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Frolic, as friends call him, neither owns nor rents property in Newport, but he has visited regularly since the first Coaching Weekend, in the late 1960s. Artist, equestrian, conservationist, and inhabitant of a painstakingly restored 17th-century house on rolling acreage in rural Pennsylvania, Frolic feels a special passion for coaching -- the arcane sport of antique horse-drawn coaches, carriages, and sleighs. As Lisette's parrot talks to itself in a distant reach of the house, we sit in the living room and Frolic expounds on his obsession.

From earliest memory, he says, his family wove horses into the fabric of their lives. "We did it all," he says, "fox-hunted, show, played polo, raced."

Coaching provided double pleasure -- it married horsemanship to rare, hand-crafted vehicles that qualify as moving works of art. Frolic experienced his first twinge of passion in 1960, when the sport that originated in Britain centuries ago had all but disappeared from the states. Refusing to allow automobiles in front of his pre-Revolutionary house, which he lights with candles and which he claims is haunted, Frolic sought the authentic touch of horse-drawn carriages parked in his yard.

Soon, he was driving -- and collecting -- them.

"At one point I had about a hundred," he tells me. "People would say, 'Oh, I wish I could do that.' I said, 'Shut up, here's a carriage, take it and do it.' And they did." Frolic's generosity contributed to coaching's American renaissance -- and left him with only a handful of horse-drawn vehicles, including a vintage hearse. "Beautiful hearse," he says. "Wonderful! It's very comfortable. I've even got a coffin." The very hearse and coffin, he declares, that will transport him to his funeral.

Frolic has traveled to Newport with four brown hackney horses named "Simply," "Rude," "And Always" "Sexy" -- and a carriage that cost $8,000 when Brewster and Co., coach maker to Vanderbilts and Rockefellers, built it in the early 1900s. One of only two such that Brewster made (the other was destroyed by fire), it's one of the rarest coaches in existence. And it's almost entirely original: except for ordinary maintenance, Frolic has done nothing more than repaint his coach in his family's colors, red and gray.

"I'm a stickler for the detail of it," says Frolic. "I want to have it perfect."

The morning advances.

Lisette drives Frolic to a nearby stable, where his hackneys and coach have spent the night with several of the many horses and 15 vehicles participating in this year's festivities. Grooms wheel the carriages onto the street and hitch the teams, and this morning's passengers climb aboard. Frolic snaps the reins and off he goes, leading the procession toward an estate on Ocean Drive, where a private lunch awaits.

Six hours later, as evening sets in, I follow a trail of horse droppings down Bellevue Avenue to Beaulieu, summer residence of Ruth Wheeler, granddaughter of the founder of the now $19-billion Dow Chemical Company. The police direct guests into her driveway as tourists in T-shirts gawk from across the street. Maybe they've just toured nearby Belcourt Castle, admission $10.

I find the coaches parked on Beaulieu's backyard, a vast expanse of lawn that fronts the Atlantic Ocean next to Clarendon Court, where Sunny von Bulow slipped from a life of luxury into the emptiness of a coma. A stiff breeze blows off the water, exciting the wind chimes on Beaulieu's porch and prompting Ruth's guests to mind their top hats and dresses; many of the hundreds who have accepted Ruth's invitation wear 19th-century finery, the uniform of coaching. Outsiders will soon have a peek at this exotic splendor, for while Ruth's party is invitation-only, a New York Times photographer has been allowed in, and 37 of his Coaching Weekend shots will fill two pages of the paper's Style section a week from Sunday. Other publications, including the Palm Beach Journal, a glossy mouthpiece of Florida society, will also pay homage.

Too chilly for champagne, I select red wine and set off to mingle. Maureen Donnell accepts compliments on her dinner party, Candy Van Alen recounts her recent visit to Saratoga, Dodo Hamilton looks forward to her party at Swiss Village tomorrow, and nearly everyone effuses about a sport that barely qualifies as a quirk in American culture. I hear no mention of the earthquake that's just killed thousands in Turkey, no talk even of Texas Gov. George W. Bush's recent straw poll triumph in Iowa -- nothing to suggest a world outside Beaulieu exists. Three months ago, I set off to discern Newport's soul. This weekend, I am closing in.

***********

A few days before her party, I visited Ruth Wheeler here on her front porch. A butler served fresh-brewed iced tea, the wind chimes serenaded, gulls dipped and soared over the deep blue sea, and Sophia, one of Ruth's beloved long-haired dachshunds, dozed at our feet. Sophia has developed rheumatism, prompting Ruth to sometimes push the animal around in a stroller.

I had come to hear Ruth's story, which, it soon became clear, could have occupied several visits.

