The Resurrection of the Romanovs (39 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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“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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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!”
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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.”
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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.
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Horan and the prince left convinced “that she had not understood” what Chavchavadze said.
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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.
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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.
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