Eileen
Gillespie
Slocum

Aeriel
Frazer
Eweson

Dorrance "Dodo" Hamilton, with her friend George "Frolic" Weymouth, of Pennsylvania, is the granddaughter of the founder of the Campbell Soup Company and is ranked by Forbes magazine as the 14th-wealthiest woman in America.

Even in this world of wealth, Mrs. Hamilton stands apart.

Granddaughter of the founder of the Campbell Soup Company, Mrs. Hamilton is one of the country's leading philanthropists, quietly supporting the arts, education, horticulture, and cancer research with gifts that total tens of millions of dollars. She is worth $1.6 billion, according to Forbes magazine, which makes her America's 14th-wealthiest woman. The 16th is her sister and Middletown summer resident, Hope Hill van Beuren, whose nickname is Happy.

I have never met a billionaire before. I've heard the whispered awe with which Mrs. Hamilton is held even in Newport (by acquaintances who are mere millionaires), and I am glad I drive a Volvo, old as it is. I am pleased I decided to dress in the uniform of a Newport cocktail party: blue blazer, button-down white shirt, tie, cuffed slacks and loafers, no socks, a look Eileen Slocum would deem attractive. Some had said that Mrs. Hamilton, notoriously shy of publicity, would never meet a writer. But after receiving my letter of introduction and, I later learn, discreetly inquiring of me, she has agreed.

Without fanfare, Mrs. Hamilton appears. She is a tall woman of about 70, smiling, tanned from golf, attired in a white dress and a straw hat with yellow flowers. She orders iced tea, and we nibble on appetizers (sliced bread with grape tomatoes and mint) while gazing out at the craggy shore and the shimmering ocean beyond. Situated atop one of the highest points in Newport, Beacon Hill, which is north of Ocean Drive near Candy Van Alen's Avalon, Mrs. Hamilton's summer home affords a spectacular view.

We chat about Rhode Island's drought, and Mrs. Hamilton explains the ingenious system of ponds her engineers are designing for Swiss Village, her nearby early 20th-century gentleman's farm that she and a partner are restoring to original splendor. Mrs. Hamilton has put me at ease. I ask how she wishes to be addressed, and she replies "Dodo," as friends call her.

Dodo could summer anywhere, but her family has old ties to Newport and she and her husband, who died of cancer in 1997, bought this place (built as a condominium, a word that hardly does justice) years ago. Dodo has also recently purchased and is restoring Wildacre, a more traditional Newport estate, and she owns a winter home in Florida -- but her primary residence is outside Philadelphia, on the exclusive Main Line, named after an old Pennsylvania Railroad route. Alarmed when developers built a shopping mall that abutted her property, Dodo bought it, thus enabling her to control its businesses, which include bridal and flower shops and three restaurants. "I thought it was better that I do it than somebody else," Dodo explains.

It's one o'clock, and someone is at the door. Joining us for lunch is Marion Oates Charles -- Oatsie to her friends. A native Alabaman and a friend of the late Doris Duke, Oatsie over the decades has become another of Newport's prominent ladies, noted for her wicked wit, entertaining stories, and distinctive attire. Today she's wearing a pink-checkered dress, oversized sunglasses, and a substantial straw hat, a terribly attractive look.

"Was it 12:30 or 1, darling?" she asks in tones that recall her southern roots. Oatsie may have the most alluring voice in Newport; hearing it, I imagine a character in a Tennessee Williams play.

Lunch was in fact supposed to be 12:30, which makes Oatsie fashionably late. She orders a ginger ale -- thankfully the butler brings Schweppes, the brand that meets her favor -- and fills us in on the sorry state of the roses at her waterfront home, The Whim, which is across the street from the home of former U.S. Sen. Claiborne Pell and his wife, Nuala. A torrential downpour last Friday followed by this week's oppressive heat have wreaked havoc. Dodo understands, for her own roses have suffered, too.

"Everything is just beaten down," laments Oatsie.

"They'll keep growing," says Dodo.

"They'll just have to be dead-headed and staked up again and watered and cosseted and they'll go on to their second growth," Oatsie says. More work for the gardeners.

The butler announces lunch and we adjourn to a table that seats eight, the maximum Dodo maintains can comfortably relate at a dinner party. Perhaps because it is rare, an invitation to dine with Dodo is cherished; or perhaps it's her menus, over which none other than Eileen Slocum, a recent guest, has already enthused to me. "She had filet of beef on a silver platter," Eileen said, "and it was so beautifully cut. Not too thick, not too thin, and very rare, which is the way -- if it's very good beef -- it should be. Mushrooms. And the most marvelous mashed potato that ever was!"

