Mariann Bevanon was not always the woman the world would come to call the ugliest woman alive. Born Mariann Webster on December 20, 1874, in the East London district of Balesto, she grew up as one of eight children in a poor family. When she reached adulthood, she trained as a nurse, a profession that had flourished in Britain since the reforms of Florence Nightingale in the 1850s and 1860s. By the late 1890s, she had completed her training, and by 1900 she was working as a nurse in London.
Photographs from that period show an attractive, dark-haired young woman. In 1903, Mariann married Thomas Bevanon, a London greengrocer whom she had been courting for some time. The couple quickly started a family, and by the early 1910s they had four children. But in 1914, Thomas died prematurely, leaving Mariann to raise their young children alone.
The loss was devastating both emotionally and financially, and the family was left in a precarious position. Around 1906, Mariann had begun to show the first symptoms of a rare disease called acromegaly. Acromegaly is a disorder of the pituitary gland, the organ that regulates the body’s hormone production. It is caused by an excessive release of growth hormones.
In children who are still growing, the condition has limited visible effects. But once a person reaches adulthood, the growth plates in their bones begin to close. If they develop acromegaly, the excess growth hormones cause the body to begin growing again, and with the growth plates largely closed, this leads to severe deformities and often intense pain. In more than 95 percent of cases, the underlying cause is a benign tumor growing on the pituitary gland.
The disease affects roughly six people out of every 100,000 and typically begins to appear in middle age. The first symptoms usually involve swelling of the hands and feet, which then progresses to deformities and enlargement of the face and other parts of the body. Later, joint pain and headaches become recurring problems, and the voice often deepens. Today, treatments for acromegaly exist.
Surgery can be used to attempt removal of the tumor from the pituitary gland, though because this requires brain surgery, medication and radiation therapy are often the preferred first-line treatments. In Mariann Bevanon’s time, however, very little was known about the disease, and no effective treatment was available. She had to continue her life as the illness began to affect her daily existence. Her hands and feet became swollen first, and as the years passed, the physical damage worsened.
At some point in the late 1900s or early 1910s, she appears to have left her nursing job as her facial features and other parts of her body became increasingly distorted. Her husband Thomas remained loyal and seemed content for her to stay at home if that was what she preferred. But when he died in 1914, Mariann was left in a desperate situation. She had four young children to support, the youngest still an infant.
By then, her face had become more gaunt and masculine in appearance, with folds of skin beginning to hang beneath her eyes. In the conditions of the time, her appearance made it increasingly difficult for her to find work. In the years after her husband’s death, Mariann moved from job to job, constantly struggling to make ends meet. Finally, in the late 1910s, she decided to try to profit from the way the disease had destroyed her body.
A newspaper contest had been announced by Claude Bartram, the European agent for the American Barnum & Bailey circus, seeking the ugliest woman in the world. Mariann sent in a photograph that caught Bartram’s attention. He contacted her and offered her a job with Barnum & Bailey in the United States. Mariann was hesitant at first, but she eventually agreed when she was offered ten pounds a week for a year, with all her travel expenses covered and additional money from the sale of any postcards of her at the circus.
With this income, she would be able to provide an education for her children. Barnum & Bailey was only one of many shows across America and other countries in the early twentieth century that are now regarded as cruel and entirely inappropriate. These sideshows exhibited people considered to be curiosities, usually because of some deformity or because they were victims of a genetic disorder or a specific disease. Such shows might feature giants and dwarves suffering from gigantism or dwarfism, conjoined twins, albinos, or individuals born without limbs or who were severely obese.
It was in shows like these that Mariann Bevanon would perform over the next several years in America. At first, her work involved a tour in Hampshire, England, but soon the head of the circus in America contacted her to come over. Accordingly, she sailed from Southampton to America in 1920. There, she discovered that she was now actually working for Ringling Brothers Circus.
