Noreen
Stonor
Drexel

Years ago, the Newport summer season reached its zenith with Tennis Week, which used to be celebrated in August. But tennis's hold waned, leaving summer colonists to their own amusements -- and, every three years, to Coaching Weekend, which actually consumes the better part of a week. Ostensibly an exhibition of horsemanship and finely crafted carriages and coaches, Coaching Weekend provides an excuse for a public ball and a punishing schedule of private parties. One of the best will be at Dodo Hamilton's Swiss Village, the early 20th-century gentleman's farm that she is restoring to original splendor.

Much anticipated every three years, Coaching Weekend is as much about parties as it is about carriages and coaches. John Seabrook, of Salem, N.J., center, is known throughout the "coaching world" of Newport.

"Speak nicely to me," Dodo teases, "and I might invite you."

It's an August afternoon, a few days before the start of Coaching Weekend, and I have returned to Dodo's for another lunch; Oatsie Charles and Betty Blake have joined us. Over cold breast of roasted turkey and a salad of mixed greens and those wonderful tomatoes shipped overnight from Dodo's Pennsylvania gardens, we touch on many subjects: Yusha Auchincloss's run for City Council, the weekend rain that put a dent in this summer's drought, Dodo's plans to stock her Swiss Village with endangered domesticated animals, such as donkeys, Guernsey cows, and Narragansett turkeys, a rare breed.

"I saw in my book that Narragansett turkeys are almost extinct," says Dodo, noting that she intends to preserve these birds, not eat them. "Wouldn't you think on Narragansett Bay we should have Narragansett turkeys?"

"I want you to get fryers back," says Oatsie. "Do you realize you cannot buy a 11/2- or 2-pound chicken?"

"You have to talk to Frank Perdue," Dodo jokes.

"Well, there's all sorts of fascinating chickens," says Betty Blake, whom friends call Betty Boop (and often just Boop). "I go to all the chicken shows. Have you ever been to a chicken exhibition?"

"No, but I'm getting involved in all this," says Dodo.

"They're fascinating," Boop declares. "There's one chicken that has curly hair -- I mean, they're the most fascinating and the most beautiful animals, those chickens."

"Well, I have some Silkies at home," says Dodo.

"Beautiful. I'm mad about chickens!"

After laughing at Boop's little obsession, I steer the conversation to how Newport society has changed over the decades. Among other differences these women cite is the decline of the large live-in staff. Nowadays, most domestics work their shifts -- and then punch out.

"My mother kept a house that had live-in staff," says Dodo. "Chefs and butlers, the whole kit and caboodle."

"Well, everybody did in those days," says Boop.

But now, says Oatsie, who has lived luxuriously in Alabama, Manhattan, Massachusetts, Washington and Bar Harbor, Maine, "nobody really has their own butler or their own this or their own that the way it used to be."

I ask what happened.

"People don't want to live in anymore," Boop explains. "They want to live in their own houses."

I note that some people I've met in my travels this summer have live-in couples.

"People have couples," says Dodo, "but I'm talking about a full-blown staff of eight or ten. You can imagine the personality conflicts. It was a nightmare."

"Terrible," Boop agrees.

"When I was first married," Oatsie says, "we lived in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts, and had 22 in help."

"And when I lived down at Seafair, we had 11," says Boop. "Everybody was always fighting and carrying on."

"I remember mother going crazy," says Dodo. "The chef would always quit before the big dinner party. I think her table sat 32 -- he'd always pull out the week before her grand dinner party of the season with all the proper ambassadors and everybody."

So now, most make do with nonresident help, such as Dodo's celebrated chef and her housekeeper, whose mother worked for Oatsie. Staff may no longer live in, but their solicitude survives.

"They know us better than we know ourselves," says Dodo.

"They don't say, 'What would you like to have Mrs. Charles?' or whoever it is," says Oatsie. "They're there with the tray with the vodka on it. And they know what everybody wants to drink, and how they like it done. They always get the drinks straight."

"We're very spoiled, yes we are."

"And thank God."

"Who better, right?"

***********

With only so many worthy cooks, gardeners, chauffeurs and related domestics to go around, an element of risk always attends a new hire. Eileen Slocum understands this perhaps better than anyone in Newport. Firsthand experience has taught her that the intimate association of servant with employer sometimes elicits intolerable, even criminal, behavior.

Owners of the teams of horses and the elaborately restored coaches that participate in Coaching Weekend gather for a group portrait outside The Breakers Stable and Carriage House.