Today's fare is less hearty, as befits a summer lunch, but Dodo's cook and butler nonetheless prepare and present it exquisitely: asparagus-onion quiche, baked tortilla chips, and mixed-greens salad with the most delicious vine-ripened tomatoes, grown in one of Dodo's Main Line gardens and shipped overnight by Federal Express to Newport. Dessert is strawberries and blueberries -- the entire meal being presented with china, gold-plated tableware, and pressed linen napkins. The only evidence of Campbell's is Dodo's playful plastic watch, whose face is the company's V-8 vegetable juice logo.

***********

Flowers occupy us again after lunch.

The Newport Flower Show -- one of the high season's celebrated occasions -- opens in four days, and Dodo, its chairman, is submitting several entries; Oatsie was among the founders of the show, which is sponsored by the Preservation Society of Newport County, operator of most of Newport's publicly accessible mansions. The show is held at Rosecliff, designed by famed architect Stanford White and built by a silver fortune heiress at a cost reported to be $2.5 million -- in 1902 dollars. With its 40-by-80-foot crystal-chandeliered ballroom, the largest in Newport, Rosecliff has served as backdrop to several movies, including The Great Gatsby and Steven Spielberg's Amistad.

Marion Oates Charles, at a cocktail party at the home of Ruth Buchanan Wheeler, is an Alabaman by birth and was a long-time confidante of the late Doris Duke.

Flower Show rules are unforgiving: even the condition of the container counts. "Pots which have not responded to repeated scrubbing to improve their appearance may be wiped with oil, then toweled off, as a last resort," the official program advises. Ultimately, of course, ratings are subjective, for beauty exists in the eye of the beholder. As one judge explains to a Newport newspaper: "If everything in the plant is equal and equidistant, you look at it and it's like boom, boom, boom -- it's kind of boring. But if your plant is a little different, it goes boom-ba-boom-bang -- it's kind of exciting."

Dodo takes keen interest in her entries, grown by her employees on her Main Line estate.

"My greenhouse crew just loves this flower show," she says. "They work like the devil, you know, bringing everything up, preparing it, delivering it to the show -- and then they have a good time in town."

"When do they come up?" I ask.

At night, to escape the heat of the day, says Dodo. "We rent a truck -- well, some of the staging we can bring in the truck. But we have a couple of large cars -- large, what are they called, sports utility things?"

"SUVs."

"SUVs, right, that we had to get because of the Newport Flower Show." This was at her crew's insistence: "Mrs. Hamilton, you know we have to have air conditioning for the plants!" they declared, and she agreed.

Upon arrival, Dodo's entries will be readied for the show in the climate-controlled shelter of her garage. "They've been pretty well groomed at home," Dodo says, "but you never know what the fatigue of the trip will do because it takes about 61/2, 7 hours of jostling around."

"You have to sort of really get those little hairs in place," says Oatsie.

"And make sure the leaves are polished and there are no bugs, certainly," Dodo adds.

Mid-afternoon approaches. The conversation dwindles, and Oatsie's driver arrives to return her to The Whim -- where her husband, Robert H. Charles, partially incapacitated by a stroke, passes his days with the help of private nurses. Assuming an unusually busy Friday doesn't exhaust her, Oatsie hopes to see Dodo that evening at the Flower Show Preview Cocktail Party.

"I have the most God-awful day Friday," Oatsie says. The Newport Restoration Foundation, founded by Doris Duke, is meeting that afternoon and Oatsie is president.

"Are you going to come for dinner Friday?" Dodo says.

"Yes."

"Good."

"I suppose I'll be late at the preview," Oatsie says. "As we say in the South, look for me when you see me."

***********

At about the time of my lunch with Dodo and Oatsie, I call on Eileen Slocum again. Eileen is instructing a plumber when I arrive.

I have previously requested a look at her wedding pictures; begging my forgiveness while she deals with the pipes, Eileen hands me several photo albums -- and a clean rag. Eileen battles dust on a never-ending basis, ordinarily entrusting the job to no one but herself: "I remember Hector our butler said, 'Oh, Mrs. Slocum, how you have the patience to do this!' And I said, 'I know, but I don't want them to be injured.' And Mummy dusted her things, too." Like her mother, Eileen has untold thousands of things: vases, urns, china, chairs, photographs, paintings, lamps and books, most passed down through generations of Gillespies, Slocums, Browns and Shermans. "There's a lot to dust," Eileen declares, "I have to go 'round and 'round the house. But if I'm having a very busy summer, they accumulate dust all summer, and I never get to them." Not until autumn, when the punishing pace slows.

