Wax On, Head Off

Has it ever occurred to you just how freaking weird Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum is? I mean, come on, these are life-size replicas of famous and infamous people that are carved out of wax. And this isn't some quirky little roadside attraction. This is an international phenomenon with more than 20 locations scattered around the planet Earth.

Bet you don't know the shocking and bloodthirsty story behind this epic slice of human weirdness. Today on True Weird Stuff, we're talking about the Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum because, you know, you've grown up with it, it's been around you your whole life. But have you ever kind of sat back and went, wait a minute, there's a museum where people, living and dead, are carved out of wax and you just go look at them? That's kind of nuts.

Max, have you ever been to a Madame Tussaud's? So when I was in London, I went and saw the Madame Tussaud's that's in London. And in thinking about it, I wanted to tell everybody that I'd been there because it was Madame Tussaud's. I never said, but I think they look kind of weird. You didn't think about it. Some of them look better than others. Let's put it that way.

They weren't all equally a great likeness. I'll say that much. You know, it's the wildest thing because it's like anything else that you've grown up with that's been around for your whole life. Madame Tussaud's has been around as an institution in London, particularly, for a couple hundred years. And so you don't question it. You go, oh yeah, yeah, we just have these life-size wax replicas of Prince Charles we can go look at.

What you probably don't know is that each one of those wax figurines at Madame Tussaud's, that's real human hair that is inserted a single strand at a time into the wax head or the wax mustache or what have you. I mean, this is some deeply bizarre stuff. OK, so let's begin with this question first. Was Madame Tussaud's a real person or was she more of a like branding icon?

You know, like maybe Mrs. Butterworth? Well, brace yourselves, pancake lovers, because while Mrs. Butterworth is actually just a talking bottle of syrup, Madame Tussaud was most definitely a real person. She was born in the year 1761 in Strasbourg, France, and it wasn't a happy beginning at all. Her father was killed in the Seven Years' War just a couple of months before she was born.

And here's a fun fact. The Seven Years' War actually lasted nine years, and in America we call it the French and Indian War, because why not make everything as confusing as possible? And this might be the reason why some struggled in social studies and history in high school. Don't you agree, Max? Either that or not studying. That might have had something to do with it, too.

So anywho, at the age of six, Marie's widowed mother relocated to Switzerland and took a job in the home of this super famous doctor and anatomist whose name was Philippe Curtius. Dr. Curtius was not only a great doctor and an unbelievable anatomist—I mean, this is pre-X-rays and MRIs, okay? Like, it was a real art and skill to understand how the human body was constructed.

He was also passionate about the art of wax modeling, which is exactly what it sounds like. It's using wax as a medium for sculpture and creativity. Dr. Curtius was so talented that he ultimately gave up practicing medicine, moved to Paris, and became a celebrated artist. Now, like pretty much everything else, wax modeling and wax art go all the way back to the ancient Egyptians.

But even the ancient Egyptians, with or without the help of extraterrestrials, could not do for wax sculpture what this fatherless little girl, six-year-old Marie Grosholtz, would grow up to accomplish. Because Dr. Curtius taught Marie everything he knew about the art of wax modeling. See, beeswax was basically Marie's Play-Doh.

And unlike us, she didn't just roll it into logs or try to eat it. In young Marie Grosholtz's hands, wax, beeswax, was transformed into the very stuff of creation. Now, Max, this is the part where we pause and we marvel at the way fate works. Because think about it, if Marie's father had survived the Seven-Year War, which was actually nine years long, who knows what her life might ultimately have become.

Maybe she would have lived and died, spent her whole life in her birthplace, completely anonymous. And yes, sure, her neighbors in Strasbourg would have been like, oh, look at how she can turn an old candlestub into the exact likeness of a hen or whatever. But history would probably have forgotten her, right? If not for the tragic loss of her father, today we would not be able to make the journey to Las Vegas to ooh and ah at the pure miraculous wonder that is the wax and snoop dog.

And I don't know if you know this, Max, but the wax and snoop dog at Marie Tussauds Museum in Las Vegas comes with a seesaw made out of a seven foot joint. I didn't know that. Fate! You gotta love it. Anywho, back in 18th century France, word of Marie Grosholtz's talents reached the court of Versailles, where King Louis XVI summoned her to come and tutor his sister in art.

And, you know, back then when the king summoned you to court to do something, you didn't get a choice in the matter. It wasn't like we're offering you the night shift at Subway. It was the king requires you at court to teach his sister art. Now, he did not know it at the time, but King Louis XVI was about to be the very last king of France.

