The true story of Shrek. Shrek from Chelyabinsk Maurice Tiye Maurice Tiye disease
This may seem like a cruel joke or a farce, but this incredible story is historically accurate and true! The prototype of the cartoon Shrek was the famous wrestler Maurice Tillet. He was born in 1903 in Russia, in the Urals, into a French family, which in 1917, due to the revolution, returned back to France.
As a child, Maurice was no different in appearance from his peers, rather the opposite - he was called “Angel”, thanks to his pretty facial features. But everything changed at the age of seventeen, when he began to develop a rare disease, acromegaly, which causes a monstrous, disproportionate increase in bones, especially the facial ones.
Due to these terrible external transformations, Maurice had to give up his desired career as a lawyer. But he did not give up on his life, but decided to use his disadvantage as a huge advantage! Maurice went to the United States to become a professional wrestler, and in May 1940 he became the American Wrestling Association champion, holding the title for the next 19 months. He was known under the nickname “the scary ogre of the ring,” but later they began to call him, as in childhood, “the French angel,” thanks to his warmth and kind character.
It is also worth noting that Maurice Tillet was distinguished by phenomenal intellectual abilities, which many were not even aware of. He was fluent in 14 languages and wrote wonderful stories and poems.
Unfortunately, his illness progressed and at the age of 51, Maurice died of a heart attack. But all of it is short-lived, but bright life is a wonderful example of human courage and bravery. Instead of complaining that life only gave him “sour lemons,” he cleverly learned to make “lemonade” out of them and enjoy his life. I am sure that Maurice would really like his cartoon prototype Shrek, who, like him, is kind and sensitive, despite his terrifying appearance.
Do you know that the prototype of the popular cartoon character Shrek was a real... no, not an ogre, but a man, and also our compatriot, whose name was Maurice Tillet. Having heard this name, the reader will probably ask - “Well, what kind of Russian is this?”, suspecting the author of some deceit, and yet this is really so.
On October 23, 1903, in a Russified French family living in the Urals, a boy was born, whom his parents nicknamed “Angel” for his beautiful angel-like face, and officially named Maurice by the name of Tillet. His father was a railway engineer who moved to distant Russia for a lucrative contract, and his mother was a school teacher.
In 1917, the Tiye family, fleeing the revolution, moved to France. Maurice was 14 years old at that moment. Around the same time, the guy began to experience swelling in his feet, hands and head, and at the age of 19 he was diagnosed with acromegaly. This is a disease that is caused by a benign tumor on the pituitary gland, as a result of which a person’s bones grow and thicken, especially in the facial part.
With a height of 170 cm, Maurice Tillet's weight was 122 kg.
Tiye treated his appearance philosophically and with humor.
In his youth, it was much more difficult for him to adapt to society, but with age he understood how to turn his disadvantages into advantages.
“My peers called me a monkey, and I was very upset. Who would like this? To hide from ridicule, I often went to the pier and that was all. free time spent near the water. The people who lived there were completely indifferent to what I looked like."
Despite his progressive illness, Maurice tried to live life to the fullest. He studied law at university, played successfully in Rugby and made plans for his life. However, due to problems with the vocal cords, he had to quit his studies and the resilient young man went to serve in the navy, where he mastered the engineering profession.
“Maybe with a face like that I could have become a lawyer, but my voice, like the braying of a donkey, is simply impossible to listen to, so I went to the Navy.”
Perhaps over time he would have made a good military career, but fate again took a sharp turn. In 1937, while on vacation in Singapore, Maurice accidentally met professional wrestler Carl Poggello, who, appreciating the guy’s appearance, convinced him to take up professional wrestling, and later became Tiye’s promoter and close friend.
For the next two years, Maurice Tillet trained and fought in France and England, and later moved to the United States, where he immediately attracted attention and quickly became a local celebrity, performing under the pseudonym “The French Angel” and winning several championship titles in various versions of the World Championship. wrestling.
However, let’s not focus only on Tillet’s sporting achievements; the famous wrestler had a lot of other talents. He played excellent chess, acted in films, spoke 14 languages fluently and had a great sense of humor. Maurice happily posed for the paleontolic museum next to the exhibits of Neanderthals, whose resemblance greatly amused him.
Over time, health problems made themselves felt, constant headaches, excessive fatigue, weakened vision and - this is just a few that are typical for acromegaly, and, of course, professional wrestling made its own adjustments - Maurice developed serious heart problems. Despite this, Maurice continued to perform until 1953, after which he left the sport.
