The Politics of Waxing: Snap a Selfie While You Still Can

NEW YORK — Madame Tussauds opened its New York City outpost at 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue after the pornography theaters were shut down but shortly before the Sept. 11 attacks. One of 24 Madame Tussauds branches around the world, it has an admission fee of $37 — $12 more than MoMA or the Met — that you can get down to $29 if you buy tickets online in advance.

As emphasized by docents in the elevator ride to its top floor, it also has two bars. “Electric Lemonade” sells for $9.95 and margaritas for $10, and drinks can be carried throughout the attraction, unlike at some of those other expensive New York institutions.

There are no rules for how visitors interact with the celebrity replicas at Tussauds. Even touching the figures’ hair, which studio artists in London painstakingly implant into heads strand by strand, is allowed. (The hair on President Donald Trump’s head? A mix of human and yak. His eyebrows: squirrel.)

“Who’s that?” one child asked his father, pointing at Bruce Willis.

“You may be able to follow the celebrities and get up close with them on Instagram and stuff like that,” said Christine Haughney, the regional head of marketing for Merlin Entertainments, the parent company of Madame Tussauds. “But here, you can actually get your photo taken with them.”

What was striking recently were the black-and-white Time’s Up pins fastened to the glittering ballgown of A-list replicas like Susan Sarandon and Anne Hathaway, and to the more casual attire of — who knows why — Justin Timberlake and Ed Sheeran. Representing the recent movement by women in Hollywood to end harassment and inequality in all industries, the Time’s Up pins speak for wax figures who, one hopes, can’t actually speak for themselves.

This slight costume change is the result of what Haughney said is the secret sauce fueling Tussauds’ 300-year survival. “We always keep our fingers on the pulse and make sure that we’re staying up-to-date,” she said. The Oscars are coming up? Actresses get Time’s Up pins. Trump decides to forgo a visit to the U.S. Embassy in London? His wildly lifelike figure is staged outside of the embassy for him. Pope Francis travels to the United States for the first time? Madame Tussauds parades his waxwork through the streets of New York in a veneer-white, top-down convertible.

The former “Today” anchor Matt Lauer is accused of sexual harassment by multiple women? His wax figure is quietly removed from Madame Tussauds.

“Just with the nature of the news, we did take him off the floor for the moment,” Haughney said, about Lauer’s representation. “But it’s still a figure that we have here, of course. We just don’t have him on the floor right now.”

“Luckily we have not had to remove any of our figures in Hollywood due to scandals,” Helen Larimore, the marketing manager for Madame Tussauds Hollywood, wrote in an email; Dustin Hoffman, Quentin Tarantino, Michael Jackson and Marlon Brando still happily hold court out west.

A survivor of the French Revolution and a protégée of the physician and waxworks hobbyist Philippe Curtius, Marie Tussaud, born Anna Maria Grosholtz, brought a traveling roadshow of wax figures she had created through England between 1802 and 1835, after which she set up a permanent exhibition in London. (Notable characters including Benjamin Franklin and Voltaire sat for her back in the day.)

Madame Tussauds thrived in London throughout the 20th century, featuring an occasionally rotating cast of wax figures, including the royal family (central and extended), as well as an extensive Chamber of Horrors, where Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels were on display.

Hitler’s waxwork, a short distance from Mahatma Gandhi, was doused in red paint in 1933 by three men and one woman, who also hung a sign from the figure that read, “Hitler the Mass Murderer.” In 2008, at the just-opened Berlin outpost of Madame Tussauds, Hitler was beheaded by the second visitor to ever step foot in the museum.

Controversy about identity and politics visits Tussauds regularly. Though the dawn of the selfie era proved to be a boon for the brand, social media has also introduced its share of problems. (“Social sharing” is encouraged by docents; the preferred hashtag is “#famousfun.”)

Last year, a wax figure of Beyoncé was taken off the floor temporarily after an outcry that she had been whitewashed, in both the literal and figurative senses. “We did a couple small outfit changes and we were able to fix the lighting,” Haughney said of the incident.

