Digital Extra

June and
Donald
MacKaye

I park amidst a fleet of luxury automobiles and walk to the Episcopal Church of St. John the Evangelist, a magnificent stone structure with a view of scenic Newport Harbor. Limousines stop in front while women in gowns and men in tuxedos line up to enter; across the street, onlookers in more modest attire crane for a better view. It is shortly before 5 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 11. This morning's rain clouds have all blown out to sea, leaving a pristine late-summer evening, perfect for a wedding.

Sophia Augusta Brown Trevor and Louis McMurrey Girard leave the church of St. John the Evangelist in Newport after exchanging vows before a packed church.

I inch toward the church door, where four young page boys, distant cousins of the bride, hand out the wedding program, a keepsake pamphlet bound with white ribbon. Excluding the string quartet and organist, 34 people constitute the wedding party: one matron of honor, two best men, five bridesmaids, four groomsmen, seven ushers, one ring bearer, two flower girls, two fathers, two mothers, three stepparents, the four page boys, and a celebrant. Many have traveled hundreds, even thousands, of miles to be here.

The church is filling with the almost 450 guests, but I manage to find a seat on the left side, near where the bride will enter. With its castle-like bell tower, dark oiled woods, stained-glass windows and traditional rear-facing altar, the church manifests a solemn English air; with only the slightest flight of fancy, one can imagine having walked into King Henry VIII's time. Five o'clock comes and goes, and people continue to stream in, filling every last seat and leaving a few unfortunate souls to stand.

Acceptably late, the bridal party starts down the aisle. Heads turn, a baby cries, flashbulbs pop, and the majestic strains of Pachelbel's Canon and The Prince of Denmark's March fill the church.

Tall, dark-haired and sharp-featured, Sophia Augusta Brown Trevor is terribly attractive, as her grandmother would say -- and positively resplendent on this, her wedding day. She wears a simple but elegant Victorian-style gown from Japanese designer Yumi Katsura and a veil worn by women in her family all the way back to her great-great-great-grandmother Mrs. John Carter Brown. The sight of Sophie moves Eileen Slocum nearly to tears, for she herself wore the veil at her own wedding, more than half a century before.

Sophie, 25, joins Louis McMurrey Girard, 30, who wears a tuxedo and white bow tie, at the candlelit altar. Louis weeps as he beholds his bride and the Rev. Jonathan J.D. Ostman begins reading "The Betrothal," from the Red Prayer Book. After vows have been exchanged and rings placed on fingers, Father Ostman begins celebrating the high Nuptial Mass, a tradition-steeped service that extends to more than an hour. A soloist sings, Communion is served, and then the church doors are thrown open. As if on cue, the setting sun bathes the church in soft gold. Sophie and Louis emerge into the early evening, their joyful retinue following. The limos regain their passengers, and guests return to their automobiles.

The line of vehicles moving down Bellevue Avenue a short while later brings to mind a presidential motorcade: it stops traffic, draws the curious, and ends with police officers directing it into an area off-limits to the public, Eileen Slocum's estate. Valets handle the guests' cars -- all but Providence Mayor Vincent A. "Buddy" Cianci Jr.'s. The mayor, a friend of Eileen's, orders his police chauffeur to park his Lincoln Town Car at the front door, next to Eileen's automobile, a Mercedes with a four-digit license plate. Buddy steps out, lights a cigarette, orders a drink, and plunges into the crowd. People meeting him for the first time, these fun-loving Texans especially, find him marvelously entertaining.

Eileen has hosted substantially larger gatherings: nearly 1,000 people attended Sophie's all-night debutante dance during the summer of 1992, according to The New York Times, which sent a photographer.

But it's unlikely Eileen's place has ever cast such a spell.

The mansion pulsates with conversation and guests spill out onto the south terrace, where they mill about two bars and partake of the champagne and finger foods the waiters and waitresses bring around. Outside the north porch, guests stroll a torchlit lane past a third bar and beds of flowers to a giant white tent, where a steak and lobster dinner will be served; illuminated incandescently, the tent glows, like a landmark in some enchanted city. A summer of preparations for this one night has paid off gloriously, with only one small imperfection observed: the lingering smell of insecticide, necessary to quell the mosquitoes.

