SYMHC Classics: The Tussaud Test of Popularity

This 2011 episode from previous hosts Sarah and Deblina covers the story of Marie Tussaud and her famous wax figures. So who exactly was she, and how did she create one of the world's most popular museums?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hello, and Happy Saturday. We have picked today's Saturday Classic
because once again this person is coming up on a
forthcoming episode of the show. It's Marie Toussau and her
wax sculptures. But really the story is so much bigger
than just the wax likenesses of famous people. Uh. This
episode also talks about wax venuses and all the beheadings

(00:23):
during the Reign of Terror, and a lot of very
savvy business decisions. This originally came out April and it
is by our previous host Sarah and Deblina, So enjoy
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast.

(00:50):
I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm Deblina Chokoateboarding. And every now
and then listener suggestions sync up exactly with ideas we're
already thinking of, and that has definitely happened this week. Yeah,
y'all are mind readers for sure. It kind of scares
me a little bit. I'm not gonna lie, but I've
been thinking for a month or so of doing a
podcast on Madam Tisseau, the famous woman who started the

(01:11):
wax works in London, and since then listener emails have
been trickling in, not tons of them, but very very
pro Madam Tissau listeners. Suddenly, I don't know where y'all
came from. Yeah, And it's interesting because a lot of us,
I mean me in particular, I hardly ever think about

(01:31):
Madam Tussau the woman behind the wax figures. But I
think of David Beckham or whatever wax figure is, the
celebra of the moment. Yeah, exactly, will stop in on
this particular visit or not. But her story is actually
really amazing. It combines court life at Versailles, revolutionary dangers,
and plucky business acumen. At least, depending on who you

(01:53):
believe according to her own memoirs that's true. In reality,
you might find that that's a little bit different. Definitely.
But one recent biographer, Kate Barrage, wrote Madam Tisso Life
in Wax I think it came out in two thousand six,
and she described the wax artists as an original tabloid journalist.

(02:14):
And I thought that was a really interesting way to
think of her, and kind of a different way to
think of her, somebody who traded in celebrity and images
long before photography or video or even color printing. I mean,
just think of the little engravings you would get in
the newspaper. If you were lucky enough to read a newspaper,
that would be all you you had to go on

(02:35):
to know what your king looked like. Even so, she
was a bit of a reporter, we could say, and
it was really more than entertainment. There was sort of
this sideshow nature of wax works at the time. They
were a little d class a depending on which exhibits
you were going to. But it was about information, you know,
letting people know what folks looked like and teaching them

(02:57):
a little bit about history too, which is always good
for our per This is yeah, definitely, But first, before
we delve into all those bigger issues, I think we
should take a look back at how she got into this.
I mean that's what I find most interesting. How does
a woman of this era get into waxy and education
in wax. Yeah, it all began for her. She was

(03:18):
born Marie Grossholtz on December one, seventeen sixty one, in Strasburg. Actually,
her mother was a cook and her father was a
soldier who died before she was born, but when she
was still an infant, her mother went to work as
the housekeeper for a young doctor named Philippe Courtius who
lived in Bairn. Yeah, but he was more than a doctor.
Quite notably, he made anatomical waxes, which originally, when you

(03:43):
were short on cadavers, that would be a good way
to train your doctors to to study the human body.
But the waxes he made were also kind of erotic
in a way. They were sometimes called anatomical venuses, and
they were usually these young women man waxes that had
parts you could unfold and look at their inner organs

(04:05):
and all of that and and study them anatomically. But
he did portraits to curiosity type stuff and started to
build a name for himself because he was quite good
at it, and most importantly for young Marie's future career,
he was really good at getting the color of the
skin right, making the waxes appear like flesh, not just

(04:26):
like a candle that melted down into a human shape.
They really look kind of like they're alive. Yeah. And
because of his skill at this, eventually word of Courtius's
talents spread to the French court, and when the Prince
de Conti Louis the fifteen cousin visits the wax maker.
He invites Cortius back to Paris, where he opens a
salon and does private commissions. So he's made it to

(04:49):
the big time. And it's a good time to be
in Paris in general, because it's booming. People of all
classes are seeking entertainment. It seems like just about constantly
you read about it. And there's something new going on too,
and that's a culture of celebrity, so people are really
interested in images all of a sudden, So a wax
works like this is a potentially profitable business. Yeah, but

(05:13):
taste changed so quickly that the wax head and Curtius
of salon are actually chiseled off when they go out
of style, which is a little bit forebodings considering when
this takes place. But after after a little while in Paris,
you know, sort of setting things up, he has his
former housekeeper and her daughter joined him. So this seems
a little suspicious, and a lot of historians have speculated

