Oh, and he was in charge of the guinea pigs that Mock Sad Alli was conjuring up in his act at the time. Mainly he was in charge of making them disappear—offstage, that is. They multiplied rapidly, and Mox never needed that many in his act. But Lyle, being softhearted and fond of animals, didn’t want to just dump the guinea pigs by the side of the road or drown them. It took most of the day sometimes, going door-to-door and stopping kids on the street, to find homes for the scads of baby guinea pigs. Thanks to him, my father would say, there were guinea pigs all over Colorado.
The magician Mock Sad Alli and his wife. The inscription reads: “To my Student and Pal Lyle, Mox and Lady Jane, 1919.”
In some ways, the best part of the tour was Mox himself, for he turned out to be a kind and generous man, as well as a magician of considerable talent. His real name was Charles Mathas, and he had been born in Germany. He knew, however, that a magician needed a touch of exoticism—a German accent hardly counted when Germans were the largest group of immigrants in the United States. Hence the stage name Mock Sad Alli, a nod to the mystic East, and to an earlier magician who’d used the same pseudonym. Mox had a broad, domed forehead, melancholy deep-set eyes, and straight, black hair that he parted neatly on the side. His wife, Dorothy, who was also his assistant, known, depending on the act that night, as either “Muhamatra” or “Lady Jane,” had a homely, intelligent face and dark, wavy hair that she tied back loosely with a ribbon. In some of her pictures, she looks a bit like her contemporary the anarchist Emma Goldman. The costumes Dorothy wore were fetching and bohemian, with Peter Pan collars, artistic stripes and polka dots, black tights and bloomers. Mox and Dorothy saw themselves as au courant, part of the “modern magic” movement that embraced the theatricality of illusion. They did not claim to derive their powers from the realm of the supernatural; they were performers, and well-trained ones, who drew on a codified repertoire of tricks. My father remembered that the two of them always seemed quite close, as husbands and wives who work together and outside the mainstream often are. They reminded him of his father and stepmother. If you walked in on Mox and Dorothy backstage, they always looked like one of them had just said something amusing to the other, something they would obligingly repeat if you asked them to but that wouldn’t quite translate. On the streets of the little towns they’d tour, you’d see them strolling together, Mox’s hand fitted gently into the small of Dorothy’s back.
A few years ago, I came across a tribute to Mock Sad Alli written by a fellow magician in a magazine called The Sphinx. The magician, E. G. Ervin, was writing in the 1930s, looking back fondly on Mox’s heyday. “He was a master of misdirection”—the magician’s strategic art of diverting an audience’s attention—“but mechanism of any nature was tabooed. He would never rely on it. A match, and ‘to hell with it,’ was the doleful end to a newly acquired coin ladder that failed to function at a Saturday matinee.” His repertoire was “varied, but not extensive,” Ervin recalled, “so he’d become quite adept at varying the mood in which he presented the tricks”—sometimes pouring on comic patter throughout, occasionally proceeding in “somber silence.” And Mox could milk an audience. “His favorite method of getting ‘response’ was by explaining that his next effect was entirely new, something that had never been seen before. His pathetic appeal, ‘please do not fool me. If you don’t like it, don’t applaud’ inevitably brought results.” If an audience seemed unimpressed by a trick, he would repeat it “by request.” When he had to take a role in the Wertz and Whetten company plays—most often as a butler or a villain—he could never memorize the lines as written and stumbled through with ad-libs. But his performance of magic was another story—in that he was graceful and sinuous. “Among his pet tricks,” Ervin wrote, “was the appearance of a silk in a tumbler held between the hands, the sleeves rolled up to the elbows. A beautiful piece of misdirection—perhaps, but how it got there was incomprehensible.”
Mox liked to help out fellow performers who were down on their luck, but he had supreme tact and a magician’s skill when it came to saving a friend’s pride and concealing where the help had come from. In a scrapbook kept by a Princeton graduate and magic buff that is in the holdings of the Princeton University Library, I found stories about Mox’s footing the bill for a fellow magician who was languishing in a TB sanatorium, and arranging a carnival job for another sickly colleague, whose salary he secretly paid. The poor man earned enough money in this way to fund a trip back to Chicago, where he had friends and where he died soon after.
