Thom Nickels: Daniel P. Mannix and Peter the Python

The Mannix farm was a legendary place in an area that was then called Bacton Hill. It was known as such because it’s owner, Daniel P. Mannix, was known as an adventure writer who traveled the world with his wife, Jule Junker Mannix, in search of wild animals to bring home.

The Mannix farm was already well known throughout the region when I was twelve or thirteen years old. The family also belonged to the local Catholic parish, and we’d often spot them at Mass. 

The word then was that actress Elizabeth Taylor had once spent time on the Mannix farm when filming her first movie, National Velvet. Apparently the adolescent Liz needed some horse experience, so it was decided that the Bacton Hill farm would be the ideal place for her to learn about horses. The farm also had pythons, cheetahs, llamas, an otter, a spider monkey and even a small elephant. 

The Mannix family was listed in the Philadelphia Social Register and were “society people,” meaning that they had a long and accomplished American lineage. Families like this are also sometimes referred to as “old money,” although if economic circumstances change they may become known as “fallen aristocracy.” (How the Mannix family as Catholics wound up in the mainly Episcopalian Social Register in the 1960s is something that will always remain a mystery.)  

Because of the Liz Taylor story, my family observed the Mannix family with a curious eye.

We would take note when we’d spot Jule at Mass wearing ordinary slacks but topping it with a worn but obviously once very expensive mink stole. At the time this was the standard Saturday afternoon shopping dress for many Main Line matrons. 

I ran high school cross country with Daniel P’s son, Danny. We were committed runners, and Danny would often invite me to run with him on his farm after school. The farm had tremendous acreage. Danny and I usually ran on a long dirt road framed by trees and fields with the occasional winding brook. After our run, Danny would invite me into the house where he’d show me his pet snakes, one of them a python named Peter. 

Before that, he introduced to his father, the writer. 

Daniel P was in his study smoking a pipe in front of a wall of bookshelves. The prolific author was sitting by a window, dressed in a tweed jacket, the smoke billowing from his pipe like the steam from a vintage locomotive. He looked very much like G.K. Chesterton. This is what people used to imagine when they thought of (male) writers. 

Danny introduced me as a friend “who wanted to be a writer.” Daniel P didn’t seem too impressed. He might even have been thinking, “Run from this life, boy, run as fast as you can.”

I came away from that meeting thinking that Daniel P smokes a mean pipe. But I liked him. 

Next, I was introduced to Peter the Python. I had already had experiences with snakes, especially when a fellow Explorer Scout taught me how to handle and hold his snake pets. As a boy I used to like to watch a snake shedding its skin. Discarded snake skins resembled transparent piping or coils.  

Dan encouraged me to put Peter around my neck. Since Peter was very large, this seemed risky. Don’t pythons wrap themselves around their victims and strangle them?

In his autobiography, this is what Danny’s father wrote about Peter:

“Handling a big snake is an unforgettable experience. There is the gentle touch of the soft lips and delicate tongue, together with the strange feeling that you are holding a living electric current swathed in smooth scales.”

Danny’s father also reminds readers that pythons are not poisonous. “Peter, like all constrictors,” he wrote, “kills by wrapping his coils around his victim, usually a chicken or a rabbit.”  

Pythons, Mannix continues, rarely kill human beings because “a man has hands and can generally unwrap a snake before he loses consciousness.”

The important thing here, I guess, is to stay awake. 

While I wasn’t afraid of Peter, his size was daunting. At that time I had no idea that the family allowed Peter to slither around the house, and that very often Peter, being a semi-aquatic creature, would curl up near the plumbing in the bathroom or worse yet, go inside the toilet for a long, cozy nap. 

“Peter strongly disliked having the toilet flush when he was inside,” Mannix wrote, adding that when that happened he would rise up and give one of his long, loud hisses.

As for the houseguest who inadvertently sat on the bowl with Peter inside, well, that’s another story.     

Daniel P. Mannix wrote about his experiences as a side show act working in carnivals. At different times in his life, he was a sword-swallower, a fire-eater, a trainer of wild animals, and a magician known as The Great Zadma.” 

In his book, Memoirs of a Sword Swallower he describes his experiences while traveling with a carnival. He writes about The Fat Lady, the human beanpole and the Ostrich man who ate broken glass. 

