The Secret Beyond the Showcase Door
This year’s Pasadena Showcase House of Design was built in 1928 by Stanton W. Forsman, a handsome young Harvard graduate mining engineer who met and married Alice Pillsbury, of the Pillsbury flour family.
According to family legend, Forsman was managing a mine near Colorado Springs when Miss Pillsbury was lodging there at the Broadmoor Hotel. One day she saw Forsman ride into town and hitch up his horse. It was love at first sight.
They married and moved to California, where the Pillsburys helped Forsman get into the cardboard packaging business. They had four children. When the youngest, Fred, was 5, they built their Monterey Colonial style mansion near the Huntington Gardens. Their staff included a cook, downstairs maid, upstairs maid, governess, gardener and helper, laundress, seamstress and chauffeur. Their garage held four cars.
Evidently Forsman was something of a sportsman and social figure. Friends recall that he was an amiable, energetic and athletic man. The Forsmans often gave bridge and cocktail parties. In summer they shut the house and removed to Pebble Beach--a two-day journey in four cars filled with family, servants and little Fred’s nemesis, the governess. They spent the night at the Santa Maria Inn, taking up a quarter of its accommodations.
Evidently his parents adored little Fred. He remembers that his father used to come upstairs to tell him bedtime stories, sometimes in his tuxedo. But Fred’s life was restricted. He was barred from the living room; he took his meals in the nursery, watched over by his militant governess, except on Sundays when he ate with his family and the chauffeur made ice cream.
But Fred used to escape through his laundry chute. He crawled in and slid down to the main floor, then roamed the house, exploring forbidden rooms. On one of these escapades he went into the basement and accidentally leaned against a wall of shelves. The shelves began to swing inward. It was a secret door that opened to reveal a smaller locked door. With admirable foresight, Fred had stolen a set of keys from the apron of the upstairs maid, and he soon found a key to fit the lock.
He walked into a dank room in which he saw banks of floor-to-ceiling wine racks, filled with bottles. A smaller room was obviously a brewery. Fred had stumbled onto his father’s secret.
What fascinates me most about the Showcase Houses is the stories they give up, the glimpses into what seems from a distance to have been a more gracious way of life, but not without its black sheep and eccentrics.
Fred had two older sisters and an older brother. The sisters are dead; the older brother is a rancher. Fred lives in Nevada City, a retired schoolteacher, and it is through the determined research of Margie Lindbeck, this year’s Showcase House historian, that we have his memories of life in the Forsman mansion. If she hadn’t got the story from Fred, we might never have known about the wine cellar.
As a small boy Fred evidently was a trial to his parents and his vigilant governess. At the northwest corner of the 2.2-acre estate stands what has now become a historical landmark--the solar observatory used by the famous astronomer George Ellery Hale. Fred recalls that he used to infuriate Prof. Hall by batting small oranges with a tennis racket through the observatory’s open gate and into the compartment where the telescope stood.
When he was 10, romance came into Fred’s life. A movie company borrowed the Von Platen house, next door, as a location for the film “Bright Eyes,’ with Shirley Temple. Fred ventured onto the scene and struck up an acquaintance with Miss Temple. Miss Temple’s mother allowed her to go back to his own yard with Fred to swing with him in the Forsman swings. “I fell madly in love with her.” he recalls. “I was 10 and she was 5.”
Some time after the film company had packed up and left, Fred received an invitation from Miss Temple to attend a birthday party for her at her Hollywood studio. Naturally, he was eager to go. His parents were sojourning at their Pebble Beach house. He told his governess he was going to ditch school and go to the party. She said no. Absolutely not.
(Wednesday: A frustrated courtship; an ill-fated gambling scheme.)