Once upon a time, Eileen explains, recruiting was straightforward: If a trusted friend didn't know and thus could not recommend a prospective hire (such a recommendation of course was preferable), one examined the stranger's application and then inquired of the people he or she listed as references -- people who would speak candidly, as one person of privilege to another.

"They used to say in a reference: honest and sober -- honest, sober and trustworthy," Eileen says. But lawyers with their irksome lawsuits put an end to that. "Now you can only catch the clue," Eileen says. A pointed pause in a conversation with a previous employer, for example.

This summer has brought a change of help on Bellevue Avenue: disgruntled with her position, Eileen's east European maid has left Eileen's employ. Fortunately for Eileen, whose granddaughter's wedding draws near, several Irish college students have appeared in Newport looking for work and Eileen has hired four: two young men, who are living with Eileen, and two young women, who live in a boarding house and who helped serve the July 10 black-tie dinner. "So pretty," says Eileen. "Such good cooks." They also make beds.

One can dismiss an employee who fails to meet standards, but preventing theft is more problematic -- and whether from within or without, thieves have long found Newport society irresistible.

One who paid dearly was the late oil heiress Carolyn Skelly, who lived in Bois Dore, Dodo Hamilton's mother's old estate. Skelly claimed to have lost jewels to thieves at least four times, including more than $2 million worth allegedly stolen by a former maid in 1984, and the middle-of-the-night heist of some $3 to $5 million by a masked invader wielding a knife two years later, during Coaching Weekend. That fourth incident prompted Skelly to issue a radical declaration. "I really like jewelry; it enhances anything you wear," she said. "But I'm finished with it. I will just get along with costume jewelry. If people know it's fake, I don't care."

Although an alarm system protects Eileen from burglars, she has suffered at the hands of dishonest insiders, including the German cook she and her late husband, John, employed when they were living in Tuxedo Park, N.Y. For years, the cook had seemed an ideal employee.

Then one day, Eileen remembers, "the postmaster called and said, 'Mrs. Slocum, your cook periodically once a week is bringing in and sending to Germany some very heavy packages. You're sure everything is all right with her?' And so I went down and I asked the postmaster if I could have permission to look in one of the boxes -- tightly wrapped for Germany -- and there were large-size silver spoons, about two dozen. I couldn't believe it! And then when I went into the silver closet I realized there were quite a few things missing. My mother had had sheet music that she had composed when she was a little girl placed on two silver slabs that folded like a picture frame -- perfectly beautiful -- well, let me tell you, that disappeared forever, too."

But the German woman's audacity paled in comparison to that of the Argentinean Eileen and John employed for years in Newport. Hector The Thief, as she now calls him, not only seemed sober and trustworthy -- he was accomplished in the kitchen, which was the foremost reason the Slocums hired him. "The most incredible chef that ever was," Eileen says. To this day, she recalls Hector's corn pudding fondly.

No one will ever know when Hector first succumbed to temptation, for even the most perceptive person is unlikely to miss one thing in a mansion filled with untold thousands of things. But toward the end of Hector's employment, Eileen noticed a favorite set of coasters had vanished. Hector blamed guests at Eileen's many Republican Party fundraisers, as Eileen recalls in an imitation of the butler and his Argentine accent: " 'Mrs. Slocum, you have so many people in the house. You not watch! I in kitchen -- you don't go to front door -- someone quickly goes out!' And I said, 'but not my friends.' 'No -- but they not all your friends! All those political people that you have -- they go off with your ashtrays and things!' "

Emboldened by his malfeasance, Hector over the course of several years lifted rare books, paintings, silver, thousands of ancient Greek and Roman coins, a nearly 2,500-year-old statue of Aphrodite -- even John Slocum's diamond jewelry in the last days of his life. John was by then nearly completely incapacitated by a stroke, but Eileen, with the help of private nurses, was caring for him at their home. One night, for old-times' sake, she attired her husband in a tuxedo and brought him in a wheelchair to their dining room table.

"I had gotten John dressed as though he were going out to a big dinner," Eileen recalls. When John had been returned to his bed and Eileen couldn't find his Tiffany diamond studs, she accused the private nurse.

"I said to the nurse: 'What did you do with the studs?' And she said: 'I took them off and put them on the night table because I wanted to wash his shirt for the next occasion.' And then I said to the trained nurse: 'That's impossible -- it's just you and John and me.' I never dreamt that Hector had come into the room, scooped them up, and gone." With Hector's dastardly side as yet a dark secret, Eileen dismissed the nurse.

