Friday, Jul. 02, 1965
Splendors at Home
RECREATION
The fine-limbed young woman rising from the foam on TIME'S cover is neither a naiad nor the creation of a fashion editor's imaginative whim. She is Mrs. William J. Anderson III, named Michael because she is the third of three daughters in a family that had been hoping for a boy. She is swimming not at Saint Tropez but at Sea Island, Ga.; she comes not from such routinely celebrated places as Manhattan, Boston, or Philadelphia, but from Nashville, Tenn.
In Nashville, her family is well-to-do but not rich, social but not all that social. Yet she and millions of other young matrons are enjoying what is becoming an increasing pleasure and privilege for a growing number of Americans--a summer home away from home.
In Michael Anderson's case, it is a cottage with a sun deck on Sea Island's five-mile stretch of white fine-grained beach whose gentle slope is ideal for her two small children, Sayle, 4, and Jody, 1. Such a beach would be hard to find in all of Europe. And more and more Americans are realizing that the U.S. has some natural advantages that can outmatch Europe's best. Europe, for example, has no stretch of shore that surpasses Cape Cod's Great Outer Beach with its soaring bluffs; no mountain lakes that are more breathtaking than those in Colorado or Wyoming; no more challenging golf courses than Pebble Beach and Pine Valley; no finer sailing than Cape Cod or the Maine Coast. Moreover, all the food is American, and all the natives speak English.
Not so long ago, going away for the summer was a privilege of the rich, and the oh-so-rich at that. Baedeker's United States, published in 1909, rated Bar Harbor and Newport as the two top resorts, and after that the Grand Tour was only a question of whether one preferred the Berkshires to Saratoga, White Sulphur to Hot Springs, or how long to remain at Tuxedo Park. Because the rich were so few, they clustered together in tight little colonies. Their "cottages" were turreted mansions, marble palaces and crenelated castles; they entertained only each other. Their summer colonies were located within a stone's throw of early U.S. wealth--New York, Philadelphia and Boston.
Times have changed. Depression and war shuttered many a resort, but 20 years of relative peace and an almost continually prospering economy have given them new status and new life. Where there once was one mansion, there are now a hundred $50,000 summer "cottages"--a euphemism that still lingers. Along with the economy and the population, resorts have proliferated westward. Founded on less rigid social standards than those that governed Eastern watering places, resorts in other parts of the country often start with a structure or an area rather than with people. And they offer facilities, rather than snobbery. Today there is scarcely a U.S. family of means, in any section of the country, that is not going away somewhere for the summer or contemplating it--with nary an envious thought for his neighbor who may be planning a quick trip to Europe.
Where do they go? To the tried and true. To the new and provocative.
Among the old, only the best survive. Among the new, only those with real merit are chosen. Herewith a partial guide to the most durable of the old and the most stimulating of the new.
THE OLD RESORTS
The oldest and richest east coast resorts have moved with the times, accepting with greater or less grace an influx of new families, who may or may not have the money the old families had--but then, neither do the old families any longer. In this area, few people stayed--or stay--at hotels. They built their own houses, or rented a native one for the summer, and took the whole family.
> In the 1880s, the Vanderbilts, Astors and Oelrichses, with gold-plated silverware and shiploads of newly immigrated servants, invaded the quiet Rhode Island village of Newport, threw up enormous 50-room houses that rivaled European chateaux in size if not in taste. As more nouveaux riches arrived, Bailey's Beach became the playground for the new millionaires, private docks gave shelter to large yachts during the summer, and ladies sipped champagne under parasols while watching their white-flanneled husbands play tennis on grass courts.
Today most of the mansions stand as museums of past glory and hors d'oeuvres are apt to be served by caterers rather than servants, but third-and fourth-generation scions still keep the banners flying high. On a sunny day at Bailey's Beach, 15 Cushings can be seen at one time, flanked by Drexels, Auchin-closses and Van Alens. Neither high taxes, lack of servants, nor the Newport Jazz Festival can drive them out from behind their wrought-iron gates and brick walls.
Newport's social bastions still are the Spouting Rock Beach Association, which owns famed Bailey's Beach, and the Newport Reading Room, where men of the summer colony still gather in the afternoon for drinks, backgammon or boccie. To gain membership in any of these hallowed institutions is every bit as difficult as it was to be accepted in Newport back in the days when old John Jacob Astor remarked that "a man who has a million dollars is as well off as if he were rich." In some ways it may be more difficult today; since many of Newport's most influential regulars are no longer rich themselves, they are apt to screen newcomers more on the basis of family or behavior rather than wealth. Recalling that Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish, one of the doyennes of Newport society in the good old days, once delighted her guests by filling her ballroom with live butterflies, a young Newport matron said wistfully, "If I did that, everybody would think they were moths."
