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RHODE ISLAND

KEY FACTS

Abbreviation:

RI

Nickname:

The Ocean State

Capital:

Providence

Flower:

Violet

Tree:

Red maple

Bird:

Rhode Island red chicken

Drink:

Coffee milk

Motto:

Hope

Well-known residents and natives:

General Burnside, Dee Dee Myers, H.P. Lovecraft, S.J. Perelman, Cormac McCarthy, George M. Cohan, Nelson Eddy, Van Johnson, James Woods, the Farelly Brothers, Seth ‘Family Guy’ MacFarlane.

RHODE ISLAND

‘I do not especially mind being asked as a guest onboard a boat, so long as I do not have to do anything more than sip wine.’

Wedged between Massachusetts and Connecticut and very much the smallest state in the union, the anchor on Rhode Island’s seal and its official nickname of the ‘Ocean State’ tell you that they take nautical matters seriously here …

The Cliff Walk

From about the middle of the nineteenth century wealthy plantation families from the South began to build themselves ‘cottages’ along the clifftops of Newport, where they could escape the insufferably humid heat of the Southern summer and enjoy the relatively bracing and comfortable breezes rolling in from the Atlantic. Over the next few decades rich Northern families began to do the same as the Gilded Age of Vanderbilts and Astors reached its imponderably wealthy, stiflingly opulent and dizzyingly powerful zenith. These cottages were in fact vast mansions, some of seventy rooms or more, designed to be lived in for only a few months of the year, but all displaying the incalculable and overwhelming riches and status that the robber barons and industrialists of post-Civil-War America had heaped up in so short a time. Never in the field of human commerce, I think it is fair to say, had so much money been made so fast and by so few.

Today the cliff walk between Bellevue Avenue and the sea is a tourist destination and many of the grander cottages are owned and run, not by their original families, but by the Newport County Preservation Society and other trusts and bodies dedicated to keeping these gigantic fantasies from crumbling away.

There are still some survivors living around Bellevue Avenue, however, and I have tea with one of them, the great Oatsie Charles, a wondrous wicked twinkling grande dame of the old school. The first president she ever met was Franklin D. Roosevelt, she attended the wedding of JFK to Jacqueline Bouvier and her talk is a magnificent tour d’horizon of high-born American family life – Hugh Auchincloss, Doris Duke, Astors, Mellons, Radziwills, parties, disputed wills, feuds, marriages, divorces and scandals:

‘She was a Van Allen, of course, which made all the difference … Bunny Mellon and C.Z. Guest were there naturally … Heaven knows what he saw in her, she can’t have had more than two hundred million which these days … she married the Duke of Marlborough. Calamitous error, we all saw that it would never do …’ All spoken in a luxurious and old-style Alabama accent elegantly mixed with an international rich aristocrat’s amused drawl.

‘I can’t tell you how beautiful even ugly people looked back then.’

‘Was it quite formal?’

‘Well, we dressed for dinner every night and all the houses were formally staffed. Handsome footmen in divine livery. We certainly never saw anyone looking like you …’ Oatsie wrinkles her nose in apparent disgust at the film crew who are dressed in the standard grungey outfit of shorts, t-shirts and sandals. ‘A man’s neck can be a thing of beauty,’ she adds, rather startlingly. ‘And yours,’ she indicates the sound recordist’s, ‘has all the qualities. Even yours, darling,’ she turns to me, ‘though yours is higher than most.’

The tea has turned rapidly to claret, served by a devoted butler, whose duty is also to transport his mistress around her messuage in a golf cart, upon which entirely silly conveyance Oatsie somehow managed to bestow the air and dignity of a fabulous Oriental litter. We go next door to the Big Mansion, for Oatsie now makes do in a converted chauffeur’s house which is big and beautiful enough in its own right, being full of her paintings, furniture and exquisite knick-knacks. ‘Land’s End’, the Big Mansion, built by the novelist Edith Wharton, the supreme chronicler of the Gilded Age, has been given by Oatsie to her daughter Victoria and son-in-law Joe.

A little gilt may have come off the Age and a little guilt may have been added, but from where I stood it was pretty Gilded still.

I am Sailing

Aside from the eye-popping, jaw-dropping, bowel-shattering wealth on display along the cliff walk, there is class of a trimmer, more elegant kind still flourishing in Newport. This is a wonderful place to sail and has been a centre of regattas and races for over a hundred years.

