Mariann Bevanon first began showing symptoms around 1906. At first, her hands and feet swelled, which is typical of the pituitary disorder she had developed. Over the years, the physical damage worsened, and her face became increasingly deformed. By the time her husband died in 1914, her features had grown more masculine, and folds of skin hung beneath her eyes.
She had been born Mariann Webster on 20 December 1874 in Plaistow, East London, one of eight children in a poor family. As a young woman, she trained as a nurse, a profession that had flourished in Britain since the reforms of Florence Nightingale in the 1850s and 1860s. By 1900 she was working as a nurse in London, and photographs from that period show her to have been an attractive, dark-haired woman. In 1903 she married Thomas Bevan, a London greengrocer she had been seeing for some time.
They quickly started a family, and by the early 1910s they had four children. Then, in 1914, Thomas died prematurely, leaving Mariann to raise their young children alone with little money. She had already left her nursing job in the late 1900s or early 1910s as her condition made her appearance more disfigured. Thomas, loyal to his wife, had not objected to her staying home if that was how she preferred to manage her condition.
After his death, she moved from job to job, struggling constantly to cover her expenses. Her illness was acromegaly, a rare disorder caused by a benign tumor growing on the pituitary gland in the brain. In more than 95 percent of cases, this tumor is the underlying cause. The gland overproduces growth hormones, and in adults whose growth plates have already closed, the excess hormones cause disfigurement rather than height.
The disease affects roughly six people in every hundred thousand and usually begins in middle age. Symptoms typically start with enlarged hands and feet, then develop into deformities of the face and other parts of the body. Joint pain and headaches follow periodically, and the voice often deepens. In Mariann Bevan’s time, little was known about the disease and there were no effective treatments.
Surgery to remove the tumor would have meant brain surgery, and even today medication and radiation are the preferred first treatments. In the early twentieth century, patients like Bevan typically lost ten to fifteen years of their lives to the condition. By the late 1910s, desperate to support her four children, the youngest still a baby, she decided to try to profit from the way the disease had destroyed her body. A newspaper contest was being held to find the world’s ugliest woman, announced by Claude Bartram, the European agent for the American circus Barnum & Bailey.
Mariann sent in a photograph, and Bartram was struck by it. He contacted her and offered her a job with the circus in the United States. She hesitated at first, but agreed when she was offered ten pounds a week for a year, with all her travel expenses covered and additional money from sales of her postcards at the circus. With that income, she would be able to provide an education for her children.
The circus was one of many sideshow entertainments across America in the early twentieth century that today are considered cruel and wholly indecent. These shows exhibited people regarded as oddities, usually because of some deformity caused by a genetic disorder or disease. They included giants, dwarfs, conjoined twins, albinos, people born without limbs, and the extremely obese. Mariann Bevan would perform in such shows for years in America.
Her work began with a tour in Hampshire, England, but soon the circus’s principal in America contacted her to come over. She set sail from Southampton in 1920. Once in America, she discovered she was actually working for Ringling Brothers circus. The Ringling Brothers, five sons of German immigrants, had founded their circus in Wisconsin in 1884.
In 1919, shortly before Bevan arrived, the circus merged with Barnum & Bailey, and the combined enterprise was advertised as the greatest show on earth. Mariann Bevan had joined one of the most famous circuses of the era. She quickly gained wide notoriety in American sideshows, and several newspapers described her as the world’s ugliest woman. Within months she was one of the show’s stars, and she soon even appeared on the pages of Time magazine.
This was amplified by the decision to dress her in men’s clothing or unattractive outfits during performances, making her look more masculine and accentuating the damage her disease had done. Her fame made money for Ringling Brothers, and Bevan received a good share of it. By 1923, she was said to have earned about twenty thousand pounds during her time in the United States, a sum equivalent today to nearly half a million pounds. In 1925 she returned to Europe for a show in Paris, but eventually decided to move her children to New York City.
With the money she had earned, she sent all four of them to boarding school and provided them a relatively comfortable life. She continued to work periodically in the Dreamland show at Coney Island in Brooklyn. In 1927, Bevan became a patient of Harvey Cushing, a leading American neurosurgeon and pathologist who had pioneered brain surgery in the early twentieth century. Cushing could not offer much treatment for her condition, but he wrote a strongly worded letter to Time magazine in response to an article it had recently published about her.
He said the poor woman seated in the Ringling Brothers sideshow between the fat lady and the armless wonder, wearing white lace caps and high boots, had a story far from laughable. She had once been a lively and beautiful young woman, but she had become the victim of a disease known as acromegaly. As a physician, he said, he disliked feeling that the press could make light of the tragedies of illness. Mariann Bevan died in 1933.
She had lived with a significant alcohol problem in her final years, which likely hastened her death, a problem compounded by her disease and the way she had been mocked almost daily for years. She died on 26 December 1933, just days after her fifty-ninth birthday. Her children honored her last wish and brought her back to England for burial. She was interred at Brockley and Ladywell Cemeteries in Lewisham, southeast London.
Her story has been retold periodically over the more than eighty years since her death, partly because of the fame she briefly gained in America during the 1920s and partly because it illustrates the cruel attitude society held toward people with physical deformities well into the twentieth century. Sometimes that attention has been cruder than others. In the early 2000s, the major greeting card company Hallmark began selling a birthday card mocking the ugliest woman in the world. The card featured a photograph of Mariann Bevan and referenced a dating show of the time in which a contestant had to choose among three women he could not see.
The idea was that the participant would pick door number three, behind which stood Mariann Bevan. The card was spotted on sale in London in 2006 by Dr. Wouter Duyra, a Dutch consultant endocrinologist at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam. He was visiting the United Kingdom for work and had recently written a scientific paper about Bevan’s life and her struggle with acromegaly.
Angered by the card, he complained to Hallmark, saying he did not believe it was right in 2006 to use her image to create a sick birthday card, and that the card insulted all patients suffering from the same condition. Hallmark reluctantly admitted that making a sick woman into a source of mockery had been a mistake, but it only stopped future production and refused to withdraw the cards already in circulation. Robert Knutson, chief executive of the Pituitary Network Association, a group supporting people with pituitary diseases such as acromegaly, later commented that making money from the misery and misfortunes of others was shameful, calling it corporate greed at its lowest. Mariann Bevan was a woman who, despite the overwhelming odds against her, made the most of her situation, even at a cost to herself.
She earned money and gave her children a brighter future and more opportunities than she herself had ever received in her youth.