> Southampton's first social resident was New York Society Doctor T. Gaillard Thomas, who went there in the 1880s and recommended it to his patients. Eventually, everyone in the upper registers of society followed him. There were the Mellons, the Thaws and the Dilworths from Pittsburgh, the Du Fonts from Delaware, the Morgans and the Murrays from New York. Aside from such "cottages" as the $700,000 mansion that Henry Ford II built, residents support five separate clubs, including the Meadows, which boasts 30 grass tennis courts. Some of the houses and some of the courts have gone to seed, but Southampton still sets the most grueling social pace in the nation. On a good night, as many as seven cocktail parties run simultaneously, and $2,000 buffets for 100 people, usually catered by Mrs. William Randolph-Hearst's former butler, are more a rule than an exception. Complains Paris Match's New York Correspondent Stephane Groueff: "The problem is how to avoid parties."
> Twelve miles east of Southampton is East Hampton. In both Hamptons the ocean influences everything. Its pounding surf has created an unbroken beach of pure, soft, white sand. Moisture from the ocean causes a heavy dew at night so that golf courses rarely need water on their fairways. In general, the Hamptons are as rigidly socially conscious as Newport, and when snobbery has reared its gelid head it has sometimes been intensified by the rivalry between the two communities. For years, Southampton claimed a social edge. It had tighter restrictions on who could buy property in the community, and it barred Jews and looked askance at Catholics. East Hampton, on the other hand, had originally been settled by artists, and now has been rediscovered by the abstract expressionists and realists, notably Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb and Moses Soyer, who were not interested in membership in the Maidstone Club or in its challenging 18-hole golf course. East Hampton has also been invaded by a sizable force of well-heeled industrialists, merchant princes and young executives, who want a pleasant place for their families to spend the hot summer months, and who couldn't care less about social climbing.
NEW ENGLAND
> On the 100-sq.-mi. island of Mount Desert (pronounced dessert), Me., the accent has always been on sports as well as society. The grandeur has been somewhat subdued since Bar Harbor's big old mansions burned to the ground in the 1947 fire and were replaced by motels. But Northeast, Seal, and Southwest Harbor still are cluttered with the kind of people who do not mind how much money they spend as long as it does not show. Swimming is possible, but the water is so bone-chilling that only the hardy or the invulnerable young do much of it except in swimming pools. Today, Nathan Pusey, Walter Lippmann, Thomas Gates, and Nelson Rockefeller go there to relax and enjoy some of the world's best sailing, with the major derivation of the visitors remaining Boston and Philadelphia --the place is sometimes popularly known as Philadelphia on the rocks.
> Cape Cod is so large, its summer colonies so numerous, and its beaches and sea air so readily available to everyone that many people who have been going there for years are never entirely aware of its social distinctions. "You never know you're out until you get in," said one visitor. Socially, the Cape's "Big Three" clubs are at Hyannisport, Wianno and Oyster Harbors. Not only do they hold their status because of the social standing of members, but also because they command most of the best facilities--golf courses, tennis courts, docks, private beaches and clubhouses. (Oyster Harbors' members include Paul Mellon and A. Felix du Pont Jr.) This actually causes little concern to the theatrical people and artists who summer at the unsocial lower Cape towns of Wellfleet, Truro and Provincetown, or to affluent visitors who summer at fashionable Chatham, which has one of the best harbors for small-boat sailing and one of the finest golf courses on the Eastern seaboard.
> Martha's Vineyard, like Cape Cod, ranks high as a fashionable resort only because so many socialites summer there; most ordinary visitors come to relax, enjoy the beaches, the sailing, the salty air and the fishing, and they do not know, or care, that the Edgartown Yacht Club is the most exclusive establishment on the island and is regarded as the summer retreat of the New York Yacht Club. In a normal season, the ferries that ply between the Vineyard and the mainland will carry some 500,000 passengers, 90,000 automobiles and 10,000 trucks; during a busy weekend as many as 200 private or commercial planes will land with passengers. But the "in" way to arrive on the island --the only way for some--is to step down from your own Beechcraft, or to drop the hook from your boat in Edgartown Harbor.
