The Junior Phils’ Many Mansions

She’ll admit it, she had wanted to make a splash the year she took over that annual benefit. For ages, it had been just this humdrum casino night, socialites dabbling at blackjack at the old Hotel Green.

She was Mrs. David (Joan) Stewart in those days, the days when Goldwater was running for president and the Beatles were debuting on the “Ed Sullivan Show”--the days when a young Pasadena matron with energy to burn either redid the living room or turned to volunteer work. If she’d known she’d end up an international businesswoman by the time she reached middle age, she’d probably have done something easy, like get a job.

Instead the new benefit chairwoman of the Pasadena Junior Philharmonic Committee put on her thinking chapeau and asked, “What would excite people like me?”

Old money, she thought. Decorating. Chintz.

Thus was initiated the Pasadena Showcase House of Design, a strange, extravagant--and wildly successful--seasonal phenomenon that in 32 years has evolved from a diversion for ladies-who-lunch into the mother of all Southern California house tours.

Each spring, the Junior Phils, as they are colloquially known, unleash a battalion of interior designers on a private mansion and then display the make-over to the ticket-buying public for charity.

It is an endeavor that is by turns bizarre, anachronistic and gorgeous, part haut monde shindig, part looky-loo’s paradise. Nowhere else, except maybe the freeway, are the rich and the rabble so likely to intersect as when the bejeweled docents mass on the front steps of the chosen showcase estate.

But growth breeds growing pains, and over time, the little fund-raiser-that-could has become nothing less than a commercial juggernaut: Last year’s attendance hit 43,000, enough people to overflow the Forum twice. So many people now show up that TicketMaster handles admissions, and visitors have to park at the Rose Bowl and take shuttles in and out.

Mansion owners sidle up to the Junior Phils, wondering if their estates might make the cut for selection as a showcase house. Hungry real estate agents proffer hard-to-sell mega-homes and run-down manors, anxious to capitalize on the foot traffic and the free make-over that are the upside of the showcase ritual.

Designers crowd the pre-showcase cattle call to bid on the key rooms; a good impression in, say, the master bedroom can make a career. When the owners of last year’s showcase sold the house, the designer who had scored the living room was hired by the new owners to redo the entire place--all 12,000 square feet of it. The sponsors did well, too--the event netted nearly $700,000 for the Los Angeles Philharmonic and music programs in the schools.

In fact, the showcase has become so popular that, for the first time in recent memory, the neighbors have petitioned City Hall with concerns about its “environmental impact.”

“Oh, we’re quite hostile about it, actually,” said 73-year-old Robert Shufeldt, who lives in a big white house across the street from the Tudor manor that is the site of this year’s event. “If they really want to do something, why the hell don’t they take care of the people under the bridges? Who the hell has a house like that to decorate anymore, anyway?

“The crux of my contention,” he went on, “is that they choose to describe this as a cultural event, which it isn’t. It’s a business run by a bunch of overgrown Junior Leaguers. And they expect to bring 45,000 people through the place this year.”

The Junior Phils retort that their benefit underwrites one of the nation’s premier orchestras and pumps money into music education at a time when it is being cut in the schools.

But, they acknowledge, Shufeldt does have one point.

“It is a business,” agreed Fran Biles, the San Marino insurance executive’s wife who has undertaken the herculean task of helming the showcase this year. Around her, on the emerald lawn of this year’s enterprise, platoons of gardeners staggered under big sacks of mulch. The front entry bore a long list of chores, divided into three parts. Morningish, Afternoonish, Eveningish, the headings read.

Biles shouted over the din of a hundred hammers and lawn mowers and drills.

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“I work seven days a week and 24 hours a day,” the middle-aged homemaker said stoutly, adjusting one gold button earring with her manicured fingertips.

To understand the mystique of the Pasadena Showcase--and design showcases in general--one must know some of the history, aficionados say. House tours have been held no doubt as long as people have had houses, but the showcase house is a fairly young phenomenon.

“The history of interior decorating and design probably dates back 100 years,” said Jody Greenwald, a historian and former director of the interior and environmental design program at UCLA extension. “But the mass interest in it really did not arise until after the end of World War II.”

During the Depression, she said, the vast majority of Americans were too preoccupied with the economy to spend much money refining their homes. The 1940s found them consumed with war, but with the 1950s came prosperity and new beginnings.

“The parents of what would become the baby boom generation saw a need to establish homes that were lovely, easy to maintain and that would be centered for family life, and they didn’t know how to go about it,” Greenwald said.

To fill that void, demonstration projects began to crop up, from model homes emphasizing the utility of newfangled electrical appliances to magazine-sponsored tours of the newly invented California ranch house. At the same time, Greenwald said, a new wave of professional interior decorators and designers arrived on the scene--talented set designers who were branching out, in part due to shifts in the movie industry in Hollywood.

It was only a matter of time before the two trends met to yield the first showcase house, which appears to have been in a posh Bay Area suburb in 1958. A branch of the San Francisco Junior League in affluent Hillsborough had toured a historic home in which a few decorators had gilded one or two corners, and the members decided to try the concept on an entire house to benefit the Coyote Point Museum.

“In those days, everybody was doing their houses or buying their first houses and having them done,” said Polly Taylor, a longtime museum trustee from San Mateo. “And a lot of women were interested in that business. Women were not in the work force then, but a part-time job as an interior designer was a sort of alternative.”

