by Greg King
“Botkin is the only friend,” Anderson rather sadly told Miliukov. “Only Botkin I trust, not any other.”13 Although Gleb regularly corresponded with her, the pair had not seen each other since 1938. That same year, he had finally abandoned established religion for one of his own making, the Church of Aphrodite. Mystical by nature, at one point in his youth Gleb had seriously considered becoming a priest; in his first book, a 1929 novel called The God Who Didn’t Laugh, he told an essentially autobiographical story of a young Russian seeking religious fulfillment and eventually turning to the cult of Aphrodite.14 Certain that men had been responsible for all of the modern world’s misfortunes, he saw his new Church of Aphrodite, over which he presided as self-appointed archbishop, as a celebration of feminine truth and an expression of hope that the horrors of the twentieth century lay behind him. It was a pagan church, certainly, with its worship of a goddess and embrace of sensuality and nature, but the Church of Aphrodite, for all of its bizarre peculiarities, was firmly rooted in the Russian sectarian tradition, drawing on rituals and beliefs inspired by that country’s Old Believers.15
In 1965, Gleb and his wife, Nadine, moved to Charlottesville, Virginia, where their daughter Marina lived with her husband, attorney Richard Schweitzer, and their children. He described his new home to Anderson in lyrical terms. “It reminds me of Tsarskoye Selo,” he wrote, “because of the many lovely Eighteenth Century buildings it contains.”16 He told her how the city nestled “in a hollow” surrounded by green mountains, and how it was filled with “friendly and well-mannered” people of mainly “British stock.”17 Slowly, surely, Gleb was laying the foundation for a suggestion that soon took concrete form: that Anderson abandon Germany and move to America—and to Charlottesville—permanently. In truth, there were sound reasons for his campaign. Convinced that nothing good would come of her remaining in the Black Forest, he was worried not only about her disintegrating living conditions and welfare but also about the financial security of a woman he adamantly believed to be Anastasia. Her supporters—her true supporters, who suffered her mercurial temperament and cared for her, who paid her bills and protected her from the world beyond Unterlengenhardt—were growing old; what she needed was certainty, an assurance that she would be looked after and provided for in her last years. People who accused Gleb of financial interests in backing her claim failed to understand just how tenuous his own situation was: often, Gleb could barely provide for his own family, his wife was seriously ill, and he himself was exhausted and in poor health. If he died, Gleb worried, who would step in and selflessly see to Anderson’s needs?
This concern led Botkin to Dr. John Eacott Manahan, a well-known and much-liked Charlottesville figure. The son of the former dean of the University of Virginia’s School of Education, Manahan, called Jack by his friends, possessed multiple degrees from the institution, a love of history, which he had formerly taught, and a passion for genealogy. More importantly, he was armed with a considerable fortune and, intrigued by the mystery of Anderson’s identity, he agreed to finance what was portrayed as an extended visit to America. Gleb once described him as “quite a bit of a tornado,” and Manahan tended to match Anderson in eccentricities.18 He dispatched regular letters to her, whose contents even she occasionally found disturbing, so enthusiastic and convoluted were his rambling missives. “Mr. Manahan,” she confided to Miliukov in 1967, “has written such a strange letter that I am afraid to go to America.”19 It took another year before Botkin finally assured her that she would be safe in Manahan’s care.
