Princesses Behaving Badly

by Linda Rodriguez McRobbie

  When Schanzkowska was fished out of the frigid waters by police, she refused to speak. She had no identification and no money, only the clothes on her back. For lack of better options, the authorities brought her to a hospital.

  Despite her dip in the canal, nothing appeared physically or mentally wrong with the young woman. They called her Fraulein Unbekannt, or “Miss Unknown”; she refused to say who she was and would speak only rarely. She was eventually transferred to Dalldorf, a state-run hospital for the mentally ill. There Miss Unknown kept to her bed, covered her face with blankets, and resisted having her photograph taken. She read constantly, especially newspapers and magazines. Such was Franziska’s life for a year and a half—until the day she read about the Romanovs.

  TO SIBERIA AND BACK

  Eighteen months before Franziska jumped into the canal, Anastasia Romanov, just a month past her seventeenth birthday, was executed in the basement of a Siberian mansion. She was the youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, who had abdicated a year before in the face of the implacable Bolshevik army, communists demanding the destruction of the monarchy. Nicholas, his wife, and their children were placed under house arrest and later transferred to a residence in Ekaterinburg, Siberia. As the White Army—the anticommunists who supported the monarchy—inched closer to Ekaterinberg, the Bolsheviks started to panic.

  On the night of July 17, 1918, the Romanov family, three of their servants, and their doctor were herded down to the building’s basement, where they were shot, by order of communist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin. Empress Alexandra was killed before she could finish crossing herself, and those who survived the initial hail of bullets were stabbed to death with bayonets and beaten with rifle butts. Swiftly, brutally, and bloodily, a 304-year-old Russian dynasty was extinguished.

  Two of the children’s bodies were burned, and the remaining corpses of the tsar’s family were sealed in a pit. The execution itself was hushed up—the Bolsheviks confirmed they’d executed the tsar on the pretext that he was going to try to escape but neglected to mention that they’d murdered the rest of the family as well. The information vacuum that followed allowed rumors to flourish that some of the Romanovs had survived. Within months of the execution, multiple imposters came forward claiming to be various members of the family. Most such impostors were dismissed out of hand, but other claims were not so easy to reject.

  In 1921, the stories of Franziska Schanzkowska and Princess Anastasia collided.

  CALL ME ANNIE

  During Franziska’s nineteen months in the hospital, newspapers and magazines were her primary link to the outside world. One day, a chatty nurse showed her the October 23, 1921, issue of Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, which featured a picture of three of the Russian princesses, accompanied by the dramatic speculation that Anastasia had survived the execution. The article announced, “To this day, it has not been possible to definitively establish if, during the course of the massacre, one of the Grand Duchesses, Anastasia, was not merely severely wounded and if she remained alive.” Shortly after, Franziska declared that she was, in fact, Anastasia.

  After dropping her bombshell, Franziska swore the staff and patients to secrecy. But her claim to be the lost Romanov princess couldn’t be kept under wraps, and word soon got around (helped out the door by a fellow inmate). Before long, a continuous parade of curiosity seekers, Russian émigrés, former imperial officers, monarchists, and displaced minor nobility was lining up to see the supposed Romanov offspring. Most didn’t believe her, but six months after making her claim, Franziska was adopted by two Russian émigrés, a baron and his wife. They’d never met the real Anastasia, but they were convinced that this woman was telling the truth.

  And for good reason, or at least so it seemed. Franziska was about the same height as the murdered princess, had the same arresting blue-grey eyes, and even suffered from the same foot condition, hallux valgus (bunions). And when she was pulled from her watery would-be grave, reports noted that she was covered with lacerations and scars, including from a stab wound to her right foot that matched the triangular shape of the bayonets used by the Bolsheviks.

