PicoBlog

Anna Anderson, 1928, self-portrait in the mirror

But I can’t tell it like that, as if I were only reporting, as if it had nothing to do with me and she hadn’t been the truest thing in my life. When my book was published in 1983, I told a friend that I still didn’t know why Anna Anderson had obsessed me, why I was so stuck on her, so consumed.

“You don’t know why?” He laughed. “What do you mean you don’t know why? It’s because she was really a princess and better than everybody.”

But was it that? If the Anastasia story was a fairy tale it ran backwards: she was Cinderella in reverse, ending finally in squalor, mad as a hatter, buried under rubbish and broken treasures like the Bouviers of Gray Gardens. Exactly like that. “Scratch a bag lady,” someone said, “and you’ll find a princess underneath.” I learned as an adult how many young boys of my temperament were enthralled by the Romanov drama at the same time I was but remained focused on the family as a whole, the martyred unit, not on the claimant I adored. They hated Anna Anderson – there is no other word for it. They saw her case as a stain on the image of the Tsar’s children. And she felt the same way herself, it seems, at the beginning. “Schmutzig,” she said, speaking to an early supporter in Berlin: “Madam, I am so dirty.” In her seventies, when I knew her, if she spoke at all about the history and outcome of her claim, she called it a “mess,” tout court – “this mess,” she said, turning her head away and shutting down the conversation.

“Please not ... Please!” she insisted. “It's not like you read in a book! For dirt it was, and nothing else. It's not like you are reading a book, where you maybe sit nicely and read and eat. I was living this dirt! Dirt I was living!"

She hadn’t wanted to meet me at all; it took months to arrange a reception, if that's the right word for the first weekend I spent at her house in Charlottesville -- rather, in a second building next to it that her husband owned and rented out to students at the University of Virginia. She knew I was writing a book about her and that was anathema.

“He is a journalist!” -- I heard her cry it from a distance before she finally emerged, after leaving me to wait for two or three hours. I had been in Europe to consult with her old friends and lawyers and she knew that too. She had broken with every one of them after the failure of the last court case, which she had never wanted to pursue. Now her paranoia took over and she imagined all manner of plots and “devilments,” as she put it. Only one friend in Europe remained unassailable: Tatiana Botkin, daughter of the physician who died with the Tsar’s family. Like her brother Gleb, Tatiana had been a devout “Anastasian” since the 1920s, and on her recommendation, with a nudge from a friendly Romanov in America, Anna Anderson Manahan opened her door to me in July 1973, during a heat wave that I thought would kill me before it was over.

“You do not shake my hand,” she said as she walked toward me, briskly, erect, like the soldier’s daughter she claimed to be: “My father was the best and bravest of soldiers.” In pictures she often looked slumped and decrepit, but not in person -- or not then, I should say, not at that time. She was a small tower of energy and presence, just over five feet, dressed in tan slacks, a matching jacket, and a colorful red and white print shirt. I mainly remember her perfect posture and her voice, as she relaxed, changing from a heavily accented German to a kind of tea-party British, formal, her words exquisitely pronounced, in a tone distinct to itself. I had heard about that tone, which seemed to move from one octave to another as she spoke, her voice either high with curiosity or low with remembrance and regret.

We went to Monticello – an obligatory stop in Charlottesville – and then to the Farmington Country Club, where Jack Manahan had membership. This was before the Manahan household had deteriorated completely, overgrown with shrubbery and trees and swarming with feral cats. “It’s how Anastasia likes to live,” Jack explained, although his mania for it by the end was stronger than her own. In Unterlengenhardt, before she left Germany, her cats had become a nuisance to her neighbors and were put down when she was briefly hospitalized in 1968, following a heart attack that found her moaning on the floor: “Mama, Mama, where is Mama?” The “murder” of her animals was the immediate cause of her fury with her friends in the Black Forest and her decision to leave for America on Gleb Botkin’s longstanding invitation. She had married Jack Manahan, 18 years her junior, just before Botkin died in 1969; it was a means to stay in the United States. I noticed that she often addressed him as “Mister Manahan." They had separate bedrooms.

