The Providence Journal, May 7, 2009

Give the gift of grandeur on Mother’s Day

NEWPORT—She’s the greatest mom in the world (of course) and you’d love to treat her to every luxury under the sun.

If only you could afford it.

So instead of celebrating Mother’s Day by lavishing her with expensive gifts, how about letting her fancy —that’s right, simply imagine—that’s she’s living in high style.

Let her pretend that she’s Alice Vanderbilt, throwing summer parties at her Newport mansion and ordering the servants around, or that she’s tobacco heiress Doris Duke, beholding a wardrobe of some the most expensive garments ever made and trying to figure out what to wear.

You can treat mom to both experiences this weekend by taking her to The Breakers, summer “cottage” of Alice and Cornelius Vanderbilt II, and to Rough Point, where the late Duke resided when she wasn’t jetting around the world. Both oceanfront estates in Newport’s illustrious Bellevue Avenue neighborhood have something new to offer this year.

For the first time since it opened as a museum, The Breakers has gone the way of other major mansions in Newport and famous attractions around the country: It has moved away from guided tours and a month ago began relying on self-guided tours with audio.

“Good morning and welcome to the Breakers. Put this around your neck,” Christine Helfrich, of Reading, Pa., is told when she steps inside the mansion on a recent day and is offered headphones and an audio controller. Having grown up in Germany, where old castles are virtually commonplace, she at first says she would just prefer to walk the grounds. But she relents and begins the tour by pressing a few buttons.

She’s not the least bit sorry about her decision.

“This house was their stage to receive the world,” the narrator says in introducing audio tourists to the Grand Hall of the Vanderbilts’ summer residence

Along the way, visitors learn about the construction, design and furnishings of the 1895 Gilded Age estate, the generations of Vanderbilts who lived there thanks to the family’s railroad fortune and the lives of The Breakers servants. The recording includes narration, sound effects, commentary from architectural experts and past servants, and readings of memoirs of Vanderbilt family members.

In the billiards room, for example, you hear the sounds of balls being struck and clacking against one another. In the kitchen, you hear the sounds of food cooking. In the music room, the sounds of stringed instruments fill the headphones.

You can begin the tour anytime you like and go through the mansion at your own pace. By simply pressing the appropriate buttons on the controllers, you can start, stop or repeat the audio, pausing to gaze out a window at the ocean, gawk at the ornate gilding and tiling and sculpture or study the bathtub with knobs for both freshwater and seawater, hot and cold.

Audio tours began almost 10 years ago at two of the Preservation Society of Newport County’s other mansions, The Elms and Marble House. But it took many more years to develop the tour for its most famous estate, which attracts more than 300,000 visitors a year.

The push for audio tours grew out of an effort “to become more relevant and engaging for our visitors and to move away from a specifically fact-based guided tour,” said John Tschirch, the preservation society’s architectural historian and director of academic programs, whose voice is heard frequently on the audio tour. “We designed a tour to offer free choice … freedom to move around the building [and] to listen as long as they want or as short as they want.”

The Breakers audio tour capitalized on an ever-growing collection of interviews conducted with people with an intimate knowledge of the mansion as well as research into how the mansion exemplifies life during America’s Gilded Age.

“We had many oral histories from servants and even members of the family,” Tschirch said. These resources, he said, allowed the audio presentation to be told from “multiple points of view.” As a result, “we came up with a different way to move through the house.”

“You entered the house as a Vanderbilt or guest, now you entering the dining room as a servant” is the new approach of the audio tour, which relies on hallways used by servants that weren’t open for guided tours.

The other advantage of the audio tour is the opportunities visitors have in virtually every room to press a button for additional information on such topics as architect Richard Morris Hunt, the typical day of a chambermaid or footman and the fire that destroyed the original Breakers. The main tour is about 35 minutes long, but the extras can extend the tour another 40 minutes.

“It was worthwhile. It was very interesting and informative,” Helfrich, the reluctant tour participant, said after taking off her headphones. “I liked the options you have. You can turn it on and off and do it at your own speed.”

Jennifer Carlson, visiting from Seattle with her husband and two children, said she enjoyed the tour and thought it would make a great Mother’s Day activity.

“It’s opulent and in a beautiful area,” she said.

YOU’D BE PRETTY hard pressed as a museum curator to come up with an exhibit more appropriately titled for Mother’s Day than Rough Point’s season-long “Shop Like an Heiress: Buying Fashion in the 20th Century.”

Of course, be warned that Duke might serve forever after as your mom’s role model. That might not so bad until you realize that Duke amassed a wardrobe of 9,000 items.

Her collection includes custom-made couture by such famous designers as Dior, Givenchy and Halston.

The exhibit “explores how she shopped for her wardrobe in search of the stylish, chic clothes that established her as one of the best dressed in society,” according to the Newport Restoration Foundation, owner of Rough Point. It follows Duke “from the couture houses of Paris to America’s top department stores, illuminating the exclusive shopping experiences available to a woman of her class.”

In the two rooms dedicated to the show, you’ll see photographs of Duke wearing clothing on display in the exhibit. Among the items is a 1955 stole by Givenchy, made with silk organza and velvet to resemble a red rose, complete with glass beads to represent dew drops. Another jacket, by Halston, is from 1981 and made of pink silk, with sequins and glass bugle beads.

“Doris Duke, like other wealthy American and European women, routinely ordered custom garments from Parisian couturiers including pieces on display by Christian Dior, Jacques Fath and Madame Grès,” according to the museum. “Her closet reveals an international roster of designers such as Italian designers Emilio Pucci and Irene Galitzine; and the American couturier Halston. She also supplemented her wardrobe with high-end ready-to-wear clothing purchased from department stores such as I. Magnin, Saks Fifth Avenue, Lord & Taylor, Marshall Field’s, and Bergdorf Goodman.”

You’ll have to start your Mother’s Day celebration early to take advantage of the exhibit. It’s open Saturday, not Sunday.

The Breakers, 44 Ochre Point Ave., opens daily at 9 a.m. with the last tours beginning at 5 p.m., or 6 pm. after June 20. For ticket prices and other information, call 401-847-1000 or go to www.newportmansions.org.

“Shop Like an Heiress” will be on exhibit at Rough Point, 680 Bellevue Ave., from April 9 to Nov. 7 and is included with the house tour. Tours are offered Thursday to Saturday from 10 to 2 through May 9 and Tuesday through Saturday from 9:45 to 3:45 through Nov. 7. For ticket prices and other information, call 401-849-7300 or go to www.newportrestoration.org.

 

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