Stephan Bibrowski (1891–1932), better known as Lionel the Lion-Faced Man, was a famous sideshow performer and a person born with a rare condition known as hypertrichosis.
Life
Stephan Bibrowski was born in 1891 near Warsaw in Poland with one-inch hair covering his body. His mother blamed the condition on the mauling of his father by a lion, which she witnessed while pregnant with Stephan. She considered Stephan an abomination and gave him up to a German impresario named Sedlmayer when he was four. Sedlmayer sent him to boarding school in a small German village, away from a curious public. Here, the bright young boy received a proper education and even learned to speak a few phrases in five different languages. When Stephan was eleven years old, Sedlmayer signed a contract with the Barnum & Bailey Circus, and the two boarded a ship to America. Barnum & Bailey's previous hairy man, Jo-Jo, had recently retired, and circus management was eager to replace him with this clever newcomer.
By the time he was put on exhibit, Lionel's hair had grown to eight inches (20 cm) on his face and hung about four inches (10 cm) everywhere else. His body was almost entirely covered with hair that gave him the appearance of a lion, the only exceptions being the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet. His official height was only five feet, three inches. Also, as is common with many forms of hypertrichosis, Lionel only had a couple of teeth in his mouth. Lionel took his place among Leah May, the American Giantess; Liou Tang-Sen and Liou Sang-Sen, the "Corean" Siamese twins; and Charles Tripp, the armless photographer. In 1903, as part of a special showing of Barnum & Bailey freaks at Huber's Museum in New York City, Lionel was booked for $500 a week – about $11,000 in modern money.
In his act, Lionel performed gymnastic tricks, and also spoke to people to show his gentle side that sharply contrasted with his appearance. He was known to be a perfect gentleman, and always impeccably dressed. He was also well-educated and spoke five languages. In private life, Stephan was a talented watercolorist who enjoyed painting landscapes. As a boy, he had aspired to be a dentist, but knew he could be more successful in the circus.
Lionel only worked with the Barnum circus for five years, however. He then moved to New York City and worked with Coney Island Dreamland Circus in New Jersey. Surrounded by circus people, Lionel was able to hone his gymnastic skills and was soon as impressive a tumbler as the show’s non-hairy acrobats.
After nearly fifteen years with Coney Island's Dreamland Circus sideshow, Lionel returned to Germany in 1928 to become a German citizen and appear at Berlin's famous Passage-Panoptikum wax museum. The nimble and erudite Löwenmenschen (lion-man) enjoyed enormous popularity. He even consented to be examined by the Berlin Society of Anthropology, Ethnology, and Prehistory. He was reported to have died in Berlin from a heart attack in 1932 at the age of forty-one. He had no wife and or children on record.