After carefully dusting, I thumb through the albums. Eileen was married on Dec. 26, 1940, at her mother's eight-story Manhattan residence; the wedding photos reveal a dashingly handsome young groom and a beautiful young bride dressed in a white gown and, as she leaves for her honeymoon in Mexico, a stylish fur jacket. The albums do not record Eileen's earlier ill-fated engagement to John Jacob Astor V, distant relative of Candy Van Alen's late husband who in the 1930s was said to be one of the richest young man in the world.

Done with the plumber, Eileen rejoins me in the drawing room, where she provides insight into managing a busy social calendar. Hers is especially busy this summer, as preparations for her granddaughter's wedding intensify.

Unlike Candy and Dodo, Eileen does not have a personal secretary -- whom she certainly could keep busy, given the tremendous volume of mail she receives from friends, politicians, and groups seeking donations. "John's secretary -- who did my mail, too -- had a nervous breakdown and that was the end of her," Eileen says. "And I took over because I thought there must be some point in my life when I can do my own mail. However, I'm doing it very badly. I miss cocktail parties and miss this and that, the mail lies on the front hall table. . . ." Eileen nonetheless manages to keep the most important events straight in her head. She is blessed with an extraordinary memory.

"I mean, where am I going tonight?" she says. "I'm going to the Winslows' dinner for Ruth [Wheeler] and her husband. And this dinner is in her honor, and Paul Miller is picking me up and Paul Miller is one of the bachelor curators of the Preservation Society -- very charming and a French scholar. So I can tell you there's not a night, not a day, and not a lunch that isn't full." And she's yet to reach the peak of the season.

In such a climate, one must inevitably compromise. Eileen, for example, was forced to schedule her black-tie dinner for Sophie and her fiance, Louis Girard, for the same night of the Flower Show dinner. "I'm running competition with them, which I shouldn't," she says, but July 10 was the only date both Sophie and Louis were free. Because of their association with the show, Dodo, Palm Beach doyen Barton Gubelmann, and several of Eileen's other dear friends regrettably will miss Eileen's black-tie dinner; on the other hand, their absence will allow invitations to guests who otherwise would have been slighted. "I can only hold a certain number in this house seated," Eileen says. Past about 100, it starts to feel crowded.

***********

Anyone with a few hundred dollars can buy a ticket to a charity ball at a Preservation Society mansion, but only those who have passed muster with the Slocums, Winslows and their close friends get past the hedgerow. One cannot thrive in this world without a firm presence on that top tier of society, invited to every event of importance. Pity the poor social climber.

Eileen tells the story of a former in-law of one of her relatives; after the divorce, this woman was no friend of Eileen's. But she had aspirations. She'd managed to be proposed for membership in New York's Colony Club.

"It is the women's club in all America," says Eileen. "Spend one night at the Colony Club and it's like going to Buckingham Palace it's so comfortable. You have a bedroom, you have a little mantelpiece the way it was when they had to use mantelpieces -- there are mantelpieces all over the club. Breakfast comes in: you put a little sign on the door at night and in the morning get hot coffee, scrambled eggs [and] fresh-squeezed orange juice, and strawberry jam, not honey -- or honey, not strawberry jam. Lovely club."

One day when Eileen and her husband arrived for an overnight stay, there was this woman's name on the candidates' bulletin board.

"I said, 'John -- can you believe? Isn't this horrible! [This woman] has been put up by somebody and seconded and she's about to appear at the members' tea.' And John said, 'Well?' And I said, 'Well, can you imagine -- we might have to share a bedroom next to those horrible people! No!' So I rallied a group -- everybody I knew that was a friend of mine that was a member -- in a great rush, I had about two days or something."

The phone lines crackled.

"One after another I said: 'You don't want her in the club, do you?' 'Oh, no, that's awful -- you're right!' So I got about ten letters, we all wrote to the head of the board of admissions. . . . So we kept her out of the Colony Club -- and [this woman] would have adored using it."

***********

Newport society still puts stock in the saying that one's name belongs in a newspaper precisely three times: when you're born, when you marry, and when you die.

