On Set with “The Gilded Age”

Carrie Coon as Bertha Russell and Nathan Lane as Ward McAllister in a scene filmed at the International Tennis Hall of Fame. Photo by Alison Cohen Rosa/HBO.

With its meticulously maintained architecture and original pedigree as one of Newport’s premier social institutions, it’s no surprise the International Tennis Hall of Fame was one of several venues around the city that appears in HBO’s “The Gilded Age.” The characters visit the property in the first season and are seen promenading and playing tennis on what’s known today as the Horseshoe Piazza. It’s a scene straight from a photograph in the museum’s collection, with one notable difference: The piazza, not quite a regulation-size court, was not set up for tennis until later in the club’s history. “Historically, [it] would have been a fountain,” says Nicole Markham, curator of collections for the International Tennis Hall of Fame. “The championships they were filming would have been played at the back of the property.” Crews returned to Bellevue Avenue last summer to film season two of the show. Rumor has it the Newport Casino makes another appearance, this time for an evening social event. “They completely transformed it,” says Megan Erbes, the hall of fame’s director of communications. “The amount of flowers they had in here was insane.”

The former Newport Casino serves as a period-appropriate backdrop in “The Gilded Age.” Photo by Alison Cohen Rosa/HBO.

Set in Stone

Newport has one advantage over its peers when it  comes to filming picture-perfect movies and TV shows set during the Gilded Age: The historic landscape and properties are almost entirely preserved as they existed more than a century ago.

That sense of traveling back in time is the result of careful, years long efforts by two women, both born at the end of Newport’s Gilded Age and determined to maintain its splendor for future generations. Katherine Warren, an art collector and socialite with a residence in Newport, founded the Preservation Society of Newport County with her husband, George; while Doris Duke, the famous heiress of Rough Point, devoted the final decades of her life to preserving Newport’s history through the Newport Restoration Foundation.

Doris Duke at Rough Point. Photo courtesy of Duke University Library.

“It’s very rare to find in this day and age a place that has so much historic character and structures still existing,” says Kristen Costa, senior curator at the Newport Restoration Foundation. “It changed the way that Newport was able to market itself and bring tourism in and become a place that people wanted to come to to learn about the past.”

By the 1940s, many of the city’s mansions had been sold off or fallen into disrepair. The downtown area was in the early stages of an urban renewal effort that would fundamentally change the city’s streetscape, removing blight but also reconfiguring neighborhoods that dated back to Colonial times.

Enter Warren, who, upon learning the eighteenth-century Hunter House was slated for demolition in 1945, organized a small group of citizens to purchase the house for the purpose of preserving it. For the next three decades, Warren led the Preservation Society in acquiring and restoring the historic mansions of Bellevue Avenue one by one. In the early years, the society offered tours of the Breakers by arrangement with the Vanderbilt family that still owned it to fund their restoration projects.

Katherine Warren. Photo courtesy of the Preservation Society of Newport County.

“It’s amazing to think back in 1947, the numbers of people who came to Newport to see the Breakers even though it was only fifty-plus years old,” says Trudy Coxe, executive director of the Preservation Society.

Twenty years later, Duke would follow in Warren’s footsteps, founding the Newport Restoration Foundation in 1968. Whereas the Preservation Society came to focus primarily on Gilded Age mansions, the Newport Restoration Foundation committed its efforts to saving the Colonial structures in danger of falling to the push for modernization. For twenty-five years, she used her personal fortune to purchase and restore more than eighty properties around Newport’s downtown.

“For the most part, everything is almost exactly as Doris Duke wanted it. She picked out paint colors, she decided layouts, she worked with a great team of architects,” Costa says.

Today, the two organizations own a large swath of historic Newport with the goal of keeping the homes — and the stories of the people who lived in them — alive for a new generation to enjoy.