The Tussaud Test of Popularity

Although Madame Tussaud's museum is world-famous, the story of Marie Tussaud herself is less well-known. So who exactly was she, and how did she create one of the world's most popular museums? Tune in and learn more in this episode.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Fair Dowdy and I'm Delaney chalk reboarding. And every
now and then listener suggestions sync up exactly what ideas
we're already thinking of, and that has definitely happened this week. Yeah,

(00:24):
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 Tissau, the famous woman who started the
wax works in London, And since then listener emails have
been trickling in, not tons of them, but very very
pro Madam tiss listeners. Suddenly, I don't know where y'all

(00:47):
came from. Yeah, and it's interesting because a lot of us,
I mean me in particular, I hardly ever think about
Madam Tussau, the woman behind the wax figures. But I
think of David back hum 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

(01:08):
actually really amazing. It combines court life at Versailles revolutionary
dangers and plucky business acumen. At least depending on who
you 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 Tiss, Life

(01:29):
in Wax I think it came out in two thousand
sixs and she described the wax artists as an original
tabloid journalist. 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.

(01:50):
I mean, just think of the little engravings you would
get in the newspaper. If you were lucky enough to
read the newspaper, that would be all you you had
to go on to know what you're 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

(02:12):
on which exhibits you're going to, but it was about information,
you know, letting people know what folks looked like. And
teaching them a little bit about history too, which is
always good for our purposes. 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.

(02:32):
I mean, that's what I find most interesting. How does
a woman of this era get into wax and education
in wax. Yeah, it all began for her. She was
born Marie Grossholtz on December one, seventeen sixty one and 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

(02:54):
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 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

(03:16):
of erotic in a way. They were sometimes called anatomical venuses,
and they were usually these young women waxes that had
parts you could unfold and look at their inner organs
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

(03:38):
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
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 a word of

(03:58):
Courtius's talents spread to the French court, and when the
Prince de Conti Louis the fifteen cousin, visits the wax maker,
he invites courtiers back to Paris, where he opens a
salon and does private commissions. Yes, so he's made it
to the big time. And it's a good time to
be in Paris in general, because it's booming. People of

(04:19):
all classes are seeking entertainment. It seems like just about
constantly when you read about it. And there's something new
going on too, and that's the 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 taste change so quickly that the wax head and

(04:39):
courteous the salon are actually chiseled off when to go
out of style, which is a little bit foreboding considering
when this takes place, that 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

(05:01):
have speculated on what the relationship between Curtius and Mrie
really was. Um 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 Murray's father. But
regardless of any possible blood relation between them, Curtius really

(05:21):
treated Murray 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

(05:43):
the understanding, 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 heggs and stuff connecting them exactly,
and molten wax would be poured inside it, and you
had to be really careful so that bubbles didn't form
when you did that bubble like taking out the nose

(06:05):
or 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 mold would be removed,
and then glass eyes would be fitted in from the
inside right, And that was apparently one of the trickiest
parts because you got to make sure the eyes are

(06:26):
going in 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 or
break the head. Yeah, exactly, So I think the 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 wax strand by strand,

(06:49):
So you can imagine tedious. 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
on goal. And so with these talents, it's maybe no
surprise that in seventeen eighty a nineteen year old Marie
somehow ends up at very si or at least that's

(07:11):
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 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

(07:34):
king met privately with his sister. She'd have sittings for
waxes with Louie, 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, so
this sounds really remarkable, and it's been a crucial part
of her legend since then, and especially since she set

(07:57):
up shop in England, especially considering what 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 Madam Tissou's life. It's
in Oxford Dictionary, National Biography, it's and Encyclopedia Britannica History Magazine.
But in that two thousand six biography I mentioned in

(08:18):
the beginning Barrage Kate Barrage's biography, she kind of raises
some questions about many aspects of Marie's memoirs, but especially
this first side part, because I mean, and we certainly
learned this in our in our Bourbon series. I would
imagine y'all remember this too. But Versaille is a really
rule driven place. It's not somewhere where you have breakout

(08:41):
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, there
are no records of her and kind of two key areas,

(09:02):
there are no records of her in the ALMANACTIFERSI, which
is the exhaustive list of court employees, has everybody who
worked in verside, 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 were making it on

(09:23):
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 chine people, it's really unlikely that she
would have just completely slipped through the cracks like this.
So she might have been to Versaill and she might
have even taught Madame Elizabeth a few classes here and there,
But what's perhaps more likely is that she was really

(09:46):
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, things changed a little bit when

(10:09):
the Revolution came around, or a lot, depending on how
you look at it. If in fact Marie was at 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 good money during it. Yeah, they

(10:29):
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 goes out of style. They go

(10:51):
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, and 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 Bastial, just a few days before it, a
crowd came to the salon and obtain the heads of

(11:14):
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 Jacque Nickire 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. It's a it's a really wild story.