***********

Sophie Trevor initially demured in the spring of 1997, when her grandmother suggested she travel to San Antonio, Texas, for a week of parties honoring several debutantes, including Sophie's friend Sarah B. Hudson. One of the hostesses of that week-long gala, Princess Tassilo von und zu "Titi" Furstenberg (of Monaco, Paris and the Bahamas), is Sarah's grandmother -- and Eileen Slocum's dear friend.

Eileen Slocum, grande dame of Newport and grandmother of the bride, leaves the church escorted by ushers, two members of the 34-person wedding party.

"I said to Sophie, 'Oh, do go,' " says Eileen. "I feel I had a hand in the whole thing because Sophie said, 'Nope, too expensive!' -- and I said, 'It opens your horizons meeting people in other parts of the world. Titi is such an intimate friend of mine, I will pay for the ticket if you will go.' "

Sophie accepted her grandmother's offer, and she flew from New York, where she was living, to Texas, where she met Louis at a party on a Thursday. After dinner the next day, they danced five hours straight.

"He was so much fun," Sophie tells me. "Very energetic, lively, very open and loving. And I really enjoyed that -- that was a nice thing, generally boys my age aren't so open. . . . He has a really good sense of humor and he's very sweet. And I liked all his friends."

For his part, Louis says, "Sophie certainly has all the qualities that I was looking for in a woman: certainly her charm, her thoughtfulness, and her beauty. Beautiful lady. We were very complementary in personalities. . . . I had always thought that we were going to get married from the time that we met -- and in fact I even told her that that first week."

Sophie didn't decide so soon. "Oh, God, no!" she jokes. "But he made it very clear from the beginning that I was the person he was interested in."

Soon, Louis was visiting Sophie in New York. After teaching art for a year in what she calls "a very, very under-resourced school" in the destitute South Bronx -- a job that caused her grandmother no end of worry, particularly when she learned Sophie rode the subway to work -- Sophie moved on to a position at a private school in more fashionable Manhattan. Meanwhile, Louis, an investment banker, opened a New York branch office of his Houston-based firm. The two began dating steadily, and in August 1997, Louis attended Sophie's sister Evelyn's wedding. "That I considered to be pretty serious," Sophie says.

In January 1999, Louis surprised Sophie by taking her to a Houston jeweler. Sophie picked out three diamonds -- a 3.8-carat main stone, and two .9-carat side stones -- and the jeweler sized her for the custom-designed ring. But weeks passed, and Sophie heard nothing further.

"I knew obviously that the ring was out there somewhere," Sophie says, "but I didn't know what the situation was exactly. We were at dinner with a friend of his [in New York] and we all drank a lot of wine, because we were all excited to be together or whatever -- just having a good time celebrating. And he ended up spilling the story of what the deal was with the ring: the ring was arriving the next day on a big Brink's truck coming from Houston."

When Louis presented the ring to his fiancée, on the eve of Valentine's Day, Sophie cried. "She couldn't believe it," Louis says. "She said, 'You made me the happiest person in the world!' "

***********

Officially engaged, Sophie and Louis over the next several months sought their families' blessings. This involved rituals in Newport, Texas and Washington, D.C., where Eileen's daughter Margy Quinn (Sophie's mother) lives.

Loraine McMurrey, left, mother of the groom, and Margy Quinn, mother of the bride, greet groom Louis Girard's father, Dr. Louis Joseph Girard, outside the church.

The first critical test was a visit by Eileen and the Quinns to Houston, which Louis and his mother, Loraine McMurrey, both call home. Among other events over the course of several days, Loraine hosted a black-tie dinner, inviting many prominent Texans, including legendary heart surgeon Dr. Denton A. Cooley and his wife. "They're my closest friends," Loraine declares. Next was Loraine's visit to the Quinns in Washington, followed by Louis's appearance at Candy Van Alen's Avalon and then his formal introduction -- with his mother -- to Newport society at Eileen's July 10 black-tie dinner.

