Monte Cristo Weekend

Last week we FINALLY went to some mansions in Newport. This is one of the Rhode Island things you have to do because you can. Taking the tours reminded me of when my brother got the Guiness World Records 2000 for Christmas and I stole it and flipped through random pages and found the world’s heaviest woman (700+ pounds) posing in a stars and stripes bikini, and the lady who had to build a special room in her house to accommodate over 5,000 pieces of soap, and I thought it was all a little bit excessive and wondered, “WHY?!” The mansions make you wonder the same thing.

But they’re fascinating, in an odd, Count of Monte Cristo way; the owners built them because they had more money than they knew what to do with. Example: one guy built a stone palace and gave it to his wife for her 39^th birthday and then they divorced and she kept the house but refused to live in it, (to spite him?) and moved in down the street with her new husband, a friend of her ex. 

Anyway, the owners of the Newport mansions had eclectic taste, like Monte Cristo—except I imagine MC had more taste. Their houses were designed with furnishings built in France or purchased from other wealthy households, taken apart, shipped to America, and reassembled in Newport—my favorite was the massive painting of Aphrodite or Athena or some ancient someone that was cut out of its frame in Italy or France and glued to the ceiling in one of the Newport lady’s bedrooms so she could wake up with good feminine (or masculine) vibes every morning. They imported cipollino marble from Italy and built rooms with platinum in walls embedded with images of the Greek muses. Their houses tried to be what classy European aristocratic palaces were, but didn’t quite impress the owners of their overseas counterparts. What probably disgusted the European aristocracy most was that  owners of the Newport mansions had no noble pedigrees. Example: Cornelius Vanderbilt, the steamboat and railroad tycoon from New York, son of lowly Dutch immigrant, was thought to have been “modest” with his money and taught Sunday school. Which is why his summer cottage, called The Breakers—the 700 pound lady of the Newport mansions—only has 70 rooms and 750 doorknobs (or is it 700?).  

In these houses you bathed in solid marble tubs that had to be filled and drained several times before the water was tolerably warm; you had to change your clothes 7 times a day and wash everything after using it once; you had servants whose entire jobs might consist of doing laundry, or emptying chamber pots, or polishing shoe buckles, respectively; you ate in dining rooms with 75 pound chairs made of bronze and covered in gold leaf while staring at massive portraits of Louis XIV's fake hair and unnatural legs. And you paid a French chef $10,000 a year (in the 1890s) to make you dinner (called Service a la russe), and the dishes moved in and out so quickly that you didn't have time to digest anything:

1. Oysters
2. Choice of soup (clear or thick)
3. Salad
4. Fish
5. Sweetbreads (which aren't what they sound like)
6. Meat roast with vegetables
7. Pheasant or some other gamey thing with more salad
8. More salad
9. Pudding doused in cognac and set on fire
10. Ice cream shaped into the form of a turtle or George Washington's face
11. Cheese, biscuits, and butter
12. Bonbons
13. Coffee, liquor, sparkling water, cigars

Side note: before refrigerators, servants/kitchen staff had to cut big blocks of ice from the private lakes on the house grounds. Everything was kept on ice, and since the collecting of ice blocks was so labor intensive, serving ice cream was the sign of real wealth.

So, yeah, life was good. I guess. But ours is better because we can go to Wal-Mart in our pajamas and we have a friend who will make us ice Redbull sorbet in the shape of our favorite animals and deliver it to our door whenever we want.

The gate outside of The Breakers

A cool lamppost.

The back of The Breakers

I like how the nose looks sunburned.

This house was built for the Vanderbilt children behind The Breakers--so the little Vs would have somewhere to play after they got tired of sliding down the grand staircases on cookie sheets.

Jesse outside of Marble House.

The lady of Marble House was obsessed with the Orient, so they put this in her backyard.