(11:37):
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

(11:57):
story before the French Revolution even really starts. Yeah, definitely,
And they keep going with this though. They keep following
the crowd, and they keep following the trends. So when
bestial 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

(12:19):
than her, Like Forgers. I think there was a guy
in there for incest AND's 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,

(12:42):
but as the revolution turned, obviously, Murray's work became a
lot grammar, and she started to model the guillotine 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

(13:03):
hours at the Tuileries massacre Louis the sixteenth before he
was interred in a double heaping helping of quicklime because
the revolutionaries really didn't want any relics 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

(13:23):
some issues 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

(13:44):
of the royals. You mentioned you don't want anyone to
have 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 just blade at the wax works
after the revolution until the eighteen sixties in London, so

(14:05):
it would have been dangerous to display them. Absolutely. Courtiers
sold off a lot of the royal figures actually to
an exhibit traveling through India, which I think is interesting
to you. Marie Antoinette and folks traveling traveling around 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

(14:26):
taking models from guillotine victims. I mean, it is quite
possible they were doing that. Um, maybe just not Louis
the sixteenth 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

(14:49):
he would visit the cemeteries and he may have modeled
Madame du Barry that way, um, since she was supposed
to be a remarkably good likeness. Marie actually even counts
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 sevente four Marie was safe and

(15:13):
supposedly making a mold of Robespierre's head. Always one step
ahead of the game, that Marie definitely But that same
year Courtius 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,

(15:34):
and one 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

(15:54):
when she marries an engineer named Francois Toussau at the
age of thirty four and they have three children drown
the first of whom unfortunately dies young. But France wis
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.

(16:14):
I mean, you'd think Marie 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 grisly
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 Paul to Philip Stall to

(16:35):
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 elderly mother. Yeah, but she

(16:56):
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 waxworks 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 those better,

(17:16):
and because she 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, always leaving one city right when

(17:40):
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, make some money and then go back
to France because that's where the core of her businesses

(18:02):
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 two children is to either succeed
or fail in England. Yeah. So, after four years in Dublin,

(18:25):
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. Before her arrival. She
threatens to leave, you know, with signs that say things

(18:45):
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 only makes her customers feel comfortable too, which
was something of note at the time. There would be refreshments,

(19:06):
there would be ottomans, 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 and weird.
And she pitched the educational value of the wax works too.

(19:27):
Like we mentioned in the in the introduction, she distanced
herself from the side show from those waxworks 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 people from the past.
She she pitched it from different angles. And she also

(19:50):
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 stage coach?
Ye can't, because risky. An article in Chambers Journal from

(20:11):
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're
shockingly like commonplace mortals. Yeah, so, I mean, I think
that's it's an interesting way to look at it, to

(20:33):
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 one failing from Liverpool to Dublin,
a lot of people on board the ship drowned and

(20:54):
they narrowly miss losing their collection entirely to fire during
the 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, it better be a pretty

(21:15):
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 Tissoda operation was still a family affair, but anybody

(21:35):
who knows the company today 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,

(21:57):
but it proved to be just about the perfect bought
for them. There were commercial businesses nearby, so it was
a busy area. The annual Smithfield Cattle Show also took
place downstairs and brought in a lot of folks from
the country. So by eighteen 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,

(22:19):
you know, and they started actually buying art in 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 where they're very

(22:41):
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. Wood. 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

(23:03):
the Fourth 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,

(23:24):
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

(23:46):
partnerships before and she's not going to do it again.
She's still sort of feeling the effects of her degenerate husband.
To France, Watus makes one last attempt to get in
touch and get something out of his long estranged wife.
I mean they haven't talked in decades by this point,
but he contacts her in the eighteen forties, and she's

(24:07):
really 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

(24:27):
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

(24:51):
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, DC, Shanghai, all over
the place. They ditched the possessive too so now it's
just Madam Tusso it's yeah, but you might still be
wondering about our title, the too So Test of Popularity.

(25:13):
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

(25:35):
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 Tussou's website and saw, you know
who their latest figures were. There was like a giant
picture of Justin Bieber and Madame Tussas. In Hollywood even
has a hot or not voting system. Lady Gaga, though,

(25:57):
seems to be the wax celebrity at 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

(26:19):
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, immortalized in wax something else indeed, um,
So I guess that brings us to Listener mail. So
today is a very special edition of Listener Meal because

(26:41):
it is reverse Listener Meal. It's a giveaway contest. Yeah
who who? Listener? Ryan actually wrote in as a fan,
but since he works in marketing, he also pitched a giveaway.
That's really good news for all our listeners. Anchor Bay
Entertainment is giving away three DVDs of the Oscar Winning
the Speech movie. Maybe you guys have heard of it

(27:03):
to stuffis in history cost listeners. Yeah, and we know
a lot of y'all are already fans of the movie,
because I think you've been requesting more about the windsor
since before it even came out, even though we have
a few episodes on them. So yeah, I know you'll
like this kind of thing. So if you happen to
live in the US and you're old enough for a
rated our movie, like really old enough, guys, cheating right

(27:26):
into History Podcast at how staff works dot com by
May second with your most entertaining royal story. Yeah, and
and no novels sense to Blina and I are going
to read them all so you know, keep it, keep
it to a reasonable and then at our sole discretion,
we're gonna pick three favorites and we'll notify the winners

(27:47):
by May nine, and san y'all some DVDs, so we're
not getting paid DC deb don't worry. This is just
for fun. We thought that it was a neat opportunity
for you guys, and it seems like you like the
movie and it seems like a good fit for the podcast. Okay,
so one more time, that email addresses History Podcast at
how stuff works dot com, so you can write in

(28:09):
to enter the contest, or you can write in just
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(28:32):
Miston History Class, but just in case you want to
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