Born in Michigan to a chemistry professor and the oldest daughter of Herbert Henry Dow, Ruth was a baby when her mother died, leaving her scientist father to raise her, in Washington, D.C. The teenaged Ruth never lacked for suitors -- even now, in her early 80s, she is a strikingly beautiful woman with blond hair, flawless skin, a flair for fashion and jewels, and an enchanting demeanor. Men are instinctively drawn to her.

Ruth graduated from Connecticut College and married Wiley T. Buchanan Jr., a career diplomat who became President Eisenhower's chief of protocol, and ambassador to Luxembourg and Austria. Ruth and Wiley happened on Beaulieu while visiting Newport, never the center of their social circle, four decades ago. Built in the 1800s, Beaulieu was one of the oldest surviving houses on Bellevue Avenue, but it had fallen to ruin; once the home of Astors and Vanderbilts, by 1960 it was boarded up, and all its fabulous furniture, seven marble fireplaces, European light fixtures, and gold faucets had been sold. Wiley saw potential in the old place, but Ruth envisioned only headache. "A haunted house," is how she remembers it.

So Wiley secretly purchased Beaulieu, later breaking the news to his wife like this: "I haven't bought it to live in. I only bought it to save it." It became their summer residence, of course, after a year of restoration that culminated with a party in honor of Juan Carlos, future King of Spain, in the summer of 1962.

Years passed, the Buchanans established their party as one of the highlights of the season, and then Wiley -- this worldly, dapper, brilliant man -- began to act oddly. His memory failed, his driving became dangerous, and he was stymied by such simple tasks as writing a check. In 1979, the Buchanans visited Europe -- and Wiley, 65, was befuddled. "Here's my husband who's been an ambassador twice, chief of protocol -- been around kings, queens, heads of state, Khruschev," says Ruth. "And here I am with him going around Europe, telling him every single thing to do." Back home, Ruth tried to get her husband to a doctor, but Wiley refused. "If I said to him, 'There's something wrong with your brain,' he'd say: 'There's nothing wrong with me -- it's you.' "

Ruth had never heard of Alzheimer's, an incurable disease, but eventually a doctor diagnosed it. Wiley began a numbing descent into dementia. He kept an office for a while -- but he would sit at his desk for hours, doodling on magazine covers and drawing moustaches on pictures of people. Ruth hid his keys so he couldn't drive, and she stopped bringing him to dinner parties because in the middle of them, he'd rudely rise and leave. "Then I had to dress him, had to shower him, had to shave him. Finally, it dawned on me: Why am I putting him in this shirt and the tie and everything? He wasn't going anywhere."

Ruth still brought Wiley to Beaulieu, but by the last America's Cup summer, in 1983, she knew the end approached.

"By that time," she says, "Wiley hardly knew me. I'd come to the door and he'd smile and be so happy to see me -- and by the time I walked from the door to him, he didn't know who I was. The worst to me was the dog -- he had this little dog like these [dachshunds]. He loved that dog with all his heart -- used to carry it around, especially when he was first sick, wouldn't let that dog go. After he got a little sicker he'd put the dog on a pantry shelf and walk off and leave her. She was little -- she couldn't get off the shelf. I mean, you had to watch him. Plus he'd eat the dog food. Just unbelievable.

"One day, the dog came running in and jumped up on his lap -- he said, 'Ugh,' he didn't want her to kiss him. Then he turned the dog away. I thought: If you don't know your dog and you don't know your wife -- he didn't know his children at all -- what's the point of living? It was just tragic."

Wiley died in 1986, at the age of 72. Ruth dated a few men, and then Ed Wheeler, son of a U.S. senator from Montana, turned up. Ruth knew him -- they'd dated when she was a teen. "I was madly in love with him," Ruth tells me. "He was very sophisticated -- he was 21, and I was 17. He'd been around. He'd dated a lot of girls. He was a very good dancer." Ruth and Ed went steady, but then, while Ruth was in college, the relationship ended.

Decades passed and separate lives unfolded. Ruth ran into Ed a handful of times, including in 1990 at a dinner party when the band happened to play Tommy Dorsey's "Once in a While," their song more than half a century before.

"I looked at Ed and he looked at me and then that was all -- I just remember glancing and thinking of that tune," Ruth says. "And if you listen to the words it's just phenomenal, because it says: 'In love's smoldering ember, one spark may remain; if love still can remember, the spark may burn again.' So that's it. I listened to that and I just thought: I wonder if he's remembering way back when -- and then we danced together."

