Eileen Gillespie Slocum, in 2000, in her home on Bellevue Avenue.

The Providence Journal / CONNIE GROSCH

You could hardly think of two more different people than Eileen Slocum and Richard Egbert.

The elegant Slocum, who died last week at 92, was Newport’s top socialite, a refined voice of the WASP establishment. The scrappy Egbert, who died the week before at 61, was a Boston criminal lawyer — streetwise, combative and Jewish.

Slocum and Egbert moved in largely separate circles, but both shone at what they did. Both relished politicians — Slocum was a Republican finance powerhouse — and both were a journalist’s dream: accessible and full of opinions.

A bridge between their worlds: former Providence Mayor Buddy Cianci, the Republican turned independent who, despite Egbert’s best efforts, wound up going to jail for corruption.

Cianci says, “They both were very strong in their beliefs, extremely strong and unwavering.” Slocum would invite Cianci to dinner at her home or a wedding, proud to have him.

And, Cianci says, “She wrote to me when I was away: ‘Keep your spirit up, keep your chin up, I’m your friend.’ ”

A Slocum daughter, Margy Quinn, says, “She adored Buddy Cianci. I think she felt he passionately loved Providence.”

I saw Slocum countless times at GOP national conventions or fundraisers at her home.

At the 1992 convention in Houston, Slocum, a delegate and GOP national committeewoman, enviously spotted a sticker that said, “A Lady With A Gun Has More Fun.” It was from the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.

She told me, “I have a little Colt .38, and I so strongly believe in good families remaining armed.”

Slocum oozed superlatives. To many observers, Bob Dole looked to be a dud of a standard-bearer as Republicans gathered to nominate him in San Diego in 1996, but Slocum said, “I think Dole is perfect.”

At the 2004 convention in New York, Providence Journal reporters were under orders from editors to produce a daily notebook of tidbits. So one morning I approached Slocum, whipped out my tape recorder, and asked for her impressions of GOP nominees over the years she’d been attending these soirees.

No problem. Let’s see: Gerald Ford, Kansas City, 1976. “I have a very warm, tender feeling for him because he was the only sitting president who came to our house. We had a very large fundraiser… in two tents on our lawn.”

Ronald Reagan (Detroit, 1980, and Dallas, 1984): “He was simply superb. Too bad we couldn’t have him forever.”

George H.W. Bush (New Orleans, 1988, and Houston, 1992): “Before he was president, he came to Newport and went to the beach with us.”

She was very keen on his son, George W., the current president, partly because of his opposition to abortion.

She certainly had an edge to her. One time when we were discussing her support for a move to underscore the GOP’s pro-life stand, I asked: Isn’t the party supposed to be inclusive? Slocum said, “It’s not supposed to be inclusive if you have somebody who believes in anything that I consider murder.”

Slocum once told me there was nothing she’d rather do than go to a convention. “That I can totally believe,” says daughter Margy. “She liked feeling she was part of this amazing political process … She admired every part of it, meeting people from all over the country … the great speeches.” And, yes, the press. “As a youngster she wanted to be a reporter.”

Headliners at Slocum-hosted events in Newport included Ford, the elder Bush, Dick Cheney, Nelson Rockefeller, Spiro Agnew, Howard Baker and Elizabeth Dole.

Interesting people, certainly, but so were folks you’d see circulating, such as Clare Boothe Luce, former ambassador to Italy, and Janet Auchincloss, mother of Jacqueline Kennedy.

Occasionally my wife, Elizabeth, and I would be invited to a social affair, such as a brunch for General William Westmoreland, who commanded U.S. forces in Vietnam.

Republican state Sen. June Gibbs says Slocum was a perfect hostess and pol. “A good politician knows how to understand people, make them feel important,” says Gibbs.

When Slocum died, I immediately thought of Eleanor Slater, the Democratic Party grande dame who died in 2006 at age 97.

Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, who was close to Slater but also moves in Newport social circles, says the two women made an interesting contrast: Slocum “operating from that big house on Bellevue Avenue behind stone walls,” Slater from a “little wooden house in Wickford behind a picket fence.”

He adds, though, “Each of them was absolutely dedicated to politics and to their party.”

I wondered if Slocum ever twitted Whitehouse about being a Democrat. He said it was his Newporter wife, the former Sandra Thornton, whom Slocum needled:

“When she found out that we were engaged, she came steaming up to Sandra and said, ‘I hear you’ve gotten engaged to Sheldon Whitehouse,’ and she said, ‘Well, yes, Mrs. Slocum, I have,’ and she said, ‘Well, you really can’t do that,’ and Sandra was shocked for a minute and then Mrs. Slocum said, ‘Don’t you know he’s a Democrat?’ And what saved it was it was all done with a twinkle in her eye.”

No question, Slocum was distinctive. Former Republican state chairman John Holmes, who worshiped her, chuckles in recalling a conversation as the two walked down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. He told Slocum about just having bought a modest home in Barrington. “She said, ‘You must be quite excited. I hope you don’t have one of those dreadful things called mortgages.’ I almost fell off the curbstone.”