Carl Pagelo, best friend and promoter of Maurice Tillet, died of cancer on September 4, 1954, on the same day Tillet died of a heart attack, unable to cope with the loss of a close comrade. A monument was erected at their common grave:
“And death cannot separate friends.”
They are both buried in Lithuanian National Cemetery in Justice, Cook County, Illinois, twenty miles from Chicago.
And almost half a century later, the famous cartoon “Shrek” was released, the main character of which, an ogre named Shrek, is very reminiscent of Maurice Tillet, both appearance, and in a good manner! However, despite numerous questions about this, the Dreamworks film company declined to make any official comments.
Scary on the outside, but very kind on the inside, the giant actually existed in the first half of the 20th century. And his name was Maurice Tillet.
ChildhoodAs a child, Maurice was a completely normal child. His family even called him Angel because of his sweet face. He was born on October 23, 1903 in the Urals into a French family. Maurice's father worked as a railroad engineer, and his mother was a teacher. The father died when the boy was still very young. Then in 1917 there was a revolution in Russia, and he and his mother moved back to their homeland.
From angel to ogres
When Tiye turned 17, he noticed that his feet, hands and head were swelling. Two years later he was diagnosed with acromegaly. This is a fairly rare disease caused by a benign tumor on the pituitary gland, as a result of which a person's bones grow and thicken. So Maurice turned into a real giant, and not a trace remained of his angelic appearance, at least outwardly.
It was very difficult to go through this. “My peers called me a monkey, and I was very upset. Who would like this? To hide from ridicule, I often went to the pier and spent all my free time near the water. The people who lived there were completely indifferent to what I looked like,” Tiye said many years later.
Despite his creepy appearance, he was a very smart man. He entered the University of Toulouse at the Faculty of Law and studied there quite successfully. His mother taught foreign languages, so Maurice studied them since childhood. It is known that by the age of forty he spoke excellent Russian, French, Bulgarian, English and Lithuanian. He also played chess well and wrote poetry and stories. So there's no shortage of mental abilities It wasn’t, but I still had to give up my career as a lawyer. The fact is that the disease progressed and gave complications to the vocal cords.
“Maybe with such a face I could become a lawyer, but my voice, like the braying of a donkey, is simply impossible to listen to, so I went to the Navy,” said Tiye.
He served in the French Navy for five years as an engineer.
Possessing a good disposition and a penchant for positive thinking, Maurice treated his appearance quite easily and with humor. He even posed for a paleontological museum next to Neanderthal exhibits. He found this resemblance amusing.
Wrestling
When he was 34 years old, in Singapore, Maurice met Carl Poggello, who was a professional wrestler and quickly realized that Tillet would have incredible success in this matter. They went to Paris together and began training.
For two years, Maurice Tillet performed in the rings of France and England, until the Second World War began. World War, from which friends left for the USA.
In the USA, real success awaited the wrestler. His appearance was quite remarkable, so he attracted huge crowds to the matches, and the “directors” of the games decided to keep Tillet invincible. Even at that time, wrestling was quite a staged type of fighting. So he could go 19 months straight without losing until the public got bored.
At first he performed under the nickname "The Ugly Ogre of the Ring", but then it was decided to add drama, and Maurice turned into the "French Angel".
Sunset
An active wrestling career lasted with varying success until 1945, and then acrohemalia again made its adjustments to Maurice’s life. His health was deteriorating, he suffered from headaches, he got tired quickly, and his vision weakened. Professional wrestling also made itself felt - heart problems appeared.
He was no longer given the role of invincible in wrestling matches. The last fight took place in Singapore in 1953. After this, Maurice left professional sports.
Death
Soon his friend and promoter Carl Paggello contracted pneumonia, which resulted in a complication in the form of lung cancer. He died after a long and painful illness.
This shocked Maurice Tillet so much that just a few hours after the news of his friend’s death, he himself died of a heart attack.
They were buried side by side at Lithuanian National Cemetery in Justice, Illinois.
Chelyabinsk men are so harsh that one of them became the prototype of Shrek. Both France and America claim the title of the homeland of this outstanding man, but Maurice Tillet was born here.
Everyone vied with each other to want to be proud of him, which is not surprising - Maurice Tillet was a world champion in wrestling, had a wonderful engineering education, spoke 14 languages and had great charisma.
