The Resurrection of the Romanovs (40 page)

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 warrants 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

Soon, though, even this peculiar theory was eclipsed when Mrs. Manahan related that none of the Romanovs had been killed; instead, she insisted, they had all escaped from Russia to Warsaw, aboard a train that they somehow themselves operated. Nicholas II, she said, had died in Denmark in 1928, while Tsesarevich Alexei was still alive and in hiding.
50
The extraordinary historical revision reached a kind of zenith when the claimant insisted not only that the imperial family had not been killed, but also that they had all left Russia before World War I. Empress Alexandra and her daughters, she said, had moved permanently to Germany in 1911, while Nicholas II and Tsesarevich Alexei joined them in 1913.
51

What to make of such tales? Was Mrs. Manahan merely entertaining herself with increasingly mischievous remarks, each more absurd than the next? Was she attempting, in so confusing the details of her case, to finally wrest back control of her own life? Or did all of these outrageous, conflicting stories reflect a mind falling victim to senility? Several of those who knew her in these years believe that it was Jack rather than his wife who was responsible for most of these theories. Manahan, recalls Ruffin, “was forever trying to put words in the mouth of his taciturn spouse. He had a detrimental effect on Anastasia’s credibility. His wife’s peculiarities were abetted and magnified by his even greater eccentricity, especially as he encouraged her penchant to repeat stories.”
52
Jack was fascinated by conspiracies, claimants, and royal intrigues, and loved few things more than feeling that he had stumbled upon previously hidden historical mysteries. More to the point, it was Manahan, not his wife, who repeated these bizarre tales, eagerly sharing with newspapers and magazines his latest “discoveries”; his wife usually sat in silence, occasionally nodding if prompted—if she was present at all, for Jack liked to present his own ideas as a kind of shared revelation.
53

On August 20, 1979, after several days of serious illness, Mrs. Manahan collapsed in pain and was rushed to Charlottesville’s Martha Jefferson Hospital. “She obviously needed to be operated on,” recalled Dr. Richard Shrum, “but she was in such bad shape I was scared that we’d kill her giving her an anesthetic.” Finally, though, Shrum was forced to act: he found an ovarian tumor that had blocked her intestine and resulted in a dangerous case of gangrene. He removed the tumor and nearly a foot of the infected bowel tissue.
54
Although the wound itself healed, Mrs. Manahan never really recovered; suffering from severe arthritis, she was soon confined to a wheelchair, increasingly retreating into a world of confused infirmity.
55

Unable to walk, she still insisted on joining Jack as he drove back and forth across Charlottesville on his innumerable errands. She would sit in the front seat of their rather battered station wagon for hours at a time, seemingly impervious to the discomfort; occasionally, though, when she felt well and thought that her husband had been gone too long, she poked her head out the window, screaming, “Hans! Hans!” in her weakened voice until he returned. Passersby stopped and stared, uncertain what to do; even when they had returned home, she often continued to stubbornly sit in the car, shouting at Jack. To the concerned questions of neighbors, though, Jack usually offered a shrug and a smile. “Oh, you know those Russians!” he would say. “They’re never happy unless they’re miserable.”
56

“I have lived much too long,” she once told Ruffin. “It is time to leave this shell. I hope that the next time you come here, poor Anastasia will be cold. And when you hear that poor Anastasia is no more, think of me as happy, because then I will suffer no more.” The last time he saw her, she whispered, “Pray, pray very much for my death.”
57
After a lifetime of turmoil, she was simply worn out, but the miserable conditions in which she lived became increasingly dangerous. By the fall of 1983, living conditions in the house on University Circle had deteriorated so badly that the authorities once again stepped in after both of the Manahans fell ill, unlikely victims of Rocky Mountain spotted fever. A hearing in a Charlottesville circuit court found Manahan incapable of sufficiently caring for his wife, and the judge appointed a local attorney, William Preston, as her legal guardian. Preston found Mrs. Manahan’s mental state so alarming that on November 28 he had her committed to the psychiatric ward of the Blue Ridge Hospital for observation.
58

