Meanwhile, Franziska played the part of Anastasia to near perfection. She often peppered her conversation with little anecdotes about life with the imperial family back in Russia. “Yes,” she pretended to reminisce at one point, “we had kokoshniki [Russian headdresses] and red costumes, I and [sister] Maria danced, we did many performances for us children, Maria and I, we always danced together.” In another conversation, while looking at a formal portrait of the Romanovs, Franziska feigned intimacy: “We were so bad, did not want to sit still. I and my brother. I still remember, Papa was so angry. Look, you can see here, he was really angry.” She was also quite adept at avoiding specific questions. There were huge gaps in her memory, she suggested, as if the horrible events she had endured had somehow shut down a part of her psyche. She made a show of agonizing while trying to remember, clenching her fists and breaking out in a sweat. They were boffo performances that left few doubting her sincerity.
One thing was certain, the imposter did not try to win support by ingratiating herself to people. Quite the opposite, actually. Imperious and rude, she often exasperated those trying to help her. In 1926 one of her most ardent supporters, an artist named Harriet von Rathlef, discovered just how nasty “Anastasia” could be while on vacation with her in Switzerland. “I can’t tell you all she’s doing to make my life miserable,” Frau von Rathlef exclaimed. “The other day she threw her stockings in my face and said ‘You are supposed to darn them! What have I got a serving girl for!?’ ” Franziska also demanded that her companion be moved out of her room and down the hall because she could hardly be expected to share a room with “her service.” This was the thanks Frau von Rathlef received for nursing the woman she thought was Anastasia and working tirelessly to advance her cause. “She’s either crazy or truly wicked,” the flabbergasted woman declared after a week of enduring “Anastasia’s” nonsense. Indeed, Franziska alienated so many people who tried to help her that it raises the question: was the imposter herself unbalanced, or just perfecting her petulant princess act? Whatever the case, her behavior only grew more erratic as time went on.
And the controversy surrounding her increased as well, especially after Harriet von Rathlef wrote a book in 1927 designed to bolster “Anastasia’s” claims and draw attention to her plight. The book was serialized in the Berliner Nachtausgabe and caused a furor. “The ‘Anastasia’ publications became the theme of all Berlin,” wrote the editor in chief of the Nachtausgabe. “And it was no different in the rest of the land. In Breslau and in Stuttgart, in Düsseldorf and in Bremen—everywhere people were asking, ‘Is Anastasia alive?’ ” Frau von Rathlef’s account was soon followed by a detailed report in the same newspaper that exposed Franziska as a fraud. But the matter was hardly settled. For those in the Russian monarchist circles already convinced Franziska was an imposter, the Nachtausgabe account was simply more evidence of that conviction. For believers, though, the newspaper exposé meant nothing. “We have often mutually observed with what fanaticism certain people have campaigned against [her],” Grand Duke Andrew, Anastasia’s uncle and one of the imposter’s few supporters within the extended Russian royal family, wrote to another true believer, Gleb Botkin, son of the physician who had been murdered with the tsar’s family.
The Anastasia mania that swept Germany was exported to the United States when Franziska arrived in 1928 to live with the real Anastasia’s second cousin Xenia, who was married to a wealthy American industrialist. The Herald Tribune called the presumed grand duchess “the reigning enigma of Europe,” and noted that the true identity of the claimant mattered little to the American public. “The mystery is too appealing,” the paper editorialized, “the hope is too dramatic. . . . The records of every social upheaval are studded with these strange, half-furtive figures, who may have been somebody or who may only have been somebody else. Were they really? Historians and enthusiasts produce their mountains of proof; but one never really knows, and one is never quite sure that one would want to.”
“Anastasia,” or Anna Anderson, as she became known,14 was the star of New York society, although she seemed to shy away from all the attention. She often retreated to her room and, as usual, made life extremely difficult for her sponsors. She was so taxing, in fact, that “cousin” Xenia finally had to dump her. “You know,” the princess confided to friends, “she isn’t normal.” That became even more evident during Franziska’s subsequent stay with a wealthy society lady named Annie Jennings. The imposter was so abusive and paranoid that she eventually had to be committed.
