The Entertainer

by Margaret Talbot

  My father always claimed there was nothing to it, really. He wasn’t worried; he never got hurt. MacKnight had explained the principle of the thing: His body would give with the force of the blow; if he was flat on a table, sure he might get injured, but suspended as he was, his resilience would protect him. That made sense to Lyle—he was a fundamentally trusting sort, and besides, this was his chance to command the stage, vulnerable and unseeing though he was in those moments with the mallet poised above him. As he lay there, trying to sink into semi-consciousness and never succeeding, keeping his eyes shut anyway, Lyle realized that what he was doing was acting. His first show was in Sidney, Iowa, in November 1919, and he refined the routine in a string of small towns in Iowa—Blockton, Diagonal, Macedonia, Silver City—that November and December.

  In the afternoons when they arrived in a new town for a show that night, it was Lyle’s job to go search around for a suitable rock. (I’ve since read, in a book called Secrets of Stage Hypnotism, that stones of about two hundred pounds are best, since “a heavy stone will break with practically no jar to the sleeping subject, while a smaller one would shake him severely.”) It was winter when he started. The mud of the unpaved streets was frozen and as hard as iron under the thin soles of the fancy shoes he’d bought with his first paycheck. The wind was like a solid object he had to lean into sometimes, and it hurled snow at him with what seemed like a malevolent force. He felt lonely, sometimes, but a little electric current of excitement about the night ahead lit him up inside. And then the next day, he’d be less lonely when he wandered around town. Kids ran up to him and called him “Atlas,” and even if they punched him in the chest to see how hard it was, well, they had a laugh together.

  It turns out, though, when you look it up, that people occasionally got injured or even killed doing the human plank, as it was known. It’s a famous trick—often with the variation that the hypnotist will stand on the human plank’s chest—but one of the original don’t-try-this-at-homes. Or maybe at all. In Woonsocket, Rhode Island, in 1901, a human plank named Thomas Bolton was crushed to death by a stone that was described in the papers, perhaps with some exaggeration, as weighing six hundred pounds. The chairs gave way, he fell, and the stone rolled onto his head. One evening in 1909, Professor Arthur Everton of Newark, New Jersey, suspended his hired subject in the human plank position and stood nimbly on his chest for a few moments, as he had done so many times before. But this time, when he propped him up and set about reanimating him, the fellow slumped to the floor, senseless. In jail and charged with manslaughter, the hypnotist insisted that the young man was not dead but still in a deep trance. The hypnotist’s wife wept and pleaded with the authorities to let her husband’s mentor, a man named Davenport, try to revive the young man. When they relented and called Davenport in, a reporter from one of the wire services was permitted to watch: “The little room was in absolute silence as Davenport applied first his ear, then the tips of his fingers over the motionless heart. Next he bent his head down low over the head above the black cloth, placed his lips close to the ear of the body he sought to raise and said sharply and eagerly, ‘Bob!’ It was a trained voice, the voice of a man drilled to shock or command the senses, and it startled without moving the intent group of watchers. ‘Bob! Your heart! Your heart is beating!’” There was no response, nor would there be, and though Everton, in a state of nervous collapse, kept telling anyone who would listen that Bob was surely alive, an autopsy showed he had died of a crushed aorta.

  In 1913, the wife of Louis Jacobson turned up in domestic court in Chicago to complain that her hypnotist husband regularly “put her in a trance, stretched her across two chairs, and then invited heavy footed men in the audience to walk over her face and body,” reported the Chicago Tribune under the headline “‘Human Bridge’ Turns on Husband.” Mrs. Jacobson had the bruises to prove it, she told the court. Moreover, when she had become too ill to work, the hypnotist had deserted her and their six-year-old son, Buster. “Jacobson admitted all of his wife’s recital was true, excepting the part related to his hypnotic powers. ‘That,’ he said, ‘was plain bunk. My advertisements were faked. My wife was a willing faker, too.’”

