The Romanovs

  In America, Gleb hurled himself into her cause. When the Romanov Declaration was published, he volleyed back with a stinging letter to Grand Duchess Xenia, the older of Anastasia’s two Romanov aunts:

  Your Imperial Highness!

  Twenty-four hours did not pass after the death of your mother … when you hastened to take another step in the conspiracy to defraud your niece.…

  Before the wrong which Your Imperial Highness [is] committing, even the gruesome murder of the Emperor, his family and my father by the Bolsheviks pales. It is easier to understand a crime committed by a gang of crazed and drunken savages than the calm, systematic, endless persecution of one of your own family … the Grand Duchess Anastasia Nicholaevna, whose only fault is that, being the only rightful heir to the late Emperor, she stands in the way of her greedy and unscrupulous relatives.

  Gleb’s letter was the final stroke in the permanent alienation of the Romanovs. Grand Duke Andrew was dismayed. “All is lost,” he wrote to Gleb’s sister Tatiana. “Does he realize what he has done? He has completely ruined everything.” “Grand Duke Andrew also remarked that the case was beginning to take on the aspect of an intrigue for the tsar’s fortune,” Tatiana Botkin wrote. “This profoundly disgusted the grand duke and he did not further wish to involve his name in it.”

  In truth, Gleb Botkin had become concerned about money—the claimant’s money, he believed—and had hired a lawyer to help her obtain it. Rumors existed of a Romanov inheritance, of millions of rubles of tsarist gold deposited in the Bank of England. In July 1928, while the claimant was a guest at Oyster Bay, Botkin asked an American lawyer, Edward Fallows, to investigate the matter. Fallows agreed, obtained the claimant’s power of attorney, and commenced a search which consumed the remaining twelve years of his life. He began by having his client sign a statement declaring that, in Ekaterinburg shortly before the murders, Tsar Nicholas II had told his four daughters that before the war he had deposited 5 million rubles in the Bank of England for each of them. Next, in order to pay his own fees and provide other sums required in the case, Fallows formed a Delaware corporation under the acronym Grandanor, for “Grand Duchess Anastasia Nicholaevna of Russia.” Miss Jennings’s wealthy friends were invited to invest. Thus equipped, Fallows went off to London to tackle the Bank of England.*

  The bank responded that it could not reveal information having to do with private deposits, including whether or not such deposits existed. First, said the bank, Mr. Fallows should go to the Court of Chancery and obtain an order that his client was indeed Grand Duchess Anastasia. Fallows went back and forth to and from Europe, spending the sums supplied by Miss Jennings and brought in by Grandanor, then working without fees, cashing in his insurance; selling his stocks, his bonds, and his house; moving his family to rented rooms. In the end, said his daughter, his efforts “killed him.”

  Controversy over the Romanov fortune in English banks continued after Fallows’s death in 1940. In 1955, Mme. Lili Dehn, who had been one of Empress Alexandra’s closest friends, declared under oath that, after the Imperial family had been arrested at Tsarskoe Selo and was expecting to be sent to England, the empress said to her, “At least we shan’t have to beg, for we have a fortune in the Bank of England.” This fortune has never been located. There is evidence that, during the First World War, Nicholas II brought home whatever private money he and his wife had in British banks and used it to help pay for hospitals and hospital trains. A number of aristocratic and wealthy Russian families, following the tsar’s example, did the same.

  After the revolution, Nicholas II’s mother and two sisters lived on what they could earn from the sale of their jewelry and on the charity of their Danish and English relatives. Anna Anderson’s supporters argued that the money Nicholas II set aside for his four daughters—to be used, perhaps, as dowries—would not have been brought back to Russia or distributed to aunts or a grandmother. This hope that money for the daughters still might be in safekeeping was diminished in 1960, when Sir Edward Peacock, a director of the Bank of England between 1920 and 1946, declared, “I am pretty sure there never was any money of the Imperial family of Russia in the Bank of England, nor in any other bank in England. Of course, it is difficult to say ‘never,’ but I am positive at least there never was any money after World War I and during my long years as director of the bank.”

  Even today, British bankers are accustomed to being disbelieved on this subject. John Orbell, archivist of Baring Brothers, a private London bank which held deposits of the Imperial Russian government after the revolution, is wearily polite when questioned about Romanov family money.* “People keep asking,” he says. “They will not take no for an answer. It’s frustrating. Listen, if there had been family money here, the fact would have come out long ago. There would have been a piece of paper, a bank statement, something. Some little clerk would have found it and stepped out and made his fortune by telling the newspapers. But nothing has ever turned up.”