(05:38):
on what the relationship between Curtius and Marie really was.
Some think that Marie's mother was his sister and so
he was her uncle, and then other people think that
maybe he was even secretly Mrie's father, but regardless of
any possible blood relation between them, Curtius really treated Marie

(05:59):
like a daughter definitely in every way. He took her
on as his pupil. He started her off modeling fruit
and flowers, which was a lot easier to do than
modeling the human form with all its different textures and colors.
And um, I guess we should give you a little
description of how the wax heads were made, because it's
pretty cool, yeah, and it really helps with the understanding,

(06:20):
I think. Um So, basically, a clay head would be made,
and from that a plaster of Paris mold was created
in sections, and then the sections would be fitted together
and molten eggs and stuff connecting them exactly, and molten
wax would be poured inside, and you had to be
really careful so that bubbles didn't form when you did
that part. When bubble like taking out the nose or

(06:42):
something in a way. Um So, then when the crust hardened,
the center was poured out because the outsides would harden
a little faster than the center. And when the whole
thing was solid, the molds would be removed and then
glass eyes would be fitted in from the inside right,
and that was apparently one of the tricky parts, because
you've got to make sure the eyes are going in

(07:03):
the right direction. One isn't kind of protruding more than
the other. Um, you don't pop them out of the
mold entirely or the new wax more. Yeah, exactly, So
I think the eyes were the tricky part, but the
hair was the really painstaking part because unless there was
a wig involved, it had to be threaded through the

(07:23):
wax strand by strand, So you can imagine it would
be really tedious. But by her teens, Marie is really
good at making these wax models. She's as good as
her so called uncle. And so with these talents, it's
maybe no surprise that in seventeen eighty a nineteen year
old Marie somehow ends up at very Sigh, or at

(07:47):
least that's her story. According to her memoirs, Marie instructed
the devout younger sister of Louis the sixteenth, who was
Madame Elizabeth, and she instructed her in religious vote of making,
which was kind of like making wax relics. So the

(08:10):
two teenagers they really hit it off, and they hit
it off so well that Marie actually became a bourgeois
star of the court, so she'd supposedly sit in while
the king met privately with his sister. She'd have sittings
for waxes with Louis, Marie Antoinette and their children. She
supposedly got hit on by the future Louis the eighteen
and she stayed there for nine years at court. Yeah,

(08:33):
so this sounds really remarkable, and it's been a crucial
part of her legend since then, and especially since she
set up shop in England, especially considering what's to come
in the Revolution. We're going to get into that in
a minute. But it's interesting to me that it's reported
without questions in most sources you find on Madame Tissou's life.

(08:55):
It's in Oxford Dictionary, National Biography, It's and Encyclopedia Britannica
History Magazine. But in that two thousand six biography I
mentioned in the beginning, Barrage Kate Barrage's biography, she kind
of raises some questions about many aspects of Marie's memoirs,
but especially this versside part, because I mean, and we
certainly learned this in our in our Bourbon series. I

(09:19):
I would imagine you'll remember this too, But Versaille is
a really rule driven place. It's not somewhere where you
have breakout stars from the middle class. Really, court etiquette
would have made it pretty unlikely that Marie, who, of
course her family's main livelihood is this kind of sideshow
wax exhibit, would really thoroughly infiltrate Versi. And perhaps most significantly,

(09:43):
there are no records of her in kind of two
key areas. There are no records of her in the
Almanactive for SI, which is the exhaustive list of court employees,
has everybody who worked in Versailles. Yeah, she really should
have been on that. Or there are also no records
of her in Madame Elizabeth's staff, which even includes Madame
Elizabeth's part time hairdresser. So yeah, even the little guys

(10:08):
were making it on the list well, and even if
he was important to her. I mean, the the main
thing there is that if it's including part time people,
it's really unlikely that she would have just completely slipped
through the cracks like this. So she might have been
to Versailles, and she might have even taught Madame Elizabeth
a few classes here and there. But what's perhaps more

(10:30):
likely is that she was really spending most of her
time back in Paris working with her family's booming wax
business and honing her art. You know, she was making
a lot of the figures herself by the time she
was in her teens, and learning the business to learning
how to attract customers and advertise, all things that are
going to serve her really well later in life. Of course,

(10:53):
things changed a little bit when the Revolution came around,
or a lot, depending on how you look at it.
If in fact Marie was Versailles, Curtius recalled her and
they consolidated their shows at the Boulevard de Temple, and
what followed from there was nothing short of amazing. Courtius
and Marie somehow managed to actually capitalize on the revolution