After unveiling the rapper Nicki Minaj’s wax figure in Las Vegas in 2015, in which she posed on her hands and knees in a revealing outfit, guests immediately began posing for obscene photographs with the waxwork, forcing Madame Tussauds to release a statement that confirmed it would bring in more security and redesign the set.

In a time where the public has a more complicated relationship with celebrity than ever, and more male stars are outed for their indiscretions, what does the future hold for a brand so dependent on famous people as Madame Tussauds? Vloggers, reality stars and even Grumpy Cat — whose figure is terrifyingly animatronic — have their own waxworks at the attractions now.

“If there’s a massive celeb and it’s big news worldwide, that’s someone we’d probably need to look at and do,” Haughney said.

“Waxworks have this simultaneous lifelikeness and deathlikeness,” Michelle Bloom, a professor of comparative literature and French at University of California, Riverside and the author of “Waxworks: A Cultural Obsession” (2003), said in a phone interview. “But a wax figure can pass for a living person at the same time that it’s very corpselike. I think we’re drawn to both, really.”

In Bloom’s book, she explores the cultural phenomenon of waxworks through art, film and literature.

“Their lifelikeness and yet — they’re not real! — means that we can do what we want with the figures,” she said. “A lot of Hollywood horror films and works of literature get to this perverseness. There is usually a male character who is enamored of or obsessed with the wax figure of a woman. It’s the ‘ideal woman’ who doesn’t talk and is literally malleable. He can control her. He can project his fantasy onto her.” That desire to trip down the uncanny valley has burgeoned an even stranger phenomenon in the era of the activist internet.

Superfans of certain celebrities address petitions on sites like Change.org to Madame Tussauds, pleading for the institution to turn their favorite stars into inanimate blocks of carved wax. Given the limit of resources at Tussauds, not every plea is successful, but Haughney said that the attraction’s priority is “listening to the guests,” after all.

In 2015, Jennifer Nieves published a petition on Change.org asking Tussauds in New York to introduce a wax figure for the Bronx-born bachata star Romeo Santos. “It is by request and high demand that Romeo Santos truly deserves this wax figure to honor his great success,” Nieves wrote. “From his beloved smile, dance moves, skills, and smooth voice that drives all his Romeistas crazy he truly deserves a place at the Madame Tussauds in New York City.”

“There were lots of tears,” Haughney said about the unveiling of Santos’ figure in July of last year. Nieves was invited to attend, and she met Santos and his wax replica, which is posed permanently with hands shaped into a heart.

Haughney said that who gets into the attraction and who gets booted, who the guests prefer and who goes out of fashion, is determined only by visitors’ preferences. “The most important thing is that we know what our promise is to our brand, as well as to the celebrities,” she said, adding that Mother Teresa — “who was just so in demand with guests” — was one of a small number of luminaries to decline to be waxed. “We would never do anything to jeopardize that. We’re very apolitical.”

Bloom was skeptical. “There are a lot of organizations that say they’re apolitical,” she said. “Depicting Beyoncé as whitewashed, that’s political. Where you choose to position a figure, or not including a figure, that’s all quite political.”

It’s tradition at Madame Tussauds for sitting presidents to be featured — Trump, who has himself been accused of sexual assault by multiple women, is protected behind red velvet rope, and by a Tussauds staff member. Visitors are permitted to be photographed with him only under a staff member’s supervision. “There’s an opportunity for visceral on-site interaction,” Bloom said, “whether you want it or not.”

One day at Madame Tussauds Hollywood in mid-February, a group of friends scripted, staged and filmed a skit that ended in an extended grinding session with Betty White. A wax museum without people is ultimately much weirder and less fun to imagine than a wax museum crowded with them.

On the way out of the Times Square attraction, into the cold, real-life version of New York that these tourists had, maybe, come to see, I asked Sherene Church, who was in town with her sister from Atlanta, if she felt that her visit represented a classically New York experience.

“Oh, absolutely,” she said. “Everything about it was good.”