Hector grew so bold as to fence his loot at Sotheby's, the world-renown fine-arts dealer and auctioneer. An informant tipped off the police, and in 1998, he was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to 10 years in state prison; some stolen items were returned to Eileen, but many, perhaps most, are gone forever. I ask Eileen to estimate the total value of her losses, but she cannot precisely; because the Slocums never took a complete inventory of their possessions, she cannot even catalog everything Hector took. "Absolutely impossible," she says.

Saddened by Hector, Eileen nonetheless finds a touch of irony in his conviction. Hearing that he may have run into disgraced ex-Rhode Island Republican Gov. Edward DiPrete while in prison, she imagines how their conversation might have unfolded.

Eileen says: "I used to do a skit for my friends and say, I know exactly what Hector said: 'Meester governor, you remember me? I make the beautiful corn pudding for you when you at Mrs. Slocum's!' "

***********

As Coaching Weekend approaches, I return to Bailey's Beach for another lunch. My host this time is Lisette Prince, sometimes mentioned in the society pages under her formal name, Countess Elizabeth Prince de Ramel, a legacy of an earlier life when she married a French nobleman and lived in Monaco.

Contrary to the image of a countess, Lisette is smart, down-to-earth, and refreshingly funny. Daughter of an American family that made a fortune in railroads, real estate, and meat-packing (Armour meat), Lisette has not been content to live off her inheritance. True, she lives on Bellevue Avenue (in Aeriel Frazer Eweson's old house) and belongs to Bailey's, but she labors in a rough-and-tumble business: print journalism. Lisette owns, publishes and contributes photographs and editorials to Newport This Week, a newspaper with an irreverent edge -- much like Lisette herself, who came of age in the 1960s.

The goings-on at Belcourt Castle, a museum and banquet hall-for-hire, are riling Lisette again. It's not so much the three owners' legal squabbles, which continue to unfold like some sort of low-brow British comedy, as the Bellevue Avenue castle's continuing tacky paid-admission parties -- and the late-night noise and traffic they create. Lisette should know, for her home is but a block away. Lisette inveighs against Belcourt in an editorial this summer, and one of her paper's editorial cartoons shows drunken revelers unconscious on the street. The caption reads: "Bellevue Avenue, 7 a.m.: Another great evening at Belcourt Castle."

As if the ordinary nuisances weren't enough, a unique approach to evening wear has further disgraced the neighborhood. A Newport policeman working a detail at Belcourt's recent Bermuda Ball has told the City Council that guests were instructed to forego underwear -- and were "inspected" for compliance at the door, the women by standing over a mirror. "There's nothing unusual about grand soirées at the mansions in this seaside city," writes The Associated Press in a report that generates lurid headlines. "But a wild no-underwear party attended by 820 people at Belcourt Castle went too far, city officials say."

***********

Annoyed as she is by Belcourt's continuing offenses, Lisette is not consumed by them; after the usual deadline frenzy, she's put the latest issue of her paper to bed and can afford a lazy afternoon at Bailey's. I join her.

Diana Macarther Stanham, Jan Corbin and Aeriel Frazer Eweson, from left to right, sip cocktails at Beaulieu, the Bellevue Avenue home of Ruth Buchanan Wheeler.

We head to the porch, crowded on this pleasantly warm day, and see Eileen Slocum, who introduces me to her lunch partner: Eleanor Edwards Wood-Prince, a relative (by marriage) of Lisette and one of Chicago's leading society ladies. Then I say hello to Noreen Stonor Drexel, Eileen's Bellevue Avenue neighbor and first cousin (on the Brown side of the family) -- a lovely woman who was raised in an 800-year-old English castle, married into an old Philadelphia banking family, and through more than half a century of philanthropy has established herself as Newport society's preeminent civic leader.

I have lunched several times previously with Noreen at Cappuccino's, the small cafe in working-class Newport that she frequents, and I have learned of the many causes that occupy so much of her time. Among other involvements, Noreen is a Red Cross volunteer, supporter of Newport Hospital, trustee of Salve Regina University, and guiding force behind the Alletta Morris McBean Charitable Trust, a deeply endowed foundation.

"I just feel that I have been incredibly lucky," explains Noreen.

I ask her what she means by luck.

"I suppose if you go back to birth, that I was a wanted child and loved by my parents and I had an idyllic surrounding," she says. "I think life is very precious and I think it's very well-worth living well -- and well means [being true] to yourself and your own conscience. I think I'm blessed, and therefore I have a great feeling that I want to give back."

I note that while many of her station may quietly write checks to charity, far fewer give of their time.

"One of the reasons that I love Newport is that it has atmosphere," she says, "and it seems to breed characters and individuals and eccentrics. I'm perfectly happy to be told I'm an eccentric -- I feel perhaps I am!"

