Whither 'high society'?

The mysteriously alluring and exclusive Bailey’s Beach (official name Spouting Rock Beach Association), in Newport. “Rejects’ Beach’’ is in foreground.

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

GoLocal readers may have read last week of the death of Marion “Oatsie” Charles at the age of (I think) 98. She seems to have been about the last of the great Newport and Washington, D.C., socialite hostesses – a vestige of the old “WASP Ascendancy’’: old money (once stinking new!), clubs (many of them for a long time anti-Semitic and even anti-Catholic), The Social Register, boarding schools, Ivy League colleges and debutante parties.

One thinks of the world parodied in High Society, the 1956 movie, set in Newport and with songs by that world’s poet laureate, Cole Porter.

Marion Charles was apparently a nice, amusing and resilient lady, though her world had plenty of social bigotry and cutting cruelty. So what about the new-money folks (money from, for instance, hedge funds and other Wall Street creatures and Silicon Valley) that are the foundation of the new high society in Newport and other watering holes of the rich, if there is such a high society anymore? I would say that they’re less bigoted, more informal, more impatient, at least as arrogant, and less polite than Oatsie Charles’s crowd.

It will fun to see how they change the mores of such old-money Newport clubs as Bailey’s Beach and the Reading Room. And change them they will: Money wins in the end.

Seaside social trauma

Bailey's Beach after Superstorm Sandy in 2012, with "Rejects' Beach'' in the foreground.

From Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com:

U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse is a Democrat, and Democrats pride themselves on representing a wider range of ethnic and socio-economic groups than Republicans, who, whatever their populist rhetoric, in practice display a special affection for the rich. Democrats present themselves as particularly sensitive to the needs and aspirations of low-and-middle-income people and ethnic minorities.

The senator is gearing up for his re-election campaign in 2018.

So the senator may feel himself in a quandary about the all-white, all-rich Bailey’s Beach club, in Newport. (The official name is the Spouting Rock Beach Association.)

He has a  very close association with the club as a former member and through his wife’s continuing membership.  He has many friends there. Furthermore, the club is  very conveniently close to their Newport house.

Freedom of association is a wonderful thing and a cousin of the First Amendment, but for practical political reasons – i.e., “the optics’’ – Mr. Whitehouse, who is very much part of the old WASP aristocracy, will presumably face considerable political pressure to separate himself from such a symbol of exclusion as the campaign heats up. It’s his business of course. And his capacity to be agood senator would seem little affected one way or the other. But Bailey’s will come upnext year, though he’ll almost certainly be re-elected.

I have been to Bailey’s Beach and found the members I metthere cool,  cordial and quiet. But as a reminder of the fragility of all human institutions, an overly fragrant mass of seaweed covered much of the lower beach that day.