At the top of the island, on a point of land called West Chop, some of the homes have been in the same family for generations. Such luminaries as Katharine Cornell, James Cagney, Thomas Hart Benton, Leonard Bernstein and Lillian Hellman have long summered among the island's rolling moors and scrub pine. Small cottages rent for from $100 to $150 for each person per week during the season, and better furnished or better located houses run considerably higher. One lucky schoolteacher who pays $135 a month for the house during the winter months sublets it for $1,000 a month during the summer.
> Less specifically labeled a resort area but spattered with the second homes of Bostonians and sometimes New Yorkers is the whole gently mountainous area of Southern Vermont and New Hampshire. Typical is the so-called Monadnock Region, with its cluster of unchanged and unchanging New England towns --Peterboro, Dublin, Hancock, Jaffrey. Those with homes in the area include Chicago Newspaper Scion Marshall Field III, Harlow Shapley, famed Harvard astronomer, Edwin Land, inventor of the Polaroid camera.
UP IN MICHIGAN
In days gone by, the rich of Chicago, Detroit, and the rest of the Midwest solved their vacation problems simply: they went to New England. But then they discovered some treasures of their own closer at hand, notably the northern tip of Michigan's lower peninsula, which juts out between Lake Michigan and Lake Huron. The result was resorts like Charlevoix, Wequetonsing and Harbor Point. Often they are patterned after classic New England counterparts. They are family oriented, many elaborately unostentatious, and no effort is made to attract outsiders--though well-sponsored families from as far away as St. Louis do not count as outsiders. Two of the choicest spots in the area are closely held, closely clubby resorts, both of which make an expensive fetish of informality.
> Harbor Point is Michigan's most exclusive because the millionaire and blue-blooded families who live there guard their privacy well. Located on a point that juts out into Little Traverse Bay near Harbor Springs, Harbor Point does not even allow automobiles to intrude upon its seclusion. Instead they are parked at the entrance to the point, and the residents are delivered to their doors by a horse and buggy that makes a circle of the area every 15 minutes. The buggy also is used when residents visit their neighbors. There are some 70 homes on the point, two-or three-storied with numerous sun porches and beautifully kept lawns leading down to the shore. Among the house owners are Wrigley Offield, scion of the chewing gum clan, Elton MacDonald, creator of Plaid Stamps, and Frederick S. Ford, a director of Libbey-Owens-Ford Glass. The Harbor Point Association carefully screens anyone wishing to build on any of the 103 lots still available in the area. There are two golf courses near by, and there is a club at the entrance to the point with a huge swimming pool and a sprawl of tennis courts. Most residents also keep a boat, which is docked in front of their homes.
> Desbarats (pronounced Deborah) is a tiny, nondescript village on the shore of the Canadian mainland just across Lake Huron from Michigan, but when Chicago socialites speak of Desbarats they mean a wonderfully scenic eight-mile stretch along the nearby St. Joseph Channel that is strewn with small islands on which unpretentious and simple cottages are half-hidden by evergreens and maples. Moreover, they will tell you in Lake Forest that Desbarats is not just a place but a way of life--a life of complete simplicity, where everyone wears old clothes, sleeps in an iron bed, and uses bottled gas for lights and cooking. Desbarats makes a fetish of rusticity bordering on hardship. Most of the cabins do have indoor toilets and wash basins now, but a few of the some 85 island dwellers who have also put in bathtubs are looked upon as softies. Sailing is by far the leading activity in the islands, and the impressive-sounding North Channel Yacht Club is a small, roofless dock where islanders assemble for a beer or two after races. Three or four fairly primitive tennis courts have been rolled out in the woods on a couple of larger islands. One established resident is Lucien Wulsin, president of Baldwin Pianos, another is Dr. Derrick Vail, famed eye surgeon. Adlai Stevenson is a frequent visitor. Desbarats is, as a Chicago women's editor sighed, "very, very chic."
THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS
The vacation area in the Rockies never had any strictly social pretensions. Early on, the natives realized they were sitting on some of the world's most magnificent scenery, and had a climate that would inevitably draw Midwesterners who longed to draw a cool breath--and even Easterners who wanted to see what a real mountain looked like.