Maurice Tillet is a historical figure. There is no doubt that his contemporary William Steig, the author of Shrek, drew his charming ogre from him.
Shrek and Maurice Tillet - find the difference.
Hint: the cartoon Shrek has tube ears, but Tillett has ordinary, albeit broken, human ears. Otherwise everything is the same.
Maurice Tillet was born in the Urals into an ethnic French family. His father was a railway engineer, his mother a teacher. In 1917, the Tiye family, fleeing the Bolsheviks, repatriated to France. Maurice was 14 years old at that moment.
It’s hard to believe, but as a child, Maurice had such a pretty doll-like face that his school friends even nicknamed him Angel. However, at the age of 17, his arms, legs and head suddenly began to swell. The doctor examined the young man and reported that these were symptoms of acromegaly - a malfunction of the pituitary gland, which usually manifests itself after the body’s growth has completed.
Maurice managed to serve in the French navy and work as an engineer until, at the age of 34, he met professional wrestler Carl Pogella. At the first glance at Tillet, Karl realized that he needed to involve this colorful person in his business. What he did brilliantly did not work three years How Maurice Tillet became the world champion in wrestling.
Whether Maurice Tillet was actually an outstanding wrestler or whether his championship was a successful trick of the entrepreneurs is a difficult question, but it doesn’t matter. Nowadays this sport would rather be called wrestling.
Interestingly, he became a champion immediately after he received American citizenship. Here Shrek swears allegiance to the people of the United States.
For 19 straight months, Tillet toured the world as the undefeated and feared champion of the wrestling mat. He had spectacular nicknames - Arena Ogre and French Angel.
He was very popular, and he immediately had epigones - wrestlers with the nicknames Russian Angel, Swedish Angel and so on. The total number of Angels on the circus wrestling mat was ten. But they could not compare with Tiye either in bestiality or charm.
Maurice's friend, the sculptor Louis Link, made a large sculptural portrait of him, and this bust still adorns the hall of the International Institute of Surgery in Chicago.
Tillet’s charm is so great that even now, more than half a century after he left our world, people love and remember him, and his image inspires someone so much that people get tattoos of his portrait.
In half a century, the animators will measure him. Who would have thought that Maurice Tillet, once nicknamed the French Angel, would once again attract the attention of the whole world, now as a fairy-tale character named Shrek, which means “horror” in Yiddish.
The giant was of average height. And still he made a deadly impression - was he a man? When the giant smiled at you, you wanted to move away a couple of steps, or better yet, completely. He was a heavyweight wrestler, this Maurice Tillet, and moreover, he had an appearance that made even his brothers in the ring groan. The very sight of him was a hook. Parents frightened their children with “Tiye the cannibal” and were afraid themselves - what if he got hungry? This was his stage image.
He was a rare person, simply a collectible. Today, his life-size bust is kept in two American museums - anthropological and sports. And in the International Wrestling Museum there is a short, about a minute, video recording of one of his performances. They say he was good at the “bear hug,” which he used on opponents in the ring, squeezing them until they ran out of air in their lungs. This quality - the monster's strength - was also unique, as was its appearance. Since it is a rare disease that youth Maurice suffered, according to doctors, never changes a person in better side. It does not add health, beauty or strength either. Tiye was unusually strong, he didn’t even have anyone to compare him to. Big-eyed funny people on the Internet once noticed his resemblance to our contemporary, also an athlete and also amazing in appearance. Tiye was even called the grandfather of our Valuev a couple of times. Nonsense, of course! Valuev, in principle, could not become related to Tiye. Maurice Tillet did not and could not have children. Unfortunately, his difficult appearance was not something natural, but only the product of a rare disease - acromegaly, in which, in general, health suffers no less than beauty and psychological balance. Tiye was never married, unlike his super-ego (this is not about Valuev, no). His life, full of internal conflict (he never managed to get used to himself in the mirror), could become a reason for a short story, and not for procreation. Well, it almost became, considering Shrek, whose fairy tales were loved by both children and adults. Although the story of the fairy-tale giant is not directly connected with Tiye. The life of our hero was not a fairy tale. And this novella carries an unexpected moral - not everything that looks like a monster, roars like a monster and smells like a monster is actually a monster. There are exceptions in life.
