Condemned Playgrounds

THE LAST RESORTS (527 pp.)--Cleveland Amory--Harper ($5).

At the height of Newport's "Golden Age," one of the resort's hostesses gave a dinner for 50 at which the center of the table was piled with sand. Each of the guests found a small, sterling silver pail and shovel at his place. At a given signal everyone dug frantically for thousands of dollars' worth of rubies, sapphires and diamonds buried in the sandpile.

That was in turn-of-the-century days, when any millionaire looking for the shortest distance between the cash register and the social register usually made a beeline for such society resorts as Saratoga, Bar Harbor, Tuxedo Park, Southampton, Palm Beach and Newport. In those days, Society with a capital S was blissfully unaware that Taxes with a capital T would ever chase it away from its playgrounds. Nowadays, as one New-porter put it before he died in 1950: "The '400' has been marked down to $3-98."

M.C. But Not M. Proust. Wandering nostalgically over the condemned playgrounds in The Last Resorts, Cleveland (The Proper Bostonians) Amory tries to catch the flavor of their heydays. He does better as an M.C. than an M. Proust, but his gossipy barrage of light anecdotes and heavy name-dropping should delight hoi polloi and aristoi alike.

Each resort had its own tone--or tried to. Tuxedo Park was the home of the tuxedo, frosty formality, and an Autumn Ball that still kicks off New York's debutante season. Like most resorts, it was built by a millionaire with a whim of iron. In the winter of 1885-86, Pierre Lorillard V (snuff and tobacco), with the aid of $1,500,000 and 1,800 personally imported Italian laborers, turned 600,000 acres of Ramapo Hills country into a select colony of stately pleasure domes. Once a "must" among top society resorters, it is now, by comparison, a social ghost town.

Before hardening of the monetary arteries set in, Newport reared its cottages like palaces, its hostesses like monarchs, and no higher gates remained to crash, outside of heaven's. Its most famous "cottage" was Cornelius Vanderbilt's "The Breakers," now unoccupied but open to sightseers, which cost $5,000,000 and boasted 70 rooms (33 of them for servants). Newport's sauciest social queen was Mrs. Stuyvesant ("Mamie") Fish, who relished the Texas Guinan approach to guests. "Howdy-do, howdy-do," she would jabber at new arrivals. "Make yourselves at home. And believe me, there is no one who wishes you were there more than I do."

From Insteps to Step-Ins. Witty talk and romantic flirtations were supposed to be Bar Harbor's specialties. Nowadays, old-fashioned flirting is extinct, and the colony's Alice Van Rensselaer thinks she knows why: "The granddaughter of the girl who wouldn't show her instep now shows her step-ins." And so it goes. Palm Beach, Saratoga, the Berkshires. the Virginia springs--they aren't what they used to be, chants Author Amory.

From his talks with old resorters, Amory has gleaned a theory about the life cycles of the old resorts. Usually the first to come, the theory holds, were artists and writers in search of good scenery and solitude. Clergymen, college professors and other "solid people" followed them. Then came "nice" millionaires in quest of the solid people and the simple life. After them came "naughty" millionaires in search of "nice" millionaires. After them came trouble.

Author Amory feels that most resorts are in bad trouble now, but this is not a unanimous opinion. Says Meyer Davis, society's favorite bandleader: "I have bigger and better things booked . . . than I have ever had." The oldtime show of wealth is a thing of the past, he says, but the old social urges--and some of the millions--remain. "No matter who's giving the party, they all keep telling me: 'No publicity, no publicity.' It makes things very tough for me and the boys."

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