Loraine and Louis were smitten with the Slocums, whose acquaintance they'd never made. "I met Eileen and liked her immensely, immediately," says Loraine. "Just a terrific lady. An extraordinary person." And while the Slocum name did not register with Louis, the Brown name did. "I think everybody's heard about the Brown family," Louis says. "Don't forget I'm from Texas, which is as far away from the East Coast as you possibly can get -- but yeah, everybody, you have the Brown University and what not."

No one's opinion mattered more than that of Eileen, who takes the matter of matrimony most seriously: from marriage come children, who, for better or worse, perpetuate the bloodlines.

"I tried to persuade all the children to have big families," says Eileen, who has two daughters and a son. "I created this sentence for my children: You don't win any wars without troops!" Eileen laughs at her cleverness. "Everybody says, 'Which general said that?' And I say, 'Me, I, myself -- I thought out that principle.' "

Eileen returned from Houston singing Louis's praises. She has not always been so delighted with her family's choices: her other daughter, the fiercely independent Beryl, married the African-American Adam Clayton Powell III (son of the flamboyant civil-rights leader and congressman from Harlem), and then had two children by him -- developments that scandalized Newport society and even now have the power to raise eyebrows, despite the fact that one of Beryl's sons is an Army captain and the other is a professor at MIT. Eileen takes pride in their achievements.

The son of a Girard and a McMurrey presents no complications. "Louis has a very exceptional family," Eileen says. "When Margy and I went down and spent a week with them, we were feted. Breakfast, lunch, cocktails, and dinner -- with a lot of teas added in. Their idea of a cocktail party is 200 people. Two hundred in this big house, 200 in that. There were some terribly attractive Texans! And every one of them told us they were going to come up for the wedding."

And thus, the matriarch having approved, the union was blessed.

***********

In the weeks before the wedding, an unusual bustle grips Eileen's estate.

Using blueprints discovered in the basement of her mother's mansion, Margy is overseeing restoration of the grounds to Frederick Law Olmsted's firm's original design: gardeners are clearing brush, installing lighting along walkways, and planting pansies, lavender, oriental lilies, irises and black-eyed Susans. Inside, the Irish college students are polishing the crystal and silver. Movers prepare to pack the most fragile objects off to the safety of temporary storage, and a worker will soon wash and wax the floors.

Margy Quinn, daughter of Eileen Slocum and mother of Sophie Trevor, chats with guests at the wedding reception.

Many others are busy as well. Sophie and Louis have hired Bachrach, portrait photographers since 1868, for the wedding pictures, and they've retained Blackstone Caterers, which enjoys a reputation on Bellevue Avenue as possibly the finest large-function caterer in all of Rhode Island. They have selected Dollie Briggs, granddaughter of oil heiress Carolyn Skelly and a legend in her own right for her floral designs, to arrange the reception flowers and decide the table settings. Reservations are being made for a week of pre-wedding parties.

This is not exactly what the betrothed had intended. "I was determined to have a very small wedding so Newport was sort of the last place I wanted to do it," Sophie later tells me. "We considered doing it in New York, but it was not the right time of year -- it was summer and it's so hot there. My sister Evelyn had just had hers up at my other grandparents' place, so I didn't want to burden them with another wedding -- plus it's sort of remote and hard to get to. So actually Newport ended up being the obvious place."

Still, Sophie and Louis had wanted a degree of intimacy: "I was really hoping the very biggest it would be was 250," Sophie says.

But now, with mere days to go, the guest list has surpassed 425 -- and continues to grow, with Eileen handing out last-minute invitations to people she feels she mustn't slight. Loraine McMurrey and her son happily acquiesce.

"Mrs. Slocum's goal was different from Louis's," Loraine later explains. "Louis's goal was to have a very small, meaningful wedding with very few people but significant: his entourage from Scotland, the people he went to school with that he felt close to."

I ask Loraine how many guests that would have been.

"Two hundred, maybe," she says, "small but luxurious. I think Mrs. Slocum's view on a wedding is more of a public relations event -- which she stated -- this is not my statement, it's really hers -- for the young couples coming out to meet those most significant for them in the future. So I think that it kind of accomplished both goals because I think she said that one of her other granddaughters had a wedding with 900 guests."