“Does Jack still screw you up?” a cheeky Russian friend had asked her. “Does he still screw you up?”

“He is my husband,” she answered with a titter. “That is all I will say.”

I knew not to ask her questions, to let her speak or not speak as she chose. Under exam, from the beginning, she had always shut down. She showed me pictures of her mother, the Empress, and cried a little in talking about her, about her firm hand and steady aim for her family and for Russia. Mention of Rasputin elicited a bark: “He was a saint!” In Charlottesville, five years earlier, she had met Rasputin’s daughter, who “recognized” her in big newspaper headlines, then renounced her, as Jack explained, “because Anastasia wouldn’t come out to California to make movies.” Maria Rasputin, once a lion tamer and now in thrall to a Hollywood publicist, had already written to me about the Anastasia case, verbatim: “I know that imperial family been all of them murdered. Really too bad. Such a nice family.” So there was certainty again.

At one point, a children’s picture book that had belonged to Grand Duchess Anastasia was brought out from Mrs. Manahan’s bedroom. It had been retrieved by a German soldier in Russia during the siege of Leningrad in World War II and given to her again after thirty years, inscribed, “To my darling Anastasia from her loving Mama.” She held it and showed it to me with pride and excitement. “It is not often,” she said, “that one receives the same present twice in one’s lifetime.”

We went grocery shopping and, to my amazement, bought cheese puffs and white wine. I remember thinking how odd it was to be at a Piggly Wiggly or Safeway with the putative daughter of Nicholas and Alexandra. I was in company with Brien Horan, a lawyer-in-training, exactly my age, and the most sturdy and devoted of all the Anastasians. Brien was American by birth but the Irish Baron of Loughmoe by descent. She called him “Baron” and me “the young gentleman,” not addressing me by name until several visits later. She had insisted on buying the wine even though Jack was a scowling teetotaler.

“Hans!” she cried, using the German equivalent of “Jack.” “It is Saturday night! The Baron and the young gentleman must have some Moselwein! Hans! Hans!” She repeated his name as often as necessary until it interrupted the flow of his talk. Mostly she stood in the corner, slipping in and out of rooms as it pleased her — she had an astonishing way of disappearing and reappearing without a sound. This left her husband alone with their visitors for long stretches of time, discoursing loudly and without mercy on any topic he wanted.

Jack Manahan was described in newspapers as a “retired history professor.” His father had been Dean of Education at UVA and he himself had taught at some community college. But in fact he was a genealogist and walking encyclopedia of crackpottery, embracing every dark notion that blew his way, from the origins of the Watergate hearings, then in progress, to the role of the Jews in history and world affairs. This was especially obnoxious. Jack’s views on Jews and Blacks could have put him at the head of the Ku Klux Klan; I could only make the best of it and remind myself that he had been born and raised in the South . He grilled me about my background on that first weekend, saying that the surname Kurth was “unfortunate” and “not easily traceable.”

“What was your mother’s name?” he asked.

“Schindler,” I said.

“That’s a Jewish name.”

“No. My mother’s grandfather was raised Lutheran and became a Universalist minister. We are all Unitarian-Universalists.”

“That’s a Jewish faith.”

I understood the Manahans’ antisemitism to be generic, hers appropriate to a European woman of her generation, whether Russian or Polish, his more rabid and rehearsed. He was ever concerned about bloodlines. His conversation was mostly jabber, nonsense half the time, and I saw how Anastasia relied on it to take attention off herself.

May I call her that, please? Anastasia? Everyone did who came close. She liked to hear the title once on presentation, and I spoke it as an American, with a modified bow: “I am very pleased to meet you, Your Imperial Highness.” Then such formalities were dropped, making no sense in the screwball circumstances.