Holmes also relishes this tale, from a time they were off to a Republican National Committee meeting. A phone call shook him out of his hotel room sleep:

“‘John, dear, did I awaken you?’ I looked at the clock and said, ‘No, I’m sitting here doing my yoga.’ She says, ‘I’m lying in my bed and I’m watching the water come from the ceiling down the electrical fixture, and it’s getting my valise and my mattress wet.’

So I sat up and I said, ‘As a matter of fact, Eileen, I didn’t pack my plumbing tools, but I’ll call housekeeping and we will move you for the evening…’ She says, ‘John, darling, you’re wonderful!’ ”

But Holmes would be the first to tell you that this was a very committed woman.

Slocum unsuccessfully ran for the Rhode Island House, against the late Democrat Paul Crowley, in the 1980s. A Journal story about their different social worlds closed with Slocum’s saying she didn’t want to be stereotyped. She said she didn’t spend her time on golf or bridge. She declared, “I’m really a very serious person.”

“That is exactly my mother,” says Margy. “She said, ‘You can always pass the time, or you can make the world better.’ ”

Lawyer Richard Egbert gained fame by representing gangsters and politicians in trouble. It could be hard to tell the difference.

He gave me plenty to think about. When former Gov. Ed DiPrete, battling corruption charges, hired him, I needled the barrister by saying that, as governor, DiPrete employed an executive counsel but now, as a private citizen, he engaged a mob lawyer.

Egbert said I was being “moronical,” and asserted, “It’s you people who like to put labels on lawyers or doctors or anyone else because it fits. I’m a criminal lawyer. That’s what I do for a living. I’ve represented judges, doctors, newspaper reporters…” And, he said, “The one time I seem to get the most respect from someone … is when they come on the wrong end of that indictment.”

He would rage against prosecutors and what he saw as their abuses and bullying, and he made his clients sound so innocent, and when I said it can’t always be that way, that some of them had to be guilty, he pounced and said, “They’re entitled to a vigorous defense too, and a fair one, and they’re entitled to a fair prosecution. The worst bum in the world is entitled to be prosecuted fairly and honestly.”

DiPrete, who eventually accepted a plea bargain and served a jail term, went to Egbert’s funeral last Monday in a temple outside of Boston.

In an e-mail, DiPrete, who called him a “bull dog in the courtroom but a giant human being on the personal side,” reported that I’d have enjoyed hearing Egbert’s brother reminisce about their Red Sox allegiance.

I wasn’t surprised. I’d run into Egbert at Fenway Park, and once, as he sat with his son, he told me that he’d been there with his father for Ted Williams’ last home run in 1960. He also said he and his brother came for the 1978 playoff won by the Yankees during the Jewish high holy days. “My mother swore she’d never speak to me again.”

I first met Egbert when he defended then-Supreme Court Chief Justice Joe Bevilacqua during a 1986 House impeachment inquiry. But he was always signing on with high-profile clients, including, in 2004, Michael Derderian in the The Station nightclub fire case. Interestingly, former Attorney General Jeffrey Pine, with whom Egbert clashed bitterly in the DiPrete case, represented Jeffrey Derderian, Michael’s brother and club co-owner.

With that, Pine said last week, “I got to know him better, and I had respect for him and his ability. Good lawyer … Very smart and quick.”

Egbert cherished the law and relished a fight. He told me, “I love to sit down and gather up every piece of evidence I can find in a case and study it, work it, develop a strategy for it and, prepare an examination and cross-examination.”

Whitehouse, who was U.S. attorney and then state attorney general, says staffers could fume about Egbert and yet want to go watch him cross examine.

I loved sparring with Egbert over, say, Cianci. In a 2004 interview, when Cianci was in prison, Egbert enthused, “Don’t you miss him?” Well, no. But Egbert said, “I miss him. I’ve never had a more disappointing day in my life [than] when that jury came back with one ‘guilty’ and all those ‘not guiltys.’ It haunts. It haunts me … keeps me up at night.”

Cianci, now a talk show host, also attended Egbert’s funeral. He told me, “He was on the front lines of the Constitution as he saw it. Naturally, if you were a so-called rat, he would not represent you. He had a strong sense of loyalty … He knew a lot of characters, and he loved to tell stories about his cases. He would never degrade even the most notorious mobsters. He always seemed to find some good in them.”

Cianci said that not long before Egbert died, he and his wife, Shannon McAuliffe, came to Providence to dine on Federal Hill and to stay at the Biltmore.

The former mayor joined them for dinner at Costantino’s Ristorante Caffe. “It was Friday evening. We spent about three or four hours there.”

Cianci said they were tentatively slated to have brunch the next day, but, on Saturday, Egbert phoned and said he was checking out. “I’m going,” he said. “I’m leaving.”

Looking back, Cianci says, “It’s kind of poetic.”

M. Charles Bakst is The Journal’s political columnist.

mbakst@projo.com