But while Mox was always gracious and avuncular, the tour Lyle went on with him hit its share of snags. In Vernon, Colorado, in February 1920, the Wertz and Whetten show was canceled because of a flu epidemic. After a hiatus, the troupe went on to Kansas in March and from there back to Colorado. In April, a late and heavy snowfall shut down business in Florence, Colorado. Peggy left the show and went home to her family. Lyle, too, went back to Nebraska, and at his father’s suggestion, took a job with the Walter Savidge company again while he waited for brighter opportunities to materialize. Mox went to Los Angeles, where he and Dorothy took an apartment downtown on Alvarado Street and where he died some time later, “practically helpless,” the recollection in The Sphinx maintains, “through a long ailment” and a “prolonged confinement in a Los Angeles sanitarium.”
In one of my father’s scrapbooks, there is a snapshot that shows Mox and Dorothy, Peggy and Lyle, and a raw-boned, black-clad Fred Whetten, the troupe’s co-owner, who is standing a little apart from them. Mox looks formal, dignified, and slightly anxious, squinting professorially into the sunshine. Dorothy has her arm looped through his and a shy smile on her face. Lyle is leaning back, one arm draped casually over Peggy’s shoulder, jacket thrown open, newsboy cap tilted rakishly above his smiling face. He seems cocky and full of life. And Peggy, in a black beret, her heart-shaped face exceptionally pretty, looks radiant.
I don’t know what became of Peggy, but I like to think of her and to imagine her memories of that adventure. My father said she never went back to showbiz and that he never saw her again. But I wonder if, having given up the raffish life of the traveling show, she found herself yearning for it now and then. I picture her leading the more respectable life that she had, deep down, always expected she would. Maybe she had married a doctor or a young man who worked in her father’s bank, and had become the lively mother of several children. Her husband would love it when she played the piano for him—so soothing to the nerves after a long day at work—but the children were always begging her to play the saxophone. Why, she didn’t even own a saxophone anymore, wouldn’t hardly know where to find one, you silly ducks. Maybe when she told her husband about those days, she played it light, made him chuckle about the vanities and eccentricities of the hypnotists and the jugglers and the Tootsies. Maybe when she was alone with her children, though, she made it all seem more magical, like scenes in a snow globe that she took out and gently tapped, making it glitter for them, and for her.
Wertz and Whetten tent show, 1920. Note the elaborately painted backdrop. Tootsie Galvin is in the front row, center, wearing white stockings. Lyle’s girlfriend Peggy is second from right in the front row. Lyle is in the back row behind the woman in the light-colored coat, Mrs. Whetten.
I imagine that maybe the sweetest memory—one that lived only in her mind, because she never even told the children about it—was of a particular night when in some farmhouse’s creaky-floored spare room she had brushed her hair until it shone, put on her charming little beret, and headed out. On the way to the hall that night, the snow had crunched underfoot and the stars winked like tinsel in the big, black sky. Lyle had surprised her, running up to her all out of breath, catching her in his arms and kissing her full on the mouth. Afterward, she could feel the warm ghost of his kiss, a tingly pressure on her chapped lips.
And that night Mox would have done her favorite trick, the one where he made paper flowers pop
out of what seemed to be an empty cardboard tube. She could easily have figured out how he did it, but she had willed herself not to. She loved the moment when the flowers burst forth like a flame in the darkness, like spring when you were sure it would never come. Mox would bow to his wife, presenting the bouquet to her with a flourish. That night, maybe Peggy kept glancing backstage and she could see Lyle there. She felt especially beautiful, as brilliant as the paper flowers, as powerful as electricity, and even in the pooled shadows behind the curtain, Lyle could have sensed the light she was making. He ran his fingers over his lips to remind her of the kiss. Her cheeks flushed. The paper flowers bloomed. It was magic.
