Renehan: The Tangled Spirits of Exclusion, Tradition & History at Bailey's Beach
Guest MINDSETTER™ Edward Renehan
Renehan: The Tangled Spirits of Exclusion, Tradition & History at Bailey's Beach
According to student Will Farley's father, the club’s man, Chris Gleason, demanded that they move and stated that the “people at Rejects are ruining Bailey’s for the members.” Police were called to the scene. The students’ paperwork was found to be in order. In the wake of this incident, the beach club – which generally hates receiving any kind of publicity at all – received a torrent of it, all negative. Thus, rather quickly, the Board of Governors at Bailey’s reversed course, issuing a statement in which they apologized for the “misunderstanding” and gave their endorsement to the energetic industry and ambition of the young people.
This is more than appropriate, and the members of Bailey’s are to be congratulated for their albeit tardy recognition of the free market from which they have all so greatly benefited through the past 140 years or more, for such is the age of the old money involved here.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTLike the wealth behind it, Bailey’s itself is a most interesting anachronism.
One of the little-known facts about Bailey’s is the truth of just how lousy a beach it really is. The New York Times commented in 2003 that the beach itself is easily “among the least lovely on the coast of the Ocean State.” Years before that, Cleveland Amory in his 1952 book The Last Resorts noted that the beach was “by all odds, the worst.” In 1962, George Plimpton wrote of how the temperature of the water never gets into the seventies, “is commonly choked with long strands of kelp, and often sports a rich purple color which results from some bacteriological phenomenon – a true ‘wine dark’ sea.”
In a 1974 account of the typical ostentatious Newport Society summer, People Magazine had much fun with its portrait of “snobbish, kelp-choked Bailey’s Beach.” Sure, there are also some tennis courts and a salt-water pool, a rudimentary cafeteria-style eatery, and some cabanas and dressing rooms, but none of these accoutrements are in any way better or more luxurious than what you’d find elsewhere. So, what is the appeal?
People hit the nail on the head with its mocking description of “snobbish, kelp-choked Bailey’s.” When you get down to it, the only real attraction to Bailey’s (for those who love it) is its exclusiveness: the idea of “we belong, and you don’t.” This attitude is nothing new. Just like shares in the club, this outlook has been handed down through generations of some of the country’s richest families (richest in the sense of the term as it was before the advent of the new digital billionaires, when millions of dollars still seemed quite a lot).
The club’s tribal atmosphere has roots in the fact that nearly everyone’s great-grandfather seems to have founded a railroad or been a Standard Oil partner or some equivalent of these things. As well, nearly everyone has a long family tradition at Groton or St. George’s or some other aged Episcopalian prep school. In other words, what we have here are the remnants of America’s former ruling class. These are the scions of a lost age, the Gilded Age, clinging to the last vestige of that Society (with a capital S) which once dominated Newport – a pretentious culture which now, to most modern eyes, seems to have been absurd, laughable, and (quite obscenely) self-absorbed.
As noted previously, what the New York Times has called “a crescent of coarse gray sand off Ocean Drive at the terminus of the famous Cliff Walk” includes the Rejects Beach just off the property line of the club. Here peons of the rabble public can, when so inclined, sun themselves beside the same unappealing waters as club members and swim in the same kelp-swamped tide. All this happens in full view of the venerable Cushings, Slocums, Cuttings, and Drexels, thus “ruining Bailey’s for the members.”
It must, indeed, be tiring for some to have to view the huddled masses taking their leisure so close to the elite’s fortress of solitude. But such is America – even though one wonders just why anyone would swim anywhere near Bailey’s if not bound there by the tangled spirits of exclusion, tradition, and history. Nearby Easton’s Beach, after all, even has waves, not to mention a boardwalk, a carousel, an aquarium, and a grand ballroom available for events.
So, let us leave the membership of Bailey’s to their kelp and their illusions of isolated superiority. And let us congratulate them once more on their bold decision to leave three hot dog selling high schoolers alone.
*Edward Renehan has written more than 25 books and lives in Wickford. He has been a guest at Bailey’s on a number of occasions and does not expect to be invited back.
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