A Pilgrim’s Digression

While recounting the details of our New England adventure, I left out one day remarkable for a detour that went terribly…well. I’ll bet you thought I was going to say “terribly wrong,” didn’t you?

Our whole trip seems like a detour in retrospect. I’m not sure we did more than a couple things we planned to do, in the beginning. For example, we did not visit Salem–we are saving that for next time–but we did visit Gillette Castle.

What is Gillette Castle, you ask? Is it the mansion of the Gillette razor magnate, King C. Gillette? Is it the Connecticut home of magician and exposer of hoaxes, Penn Jillette?

No, Gillette Castle is the one time home of actor William Gillette, famous in the first decades of the 20th century for his portrayal of Sherlock Holmes.

We discovered the house quite by accident. On our way from Hartford, Connecticut, to Warwick, Rhode Island, Sunday morning, we started seeing signs for an attraction called “Gillette Castle.” What’s that? We wondered. I feared the worst, thinking razor blades. Thinking hyperbolic, Age of Innocence-era grandeur.

Lynn looked it up in the guidebook, and upon informing us of the truth, we decided to take a side trip and see it. On the same stretch of Connecticut highway, there was also a sign for the Nathan Hale Schoolhouse, as well, so I figured if Gillette castle proved to be a bust, or closed on a Sunday, we could always do something else. Or worst case, get back on the road to Warwick, having lost only an hour or so.

Gillette Castle proved to be something of a rare treat, however: a remarkable architectural wonder with a great story behind it, little visited by tourists but definitely worth seeing.

Gillette built it using his sizable income from his stage portrayal of Sherlock Holmes. Apparently, his career in theater was on the rocks, with his advancing age and the advent of film, and so Gillette wrote to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and asked if he might portray Doyle’s character on stage, in a play that Gillette himself omposed based on Doyle’s stories (he had often written and produced his own plays, during his life). Doyle granted his permission, and Gillette went on to make quite a pile of money, travelling the world as the erstwhile fictional detective. With that income he built his home, Gillette Castle, in Hadlyme, Connecticut, on a hill overlooking the Connecticut river.

The hills surrounding the home were called the Seven Sisters, and the castle was built on the seventh of the seven sisters, so officially, Gillette called his home the Seventh Sister. But unofficially, it is known just as “The Castle,” or alternatively, “Gillette Castle.”

As much as I have drifted away from my early interest in literature, there remains enough of the Kafka devotee in me to take pleasure in the following picture. Lynn snapped this of me at the visitors center, on the road to the Castle.

Later, I took some pictures of the exterior of the structure. No pictures were allowed inside. As you can see from this shot, the place looks more like an old English ruin than a house. Indeed, the house was apparently designed after an old Norman castle which, today, probably is a ruin. But Gillette Castle is no ruin. Even up close, it is a wonder.

The castle consists of 24 rooms with 47, “puzzled hand-carved locks,” each one unique and designed by Gillette himself. He hung a series of mirrors in the main room, leading up to his study and bedroom, so that he could see who was at the door. The tour guide said this was so that if he did not want to see a visitor, he could send a servant down to say the “master” was indisposed or not at home.

Gillette loved trains, as well, and constructed his own personal small-gauge train for ferrying passengers and materials from the main road to the castle. The light switches inside the castle are wooden levers designed to look like the switches on an electrict train set. There are more personal touches such as those throughout the house, design features I have never seen anywhere else. For example, the dining room table was on a track so that it could be retracted when the meal was over. An alarm system built into the track alerted servants to the end of the meal, so they knew when to come clear away the dishes. Even the locks on the windows were a elaborate, wooden peg and groove locks that Gillette himself designed.

In the rear, facing the Connecticut river, is the conservatory and garden.

I could not get a good shot of the river from the bluff of the Seventh Sister, due to some construction, but trust me, the view was lovely. I am sure Gillette would not have built there, had it been otherwise.

After the tour, in discussing it with Lynn, she made the claim that she thought Gillette was gay. Apparently, her gay-dar had gone off several times during the tour.

Gillette’s wife died after being married for only six years; he never remarried. He loved cats. Besides acting, he poured his energies into interior decorating and design. He had a Japanese man-servant who “serviced” Gillette for more years than he was married to a woman, the servant outliving him and spending his remaining years in a home on a piece of land given to him by Gillette. The only child to ever spend time at Gillette Castle was his young niece. Rumors spread about Gillette’s philandering with women, but Lynn said Gillette probably spread the rumors himself, to avoid suspicion.

Perhaps most “damning” of all the evidence is that Gillette embroidered his own linens with his personal seal. An actor, playwright, an interior decorator, and an expert embroiderer…maybe times were different back then and every man knew how to embroider. Or maybe not.

After Gillette Castle, we drove into Haddam, Connecticut, a nearby town where we had lunch and visited a gift shop. We ate one of our best meals here in this quaint little town, at an Italian restaurant called La Vita Gustosa.

Sort of as a joke, Lynn snapped this picture of me cutting into my chicken parmesan. It was easily the best I have ever had. I only wish I could have had a glass of white wine with it. I was driving, however, and remembering how knackered I got on one glass of wine in Minneapolis, back in May, I restrained myself from drinking this time.

The origin of the “joke” in this picture is that seven years ago, we travelled to Paris with a good friend, and she was so amazed by the foods she was eating that she took a picture of every meal she ate.

All in all, one of the best, and best tasting, detours I have ever made while on vacation.