When we got back from the supermarket she at once offered me the “services,” a gesture familiar to anyone who knows royalty or the British upper classes: “Do you need the services?” I had brought greetings not just from Tatiana Botkin but also from Nancy Wynkoop, the daughter of Princess Xenia of Russia, Anastasia’s cousin and childhood playmate, who had welcomed “Anna Anderson” to the United States in 1928 and lived with her for six months, remaining her supporter until her early death in 1965. I showed her a picture of Xenia from the period when they had lived together. Nancy was three at that time.

“That is Xenia?” she remarked, puzzled. “That is Xenia?” She ventured that it looked more like Xenia’s sister, Nina, a Romanov who blew hot and cold, like so many of them, on “the identity question.” With Nina, it depended on whom she was talking to and how much she had had to drink. She was the first Romanov I met on my quest and one of the dearest, a princess whose father was shot by the Bolsheviks and who downed tumblers of vodka at eleven in the morning. Princess Xenia’s American husband and widower, Herman Jud, met Anna Anderson in Charlottesville and remarked after leaving, “She looks like Nina after a bad night.” Everyone acknowledged how strongly she resembled different aunts and cousins in the Romanov family, but, as Nancy remarked, “How do you tell a judge that she scratched her ear like Aunt Tillie?”

Nina and Xenia’s royal line were the Romanovs of Greece and Denmark, the descendants of King George I, a Danish prince placed on the throne of Greece in 1863 and married to Olga Konstantinovna, a Russian grand duchess, granddaughter of Nicholas I. King George was ultimately assassinated at Thessaloníki in 1913. His children and grandchildren spread all over Europe in dynastic alliances, as if his busy siblings weren’t sufficient to populate thrones. Two of his sisters were England’s Queen Alexandra and Russia’s Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna, mother of Nicholas II, grandmother of Anastasia. Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, was George’s grandson; Nina and Xenia were Philip’s first cousins, daughters of Princess Marie of Greece and Denmark and the Russian Grand Duke George Mikhailovitch, both close cousins of the Tsar.

Philip de László: Princesses Xenia and Nina of Russia, 1915.

I loved keeping track of these people, their positions and interconnections, no more complicated than in any other family, obviously, but carefully traced for me in volumes of royal genealogy. King George’s third sister, Thyra, Duchess of Cumberland, and especially his younger brother, Waldemar, were friendly to Anna Anderson and did what they could to help her in the 1920s, to no avail. Waldemar had a long affair with his nephew, another George, who was married to Marie Bonaparte, the writer and Freudian psychoanalyst. And of course he wasn’t the only gay member of the family. Prince Christopher (of Greece and Denmark), King George’s youngest son, was notably light in the heels and briefly involved in the Anastasia case. He met Mrs. Anderson in New York and believed her claim, until he was bullied out of it by his older brothers and cousins: “Oh, Christo, how could you,” etc.

There were many such. When I met Prince Waldemar’s granddaughter, Queen Anne of Romania, she sighed that it was impossible for junior members of the family to buck the decisions of their seniors in regard to almost anything, never mind the Anastasia claimant.

“Simply impossible,” she said. “But we knew who she was.”

One Romanov line was cut off from me entirely by their hostility: the six sons of the Tsar’s sister, another Xenia, the senior surviving grand duchess of Russia. None of them ever saw Anna Anderson but they were the first to sign a denunciation of her claim in 1928, one day after the death of the Dowager Empress in exile, when issues of primacy and inheritance arose: “We declare categorically that she is not Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia.” This lot were particularly distasteful to me, certain in their cruelty when simple human feeling might have given them pause. Grand Duchess Xenia lived out her life on the charity of England’s King George V, her first cousin. He gave her an allowance and a house at Hampton Court, while her sister, Olga, was left to fend for herself. When their mother died in Copenhagen, Olga’s cut of her remaining jewels was significantly smaller than Xenia’s. “I understood that the matter could not concern me closely,” Olga said, “because I had a commoner for a husband.”