Ringling Brothers had first been founded in Wisconsin in 1884 by the five Ringling brothers, sons of German immigrants to America. In 1919, shortly before Bevanon arrived, the circus had merged with Barnum & Bailey. The combined entity began advertising itself as the greatest show on earth. When she appeared in their production, Bevanon was part of a world-famous circus of the early twentieth century.
She quickly gained wide fame in the American sideshows and appeared in several newspapers that described her as the ugliest woman in the world. Within a few months, she had become one of the show’s stars and soon appeared on the pages of Time magazine. This was heightened by the decision to dress her during performances in men’s clothing or unattractive outfits, in a way that made her look more masculine and emphasized the damage the disease had done to her body. Because of this fame, Ringling Brothers earned more money, and Bevanon received a substantial share of it.
By 1923, she was said to have earned about 20,000 pounds during her time in the United States, an amount equivalent to nearly half a million pounds today. One cannot help but wonder about the emotional and psychological toll of being exhibited as a human curiosity night after night during those years. In 1925, Mariann returned to Europe to appear at a show in Paris, but she eventually made the decision to move her children to New York City. With the money she had earned, she was able to send all four of her children to boarding school and provide them with a relatively comfortable life.
She continued to work periodically at the Dreamland show at Coney Island in Brooklyn. In 1927, Bevanon became a patient of Harvey Cushing, a prominent American neurosurgeon and pathologist who had pioneered brain surgery in the early twentieth century. Cushing could not offer much treatment for Bevanon, but he wrote a sharply worded letter to Time magazine in response to a recent article about her. He noted that this poor woman sitting in the Ringling Brothers sideshow between the fat lady and the armless wonder, wearing white lace caps and high boots, had a story that was far from amusing.
She had once been a lively, beautiful young woman, but she had become a victim of a disease known as acromegaly. As a physician, he said, he did not like to feel that the press could be flippant about the tragedies of illness. Mariann Bevanon died in 1933. If acromegaly is treated today, it does not significantly affect life expectancy.
But in the early twentieth century, patients typically lost ten to fifteen years of their lives. That was the case with Mariann Bevanon, who died on December 26, 1933, shortly after her fifty-ninth birthday. Fortunately, her children carried out her final wish and brought her back to England for burial. She was laid to rest in Brockley and Ladywell Cemeteries in Lewisham, southeast London.
Her death may have been accelerated by a serious alcohol problem in her later years, a problem undoubtedly worsened by her illness and the way she had been mocked almost daily for years. Mariann Bevanon’s story has been retold periodically over the more than eighty years since her death, both because of the brief fame she gained in America in the 1920s and because her story reflects the cruel attitude society took toward people with physical deformities well into the twentieth century. Occasionally, she has resurfaced in popular culture in cruder ways. In the early 2000s, the major greeting card and stationery company Hallmark began selling a birthday card that mocked the ugliest woman in the world.
The card featured a picture of Mariann Bevanon and referenced a dating show of the time in which participants had to choose from three contestants they could not see. The idea was that the participant would choose door number three, behind which stood Mariann Bevanon. The birthday card was spotted on sale in London in 2006 by Dr. Wouter Duira, a Dutch endocrinology consultant at Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam.
Duira had recently written a scientific paper pointing to Bevanon’s life and her suffering with acromegaly. He was upset by the card and complained to Hallmark, saying that in 2006 he simply did not think it was right to use her image to create a sick birthday card, and that the card was insulting to all patients suffering from the same condition. Hallmark reluctantly admitted that making a sick woman the subject of mockery was wrong, but it only stopped future production and refused to withdraw the cards already produced from circulation. Robert Knutson, chief executive of the Pituitary Network Association, a group focused on supporting people with pituitary diseases such as acromegaly, later commented that making money from the misery and misfortune of others is shameful, calling it corporate greed at its lowest level.
Mariann Bevanon was a woman who, despite all the obstacles she faced, managed to make the most of her situation, even if it came at the cost of herself. She earned money and gave her children a brighter future and more opportunities than she herself had received in her youth.