***********

Lisette and I are about to claim a table when a woman comes running toward me. It's Maureen Donnell, one of my partners at Eileen's July 10 black-tie dinner.

Maureen calls out my name.

The porch seems suddenly dead-quiet. I fear I have committed some terrible faux pas.

"He sent me one of his books!" Maureen exclaims.

Flattered, Maureen now responds with a gesture of her own: an invitation to the black-tie dinner party she and her husband are hosting during Coaching Weekend. With 300 or so guests expected, it should be a party to remember.

***********

And so, a few days later, on Aug. 19, the Thursday evening of Coaching Weekend, my wife and I motor past Hammersmith Farm off Harrison Avenue and on to the Donnells' estate, Ker Arvor, where a line of luxury cars inches toward a flurry of valets awaiting duty in the long drive. We entrust our car to one of the boys and enter an opulently appointed house: an extraordinary ode to fine art, furniture and fabric that overwhelms the senses. We receive our seating cards from a secretary and, after crossing the foyer, step onto a terrace set with tables and topped with a hangar-sized white tent. I greet Maureen and introduce her to Alexis and then we move on to the pool and grounds beyond.

Donald MacKaye, center, spends his winters in Atlanta, where he and his wife entertain author Tom Wolfe, among others.

Greek statues encircle the pool, and Maureen has recently put in an adjoining garden with exquisite foliage and a burbling fountain. An orchestra plays, bartenders pour champagne, hors d'oeuvres appear at every turn, and a half moon looks down from a silvery sky. This is magical.

Maureen's guests include most of the top tier of The Green Book, the private directory that serves as Newport's Social Register: Dodo, Eileen, Candy Van Alen, Eileen's son John J. Slocum Jr. and his wife, Diana, Lisette Prince, John and Helen Winslow, Noreen and John Drexel, and Ruth Wheeler -- of course no Tinneys of Belcourt Castle. All of the men wear traditional black tuxedos, but some of the women exhibit bolder inclinations: strapless gowns, much exposed leg, and ample cleavage, even on ladies on the far side of 70.

Cocktails over, it's time for dinner; the crowd abandons the garden and pool for the terrace. Alexis and I have both been assigned to table 16, near the end of the tent, a cruel distance from the crème de la crème, who occupy the center. We sit across from each other; too far for meaningful conversation, we turn our attention to our partners on either side. One of mine is new Preservation Society Executive Director and former Save the Bay head Trudy Coxe; the other, an older woman I've never met. Alexis's partners are Trudy's husband and a man who looks at least 80.

As the wine and first course arrive, the old man shows an undeniable interest in my wife, who is roughly half his age: face close enough to hers that she cannot escape his breath, he tells stories and offers opinions, including the novel one that South Africa's apartheid rulers did Nelson Mandela a favor by imprisoning him since he surely would have been assassinated had he remained free. At one point, the old man mentions that he has a wife.

"Is she here?" Alexis says.

"Why, she's right there," the man says, pointing out a tanned, toned and pretty woman at our table who looks at least three decades younger than her spouse. She seems less than amused by her husband's interest in my wife, who is younger than she.

Over where I sit, Trudy outlines her plans for the Preservation Society, while my other partner shares gossip that will have Newport society talking for months to come. As it turns out, Maureen's is not the only party tonight: Newport summer resident Alice Lynch (wife of Edmund C. Lynch Jr., son of the first partner in Merrill Lynch, the investment firm) is hosting her own affair. Some in Newport were invited to both.

Surely this is no coincidence. Yet, why would anyone want to compete with the Donnells? Why prompt such a terrible pledge of allegiance? My partner provides a clue when she confides that one of the principals in Alice Lynch's party is Robert Jenney -- who, like Maureen Donnell, winters in Palm Beach. Jenney figured in a protracted and very public libel suit against Maureen.

The suit, I later learn, originated with Maureen's belief that elderly Palm Beach resident Leighton A. Rosenthal's daughter was attempting to deny Maureen's son a membership in a country club in Brookline, Mass. Maureen sent a letter to Jenney, who belonged to the club, accusing Leighton Rosenthal and Rosenthal's father of being "profiteers" during World War II -- and that the father "went to jail" for some crime. Wrote the Palm Beach Post, which splashed the suit across its front page: "Thus began a chain reaction of rumors, insinuations and innuendos from nearly everyone involved."