More years passed. Ruth was vacationing in Mexico when Ed's wife died, in 1995, but she sent flowers -- and then, two weeks later, she ran into him at the funeral of a mutual friend. Seeing them together, Ed's daughter urged him to call Ruth. He demured; his own wife, after all, was barely in the ground. But the daughter persisted, and Ed picked up the phone.

"But I was again away," Ruth says. "I had gone to Antigua with another widower who I had gone with when I was 19. His wife had died in November and he called me -- I seem to be the widower's delight!"

Eventually, Ed reached Ruth.

"He said, 'When are we going out?' I thought he was calling to thank me -- I'd written a nice condolence letter."

After a week of steady dating, Ed proposed.

"I said, 'You don't even know me. I mean, your wife is just dead, we haven't seen each other in 60 years, and you're thinking you want to marry. . . . If you want to go out with me, fine, but we're not going to continue the conversation about getting married.' It didn't make any sense -- we were too old."

But Ruth and Ed began living together, and Ruth's resistance weakened.

"Finally I got to thinking about it," Ruth says, "and I thought: This is just silly. You only pass this way once, I should have married him when I was a teen -- well I shouldn't have at all, but I might have. I thought: Why not finish it off and marry him, make it legal? So I did."

That was the spring of 1999, in Washington. Ruth returned to Newport a newlywed.

***********

The morning after Ruth's Coaching Weekend party, I follow a fresh trail of horse droppings to Dodo Hamilton's Swiss Village, which is on the Hammersmith Farm side of Beacon Hill.

I arrive after the carriages, at about noon. The police direct traffic to a grass parking lot, from which golf carts driven by clean-shaven young men transport guests to the village. A crowd has gathered by the entrance, a towering stone arch that looks like it was snatched from a medieval castle. Built into the hill, the village consists of a circle of stone turrets, houses, barns and out-buildings connected by a serpentine succession of bridges, tunnels, hidden walkways and staircases -- with a small green valley (perfect for a lunch for several hundred) right in the middle.

Undeterred by the hour, guests fill their champagne glasses (Moet) and set off on tours of this costly anachronism that someday will be home to endangered Narragansett turkeys, but off limits to the public. The women today outdo one another with their huge flowered hats, pashmina shawls, pastel dresses, and diamond and pearl jewelry; a few men wear top hat and tails, but most, the standard blue blazer. Praise of coaching having finally been exhausted on this next-to-last day of Coaching Weekend, the conversations concern the outfits, tennis, and the indisputable grandeur of Dodo's village.

Truth be told, I find making small talk difficult after such a steady diet of it. Did anybody hear anything about an earthquake? But I push on nonetheless. Isn't Swiss Village incredible -- just imagine when it's done. Will you be at The Breakers ball tonight? Have you tried the red wine -- a 1995 Chateau Gloria St. Julien, I believe. Do you think it will rain?

***********

I leave Swiss Village and pass the remainder of the afternoon gathering my strength for the evening ahead. As I rest, I recall a visit I made recently with Gladys Szapary at her ancestral home, The Breakers. Apparently she had warmed to a writer, for this time she acted cordially.

Even by the standards of Newport's Gilded Age, when America's wealthiest families sought to outdo each other with their progressively more gaudy summer "cottages," The Breakers belongs in a class all its own. Built at a cost of several millions of dollars in the 1890s by Cornelius Vanderbilt II (grandson of steamship and railroad mogul Cornelius "Commodore" Vanderbilt) and designed by the fabled architect Richard Morris Hunt, the Italian Renaissance-style palazzo features 70 rooms on 11 oceanfront acres. Vanderbilt hired an international team of artists and craftsmen to decorate and furnish his mansion, and they spent more millions of 1890s' dollars on the finest marbles, mosaics, alabaster, mahogany, tiles, tapestries, draperies, chandeliers and gold trim. One cannot step foot into The Breakers without being overwhelmed by its outrageous decadence, for one enters through the Grand Hall, which rises 45 feet to a trompe l'oeil ceiling painted in the likeness of a summer sky.

On my visit, I sit with Gladys and her brother, Paul L. Szapary, in a smaller but still oversized and ornate room: the library, which is paneled in Circassian walnut accented with gold leaf, and which features a four-centuries-old fireplace imported whole from a chateau in Burgundy. Coaching Weekend was just two weeks away, and the Szaparys, Gladys especially, were preoccupied with menu, music, flowers and the myriad other details of planning a ball for 700.

"We're going to have Gypsy music at the beginning when people walk in," says Gladys. "Which was very traditional. We have records of 1890s' parties here and they all list Hungarian Gypsy music when people entered the house. And that was before there was any Hungarian connection to the house at all -- before any of the Vanderbilt side ever married a Hungarian."