(11:13):
good money during it. Yeah, they actually profited. They switched
from displays of the King and Queen at the Grand
Couvert to revolutionary heroes to later suit scenes like the
death of murat Um, all without losing their heads. So
it's pretty impressive because you can imagine the mob in
Paris during the revolution. There. It's not just like somebody

(11:34):
goes out of style. They go out of style and
you better not still be exhibiting the wax works when
it when it happened. So Curtius himself, though played a
role in the revolution. He was among those who stormed
the Best Steal, and his wax works had a role too.
Surprisingly enough, even before the storming of the Bastil, just
a few days before it, a crowd came to the

(11:57):
salon and obtain the heads of the heroes of the moment.
This is pre guillotine, so heads don't have quite the
significance they would have later. At this point it was
Jacques Nicuire and the Duke Dorleon, and the crowd takes
the heads and they go and show them off and
um march around with them and eventually run into some
trouble with royal soldiers and try to protect the heads.

(12:20):
It's a it's a really wild story. Some of them
are killed trying to defend the wax heads, and the
Orleans bus is lost in the scramble, but the Nick
Caroline actually comes back to the shop badly sinned. You
can imagine at that point maybe the eyes would be
a little out of whack and the hair would be
burned off, but makes it back. Just a strange story.

(12:44):
Before the French Revolution even really starts. Yeah, definitely, and
they keep going with us though. They keep following the crowd,
and they keep following the trends. So when Bastille memorabilia
becomes big, Marie models a figure of the Comte de Lorge,
a prisoner who's actually been made up, since the real
guys inside had been a little less than heroic forgerers.

(13:05):
I think there was a guy in there for incest
and his family wanted him locked up. Nobody in the
best deal was really like super heroic. You wouldn't want
a figure of him hanging out in your house exactly,
So you just make one up and then Murray makes
a wax of it for you. There you go. So
by the summer of seventeen eighty nine, an entire tableau
of the siege was featured in the waxworks. Yeah, but

(13:27):
as the revolution turned, obviously, Murray's work became a lot grimmer,
and she started to model the guillotined heads of her
supposed former friends at her side. And this is a
really poignant part of the two so legend. You know,
she claimed to have molded the heads of the Princess
de Lambal, who had been tortured for four hours at

(13:49):
the Twilery mass her Louis the sixteenth before he was
interred in a double heaping helping of quicklime, because the
revolutionaries really didn't want any rel left and Marie Antoinette herself,
although this story didn't come from Marie, it came from
a nineteenth century exhibit catalog. Again, though, there's some issues

(14:10):
with this idea of her catching the heads from the
guillotine essentially and making molds of them. Yeah, Marie always
mentions that she models the head at the order of
the National Assembly. Perhaps unlikely though, considering the efforts that
the revolutionaries would take to erase all relics of the royals.
Like you just mentioned, you don't want anyone to have

(14:32):
Louie's body, Why would you want him? Why would you
want them to have a perfect likeness of him? Right?
And then also some of the heads just plane didn't
show up for a really long time. For instance, Louie
and Marie Antoinette weren't displayed at the waxworks after the
Revolution until the eighteen sixties in London, so it would
have been dangerous to display them. Absolutely. Courtiers sold off

(14:55):
a lot of the royal figures actually to an exhibit
traveling through India, which I think is interesting. Stand you,
Marie Antoinette and folks traveling traveling around a lot safer there,
I guess, so, unless it's hot, I'm not sure. But
that's not to say that Curtius and Marie weren't taking
models from guillotine victims. I mean, it is quite possible

(15:15):
they were doing that. Um, maybe just not Louis the
sixte himself. It's possible that Curtius made a deal with
one of the really famous executioners during the revolution to
inspect all the outgoing heads to see if any famous
faces were among them. And it's also likely that he
would visit the cemeteries and he may have modeled Madame

(15:37):
de Barry that way, um, since she was supposed to
be a remarkably good likeness. Marie actually even recounts her
own near brush with the guillotine when she, her mother
and an aunt were seized in the middle of the night,
imprisoned and they got their weekly haircuts for the blade.
But by seventeen nine four Marie was safe and supposedly

(15:58):
making a mold of robes Year's head, always one step
ahead of the game that Marie definitely, But that same year,
Courteous died at home. I mean, this is probably kind
of an amazing stat for the time. Anyways, dying at home,
and he left Marie everything he had. Like we said earlier,
he really did treat her like a daughter, and one