> Jackson Hole, in northwestern Wyoming's Grand Teton National Park, has a traffic jam now and again, but mostly when moose and elk saunter across the roads. Tourists drop by from almost everywhere, but it is a summer retreat for well-to-do families from California, Illinois, Colorado and Utah, who want to turn the kids free to enjoy the glories of unspoiled nature without entirely forsaking silver on the table, innerspring mattresses and modern plumbing. Because the late John D. Rockefeller Jr. fell in love with the area and set up a nonprofit corporation to provide facilities, visitors now have a wide choice of accommodations, ranging from the richly rustic Jenny Lake Lodge ($40 a day double, with two meals) to a trailer park with water, sewer and electrical connections ($2.25 a day). After-dark activity is limited, but a square dance, movie or concert generally can be found. During the day there is fishing, boating, horseback riding and nature hikes conducted by park rangers, but a favorite pastime of almost everybody is simply sitting and staring in disbelief at the spectacular, mica-strewn Teton Range, known to the Indians as "the Big Shining Mountains," and often roguishly described by airline stewardesses as "the Sweater Girl Mountains."
> Far to the south, near Colorado Springs, is that fabulous old hostelry the Broadmoor. Legend has it that once a spotter with binoculars kept vigil in its tower, and when he cried, "Here come a bunch of Osages!", the rate on the bridal suite immediately was tripled, and the arriving oil-rich redskins always were installed there with sly but obsequious ceremony. Like most Western legends, this one is of dubious authenticity, but it is a fact that for close on to half a century, the sprawling Broadmoor, whose facilities meander over 5,000 acres just west of looming Pikes Peak, has attracted some millionaire Indians as well as a succession of U.S. Presidents, gold-plated Texans, royal personages of varying distinction, business tycoons, theatrical celebrities and battalions of generals and retired generals. Actually, though it maintains an agreeably old-fashioned air of opulence which approaches that of the best lodges in Switzerland and Scandinavia, the Broadmoor is not strictly a mountain resort but a vast complex designed to offer something for everybody, summer or winter. Besides such standard accouterments as a lake for waterskiing, swimming pools, a 36-hole golf course, ski slopes, riding and hiking trails, it has an ice palace, a stadium, a 2,400-seat theater where such stars as Helen Traubel and Maurice Chevalier entertain nightly, and even a zoo. It also has a variety of dining rooms and cocktail lounges, including an authentic 18th century English pub that was imported piecemeal and reassembled. Originally laid out near the turn of the century by a German count who envisioned it as an American Monte Carlo, the Broadmoor was finally completed in 1918 and given its unique flavor by the late Spencer Penrose, a flamboyant and openhanded Philadelphia socialite who made a fortune in Cripple Creek gold and Utah copper, and poured millions into the hotel and the surrounding area. Rates at the Broadmoor are fairly reasonable by luxury hotel standards, starting at $17 a day single and $22 double and progressing up to $160 a day for a luxury suite with maid and cook.
> The entire mountain region of Colorado has a myriad of old and new resorts which draw thousands of visitors all year round. Aspen, where Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy and her children skied last winter, in summer swarms with intellectuals and scholars attending the Aspen Institute of Humanistic Studies, and this year will draw music lovers for a festival and a conference on contemporary music, featuring lectures by distinguished composers. Vail is a bustling new ski resort built to look like an Alpine village. Texas Financier John Murchison has built a home there, IBM Chairman Thomas Watson owns an apartment, and the resort is luring summer visitors with its gourmet restaurants, heated pools, and facilities for riding, hiking and fishing, and a jumping discotheque for the younger crowd.
THE WEST COAST
Los Angeles has proclaimed its superior locale and climate for so long that some people find it hard to believe that a native would ever dream of leaving home, even in the summer. Yet, no matter how close they are to a beach in winter, when summer comes many rich Angelenos decide that they want to be even closer; no matter how high they are perched on a hill, many decide they want to go still higher. The result is that although the city has something approaching summer all year long, the surrounding area still is heavily stocked with summer resorts. Old-rich Los Angeles families and new-rich Hollywood stars have studded the beach along the Pacific with private enclaves carefully fenced off from the hamburger stands, volleyball games and muscular exhibitions of the public beaches. Angelenos who want to get further away from it all may escape to two resorts, one old and one new:
> Huge, castellated, rotunda-capped, the Del Coronado Hotel dominates the Coronado peninsula, just across the Bay from San Diego. While it now caters to conventions, it still holds the loyalty of longtime visitors, including almost anybody who is anybody in Hollywood.