  There was, clearly, a sadistic impulse at work in hypnotic exhibitions, though I doubt my father saw it quite that way. It wasn’t his habit to look for the darker psychological strands in things, and he forgave a lot in the service of a good show. But part of the fun lay in making people do embarrassing, even humiliating things. That was all well and good if you were part of the act, getting paid for it, and moving on to the next town, but for the people left behind, it was another matter. In a how-to pamphlet on hypnotic exhibitions, for example, Professor L. A. Harraden suggested the following cruel setup: “Take a dignified young lady” from the audience, hypnotize her, then “tell her that she is growing old and wrinkled and has a good deal of superfluous hair on her face.” This, Harraden noted, “will naturally put her in very low spirits.” Then, tell her a doctor can remove all these blemishes with an electric needle, and give a hypnotized young man a “lead pencil—not too sharp—with which to operate.” The whole scene “never fails to delight a family party, and produces roars of laughter while the poor girl never afterward hears the rest of her mustache and wrinkles.” The same incessant teasing might be in store for the two unattractive older people made to act out Romeo and Juliet, or the woman with a voice like a screech owl made to deliver an aria, or the dazed young men who’d danced with each other cheek to cheek.

  Of course, maybe some part of them wanted to do it. Maybe it was sometimes liberating. Social roles could be constraining in small towns, and here was license to behave utterly outside them and blame it on a trance. (The cross-dressing theme, for instance, was rampant in these shows.) Maybe some of the people who went up onstage and did something wildly out of character were enacting their own version of running away with the hypnotist, but just for the evening. Even if you have been successfully lulled into a deeply relaxed and suggestible state, it won’t force you to do something to which you are truly averse. A lot of what was happening with the true volunteers onstage was a kind of hysteria, a placebo effect. That was the whole idea of using hired subjects like Lyle; not only would they “warm up a frigid audience,” as Harraden put it, but “by force of example and that epidemic peculiarity of nervous conditions,” they could make other people think they were hypnotized and act accordingly. So it felt real, not like something they had faked, and maybe that helped when they thought about it later—sure, they’d done something crazy, but they just couldn’t help themselves, no one could have.

  There was something rather cavalier about the way hypnotists regarded their hired subjects, whom they called—and this tells you something—horses. Everton seems to have been genuinely distraught at the death of poor Bob. MacKnight was kind enough, though my father never felt close to him. But a lot of hypnotists seem to have regarded their horses as cheap stage fodder, and more or less expendable. “They are comparatively easy to find, and can be purchased for a small price,” Professor Leonidas wrote in his 1901 Secrets of Stage Hypnotism. “Offer any somnambulistic youth $5 a week and expenses and an opportunity to travel, tell him that you will always tell others that he is getting $50 a week, and he is yours for as many seasons as you desire his company. In fact, $5 a week is good pay for a subject. There are lots of boys who would go for room and board and cigarette money.”

  Reliable hypnotic subjects were worth getting a hold of, but not necessarily paying or treating properly. “Yes, these good sleep artists want some vice, some glaring sin, and they are happy. Get a good subject; one who can be put into catalepsy or made to eat the delusive strawberry that is supposed to grow on the fertile stage and he is the boy to purchase, hire or kidnap!” Boys could more easily be “procured,” as Leonidas rather unfortunately puts it, in the country than in the city. “If the town is a small country village or a prosperous country town of a few thousand, t
here are always enough boys doing nothing in particular that can be engaged for the season.” The city was different—there you’d run into professional somnambulists who valued their services as highly as the greatest thespians. Some boys who would come to try out expected they’d be faking it, but Leonidas claimed to be looking for people he could really put under. To prove his seriousness, he’d stick a hat pin into one of his hypnotized subjects—they were supposed to be impervious to pain in that state—while the would-be new ones looked on.

