It is unimaginable the extent to which a mother can go to take care of her kids. And Mary Ann Bevan was a living example.
After Mary was widowed, she was wondering how she could feed her four children. She was determined to do anything for them and that landed her in a freak show as the “world’s ugliest woman”.
This is the story of her real-life hidden behind the curtains for decades.
A Nurse
Mary was born in December 1874 of eight kids in an impoverished family in Plaistow, east London. She was always a fighter and so she fought her way out of poverty to become a nurse.
Later at the age of 29, she married Thomas Bevan and went on to have four children.
Pictures of Mary Ann taken as a young woman show a pretty brunette with delicate features.
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The Disease
But unfortunately, her beauty didn’t last for long. Her appearance was drastically changed due to acromegaly, a disorder caused by the body producing too much growth hormone.
The condition can cause a person’s hands and feet to become enlarged. It may also change the shape of the face, and Mary Ann’s face rapidly became larger and more masculine. It is said to be an incredibly painful condition, with both the bones and tissues increasing in size at a rapid rate.
Her physical state drew unkind comments in the street. Things went even worse when her husband Thomas died 11 years after they wed. She was helpless and frantically tried all she could to earn a living and keep a roof over their heads – but her appearance made her unemployable.
Showbiz
This is when her fate took a major turn.
One day while scouring the newspaper, she saw an advertisement that read: “Wanted: Ugliest woman. Nothing repulsive, maimed or disfigured. Good pay guaranteed, and long engagement for successful applicant. Send recent photograph.”
Without a second thought, Mary Ann sent in a recent photograph and immediately captured Claude Bartram’s (The European agent for the American circus, Barnum and Bailey) attention.
However, initially, Mary did not like the idea of placing herself on exhibition, she was shy and did not want to be separated from her children. But then her family was at stake. They were paying her £10 per week for a year, traveling expenses, and all the money from the sale of picture postcards of herself, so she could provide for the education of her children. She hesitated but finally agreed.
She then started with a tour of Hampshire but she was so successful that she was offered a job by P.T Barnum, the circus maestro portrayed by Hugh Jackman in The Greatest Showman, and so made the voyage to the US by ship from Southampton in 1920. When Mary arrived in the States, she was all over the place on the cover of every newspaper in New York, who heralded her as “The Ugliest Woman on Earth”.
The craze to see her never diminished for a long time and she went on to be the star of the show, overshadowing bearded ladies, conjoined twins, little people, giants, and people with physical disabilities.
Doctor’s Objection
But someone was sane enough to speak up and tell the world about her illness. It was the era’s leading neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing who wrote a letter to Time magazine in 1927 to complain about the way it had made fun of the ugliness of his patient.
“Being a physician, I do not like to feel that Time can be frivolous over the tragedies of disease,” he objected.
Fulfilling Duties
But the show went on. Mary is said to have earned £20,000 (which is about £500,000 today) in the next two years.
This amount was sufficient to put her four children in boarding school and although she missed them terribly she regularly wrote to them, and knowing that their futures were secure helped her power through and let the insults bounce off her.
The End
After some years, Mary returned to Europe in 1925 to take part in an exhibition in Paris but spent the remainder of her life at the Coney Island Dreamland Show. It is claimed that she developed a severe drinking habit during her final years, and lost a lot of her fortune to poor investments. She passed away in 1933.
Today she is put to rest at the Ladywell and Brockley Cemetery in South London as per her dying wish.
Nowadays, acromegaly is a condition that can be treated and controlled.