  In August 1932, Anna Anderson returned to Germany accompanied by a private nurse in a locked cabin on the liner Deutschland. Her Park Avenue benefactress, Annie B. Jennings, paid for this voyage, as she had paid twenty-five thousand dollars for the one-year stay at the Four Winds Sanatorium, and as she would pay for an additional six months’ cure at Ilten psychiatric home near Hanover. When this cure was finished, Mrs. Anderson embarked on another seven years of wandering. She lived for several years in Hanover, spent a year in Berlin, then moved on to Bavaria, Pomerania, Westphalia, Saxony, Thuringia, even Hesse. World War II found her living in Hanover, where she endured the heavy Allied bombing. When that city was mostly destroyed, she fled to a ducal castle in the east. At the end of the war, this territory was occupied by Soviet troops, and, with the aid of a German prince and the Swedish Red Cross, she escaped to what was to become West Germany.

  In 1949, from his own meager funds, Prince Frederick of Saxe-Altenburg settled her in a small former army barracks in the village of Unterlengenhardt on the edge of the Black Forest. In this modest place, surrounded by overgrown shrubbery, vines, brambles, and high weeds, guarded by four huge dogs, half St. Bernard and half wolfhound, Anna Anderson lived for the next nineteen years. A group of educated, middle-aged German women took turns obeying her instructions and catering to her needs. She spoke to them in English, which, from that point to the end of her life, was the language she preferred to speak. Ironically, her use of English, like her nonuse of Russian, became a weapon against her. “It was not the English of someone who has spoken English since childhood—as Anastasia did,” said the English writer Michael Thornton, who first went to Unterlengenhardt in 1960. “The accent was Germanic, the sentence structure German, the grammar hopeless. I knew Grand Duchess Xenia, Anastasia’s aunt, who lived in London. Her English was simple, pure and refined, the English spoken by the Romanovs.”

  During the years at Unterlengenhardt, two final eyewitnesses stepped forward: Lili Dehn, the empress’s friend; and Sidney Gibbes, the English tutor of the Imperial children. Their testimony was contradictory: “I have recognized her, physically and intuitively, through signs which do not deceive,” said Madame Dehn. Gibbes disagreed. “If she is the Grand Duchess Anastasia, I am a Chinaman,” he told a friend. He put his view more formally in an affidavit: “She in no way resembles the true Grand Duchess Anastasia that I had known.… I am quite satisfied that she is an impostor.”*

  During these years, the play and the film Anastasia appeared, bringing Anna Anderson a new, worldwide burst of publicity. When the playwrights, who had not realized that she was still alive, felt sorry for her and voluntarily paid her $30,000 of the $400,000 they were paid by Twentieth Century-Fox, she used the money to build a small, modern chalet on the site of the crumbling army barracks. Thereafter, the public, seeing pictures of Anna Anderson, complained that she did not look like Ingrid Bergman.

  Her actual appearance during those years was graphically described by Mme. Dominique Auclères, a correspondent for Le Figaro o
f Paris, who first visited the claimant in Unterlengenhardt in August 1960 and subsequently became a devoted supporter:

  Suddenly, a door opened and I saw the strangest looking woman I have ever seen in my life. It was a tiny Madame Butterfly disguised as a Tyrolean. She wore a Japanese kimono; over this was an Austrian loden cloak; and over this was a black mackintosh. On top of the pointed hood of the cloak, she had perched a green felt Tyrolean hat. Her hair was light brown with streaks of grey, cut short to the level of her ears. She wore black leather gloves and had a kind of floating walk which conferred something unreal on this apparition. I noticed a slightly tipped and tilted nose (I saw her only in profile) and an eye more grey than blue. In front of her mouth, one of her black-gloved hands held a little paper fan which never moved throughout my visit.

  Before she left, however, Madame Auclères caught her unawares and was able to see the mouth, “deformed by the top jaw slightly deformed to the right.” The interview was in English, although, at one point when the reporter forgetfully slipped into French, her hostess responded immediately in French. Her accent, said Mme. Auclères, was “perfect.”

