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New York Times
10-08-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Let's Not Make America Gilded Again
HBO's 'The Gilded Age,' Julian Fellowes's frothy, decorous, lavishly set-decorated historical soap opera set amid the social-climbing robber barons of New York City in the 1880s, is having its Season 3 finale on Sunday night. The show is worth watching for Agnes van Rhijn's withering propriety and Bertha Russell's dresses and millinery alone. But don't be fooled: The show itself presents an entirely sanitized portrait of its era, a Darwinian time in New York (and America) when great industrial fortunes were being built with little regard for the general welfare of those exploited in building it. It's not a show that knows the average life expectancy was around 48 and many children didn't live beyond their fifth birthday, dying of the sorts of things we (at least for now) vaccinate against. (Some spoilers ahead if you have not been watching this season.) It is sometimes noted that we live in a sort of second gilded age, with the rich ever richer and inequality on the rise. The finale comes just a few days after President Trump unleashed tariffs at rates in line with the actual Gilded Age, a time which he openly pines for, when ruthless patriarchs like one of the show's main characters, the robber baron George Russell, ruled the world, coercing and outflanking their less-clever rivals (Assuming, that is, that Russell survives an assassination attempt, just as Mr. Trump himself did.) Lest you think I'm being hyperbolic, Mr. Trump said shortly after taking office: 'We were at our richest from 1870 to 1913. That's when we were a tariff country. And then they went to an income-tax concept.' Similarly, Howard Lutnick, now the commerce secretary, mused last fall about how much he preferred things back then, when 'we had no income tax, and all we had was tariffs.' Mr. Lutnick has called that era a 'golden age,' when 'we had so much money that we had the greatest businessmen of America get together to try to figure out how to spend it.' So, it's not a stretch to say that a return to the Gilded Age is a goal for Mr. Trump and his administration: They pretty much said so out loud. So it seems worth noting that the actual Gilded Age was not the tidied-up one depicted on the show. I'm not saying the show needs to be this gritty downer — that wouldn't be any fun — but it is a fantasy. At the start of Season 3 we find the ambitious Russells having made their way in the Manhattan society that had spurned them as arrivistes, much as Mr. Trump was once. Bertha Russell (Carrie Coon) has a plan to marry her daughter off to the Duke of Buckingham, while Mr. Trump had to make do with his daughter marrying the son of a disgraced New Jersey real estate developer. There is a discreet gay couple who stay discreet, and one of them is killed off by the end of the current season (run down by a horse-drawn carriage — another danger of that era that we don't need to bring back). Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
08-08-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘The Gilded Age' Goes to Newport. But of Course.
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.'