“Mrs. Anderson . . . has been the guest of, and supported by my sister for 18 months,” Walter Jennings wrote in the formal application for commitment to the Supreme Court of New York. “She believes attempts are being made to poison her, refuses medical assistance, spends most of her time confined to her bedroom talking to two birds. She believes my sister has stolen her property.” This was no act. It seems the imposter really was seriously disturbed, which may help explain why she was so successful. Only a crazy lady could commit to a role with such intensity for so long. And all for so little obvious benefit. Perhaps a part of Franziska Schanzkowska actually believed she was the Grand Duchess Anastasia, or wanted to be so desperately that it consumed her. “One of the most convincing elements of her personality was a completely unconscious acceptance of her identity [as Anastasia],” Princess Xenia noted. “She never gave the slightest impression of acting a part.”
Money did not appear to be the motivation for Franziska’s charade, although for some of those around her she represented a potential bonanza. Tsar Nicholas II had reportedly stashed a fortune in the Bank of England for the benefit of his daughters. If it could be proved that Anastasia was alive, she stood to inherit millions—or so it was believed. Gleb Botkin went on a mission and, in 1928, hired an American lawyer named Edward Fallows to follow the money trail. For twelve years Fallows toiled. He formed a Delaware corporation under the acronym GRANDANOR (for Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolayevna of Russia) to help fund his quest, and invited Miss Jennings’s wealthy friends to invest. He also poured his own money into the venture. He sold his home, cashed in his insurance policy, and emptied his portfolio of stocks and bonds. The effort eventually killed Fallows, his daughter claimed, and in the end not a ruble was recovered.
While poor Fallows pursued his fruitless quest, Franziska sailed back to Europe in 1931. There she lived a nomadic existence for years, until 1949 when Prince Frederick of Saxe-Altenburg settled her in a small former army barracks in the German village of Unterlengenhardt. There she lived for the next two decades, imperious and controversial as ever. During this time, two more people who had been intimately acquainted with the real Anastasia saw the imposter and offered conflicting conclusions. “I have recognized her, physically and intuitively, through signs which do not deceive,” said Lili Dehn, a friend of Anastasia’s mother. Sidney Gibbes, a tutor for the Romanov children, had a decidedly different opinion. “If she is the Grand Duchess Anastasia,” he declared, “I am a Chinaman.” Then there were those, with only Hollywood as a reference, who saw pictures of Franziska and complained that she looked nothing like Ingrid Bergman, who starred in the 1956 film Anastasia.
A legal action brought by Franziska in 1938 to contest the distribution of a small estate to Empress Alexandra’s German relatives came very close to vindicating the claimant. (It was the longest legal action in the German courts during the twentieth century, proceeding on and off until 1970.) Two expert scientists appointed by the court testified in Franziska’s favor. One of them, Dr. Otto Roche, an internationally renowned anthropologist and criminologist, compared more than one hundred photographs of Anastasia to ones of Franziska taken at the same angles and under similar lighting conditions. After a millimeter by millimeter analysis, Roche concluded that “such coincidence between two human faces is not possible unless they are the same person or identical twins. Mrs. Anderson is no one else than Grand Duchess Anastasia.” Similarly, Dr. Minna Becker, a graphologist who
assisted in the authentication of Anne Frank’s diary, compared samples of Anastasia’s handwriting with Franziska’s. “I have never before seen two sets of handwriting bearing all these concordant signs which belonged to two different people,” Becker concluded. “There can be no mistake. After thirty-four years as a sworn expert for the German courts, I am ready to state on my oath and on my honor that Mrs. Anderson and Grand Duchess Anastasia are identical.” Compelling as the evidence was, the court ultimately determined that case non liquet, neither established nor rejected. Franziska seemed unphased by the outcome. “I know perfectly well who I am,” she snapped. “I don’t need to prove it in any court of law.”
