Bringing the wax to life

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MADAME TUSSAUD AND THE HISTORY OF WAXWORKS

By Pamela Pilbeam

Hambledon and London, $29.95, 287 pages, illus.

Sometimes it takes unvarnished opportunism to get a head. Marie Tussaud knew this, and in 1789 when angry and lawless masses attacked the Bastille, killed two of its defenders and hoisted their heads on a spike, the young Frenchwoman "sat on the steps of the exhibition with the bloody heads on her knees, taking the impressions of their features." Or so she would have us believe.

In "Madame Tussaud and the Waxworks," Pamela Pilbeam notes that the 19th-century entrepreneur made other questionable claims in a memoir she wrote at the end of her life. Notable among these is her assertion that she lived at Versailles in order to tutor the king's sister Madame Elizabeth "in the technique of wax modeling." Ms. Pilbeam writes that "there is no proof that [Madame Tussaud] ever lived at Versailles. She is not listed in any of the royal almanacs, nor does she appear on any royal payroll."

Madame Tussaud a liar? A fraud? This cannot be. And it is, as Ms. Pilbeam shows, beside the point. Her subject most likely did visit Versailles from time to time in order to offer instruction. And one gathers from the evidence here that Madame Tussaud's waxworks relied on the line between fantasy and reality staying firmly blurry.

The book opens with a general outline of roots of the family business. "The modern history of waxworks originated with Philippe Curtius' two exhibitions in Paris in the 1770s. He trained Marie Grosholz, (the future Madame Tussaud, whom he always introduced as his niece but who was probably his daughter. She inherited the business when Curtius died in 1794."

Later, after marrying Francois Tussaud, Madame Tussaud took advantage of the peace between England and France and crossed to England in 1802, never to return to her husband. She was 41 when she began her touring career (with a 4-year-old son in tow) and 74 when she finally settled in Baker Street. When she died, her "exhibition was the most successful tourist venue in the country." The exhibition was owned and run by her descendants until it became a limited company in the 1880s shortly after the move to its present site on Marleybone Road. "The last member involved in running the show died in 1967."