The greatest prize in sailing is of course the America’s Cup, ‘the oldest active trophy in international sport’, the great dream, the Holy Grail – The One. It was offered as a prize by the British Royal Yacht Squadron of Cowes, Isle of Wight in 1851, and was won by a boat called America, which is how the cup gets its name, though it might just as well have been because yachts from the United States have won it so consistently and for so long …

Enormous fortunes have been poured into chasing the cup and for 132 years it remained in America, for much of that time in Newport. Poor Britain, that great sailing nation, has won the trophy precisely zero times. The United States held it for the longest winning streak in history, testament to the remarkable qualities of American seamanship, marine savvy, nautical engineering skills and sheer damned money.

Most would agree that the Golden Age of America’s Cup racing was the late forties, fifties and sixties, the days of the 12-metre class yacht. In 1962, winning by 4–1 and watched by President and Mrs Kennedy, was the graceful Weatherly. She kept the cup in Newport, where it had been since 1930 and where it would remain until Alan Bond of Perth, Australia finally broke that winning streak in 1983. The Weatherly is now one of only three surviving wooden America’s Cup defenders in the world, the only yacht to have won the cup when not newly built. She is beautiful. My, she is yare, as Grace Kelly says about her boat the True Love in the film High Society, which is set, of course, in Rhode Island. The Weatherly is as yare as they come. She is now owned by George Hill and Herb Marshall who manage to keep her in tip-top racing condition and to make money from her by charter.

George, a fit and trim fifty-year-old with silver hair and a lean, outdoors face, watches me clamber aboard, pick myself up, trip over a sticky-up thing that had no right to be there, pick myself up again and fall down in a heap, gasping.

‘Welcome aboard,’ he says.

A crew of three barefoot limber girls and a barefoot limber youth are tying knots with their toes, hauling on winches and, without trying, outdoing Tommy Hilfiger and Ralph Lauren models for looks and style. Within a few minutes sails have been unfurled and ropes uncleated and we are under way. I take up a position next to George, who is manning the wheel and calling out mysterious commands.

This is real sailing, the power, speed and excitement is hard to convey. I have always been a physical coward in sporting endeavours, sailing not excluded. Being shouted at to ‘turn about’, having to duck as great beams swing round to bang you on the head, leaning over precipitately, simply not understanding what is going on, having words like ‘tack’, ‘jib’, ‘sheet’ and ‘cleat’ hurled at you … my childhood was full of such moments, growing up as I did in a nautical county like Norfolk and I long ago decided that sailing was for Other People. I do not especially mind being asked as a guest on board a boat, so long as I do not have to do anything more than sip wine.

George has other ideas. If I am to go on board the Weatherly then I am to pay my way by crewing. He is very kind but very firm on this point as he steps aside for me to steer.

‘You’re luffing,’ he says.

‘Well, more a bark of joy at the blue sky and the crisp …’

‘No, not laughing, luffing. The canvas is flapping. Steer into the wind and keep the sail smooth.’

‘Oh right. Got you.’

George is a proud Rhode Islander. ‘Rhode Island is known to most Americans as a unit of size,’ he says. ‘You hear news stories like “an iceberg broke off Antarctica bigger than the state of Rhode Island” or “So and so’s ranch is bigger than Rhode Island”. Try to come up just a little bit. Once you’re on the breeze like this just little small slow adjustments. That’s good, just there and no higher. The Rhode Island charter of 1663 is an amazing document. It contains all of the concepts of freedom of speech and freedom of religion at a time when – you’re luffing again … when she loads up like that, just straighten her out.’

Strangely I enjoy myself. I enjoy myself very much indeed. I will go further. I have one of the most pleasurable days of the 18,330 or so I have spent thus far on this confusing and beguiling planet. The speed, the precision, the astounding power bewitched me: it was a glorious day, Newport Sound and Narragansett Bay sparkled and shimmered and glittered, the great bridges and landmarks around Newport shone in clean, clear light. You would have to be sullen and curmudgeonly indeed not to be enchanted, intoxicated and thrilled to the soles of your boat-shoes by this fabulous (and fabulously expensive) class of sailing.

Farewell, Rhode Island. Farewell too any lingering belief that America might be a classless society … I luff myself silly at such a thought.