> Apple Valley Inn is in the Mojave Desert country, so isolated that when first built in 1948 it could not get telephone service; it put carrier pigeons in the comfortably furnished outlying "bunkhouses" so that guests could place orders for room service. Lying in the little Apple Valley with the Mojave River to the west and the San Bernardino foothills to the south, the inn offers solitude, good food, clean air, and some of the most fascinating desert vistas to be found anywhere. Movie stars show up from time to time, but its regular patrons are mostly prominent social, business and political figures. Richard Nixon went there to complete his book Six Crises.
San Franciscans have a somewhat different problem. The cold fact of the matter is that their bordering sea is too cold to swim in, even in summer. They have learned to compensate. They go away, mostly to the Lake Tahoe area, where the water is even colder, but the surrounding scenery is more spectacular and the swimming pools are heated. Besides, how do you see your friends during the summer unless you go to Lake Tahoe? The lake is great for sailing, and the cocktail-party circuit is intense. After the healthy activities of the day, the energetic Lake Tahoeist can take off after dinner for the gambling casinos across the state line in Nevada, where any visitor can get a quick piece of the action. Most successful caterer to these mixed interests is River Ranch, a Currier & Ives styled encampment that opened only one year ago on the brink of the Truckee River just south of the lake, and has already become the place to stay for sophisticated young San Francisco marrieds.
> Just south of San Francisco is one of the most spectacular golf areas in the world. The Monterey Peninsula is spangled with five golf courses, which are set off by the sound of Pacific rollers soughing in on the rocks and cliffs of a coastline overhung with the etched shapes of the famed Monterey cypresses, which need yield nothing in beauty to Italy's justly celebrated sea pines. Deer wander across the golf course near Del Monte Lodge, the sumptuous peninsula hotel. Pebble Beach is a favored course of such diverse luminaries as Dwight Eisenhower and Bing Crosby.
> Only a few miles farther south, near the almost alarmingly pretty village of Carmel, the tennis buff can find a kind of nirvana. It is Gardiner's Tennis Ranch, founded in 1958 by the Del Monte Lodge's former tennis pro when the notion struck him that "if nothing else interferes, you can really perfect your tennis game." Based in a California ranch house set in a stand of oak and eucalyptus trees that provided a windbreak, his tiny but flourishing operation has accommodations for 22 people, includes two swimming pools, seven hard-surface tennis courts running full tilt, and two deluxe cottages, appropriately called Wimbledon and Forest Hills. The Tennis Ranch is operated as a private club, and among its members are such notables as Procter & Gamble President Howard Morgens and Alaska Steamship Co. President David Edward Skinner. Five-day clinics for couples who want to perfect their mixed doubles game are held eight months a year, and the couples are expected to play tennis five hours a day. "We compensate by giving them breakfast in bed, a sauna bath and a massage," Proprietor John Gardiner says.
THE SOUTH
Since so many Northerners trek south for the winter, it would seem reasonable for Southerners to migrate north in the summer. But comparatively few of them do. More often, Southerners simply go to the same resorts Northerners visited during the winter--and they enjoy them just as much, perhaps more. The prevailing breezes wafting across beaches are often more appreciated in the summer than the winter. The result is that a steady summer flow of Southerners (and Northerners taking advantage of reduced rates) keeps some Southern resorts busy all year long.
> Sea Island, Ga., where Michael Anderson vacations, is small (five miles by two miles), immaculately clean and sedate, and mostly favored by reasonably well-to-do and well-bred Southern families and honeymooners who like Southern ways, though a fair number of Midwesterners and Yankees show up each year also. Sea Island is geared to outdoor living--golf and swimming particularly, and an old-fashioned barbecue is a week-end attraction. The atmosphere is more like that of a club than an ordinary resort since most of the guests return more than once. Social life centers around the main building, the Cloister, an expansive three-story building that is done in Spanish red-tile fashion. Though there is a band for dancing in the evenings, spirited nightlife is almost nonexistent. First-time guests at Sea Island usually take a room at the Cloister (summer rates $32-$49 a day double with meals), but regulars usually rent one of the privately owned houses on the island, which are available when their owners are not in residence. The Sea Island Co. takes care of the rental for owners, puts the houses in order for guests, and supplies servants when requested (cost: $600-$1,500 monthly).
> Ponte Vedra, Fla., 20 miles east of Jacksonville, is a resort that combines private houses and a resort hotel. The houses are in the $40,000-$150,000 price range and include a cubistic concrete and glass extravaganza designed by Paul Rudolph. Many of them have interior-court swimming pools, open to the sky but screened against flying insects. Aside from a Robert Trent Jonesdesigned golf course, featuring a famed 9th hole where the player must drive the ball across 100 ft. of water to a green surrounded by five sand traps, Ponte Vedra has its own 10,000-acre hunting preserve, stocked with turkey, quail and mallard duck. Judge Harold Medina each winter rents a one-bedroom-and-parlor suite overlooking the Atlantic. When Georgia Senator Herman Talmadge visits the resort, he stays with his sister-in-law and her husband, the Scott Shepherds, at their $70,000 home.