Meanwhile, as her case crawled through the German courts, Franziska’s mental health was deteriorating. She lived alone with sixty cats and banned even close friends from entering her home. When the Unterlengenhardt Board of Health objected to the conditions at her home, especially the terrible odor of animals buried in graves too shallow to mask the stench of decay, an insulted Franziska decided to take up an invitation from her old friend Gleb Botkin and come to Charlottesville, Virginia. There Botkin introduced her to a wealthy genealogist friend of his, Dr. John Manahan. The two apparently hit it off and were married in December 1968. “Well, what would Tsar Nicholas think if he could see his new son-in-law?” Manahan, eighteen years “Anastasia’s” junior, joked to Botkin.
The odd couple lived together for fifteen years in a Charlottesville home that came to resemble the dump Franziska had left behind in Germany. The yard was a jungle, while inside a large population of cats made quite a mess. Whenever one of them died, Franziska would cremate it in the fireplace. Manahan seemed happy to indulge his spouse’s eccentricities. “That’s the way Anastasia likes to live,” he explained. Perhaps his tolerance had something to do with the fact that he was growing every bit as weird as his wife. In one nine-thousand-word tract sent out as a Christmas card, Manahan accused President Franklin Roosevelt of aiding in a Marxist conspiracy to take over the world. The CIA, KGB, and the British Secret Service, he said, were all monitoring him and his wife. Delusional as he appeared to be, it was Franziska who was eventually institutionalized in 1983. During her confinement, Manahan kidnapped her and drove around Virginia’s back roads with her for three days. Police arrested them and returned Franziska to the psychiatric ward. Three months later, on February 12,1984, she died of pneumonia and was cremated the same day.
The mystery of Franziska’s identity outlived her, however. Like the lost king of France, it would take a scientific analysis of her DNA to finally close the case. Although Franziska’s body had been cremated, a Charlottesville hospital held samples of her intestine from an operation performed in 1979. After a great deal of legal wrangling to obtain a sample of the tissue, DNA extracted from it was compared to samples provided by members of the true Anastasia’s extended family, including Prince Philip, husband of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II. A series of tests finally proved that Franziska Schanzkowska was a fraud. Still it was hard for the true believers to accept.
“I knew her for twelve years,” Peter Kurth, author of Anastasia: The Riddle of Anna Anderson, told historian Robert K. Massie. “I was involved in her story for nearly thirty years. For me—just because of some tests—I cannot one day say, ‘Oh, well, I was wrong.’ It isn’t that simple. I think it’s a shame that a great legend, a wonderful adventure, an astonishing story that inspired so many people, including myself, should suddenly be reduced to a little glass dish.”
The Tower of London: escape-proof?
Part IX
ESCAPES HATCHED
The human spirit’s resistance to confinement has been manifested over time by the remarkable ingenuity and determination people have used to overcome it. Deception was a key element in many of history’s greatest escapes, some of which are recounted here.
1
A Bloody Good Ruse
The ancient rhetorician Polyaenus recorded a number of brilliant escapes in his Stratagems of War, a book he dedicated to the joint Roman emperors of the second century, Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus. One of the more imaginative concerned Amphiretus the Acanthian, who had been captured by pirates and held for ransom on the island of Lemnos. While in captivity, Amphiretus ate little food, but secretly drank a mixture of saltwater and vermilion. This potion, reported Polyaenus, “gave a [red] tinge to his stools that made his captors believe he was seized with the bloody flux.” Concerned that they would be robbed of their expected ransom money if Amphiretus died, the pirates released him from close confinement and allowed him to exercise outside in the hope that this might restore his health. The relaxed security allowed Amphiretus to slip away under cover of night, board a fishing boat, and sail back to Acanthum a free man.
In another episode, Polyaenus wrote of the tyrant Lachares, who sought to escape from Athens after Demetrius Poliorcetes captured it in 295 BC. He blackened his face to resemble a slave and slipped out of the city with a basket of coins. When a group of soldiers saw through his disguise and gave chase, Lachares was ready. He reached into his basket and tossed the coins behind him. As his greedy pursuers stopped to collect the treasure, Lachares galloped away.