  The hypnotism craze ran its course eventually. Not that hypnotism itself ever disappeared; people still see hypnotists to help them quit smoking or relax, and you occasionally even hear about stage hypnotists. But it was no longer a phenomenon to which errant behavior was widely attributed. It had not turned out to be the sensational magnetic force, the magical science it looked to be to many people. It was not the psychological equivalent of electricity, a way of controlling and illuminating neural circuitry invisible to the eye. Research psychology and psychoanalysis would take over those hopes of illuminating the emotional underneath, and hypnosis would be relegated to the more gimmicky margins. The movies would take over much of the wowing of audiences with visual trickery: special effects on screen stirred the places in people’s imaginations that stage magic—levitations and disappearances and somnambulism—once had. By the 1920s, and certainly by the 1930s, you no longer saw headlines like the one that ran in the Chicago Tribune in 1905: “Hypnotism Peril to Entire Nation: Army of Itinerant Svengalis Spreading Dangerous Teaching Through Country.” Discontent with hypnotists had been growing for years. Though the shows fascinated audiences, they repelled many reformers, who found they smacked of exploitation, of the sexualized display of vulnerable bodies. These itinerant Svengalis were “sweeping the country, subjecting victims to all sorts of cruelties for the morbidly curious or for advertising purposes,” as the Tribune article put it, picking up on fears that Americans were an enervated race already. “They are leaving behind them a trail of maimed bodies and weakened intellects.” A New York Times editorial called hypnotic exhibitions “degrading,” and added that “the exhibitor might as well be allowed to chloroform people in public in order to amuse a mixed audience with the phenomenon of their narcotization.” Starved of venues and audiences by the decline of the road-show circuit, starved of goodwill by an evolution in attitudes—the same sort of evolution that led to the growing distaste for freak shows—stage hypnotism lost its magnetic appeal.

  By then, my father had long since given up the hypnotism business. One frigid January afternoon in Worth, Missouri, MacKnight told him that the show was canceled that night for lack of business, and that he didn’t have the money to pay him. The landlady had perhaps grown tired of the adventure by then, or was disappointed in MacKnight’s hypnotic abilities offstage. In any case, she was no longer emptying her pocketbook for him. Maybe that was when my father first developed his freelancer’s optimism, his belief, which his children share, that Something Will Turn Up. Of course, we get antsy between gigs; so did he. Somewhere in the back of my mind is the tiny flicker of fear that I will never get another writing assignment, and he must have felt the same about acting, a still more unpredictable business. You can always write alone, even if there’s no prospect of publication; but acting, unless you do soliloquies all your life, pretty much requires other people. When I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, before answering machines, the ringing telephone was promise incarnate, a clunky red talisman of hope, and for one single reason: It might be the agent calling. I was trained in phone politesse from a very early age—to chirp “Talbot residence” when I answered, and if the caller asked for my dad, to say, “May I tell him who’s calling, please?” And, oh, when it was my father’s agent, offering him some chance to return to the stage or the cameras, how lucky I felt to be the one tearing through the house to tell him who was on the phone. Generally, we could use the money, and always, my dad was thrilled to be working again. Our job was to be ready, and to be ready was to be hopeful—no matter how long the hiatus between jobs, even if the part was small, for a small part could be a cameo, and a cameo could be classy.

  The thing that turned up that January evening in Worth, Missouri, was a telegram. It came from a magician who called himself Mock Sad Alli. The clerk at the rooming house where Peggy and Lyle had been staying, and where they had enough cash to stay for exactly one more night, had scrawled the message in pencil on a piece of butcher paper. Mox, as his friends knew him, was an old friend of Ed Henderson’s who was touring with an outfit called the Wertz and Whetten tent show. He told Lyle there was a place for him and Peggy in the show. For $50 a week each, plus transportation and minus board, Lyle could do a little singing and a little patter between Mox’s magic acts, and Peggy could play the piano.

  Peggy and Lyle were on the train the next morning headed for Stratton, Colorado, Wertz and Whetten’s next stop. They didn’t get all the way there by train because Wertz and Whetten played what was known as the inland circuit—the towns they went to weren’t on the railroad lines. “There were twenty-five people in the company, and in most of those towns, they had no hotels,” my father would recall. “We’d live at people’s homes. Maybe a farmer had a spare room. You’d pay sixty cents a night and that included breakfast.”