> Pinehurst, in North Carolina's rolling hill country, means golf to most people, and on almost any day in the season around 1,000 rounds of golf will be played at the Pinehurst Country Club, the only private club in the world with five 18-hole golf courses. A picturesque little village that suggests New England more than North Carolina, it has for 70 years attracted a quiet, middle-aged-to-elderly clientele, which though often enormously rich is not particularly interested in capitalized society or bright lights. Next to golf, horses are the primary interest of most visitors. The riding facilities are of top quality, and gymkhanas in horsemanship are held regularly.
> A hundred and fifty miles away is Hound Ears, in the Carolina mountains and opened for only a year. Hound Ears owes much to the personality of its owners Grover and Harry Robbins, casual native sons who let their poodle eat from a dish on the dining-room table and invite any guest who doesn't like it to leave. In the winter, the resort is a favorite ski area and already millionaires are beating a path to its door. Operated both as a club and a hotel, Hound Ears was named for a nearby mountain formation. The Robbins brothers keep a close, even dictatorial, eye on its operation. Several permanent members of the club have been sold land and permitted to build $100,000 homes in the development, but Grover and Harry have reserved the right to say how the house will be situated, what trees can be cut, and even what kind of roof will be built. They have also built a number of more modest A frame chalet-type houses which sell for around $25,000. Says Grover Robbins, "Nobody has to come in unless they like it." Apparently many people do like it, for the membership roster already reads like a North Carolina Who's Who.
> Kerrville, deep in Texas hill country, 55 miles from San Antonio and 55 miles from L.B.J.'s spread, is the favored watering hole of local millionaires. With evening temperatures 10DEG cooler than the low lying parts of the state and, more important, a dry climate, Kerrville is highly regarded by those wanting to escape the oppressive humidity of Houston. Watered by the Guadalupe River, the site is crisscrossed with streams, verdant with cypress, oak, pecan and cottonwood. Kerr County has long been a ranching center, and the resort houses often retain the ranch-house look, but with a difference: one Houston millionaire has installed an indoor heated swimming pool in his hilltop home. For dedicated huntsmen who cannot find the time to take African safaris, there is the 115-sq. mi. Y.O. Ranch. Owner Charles Schreiner III has stocked it with imported game from all over the world: deer from Japan, aoudad rams from North Africa, antelope from India, Corsican rams and the twisted-horn eland from Africa. Since Texas game laws don't protect these exotic animals, there is no special season. For $25 a day the hunter gets clean but rustic accommodations. The animals cost extra--$275 for each animal killed, but $4,000 for an eland.
No matter whether they are perched on some lofty peak in the Rockies or nestled beneath royal palms on a Florida lagoon, the most obvious thing about today's resorts, aside from the fact that they are proliferating wildly, is that they have changed. They have adjusted to a new time and a new social structure, and this is not necessarily because, as one old shellback snorted, "The '400' has been marked down to $3.98."
Few people go to resorts any longer because it is the fashionable thing to do; they want the rest and the relaxation, the sports, or sometimes the lush or gay life a particular resort offers. Even Old Guard bluebloods are beginning to understand and adjust to the fact that the newcomers who are intruding on their little provinces are not interested in rubbing elbows with them but only in enjoying the same facilities that brought them there in the first place.
In Edgartown, on Martha's Vineyard, for example, a modest old inn fronting the harbor, which once was content to cater to old ladies, has been expanded into a large and modern apartment complex, complete with a swimming pool. Michigan's Harbor Springs, near exclusive Harbor Point, is burgeoning with motels and a large public marina that can accommodate 100 yachts at a time. Even at old Newport, many of the old, awkward and pretentious mansions are being converted into apartments for the middle-rich. Second Beach is thronged with happy daytrippers, and farther out at Third Beach, handsome homes of handsomely prosperous families have filled an area that was only beachgrass wasteland a few years ago.
The Third Beachers joke comfortably about the touted snobbishness of Bailey's Beachers, when they speak of them at all. They joke without rancor, for they breathe the same winy air, sail on the same waters, and their beach is as good as Bailey's. Maybe better.
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