The Resurrection of the Romanovs (32 page)

Anna Anderson, with Prince Friedrich of Saxe-Altenburg, on the day she moved into her converted barracks at Unterlengenhardt.

Not until 1949 did Anderson finally obtain a home of her own. This was a single-story, ramshackle hut formerly used as a barracks by German soldiers, a few miles outside of the Black Forest village of Unterlengenhardt near Bad Liebenzell. Purchased and given to her by a supporter, this required extensive repairs before it could be occupied, and limited finances meant that only one room could be heated, but for the first time the woman whose claim had captivated the world had some measure of personal security. She quickly set about turning this haphazard assemblage of rooms into her own zealously guarded miniature kingdom: windows were boarded up to preclude the possibility that she could be spied upon; a tall batten-board and chain-link fence topped with barbed wire that shielded the compound from the adjacent road arose; and, in a final effort to protect her privacy, she adopted four immense wolfhounds, christened with unlikely names such as “Baby” and “Naughty,” and set them loose to patrol the grounds.
41
Within, a succession of elderly aristocratic keepers and friends, including Baroness Monica von Miltitz and Frau Adele von Heydebrandt, cared for her daily needs, and Baron Ulrich von Gienath took charge of her financial affairs.
42
It was a curious place: although one supporter had presented Anderson with an impressively carved bed that had once belonged to Queen Victoria’s family, she refused to sleep in it. The bed was given over to her dogs and to an ever-increasing swell of cats, while the claimant slept on a sofa in her sitting room, whose walls were adorned with portraits of Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra. There was clutter everywhere: piles of unopened and unanswered letters from the curious public; stacks of magazines and newspapers; dangerously uneven stacks of books that swayed on the uneven floor; and mountains of discarded clothing heaped upon bags of debris that eventually seeped out and permeated the little house with a rank odor.
43
Within a decade, the hut had become a health hazard, and a new, prefabricated chalet was erected nearby for the claimant in 1960. Soon enough it, too, had become a crowded repository for the flotsam and jetsam of her fabled life.

The new chalet at Unterlengenhardt into which Anderson moved, 1960.

Visitors to the hut at Unterlengenhardt were never welcomed and rarely let inside, even when they were the claimant’s most dedicated supporters. “Although the interest of the people was mostly friendly and curious,” recalled Baroness von Miltitz, “they began to throng around her. Thousands of sightseers invaded our little village, anxious for a glimpse of the ‘mysterious Grand Duchess.’ Many motorists disregarded the sign outside the entrance forbidding traffic on this part of the road, and large buses came full of passengers who got out to stare at her grounds. They climbed trees, pressed against the fence, tried to vault the gate, peered through gaps in the hedge, threw stones, whistled, and called for her to come out.”
44

Anderson in her garden at Unterlengenhardt.

They came—and would continue to come—because by this time, Anna Anderson was indeed a living legend, her claim an enigma promoted or denounced in numerous books and even motion pictures. The first film had come in 1928, during her stay in America, a sixty-minute silent feature produced in Hollywood and called
Clothes Make the Woman
. Starring Eve Southern as a surviving Anastasia, this followed Anderson’s tale only as far as the execution and her alleged rescue by a sympathetic soldier; more interested in appealing to imagination, the film then spun off into a true Hollywood twist, with a surviving Anastasia off to Los Angeles to portray herself in a new movie about her family’s murder.
45
That same year brought a German production,
Anastasia: Die Falsche Zarentochter
(
Anastasia: The Tsar’s False Daughter
), apparently rushed onto screens to take advantage of the publicity over Rathlef-Keilmann’s book and the press furor over the claimant, and two more films followed in the 1930s:
Secrets of the French Police
, which offered up a poor Parisian flower girl as the victim of a sinister Russian general attempting to pass her off as the grand duchess, and
Kampf und Anastasia
, an unlikely German comedy short very loosely based on Anderson’s tale.
46

Anderson at Unterlengenhardt.

The story fell victim to the more pressing concerns of the Second World War, but in 1954 it returned with a renewed and persistent vengeance that would last for the rest of her life. It all began with a play, a simple, three-act piece by French writer Marcelle Maurette titled
Anastasia
. The plot was straightforward: an amnesiac young woman named Anna is rescued from a suicide attempt in Berlin by a former White Russian general, Prince Sergei Bounine, who plans to fill her head with tales of the imperial family and pass her off as a surviving Anastasia to gain access to the Romanov fortune. Soon the destitute Anna is transformed into a woman of regal bearing, with a sure command of Anastasia’s life, including facts she seems to recall spontaneously. When meetings with former courtiers and aristocrats produce no definitive opinion, Bounine convinces Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna to receive his protégée. In the play’s emotional highlight, Anna casually recalls a terrible storm during a cruise aboard the imperial yacht; it is enough for the dowager empress, who embraces the young woman as her lost granddaughter.
47

Anderson at Unterlengenhardt.

Guy Bolton translated and adapted the play, and Sir Laurence Olivier’s London production premiered to great acclaim; soon
Anastasia
moved to New York City, and a successful Broadway run with Viveca Lindfors as Anna and Eugenie Leontovitch as Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna. The public was again fascinated by the story, and Hollywood, quick to recognize the romantic potential in the mysterious story of a lost princess, announced plans for a major motion picture. Hearing this, Dr. Kurt Vermehren, one of Anderson’s lawyers, took the unprecedented step of negotiating with a German studio and director Falk Harnack to produce a rival film on the claimant’s life.
Anastasia: Die Letze Zarentochter
(
Anastasia: The Last Tsar’s Daughter
) abandoned the fictional premise of Maurette’s play, offering a narrative history of the story that included such real-life characters as Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, Harriet von Rathlef-Keilmann, Clara Peuthert, the duke of Leuchtenberg, and Gleb Botkin. Her performance as Anna Anderson won Lili Palmer a Best Actress Award at the 1957 Berlin Film Festival, but within a few months of its release it sank into obscurity, dwarfed by the steamroller that was Twentieth Century-Fox’s 1956 Technicolor epic
Anastasia
.
48

Anderson, in the wild garden surrounding her chalet, surrounded by her dogs.

Starring Helen Hayes as the dowager empress, Yul Brynner as Bounine, and Ingrid Bergman in the title role, Anastasia was a lavish, $3 million rendering of the Maurette-Bolton play, as much an unlikely love story between the claimant and her muse as it was the story of her struggle for identity. The film, which gave Bergman her second Best Actress Oscar, was an enormous sensation; even Olga Alexandrovna enjoyed it, deeming the movie “well done and quite exciting.”
49
Exciting it certainly was for most people, and once again the narrow lanes of Unterlengenhardt were overrun with curious tourists, whose buses whisked them past Anderson’s ominous-looking compound to shops stocked with books on the Romanovs, pictures of the claimant, and even postcards of her little residence labeled “Anastasia Haus.”
50
When two men arrived from
Life
magazine, Anderson—in exchange for a small fee—reluctantly granted an interview and posed for photographs in her impossibly crowded sitting room, but she found the experience disturbingly intrusive. The men, she complained, had been “like mice in every corner,” poking through her hut and constantly asking her to smile for their pictures.
51