  Other evidence soon surfaced. Franziska refused to speak Russian but could understand it and, according to a doctor, spoke it perfectly in her sleep. Under the influence of anesthesia, she raved in perfect English, the language of Anastasia’s mother, and spoke French with a “perfect” accent. (Anastasia, like other princesses, had learned French from a young age.) Franziska could also recall intimate details of the Romanovs’ family life, including nicknames Anastasia supposedly bestowed on obscure courtiers and military officials. Her imperial etiquette was impeccable. She convinced handwriting experts that she was the real deal (apparently having practiced copying Anastasia’s signature from a signed photograph found in a book) and broke into genuine tears upon hearing an obscure waltz that had been played for the princess once upon a time. How could she have known all these things if she wasn’t a true Romanov?

  In 1922 Franziska, still living with the baron, didn’t seem eager to press her claim to princesshood just yet, though she didn’t disabuse anyone of the notion, either. When her hosts asked what they should call her, she told them to dispense with etiquette and just call her Fraulein Annie. Which was nice for them and handy for her, relieving her of the pressure to continually act like a princess. It also gave Franziska time to figure out exactly how best to become Anastasia.

  At first, a string of happy coincidences, such as the foot deformity, tied Franziska to the deceased princess. But as time went on, three factors consipired to force her into perpetuating her claims: memory “lapses,” a growing fear of being found out (Franziska was an unhinged woman with nothing to lose and a lot to gain), and the willingness of those who wanted so much to believe to her.

  As Anastasia, Franziska declared that the trauma of her family’s execution, her beating at the hands of the Bolshevik soldiers, and her subsequent escape had resulted in huge memory gaps. She claimed to have been rescued by a man whom she variously described as a soldier she’d just met or a young guard who’d been friendly to her for weeks; he was either a peasant who’d raped her or a member of a fallen Polish noble family whom she’d married and whose child she’d borne (and then misplaced). She also maintained that her rescuer used some sort of device to alter the shape of her nose and mouth, thus explaining the differences in appearance between her and Anastasia. Most of her details were just as hazy, contradictory, and half formed. For example, she stated that she couldn’t read German, tell time, or recognize numbers (despite being a devotee of solitaire). All such inconsistencies were assumed by her supporters to be evidence of the severe abuse she had suffered at the hands of the revolutionaries.

  Growing increasingly afraid of being exposed, Franziska devoured everything about the Romanov family, ferreting away facts and information to dole out when questioned. Such details allowed her to endear herself to those people who wanted desperately to believe that Anastasia was alive, namely Romanov relatives. Aristocrats, too, yearned for the days before the Russian Revolution, which had completely destroyed their privileged way of life. Still other supporters hoped that if the imperial family did return to power, their loyalty and assistance to Anastasia would be rewarded. They all seemed to ignore moments when the pretend princess behaved strangely, such as the lapse in imperial etiquette she suffered when she ducked under the dinner table to wipe her nose.

  Once people believed the outlandish story, it was difficult for them to stop. Committed to the idea that Anastasia still walked the earth, they were just as invested in the charade as Franziska was. Even evidence proving that she was lying couldn’t dissuade them. In 1928, a dozen of the dead tsar’s nearest relatives came together to assert that Anna Anderson (an alias Franziska used at hotels to avoid reporters in America) was not Anastasia. They stated, “Our sense of duty compels us to state that the story is only a fairy tale. The memory of our dear departed would be tarnished if we allowed this fantas
tic story to spread and gain any credence.” But such statements didn’t sway the true believers. Their belief alone was enough to confuse the general public, with its voracious appetite for stories about the fake Anastasia.

  Franziska and her dogged supporters had another reason to stick to their guns despite the holes in her story: money. The tsar’s considerable wealth hadn’t disappeared with him; his stash of 2 million rubles (more than $20 million in today’s money) was left to rot in a Berlin bank. In 1933 the bank issued shares of the remaining funds—totaling only about $105,000 in today’s money—to seven Romanov heirs. Anastasia was not among them.

  Franziska’s lawyers filed a petition to stop the distribution of the inheritance, triggering a 37-year legal battle, the longest in German history, to prove that Franziska/Anna Anderson was Anastasia. The case staggered between rejection and appeal, and falsehoods abounded on both sides. When in 1961 the court finally decided that Franziska’s claims were unfounded, her lawyers appealed and the case once again lurched forward. Franziska, however, never appeared in court, which only added an “aura of authenticity to her claim,” according to one later biographer.

