The Book of the Dead (29 page)

Santa Anna didn’t make a peseta from his role as father of American chewing gum. In 1874 he was finally allowed back into Mexico. In the two decades since he had left, the country had been plunged into civil war and had had an Austrian puppet emperor imposed on it by the French. Now the liberals were back in power. President Benito Juárez was the first indigenous Amerindian (and the first civilian) to govern Mexico. He ignored Santa Anna’s return: There was to be no reentry to political life for him this time. The “Napoleon of the West” died, almost blind and penniless, stripped of property and honors, in Mexico City in 1876. His wooden leg remains in exile. Several attempts to return it have foundered: The last received a frosty response from a historian at the National Museum in Mexico. Santa Anna, he said, was a theatrical opportunist who looked out for only himself: “Returning the leg wouldn’t mean much. We do not want the leg returned.”

Did the loss of a leg profoundly alter the course of Santa Anna’s life? Probably not. Was it a defining moment? Without doubt. The lost limb was the symbol of his self-appointed role as savior of his country, a kind of visual proof of his canonization. At the same time, as with Stuyvesant, it became a national joke. Santa Anna’s life, with its vanity, cruelty, and lack of integrity,
nonetheless has a compelling quality, rather as if Casanova had put his energy into politics instead of sex. Though the immortal national hero status he lusted after was ultimately denied him, how many people have ever inspired a sea shanty?

O! Santianna had a wooden leg
Heave away, Santianna!
He used it for a cribbage peg
All on the plains of Mexico

O! Santianna’s day is o’er,
Heave away, Santianna!
Santianna will fight no more.
All on the plains of Mexico!

There are no songs dedicated to the “surprising Corpulency” of
Daniel Lambert
(1770–1809), but for a while his name was the universal cliché for anything big. London was “the Daniel Lambert of cities” and any especially erudite scholar, the “Daniel Lambert of learning.” There have been heavier men since—but not many, and none as fondly remembered. Perhaps for this reason he has kept an honorable mention in the
Guinness Book of Records.
When he died, aged thirty-nine, he weighed nearly 750 pounds and his waist was 9 feet 4 inches in circumference. In today’s terms that would give him a Body Mass Index of 104—three times the level at which obesity kicks in. Quite how he got so large was as much a puzzle to him as to others. He didn’t eat to excess and drank only water. He just kept getting bigger.

Obesity is not a modern phenomenon, although it has become a modern obsession. Today, in Britain and America, one
in four adults is obese, and the cost (in terms of health care and lost earning potential) runs into hundreds of billions. Cheap food has meant that, for the first time in history, the bottom 20 percent of earners are, on average, more obese than the top 20 percent. The diet industry in the United States alone is valued at $60 billion per annum, more than the global turnover of Microsoft and McDonald’s combined. This double hysteria—overeating then trying to lose weight again—is a long way from rural Leicestershire in the late eighteenth century.

Lambert came from a cheerful lower-middle-class family. None of the rest of his relatives was in the least remarkable, either in size or achievement. His father was keeper of the Leicester County “bridewell,” or house of correction. Bridewells got their name from the original Bridewell in the city of London, first a royal palace, then a hospital, and finally a prison. They were run by local magistrates and were used to keep the streets clear of vagrants, idlers, and minor offenders. Keepers were salaried but were allowed to supplement their income by hiring out inmates as a source of cheap local labor. Lambert’s institution had eight rooms, three for men and five for women (it wasn’t considered appropriate for women to share a room).

Daniel grew up living the active, outdoor life of a Leicestershire countryman. He was a passionate devotee of cockfighting and hare coursing, rode with the hunt, and taught children to swim in the River Soar. He matured quickly, reaching almost six feet tall in his teens. He was also extremely strong, said to be able to carry huge cart wheels and quarter-ton weights and swim with two men clinging to his back. Once Lambert’s dog attacked a dancing bear that was due to perform in the town. The bear had retaliated and, to encourage some sport, its handlers removed its
muzzle. When they refused Lambert’s request to restrain the bear, he felled it with a single blow to the jaw and rescued his dog.

When Lambert’s father retired, Daniel took over the running of the prison. He was well liked by his charges, working hard to improve their living conditions and ensure all of them were treated fairly; there are even reports of inmates crying with gratitude for his kindness as they left. The only problem with the job was that it didn’t involve much more than sitting on his seat in the street outside the prison. He became a popular character in Leicester, puffing on a pipe of tobacco, striking up conversations with people as they passed or swapping tips about breeding fighting cocks and greyhounds. It was this sudden transition to a sedentary life that Lambert blamed for his rapid weight gain, but it’s probable he suffered from a metabolic disorder. Within two years he weighed 450 pounds and was too big to find a horse that would carry his weight. Even simple physical tasks started to exhaust him: It was easier to sit and watch the world go by. In 1803 a prison inspector noted Lambert’s “constitutional propensity to ease…. He is spoken of as a humane, benevolent man but I thought him a very improper person to be the Keeper of a prison.”

Then, in 1805, the Leicester magistrates decided to close the correction house and set the inmates to forced labor instead. Lambert was awarded a one-off annuity of about $75 as a thank-you, but this wasn’t enough for him to live on (it would be worth about $6,000 today). He was now thirty-five years old and his weight had crept up to seven hundred pounds, making it impossible for him to find work. He couldn’t even squeeze into a standard-sized coach to visit the races. By the end of the year, out of money and deprived by his immense size of the hobbies he
loved, Lambert found himself practically housebound. Things weren’t helped by a string of visitors wanting to see if the rumors of Leicester’s “Human Colossus” were true. One pushy man from Nottingham pressed for admission on the grounds that he had a particular favor to ask. Lambert eventually let him in only to have the man ask the pedigree of a local mare, information readily available from the owner. Lambert, who had by now developed a smart line in witty put-downs, answered, “Oh! If that’s all, she was got by Impertinence out of Curiosity.”