The increasingly deplorable situation at Unterlengenhardt undoubtedly eased Anderson’s decision. In the third week of May 1968, town authorities warned Prince Friedrich that the claimant would have to clean up both her chalet and its wild garden, in which Anderson had taken to burying her deceased dogs and cats in shallow graves. The smell was atrocious, and the inside of the chalet not much better. On hearing this news, though, Anderson locked everyone out of the chalet and barricaded herself inside the house, refusing to admit anyone. For three days, Prince Friedrich stood at the door, listening to her harangues as she accused him of betraying her; on the fourth day, there was no answer to his knock. Worried, he summoned the town fire department, and the door was axed open. They found Anderson on the floor, dehydrated, emaciated, and nearly unconscious. She was carried off to a hospital at Neuenburg, where she would remain in room 85 for seven weeks. During her absence Prince Friedrich swept through the chalet, which, as Ian Lilburn recalls, had “been completely devastated by her cats.” There were more than sixty of them altogether, inbred and ill, the house reeking so badly that it took a week for the smell to dissipate. Prince Friedrich had the cats put to sleep, along with Baby, the last of Anderson’s enormous and fierce dogs, and had the rotting animals in the garden dug up and carted away. By the time the smell within the chalet had faded enough for Prince Friedrich and Lilburn to work inside, they were astonished at what they saw. “It was incredible,” Lilburn remembers, “signed photographs of the Emperor and Empress, letters from the Crown Princess of Prussia, a handkerchief that had belonged to Empress Alexandra—the most extraordinary mementos scattered haphazardly about the floors, lost in a wasteland of dog and cat mess and rotting food.” Lilburn salvaged what he could, packing up boxes of Anderson’s belongings, trying to salvage the physical history of her storied life.20 When Anderson learned of all this, she deemed it to be Prince Friedrich’s ultimate betrayal, and she refused to see or speak to him for ten years.21
Jack Manahan with Gleb Botkin and Botkin’s wife Nadine, Charlottesville, 1966.
With her animals gone and the sanctity of her house, as she saw it, invaded, Anderson agreed to Botkin’s suggestion that she go to America. On July 13, 1968, accompanied by Miliukov, she very reluctantly boarded an airplane and flew from Frankfurt to Washington, D.C. It was the first time she had ever flown, and she was none too enthusiastic about it: airplanes, she told Miliukov, were “unnatural,” and she cursed them as “devils” even as she disappeared across the Atlantic.22 And it was the first time Anderson had set foot in America since being unceremoniously shuttled from the Four Winds Rest Home back to Germany nearly four decades earlier. She liked the United States, liked the people, the landscape, the national spirit, and she happily fell in with Manahan’s plans as he took her to sites in Washington, D.C., and in Virginia as the summer wore on. Soon, though, they were in Charlottesville, visiting Gleb Botkin and his family and touring Manahan’s nearby 660-acre Fairview Farm.
Anderson in America.
Anderson was happy, unencumbered by the constant pressure of having to prove that she was Anastasia, and after an initial burst of publicity documenting her arrival, the press largely left her alone. But this tranquility was shattered in August, when one of the most notorious names from Russia’s imperial past emerged from the shadows amid a deliberate glare of publicity. This was Maria Rasputin, daughter of the infamous Gregory Rasputin, who arrived in Charlottesville to meet the claimant. Maria had, at best, met Anastasia on a few isolated occasions before the Revolution, though as she told journalist Patte Barham, who had accompanied her, Anderson seemed to recall many incidents from the past, incidents that she herself had forgotten. In everything she did, Maria told Barham, Anderson reminded her of “the regal manners” of the Romanovs.23 This was somewhat less than compelling and seemed positively opportunistic when, after Anderson refused to return with her to Los Angeles to promote the recognition, Maria cynically reversed her opinion and declared that the claimant was not Anastasia.24
But the most unlikely development came that winter, when on December 23, 1968, Anderson married Jack Manahan at the Albemarle County Courthouse, in a hastily arranged ceremony proudly watched over by best man Gleb Botkin. At forty-nine, Manahan was nearly two decades younger than his new bride, but he was a millionaire and could offer her financial security. “If you ask her,” he told a reporter, “she’ll say she married me because she wanted to live in America and her six-month
visa expires.”25 This may have been true, but after decades of uncertainty, it was an arrangement that ensured Anderson would be provided for. It also brought her something else besides security: for the first time in her adult life, she had an indisputable, legally recognized name: Anastasia Manahan.
Maria Rasputin.
Had Gleb’s own health not been so poor, and his financial stability so uncertain, he might well have married Anderson himself, for he was a widower by this time, but in Manahan he had found someone willing to assume the burden of caring for her and ensuring her future. But the introduction of a third party disrupted the previously intimate relationship between Botkin and Anderson. Previously she had looked to Gleb as her most trusted adviser, someone upon whom she could rely to see to her interests; now, Manahan stepped into that position, and gradually but inevitably Botkin’s influence waned. And he had other problems as well, for throughout 1969 his health seriously declined. Just after Christmas 1969 he suffered a fatal heart attack.
