Radiolab - Death Mask

Episode Date: November 28, 2011

Near the end of the 19th century, a mysterious young woman with a beguiling smile turned up in Paris. She became a huge sensation. She also happened to be dead. You'd probably recognize her face yourself. You might have even touched it.

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. Shorts! From W. N. Y.

C. See? Yes. And NPR. Hey, I'm Chad. I'm O'Mrod. I'm Robert Krollich. This is Radio Lab. The podcast.

And today on the podcast, something from our producer, Sean Cole. You've been out doing something. I've been doing many things. Yes, but I mean, in particular, With regard to this podcast, you have a story for us. I do. Don't tell us about those other things. Nope.

What's the story? So there's a story about a woman. Good. You've probably seen her. Really? You've seen her face. Oh. You may have even...

Dated her? Well, put your mouth on her. Ew. Explain. So, you know, when you got to bring somebody back to life? One, two, three, four, they make you take a class. Yeah. And they make you practice on this dummy.

CPR, yeah. And the dummy has this face. That you suck on. Well, you don't suck on it. You blow into her. That's what I meant. You don't know a lot about CPR. Yeah, all right.

What's the story with the dummy? So that lady... Three, 29, 30. Before she was a dummy, that face belonged to an actual woman's face. The CPR dummy's face is an actual lady? An actual lady that was transfixing and inspiring to millions of people and used to basically hang out with Napoleon and Mozart. What? True.

Yes. I first heard this story from this guy, Jeremy Grange. I'm a producer with BBC Radio in the UK. You made a documentary about all of this a while back. But basically, our story starts in Norway in the early 1950s. There was this toy maker named Asmund Leirdal. I mean, Asmund Leerdal was making plastic toys, brightly colored toys. And this story also involves his two-year-old son, Torre.

I'm Torre Learal. He's all grown up now. Well, obviously, I don't recall that he tells myself, but it's been told to me that... One day, he and his father, Asmund, are at their summer home, which is on the ocean. And somehow Tor tottles his way out of sight, and the next thing anyone knows... I was found floating face down in the sea. And I was just kept floating by some air trapped in a raincoat. He's on top of a raincoat on the water?

I think the raincoat is on top of him, but basically it's keeping him a lot. there's a bubble of air under. Yeah, and then Asmund, his dad sees him. I don't know how long I have been in the water, but when I was pulled out by my father, I was lifeless. And not only does Asmund not know mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. This was in 1954.

There is no mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. I mean, no people didn't know about it. They hadn't really been developed yet. And so his dad... He was shaking me and... Doing whatever he could. Gradually, I responded. And as fate would have it, not long after that, Osmund, having freshly saved his son from drowning, is contacted by the man who is developing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

An Austrian doctor called Peter Safer. Good name for a guy trying to keep people safer. We'd worked out all the basics of CPR with the mouth-to-mouth and the compressing the chest and everything like that. But he realized he needed a way for people to practice this. And my father was asked whether he possibly could help making some kind of training device. And pretty quickly, Aspen thought, well, we need a dummy. And the mannequin. Somewhere along the line, Aspen had to decide what the face of this dummy was going to look like.

Should it be a woman? Should it be a man? I think he felt that people would be more intimidated or shire if it was a man's face. So he decided to go with a woman's face. An attractive woman's face. Because at that time, you were asking lay people to blow up. into a quote-unquote dead person. You know, you don't want to blow

into somebody who's gaping with a horror face? She should look comfortably dead. And then he came across this girl in my grandparents' home. Asmund is there in the house and he looks up at the wall

and sees this face of a woman. It's a mask. And my father was taken back by the beauty of this face. And he says, that's the face. That's the face I'll use. This is a mask?