Chapter 3
FOOTLIGHTS ON THE PRAIRIE
Lyle sat on one of the blue folding chairs under the tent, his throat taut, his eyes burning. The actors were rehearsing but without him. The night before—his first night playing an actual role in a full-length play—had been a disaster. Every time he thought about it, he squeezed his eyes shut, trying to erase the demoralizing picture. It was July 1920, Jefferson, Iowa. Lyle was eighteen, full of pep, a bit of a hayseed still, but with aspirations to savoir faire and with a pilot light of ambition that would have been hard to extinguish. Today, though, it was nearly out.
A few weeks before, Lyle had borrowed a suit from his father, gotten some photos taken, and managed to land a job filling in at the Chase-Lister theater company for a more experienced older actor whose drinking had gotten out of hand. The play he was to debut in was Her Other Husband, a melodrama with a small-town setting. Lyle was supposed to be a drunkard who has run off and whose wife assumes he has died. (It was evidently a case of typecasting for the original actor.) Then one night, long after his virtuous wife has remarried, this time to the local minister, the lush turns up. Of course, there’s a fight, but the lush, being a lush, is meant to lose, ignominiously. The minister was played by Raymond Ketchum, the company’s leading man and co-owner, and a man Lyle greatly admired, as he did most people who’d give him a job.
Lyle, the young actor.
Waiting backstage, Lyle was nervous, but it was more than that, and better. If nerves made you feel like you were one guitar string being plucked over and over again, this felt like being strummed. Everything around him seemed louder, sharper, more vivid. There were lots of kids in the audience, and he thought he could hear them wriggling around on their squeaking chairs, pick out the patent-leather protest of their new Buster Browns. He could smell the sweet, sharp scent of the trampled grass on the tent floor. He could hear the summer night sounds outside the tent—crescendos of cicadas, a lazy wind plucking at the tent flaps. He could see the shine of stage makeup and perspiration on the leading lady’s face as she rustled past him.
And then, suddenly, somebody was clamping his arm and propelling him onstage, and there he was, with the audience gasping and hooting because here–surprise!—was the prodigal husband. Adrenaline made his fingertips tingle and his face feel hot. He made as if to slug Ray Ketchum, just as he was supposed to do, only instead of swinging past Ray’s face, his fist made contact with it, and Ray slumped heavily to the floor. For a moment, Ray was out cold. He lay back, scarcely moving. Then he inched up on his elbows, looking shocked and furious. Blood was pooling on his split lower lip, trickling steadily over his chin. Chase-Lister advertised itself, with peculiar understatement, as “The Show Without a Headache.” The slogan popped into Lyle’s mind as he stood over the felled leading man, for Ray would surely have a headache soon if he didn’t have one now. As somebody hastily brought the curtain down, Lyle could hear Ray whisper, “You’re fired.”
So it was over, Lyle thought—the whole cockeyed dream he’d had of acting on the stage. He sleepwalked through the rest of Her Other Husband, assuming, correctly, that his dismissal was meant to take effect after the play was over. If everything had been brighter and louder before, now it was muffled, the other actors’ voices sounding in his ears like watery murmurs through the wall of a neighboring hotel room. What could they mean to him now except as prompts to steer him numbly through his paces, and eventually off the stage forever?
Lyle couldn’t know it then, but there would be other moments like this; there are in every veteran stage actor’s life. There was the time, a few years later, when he was supposed to be shot onstage and the gun jammed. From the wings, somebody whispered, “Well, kick him, then!” So his fellow actor did. Which might have been fine, except that Lyle’s next line was “I die by the hand of the assassin!” The audience howled, but what should he have said—“I die by the foot of the assassin”? There was the time, many years later, when he was acting in a play in San Diego, and some befuddled guy wandered in from the alley, through the stage door, and right into the middle of a scene. Lyle quickly ad-libbed. “Oh, hello there, Barney! We weren’t expecting you! But since you’re here, could you go out and get us a bottle of wine?”—a piece of direction the intruder, who was clearly three sheets to the wind, was only too happy to take. Or the time when he played the role of an aged knight who went everywhere in the company of his faithful sheepdog. One evening, without warning, the faithful sheepdog bit him squarely on the ass. He was in the middle of a speech, a speech he continued until it was done. (The fake chain mail helped.) But by then he was a pro, and if not exactly used to such things, at least confident they wouldn’t be the ruin of him, and well aware there was a lot you could put over on your audiences in a pinch. They’d be grateful for it; they didn’t want the spell broken any more than you wanted to break it.