(16:19):
of the things he left her, one of his most
valuable possessions, was, of course, the core of his wax works.
He had thirty six full figures, seven half length figures,
and three reclining figures. So it seems like Marie is
going to be able to carry on the family business. Yeah,
and she does that, and she makes it even more
of a family business, I guess when she marries an

(16:40):
engineer named Francois Toussau at the age of thirty four,
and they have three children, the first of whom unfortunately
dies young. But Francois he wasn't really a good partner,
either at home or in their business. He gambles and
gets them into pretty bad debt. Plus business just isn't
going that well in general. I mean, you think Marie

(17:01):
would be happy to be out of the revolutionary horrors,
but business just has slumped since then, maybe because people
aren't interested in seeing grizzly thieves and heads and that
type of thing when they've seen it firsthand, not that
long ago. So Marie takes up the offer of showman

(17:26):
Paul to Philip Stall to tour England with him, and
he owes her one. That's why she gets this deal
with him. She owes her one since Courtius saved him
from the guillotine. Um. Again, though it's a poor partnership
between the two of them. Marie actually has to pay
her own way and split her takings fifty fifty. She
also has to leave behind her younger son and her

(17:47):
elderly mother. Yeah, but she does well for herself even then.
So she's she's taking her older son with her, and
she's learning enough English to get by and competing with
the existing wax works in England, which I know now
we only think of her as far as waxworks go,
but at the time there were other big names in
the business. Her quality, though, is better, and because she

(18:10):
was French and fresh from the Revolution, that added sort
of a cachet to the whole the whole enterprise. Yeah,
but even though Marie is doing well, her partner Philip Stall,
really isn't and so he kind of changes the nature
of their working relationship. It turns more and more into
a kind of indentured servitude. He drags her to Scotland,

(18:31):
always leaving one city right when she's taking off and
getting really successful. And from Scotland they go to Dublin,
where she's finally able to buy him off, and she
starts advertising under her own name instead of the better
known Courtius. Yeah. And it's also in Dublin where she
decided she's not going to go home to France, but
had always been the plan. Stir up some interest, makes

(18:51):
some money, and then go back to France because that's
where the core of her businesses and where the rest
of her family is. But her husband won't respond to
her letters. He loses their house, he loses the collection,
and there's really nothing there for her anymore except her
younger son. And it becomes clear to her that the
only way she's going to make a future for her

(19:11):
two children is to either succeed or fail in England. Yeah. So,
after four years in Dublin, she makes the decision to
go on the road and as a traveling exhibit and
tours Great Britain for twenty seven years. Or so she
perfects her advertising in her business strategy. At this point,
she starts plastering the towns that she's in with her show.

(19:33):
Before her arrival. She threatens to leave, you know, with
signs that say things like only one day left yeah,
and then actually ends up staying instead of a popular demand. Right, um,
she really only leaves a place when her business slows,
and she takes out these grand rooms to show off
the figures, and she really makes her customers feel comfortable too,

(19:55):
which was something of note at the time. There would
be refreshments, there would be autumn men, so you could
relax and chat with each other and look at the
wax works at your leisure, not just some exhausting trip.
There was background music that was another kind of revolutionary thing,
make the place feel a little more comfortable, not quiet

(20:16):
and weird. And she pitched the educational value of the
wax works too, Like we mentioned in the in the introduction,
she distanced herself from the side show from those wax
works with her quality with her little biographies. It was like,
this is a really good way for people to learn
about the heroes of the day, the famous criminals, famous

(20:38):
people from the past. She she pitched it from different angles,
and she also spent a lot of time making figures. Still,
all the new celebrities, the thieves, the royals, she would
make them, and she would fix the ones that got
banged up during stage coach journeys between towns because gosh,
I mean, can you imagine toting wax figures in a

(20:59):
stage coach? Yeah, can't be good, risky. An article in
Chambers Journal from eighteen eighty one actually describes the appeal
of these waxworks. It says, one can fearlessly criticize the
crowned kings of England, and one can enter securely into
a layer of thieves and murderers and feel with a
chill that they are shockingly like commonplace mortals. Yeah. So,

(21:20):
I mean, I think that's it's an interesting way to
look at it, to to have that closeness to your
king or to people who you're reading about in the news,
and and really get to see them almost firsthand. But
Marie and her elder son's constant travel is interrupted a
few times by real life drama. They were shipwrecked once

(21:43):
sailing from Liverpool to Dublin. A lot of people on
board the ship drowned and they narrowly miss losing their
collection entirely to fire during the eight thirty one Bristol riots,
which I think it was always a constant concern, even
back when she was traveling with Philip Stall. She was
really concerned when this new gas light show is like
going to come in downstairs, because if you're dealing in wax,