Shrek was invented by the writer William Steig, a part-time cartoonist who for many years decorated the editorial pages of the most popular American publications with his drawings and replenished American literature with a bunch of children's books that no one in Russia had ever thought of translating. Steig also became famous for being one of the top ten writers banned in the United States. In the late 70s, American society took up arms against the most innocent book “Sylvester and the Magic Crystal” - the biography of a smart donkey named Sylvester (nothing sacred!). The writer was framed by his own pig characters. The story was cursed by members of the police association, who were offended by the caricatures of police officers as pigs. The metaphor angered them. They achieved their goal by driving out demons from libraries.
Shrek was born much later, did not cross anyone’s path, and it was a very short story, only about thirty pages, illustrated by the writer himself, a man of great and varied talents. "Shrek" hit bookstore shelves in 1990. There was no epic, the scale was insignificant. It was a story about the adventures of a creature, in European mythology called an ogre - a cannibal giant. The story is about how a young giant living in a swamp, frightening the surrounding people with his appearance, turns out to be so kind that he is simply unable to cause any harm, except for a frightening growl. In search of impressions, the giant Shrek goes on a journey that ends with his marriage to a beautiful princess, a giantess like himself. "Horror!" - this is how the name given by the writer to his character is translated from Yiddish. There is nothing strange in the fact that the writer chooses this word, familiar to him from childhood - this is exactly how his own grandmother reacted to life's collisions. Steig came from a Polish-Jewish emigrant environment. He spent his childhood in Brooklyn. At the beginning of the last century, there was some kind of shrek happening there at every step.
But if he came up with Shrek the Ogre himself, he at least had an excellent reason for it. Shrek existed! There was no need to invent it at all, just describe it. And of course, long before the birth of the cartoon, Steig had already met his future literary child. The acquaintance with the prototype character named “Horror-Horror” took place out of love for sports. Love is not to make love, but to watch. Steig attended in his youth favorite places gatherings of citizens are wrestling arenas. In those days when the cannibal giant, aka the French Angel, shone on them, this is how Tillet was announced in different years. Wrestling, the type of competition in which he participated, was most popular in America, only later it became a corrupt spectacle, in which, from beginning to end, the circus component replaced the sport, in fact, not the wrestling itself, but its imitation. In earlier times, true competition was not alien to wrestling. Sometimes they fought seriously. And both the rich and the poor, who had nothing to do, went to watch the battles, especially during the Great Depression, and for a long time after it, when there was nothing to do at all, even hang yourself. The passion of the sports world attracted and charged with adrenaline, making some of the impressions unforgettable. And the impressions of youth remain fresh for a long time. The future writer could not get the amazing fighter - the invincible Maurice Tillet out of his head. By the way, Tiye and Steig were almost the same age in age. The writer was born in 1907 in New York. And Shrek, that is, of course, Tiye - in 1904... in the Urals. This curious fact of his biography was recently discovered by journalists who got to the bottom of the truth after the “secret of the birth” of Shrek was revealed. In American magazines of the 40s, there were interviews with Tillet, in which he informed readers of details of his biography, now long forgotten. It turns out that he spent his childhood in St. Petersburg. Is it true? It is quite possible that not. The biography of Tillet, a long-forgotten wrestler, is full of gaps. After all, not everything that media figures tell journalists is worthy of trust. And seventy years ago everything was exactly the same - the stars lie, onlookers believe. Sometimes they lie disinterestedly. Is it worth explaining to your fans that you were born in the city of N, N-district, Zaensky volost, if all these names don’t tell their minds and hearts anything? But St. Petersburg - yeah, a guy from Russia!
A guy from the Russian underworld
In fact, Maurice Tillet was born not in the capital, but in the Urals, where there are still settlements, remembering French names and surnames. It was always good with the French in the Urals. There is even a village called Paris (they say this was a joke among the Cossacks who settled in those parts along the way from the War of 1812). And Tillet was not Russian at all - it is known for sure that his parents were of French origin. They were the same foreign specialists who were so adored in pre-revolutionary Russia, lovingly sent from abroad - all these “Missy”, “Monsieur” and “Monsieur” - teachers for children, companions for adults. Tiye's mother was a teacher. Obviously, a governess. And my father is a railway engineer. By the way, Tiye carefully hid information about his ancestors all his life, but not at all because he treated them worse than he should have. Vice versa.