Raymond Ketchum met him at the tent the next morning. There was a bruise the size of a carnation blossoming near Ketchum’s mouth, but he looked calmer. “Mr. Talbot, how old did you say you were?” “I know I said I was twenty-one. But I’m really only eighteen.” “And how much experience do you have?” “Well, I was on the stage for a year as the assistant to the hypnotist MacKnight. Oh, and I’m a member of the Amateur Magicians Correspondence Club of America.” Ketchum sighed. “I’ll tell you what,” he said, “You go away to some smaller company and work for a year and get some experience. Then if you still feel you’d like to be with us, write me and I’ll find a place for you.” Lyle was humiliated, though perhaps not so totally that he did not stop to wonder if there was a smaller company.
He had a dim notion that he would wait—wait for what he didn’t know—so he sat himself down under the tent. After a while, Raymond’s wife, Sally, came in and sat down beside him. Sally was the leading lady. She had a stalky neck and grave, bulging eyes; in truth, she looked a bit like a pensive box turtle. But she was kind and she was soft on Lyle. She laid her hand on his forearm. And to Lyle’s embarrassment and relief, he began to cry. “Do you really want it that badly?” she asked. When he choked out a yes, she said, “We’ll fix it up, then. I’ll talk to him.” The release of being understood by a sympathetic woman was immediate, warm and almost illicit. Dear Sally, wonderful Sally.
The upshot was that Chase-Lister cut his salary from $25 a week to $15. Lyle could stay—if he agreed to do a bit of everything except act. He’d help put up and take down the tent, he’d sell candy and popcorn between acts. He’d go around town posting the “Tonighters,” small posters on brightly colored paper that announced the play that was on “Tonight at the Big Tent.” (“Near the end of the season, they’d have a lot left over,” my father would recall years later, “and maybe we weren’t going to do that one show enough to use up the Tonighters for it, so Mr. Chase would just change the name of the play that night” to match whatever extra posters they had around.)
Lyle figured that eventually the management would throw him a few parts, and he was right about that. In the meantime, he watched and he learned, and he read what he could about acting. He was a sincere young man, the sort who clipped newspaper articles that seemed wise to him and pasted them in his scrapbook or carried them around in his wallet. One of his prized clippings excerpted an essay by the celebrated B
roadway actress Laurette Taylor. He found its elevation of youth and imagination over experience and tradition in acting both reassuring and exhilarating. “The only thing experience can teach the youngster is the necessity of hiding his experience. The more experience he gets the harder he should dissemble before his audience. The thing is to preserve your imagination. Always think of preserving it, deliberately,” Taylor wrote. And, she counseled, “Don’t ever travel with people who haven’t enthusiasm. They have no imagination and may make you work yours overtime to no purpose. Avoid rabid realists. They are slowly starving their imaginations by giving them the obvious.”
Lyle knew enough about acting to appreciate that this was a new era in which personality, passion, and good looks mattered more than perfect elocution or grandiosity, those hallmarks of a fine performance in the nineteenth-century theater. By today’s standards, performers at the start of the twentieth century would still have sounded artificial, guided by what one contemporary commentator called the “sucking dove” school of speech. But compared with earlier styles of acting, theatrical gestures were less extravagant, speech less declamatory in the first decades of the twentieth century. “Sincerity, innocence, urbanity, wit, intelligence: these and other qualities did more to attract playgoers than the stentorian manner of an earlier day,” as Benjamin McArthur, a historian of American theater, has written. “Combined with good looks and an attractive figure or physique, they became an unbeatable combination.” The early-nineteenth-century American theater had placed no particular premium on looks; actors and actresses alike were sometimes mammoth, often homely. But expectations changed over the course of the century, particularly as photography multiplied the images of performers—in theater windows, on cigarette packages and postcards. And looks would become paramount with the dawn of movies and the close-up.
The Entertainer Page 9