  Nevertheless, the trials made a show of what were, by then, decades of conflicting accounts. People on both sides made up stories, gave inaccurate or contradictory testimony, and generally made a mess of things. Handwriting experts, accent specialists, psychologists, photographic analysts, and forensic investigators who claimed to be able to identify people by their ear shape all examined the evidence. The results were muddled. Some experts claimed that certain facts confirmed Franziska’s story, but on the whole the evidence tended to discredit her. On February 17, 1970, the Western German Supreme Court handed down its verdict: the woman claiming to be Anastasia had not proved her case. Not that Franziska cared. By that time, she was in her seventies and frail, and she had long been pushed, prodded, coddled, and cajoled by people who believed her story.

  CAT LADY

  Franziska was also a little bit crazy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that her lifelong career as a royal impostor began with a suicide attempt. From the beginning, she always appeared to teeter on the edge of a nervous breakdown, careening from quiet happiness to tearful mania to dark depression. For someone who’d invented such an elaborate attention-grabbing story, she hated the spotlight and soon became paranoid, believing she was the victim of some vague conspiracy. Not long after moving in to the baron’s home, Franziska’s tantrums made her unwelcome; she spent the rest of the decade shuffling between hospitals and the homes of various supporters. Beginning in 1928, she lived in America with a wealthy cousin of (the real) Anastasia, Xenia Leeds, and then at the home of Annie Burr Jennings, a Manhattan socialite happy to host the curiosity. After Franziska attacked the servants, ran naked onto the roof, threw a fit in a department store, and broke down after accidently stepping on and killing her pet parakeet, Jennings had her committed to the Four Winds rest home in upstate New York. Franziska left the sanitorium in 1931 for a psychiatric facility in Germany before resuming her peripatetic lifestyle, moving from guest room to guest room for the next 16 years while relying on the generosity of friends.

  Franziska’s first permanent home, a former barracks hut near the Black Forest in Germany, was purchased by one of her supporters in 1949. She boarded up the windows to keep out spies, erected a barbed wire fence, and procured four enormous wolfhounds to patrol the property. She became a hoarder, surrounded by cats and stacks of unopened mail. In 1960, she moved to a new prefab chalet, again provided by a supporter. In 1968, she was found inside unconscious, surrounded by her cats. That year, at the behest of a long time supporter, Franziska, now in her seventies, traveled to America. After her tourist visa expired, she married John Eacott Manahan, an eccentric history professor and gifted genealogist from Charlottesville, Virginia, who was more than twenty years her junior. To him, Franziska was the princess. He referred to himself as the “son-in-law of the tsar” and “grand duke in waiting.” Franziska, now calling herself “Anastasia Manahan,” still maintained that she was the lost princess. But as she slipped into dementia, her stories about the Russian imperial family became increasingly bizarre and contradictory. Some days, she even claimed that none of the Romanovs had been killed at all, that they’d all had body doubles who died in their places while the real family members escaped.

  The couple lived in squalor for more than a decade, in the kind of house that had the neighbors calling officials about the rats, the garbage, the cats, the smell. They shared the home with more than 20 dogs and dozens of cats, who Franziska claimed were the reincarnations of Anastasia’s dead relatives and friends. When the cats died, they were cremated in the fireplace. An overflowing tub of potatoes sat on the balcony to assuage Franziska’s fear of being hungry in winter. Their car was stuffed with Styrofoam takeout containers; neither of them cooked.

  When the couple came down with Rocky Mountain spotted fever in November 1983, it was clear Manahan could no longer care for his wife. She was committed to a psychiatric hospital for observation, only to be “freed” by her husband and then discovered three days later in their filthy station wagon next to an abandoned farmhouse. After that episode, Franziska was placed in a private nursing home. On January 28, 1984, she suffered a stroke; she died of pneumonia on February 12. Manahan would later claim she’d been murdered by KGB agents or possibly British intelligence operatives.