  The Anna Anderson case was the longest legal action in the German courts during the twentieth century. Beginning in 1938, when she sued to contest distribution of a small estate to Empress Alexandra’s German relatives, suspended during World War II, renewed in Hamburg during the 1950s and ’60s, the case finally concluded in 1970 with a rejection of her appeal by the German Supreme Court in Karlsruhe. The opposition to Anna Anderson’s claim in these trials was provided by the House of Hesse, still adamant that she must be discredited. Grand Duke Ernest was dead, but his son Prince Louis took up his father’s cause, along with Prince Louis’s niece, Barbara Duchess of Mecklenburg. Financial backing for the Hessian case came from Lord Louis Mountbatten, the British war hero, former Viceroy of India, Chief of the Defense Staff, and uncle of the queen’s husband, Prince Philip. Earl Mountbatten was Hessian; his mother, Princess Victoria of Battenberg, was Empress Alexandra’s sister; the Prussian Princess Irene was his aunt; Grand Duke Ernest of Hesse was his uncle. Had Anna Anderson been legally proven to be Grand Duchess Anastasia, Mountbatten would have had to recognize her as his first cousin. He was determined not to do this and to prevent it poured thousands of pounds, inherited from his wealthy, deceased wife, into lawyers’ fees.

  One body of evidence, largely ignored in the early years of the Anna Anderson case, came to the fore in the German court trials of the 1950s and ’60s. It was the testimony of medicine and science, and, to a surprising degree, it supported Anna Anderson’s claim. In the early years after the claimant’s appearance, doctors—most of them psychologists—had tended to believe her story. In 1925, Dr. Lothar Nobel, director of the Mommsen Clinic in Berlin, gave his opinion that “no mental illness of any kind exists.… It seems impossible that her knowledge of many small details is due to anything but her own personal experience. Furthermore, it is psychologically scarcely conceivable that anyone who … is playing the part of another person should behave as the patient does now.”

  This view that the patient was incapable of playing a role was reiterated in 1927. After the claimant had spent eight months in his sanatorium in the Bavarian Alps, the director, Dr. Saathof, declared, “It is, in my opinion, quite unthinkable that Frau Tschaikovsky is an imposter. Even at crucial moments, she has almost always behaved in the exact opposite way from what you might expect of an imposter.” A similar, albeit nonprofessional, opinion was offered by Princess Xenia after observing the claimant on her Long Island estate: “One of the most convincing elements of her personality was a completely unconscious acceptance of her identity [as Grand Duchess Anastasia]. She never gave the slightest impression of acting a part.”

  During the Hamburg trials, the court decided to obtain physical evidence, based on science. It appointed two distinguished expert witnesses: Dr. Otto Reche, an internationally famous anthropologist and criminologist who had founded the Society of German Anthropologists, and Dr. Minna Becker, a graphologist who had assisted in the authentification of Anne Frank’s diary. These doctors and scientific experts were seeking neither money nor fame; they were professionally examining a litigant. Reche collected more than a hundred photographs of Grand Duchess Anastasia and then photographed Anna Anderson at the same angles and under the same lighting conditions. He compared the two faces, millimeter by millimeter, and concluded that “such coincidence between two human faces is not possible unless they are the same person or identical twins. Mrs. Anderson is no one else than Grand Duchess Anastasia,” Becker compared more than a hundred samples of Grand Duchess Anastasia’s handwriting with samples of Anna Anderson’s handwriting. “I have never before seen two sets of handwriting bearing all these concordant signs which belonged to two different people,” she concluded. “There can be no mistake. After thirty-four years as a sworn expert for the German courts, I am ready to state on my oath and on my honor that Mrs. Anderson and Grand Duchess Anastasia are identical.” Despite the testimony of Dr. Reche and Dr. Becker, the court declared the case non liquet, neither established nor rejected.

  During her lifetime, Anna Anderson enjoyed another scientific victory, gained in 1977 by Dr. Moritz Furtmayr, a prominent German forensic expert. Furtmayr had devised a system of mapping the human skull with grids and graphs to produce what he called a “head-print,” no two of which were alike in human beings. Using this “P.I.K. Method,” which had been accepted in criminal cases by German courts, Furtmayr proved that the anatomical points and tissue formations of Anna Anderson’s right ear corresponded with Grand Duchess Anastasia’s right ear in seventeen points, five more than the twelve required by German courts to establish identity.

