Last week I got a call from George “The Giant” McArthur, who was reaching out with sad news. Our friend Vivian Wheeler had passed away at the age of 77 on July 27. Vivian was a bearded lady who had performed in circuses and sideshows since childhood. She was born on August 9, 1948, in Alton, Illinois, with 1 ½ inches of blond facial hair.
Her beard would eventually earn a Guinness World Record for its length of 11 inches—a place in history Vivian treasured. At one point, however, she claimed her whiskers had reached 17 inches. She was also proud to have been featured in Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! publications.
I first met Vivian in 2004 while writing American Sideshow, where she is one of two hundred featured performers dating back to the mid-1800s. As she told me during that initial interview, her father put her in the Ringling Bros. show when she was as young as five. Her father was humiliated by her facial hair and by the fact that she was born a hermaphrodite.
“They took out the male organs and put on the birth certificate ‘female,’” she told me, adding that her father had two sons already and her mother wanted a daughter. Vivian also said her paternal grandmother was a bearded lady. “She told me I was not a mistake – I was born because God wanted it that way.”
Instead of going to school, Vivian had teachers on the road. Her career as a bearded lady continued into adulthood, working for showmen Jeff Murray, Ward Hall and Chris Christ, Ken Harck, and others, often under the stage name of Malinda Maxey.
“I’m out here all the time with my beard—I go through my life as me,” Vivian said. “I have no problem being myself. I color my hair. I color my beard. I was born a redhead. I color the beard dark because it shows up better.”
But getting to that point had taken years. In between shows, she told me, she would shave for her family, then grow her beard back when it was time to leave again. She even shaved after her mother died so she wouldn’t be bothered while she grieved. Eventually, she decided she was done hiding it. “Without my beard I’m not me,” Vivian said. “I’m pretending to be someone I’m not.”
“Society doesn’t want you to be who you are. It wants you to play the part it wants you to play.”
Along the way, she developed a deep faith in God and was baptized as a born-again Christian in 2001. But even at church, many saw her for her beard, not for the person she was.
“People stay away from because of the fact I have facial hair and I’m the unknown. When I go to church the pastor tells me I can’t keep coming because people pay more attention to me than they do them. God looks on the inside of you, not the outside. And he sees the person that I am. See, we are the church, not the building.”
It was a conviction she returned to often. “God don’t make mistakes,” she once told me. “He does things the way He wants to do them. I don’t question Him.”
I stayed in touch with Vivian after American Sideshow was published in 2005. We’d chat every now and then. She’d share more stories from her days in the sideshow and we’d catch up on life. She enjoyed reading and watching movies, and she loved her dogs. Every Christmas a card arrived in the mail. But we’d never met in person. Then, in 2010, I received an email from her son—and that soon changed.
As if Vivian’s life wasn’t challenging enough, her son Richard was taken from her at age 3 by the boy’s father. Vivian told me she searched for him for years. The loss eventually took such a toll that she collapsed while performing and suffered a breakdown.
Richard was eventually put into foster care and grew up never knowing who his mother was. More than 30 years after being taken from her, he filed a request with the Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services to find his biological parents. When he finally got a response, the letter informed him that his mother was Vivian Wheeler and he could find more details through an internet search. It then added: “Both your birth mother and maternal grandmother has/had Hypertrichosis (werewolf syndrome). They both had facial hair even as children. Your birth mother was born with both male and female reproductive organs.”
Quite a letter to receive.
Richard began reaching out to people in the sideshow community for help in finding her. Eventually, he contacted me and George the Giant. At the time, my phone number for Vivian no longer worked. She moved often and sometimes could only be reached through a friend. But as chance would have it, or maybe a higher power, she ran into George at a park in Bakersfield, California, where they both lived.
“The Holy Spirit told me to go. He told me George had something to tell me that was very important,” she explained in my AOL article. “I hollered at him from behind, and he turned around and told me my son was looking for me.”
“The day I asked if she had a son she cried with joy telling me, ‘Yes, yes, what do you know about him?’” George recalled.
George connected them by phone, and soon Richard made the trip to California to reunite. For Vivian, the moment ended decades of uncertainty. “I want the whole world to know I have found my son instead of wondering if he’s alive or dead,” she told me. “I’m very happy I have found my son.”
I covered the story for AOL Weird News. In my initial story, she mentioned that she wanted to go on the Maury show for a maternity test. Maury Povich’s producer contacted me the day the article ran, and arrangements were made to have Vivian, Richard, and me on the show. It taped in Stamford, Connecticut, not far from me. Vivian took a train from California (she didn’t fly for health reasons) and I was finally able to meet her in person.
She eventually moved to Lawton, Oklahoma, to be closer to her son and his family. Sadly, their relationship eventually slipped away again. Vivian also had a daughter, but from what she told me, she had little contact with her.
I eventually stopped hearing from Vivian around 2022. Once again, none of my phone numbers worked for her. I began to worry, knowing she had frequent health issues and very little money. But online searches turned up no news about her or her whereabouts.
Then George called. At some point, she left Lawton for Wichita Falls, Texas, where she lived out her final days in a nursing home. According to the Times Record News, her remains will be buried in the county cemetery.
“I plan on dying with a beard, as long as it wants to go,” Vivian told me years ago. And so she did.