Maurice Tillet was an angel. And it was not for nothing that he was called that in the ring - the French Angel. As if to compensate for his appearance, he was decorated with the most beautiful and wonderful traits that can be found in a human being. He was kind, smart, tender-hearted, well-educated, very cultured and inhumanly decent. Every mother dreams of something like this loving son- caring was another of his commendable qualities. And he really didn't want his poor mother to be disturbed by journalists in connection with his sporting achievements or interesting appearance. Maurice Tillet was ashamed of himself and intended to protect his family from his fame. True, his father died before the family left Russia and before the boy discovered that he was sick. Dad was lucky, he died without knowing that he gave birth to a farcical ogre, so Maurice believed.
The ogre's mother was born in Paris. Being a Frenchwoman in the Russian province is her personal hell, chosen voluntarily. Madame tried her best to become at least somewhat Russified. Going to Russia following Maurice's dad, who was traveling under a contract, she had no idea that she would have to fit into a very Frost patterns. The young French were promised mountains of gold, but they forgot to talk about the Russian reality that will not leave a European indifferent, be it Voltaire or Théophile Gautier. Mama Tiye was never able to get used to the roads paved with liquid clay, to kvass instead of coffee, to jam instead of confiture, to pickled cucumbers, to the lack of flea liquid in the pharmacy, to an empty powder compact, and so on. You never know what a woman can’t survive. In 1917, she noticed that she had absolutely no place, and most importantly, no money to buy gloves for herself, so she jumped in and together with minor son left Russia. With this, the Russian roots of Maurice Tillet were cut off forever. Except for one story, as it turned out later, that tightly tied him to Russia. He once told this story in his spare time to one of his few close friends, fighting with him in checkers. Or chess - that's not the point.
Angel
Angel - that’s what all the aunties who saw him called little Maurice. Mom also called him an angel. “Come here, little angel...” As a child, he was indeed a very handsome boy. It seems that only one photograph of him has survived, in which he is depicted in a sailor's jacket - it is immediately clear good boy from a decent family. In Russia there was a strong fashion for sailor suits, worn by everyone, starting with the heir to the throne. It was in this sailor suit that he left Russia in the summer of 1917 forever. He remembered the birch groves that monotonously, in the rhythm of a waltz, flashed through the window of the train in which his mother was taking him to his homeland, and roadside taverns where travelers were forced to stop to satisfy their hunger. All these establishments were similar to one another, in each of them they bought “pi-ro-gi” with potatoes or cabbage, so as not to get poisoned, they bought the simplest dish that you could take with you, wrapped in a paper towel. In one of these establishments, after paying and leaving, the mother forgot her umbrella. They shouted after them to return them, but the mother was in a hurry - the train was on the platform, and did not notice the call. An unfamiliar old woman, who happened to be in the hall, snuck out to catch up. Carrying in my hands lost item, in the bustle of leaving, the old woman stuck her umbrella out the window, and the mother could not understand why she was scratching and why she was knocking with her umbrella, what she was trying to shout with her toothless mouth - the most repulsive sight from which they could not take their eyes off to realize that the grandmother was just returns a forgotten umbrella. Finally, we figured it out. The train was still at the station, and Maurice's mother sent Maurice to pick up the lost property - a good umbrella, even valuable, was left behind thanks to the rain that had stopped pouring. The old woman clearly hoped for financial compensation for her troubles. She extended the bone handle of the umbrella to the boy, but did not give it back, she pulled it back towards her, as if hinting that in return it would be nice... But in the bustle of the station, the mother did not remember the tip. She forgot to give him some change. As a result, Maurice stood on the platform like a sheep, stupidly pulling the umbrella towards him, while the old woman did not let go, muttering something and starting to get angry. Maurice looked at this poorly dressed an elderly woman, unable to hide emotions. He was overcome by the disgust characteristic of youth towards outside old age. Maurice generally easily moved from one mood to another, often the opposite, he was embarrassed, the situation with the umbrella plunged him into anxious embarrassment. To his right, the train was already hissing, spitting on the rails, the seconds were passing, it seemed there would be no end to it. However, realizing that she would not achieve anything from the teenager, and, letting go of the umbrella, the old woman shouted to him offendedly (maybe he misunderstood her?): “Does it disgust you to look at me? You will be just like me, little angel!” At that moment, the train started moving, clattering iron, and Maurice was left forever with an umbrella in his hand and the imprint of the toothless grin of a strange old woman in his eyes. At night, lying on a rocking bed, he tried to figure out what exactly she wanted to tell him - “You will be like me.” Old, perhaps? Her words remained in his ears until the boy fell asleep. He didn’t tell his mother anything. She was already nervous when the train jerked. Maurice forgot about the nasty old woman - the impressions of the road at that time completely blocked this episode from him. He remembered about it only a few years later, when...