Before the Revolution, the Dowager Empress had married off Olga to an aging gay prince, Peter of Oldenburg, “Petya,” whom everyone held dear. But during World War I, working as a nurse at the front, Olga rebelled and secured an annulment, finally marrying the man she loved, a lowly colonel of the Blue Cuirassiers, Nikolai Kulikovsky. Morganatic marriages in the Romanov family were scarcely unheard of but still punished and despised, and Grand Duchess Olga, a crucial witness in the Anastasia case, lost whatever clout she may have had in the inner circles. I had some small contact with her sons, Tikhon and Guri, who only repeated the family line: “She cannot be Anastasia.” Tikhon was devoutly Orthodox. When the imperial family’s skeletons were recovered in Russia in 1991, he denounced them as false, saying that if they were genuine they would “produce miracles” in their vicinity. Unless they did, Tikhon said, they couldn’t be the Tsar’s bones. And there are still millions of Russian Orthodox who feel the same, that the bones were a plant, a last-minute ruse by the Soviet government to divide and confuse the faithful.

There was so much sadness in this story, so much anguish and misunderstanding. “She is similar, she is similar,” said Empress Alexandra’s sister Irene, who met Anna Anderson briefly in 1922, in an encounter that the claimant herself sabotaged by turning away and refusing to speak. All of Alexandra’s native family, the House of Hesse and by Rhine, became implacable Anderson opponents, although only Irene ever saw her, keeping silent even when her own son, Anastasia’s cousin Sigismund, acknowledged Mrs. Anderson without reservation.

That trend prevailed. Olga, the Tsar’s sister, having first sent trusted witnesses to meet Mrs. Anderson in Berlin, finally went herself and encountered the dilemma of her life. At the time, Mrs. Anderson was hospitalized with tuberculosis and weighed about 75 pounds. If she was unrecognizable as the girl Olga had known in Russia she was not as a suffering human being, and Olga’s public rejection of her claim, after four heart-wrenching visits and months of indecision, convinced no one in the family, who knew how mercilessly she was pressed into it. Her mother, the Dowager Empress, refused to accept that any of the Tsar’s family had been killed at Ekaterinburg and the subject of Anastasia was forbidden in her presence. It was a hopeless situation. “But if Auntie Olga didn’t believe her,” said Princess Nina to me, “why did she still sometimes call her `my niece’?”

The right thing to have done with Anna Anderson – the right thing for anyone to have done – is what Nina’s sister, Xenia, finally did: she took her in, lived with her, and got to know her. She had enough time to make a reasoned and responsible judgment.

“I wanted to give her every chance to reveal her true personality to me,” Xenia said. “I felt that if she were separated from doubtful people accused of suggesting memories and facts that she claimed to know, then her true identity and personality must reveal itself. This in my opinion is exactly how it turned out, what I found and have therefore firmly believed ever since: that she is Anastasia.” At our first meeting in Charlottesville I presented Mrs. Anderson with a handkerchief that Xenia’s daughter, Nancy, had given me for that purpose: white silk, embroidered with a crown and the letter “A.” It had belonged to Nancy’s American grandmother, the former Nonnie Mae Stewart of Cleveland, Ohio, who, after two earlier marriages, bagged Prince Christopher and became Anastasia of Greece, rescuing the exiled Greek royal family after World War I with the immense fortune left to her by her second husband, the tin-plate magnate William B. Leeds. Mrs. Leeds was made a princess by the king, suo jure, “in her own right,” not just as Prince Christopher’s wife, becoming a royal highness with all rights and prerogatives and proving that such things could be done at the will of any monarch. When I gave the handkerchief to Mrs. Anderson she gasped.

“Oh, no,” she said. “It is too precious, too important. You must give it to my husband to keep.” But I knew it was the clincher for my bona fides.

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