2
Cross-Dressed for Success
The Tower of London has served many purposes throughout its nearly one-thousand-year history—from royal palace to zoo—but it was as a prison for enemies of the state that the famous structure acquired its fearsome reputation. Behind the Tower’s stone walls, where Jesuits were tortured on the rack and three queens beheaded on the Green, few could hope to ever find freedom again. Nevertheless, some did.
William Maxwell, the fifth Earl of Nithsdale, had his wife, Winifred, to thank for his cleverly engineered escape from the Tower in 1716. He and several other Scottish lords had been condemned to death for their role in the plot to overthrow King George I and replace him with the late Queen Anne’s half brother James. Lady Nithsdale, at home in Scotland when she received the news of her husband’s capture, immediately buried the deeds to the family property and other important documents in her garden, then set off to London in a heavy snow to plead for his life.
According to her own account, she found King George in an unforgiving mood when she met him at St. James’s Palace. Dressed in mourning, she waited in a corridor through which she had been told the monarch would pass. When he did, she threw herself at his feet and begged him to show mercy, but the king impatiently brushed her aside. Desperate, she grabbed the skirt of his coat and was dragged along the floor as he strode away. All hope now seemed lost, but still Lady Nithsdale was resolved to save her husband from a traitor’s death. And so she concocted a daring plan.
Prisoners at the Tower weren’t always consigned to dark, bone-chilling cells as they awaited their fate. Some, especially persons of rank, were given relatively comfortable rooms, where their servants could attend them and family members could visit. So it was with Lord Nithsdale. He was confined in the Lieutenant’s Lodgings (now called the Queen’s House), one of many buildings within the Tower complex where Anne Boleyn and other prominent prisoners stayed before their executions. Lady Nithsdale’s escape plan incorporated the access she had to her husband, and the relative inattention Tower guards gave to the comings and goings of women.
She enlisted four accomplices: her faithful maid Evans, her land-lords Mr. and Mrs. Mills, and a woman named Miss Hilton. On the evening before Lord Nithsdale’s scheduled execution, his wife and her companions arrived at the Tower. Lady Nithsdale left the three women outside the Lieutenant’s Lodgings while she went in and brightly announced to those gathered that her husband’s death sentence was to be reconsidered. This was meant to diffuse the high-alert atmosphere that always preceded an execution. She then entered her husband’s room on the second floor, shut the door, and immediately set about disguising him to look like Mrs. Mills, the landlady waiting outside. To achieve the effect, she gave him a red wig she had smuggled in, painted down his thick eyebrows w
ith a chalky paste, and rouged his cheeks.
When the transformation was complete, Miss Hilton entered the room wearing two coats. She removed one and, after a few moments, she left, still wearing the other. Lady Nithsdale accompanied her to the stairs, then, for the benefit of the guards, called after her to send her maid Evans to help her get ready for the presentation of the mercy petition. As Miss Hilton departed, Mrs. Mills arrived, her face buried in a handkerchief, shoulders heaving, as she pretended to sob uncontrollably for the condemned man. When she entered Lord Nithsdale’s room, she took off her long hooded cloak, gave it to him, then put on the extra coat Miss Hilton had left. Her demeanor was entirely different when she departed—dry-eyed and composed. The crushed and weeping persona Mrs. Mills had earlier affected would now be adopted by Lord Nithsdale, along with her appearance.
Everything was set; all that was needed now was an incredible amount of good luck. The couple opened the door and stepped out into the adjacent Council Room. It was filled with people gathered in anticipation of the execution the next day. Those who noticed saw that poor “Mrs. Mills” was still a mess, sobbing into her handkerchief and supported by the soon to be widowed Lady Nithsdale. The two walked through a short passage and down the stairs, at which point Lady Nithsdale loudly reminded “Mrs. Mills” to fetch her maid. She then turned around to go back to the room where her doomed husband supposedly waited, while he walked out of the Lieutenant’s Lodgings. The maid Evans met him outside, and together they headed for the Tower’s Bulwark Gate—the passage to freedom—where Mr. Mills waited with a carriage.
A Treasury of Deception Page 19