In his book, Freaks, Mannix describes the love affairs of little people (called midgets in those days), the story of elephant boy; the amours of Jolly Daisy, the fat woman; the notorious pinhead who inspired Verdi’s Rigoletto; and the black little person, only 34 inches tall. Then there was the human torso with a talent for sewing and typing.

As one reviewer commented, Freaks comprises “bizarre accounts of normal humans turned into freaks — either voluntarily or by evil design”.

In the sword swallowing book, we are able to enjoy photographs from the 1930s and ’40s (all taken by the author), and observe the goings on in the forgotten world of circus performance artists. One reviewer said that the book “will appeal to all who speculate about the outer limits of pain, pleasure, and revulsion.”  

Mannix’s book, The Beast: The Scandalous Life of Aleister Crowley, is about the English occultist and ceremonial magician. After the book was released, Mannix received an invitation to join Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan. Mannix wisely refused the offer, since LaVey obviously couldn’t distinguish between the curious and sometimes sensationalist imagination of The Writer, versus the world of personal belief.

Mannix, as far as I knew, was still a good member of our local parish and received Communion on Sundays. 

Mannix’s most famous book, Those About to Die, takes the reader into the bowels of the Roman games in the Coliseum; It was also a look into the daily lives of gladiators. 

While I was running cross country at Great Valley High School with Danny, his father had already published The Hellfire Club, about the secret decorated caves in England where the country’s one famous “one percenters, engaged in parliamentary style meetings and various forms of sexual debauchery. Eminent and respected men from the worlds of arts, letters and politics, including benign Benjamin Franklin himself, were said to be habitués of these dens of vice where everything was permitted. 

Mannix, who was born in 1911 and died in 1997 at age 85, survived his wife, Jule, by 20 years.  

Today there’s a renewed interest in his work, as many of his earlier out-of-print books have been republished. And while I haven’t set foot in the farm where Liz Taylor once groomed the National Velvet horses, during my research I did discover that Mannix had once teamed up with famed literary critic Malcolm Cowley when they co-authored The Middle Passage. This disturbing essay focuses on the mechanics of slavery; its origins in Africa; its European history and what happened on the slave ships that came to America.

We learn, for instance, that “the vast majority of the Negroes [Mannix’s term] brought to America had been enslaved and sold to the whites by other Africans.” These other Africans “were coastal tribes and states, like Efik kingdom of Calabar, that based their whole economy on the slave trade.”

The authors report that the slaves might have been prisoners of war, or kidnapped by groups of black marauders, or even sold with their entire families for such “high” crimes as adultery, impiety or, as the authors state, “stealing a tobacco pipe.”

Slaves were shackled two by two then sent below the ship although women slaves were allowed to roam the vessel so that the sailors could see which ones they could have their way with. Mannix writes: “All the slaves were forced to sleep without covering on bare wooden floors…..In a stormy passage the skin over their elbows might be worn away to the bare bone….”   

In the morning, the sailors would oversee the “dancing of the slaves,” a ritual in which the chained slaves would be forced to dance around the deck by the cat-o-nine tail armed sailors. This happened while one slave pounded a drum or a sailor played a bagpipe. This therapeutic ritual was a precaution against “suicidal melancholy,” although the authors report that many slaves suffered from a condition known as “fixed melancholy,” an expression used to describe a state when a slave had lost the will to live. 

Diseases like yellow fever plagued these ships, as did the smell of human excrement which could be detected miles away, depending on air currents.  Mutinies were not uncommon, given the conditions on board. Sometimes the ship’s crew would be slaughtered although then the problem for the slaves became where to dock the ship, because at least for them, there was no such thing as freedom. 

Today, whenever I return to Chester County to visit family I try to visit the old Mannix farm where Danny (now deceased) and I used to run through the woods after school, and where Liz Taylor at age thirteen first learned to ride a horse.

Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist/columnist and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism. He writes for City Journal, New York, and Frontpage Magazine. Thom Nickels is the author of fifteen books, including “Literary Philadelphia” and ”From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami: Religious Cults in Philadelphia.” His latest is “Death in Philadelphia: The Murder of Kimberly Ernest.” He is currently at work on “The Last Romanian Princess and Her World Legacy,” about the life of Princess Ileana of Romania.

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