Paris, Reims, New York
The small family, consisting of mother and son, was very lucky that they managed to return to their homeland in time. Who knows how this difficult page in Russian history would have turned out for them. Having left the Urals, which never became their home, they returned first to Paris, and later settled in Reims, where any pharmacist has better wine bins than a Russian landowner. But their lives did not become richer because of this. The mother continued to teach, the son continued to study at the Catholic school where she taught. He was an amazingly capable child, this little Tiye. And although they were always in cramped circumstances, he studied, persistently achieving the best knowledge, intending to continue his education - Maurice firmly decided to become a lawyer. Alas, fate laughed at his dreams.
It all started with a bad jump at school. Maurice loved sports and was distinguished among his peers by his excellent physique. He was broader in the shoulders than any of his peers. I considered people from aristocratic circles who set an example for myself physical culture on the same level as intellectual development. One day, after intense exercise, he noticed unpleasant sensations, which he associated only with excessive zeal in training. However, neither a week nor a month later the discomfort did not leave him - at first his limbs swelled, then he noticed with horror that his face began to swell.
At the age of seventeen, he first turned to a doctor, who was unable to help. They were still trying to treat him for arthritis, when it became clear that the joints were not the cause, but the effect. And only two years later he was finally diagnosed with acromegaly. The disease struck him at the most dangerous age, when a young man’s body grows at the most intense speed. These two years, while he could not understand what was happening to his unfortunate body, he suffered unspeakably. He became afraid of mirrors. At night it seemed to him that his bones were cracking, telescopically moving apart. 70 years later, a cartoon about an ogre will faithfully show how a handsome prince turns into Shrek and vice versa. But young Maurice Tillet - the future French Angel - had no time for cartoons. After all, it was not Ducky-Duck, not Mickey Mouse, but he himself became a giant before our eyes. It was as if an evil witch had placed a curse on him: “When you reach adulthood, you will become a monster.”
At night, in the faint light of the moon, he looked at his wrists, which by the age of 20 had become twice as wide as those of an ordinary person, and tried to understand... he kept racking his brains as to why he suffered a cruel fate. Once he even remembered the “evil witch” with her curse. As if a fairy tale had jumped out to him from the pages: “You will become just like me!” A terrible fairy tale grew flesh before our eyes.
Acromegaly and nothing else! The doctor who broke the news young man, was the open, good-natured face of a man in the street who had recently dined and intended, having finished with the patient, to go to the club. This was already the tenth doctor to whom the mother took her child. The doctor told Maurice in great detail why this happened to him, and opened his eyes to the mechanism of “witchcraft.” It turns out that the disease is caused by a benign tumor on the pituitary gland, as a result of which the human skeleton thickens, the patient’s bones begin to grow uncontrollably, especially in the skull. And no one can predict when this process will stop or whether it will stop at all. Acromegals grow throughout their lives, until the very moment when the disease overcomes them. How exactly? The doctor looked at his still so young patient, wondering whether it was worth telling him the truth, devoid of embellishment. After all, acromegals die before reaching fifty years of age, as if crushed by their own weight. Most often their heart simply fails. Is it pleasant to live knowing what you will die from?
One could say that Maurice was crushed by this very news. The doctor left him no hope, telling him that modern medicine can offer nothing to the patient except “pill number 7”, which helps with everything. By the way, it remains almost in the same place today - treatment of acromegaly, or gigantism, as it is also called, remains an inaccessible dream for doctors. And the best they can offer living acromegalics are battery-powered heart stimulators implanted inside the body. Every couple of years the batteries have to be replaced by cutting and resuturing the skin, prolonging life. And they live, most often trying to hide from prying eyes. By the way, the most famous giant in the world is our former compatriot Leonid Stadnik, who lives in the Zhytomyr region in Ukraine. In fact, this is the tallest person on the planet today, whose height is 2 meters 53 centimeters - approximately, since for some time now the giant has sent away those who like to climb on him with a ruler from the Guinness Book of Records, who got into the habit of visiting Leonid with dreary regularity. So, since Stadnik, in the spirit of Shrek, closed the door in the face of the representatives of the measurement commission, Guinness turned away from him, replacing him with the Chinese Bao Xishun, also quite tall and heavy, but, of course, not like ours. The herdnik is done with this farce - after all, not every giant has such a gentle character as our main character Tiye, who turned out to be one of the few who managed to turn the disease to their benefit, well, as far as one can imagine the benefit of a disease that brings early death.