Of course, even in a shuttered world, life never unfolds neatly: the laws of human nature have a way of applying regardless of social register. Members of Newport society squabble, fail, fall out of love, betray and begrudge, same as anywhere. Occasionally, unpleasant details of divorce and dalliance leak out to the celebrity-crazed press, and the most extreme nastiness -- that which results in a corpse -- is impossible to conceal.

In October 1966, Doris Duke and interior designer Eduardo Tirella were leaving Duke's Bellevue Avenue estate, Rough Point, when Tirella stopped the car and got out to open the gate, comprised of two massive inward-turning iron doors secured with a padlock and chain. Duke took the wheel -- ostensibly to drive through the gate after Tirella opened it. But Tirella never did open it, at least not in the conventional manner. A state investigator discovered 22-foot-long tire marks in the driveway, a broken chain, and a gate that had exploded outward -- against its sturdy design. The car burst across Bellevue, destroying a section of iron fence before slamming into a tree; Tirella's body, found under the rear axle, was too mangled for an open coffin. Duke insisted she'd kept her foot on the brake the entire time, but an examination of the vehicle revealed it in working order. Duke was cleared, but the gossip spiraled out of control. Had Tirella somehow crossed his famously eccentric employer? Was Duke his lover? What really went on?

Another scandal left utilities heiress Sunny von Bulow in a coma in which, two decades later, she lingers. Prosecutors claimed that von Bulow's husband, Claus, motivated by greed and the charms of a mistress, tried to kill her with an injection of insulin -- and jurors at his 1982 murder trial concurred. But that guilty verdict was overturned three years later on an appeal masterminded by Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard law professor whose pushy brilliance would hardly be an asset at Bailey's Beach. The von Bulow case was the worst sort of mess -- one producing a flood of news stories over a period of years, not to mention books, articles, and a Hollywood movie. For years, reporters literally crawled through the hedges.

Thankfully for those who hold the three-times rule dear, no such spectacles envelop Newport this year, and what public scandals there are do not directly involve anyone in Eileen Slocum's circle. Byron de Weldon, the son of famed sculptor and one-time Newport bon vivant Felix de Weldon, has been charged with child molestation, but he's safely locked away until his trial ("That depraved little boy," Eileen Slocum opines. "Terrible, terrible fellow.").

Another sort of nastiness is unfolding at Bellevue Avenue's Belcourt Castle. Once the summer home of banking heir and equestrian Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont, Belcourt now is operated by its three owners as a museum and banquet hall-for-hire, an arrangement that has long irritated their better-appointed neighbors, especially on nights when loud drunken commoners spill outside from some tacky paid-admission party. Now one of the owners is suing the other two and the fight has hit the front page. Even the TV program Dateline has sent a crew.

But beyond the headlines, juicy gossip abounds, as always.

Despite the required impeccable letters of support, one relative newcomer in town is being thwarted for membership at Bailey's. Is that because, as rumor has it, he somehow offended the wife of one particularly influential Bailey's governor -- a woman you cross at risk? And why is another relative outsider -- a man with far less money, and less widespread support -- destined for membership? Can it be that this second man, a Preservation Society insider, has been befriended by this same governor's wife, who sees him as a possible ally in her own agenda?

And what of the wealthy out-of-towner who has just bought a mansion and who seeks entree to Newport society?

This man has aroused suspicions, in part because of a magazine article about him -- a most unflattering piece in which one acquaintance remembered him as "a snake oil guy" and the author referred to "his carpet-bombing style of name-dropping and . . . the whiff of Gatsby-esque self-invention." Photocopies of the article are being circulated this summer to people who need to know -- influential Bailey's governors and their wives, for example. Life can be cruel.

***********

Anticipation fills me the afternoon I call on Aeriel Frazer Eweson, daughter of auto titan Joseph Frazer, best remembered for introducing the Jeep to the military market. Aeriel does not appear in the photograph I have seen on the wall of Bailey's, but, like Eileen, she wore the title of Glamour Girl.

A comely woman of about 80 welcomes me into her house near Bellevue Avenue, a large, lovingly preserved colonial owned by Doris Duke's Newport Restoration Foundation. Aeriel has been struggling with poor health lately, and she walks slowly and her hands sometimes hurt, but she is kind and gracious and friends tell me that she never complains -- not of her frailty now, nor of a life burdened by tragedy. We sit in her living room and she begins to show me photographs, some almost as old as she.