Hungarian royalty, to be precise: Cornelius Vanderbilt II's daughter married a Hungarian count and then gave birth to Countess Sylvia Szapary, Paul and Gladys Szapary's mother. That makes Gladys and Paul the great-grandchildren of Cornelius Vanderbilt II -- by blood alone. Vanderbilt wealth evaporated with the passing generations, a fact documented by biographer Arthur T. Vanderbilt II in his Fortune's Children: The Fall of the House of Vanderbilt, a book you won't find for sale in The Breakers' gift shop. "When 120 of the Commodore's descendants gathered at Vanderbilt University in 1973 for the first family reunion," the biographer wrote, "there was not a millionaire among them." The Breakers left family ownership three decades ago, when the Preservation Society bought it for $365,000, a pittance -- but let Paul, Gladys and their mother continue summering on the third floor, formerly servants' quarters. Mother died in 1998 but her children summer there still, hidden from the hundreds of thousands of tourists who explore below.

The 700 guests at The Breakers ball will experience splendor.

"Our great aunt was married here," Gladys explains, "and we're going to use some of the designs they did for that wedding -- and that involves wrapping of some of the columns, which we've never done before, with ivy or flowers." Champagne will flow; photographers will prowl; and New York City's The Bob Hardwick Sound, hailed in People magazine, will play. But Gladys refuses to go overboard with the food: where once Vanderbilts entertained for entertainment's sake, this ball is intended to raise some of the $3.5 million needed to replace The Breakers' Spanish tile roof. Tickets are $300.

"We would love to make some money on this event," Gladys says, "and so I'm not one that will go for a really huge dinner, very extravagant, that will cost a lot of money. . . . But we've got our mother's recipe for lemon mousse, which was always a secret, and that's going to be the dessert in her memory."

***********

I leave my car with a valet and enter The Breakers, where Gladys Szapary greets her paying guests, much as great-grandmother Alice Vanderbilt must have greeted her non-paying friends more than a century ago. Gladys extends and receives compliments, the consummate hostess.

The Great Hall swarms with tuxedoed men, and women who've hit a fashion high note with their satin and organza gowns. Gypsy music from Hardwick's band rises over the loud murmur of conversations and one cannot finish one's champagne without having a waiter materialize with a silver tray bearing another. I mingle, then move deeper into the mansion, where mixed drinks are served and yet more small talk unfolds. Isn't The Breakers incredible? Don't you look marvelous! Wasn't Gypsy music the perfect touch? What do you suppose Gladys has put on the menu? Thank goodness it didn't rain.

Newport has reminded me of a Hollywood movie before, but never so strongly as tonight. I feel irrelevant, like an extra in a cast of thousands.

As nine o'clock approaches, the crowd gravitates toward the terrace, where a tent at least twice the size of the one at Maureen Donnell's party has been erected. Guests find their tables, and when they are settled, a sort of illustrated directory of Newport's social hierarchy has formed.

Occupying the center of the terrace is Eileen Slocum, her family, and Ruth Wheeler's daughter and son-in-law; nearby is Dodo's table, which in turn is close to the Ballards, a Texas oil family and Dodo's partner in Swiss Village. The formerly feuding Donnells and Jenneys have tables -- number 24 and number 40, safely apart. Ruth Wheeler sits with John and Helen Winslow, and best-selling society writer Dominick Dunne shares a table with Sunny von Bulow's daughter and son, Ala Isham and Alexander von Auersperg. There is Candy Van Alen, at a table next to former Sen. Claiborne Pell and his wife, Nuala; the Pells are joined by Aeriel Frazer Eweson and another former Glamour Girl, Jane Pope Ridgway, and Jane's husband, Tom. And mixed throughout the terrace, several of Eileen Slocum's cousins, the Providence Browns.

And me -- I am at the edge of the terrace, far from the thick of things, at the officially designated press table, of all places. Only 6 of the 12 seats here are taken -- one by an out-of-town reporter who is so drunk I fear he will go face-down in his soup (at least that might stop his slurred attempts at humor). As it happens, seating was not assigned but preselected by those desiring togetherness, and no one invited me. The summer has nearly passed, and I have wound up where I began: an outsider with a pen.

***********

August wanes, leaving Eileen Slocum's granddaughter's wedding the crowning event on this season's calendar. Already, people are finalizing their plans for Palm Beach, Manhattan, or the Caribbean; soon, Bailey's Beach will close, and caretakers will have the summer residences all to themselves again.