The captivating fairytale of the tragic, lost princess was but a distant memory, but the story was still not yet finished, for the very next day Manahan abducted his frail wife from the hospital, launching a media frenzy about the “missing grand duchess” and a multistate police search for the pair. It took four days to find them, living in their broken-down station wagon off a country road, and a dehydrated and confused Mrs. Manahan was returned to the hospital ward.
59
It was to be the last adventure in a lifetime of almost unbelievable twists of fate. A court found that while Mrs. Manahan was most likely suffering from senile dementia, she could not legally be kept in a psychiatric facility, and so Preston placed her in a privately run nursing home. The woman whose story had intrigued the world and spawned countless books and motion pictures was a mere shadow of her former self, emaciated and confused, her weight barely sixty pounds, her once-vibrant blue eyes clouded as she slipped into a haze of the unknown.
60

Manahan visited her daily, decorating her room with photographs of the imperial family, but on January 28, 1984, a possible stroke sent her to Martha Jefferson Hospital.
61
Just two weeks later, at 11:40 a.m. on Sunday, February 12, 1984, she died, at peace, the years of intrigue finally behind her. Manahan later insisted that his wife had been murdered, claiming that either members of British intelligence or operatives from the KGB had disconnected her oxygen tube.
62
In fact, she had died of pneumonia. Her death certificate duly recorded her name as “Anastasia Nikolaievna Manahan,” born June 5/18, 1901, at Peterhof in Russia; listed her parents as Tsar Nicholas II and Alexandra of Hesse-Darmstadt; and gave her occupation as “Royalty.” In death, the commonwealth of Virginia granted her the identity she had claimed for sixty-three years.
63

Many years before, when she was still lucid, the claimant decided that she wished to be cremated, and this was carried out on the afternoon of her death at a nearby funeral home. Two days later, her memorial service took place at the Chapel of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Some three hundred friends, neighbors, and supporters crowded the structure, which Manahan had decorated with Romanov photographs and brass altar candelabra bedecked with imperial double-headed eagles. Although she had long before abandoned organized religion, an Episcopal clergyman conducted the service, though it was the widower who commanded most attention, offering up what he termed “historical comments” on the Romanovs and on his late wife.
64
Like so much of her storied life, even the memorial quickly became a circus as Jack railed against those he termed her “former friends” in Europe who had abandoned her and against the Romanov family, for “rejecting Anastasia”; and, in a truly odd twist, blamed Queen Elizabeth II for his wife’s misfortunes, proclaiming that the British monarch was “an international drug dealer.”
65

Anderson’s death certificate.

For a few months, Manahan kept his late wife’s ashes in an urn. He faced some difficulty in carrying out her final wish, that her ashes be interred at Seeon. In 1934, the Nazi government forced the Leuchtenberg family to sell the estate to authorities in Berlin, though they preserved burial rights to the small, enclosed yard surrounding the Chapel of St. Walburg. Here, beneath a tomb he himself had designed before his death in 1929, rested Georg, duke of Leuchtenberg, joined by his wife, Olga, in 1953. Duchess Catherine of Leuchtenberg, widow of Duke Dimitri, protested the claimant’s interment. Neither she nor her husband had ever believed she was Anastasia, and did not want a woman they regarded as an impostor buried alongside exiled members of Russia’s aristocracy. Then, too, she objected that cremation was contrary to the teachings of the Orthodox Church.
66
It was left to the ever-loyal Prince Friedrich of Saxe-Altenburg to see to the details, and not until he provided a sworn statement offering assurances that Duchess Olga had personally granted permission did the Catholic officials who maintained the churchyard agree to Manahan’s request.
67

Anderson’s grave in the churchyard of the Chapel of St. Walburg at Seeon.