"That was taken by Mr. Pope. It was sort of an end-of-summer photo," she says, handing me a portrait of laughing, bright-eyed teenaged girls posed outside The Waves, an oceanfront house near Bailey's Beach. Famed architect John Russell Pope, designer of Washington's Jefferson Memorial and other national treasures, built The Waves for his summer home -- and his daughter Jane Ridgway (Popey to her friends) appears in this 1930s picture, along with Aeriel, Eileen Slocum, and another Glamour Girl, Betty Blake, nicknamed Betty Boop.

Aeriel is lost to long-ago. She describes her first husband, the man she loved: he died when his plane crashed during World War II. She tells me about her two sons, her only children: one died young while climbing a mountain, and the other met an early end in a plane crash, just like his father.

"Come with me," Aeriel says. I follow her up a flight of stairs.

"So many people are dead," she says, stopping at a table crowded with photographs. "This is like a mortuary." She shows me pictures of her long-departed family, but she is not morose; she says that while her husband and sons have been taken, nothing can steal the happy memories these pictures keep alive. Aeriel lives with her cat, Pumpkin, who now joins us. "Yes darling," she says, giving him a kiss. "Pretty boy."

We move into a spare bedroom, where Aeriel stores her scrapbooks in a closet. She starts with one of the oldest, which she began compiling almost seven decades ago while attending Foxcroft, the exclusive Virginia boarding school. One yellowed newspaper clipping trumpets 18-year-old Eileen Slocum's engagement to John Jacob Astor V, considered one of America's most eligible bachelors. The papers devoured this romance -- and they flew into a tizzy when Eileen broke her engagement six days before the wedding and refused to immediately return Astor's 32-carat diamond ring, which was so big it wouldn't fit under Eileen's opera glove. Astor, Eileen (and many others) maintained, was crazy.

"When was that?" I ask Aeriel.

"Thirty-four, '35," she says. "A long, long time ago."

Aeriel laughs remembering another friend, who met an older man on an ocean liner and then eloped with him, at the age of 17. "She got cold feet at the end and went back to her parents," Aeriel says. "They had the marriage annulled. But when it was being annulled, the judge said, 'Now, Miss Snowden, was your marriage consumated?' And she didn't know what that big word meant so she said, 'I can't recall.' It was written up in all the tabloids."

We pore over photographs of Aeriel's own wedding, covered by countless magazines and papers, including The New York Times, which proclaimed: "Nation's socialites in Newport today to attend wedding of Aeriel Frazer."

Another photo features the Glamour Girls as young women attending a ball sponsored by Robert R. Young , railroad magnate and prominent Newport summer resident. I ask Aeriel to identify the women: she points out herself, Betty Boop, and others. Then Aeriel tells me about Young's only child, Eleanor, who was not in this photo. Aeriel describes her as a dark-haired beauty -- sweet, fun-loving, star-crossed in love.

At the age of 21, Eleanor eloped with Bunty Bacon, a handsome ne'er-do-well her parents despised.

"We're all entitled to make mistakes," Aeriel says, "and that was one."

***********

A few days after calling on Aeriel, I visit The Providence Journal's library, where I find Eleanor Young easily enough on microfilm: she's splashed across the society pages of the Sunday paper in August 1936, when she made her debut. Eleanor was presented during Tennis Week, the highlight of the summer season in that era -- a full week of luncheons, parties and balls (and some tennis) that constituted a festival of pleasure while ordinary Americans struggled to escape the Great Depression.

"She was presented at a large dance given by her parents at Beechwood, Bellevue Avenue estate of Mr. and Mrs. Vincent Astor, which the family has occupied the past two seasons," The Sunday Journal reported that Aug. 16. Eleanor's mother (Robert R.'s wife) was Anita Young, sister of Georgia O'Keeffe, one of America's foremost painters.

Two orchestras played for Eleanor that night at Beechwood, and a "large supper room and lounge" had been built off the oceanfront terrace to help accommodate the more than 400 guests.

"This was draped with a silken material, which indirect lighting turned into a handsome room of eggshell pink decorated with roses of various colors and surrounded by a hedge of large cedars," The Sunday Journal reported. "The lawns were bright under the rays of numerous floodlights. Searchlights were focused on the shore and flung long beams of light on the waves that lapped the rocks. Driveways were outlined in green lights and hundreds of pink lanterns shone in the trees."

I scroll through the microfilm, hoping for a photograph that will do justice to the young woman who warranted such splendor -- but I find only scratched and grainy images. And no word of Bunty Bacon, the handsome no-good Eleanor should never have married.