A Couple’s Medieval Majesty on the Mississippi

Once upon a time, there lived a couple in a castle on a hill. They dressed like royalty, threw big parties, slept all day and stayed up all night. They kept lions and tigers and bears in an old schoolhouse down the street.

Fantasy, you say?

Exactly, says Alan St. George, the “king” of Havencrest Castle and keeper of the faux menagerie.

His company, Facemakers Inc., turns fantasy into reality, creating elaborate costumes of animals, elves, vegetables, sports mascots--even dust mites. Whatever the customer dreams up, St. George promises, his staff can create.

St. George’s business success has allowed him and his wife, Adrianne, to indulge their penchant for make-believe at their 1901 mansion. Over two decades, they have expanded and transformed the original 23-room home into a 64-room canvas for their artistic and decorating talents.

It is adorned with stained glass, Italian marble, ceiling paintings and stucco sculpture. Images of St. George and his wife are everywhere. Oil portraits show the couple as medieval figures. Their faces appear on cherubs floating on painted clouds and on sculptures decorating the ornate library.

At extravagant dinner parties, often to benefit charities, Alan St. George mingles in a black jacket and ascot while his wife holds court in regal gowns. At other times they don royal capes and crowns.

“Reality is for those who lack imagination,” reads the motto engraved in their home.

“We kind of live like that,” St. George says.

His path to a fantasy life began in suburban Chicago, where in the early 1970s he turned his classical artist’s training and a flair for monster makeup into a career as a costume maker. He opened a small retail store in Oak Park but grew tired of the frantic, seasonal pace.

He started concentrating on mail-order sales, and business took off, allowing him more freedom to live and work wherever he chose. In 1976, after a four-state search for a suitable home and studio, he bought the mansion that would become Havencrest Castle, tucked along a wooded crest overlooking Savanna, a small Mississippi River town in northwestern Illinois. In 1989, St. George moved his business into an old elementary school a couple blocks away.

On a recent day, the three-story brick building was hushed and a little chilly as a few employees in the basement and on the first floor created costumes.

Some are standard designs, while others originate from little more than a customer’s idea, which St. George transforms into a pattern. The company offers more than 350 stock characters, with a basic padded costume going for around $500. Custom designs can cost $5,000.

A clay mold of the figure’s head is made by hand, then re-created in a fiberglass-type mixture to be durable and relatively lightweight. Sometimes a battery-powered fan is mounted inside to draw hot air through a vent in the top.

Foam rubber, spandex and fleece become the creation’s features, skin or fur. Some custom jobs use Icelandic sheepskins for horses’ manes or lions’ faces.

Production manager and “glue-gun queen” Joyce Marken attaches eyes, trims fake hair and adjusts folds of synthetic fur until she gets just the right look. She hones her craft by visiting zoos “to see how God put them together.”

Head seamstress Cathleen Letcher keeps an eye on the competition by watching television at home. “My husband is watching a game, and I’m watching the sidelines to see the mascots,” she says.

Over the years, Facemakers’ costumes have ranged from the famous (Smokey Bear) to the obscure (Miss Organic Soybean).

The company itself is not very well known in its own blue-collar town, where the Savanna Army Depot is the biggest employer.

The same might be said for the St. Georges. They are rarely seen about town, in part because of their night-owl schedules. The couple find they are most creative at night, so they frequently sleep by day.

In certain circles, however, they are the life of the party.

Adrianne St. George stars as the “Queen of Cold” in a children’s video that the couple wrote, produced and shot at the castle using their own costumes, worn by players from the local theater troupe they founded. They also hope to parlay their party-throwing skills into a new business venture by playing hosts for weddings and other special events with themes like “fairy tale feast.”

“We care about the world,” St. George says. “But our reality is different.”