In the early 1920s, audiences across America paid to gape at a woman billed as the ugliest in the world. Her name was Mary Ann Bevan, and behind the lurid carnival posters was a story few of the onlookers knew: a widowed mother of four, slowly destroyed by a rare disease that twisted her once-attractive features, who had chosen the freak show as the only way left to feed her children. She had been born Mary Ann Webster in Plaistow, East London, on December 20, 1874, one of eight children in a poor family. As a young woman, she trained as a nurse, a profession transformed in Britain by the reforms of Florence Nightingale.
Completing her training in the late 1890s, she was working as a nurse in London by 1900. Photographs from that period show a dark-haired, attractive woman. In 1903, she married Thomas Bevan, a London greengrocer she had been courting, and became Mary Ann Bevan. The couple started a family quickly, and by the early 1910s they had four children.
Around 1906, she began to show signs of a grave disorder. It was acromegaly, a condition caused by a benign tumor on the pituitary gland, the organ regulating the body’s hormones. The tumor produces excess growth hormone. In children, this can lead to excessive growth, but in adults, whose growth plates have already closed, the surplus hormone instead causes severe deformities and intense pain.
The hands and feet expand, facial features coarsen and enlarge, joint pain and headaches become common, and the voice deepens. The condition affects roughly six people in every hundred thousand, usually beginning in middle age. Today, treatments exist—surgery to remove the tumor, medication, or radiation—but in Mary Ann’s time, little was known and no effective therapy existed. As her face and body grew steadily more disfigured, she appears to have left her nursing career behind in the late 1900s or early 1910s.
Her husband remained devoted and supported her staying at home as the illness advanced. But in 1914, Thomas Bevan died prematurely, leaving Mary Ann a widow with four young children, the youngest still a baby. She had no financial security. Her face had become lean, masculine, with folds of skin hanging beneath her eyes, and in the social conditions of the time, her appearance made it increasingly difficult to find work.
She moved from job to job in the years after her husband’s death, constantly struggling to make ends meet. In the late 1910s, she made a decision born of desperation: she would try to profit from the very disease that had destroyed her body. Claude Bartram, the European agent for the American circus Barnum & Bailey, had announced a newspaper competition to find the ugliest woman in the world. Mary Ann sent in a photograph that caught his attention.
He contacted her and offered a job with the circus in the United States. She was hesitant at first, but the terms convinced her: ten pounds a week for a year, all travel expenses covered, and extra money from sales of her postcards. It was enough to pay for her children’s education. She accepted.
Such sideshows were common across early twentieth-century America, presenting people with deformities, rare disorders, or genetic conditions as public curiosities—giants, dwarfs, conjoined twins, and others. In 1920, Mary Ann Bevan sailed from Southampton to America, where she discovered she was actually working for Ringling Brothers. That circus, founded in Wisconsin in 1884 by five German-American brothers, had merged with Barnum & Bailey shortly before her arrival in 1919, and the combined enterprise was being promoted as “The Greatest Show on Earth. ”
She quickly became one of its stars.
She was described in the press as the ugliest woman in the world and appeared in several newspapers, eventually even in Time magazine. The circus dressed her in masculine or deliberately unflattering clothes to emphasize the damage the disease had done, making her look even more severe. By 1923, she was said to have earned around twenty thousand pounds during her time in America, a sum worth close to half a million pounds today. She sent her children to boarding school and gave them a far more comfortable life than she had ever known.
Mary Ann returned to Europe in 1925 to appear in a show in Paris, but eventually decided to move her children to New York City. She worked periodically at Dreamland on Coney Island, Brooklyn. In 1927, she became a patient of Harvey Cushing, the renowned American neurosurgeon and pioneer of brain surgery. Cushing could offer her little treatment, but he was deeply disturbed by how she was being exploited.
When Time magazine published an article about her, he wrote a strongly worded response. The poor woman seated in the Ringling Brothers sideshow between the fat lady and the armless wonder, he wrote, wearing white lace caps and high-buttoned boots, had a story far from amusing. She had once been a lively and beautiful young woman, fallen victim to a disease known as acromegaly. As a physician, he said, he hated to feel that the press could make light of the tragedies of illness.
Mary Ann Bevan died on December 26, 1933, a few days after her fifty-ninth birthday. Acromegaly today, if treated, does not greatly shorten life, but in the early twentieth century patients typically lost ten to fifteen years. Her children honored her last wish and brought her back to England, where she was buried in Brockley and Ladywell Cemeteries in Lewisham, southeast London. Alcoholism in her final years may have hastened her death, a problem undoubtedly compounded by her illness and the years of public mockery.
Her story has been retold periodically for more than eight decades, both because of her fleeting fame in 1920s America and because it exposes the cruelty of society’s treatment of people with physical deformities. It resurfaced in a cruder form in the early 2000s, when Hallmark, the major greeting card company, began selling a birthday card that mocked the ugliest woman in the world. The card showed her picture and referenced a dating game show of the time, the implication being that the buyer would choose door number three, where Mary Ann Bevan stood. In 2006, Dr.
Wouter de Herder, a Dutch endocrinology consultant visiting London who had recently written a paper on her life and struggle with acromegaly, spotted the card being sold in the city. He complained to Hallmark, saying he did not think it was right in 2006 to use her image for a sick birthday card, and that it was insulting to all patients with the same condition. Hallmark grudgingly acknowledged its mistake but only stopped future production, refusing to withdraw from sale the cards already printed. Robert Knutson, chief executive of the Pituitary Network Association, which supports people with pituitary diseases, later called making money from another’s misery shameful—corporate greed at its lowest.
Mary Ann Bevan, against every obstacle, extracted what she could from a cruel situation, even at enormous cost to herself. She earned money and gave her children a brighter future and more chances than she herself had ever enjoyed in her youth.