‍LONDON and particularly Fleet Street has had a long fascination with freaks. The dwarf Tom Thumb; The Elephant Man; Siamese Twins; The Dog Faced Boy and many more were on show in the city and Europe from the beginning of newspapers through to the 20th century. The Ape Woman was one.

‍

‍Her name was Julia Pastrana (pictured above with her son after their death) and the British Press called her: “The ugliest woman in the world.” Scientist Charles Darwin was to give her credibility as a primate when he was sent her jaw bones and teeth.

‍

‍He compared her to a hairless dog that had skin disease and connected her to the animal world.

‍

‍When she came to London’s Regent’s Street to go on show, Royalty and the rich flocked to see her alongside reporters and the poor. Many mocked her but, in the end, it was a fraternity of newspaper journalists who were to give her dignity back to her, even if it was a bit late.

‍

‍Julia was covered in hair; had a large jaw with thickened gums; a beard; unusually large lips, and a wide, flat nose. She was billed as “The Ape Woman from the wilds of Mexico!” Some called her a bear.

‍

‍But doctors in America and Britain who examined her said she spoke Spanish and was half human and half orangutang … a hybrid. Many agreed she was “born from the lust of Indian women, who mixed with apes and monkeys with detestable sensuality.”

‍

‍The ape woman was different to other apes though, she fell in love and had sex with a human. I am the happiest person in the world she said. “At last, I have found someone who loves me.” But her lover and husband-to-be, freak show promoter Theodore Lent, had other plans for her a long way from married bliss.

‍

‍When she died a few days after having a son, who also died, he had her stuffed … but he wasn’t finished there, bless his cotton fillings. He stuffed her son too and put both their bodies on display. Victorians in London flocked to see their corpses like sheep.

‍

‍The sad story of Julia, which varies in some versions, began when she and her mother were found hiding in a cave by a cowman in the mountains of Western Mexico in 1834. Her mother had fled her village, blaming a breed of shape-shifting werewolves for her daughter’s deformities.

‍

‍Julia was put in an orphanage where she grew up covered in black hair and became a live-in maid to the State Governor for the amusement of guests, who would say how sad she seemed to be. “A dear sweet monster with big eyes. A pet like a dog.”

‍

‍The freak show world soon opened its doors to her, and she found her way to singing and dancing on Broadway in New York. Views were mixed and the Boston Natural History Society examined her declaring: “She is a perfect woman, performing all the functions of her sex.”

‍

‍On Broadway, Julia met performer Theodore, who became her promoter promising her great riches and they made their way to London. He booked her in to appear at Regent Hall (later to become Regent’s Park) and billed her as being from the tribe of Root Digger Indians ‘spiteful and hard to govern’, who lived in animal caves and had sex with bears and apes.

‍

‍At first, he branded her The Baboon Lady and she was a sellout appearing three times a week in 1857. The money flowed in.

‍

‍When Theodore heard that the great showman Phineas Barnum and other theatre and circus producers were taking an interest, he acted fast to keep her under his wing — what better way than to marry her and have a child?

‍

‍Soon Julia’s married life revolved around her showman: she was not allowed to go out during the day, in case being seen would diminish her earning power, and she only travelled to work at night wearing veils. Theodore trained her like an animal.

‍

‍In March 1860, while touring, she had a son in Moscow. He was unusually large; covered in hair like his mother and had the same pronounced lower facial features. Julia held him and cried.

‍

‍The baby lived only 35 hours, and Julia, 26, who had been lacerated with forceps, survived for just a few more days.

‍

‍Theodore sold the bodies to a Russian taxidermist to preserve them and put them on display at Moscow’s Anatomical Institute standing up. The baby was perched on a rod with an alert expression on his face; his mother standing with hands on her hips, feet wide apart, face turned to one side.

‍

‍But later, Theodore, hearing how good she and their son looked, took advantage of an escape clause in his contract and took them back. They were money-makers dead or alive.