What kind of mask was this? It was a death mask. What's a death mask? All right. I'm going to go back even further here. So stay with me for a minute. Back in the 19th century, commonly people, after they were dead,

they'd have masks made of their faces. Here's one of Abraham Lincoln. There's a death mask. Really? Yeah. Because you want to preserve their countenance. So right after the person dies, pretty much, you take a bunch of clay and you stick it on their face and you make a mold,

fill the mold with plaster, and then you've got a plaster mask, and you can reproduce it and reproduce it. It was especially common in Paris. Hey, Radio Lab. It is a sunny, cold Paris October morning. Of all these mask makers workshops that existed around Paris 120 years ago, there's only one left. And we're about to visit Lorenzies, which is like a mask-making shop, so I'm coming up to the gate. asked our friends Kristen Clark and Tamara Seredoyevich to drop by there for us. I've still got this incredible workshop and you got some rickety narrow wooden stairs. And you get to the top and there's just banks of faces.

Rows and rows of people that look like they're sleeping. Death masks of... Who is the one at the top there? Everybody, Napoleon. Napoleon here. Robespier. Robespier. Yeah, Robespierre, he was in the French Revolution.

Mozart and Beethoven. That's the mask of Chopin, the composer. Looking at you from the wall and from the ceiling. All of their eyes are closed. Face after face after face. And they're all famous. Historical figures, but also among them is... This girl.

She's not a poet. She's not a conqueror. She's not anybody. She's got to be somebody. Well, the story that emerged after she died, and this is... Possibly fancy, possibly, you know, maybe fact, but the sources are lost to us, so we were not sure exactly what happened. But she was young.

You know, in her early to mid-20s, who, you know, came from the countryside. Not from Paris. You know, she was a sort of poor, uneducated woman, but she came to Paris. It's a man. And there was a love affair. Which then turns sour. The story is that maybe she was pregnant and abandoned, or maybe she was. was just abandoned.

She goes to a bridge that's stretching across the saint. Might be the one by the Louvre. Steps to the edge. And she threw herself into the river. She drowned. And then the body was recovered. She was taken to the morgue, which wasn't that far away. And in those days, bodies would be displayed behind glass.

And hopefully their relatives or their friends would come along and say, yes, that's my father or my sister or my daughter and they would reclaim the bodies. Since they were displayed, we're also like strangers coming around for a kind of like weird museumy thrill. Absolutely, yes, it was. That's probably what it was with her.

She was this particularly beautiful corpse and everybody rushed down to see her. And eventually the guy who ran the morgue took a plaster cast of her face because she was so beautiful. He was just struck by her, just like Leardal, just like everybody. What did she look like? I wouldn't say a sort of plump face, but a rounded face.

She's lovely, but not in a come-hither way. She's more like sort of weirdly saintly looking. She's serene? Innocent, maybe. Serene, innocent, but also sort of knowing. And she has a little smile. If you look at the mask, there's just this little smile playing on the lips. And it's just enough to kind of make you think, well, why is she smiling?

And who is she? The problem was... She wasn't identified. So they didn't know. No. And so ultimately people started calling her by this name. The Anconu. Oncanu.

Ankenu. What does that mean? Well, so you know, like the word ingenue, which means innocent lady, like the character of the ingenue in the movies. This is Lankanu, which means unknown women. The Anconu de la Sen. unknown woman of the scent. And then gradually the plaster cast worked its way into the mask maker's workshops and out onto the streets of Paris.

And it wasn't long before this woman became a sensation. And everyone started writing about her. The face of the young drowned woman. Rilke was beautiful because it smiled, smiled so deceptively as though it knew. Anais Nin. The woman who had... drawn herself here years ago, and who was so beautiful that...

A Nabokov. Touchingly frail young shoulders. Who wrote this entire poem sort of demanding, you know, who made you jump? Who was he? What, you know, who was the guy? I beseech you. Tell me your mysterious seducer.

Was he some neighbor's curly-locked nephew of the loud tie and gold-capped tooth? In any case, this mask is a huge deal, and all thousands, countless people have it hanging on their wall. The same way you would hang Napoleon on your wall, because he's Napoleon. But they don't know who she is. And that's sort of the point. They're like, who is she?

And everybody's captivated, including our toy maker, Asmund Leirdo. He felt that the Anconu, the attractiveness and the story, would be the right model to use. For the first CPR mannequin in history, who has a name? Resussian. Resuscian. Could you describe what we have in front of us here? Well, what we see is the very first production model of Rissacian from 1960.