  Furtmayr’s report provided a nasty shock for Lord Mountbatten. Despite his large investment of money, Mountbatten never met the claimant. In 1977, however, Michael Thornton, bringing with him a copy of Furtmayr’s findings, visited Earl Mountbatten at Broadlands, his country estate. “He sat opposite me and he read through it twice, in German and in the English translation,” Thornton remembered. “His face was an absolute study while he was reading it. What I could see in his face was recognition of the terrible possibility that this raving woman, who was so eccentric, so unlikely, who was dismissed out of hand by 90 percent of the people she met, might actually be his cousin Grand Duchess Anastasia.”

  The final judicial verdicts were inconclusive. The courts did not say that Anna Anderson was not Grand Duchess Anastasia; they ruled only that she had failed to prove that she was. Eight thousand pages of testimony were bound into forty-nine volumes, placed on back shelves, and forgotten. At Unterlengenhardt, Anna Anderson announced that she no longer cared. “I know perfectly well who I am,” she said. “I don’t need to prove it in any court of law.” Meanwhile, her circumstances were deteriorating. She had retreated from the world, barred the door even to her friends, and lived alone inside with sixty cats. When the third of her great dogs died, she buried it herself in a shallow grave—too shallow, apparently, for the odor spread over the village and brought remonstrance from the district board of health. Insulted, she suddenly decided to accept an invitation arranged by her friend of forty years, Gleb Botkin.

  Gleb, now living in Charlottesville, Virginia, had befriended a wealthy genealogist, Dr. John Manahan. At Gleb’s suggestion, Manahan, a bachelor, had offered the claimant his hospitality in Virginia for as long as she liked. On July 13, 1968, without a word to anyone in Europe, she suddenly flew to Dulles Airport at Manahan’s expense. He and Gleb met her and drove her to Charlottesville. In December 1968, her friends in Europe were shocked again when she married chubby, crew-cut Manahan, who was at least eighteen years her junior. It was a marriage of convenience, they told themselves; her American visa was about to expire. Manahan himself was amused as well as pleased. “Well, what would Tsar Nicholas think if he could see his new son-in-law?” he asked his best man. “I think he would be grateful,” Gleb Botkin replied. r />
  Anastasia and John Manahan lived together for more than fifteen years. They had separate bedrooms in his classically elegant house on a quiet street in Charlottesville, only a few blocks from the university and Thomas Jefferson’s famous library and quadrangle. She called him—inexplicably—Hans; he called her Anastasia. They drove almost daily to his large farm in the nearby countryside and frequently dined at the Farmington Country Club. There, Anastasia, a tiny figure with dyed auburn hair, often dressed in a blouse and bright red pants several sizes too large for her, carefully collected scraps from the plates of everyone at the table and placed them in foil to take home to her new and growing population of cats. It did not take long for the house and garden to begin to resemble her chalet at Unterlengenhardt. Overgrown bushes, vines, and weeds filled the front yard and blocked the front door. Inside, the floor of the living room was piled high with books and covered with newspapers, spread to cover messes made by the cats. When one of the cats died, she cremated it in the fireplace. Manahan seemed not to mind. “That’s the way Anastasia likes to live,” he explained. The neighbors minded, however, and in 1978, the Manahans were taken to court over the smell—“I think it could be described as a stench,” one friend admitted—rising from the property.

  Manahan enjoyed being Anastasia’s husband; he sometimes described himself as a “Grand Duke-in-Waiting.” His wife seemed uninterested. “That is so far back and so dead,” she said, “all so past. Russia doesn’t exist.” Gradually, the couple descended from eccentricity into derangement. On one occasion, Manahan told a gathering that his wife was a descendant of Genghis Khan; subsequently, he added Ferdinand and Isabella to her ancestral tree. In 1974, he sent out a nine-thousand-word Christmas card entitled “Anastasia’s Money and the Tsar’s Wealth,” in which he accused Franklin D. Roosevelt of aiding the Marxist conspiracy to communize the world and described an episode at the end of World War II in Europe as the arrival of “American negroes with leveled guns.” He and his wife, he said, were under surveillance by the CIA, the KGB, and the British Secret Service. She told a visitor that, in the Ipatiev House, the entire Imperial family except the tsarevich had been repeatedly raped, all of them being forced to watch as each was violated. In November 1983, she was institutionalized. A few days later, her husband kidnapped her, and for three days they drove down Virginia back roads, stopping to eat at convenience stores. A thirteen-state police alarm finally produced an arrest and her return to a psychiatric ward.