the smaller hall by the front door perhaps one half of a room. So by this reckoning, how many rooms?

"I really promise you, I just don't know," says Eileen, amused, if not mystified, by my interest. "There are two rooms in the attic -- but I don't know whether you could call them a room or not. And the bathroom in the basement? The wine cellar? You see, you just don't know. It counts up more if you add all these kinds of adjuncts."

***********

Now June's well along, and the season is set to blossom, quite literally: the Newport Flower Show, one of the summer's highlights, looms around the corner, and organizers and entrants lack enough hours in the day.

But flower lovers are hardly the only ones absorbed by the new-fledged season. Along Bellevue Avenue and out on Ocean Drive, I see luxury automobiles with Florida and New York plates in driveways where just a few weeks ago I saw only pickup trucks and panel vans -- and the Bailey's lot is more crowded with each passing day. Aided by my association with Eileen, Candy Van Alen, and Hugh D. Auchincloss III, another prominent Newporter sympathetic to my cause, I am beginning to receive invitations to private lunches and dinner parties. I am meeting the right people in Newport today, or so I am told.

And I am becoming haunted by the past: since leaving Bailey's that day, I can't get the Glamour Girls off my mind.

Young and rich, their futures at the moment that photo was taken were as unbounded as the ocean itself. Who were these women? I know Eileen Slocum, but what of the rest? What did their wealth and beauty bring them?

Curiosity pulls me. And I've yet to discover Eleanor Young, the most beautiful -- and tragic -- Glamour Girl of all.

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