She's had to check. The face has changed slightly because if you want to do CPR, you have to have an open mouth. So regrettably the slight smile is now parted. But you've still got the high forehead and the closed eyes. Every Rissusian CPR mannequin that's produced, 300 million people have been trained on this thing since it was first introduced in 1960. And every single dummy has the face of the Ankhornu. Still.

Still. And hopefully, she's looking quite attractive. Four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, sixteen, The craziest part about it is that this face of this drowned woman becomes the face that people blow into to learn how to save drowned people. So it's like, it's like over and over and over again, thousands and thousands of people are trying to bring this woman back to life. That's kind of beautiful. That's kind of good. The only issue may be like is like every fact you've just given her isn't really a given about her.

Yeah. What do we actually know about this woman? Well, so, I mean, Jeremy went into his research sort of asking the same question. What do we really know? Would we really know what's true? I have a horrible suspicion. The truth, you know, is that she didn't die. What?

Yeah. I mean, having shown the mask to Pascal. Jacquesin, who's a member of the Brigade Fluvial. This is the river police, whose job it is to pull dead bodies out of the same, and rescue people from the seine, and Pascal is in charge. So he's seen, you know, hundreds of drowned bodies. He can look at a face, and he can know whether that's somebody who's drowned. And he said,

It's surprising when I saw the picture to sit at so peaceful face, just because everyone we found in the water, it's never so. peaceful. Not to put too fine a point on it, but when somebody's drowned, they start decomposing quite quickly. They are swollen most of the time, so... The features that you would have seen in life don't really last very long. It's not so nice looking once somebody's been in the water. Do you think she's attractive? Yeah, yes, of course, yeah, yeah. Just she looks really graceful. So if she didn't die, then... Who was she then?

have been a model that somebody just thought was pretty, wanted to take a plaster cast of her face. I mean, it's really at that point it's anybody's guess. We don't know this? This is our end of knowing. It's our end of knowing. Well, it's frustrating. But maybe it's better that way. I mean, if you, like, the reason why she was so captivating is because people don't know and they can just fill this gap with their own stories. They can just sort of sit there and muse about her. In fact, Jeremy told me this story about this museum that he went to in Liverpool. It was the historic house of a photographer there. In the kind of waiting room, there was the mask of the Anconu actually on the wall there.

So, you know, slightly disingenuously, I asked the guide, oh, what's that? Very disingenuous. Then you knew everything about it at that point. I thought I'd see. And it was amazing. She told me this story about twins, two girls. From Liverpool, and this is an important bit, from where we were, from the city where we were. Not from anywhere near friends.

Exactly. The story was almost exactly the same, except this time one of the twin girls left Liverpool in her late teens or early 20s, made her way to Paris, fell in love, got knocked up, the guy left, she despaired, and then... Threw herself off the bridge and drowned, and the mask of this beautiful corpse was taken. But this version keeps going after that. 50 years later, the surviving twin, who never knew what happened to her sister, takes a trip to Paris. He's walking through the streets of Paris and sees this face on the wall. And this time, instead of it being her own face, it's the face of her twin sister who's there. And so her twin, who died long before her is kind of kept forever young while she's had to age. And so she's from Liverpool now as far as, you know. as far as the Liverpoolians are concerned.

Yeah. And I wonder if she's also from Cornwall, as far as the Cornwallians are concerned. And from, you know, like... Maybe she's a Moscovite, as far as the people in Moscow are concerned. She's Sicilian, as far as the Sicilians are concerned. Maybe she's a Laotian, as far as the Laotians are concerned. And a Buenos Aires. Maybe Australian.

How about Calcutten as far as the Calcuttons are concerned? Beirutian, as far as the Beirudians are concerned. Let's go a D-1. Denverite, as far as the Denver people. consider? Yeah. Delatian, in Dallas.

Producer Jean Cole. And before we go, thank you to Jeremy Grange and to our readers, Pike Malinovsky, Marine Budo, and Jeff Spurgeon. And special thanks

to Lisa Morehouse and Michelle Cano. Hey, my name is Maya from Raleigh, North Carolina. Hi, Radio Lab. I am a Radio Lab listener.

Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www. www.org. Bye, Radio Lab!