Fueled by the ardor of real and wannabe designers and by an ample stock of grand Bay Area estates, the Hillsborough group refined the labor-intensive art of staging a showcase. As most groups now do, its members would scour the neighborhood for a mansion that was either up for sale, in probate or, as one Hillsborough matron gently put it, “in need of some glamorizing, if you know what I mean.”

Then they would persuade the owners to vacate the premises for six months, on the promise that the owners would be able to keep any upgrades made to the walls, carpets or infrastructure of the house, and would get deep discounts and first dibs on any of the furnishings donated by suppliers for the event.

Designers would be called in to bid on the rooms; each room would be decorated by a different hand. The house then would be used to display a sort of continuing fashion show of interior design, and as a plush setting for assorted ancillary fund-raisers, bazaars and teas.

By the early 1960s, word of the new charity concept had traveled down the coast to high society circles here. In 1964, the Junior Phil showcase--the nation’s second--was launched. Together, the two endeavors became national models, in part because they were no-lose: The mansion owners got tens of thousands of dollars worth of property improvements either for free or at a nominal price; the designers got weeks of valuable exposure, and the volunteers got tons of money for their favorite charity.

The public, as it turned out, was wild to see the insides of the area’s ritziest homes and the cutting edge of interior design--the newest kitchen appliances, the most lavish bedroom suites, the dining room tables tricked out in so much Tiffany crystal and silver that round-the-clock security guards had to be posted at the doors.

There was always the chance the homeowner could end up with a few Decorating Don’ts--purple ceilings, for instance, or rooms papered entirely in red plaid. But even now, homeowners who can afford to hand over their estates for the duration of a showcase tend to see them as a good deal.

“Hell, they’re going to spend four or five hundred thousand dollars doing this house,” said Marshall Morgan, the Pasadena attorney who let the Junior Phils use his mansion this year after trying in vain to sell the place. This is the second time he has allowed his estate to be used as a showcase--the first was 21 years ago, shortly after he bought the property.

Eventually, the Hillsborough showcase would collapse, a victim of its own success: Hillsborough officials slapped it with a ream of untenable restrictions after the museum auxiliary trooped 75,000 people in to see the Carolands-Chateau Remiollard mansion and the overrun neighborhood rebelled.

But the Pasadena Showcase has lived on, its organizers touting it as “the longest continuing showcase in the United States” even as local designers bemoan the creeping commercialism that has seeped into the benefit over the years.

“It was my first big benefit,” recalled the now-ex-Mrs. Stewart, whose success in the showcase helped inspire her later career as a partner in an international golf course management company.

She is now retired, remarried and living in Sun Valley, Idaho, under her new name, Joan Price Anawalt, but she still sounds tired when she talks about her showcase years. All that work--the lobbying of suppliers and designers, the locating of the vacant San Marino mansion in which it was held, the whipping into shape of the antic Junior Phils. (“Nice gals, but not people who were used to working very hard,” as she recalled.)

“Let me tell you,” she laughed, “after that, going to work was a breeze. I’ll never forget my first committee--one woman had a hysterectomy, another got divorced and a third had a child who had a major accident. But when things got bad, there was always someone there to say, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll do it for you.’ ”

In the years since, the design house concept has spread nationwide. There are now so many showcase houses in the Bay Area alone that charities there have carved up the area among themselves to avoid poaching on each others’ donor pools.

There are showcases so big--the sumptuous Manhattan showcase to benefit the Kip’s Bay Boys and Girls Club, for example--that glossy coffee table books are published about them. Others spotlight celebrities. There’s a showcase this season in Greer Garson’s old Bel-Air estate. Even the late Lyle Alzado’s 22-room house on the Palos Verdes Peninsula was once used for a showcase.

In Southern California, where so many hearts are so entwined with so many pieces of property, the showcase has found a breeding ground so fertile that design houses have cropped up even in communities not famed for their stately manors and practitioners of interior design.

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There have been showcases in ranch houses in rural Ventura, in old Colonials in Upland, in beach homes in the Pacific Palisades and in brick-and-shingle landmarks in Whittier. Designers talk about cutting their teeth on the 6-year-old Orange County Philharmonic Society showcase before “making the next step up” to Pasadena, and joke about the long, slow climb up the pecking order of design homes.

“We went to a showcase house once in Newport Beach, and well, I can’t even discuss it,” a Los Angeles County decorator confided in hushed tones. “The woman who took us through couldn’t even pronounce chinoiserie.”

The decorator paused. “Oh, well. There’s a lot of money in Orange County now--new money,” she finally sniffed. “But as a client once told me, ‘Nothing wrong with new money, dear. After all, it’s paying your bills.’ ”

There is something intriguing in the popularity of showcases so long after the passage of the cultural currents that created them. Showcases in general require hundreds of volunteer hours at a time when most women hold jobs, and no longer have time to spend, say, an entire afternoon pruning the roses on someone else’s fence. They also require big estates whose owners don’t mind having strangers troop through, and people who will pay cash for the chance to poke around a swanky manse.

Theoretically, all these things should be in short supply--volunteerism is down, mansions are increasingly being sold to privacy-loving foreigners and, in this era of downsizing and corporate greed, people aren’t feeling all that warm and fuzzy toward the rich.

Yet the trend remains popular. Record crowds are expected when the Pasadena Showcase opens Sunday. It runs through May 19.

“I think showcases speak to the magic in people--at least, in people who love homes,” said Virginia Knight, who teaches residential interior design at UCLA. “Even in smaller homes, it speaks to a part of your soul.”

Adds designer Logan Brown: “People love to snoop through other people’s houses.” He chuckled. “I mean, seriously. Don’t you?”