“Bailey’s On The Rocks” - Marc Sorensen Leandro

“Bailey’s On The Rocks” - Marc Sorensen Leandro

The day after my eleventh birthday in 1982, I started attending a fancy private school in Newport. The year before my mother had noticed me getting good grades with little effort, and worried that public school was boring me. Then she ushered me through the application process and managed to secure the financial aid that would make it feasible on her teacher’s salary. I remember meeting the headmaster in his clubby, wood-paneled office, and thinking he looked as if he’d exited the birth canal wearing a bow tie.

Up to that point. I’m not sure I'd ever been in spitting distance of a Republican, so tenuous was my connection to the New England WASP elite. Many of my new schoolmates seemed exotic, like pastel-toned caricatures shaken from the pages of the recent hit paperback The Preppy Handbook. I can still feel the ripples of stunned silence when I casually mentioned to the carpool mom one morning that Ronald Reagan should be called Reaganhood, because he stole from the poor to give to the rich.

A different kid might have entered this rarified world and decided that it would never be his. But I was open and uncynical, and wedged my way into my new reality. The social construction at St. Michael’s Country Day was sink or swim, because with each class totaling less than 15 people, you were either popular or you were set upon. I can still hear the muffled screams of a new arrival who landed, arbitrarily, on the wrong side of that divide. He was labeled an outsider, and one day at recess he was piled on with so many bodies, with such male juvenile ferocity, that his radius snapped like a cracker. I was lucky to have found my way early on. It’s not like I was athletic, or rich, or had Mayflower ancestry to fall back on, after all.

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St. Michael’s was where I first heard about Bailey’s, the colloquial name of the old WASPy Newport beach club whose real name, perfectly, is the Spouting Rock Beach Association. I was invited once or twice with friends, and was struck by how cold it felt, and how even though I wasn’t given to feeling like an outsider, I seemed to be wearing a sign on my back that blared “I don’t belong here.” And I’m exclusively of European descent.

It wasn’t until years later that the racist rumors made their way to me. One rumor was that a cocktail was available at the bar - said to be a favorite of JFK’s - called Ni%$er Toes. It was served in a coupe-style glass, I was told, with a frothed egg white on top that was finished with stripes of dark liqueur in a distinctive pattern. Another rumor, which I’ve heard at least 50 times, is that at some point in the 1970s, the large swimming pool that serves as the centerpiece of the clubhouse was drained after an African man swam in it, and then re-filled. He was a diplomat of some kind, is what I heard. Again, these are rumors, and an institution should not be judged by rumors.

But what of the undeniable reality of today’s Bailey’s? Like just this week, when Rhode Island and then national news ran with a story about Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s membership at the club? Caught off guard by a question from a local Providence reporter, Senator Whitehouse said that Bailey’s was a “family club” and that such clubs, which lack diversity in any meaningful sense of that word, are “common in Rhode Island” Later, the Senator’s staff later tried to clean that up by saying he’d meant to say that “family clubs” are common, not restricted clubs.

What I wonder is why the Senator wasn’t prepared for this question? His membership came up a few years ago, and at that time he said he’d be giving it up. Then, he apparently transferred his shares to his wife, in a bumbling attempt to have it both ways by making himself technically not a member. But I think the larger reason is that his caste - the High WASP - feels in their bones an entitlement to live just as their fathers and father’s fathers and father’s father’s fathers did, albeit in a more cloistered “modern” way. For me, this isn’t about politics. I think Sheldon Whitehouse is about as smart and hard-working and compassionate a politician as this country has, and Rhode Islanders are lucky to have him as their Senator. But at what point do personal decisions reflect so poorly on a person that one must start to think differently about them?

Just Wednesday, in response to a fire they hope to douse before it hits 4 alarms, the Spouting Rock Beach Association released a rare statement that “we do not discriminate against any race, religion, or ethnic background when it comes to our membership process or to the hiring of our staff – I can assure you that there is no one on our Board of Governors who would ever tolerate such an offensive practice.” I can assure you that that is a particularly poor piece of public relations. Because the club also said that privacy concerns prevented them from releasing any information that might back up their woke boilerplate with actual demographics. I can only imagine that if there were even one Black or Latino shareholder member, the pressure for that person to come forward and publicly defend the club would have been white-hot. No one has come forward. The club also used the same phrase Senator Whitehouse did; it’s a “family club.” It is. It’s a club either entirely or nearly entirely populated by families who are white and whose fortunes generally go back many generations, to a time when their balance sheets undoubtedly benefited from the free labor of enslaved people, directly or indirectly. So it’s a family club of rich white people who don’t want rich black or brown people to dilute their culture. Of racial exclusivity. Simple. 

I heard this week about how a member told a non-member friend that it’s so wonderful to be able to go to Bailey’s in the summer and see many generations of her family, and other families her family has known forever. And what a family-and-fun-hating jerk one would have to be to deny her that. But then, this isn’t a family club like the YMCA is a family club. To review, it’s a club of rich white people who don’t want rich Black or Brown people to join their club. Still simple.

If Bailey’s were located on a private island off of South Carolina, I’d probably be annoyed but unsurprised. But what makes this week’s controversy so hard to process is that at least a portion of the club’s current membership surely consider themselves committed progressives. I’d be unsurprised if among the younger set there aren’t even a few Bernie fans. But how does one square those beliefs with the reality of membership in a club that is restricted in fact, if not in by-law? How is it okay, after last summer, and the reckoning that has unfolded in this country about race, that those who espouse a vibrant, modern inclusive liberalism can talk that talk yet hold themselves harmless in their deeds, because, well it’s just a “family club”?

At an elite primary school, outsiders are identified and sometimes their arms are snapped and then they leave the school. But by the time the arm-breakers are adults, unmistakably situated atop the heap, there is no need for outsiders at all, much less having to hear their screams. They are erased entirely, so the anointed can swim in their pools and drink their drinks, undisturbed by the changed world outside the gates.

Marc Sorensen Leandro is a California-based writer who was a contributor to Huffington Post from 2012-2016, and has contributed to Out Magazine, American Circus, and others. He is currently working on a memoir.