‘The Gilded Age' Goes to Newport. But of Course.

New York Times

08-08-2025

Venal and vulgar, grasping and striving, the whale-boned and top-hatted personnel of the sudsy hit HBO series 'The Gilded Age' — which has its Season 3 finale on Sunday — depicts an American moment in many ways like our own.
'There are times when I have thought we are living through another Gilded Age, with Richard Branson and Elon Musk racing their rockets to the moon,' Julian Fellowes, the show's creator, said on Thursday while on holiday in Greece.
'We went through a long period when people seemed to hide the fact that they were rich,' noted Mr. Fellowes, who also created that other monument to class, the 'Downton Abbey' franchise.
Now, much like the robber barons of old, the ultrawealthy are hosting lavish wedding celebrations and flaunting their yachts, jewels and mansions.
'People are prepared to put on a show of what they can afford and what they can do,' Mr. Fellowes said, 'and the rest of us just have to put up with it.'
In few American places has that attitude prevailed more starkly than in Newport, R.I., a coastal redoubt where a century ago a colony of the superrich erected monuments to what Joan Didion characterized as the 'metastasis of capital.'
It is in Newport that the skein of tangled 'Gilded Age' plotlines is set to unravel at a ball given by Bertha Russell, the ruthless arriviste played by Carrie Coon.
And it is to Newport that tourists still migrate each summer to ogle colossal marble and limestone piles like the Breakers, Marble House and Ochre Court — to cite a few of the 'cottages' built on fortunes largely made in copper, silver, oil and coal. Particularly along a stretch of Bellevue Avenue, visitors can see the remnants of a society dominated by Gilded Age names like Vanderbilt, Berwind and Astor.
'Physically and geographically, some of the more important houses stand as they did 100-plus years ago,' said Trudy Coxe, the executive director of the Preservation Society of Newport County.
Many such homes have been demolished. Some that remain are sustained by tourist dollars. Others have had life breathed back into them by representatives of a new cadre of the superrich, people like the Blackstone C.E.O. Stephen A. Schwarzman, who in 2021 paid $27 million to acquire Miramar, a French neo-Classical mansion constructed in 1912 for the Widener family of Philadelphia.
'Places like that were very much the product of the new money of the time, as you can see in 'The Gilded Age,'' said David Ray, a longtime Newport resident and owner of the Bannister's Wharf complex and the Clarke Cooke House restaurant. 'There was one-upmanship at any cost.'
The swells who flocked here did their best to repel nosy reporters and self-styled arbiters like Ward McAllister, the writer portrayed in the series by Nathan Lane. Some still do.
'They jealously guard their privacy and would not even want to be mentioned,' said Paul F. Miller, a historian whose 'Lost Newport: Vanished Cottages of the Resort Era,' documents the nearly 100 mansions lost over the decades.
Until not so long ago, there survived a healthy population of those with ties to the world of 'The Gilded Age.' Among them were a passel of grandes dames.
'There were people like Nonie Drexel, Oatsie Charles and Nuala Pell,' Mr. Ray said, referring to Noreen Stonor Drexel, Marion Oates Charles and the patrician wife of the Rhode Island senator Claiborne Pell. 'That group has all passed away now.'
If their descendants still summer in Newport, in houses perhaps less palatial than Miramar, he added, they do so 'very much under the radar.'
'Unlike the Hamptons or Nantucket, Newport refuses to change,' said Nick Mele, a grandson of Ms. Charles and a photographer whose 2022 book, 'A Newport Summer: An Insider's Look at American High Society in Newport's Mansions,' offers a glimpse of this sphere.
'Newport also refuses to forget its history,' Mr. Mele added. 'The same families are in the same houses, even if they don't have the money to maintain them, with cracks in the wall, rips in the furniture, every age socializing together and the oldest person in the room still the most revered.'
Ancestor portraits may bag in their frames, and the springs in upholstered chairs may lurk as booby traps. Yet certain Newport homes — those on view and those that will never appear on any tourist map — still possess original dumbwaiters and separate passages for servants.
'The Julian Fellowes series plays to the idea of Newport as a mecca for voyeurism in the broadest sense of the term,' said Mr. Miller, the historian. 'People have an idea of the place from that show and from how the press and Chambers of Commerce have depicted it. People still come here expecting something that may or may not exist.'