Whatever the final head count, one thing is all but assured. In the words of Atlantan Donald B. MacKaye, a charming fellow who drinks light beer from a can, counts writers Tom Wolfe among his friends, and who summers with his wife, June, at Quatrel, a Bellevue Avenue estate across from Doris Duke's Rough Point: "It's going to be a humdinger."

***********

By the Friday of Labor Day weekend, eight days until the wedding, guests from all over the world are converging on Newport. No sooner have they unpacked their bags at the private residences where they are staying (only the luckless must settle for hotels) than the celebrating begins.

Jane Pope Ridgway and her husband, Tom, make an entrance at the wedding reception at Eileen Slocum's house.

Sunday finds everyone at Bailey's Beach for a dinner hosted in part by Betty Blake's daughter, Joan Lapham, wife of author and Harper's Magazine editor Lewis H. Lapham. On Wednesday, bridesmaid and former debutante Sarah Hudson hosts a small dinner for Sophie, Louis and friends at The White Horse Tavern. On Thursday, a woman from San Antonio hosts a Mexican fiesta party at the Clambake Club. And then comes Friday, with a merciless schedule.

The day begins with lunch aboard three chartered yachts on Newport Harbor. Having barely caught their breath, guests then head off to rehearsal dinner -- or, to be precise, dinners: Sophie, Louis and 100 others dine at Harbourcourt, formerly the John Nicholas Brown estate and now the Newport headquarters of The New York Yacht Club, with another 200 or so the yacht club could not accommodate eating at Bailey's. After dinner, Louis and Sophie retreat with friends to the exclusive downtown Sky Bar, where they dance and drink until closing.

Meanwhile, away from the good times, preparations have reached a near-fever pitch; as the moment approaches, the wedding has become a cottage industry, employing dozens. The lawn has been cut and trimmed; the tent has been pitched; the outside lighting has been checked under actual nighttime conditions; the bars are being stocked; the caterer has procured the filet mignon and lobster tails; the baker is set to bake the five-layer chocolate cake; the florists are fashioning thousands of freshly cut flowers into bouquets, boutonnieres, and centerpieces; and those Irish lads and lasses have joined forces with outside cleaners to ensure that Eileen's house shines -- literally -- from the crystal chandeliers down to the marble floors.

And there has been no rest for three ladies: working with large sheets of white paper, Eileen, Margy and Loraine have tackled the seating.

"We spent one whole day," Eileen later tells me. "We had our secretary Martha Tucker looking in and going out, looking in, going out to see what she could do to help. We started off at 9 o'clock at Margy's cottage over there -- out on the little terrace where you don't feel sort of shut in -- and we worked till lunchtime, and then Margy and Loraine had sandwiches and I came back to get some soup. . . . I hate a meal without something fluid, something hot and fluid. And then I went back again and we worked till 5 or 6."

"It was a team effort," confirms Loraine, who has been Eileen's houseguest since Coaching Weekend. "Anything like that is really a team effort."

As the clock ticks down, only one incident casts a shadow: on the very morning of the wedding, Eileen once again is robbed, this time of a priceless silver teapot and silver coaster passed down from her great-grandmother. With so many people in and out of the house and the front door unguarded, the thief was able to strike at will.

Asks the police officer who is investigating the crime: "Do you suspect anyone in particular?"

Eileen doesn't. She is saddened, for another piece of family history is gone, likely forever. "These are beautiful pieces of silver," she says. "They wouldn't look like anyone else's. What I really miss is my teapot because a tea set with a teapot gone has lost a lot of its value."

"You can't really trust people today," the officer says. "It's not like it was a few years ago."

"It confirms [my son's] belief that by the time I die, there won't be anything of any value left in the house," Eileen laments.

***********

Darkness has fallen on Sophie and Louis's wedding day when the Bachrach photographer finishes the formal portraits, on Eileen's south lawn, and guests begin migrating to the tent where dinner will be served.

Scottish friends and groomsmen join Texas oil tycoons, a British viscount, a Swedish ambassador, Tabasco sauce heirs and New England blue bloods at the wedding.