(22:06):
it better be a pretty stable temperature. But when her
younger son was twenty two, he finally rejoined his mother
and brother in England, and the two sons got married
to English women and they started families, and as late
as nineteen sixty seven even the tissueda operation was still
a family affair. But anybody who knows the company today

(22:30):
knows that the original was in London. So when did
she finally change her operation from this traveling company to
brick and mortar building. Well, in eight thirty five Marie
and her sons took out a nice spot at the
bazaar on Baker Street, still a short term lease as usual,
um nothing too serious, but it proved to be just

(22:51):
about the perfect spot for them. There were commercial businesses nearby,
so it was a busy area. The annual Smithfield Cattle
show all so took place downstairs and brought in a
lot of folks from the country. So by eight thirty
six they had decided to stay. Yeah, and the Sun
spent a lot to really outfit the place beautifully. They
bought a lot of treasures, you know, and they started

(23:12):
actually buying art and nice furniture and that sort of thing.
The Duke of Wellington paid them a visit and they
really focused on Victorian stuff too, because this coincides with
the start of Victoria's Rain, and so they had comfy exhibits,
way different from Louis and Marie Antoinette at the Grand Couvert,

(23:33):
where they're very formal and stiff. At dinner, they had
displays of Victoria and Albert and their young kids just
sort of relaxing at home like a normal family would. Yeah.
The collection starts acquiring real stuff too, not just good copies. Marie,
for example, buys the original guillotine from the Plas to
grev for the Chamber of Horrors. She also purchases George

(23:56):
the Fourth's actual coronation robes, and perhaps most tellingly, amount
of dis becomes a star herself in her old age.
Dickens actually parodies her as Mrs Jarley, and consequently doesn't
make it into the collection until both of them are dead.
So even though he's arguably the biggest star of the era,
he must she must have not liked that very much. Currently,

(24:17):
not Westminster Abbey, which we just talked about on a
recent podcast. They asked her to refurbish their waxes, which
we also mentioned. She refuses, says, I have my own
wax shops. Sorry, guys, and Barnum the circus man tries
to buy them out. She refuses him to, probably because
she's been into these She's gotten herself into these bad

(24:39):
partnerships before, and she's not going to do it again.
She's still sort of feeling the effects of her degenerate husband.
To Francoists makes one last attempt to get in touch
and get something out of his longest strange wife. I
mean they haven't talked in decades by this point, but
he contacts her in the eighteen forties and she's really

(25:00):
disturbed by it. She's disturbed that if she dies before him,
and she is a few years older than him, um,
he'll he'll get the business and and her sons will
be left out in the cold and so she signs
articles of partnership between herself and her sons to protect
their interest, and she dies not too long after that

(25:20):
April eighteen fifty, which is one year before Prince Albert's
famous Great Exhibition, which proves to be sort of a
turning point for the show. They her sons prepare for it,
they enlarged their rooms. They really know how big it's
going to be, and they get ready and it it
serves to their advantage, and the exhibit eventually moves to

(25:44):
Marley Bun Road, and it was damaged during the Blitz,
but has since become an international chain with locations, of course,
in Hollywood, New York, Bangkok, Berlin, d C, Shanghai, all
over the place. They ditched the possessive too, so now
it's Madam Tusso it's yeah, But you might still be
wondering about our title, the two so test of Popularity.

(26:05):
I guess it's pretty obvious. But it came about in
an eighty nine issue of Punch magazine. And I'm just
gonna go ahead and read to you what was written
in Punch. In these days, no one can be considered
properly popular unless he has admitted into the company of
Madam Tussot's celebrities in Baker Street. The only way in
which a powerful and lasting impression can be made on

(26:28):
the public mind is through the medium of wax. And
I think that's interesting because it's still kind of true.
Today I went to the Tusso's website and saw, you
know who their latest figures were. There was like a
giant picture of Justin Bieber and Madam Tusso's in Hollywood
even has a hot or Not voting system. Lady Gaga, though,

(26:50):
seems to be the wax celebrity of the moment because
there are eight Lady Gagas in different costumes around the world.
I thought they'd at least be identical, because how many
people are going to go to the one in London
and then Shanghai and then New York. I guess they've
given super fans of a reason to do so now,
absolutely and here. Helen Mirren once commented on what it

(27:12):
was like, I guess to be immortalized in wax, and
she said, it's like becoming a dame, really a great honor.
So there you go. Thanks so much for joining us
on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive.
If you heard an email address or a Facebook U
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(27:34):
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(27:57):
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hm