  Ironically enough, it was her death certificate that gave Franziska the validation she’d been looking for all her life. Filled out by her husband, it lists her name as “Anastasia Nikolaievna Manahan” and gives her birth date as June 5/18, 1901 (that is, June 5 by the Julian calendar, which was use in Russia before the revolution, and June 18 by the Gregorian calendar) and her birthplace as Peterhof. Her parents are listed as Tsar Nicholas II and Alexandra of Hesse-Darmstadt; her occupation is given as “royalty.” Manahan died in 1990.

  IDENTITY CRISIS

  Despite the court case, doubts and questions about Anastasia/Anna/Franziska’s identity persisted until science was finally able to give the world a definitive answer. In 1994, using genetic evidence provided from intestinal surgery Franziska had undergone in 1979, scientists determined that she definitely was not a Romanov. Moreover, they were 98.5 percent sure that she was the Polish factory worker who’d gone missing in 1920. But even knowing who she really was, the questions still remain. Why did she do it? And why did she keep up the pretense for the rest of her life?

  The second question is the easier one to answer. Once she’d committed to being Anastasia, Franiziska was stuck with her story. She could never give up the assertion for fear of legal repercussions; she also had to be careful about when and how hard to press her claim for fear of being found out. From the moment she declared herself Anastasia, she lived in a kind of sad limbo, unable to return to being Franziska but not likely to ever convince the right people that she was the royal heir.

  As for the first question, her initial decision was probably rooted in the same pressures that motivated her to attempt suicide early in life. As a factory worker, Franziska had it rough. It’s hard to overstate just how difficult things were for people in Europe during the Great War; there was little food, little work, and little good news. Franziska had a particularly tragic history. After leaving Poland around 1916, she’d managed to find work, first as a maid, then as a waitress, and finally as a worker in a munitions factory. She met a young man, a soldier; they were engaged and she soon became pregnant. But before they were married, he was sent to the eastern front and died from combat wounds. It’s likely that Franziska had an abortion. Then, she fainted at work one day and dropped the grenade she was working on. The bomb rolled into a line foreman and exploded, killing him. Franziska awoke in a pool of his blood.

  After a nervous breakdown and a brief return to Poland to work in an agricultural field, Franziska eventually left her unsympathetic mother and wandered back to Berlin. She bore a triangular scar on her foot from anot
her farmworker’s attack with a farm tool. She found a room with a kind landlady and, it seems, began working as an occasional prostitute. By 1920 she had nothing to live for, and at age 23 she jumped into the freezing cold canal. It was this bizarre baptism that gave her a new life—she emerged first as Fraulein Unbekannt and then, to her lasting fame, the long-lost Romanov princess.

  Other people have pretended to be lost royals—some have even pretended to be Anastasia—but none had the influence of Franziska. Her charade propelled the real princess Anastasia from a tragic footnote in a dark chapter of Russian history to being the story of the Bolshevik Revolution, inspiring a film starring Ingrid Bergman, a stage musical, and, strangely, a ballet. Even Franziska’s death could not stop the flood of fables: in 1997, Fox Animation released a musical called Anastasia that took the bare bones of the Romanov story and outfitted them with a creepy sorcerer, a talking albino bat called Bartok, and Meg Ryan as the voice of the amnesiac princess.

  It was a fairy tale about as true as Franziska’s version of the grand duchess … but with a much happier ending.

  FAMOUS LAST WORDS

  In the end, death comes for us all, princess and pauper alike. But some princesses went out a bit more stylishly, a bit more heroically, a bit more dramatically than others. Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi died fighting the British; Queen Durgavati killed herself after she was wounded in battle rather than be captured by her enemies. Others died as they lived: Anne Boleyn, witty and clever to the end, joked with her executioner that he’d have an easy job chopping off her head because her neck was so thin. All these memorable women passed out of this life and into legend.

  MARIE ANTOINETTE: THE PRINCESS WHO ASKED FOR PARDON (SORT OF)

  Marie Antoinette, the lovely, extravagant, too fashionable, and much-maligned victim of the French Revolution, mounted the scaffold to her death on October 16, 1793, with the distinguished bearing of the princess she was. Though whether that bearing was courage and strength or hauteur and arrogance depended on who is telling the story.