‍

‍The bodies went on display in London in 1862, where they could be seen for a shilling—less than he charged when Julia could sing and dance.

‍

‍After surviving the war, the bodies went into storage and emerged for small tours in the 1970s, when they were greeted with outrage by the London Press and Europe. Sweden banned their presence, saying corpses could no longer be exhibited for profit.

‍

‍They ended up in an Oslo warehouse where teenagers broke in and ripped off Julia’s arm, thinking she was a mannequin. The baby was damaged beyond repair and tossed into rubbish.

‍

‍Then in 1990, journalists at the Norwegian magazine Kriminal Journalen, discovered her in the basement of Oslo’s Institute of Forensic Medicine. From then on, her fate became a fixture of Norwegian newspaper reports and government committees.

‍

‍The Press in general fought her case and in February 2013, her body —encased in a white coffin and covered in white roses — was finally buried in a cemetery in Sinaloa de Leyva, a town near her birthplace. At last, she was remembered for being more than ‘a monster.’

‍

‍Theodore died in a lunatic asylum.

‍

‍PLAYBOY PREDATOR WITH 

‍A TASTE FOR A PARTY PIE

‍

‍WHEN The New York World ran the story of ‘The Girl in the Pie’ (pictured) it launched a trend in America that began in 1895 and lasts today. It even came to the Hollywood screen in the classic George Segal movie Under Siege in the 1990s.

‍

‍The man at the centre of the popular paper’s story was renowned as a Jekyll and Hyde gentleman who was on the one hand a brilliant architect and the other a hell-raiser and sexual predator. He was architect Stanford White, who had designed buildings from the Brooklyn Museum to Columbia University.

‍

‍On May 20, that year, 16-year-old Susie Johnson, wearing nothing but gauze and escorted by a flock of live canaries, burst through the crust of a giant pie singing Four and Twenty Blackbirds to the wild New York playboys of the time.

‍

‍The $3,800-per-head dinner, more than 2,300 times the wage of a dock labourer, took place in the New York Studio of famed society photographer and artist James Breese for top polo player John Cowdin’s 10th wedding anniversary.

‍

‍Cowdin’s wife wasn’t invited. White, who cooked up the idea, was. And his friend Breese was no slouch when it came to seediness.

‍

‍The dinner was a sensation across America and the report featured an illustration of Susie naked surrounded by rich men in suits. White was standing to her left wielding a large kitchen knife as if to carve her up. The article said she later ‘posed by electric light’ (a euphemism for sex work) and went missing soon after.

‍

‍The period was already becoming notorious for lavish stunts pulled by the bored, wealthy 400 socialites of New York, but there was still something a bit shocking about this dinner.

‍

‍The word began to leak out and somehow, months later, Joseph Pulitzer’s tabloid newspaper The World managed to get a scoop on it. Suddenly White’s lurid, seedy doings were splashed on the front pages of the metropolis’s most notorious newspaper.

‍

‍Ordinary folk threw ‘girl in a pie’ parties across America and it became a trend right up until the 21st century when actor George Segal played a Navy Seal aboard an American warship hunting terrorists who used pie party as cover for a hijack.

‍

‍The pie idea wasn’t entirely new. Medieval Brits stuffed pies with live frogs to watch them hop about the table. And in 1474, an Italian cookbook included instructions on how to fill a large pie with birds, which burst into flight on the pie’s slicing. In England, it was the origin of the “Sing a Song of Sixpence” nursery rhyme.

‍

‍But in 1626, the Duke and Duchess of Buckingham gifted Charles I a pie containing the live Sir Jeffrey Hudson, a famous dwarf who would go on to serving the pies at dinners across the continent.

‍

‍In 1907 meanwhile, White was soon dominating the New World’s headlines again. He was murdered by the husband of another young woman, Evelyn Nesbit, who claimed he raped her. The case was splashed across popular newspapers; detailed in a pulp novel and dramatised in a Hollywood movie.