Things turned nasty down in sunny Florida after Rosenthal filed his action against Maureen, in April of 1996. In depositions, Rosenthal alleged that Maureen enjoyed a "not nice" reputation in Florida, and that others had applauded him for suing her; Rosenthal's wife, Honey, accused Maureen of being anti-Semitic. In turn, Maureen called Jenney a "bastard" for remarks suggesting her son was a thug. The suit generated 15 subpoenas, 54 motions, 59 orders, 161 notices and 49 re-notices that fill 26 single-spaced pages of a computer-generated court docket. The lawyers were busy. After more than two years, the parties finally settled, on the eve of trial, with Rosenthal accepting $80,000 from Maureen's insurance company.

***********

One day while visiting Eileen Slocum, I ask her about Glamour Girl Eleanor Young, and Eleanor's husband, Bunty Bacon.

"The most awful man," Eileen says. "He had a lot of people fooled -- he was a Hector type, I can tell you, an American Hector type. He was a great big bronze fellow who used to play tennis every day."

A Texan and Newport summer resident, Betty Lou Sheerin, chats at a Marble House luncheon during Coaching Weekend.

Bunty eloped with Eleanor Young after divorcing Eileen Slocum's friend Agnes Pyne, who in turn soon married John R. "Jock" McLean, whose mother owned the fabulous 45.5-carat Hope Diamond; that marriage eventually ended, too, and Jock subsequently became Betty Boop's third husband.

"They married and intermarried so fast those days that I can hardly remember the sequence," says Eileen.

Eleanor was soon with child after she and Bunty eloped in April 1939, but the pregnancy was difficult and Eleanor's health suffered. She was supposed to be the maid of honor at Aeriel Frazer's wedding in Newport that July, but she was too ill; not knowing the underlying cause of her sickness, the society-page writers depicted her absence from the wedding of the year as a mysterious twist in an otherwise enchanting fairy tale.

"And then the story picks up dismally in the hospital in New York," says Eileen. "My friend Hildie van Royen was having a baby in one room and in the next room was Eleanor Young having a miscarriage. . . . And Mrs. Young was out in the hall and she was just so unhappy about her daughter."

Losing their grandchild was the last straw for Robert and Anita Young: Bunty was sent packing, and Eleanor was discharged from the hospital to the protection of her parents in Manhattan, where Eleanor and Eileen had both grown up. "One whole summer she convalesced in the front drawing room with her mother playing backgammon -- she was white as a ghost," Eileen remembers. "The following winter, one day when I was having tea in New York with Eleanor . . . I said, 'Why did you marry him?' She shuffled out these photographs of Bunty skiing and so on and she said: 'I loved that man.' "

By late 1939, the most glamorous of the Glamour Girls felt well enough for a vacation in Sun Valley, Idaho, where, just before Christmas, she divorced Bunty and reclaimed her maiden name; Bunty meanwhile took up with another woman in Palm Beach and soon announced their engagement. Eleanor spent the winter at the Sun Valley Lodge skiing, shooting skeet, receiving massages, swimming, entertaining, and being entertained. Mostly she had a blast, as she informs her parents in her letters -- which I find at Yale University's archives in the dusty boxes that comprise the Robert Ralph Young papers.

But Eleanor had her down moments, including after a certain dinner party she hosted. "Everyone said they had fun but I didn't really have a wonderful time," she wrote. "I seated the damn thing all wrong which made me furious and I have been in a bad humor ever since." And for the moment, at least, Cupid had fled. "I have no interest in the men I see around," Eleanor wrote to her parents. "There is absolutely no one who appeals at all so you poor dears will have me on your hands indefinitely, I am afraid."

Eleanor spent the summer of 1940 in Newport, returning to Sun Valley for that next winter, when the world slid toward war.

Romance continued to elude Cookie, as friends called her, and she welcomed the offer of a male acquaintance who claimed to be skilled in matchmaking. "He says that I am so attractive that I can get anyone I want," Eleanor wrote the morning of March 3, 1941. "He got me just at the right moment when I was getting ready to settle for almost anything. Now I am again holding out for something sensational."

That very evening, a young man named Nicky Embiricos arrived at Sun Valley Lodge. "He is very nice and amusing," Eleanor wrote. "He was gambling last night and when I went up to the table he asked me what number I wanted to play. I said '31' and up it came. Not bad."

Feeling luck was with her this time, Eleanor fell for Nicky, son of a Greek shipping family who was separated from his wife and young child. Handsome and rich, Nicky owned a spiffy three-seat monoplane that became the talk of the town when he showed up in Newport with his beautiful new sweetheart in the spring of 1941. Nicky was clearly the adventurous type, but he'd logged precious few hours in the air.