  The company trundled from town to town in a caravan of boxy, black automobiles, with slogans advertising the show painted on the sides. The players would lean out the windows to call back to one another, flirting, cracking wise, each shout unfurling white scarves of steam in the cold air. The towns were so spare and small they made Brainard look like the big time. Lyle took a lot of snapshots. His father had given him a Brownie camera to bring with him on the road. Brownies were still new at the time—the first basic cardboard model had come out in 1900. Like a lot of young people especially, Lyle was delighted with the idea that you could take photos on the fly and that they didn’t have to be serious or dignified. You could show your friends looking the way they wanted to instead of the way their parents wanted them to. You didn’t have to sit stiffly and patiently as you did in a professional photographer’s studio, with its long time exposures and daunting expense and earnest aura of commemoration. You could take pictures just so your friends would have the fun of mugging for the camera or to pump your own memory about a place you’d been. In his scrapbook from those years, there is a snapshot from the Wertz and Whetten tour that shows a wide grassy expanse in Kirk, Colorado, empty except for one distant figure standing stock-still and a plain, one-story wooden building. Under it, my father has written drolly, “A Busy Day.”

  A show like Wertz and Whetten’s operated on the smorgasbord principle: Put it all out there, and the people would not only find something to like but, with any luck, come back for more. And as in vaudeville and variety shows, the acts ran the gamut. When Lyle and Peggy joined the company, for instance, it included, in addition to the supposed “Hindoo” magician Mock Sad Alli, a dancer and actress named Tootsie Galvin, who had lately been entertaining doughboys before they shipped off for France (“Cheer up, Tootsie is coming,” read the flyer, “direct from 18 months engagement at Camp Pike, Little Rock, Arkansas”), a comedic juggler known as “The Wizard of Motion,” a jazz orchestra, and a play that poked fun at Swedish people. These Swedish dialect yuk-fests were actually quite popular then in the Midwest, when Scandinavian immigrants, who had begun arriving in the 1850s, with a peak wave in 1910, were both plentiful and still something of a novelty. “Ole Olson” and “Yon Yonson” were stock characters in the tent show repertory: good-hearted, slow-witted, blond-haired lads squeezed into too-small clothes. (It was a variation on the American country-bumpkin character known as Toby.) Though their English was fractured, though they were pigeon-toed and clumsy (if strong), the joke was not entirely on them. In the plays that featured them—plays like “Ole, the Swede Detective,” “Ole on His Honeymoon,” “One Year Over,” “A Yenuine Yentleman”—t
he Ole and Yon characters acted out stories of adaptation, of immigrants learning, quicker than you might expect from outward appearances, what it took to get by in America.

  As for the alluring Tootsie, her photo shows a chubby-cheeked girl of perhaps seventeen or eighteen in a short, poofy dress and white ankle boots. You could imagine her determinedly twirling a baton in some suburban high school homecoming parade today, but she was hot stuff in an era when showing your knees really meant something. A clip from one of the Colorado papers, written in the voice of a smitten young rube, gave a sense of her charms: “If that young leadin’ man gets any wages, it’s an outrage because he does nothing but make love to Tootsie from start to finish, and if I could do that, I would pay the people what runs the show.”

  Lyle and Peggy did a little of everything, too. Peggy was soon being billed as “Miss Peggy Schaefer, the saxophone wonder.” (Her conservative family must have been aghast—if they knew, that is. The piano was one thing; refined young ladies did play the piano and the harp, even if they didn’t usually do so for hypnotists. But the sax was associated with jazz, with nightlife, with walks on the wild side. Peggy must have had gumption.) Lyle, meanwhile, had a line in “unique and witty songs and sayings,” some of them sentimental and Irish, such as “A Fire Laddie, Just Like My Daddy.” He even did a blackface routine, in which he performed a song about Little Eva going to heaven, from the perennially popular play adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Sometimes he stepped in as Ole or one of his Swedish sidekicks. He did magic tricks, but as he told an interviewer years later, he wasn’t much good at them: “I had been around enough to know that if your tricks weren’t playing (and they rarely did), you had to talk to the crowd. So I would get up there and do this long, nervous monologue. I didn’t even know what I was saying half the time.”