‍

‍The New York World told how White had offered to help Nesbit’s career; care for her and pay her and her mother’s expenses to keep quiet. He was 47 and married; she was 16 and a chorus girl.

‍

‍It reported that the first time he invited Nesbit to his 24th Street apartment, one of many he owned in the city, he took her to a room, where he had rigged a velvet swing to hang from the ceiling.

‍

‍White sat Nesbit on the swing and pushed her naked: his hands on her back, her legs straining until she cried with pain. A few days later he took her to his bedroom, gave her a glass of spiked champagne, and raped her. She woke naked in her blood on the sheets.

‍

‍“Now you belong to me,” White had told her, holding her after.

‍

‍Nesbit told no one about the rape until a few years later, when she confided in husband-to-be Harry Thaw. But Thaw had a reputation. He was known to beat working class girls with dog whips and soak them in boiling water until they scalded.

‍

‍He couldn’t stand that Stanford White had “ruined” his wife-to-be, so on June 25, 1906, at an opening performance in the Madison Square Garden theatre that White had designed, Harry shot and killed him.

‍

‍“He ruined your life, dear,” he shouted to his wife as a fireman marched him out of the auditorium in handcuffs, his gun still hot from the kill. “That’s why I did it.”

‍

‍White made his last journey on the streets of New York to the cemetery, past many of the buildings he designed.

‍

‍THE PIPE DREAMS OF PETER PAN

‍

‍FROM the Victorian era to Fleet Street in the 1900s, smoking was a pleasure, even in the stale-air newsrooms of the Press. Pipes, cigars, fags; it was a free for all.

‍

‍Great pals Churchill and Beaverbrook were cigar men of course, but their friend, writer J.M.Barrie, creator of the wonderfully ageless Peter Pan, was into his pipe and loved smoking so much, that he wrote a book about it in 1896, a few years before Peter flew onto the scene.

‍

‍My Lady Nicotine (a study in smoke) started life as a series of newspaper articles in St James’s Gazette and the Edinburgh Evening Dispatch among others. But by the time Barrie had finished it became more of a book about his battle to give it up for health reasons.

‍

‍There are chapters on the friends of tobacco … pouches, smoking tables, choices of pipe stem and bowl; daydreams lost in the world of nicotine and smoke; friends he puffs with as he listens to their thoughts.

‍

‍And his confessions that the pipe or a cigarette gives him confidence with the ladies. He hid behind his pipe because of his shyness and timidity. Before he got it, he would practice conversations the night before entering “into the society of ladies.”

‍

‍Known to scoffers as “the Mermaid”, his pipe’s mouthpiece was a cigarette holder, which required “months of unwearied practice … before you found the angle at which the bowl did not drop off.” He turned this to his advantage at parties.

‍

‍He wrote: “She observed my strange-looking pipe. It is possible that she may pass it by without remark, in which case all is lost, but experience has shown me that four times out of six she touches it in assumed horror, to pass some humorous remark.

‍

‍“Off tumbles the bowl. “Oh,” she exclaims, “see what I have done! I am so sorry!”

‍

‍“I pull myself together. ‘Madam,’ I reply calmly and bowing low, what else was to be expected? You came near my pipe — and it lost its head!” She blushes but cannot help being pleased; and I set my pipe for the next visitor.

‍

‍The book ends on a depressing image. Barrie sits each night alone in the drawing room, while his wife sleeps upstairs. At a certain hour, a neighbour on the other side of the wall, whom he has never met, lights up a meerschaum pipe, and our man, trying to give up, puffs his empty pipe in solidarity until he hears him clearing out his bowl’s final ash.

‍

‍“When his last tap says goodnight to me I take my cold briar out of my mouth, tap it on the mantelpiece, smile sadly, and go to bed myself.”

‍

‍TERRY MANNERS

‍

‍28 April 2025