A portrait of “Lionel the Lion Faced Boy” during the height of his fame in 1907.

Polish-born Stephan Bibrowski began his American show career in 1901 with the Barnum & Bailey Circus. “Lionel, the Lion-Faced Boy” stood on the platform and told his life story to an intrigued crowd: he had been born in Wilezagora, Poland, in 1890, the fourth of six children who were all normal except for him. When his mother was pregnant, she had seen her husband attacked and killed by an escaped circus lion, thus imprinting her unborn baby with the face of a lion. He was also gifted with the eyes of a feline and could see in the dark. So superstitious were the villagers that the military had to intervene to protect the boy.

Of course, this story was fabricated; there were no lion attacks in Poland in the year 1890, and even the town name, Wilezagora, was made up. Lionel actually came from a suburb of Warsaw and was discovered at the age of four by a German showman known only as Sedlmayer, who took Lionel and his mother to Berlin so the child could be exhibited. While the three were staying in Berlin, Lionel’s mother abandoned the boy in Sedlmayer’s care and returned to Poland.

Sedlmayer now had carte blanche to exploit this lucrative child freak however he pleased, but his decency prevailed. He removed Lionel from showbusiness entirely and 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. 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. 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.

Lionel only worked with the Barnum circus for five years, however. In 1907 he returned to Germany, his adopted homeland, to 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, where a Dr. von Luschan wrote a full report of him and revealed some interesting details about his condition. Lionel, like his predecessors Jo-Jo and Alice Doherty, was nearly toothless; he had one tooth each in the upper and lower jaw. Not surprisingly, his claim of feline night vision was false as well. He was, in fact, extremely nearsighted and wore glasses when he was not on stage.

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. After nearly fifteen years with Coney Island’s Dreamland Circus sideshow, he returned to Germany in 1928 and became a German citizen. He died in 1932 of a heart attack.