Louis and Sophie experience slow going, for other photographers -- including one for The New York Times -- keep requesting poses. I remember the gauntlet the Glamour Girls often ran when entering Bailey's, but Louis and Sophie are accommodating. Two photos, including one of them kissing, will appear in The Times a week from tomorrow, illustrating the paper's popular "Vows" column, written by Lois Smith Brady, whom Eileen invited without informing Sophie ("You can't argue with your grandmother too much," Eileen explains).

Now the guests are taking their seats, so carefully assigned.

And what a mix: Texas oil tycoons and New England blue bloods; a British viscount and a Swedish ambassador; a Tabasco sauce heir and a silver heiress; Denton Cooley's daughter and the five-times-married horse fancier Josephine Abercrombie; Atty. Gen. Sheldon Whitehouse, whose family has old ties to Newport, and Joan Kennedy, mother of congressman Patrick J. Kennedy; Yusha Auchincloss, stepbrother of the late Jackie Kennedy Onassis, and Candy Van Alen, who has put up several out-of-towners at Avalon as a favor to Eileen. The Donnells are here, along with the Winslows, Ruth and Ed Wheeler, several Browns, the surviving former Glamour Girls, and most everyone else I have met this summer. And, of course, the ubiquitous Buddy Cianci.

After dinner, toasts are made, the cake is cut, and a rock band plays. Older guests trickle back to their cars, but the younger set stays to dance -- and to eat a midnight breakfast. The party remains robust at 3:30 a.m., when Sophie and Louis sneak away; the hardiest guests endure until 7:30 in the morning. Other than a broken vase and the ceiling damage caused when one of Eileen's houseguests went to sleep, leaving a second-story bathtub running, the wedding has met its grand expectations.

"Absolutely the most unbelievably perfect wedding I could possibly have ever imagined," Sophie later tells me.

"Perfection," Eileen agrees.

***********

Not long after, on the very last day of summer, a damp and dreary day that pulls the first leaves from the trees, I drive from Newport to Portsmouth. I turn off at St. Mary's Episcopal Church.

Eleanor Young's funeral was here, almost 60 years ago, and she is buried in the graveyard beyond.

It was the afternoon of July 3, 1941. Packards and Dusenbergs with chauffeurs discharged their grieving passengers, and then the hearse carrying Cookie's poor broken body arrived. Fourth of July festivities at Bailey's had been canceled by vote of the governors, and Newport society, Eleanor's fellow Glamour Girls included, filled every pew. The organist played "Ave Maria" and the priest greeted the polished mahogany coffin with words from The Book of Common Prayer: "I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. . ."

From the church, I walk to the Young family plot, in a secluded corner of this quiet tree-filled graveyard. Robert R. Young is buried here: never fully recovered from the death of his only child, Young, prone to depression all his life, sat down in the billiards room of his vast Palm Beach estate on the morning of Jan. 25, 1958, put the tip of a double-barrel shotgun in his mouth, and pulled both triggers. His widow, Eleanor's mother, Anita Young, joins him here: she died, alone, of natural causes in 1985 at the age of 93, leaving an estate that included her $25-million, 35,000-square-foot Palm Beach residence.

And of course, Eleanor, the first to die, lies here with her parents in an underground reinforced-concrete crypt that Robert bought to shield his daughter from the elements. An enormous white stone guards the entrance to the crypt, and the names of the three Youngs are engraved on its border. To further protect Eleanor, Robert bought the land surrounding the graveyard, deeding it to St. Mary's with the stipulation it never be developed.

Lost in thought, I stand by the grave. Wind rustles the leaves and a boy who never knew these people existed skateboards by. I contemplate Eleanor Young's life, which passed quickly, leaving nothing more substantial than memories; I think of a Newport summer, so strikingly similar.

I reflect on my journey through Newport society, of how I sought to discern its soul.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote: "Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them." For most, it creates a comfortable illusion: a world where surfaces predominate, and money buys almost everything.

I run my fingers along Eleanor's cold tombstone. Leaving, I am grateful for the warmth of my old car and my return to an imperfect world.