And you can't blame him entirely. Like, it's not all his fault that the royal party in France was about to abruptly end. Louis XVI was not a stupid man. He wasn't a brave one either, but he wasn't a stupid man. And God knows he took a shot at having a noble reign, what with his early embrace of enlightenment ideals and support of those dirty, ragged colonists over in North America that were trying really hard to break up with the king of England.

It's just that the French people were good and damn weary of being hungry and oppressed. And they were deeply pissed off at the aristocracy. And they thought King Louis and his wife, Marie Antoinette, were just absolutely insufferable and bougie and privileged and entitled, which is kind of like the way many people feel about the Kardashians today.

Think about it. Anyway, Marie Grosse Holtz was a big hit at Versailles. She sculpted wax likenesses of famous people even then, like the great French writer Voltaire and America's very own Ben Franklin. You know, the statesman and founding father, not the plumbing franchise. Because if you know your American history or if you're a fan of the musical Hamilton, you know that both Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson spent a great deal of time in Paris.

And so all of these historical figures, and this is what's wild and weird about history, is the overlap, you know, of like, oh my God, we've got, you know, King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette over there in France getting ready for, you know, to be taken down in this bloody battle revolution. What's Benjamin Franklin doing over there?

Well, he was getting his head sculpted in wax by the young and very talented Marie Grosse Holtz. And then it happened. Revolution. The French Revolution, to be exact. And there was Marie Grosse Holtz, uniquely positioned to apply her considerable gifts to a custom that most people are probably really glad we no longer embrace.

The art of the death mask. Max, I know you know what a death mask is, because you're as morbid and creepy as I am. The death mask was something we did before photography. First of all, I'm just going to take a little sidebar here to talk about how weird people are, because before photography was invented, the deceased would have a death mask made.

And it's just like it sounds. An impression would be made of the corpse's face. And then that will be preserved in some form. Maybe it would be sculpted in stone or made of gold or wax or whatever. And this served a couple of purposes. One, it allowed us to preserve a likeness of the deceased. And there are some famous death masks in history. King Tut is an example.

There's a hotly disputed death mask of William Shakespeare that may or may not be an accurate death mask. There's so much about Shakespeare that's sort of murky when it comes to history. But the death mask was a mask of the dead person. And it's morbid and creepy, right? Like, I'm super glad that we don't do this to Grandma today.

But a lot of people pay good money right now to go view the death mask of the notorious gangster John Dillinger. And you can see that at the National Museum of Crime and Punishment. So if people are still lining up today to go look at a death mask, you can't say that it was an idea without merit, right? It's kind of a fascinating historical artifact.

Once photography was invented, human beings were not willing to let go of their really, really gruesome, creepy morbidness. So we had a practice briefly where the deceased would be photographed in their coffins or sometimes propped up as though they were alive. And if you look at some of these old photographs of the deceased, they are spooky AF.

Because I don't know what you all believe. I believe there's a soul. And when the soul departs the body, the empty shell that's left behind is unsettling. And the photographs of the deceased that we begin seeing in the mid-1860s, right around the Civil War. Have you seen some of those, Max? Some of them, they actually, they'll prop the person up.

They're like on a rack of some kind. And they're propped up. And then sometimes what they would do is use either photographic tricks or by hand paint their eyes as if they're open. Good Lord, y'all. I mean. So, you know, they say that human beings are terrible and that we never learn anything. I feel like we learn something there.

Like maybe, maybe don't prop up our deceased loved ones and take their picture. Anywho, let's get back to the French Revolution. It was a right bloody affair, as revolutions generally are. And a revolution that relies on the guillotine, as the French Revolution did, can be counted on to be extra gory. King Louis XVI lost his head literally, as did his wife, Queen Marie Antoinette.

And that gifted young art tutor in the court of Versailles, Marie Grosholtz, found herself in the very most wrong place at the very worst possible time. And she was forced to prove to the revolutionaries that her loyalties did not lie with the king. So how did she do that? By agreeing to make death masks of the beheaded, many of whom were her friends and acquaintances at the court of Versailles.

Oh, my God. Can you even imagine if this happened today? It would be like you're getting marched down to accounting to make a death mask of Glenn, who was just beheaded. And yet Glenn was a little bit annoying, maybe, but off with his head. Seriously. And now you have to make a mask of his face. Like I said. Oh, my God.

