Circus Freaks

I’m not entirely sure how I found myself neck deep in an article on Rasputin’s daughter Maria this morning, so let’s just shake hands that it happened and move along to what at least for me was an interesting find there. The late nineteen teens was a bad time to be the offspring of Russia's most dubious mystic, and given the wind speed and storybook quality of the personal turbulence she endured during that period it’s not surprising that she was eventually set down somewhere near Kansas. In the years between leaving Russia in 1918 and alighting in the Midwest in 1935, she spent a great deal of time as a dancer and circus performer in various European hot spots with a doofus husband who died along the way from tuberculosis. She also released a handful of biographies on Rasputin, the most notable of which was Rasputin, My Father, a title reminiscent of Jonathan Franzen’s insistence on writing an essay every few years to remind us he and David Foster Wallace were (inexplicably) best friends. Her books seem to have done very little for her career or for history’s reflections on her father’s behavior.

One of the great punchlines of the Midwest can be found in its naming conventions, and for an example we need look no further than Peru, Indiana. You’ll notice from the photo above that there may not be a less Peruvian place on the Earth, and I found a note memorializing the fact that old guard locals pronounce it Peeru. But how Maria found herself in the least exotic place in the hemisphere is less strange than you might think: the town served as the HQ for the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus and she joined in 1935 as a lion tamer. She kept the post for a few months until she was mauled by a bear, but stayed on with the circus until it reached Miami at which point she retired and the circus, it seems, went out of business. Two interesting tidbits before we leave Maria in peace:

1. In 1940, she married a former officer of the White Army in Florida in Miami. For the sake of space, the White Army is the one that lost to the Red Army during the Bolshevik Revolution. I point this out only because the White Army gave her and her husband a great deal of trouble while they were trying to get out of Russia many years before, and the fact that she ended up marrying a member of it years later to avoid deportation was very funny to me.

2. In the late 60’s she became a psychic and claimed to have been visited in a dream by Pat Nixon. If being visited by famous women in dreams is the only grounds you need for that sort of thing then I’ll be hanging a neon sign in my office window later this afternoon. But I mention this mainly because I found it interesting that near the end of her life she reverted to a pattern her father had played out as well, although her parading seemed to have been thoroughly innocent by comparison.

And one more thing about Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus and Peru, Indiana. I love unearthing historical moments or gatherings of interesting people you wouldn’t expect to have ever been together under one roof, with a very obvious and modern example being the cast of Freaks and Geeks. And the HW Circus was the 2nd largest circus in America at the time behind the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus, so from a casting perspective it had quite a spread. Some highlights I dug up were Red Skelton and his father, the future Hollywood great Hoot Gibson, Clyde Beatty, and our very own Maria Rasputin. I’m not expecting all of those names to jump off the page, but since The Red Skelton Show had a weirdly strong but brief impact on me as a kid I thought I’d mention the whole gang here in case any of you had a similar connection back into this particular gang of misfits.

What a strange life though huh? From her father playing a major role in the dissolution of the Russian Monarchy, to having to dance in cabarets and European circuses to stage reproductions of her own father’s assassination, to taming lions in Peru, Indiana with Red Skelton and one of the biggest cowboy actors of all time, to working as a psychic in Miami. If anything, it’s a helpful reminder that we never really know what’s just around the corner for us, and while it would be difficult to categorize life as a joyride it certainly is an incredible series of trips around the sun.