Before she leaves, Jane Pope Ridgway, the last of the surviving former Glamour Girls I wish to meet, invites me to her place, a stylishly decorated apartment in a large house off Ocean Drive. Popey, as friends still call her, is the beautiful young blonde in the photo on the wall at Bailey's -- and she remains attractive, a tall, shapely woman with platinum hair and a distinctive deep voice. She introduces me to her husband, whom she knew growing up -- and then didn't see for the nearly four decades she was married to her first husband. I am reminded of Ruth Wheeler.

I ask Jane about her debut ball, which was held more than 60 years ago at The Waves, the summer home her famed architect father John Russell Pope built on the south coast of Newport near where Oatsie Charles and the Pells live now. Eileen Slocum attended, along with Aeriel Eweson Frazer, Betty Boop, Eleanor Young, and the rest of the Glamour Girls. A tent covered the lawn, a band played, and the dancing went past midnight. And then, in the middle of the night -- I imagine the moon above, the silver-flecked surf below -- Popey, Cookie and friends snuck off to Bailey's for a swim, the young men still wearing their tuxedos.

"It was a lovely way of life -- yes, a glamorous way of life," says Jane, but it was not one her own children sought. "My daughters didn't want to come out; they thought it was silly. And in a way it was -- but it was lovely, too. A lot of things that were silly also had good points to them."

Jane's first husband, ambassador to New Zealand under President John F. Kennedy, died of a heart attack when she was middle-aged. But like Aeriel, Jane was no stranger to tragedy: one of her sisters died of meningitis when Jane was 5, and her other sister died in a car crash eight years later. Shortly after, her father died of complications of cancer. He was barely 60.

I ask Jane how she has coped with all this.

"My faith," she says. "That's the only thing I can tell you that helped me. I was told to try a lot of things but the good Lord helped me when I needed it."

***********

A photograph of Eleanor Young walking into Bailey's appeared in the society pages of The Providence Sunday Journal of June 29, 1941, and an article trumpeted Newport's plans for the Fourth of July: "Following a series of dinners and lunches, the day will be rounded out with another dance, a subscription affair to be given in the ballroom at Bailey's Beach for which a New York orchestra is being brought to furnish the music." The orchestra was the same that played Hungarian Gypsy music at Eleanor's $75,000 debut.

War consumed the front page of The Providence Journal two days later, on the morning of July 1. Nazi tanks were advancing toward Moscow, and America was considering sending U.S. ships to aid the British in the battle of the North Atlantic. Soon, America would be engulfed in global conflict.

History does not record whether Eleanor read these headlines, or cared; she was crazy for her new beau Nicky Embiricos and believed they were destined to marry, just as soon as his divorce from the wife he'd left with his young child in Palm Beach was final. On the morning of July 1, Eleanor left her parents' summer estate and drove with Nicky, a weekend houseguest, to the Newport airport. Nicky kept his Fairchild Model 24 monoplane there.

I have seen this plane -- a photograph of it with Nicky, Eleanor and her beloved Yorkshire terrier posed in front is preserved in the Robert R. Young papers at the Yale University archives. Sharp-nosed and sleek, with a dark fuselage and light-colored wings, the plane sold for more than $6,000 new, a sum no ordinary person could have afforded.

I have found additional photos of Eleanor in those dusty boxes at Yale, too -- glossy 8-by-10 shots that surpass any newspaper microfilm. With her long black hair, dark eyes, and creamy skin, Cookie was stunning -- truly the most alluring Glamour Girl of all. Except for the color of her hair, she brings to mind the early Marilyn Monroe.

Heavy fog rolled in off the ocean that long-ago morning for the second day in a row.

Eleanor and her beau intended to visit friends in New York, and unlike yesterday, when they'd canceled their flight due to the weather, today they would not be deterred. With Nicky at the controls, they lifted off shortly before noon. A new pilot, Nicky had just 136 hours in the air, and his plane was equipped with only basic instrumentation.

Jane Ridgway was at Bailey's Beach when she heard the engine.

"The plane came over," she says, "and we were sitting in the cabana and it dipped its wings -- we gathered it must be Eleanor. He dipped his wings and off he went into the horizon."

Moments later, when the ceiling had dropped to 100 feet or less, Nicky became disoriented. They were off Matunuck now, and people on the beach below heard -- but could not see -- the plane madly circling.

Suddenly, the Fairchild burst through the fog.

It plummeted, zoomed back up, flipped, then hurtled down again, hitting the ocean with enough force to knock both wings off.

Eleanor and her dog were thrown from the plane. Lifeguards pulled Nicky from the wreckage; they detected a faint pulse, but he died there on the beach. Unconscious but breathing, Eleanor died an hour later at South County Hospital of a fractured skull, broken bones, and multiple internal injuries. The body of her dog was later found washed up on shore.