As already mentioned, the giant was of average height. With a height of 170 cm and a weight of 122 kg. Maurice was not so much tall as he was wide and huge. The word “huge”, by the way, has the same root as “ogre”. The disease hit him with all its force, for some reason becoming wider and not longer. The most terrible thing in this whole story was that a very young man had to give up all claims to human socialization. He dreamed of becoming a lawyer and entered university for this purpose. He struggled to master the skills necessary to be accepted as an equal in this social niche. Without any financial support from his family, he planned to eventually get on his own feet. It is known that Maurice was an excellent mathematician and polyglot and spoke fluent 14 foreign languages. And he was an aristocrat from sports - he played rugby, polo, golf, but not aimlessly, but realizing that sports grounds provided a convenient field for friendship, for communication and establishing business relationships in the world he was about to enter. For his sporting successes in rugby, King George V of England himself once shook his hand. But Tiye had to leave the Faculty of Law at the University of Toulouse due to illness. The practice of law is unthinkable without respectability.
The legal profession, in which he was so successful at the faculty, could not become his life. If anyone thinks that a lawyer's main tool is his brain, then this is a mistake. Voice! This is what a lawyer does when speaking in court. Tiye lost the main thing with which he had to earn his bread - his voice. The disease affected the vocal cords. Twenty years after the collapse of his ambitions, in an interview with one of the New York newspapers, he would say: “Maybe with such a face I could become a lawyer, but my voice, like the braying of a donkey, is simply impossible to listen to.” He still tried to change something, drank some powders, gargled, practiced oratorical exercises, but every day he understood more and more clearly: he would never become eloquent. The legal profession was going through the woods. Where should the youngest giant go?
He served in the French army for about five years, but left armed forces due to some personal circumstances, returning home. However, civilian clothes suddenly turned out to be too big for him. He did not yet know that society does not so easily let in people who are unlike anyone else. And he began a long series of ordeals trying to find a job. He worked as a loader, a librarian, a stage installer in the theater, and even sold medicine in a pharmacy, trying to be closer to life-saving medicine. And sooner or later he was asked to leave from everywhere, since there is no place in society that is not swarming with nervous people, frightened faces and voices of an ogre - a man who looks more like an evil cannibal giant than your kind uncle. He was kicked out of the pharmacy after an incident with a little girl who screamed incessantly for half an hour and fell into a nervous stutter after meeting Maurice. He managed to emerge from under the counter, under which he was tying his shoelace. By the age of thirty, he had come to terms with the fact that the first reaction to meeting him was almost always “Oops!”
Tillet met the winter of 1937 in the cinema lobby. There he stood, dressed up as Frankenstein - huge, embarrassed, naked, in some rags on his hairy torso, in makeup and a wig. The costume looked lively on him, and even partially compensated for his real ugliness, since it was unclear where the makeup was and where the real ugliness was. He checked the tickets, earning his honest and hard-earned money, enough to live on. In the guise of a medieval monster, he caught child stowaways. It was there that he was seen by a man named Carl Poggello, a professional wrestler who had come to watch a pre-war comedy. He stood for quite a long time, admiring the unexpected sight, after which he approached Maurice to introduce himself. And that same evening, fate presented Tiya with its completely new, friendly interface.
The new comrades sat down in a cafe, where, over a glass of beer, Poggello revealed the brightest prospects to Tiye. Poggello convinced him to take up a previously untried profession. He brushed aside all the excuses that he had already tried everything and failed everywhere, that standing at the checkout he was earning his hard pennies and had no intention of quitting the job he had found with such difficulty, where he was not persecuted for his appearance, in one sentence: “Sixty? ?? I offer you a thousand!” Tiye agreed. After all, he was still a very young man, no stranger to adventurism. In the morning next day new friends went to Paris, and a week later began training. Maurice was thirty years old at that time. For a career as a novice athlete, he was, to put it mildly, a bit old. But this did not stop his newly minted producer - in Frankenstein he saw something delightful, like a golden cigarette case in a spittoon. Maurice could only suppress the heavy thoughts that he was becoming a scarecrow of his own free will. After all, wrestling has always been a circus. It was then that he once and for all cut off all talk about his mother - he did not want to associate her with himself, the voluntary comprachico of the ring.
