The Titanic Plan by Michael Bockman, Ron Freeman Page B

turned up a long horseshoe driveway and saw the imposing cream stucco walls of Beechwood , a tinge of sadness began to color his exhilaration. Not only was Ava gone, but so was his mother. And his son Vincent wouldn’t be there for weeks. A deep sense of loneliness crept over him.
    The servants expected his arrival and set out a simple lunch of foie gras , tea sandwiches and white Rhine wine. Astor wandered through the mansion alone, finding his way to the heart of the house, the ballroom. He strode across the polished wood floor to a bank of floor-to-ceiling windows. The view onto the ocean was spectacular. It was as if the ballroom, with its gentle swirling arches and seaweed lighting sconces, was an extension of the shimmering blue ocean outside. The light flooded in. Astor closed his eyes and tried to retrieve the memory of the music and gaiety that had long filled the room. All he heard was the crashing waves. An overwhelming weariness overtook him. He went up to his bedroom and lay down for a nap. He slept till the next morning.
     
    “ The Season,” as it was simply known in Newport, officially began the first week in July and ended the last week in August. The quaint Rhode Island town was a center of commerce during colonial times and became a cultural retreat in the mid-nineteenth century with summer visitors that included Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Henry and William James, and Edgar Allen Poe.
    August Belmont Sr. built the first “cottage” on Bellevue Avenue for his wife Caroline, who was a Newport native. No matter how large and ostentatious a Newport mansion was, it was always referred to as a “cottage.” It wasn’t until 1881, when the Mrs. Astor beseeched her husband, William Blackhouse Astor, Jr., to purchase the modest cottage of Beechwood , that the floodgates flew open and society began flocking en masse to Newport. Mr. Astor bought Beechwood for $150,000 and thought he got a bargain. The dour Mr. Astor loved bargains. The Mrs. Astor knew how to turn any bargain into an expensive extravagance and proceeded to hire the most famous architect of the era, Richard Morris Hunt, and pump $2,000,000 into renovating the place. A year later Beechwood opened and became the social hub of Newport society.
    Following Mrs. Astor’s lead, new “cottages” began springing up along Bellevue Avenue like gaudy flowers. Oliver Belmont, August’s son, built a Louis XIII–style castle called Belcourt . Alva Vanderbilt one upped Belmont with the building of Marble House , a mansion entirely constructed of exquisite marble – black marble, white marble, veined marble, yellow Sienna marble, pink Numidian marble, gold leafed marble, rough hewn marble, polished marble, marble inside and out. Not to be outdone by his social climbing sister-in-law, Cornelius Vanderbilt II commissioned Richard Morris Hunt to build the grandest cottage of them all and expense be damned. Hunt created a 70 room, four-story limestone manor called the Breakers . With a grand entrance hall whose ceiling rose 45 feet above its floor, a kingly salon, a rococo dining room of marble and gilded bronze, music rooms, separate ladies and gentlemen reception rooms, a library whose great stone chimney was imported from a French chateau, the Breakers stood as the ultimate lavish expression of an excessively lavish age.
    By 1909, the building frenzy had long stopped. The giants of the Gilded Age were either dead or doddering, and “The Season” had devolved into highly stylized rituals of leisure carried on by a younger generation who lacked the inspired gusto for conspicuous consumption. Yes, there were parties and polo and lawn tennis and swims at Bailey Beach , but the unbridled decadence and extravagant spending sprees of the new breed paled in comparison to their mothers and fathers.
    The last remaining vestige, the final link to the full golden bloom of the Gilded Age was, ironically, the poorest – Mamie Stuyvesant Fish. Mamie would often crack