There was something extremely odd yet somehow fitting in the existence that now enveloped the twentieth century’s most famous living mystery. “Mr. Jack,” confided Manahan’s butler James Price, “well . . . he just never done growed up.” As childlike as his new wife, he loved to show her off, as if she were “a sort of prize,” remembers frequent visitor Bernard Ruffin, describing her “as a barker would describe a carnival freak.”26 She and Jack divided their time between his Fairview Farm and an elegant little Palladian house on Charlottesville’s tree-shaded University Circle. Jack’s circle of friends became her circle of friends, though she was social only on her own terms, that is, infrequently, reluctantly, and often angrily if her husband pushed, for she disliked being dictated to; still, when she found herself in convivial or sympathetic company, she could be charming, head lowered, a smile on her mouth, eyes raised to take in everything around her. It was Jack who shopped for her clothes, an increasingly curious and outrageous assortment of plaid pants, polyester suits, and garishly colored plastic raincoats and hats; it was a dramatic change from the fashionable figure who had arrived in New York in 1928 with her expensive white winter wardrobe, but she seemed to no longer care about such matters. She had few interests: she “ate very little,” remembers her biographer Peter Kurth, “and usually with objections,” preferring a largely vegetarian diet. She neither smoked nor drank, though she often pressed visitors into accepting a glass of wine; her one vice was coffee, which she drank from the time she arose until she retired.27
“Anastasia!” Jack would yell. “You have visitors!” Soon enough, she usually appeared, a “striking looking old lady,” recalls Ruffin, “slender, with a beautiful, unblemished white complexion,” “thick, closely cropped hair, usually bleached blonde,” a “long, sharp, high-bridged nose,” and “beautiful, sparkling blue eyes.”28 And following in her wake was an inevitable stream of animals—several dozen cats and upward of twenty dogs, and “none of them apparently housebroken.”29 She disliked those who greeted her with shouts of “Your Imperial Highness” or referred to her as “Grand Duchess,” or even as “Anastasia.” She wanted to be called simply “Mrs. Manahan.”30 She chatted amiably if she felt her visitors wanted nothing of her; when pushed, though, she usually became angry or simply ignored the flow of questions. “What does it matter if he thinks I am not me?” she once asked of a skeptic as she ate dinner. “Who cares? Maybe I am not me. Maybe not. All I care about is let’s eat this ice cream!”31
The Manahans spoke in English, at least in the first years of their marriage. By now, after so many years of living in Germany and being surrounded by her coterie of German ladies, the claimant’s English had deteriorated, though it had never been particularly impressive. She spoke in an accent no one could accurately place, a thick, guttural flow of words peppered with anachronistic idioms and phrases haphazardly thrown together in distinctly ungrammatical sentences. Soon, though, the Manahans took to using a mixture of English and German, and then, when alone, almost exclusively German, so that her grasp of English only faded with the passing years. To Manahan, she was “Anastasia,” drawn out flatly in his genteel southern accent, while she took to calling her husband “Hans,” a diminutive of the German “Johann” or “John.”32
And of Russian there was nothing. In 1973, lawyer Brien Horan, who had become fascinated by her case, arranged for the claimant to meet Prince David Chavchavadze, son of Princess Nina Georgievna. The prince’s mother had met and rejected the claimant, while his Aunt Xenia had accepted her as Anastasia, so he was intensely curious about the frail-looking woman he now encountered. Thinking to test her knowledge of Russian, he repeated, very slowly and deliberately, the story that had been passed down in his family of how the claimant had once spoken the language accidentally, when referring to her pet parakeets. She had, in the past, clearly followed conversations in Russian, even if she elected to reply in German, but hearing Chavchavadze now she seemed completely bewildered and stared at her visitor.33 Horan and the prince left convinced “that she had not understood” what Chavchavadze said.34