Annoying as these visitations were, they helped him conceive a plan. In early 1806, he surprised everyone by renting a house on Piccadilly in London. He announced his arrival with a flurry of handbills and newspaper advertising: For the price of one shilling, the gentlefolk of London would be able to enjoy an audience with “the Heaviest Man in Britain.” Lambert had decided that because his condition prevented him from working, he would turn people’s nosiness into an income. He had strict rules: Politeness was an absolute prerequisite, and gentlemen were ejected if they refused to remove their hats. He did what he could to defuse the invasiveness of some people’s questions with humor. When a young beau accosted him by peering through the fashionable device of a quizzing glass (a monocle on a long stick) and asking what he most disliked, he retorted, “To be bored by a quizzing glass.” A woman who asked him how much his enormous red coat cost was told, with a twinkle, “If you think it proper to make the present of a new coat, you will then know exactly what it costs, madam.” For rudeness, he operated a zero-tolerance policy: A man who accused him of paying too much attention to the lady guests was threatened with immediate defenestration. His “act” was simply to tell amusing stories,
discuss the news of the day, and pick over in detail the qualities of particular horses or packs of hounds. He did brisk business on the side, selling his own lines of pedigree pointers and spaniels. His pet terrier was so admired he was once offered a hundred guineas for it—equivalent to more than $15,000 today—but he refused, pleading that it was his closest and most loyal companion. A visit to Lambert became a must for every fashionable Londoner, and some afternoons as many as four hundred people would pass through his house. The
Times
wrote admiringly:

To find a man of his uncommon dimensions possessing great information, manners the most affable and pleasing, and a perfect ease and facility in conversation, exceeded our expectations, high as they had been raised. The female spectators were greater in proportion than those of the other sex, and not a few of them have been heard to declare, how much they admired his manly and intelligent countenance.

For all his handsome profile and his witty conversation, there is no record of Lambert’s ever having had a romantic attachment. He was not, by this point in his life, built for love:

When sitting he appears to be a stupendous mass of flesh, for his thighs are so covered by his belly that nothing but his knees are to be seen, while the flesh of his legs, which resemble pillows, projects in such a manner as to nearly bury his feet.

One of his regular visitors was the celebrated Polish dwarf Count Joseph Borulawski whose “entertainment” Lambert remembered visiting in Birmingham when he was an able-bodied apprentice, twenty years earlier. As Lambert stood to show the count his full bulk, the tiny visitor grasped one of his calves (by
then more than three feet in circumference) and exclaimed,
“Ah mein Gott!
Pure flesh and blood. I feel de warm. No deception! I am pleased: for I did hear it was deception.” In turn, Lambert asked if his (normal-sized) wife was still alive. “No she is dead,” the midget replied. “I am not very sorry, for when I affronted her, she put me on the mantel-shelf for punishment.”

Lambert returned to Leicester later that year wealthy and famous. Through his excellent manners and his cheerfulness, he had turned the nightmare of his condition to good account. Most important of all, he had done it on his own terms, escaping the horrors of the freak show. Even allowing for a more tolerant attitude to fatness than in our own diet-obsessed times, Lambert was considered an astonishing phenomenon, in the words of the
Morning Post
, “the acme of mortal hugeness.” But perhaps because of his dignity and his utter lack of self-pity, he became a symbol of British pride. Rather like a champion bull, his size and good nature showed off the best of the national character. In a cartoon of April 1806 a gargantuan Lambert is shown taunting the amazed (and tiny) Napoleon:

I am a true born Englishman from the county of Leicester—a quiet mind and good constitution nourished by the good air of Britain makes every Englishman thrive.

In another, Napoleon eats a small bowl of soup while Lambert feasts on a round of roast beef, with a bowl of mustard, a whole loaf, and a foaming pot of stout. No further caption was needed. Here was John Bull in all his splendor.

Over the next two years, Lambert toured the country in a specially reinforced coach to exhibit himself in provincial cities such as Birmingham, Cambridge, and York, as well as twice
returning to London. But the constant traveling took a toll on his health and he started to make plans for his retirement. In September 1809, he returned to Stamford, in Lincolnshire, for what would be his last residency. He loved the Stamford race meeting, and in the times when he was merely huge rather than vast, he had enjoyed laying bets in the town’s many pubs that, given a small head start, he could win a race from one end of Stamford to the other. The town was a maze of narrow alleys, and he knew that once he got ahead of people, he could literally block their passage and they would never be able to get past him.

As he could no longer climb stairs, he had taken a room on the ground floor of the Wagon and Horses inn and sent a droll note to the
Stamford Mercury
asking them to send someone to take an order for printed handbills announcing his arrival: “As the mountain could not wait on Mahomet, Mahomet would go to the mountain.” The printer came, and though Lambert complained of being tired, he seemed full of enthusiasm for his appointments the next day. The following morning he was about to shave when he complained to the landlord that he was finding breathing difficult. Ten minutes later he was dead. There was no autopsy but the likelihood is that he suffered a massive blood clot to his lungs. Two days later he was buried, the
Mercury
commenting that “his remains had been kept quite as long as was prudent.”