Two years later, England and France already knew the new fighter very well. And only the Second World War prevented him from gaining world fame in Europe, defeating all living things there. Wars do not contribute to the development of interest in sports spectacles. He had to move to the USA. Maurice trained hard, making up for the skills he was deprived of, and less than three years later he managed to win the title of world wrestling champion. This happened shortly after he became a full-fledged American citizen - he received citizenship. However, the world championship was then awarded for living well in any city where there was a wrestling arena. For a year and a half in a row, Tillet toured America, confirming his fame as invincible and truly terrible.
His career developed rapidly. During World War II, in Boston (Massachusetts), promoter Paul Bowser introduced Tillet to the noblest public under the pseudonym French Angel as his own discovery, a superstar. By this time, Tillet had already mastered all the rules of the game, in which he had to maintain his image as an evil and insidious fellow, capable of biting off both ears of someone, along with his head to the waist, without blinking an eye. He growled, spat, uttered an inhuman howl, hitherto unheard of from anyone in the ring, he behaved like a real fairy-tale cannibal giant. Or like Shrek, when he wants to scare people. Crowds came to see Tiye. In the spring of 1940, he won the Boston World Championship and held his title of invincibility for two years in a row, after which he defeated all his opponents in the same way in Montreal. As a result, Tiye had imitators, howler monkeys, who adopted his nickname of angel, only with modifications like the Swedish Angel or the Berlin Angel. He knocked these ones down with one left.
Alas, fairytale ogres cannot withstand collisions with real life. Tiye's sports career was not destined to last long. Just a few years after the victorious march across America, he fell ill with migraines that beset him. He stopped sleeping - he was tormented by nightmares. Carl Pagelo, his only closest friend, more than once listened to complaints about dreams, during which the poor man saw more and more transformations of his body. Then one day, right in the ring, he suddenly stopped seeing. Vision returned after rest, but it became clear that further participation in sports life was impossible. And although he still continued to entertain the audience from time to time with his cannibalistic jokes, roars and aggressive attacks, entering the ring, this was more of a show than a serious claim to victory. That's when he truly became a show-off ogre. IN last time he entered the ring in 1953 in Singapore, losing the fight to the then equally famous wrestler Bert Assirati.
And so he would have sunk into oblivion, this “arena cannibal,” if not for the Chicago sculptor Louis Link, who became so interested in Tillet’s appearance that he made busts of him. The surviving ones have been preserved in history. For example, one is kept in the Chicago International Museum of Scientific Surgery as a reminder of the game of nature that once laughed at a good man. The sculptor Link managed to convey in his works not only the famous ugliness of Tiye, but also his kindness, his charm and gentleness hidden in the folds of his huge face - Tiye’s head was on average three times larger than an ordinary human one. He was the spitting image of a giant from a medieval epic.
He died, as predicted by the good doctor, barely reaching the age of fifty, from a heart attack that overtook him after the news of the death of his dearest friend - the same Carl Pagelo, who made him a wrestler, a “cannibal giant” and a French Angel. And he was reborn to life in the form of a funny and touching Shrek - more than half a century after his death. By the way, the DreamWorks studio, which once presented the world with its charming Shrek, carefully hides the origin of the character. Apparently, if such heirs are found, it would be a bad idea for them to profit at the expense of their good memory.
Tillet left no legacy, only a memory of himself - a short story about how the most deplorable circumstances are subject to the power of the human spirit. The friendly memory of Maurice Tillet remains only the kindest. Those few people whom he called friends (those who could be sure that they loved him not for his beauty) managed to tell only the most beautiful and even romantic things about him. He loved life, did not consider it cruel, on the contrary, he attributed the quality of “exclusivity” to his fate and was pleased with it. And he loved his friends, without exaggeration, mortally. Carl Paggello, Maurice Tillet's best friend and promoter, died of cancer in 1954, and on the same day, September 4, our hero died of a heart attack. The good doctor’s prediction of “maximum fifty years, my dear” came true. The heart of the fifty-year-old “ogre” could not stand the loss of his friend. “Death cannot separate friends” is written on the tombstone of their common grave, which today is often shown to the curious as “Shrek’s grave.” This is how a good but ugly man became a terrible but very attractive giant. Truly, in great ugliness, as in great beauty, there is something magical that forever attracts people.
(c) Olga Filatova