At first it all seemed unlikely but interesting, this alleged grand duchess who now drove through the streets of Charlottesville with her husband. People were fascinated, but the public appearances began to devolve into startling and uncomfortable scenes. The couple were prominent figures—the most prominent figures—in Charlottesville, and though people largely left the claimant alone, it became difficult to ignore some of her more spectacular appearances. The Manahans belonged to the exclusive Farmington Country Club, and liked to dine in its restaurant, if “dine” is the correct word for what often took place, for while Jack enjoyed his meals, his wife merely picked at her food, waiting patiently for him to finish, then out came her purse, and rumpled bits of tinfoil that she spread on the table to receive the contents of her plate. Anything that was left went into her purse—treats for her cats and dogs. One Charlottesville local recalled the strange sight of this presumed grand duchess carefully pouring her tea into the saucer and then sipping it from the plate.35 Manners aside, it was her occasional outbursts that seemed to most unnerve the refined country club set; if Manahan lingered too long over his food, if he said something she disliked, if she felt that he had slighted her in any way, out came the accusations, loud, shouted insults in a mixture of English and German that had heads turning and waiters coughing uncomfortably. Eventually it all became too much for the denizens of Farmington, and the club let Jack know that it would be best if he let his membership quietly lapse.36
Reporters who came to interview the alleged grand duchess were shocked on approaching the couple’s once elegant house on University Circle: as Manahan aged and grew more eccentric, trees obscured windows, the remaining grass went uncut for years, and traps of banana peels, firewood, and sacks of garbage—set by the claimant to ward off unwanted visitors—encircled the little brick building. Other sacks of garbage had been tossed out windows or doors and left to rot.37 Two British journalists who called on the couple in 1974 described the living room as “an extraordinary muddle. In the center, incongruously, is a huge tree stump; on the walls old pictures recalling the glories of Imperial Russia contend in cramped space with bric-a-brac and childish daubings; over everything hangs the pervasive smell of cats. The balcony, which should be a pleasant place to contemplate the view, is piled high with a mountain of potatoes, which have overwhelmed their container, a large plastic bath. All this, says Manahan, is how Anastasia chooses to live.”38
And this visit took place when the house was still in relatively good condition. By the end of the 1970s, the situation at 35 University Circle had grown dangerous. “There is a great smell emanating from this property,” declared one neighbor. “The odor can only be described as a stench.”39 Manahan put up with his wife’s eccentricities: she refused to have any of her pets put to sleep, and when they died she generally cremated them herself in the living room fireplace. By 1978, neighbors reached their breaking point and swore out war
rants against the Manahans for failing to maintain “clean and sanitary premises.”40 During a hearing on the issue, Mrs. Manahan sat stiffly in the last row of the courtroom, refusing to answer questions from the judge. “Anastasia,” her husband explained, “feels she is not subject to American law.” Although Jack insisted, rather improbably, that there was nothing unsanitary about his residence, the judge fined Manahan some $1,750 and ordered that he clean up the property.41
Still the reporters came, willing to add their own chapter to this most enduring of historical enigmas. The claimant cooperated one day, only to refuse to see someone the next. “I am ill of this dirt,” she once declared. “I will not read this dirt. I am ill of the constant, constant questions.”42 To one television crew, she offered up the appropriately enigmatic: “How shall I tell you who I am? In which way? Can you tell me that? Can you really prove to me who you are? You can believe it or you don’t believe it. It doesn’t matter in any way whatsoever.”43 Things took an intriguing turn in 1976, when a book called The File on the Tsar appeared; a lengthy chapter presented the claimant’s case in a highly favorable light, but quoted her as remarking of Ekaterinburg, “There was no massacre there, but I cannot tell the rest.”44
Although she condemned the book as “a put together mess,” Mrs. Manahan seemed to adopt some theories in The File on the Tsar, including the notion that the empress and her daughters may not have been murdered in Ekaterinburg.45 Until then, she had been consistent—on the rare occasions when she could be coerced to speak of it—in repeating her story of the executions in the Ipatiev House, though the version she first gave in the 1920s took a lurid turn in her later life when she claimed that the Bolsheviks had repeatedly gang-raped the imperial family before shooting them.46 But the stories now became more bizarre. In 1976 she claimed that the imperial family had all possessed doubles, who acted for them in public on dangerous occasions, and that these unlucky actors had somehow willingly maintained a charade that led to their executions in the Ipatiev House.47 A few years later, this took an odd turn when a retired Richmond, Virginia, dentist stepped forward and claimed that his Uncle Herschel Meistroff had been Nicholas II’s double and was shot in his place.48 Hearing this, however, Mrs. Manahan dismissed it as “nonsense,” while her husband added, rather unfortunately, “No Jew would have helped the Tsar.”49