THE OLD LADY
WHO WASN’T
We’ve written about Jeanne Calment a few times over the years. She’s a Frenchwoman who died in 1997 at the ripe old age of 122, after earning a hallowed place in Guinness World Records as the world’s oldest person. “God must have forgotten me,” she often joked. That’s one theory for how Calment got her record. Here’s another.
THE RUSSIAN REPORT
In January 2019, a report was published that accused Jeanne Calment—whom Guinness verified was 122 when she died—of only living for 99 years. The controversial findings were put forth by a Russian mathematician named Nikola Zak, with the help of a gerontologist (someone who studies aging) named Valery Novoselov. Zak didn’t set out to disprove a world record. His initial aim was to create a “mathematical model of the lifespan of supercentenarians” (people over 110). But everything changed when he started noticing problems with Calment’s story. “The more I searched, the more contradictions I found,” he told Agence France-Presse.
After analyzing all of her interviews, biographies, witness testimony, and surviving photographs—and comparing them with public records from her French birth town—Zak came to the startling conclusion that Calment’s daughter, Yvonne, had assumed her mother’s identity. Likely reason: Tax evasion. In 1934, says Zak, it wasn’t Yvonne who died—as has long been thought—but Jeanne herself. Yvonne was a young woman, and she stood to inherit her mother’s money…but she would have to pay taxes on it. If, on the other hand, she simply told people that she was her reclusive mother, the money would all be hers, tax-free. All of a sudden, Zak’s theory goes, Yvonne became Jeanne, and she gained 22 years just like that.
AGE OF REASON
The Russian mathematician offered some compelling evidence, including, according to Agence France-Presse, “discrepancies between physical characteristics listed on Calment’s identity card from the 1930s and her appearance in later years.” Among the discrepancies: different eye colors and different heights. Novoselov, the gerontologist, studied footage of Calment in her later years, and she looked very healthy for someone who was over 110. “The state of her muscle system was different from that of her contemporaries,” he said. “She could sit up without any support. She had no signs of dementia.” Most damning of all: When Calment became a famous supercentenarian, she reportedly had all of her old photographs burned to hide the evidence. But she couldn’t hide it all.
A TIP FROM UNCLE JOHN
Eating vegetables and not smoking will help you live longer, but here’s one unexpected life-lengthener: flossing. Studies show that cleaning between your teeth can add as much as six years to your life. Reason: It removes infectious bacteria and other germs before they can enter your bloodstream.
Another great checkup: sharks can’t get tooth cavities.
Jeanne Calment is considered a national hero in France, and it was a big deal when Guinness verified her age, so it’s no surprise that the Russian report was met with a lot of blowback. Guinness stood by its initial assessment, saying there was “never any doubt” to the authenticity of the documents they were provided with. They accuse Zak of attempting to defame Calment (although it’s unclear what he would gain from doing that). The former mayor of Arles, the town she lived in, called the theory “completely impossible” and “ridiculous.”
Zak and Novoselov stand by their findings. They maintain that Calment’s age could have been verified in 1997 if an autopsy had been performed, but her family wouldn’t allow it at the time. And it’s unlikely they’ll ever agree to letting anyone exhume the body for a DNA test. At the very least, says Zak, the age-verification methods need to be more vigorous, and Calment’s case “should be used as an example of the vulnerability of seemingly well-established facts.”
OLD NEWS
If it is true that Jeanne Clement was 22 years younger than she claimed to be, it could put a whole new spin on an article we wrote about her in Uncle John’s Uncanny Bathroom Reader called “The Real Estate Deal of a Lifetime.” Back in 1965, Calment was living in a fancy apartment that was coveted by a lawyer named Andre-François Raffray. He offered to buy it from her by way of an en viager transaction, wherein he would pay her a monthly stipend of 2,500 francs ($500) until she died, and then the apartment would become his. As we wrote in Uncanny, “One of the risks associated with en viager transactions is that the seller can lie about their age or pretend to be sicker than they really are, in order to extract larger monthly payments from a buyer who believes the seller might die at any minute.” Raffray, 47, was under the impression that Jeanne was 90, and that she’d been a heavy smoker and drinker for 70 years, and she was already two decades beyond her life expectancy, so it seemed like a really good deal. She even said she ate two pounds of chocolate per week!
However, if Nikolai Zak’s theory is correct, Raffray actually made the deal with a 68-year-old woman who was in much better health than she let on. Thirty years later, Raffray died after having paid nearly $180,000 for an apartment that he never got to live in. “It happens in life that we make bad deals,” Calment joked at the time. She died two years later at the age of…?
Makes sense: “Himalayas” translates to “houses of snow.”