Not only did Marie immortalize the beheaded in wax. And I don't know what that experience was like. You know, they would they would they would sentence these aristocrats and nobles and royals to death by guillotine. And then they would take them through the streets of Paris to the executioner. And then they would lop off their heads and the head would be collected in a basket.

The body would be given, hopefully, some sort of proper burial. And the basket would be delivered to Marie to make a death mask. Yikes. Yikes. But she did it. And when the French Revolution ended, Marie packed up her creations and took them on the road in this sort of traveling show. This very macabre traveling show. And yes, you heard that right.

A traveling show of death masks from the French freaking revolution. A show that ultimately brought her to London in the 1830s, where she settled down to the business of becoming an icon, along with her natural talent as a wax sculptor. Marie was born with a real streak of show biz savvy. She set about to acquire all sorts of authentic and gruesome objects and artifacts that would help her give her wax tableau that extra dollop of morbid drama.

For example, why just have a wax murderer when you could have his real pair of spectacles perched on his face? It was a big hit, which doesn't surprise us modern humans, because we know how grim and bloodthirsty people can be. Marie's destiny as the creator of an epic tourist attraction that would one day be a worldwide sensation.

That destiny was sealed in 1846 when Punch magazine hailed her creation as, quote, a chamber of horrors, a name that stuck to this very day. Humanity loves that sort of thing. And Max, that chamber of horrors in London, the Madame Tussauds in London, that is the very location that you visited. That is, yeah. I believe I saw Charles Manson there, a wax figure of Charles Manson.

But I guess when they started doing this, I mean, the world was a much different place. So the only chance you'd have to see if you were taller than a particular celebrity or something was to go to this museum. If you go to the chamber of horrors in the London branch of Madame Tussauds, although I suspect that that's the only one I've been to as well as London.

But I suspect it's the same in all the locations worldwide. You'll see Adolf Hitler. You'll see Charles Manson. You'll see Jack the Ripper. You will see horrific, grim, vile and violent scenarios laid out for your touristy viewing pleasure. It's very, very unsettling. And then you can go upstairs into the bright and look at Brad and Angelina and the Kardashians and Elvis and Princess Di and the Queen and probably Lassie for all I know.

So, Madame Tussauds, there she is on the map, the chamber of horrors, people flocked to Baker Street in London to visit Madame Tussauds. But just four years later, she died, having lived this almost unimaginably grand and adventurous and turbulent life. A life that granted Marie Grosz-Holz Tussauds the kind of immortality that eludes all but the most select handful of artists and entrepreneurs.

And if you're wondering, wait, how did she go from being Marie Grosz-Holz to Madame Tussauds? Well, it's simple. She married a dude named Francois Tussauds in 1794. He was a civil engineer and no doubt a very loving and supportive spouse, because, hello, you pretty much have to be to be sharing your life with a woman who created a freaking empire out of wax.

Right. And with no disrespect to our civil engineers in the audience, y'all are very practical, pragmatic, reasonable and rational people. What the hell Francois Tussauds made of Marie carving murderers heads out of wax? History cannot tell us, but I'm pretty sure he must have loved the hell out of that woman. Can I get an amen, Max? Amen.

Now, today, more than two million people worldwide visit the various Madame Tussauds wax museums. You might be one of them. And maybe you never realized that a slew of beheaded aristocrats who died, the guillotine whose heads tumbled onto the dirty cobblestone streets of Paris, streets that were running with blood and urine and animal waste and garbage.

You probably never realized those folks helped make your little vacation excursion possible. I mean, damn, but human beings are some kind of weird. And that, my friends, is how Madame Tussauds wax museum became a must see stop for tourists visiting London and Vegas and all sorts of other places. And now, you know how we got there.

Yikes. Next time on True Weird Stuff. Long before anybody had ever heard of Timothy Lear, your LSD, your government was slipping unsuspecting men acid and then taking them to a wired up surveillance brothel. Your tax dollars at work. Next time on True Weird Stuff. True Weird Stuff is a Now! Media production. Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia.

The show is written and hosted by me, Sheri Lynch, along with my deeply weird director, Max Sweeten. Our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser. Additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call. Our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr. Original graphics by Kevin Nash. Original artworks by Olivia Axland.

True Weird Original Music composed and performed by Jack Griffin and Sam Nash. Copyright 2023. Now! Media. All rights reserved. All norms remembered. Hey, thank you so much for listening to the Bob and Sherry podcast and the Bob and Sherry oddcast. We would love if you would subscribe, rate and review and share it with a friend on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, wherever you go.

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