The beach itself is a crescent of coarse gray sand off Ocean Drive at the terminus of the famous Cliff Walk, the shoreside path skirting the opulent chateaus erected by men known in their day as tinplate or railroad or tobacco magnates. Of the Vanderbilts and Astors, whose marble and limestone palaces along Bellevue Avenue remain the city's largest tourist attraction, there is not locally ''one living, breathing member left,'' said Eileen Slocum, a Republican Party stalwart and Newport's octogenarian doyenne. But this is not to suggest that their class is defunct. As tourists queue up along Bellevue Avenue every day awaiting admission to Gilded Age palaces turned museums, like the Breakers or the Elms, they are not likely to have much inkling that, behind the nearby hedges, there remains intact a world of emerald-barnacled dinosaurs attended by uniformed retainers and underwritten by ironclad fiduciary trusts. There are people still living in Newport who have not only never held jobs, but ''literally never met people outside their class who didn't work for them,'' said Ennals Berl, whose family owns Seaweed, a 19th-century ''cottage'' overlooking Bailey's Beach. Diversity, of course, has made scant inroads on the Newport of Bailey's Beach, whose membership profile might be defined less by who people are than what they are not. ''Jewish, yes,'' Audrey Oswald, a lifelong member replied, when asked about the club's demographic composition. ''Blacks, not really,'' Ms. Oswald added, although that is not altogether the case. Mrs. Slocum, by all accounts the reigning dowager of the resort, has grown grandchildren who sometimes visit the beach and who are biracial, the offspring of her daughter Beryl's marriage to Adam Clayton Powell III. ''Long stretches of beach are pretty for a moment, but at the end of the day they're boring,'' said Diana Sherman Oswald, whose Wetmore ancestors built the Italianate villa Chateau-sur-Mer in 1852. For Ms. Oswald, as for others, the appeal of Bailey's Beach lies in ''the fact that, no matter what happens in what I'll call the outside world, at [Bailey]'s you are in a good place, a little bit of a bubble.'' Bailey's Beach is a place where, as Ms. Oswald said, ''every face is familiar and some of the staff has been there forever, and when I see them I can give them a big hug and a kiss.''