Epic orchestral music reverberated from some hidden hi-fi system. The music sounded heroic: full of horn swells, harp swoops, flute trills, and tribal drums, Braveheart for a moment, Lion King the next. It heightened the dramatic intrigue of being on the island, creating a sense that something monumental could happen at any instant.
“What’s this music?” I asked him.
“Magic music,” he answered, straight-faced. “You’ll find Klipsch speakers scattered among the palm trees.”
Maybe I was reading too much into it. He certainly took pride in his possessions and clearly cared a great deal about the island. Sure, he had an obsessive side, but despite his ludicrous wealth, Copperfield seemed reasonably regular; tense, certainly, and highly sensitive, but also hospitable, sardonically humorous, and a bit goofy. Then his perfectionist tendencies came to the fore again when he demonstrated the precise way to arrange pillows on the chaise lounges. “Even the Balinese daybeds have secret compartments,” he added, opening a chair to show us an instructional document on pillow placement.
Expounding on how much Musha meant to him, he said he wanted BestLife readers to understand the passion he felt for this place. It was where he came to “escape from the escapes.” How strange it must be to need a break from escaping, I thought, to take time off from working as an escapologist.
He spoke about how, despite the prohibitive expense of running the island, nothing could prevent him from focusing all his energies here. I said I could tell how hands-on he was about it, from the time he’d taken to talk to me before the trip to the way he’d given this personal tour.
It wasn’t just about the sugar-sand beaches, he went on, it was about imbuing them with stories. He explained his plans for a haunted island where it would snow on the beach, like in that short story he’d once written. Soon guests would be able to go on yeti quests, where Sherpas would make water magically appear. “What makes me happy is people going like this—” He dropped his jaw. “Everything comes back to that.”
When he took a break to respond to a call on his walkie-talkie, Raf and I had a chance to speak openly. “This place is truly amazing,” he whispered. “David is like a kid who just wants to show off all his stuff. And he’s kind of tacky, no?”
“He has so many secret things. Secret cays, secret TV stands that rise out of the ground on hydraulics, secret passageways leading to secret monkey enclaves, secret underground chambers, secret daybeds. Everything has a secret compartment!”
“You never know what you need to hide, I guess.”
The tour wound up with Copperfield showing us the various accommodation options, all of which were waterfront houses. In one of the buildings, he took a moment to make sure we noticed the laminated page he’d made explaining how the remote controls worked. He told us how guests who come to the island can spend the entire time letting it all hang out: “Some people just want to come here and be naked and play bongos. Musha is a place where you can be totally fucking naked because it’s secluded and there’s no paparazzi around.”
As our golf cart hummed past an empty tennis court, Copperfield asked what I thought about the tour, and whether the things he was showing me would be good for the magazine story.
I told him that everything was useful, even though I wasn’t sure what would make it into the final text—or texts. “You never know until you’ve done all the reporting,” I confessed. “But I love the feeling of not knowing, of being lost in a story as it’s coming together. I feel like I’m in the labyrinth right now.”
As he dropped us off at our beachhouse, he mumbled something into the breeze about how much he appreciated being lost in illusions himself.
* * *
“What a shithole,” said Raf, walking into Pier House, our hyperluxurious two-bedroom suite. The décor drew upon the Far East—large shadow-theater puppets, Buddhist masks, and a carved temple archway painted in fading primary colors. Raf threw open the blinds on the large windows, revealing a white-sand beach and green-gabled pier. On the coffee table, I found a metallic container embossed with an Egyptian scarab, that ancient symbol of immortality. Had Copperfield put it there intentionally?
Raf busied himself in the snack pantry, a larder closet stocked with chips, candy bars, cookies, crackers, nuts, popcorn, pretzels, Snapea Crisps, and any other junk food you could ever want. “No Tab cola though,” he tsked. He grabbed a couple of coffee pods for the in-room espresso machine and started making macchiatos.
“That thing was so Photoshopped it’s not even funny,” he said, adjusting the steam wand’s intensity.
“You really think so?” I asked, no longer sure. “He wouldn’t be so audacious to pull a fast one like that.”
“Like that?” Raf scoffed. “The guy walked through the Great Wall of China, he made the Statue of Liberty disappear—that’s what he does, he pulls fast ones. That Photoshop image is small potatoes. Audacious. Ha!’”
After a final snort, Raf started singing the words “We’re in David Copperfield’s private island resort” to a childish melody. He laughed maniacally and looked to the heavens. Stopping suddenly, he threw me a cut eye. “You realize we’re being filmed, right now, through this Laotian mask.”
I immediately started talking loudly about how magical Musha felt, lauding David’s passion, complimenting his taste, noting the exquisiteness of his many Oriental sculptures. I filled Raf in on what David had said about this place being his most important project. “He’s a perfectionist,” I concluded. “One hundred percent or nothing.”
“That’s David Copperfield,” said Raf loudly. “An OCD Jewish nerd who can make you believe he levitated over the Grand Canyon. A magician surrounded by supermodels on his island. What a tough life.”
Moments later, a black winged creature flew into the room. “It’s a bat!” I cried, as the hairy dark thing fluttered about erratically. Transylvanian thoughts caromed through my mind.
“No—wait! It’s a fucking moth!” Raf shouted, as it hurtled to a stop upside down in a corner where the ceiling met the wall. “Holy shit, David Copperfield just flew in here as a moth! Can he do that?”
We edged closer. Before us quivered an extremely large, velvety-black butterfly. Two striking dark brown eyes looked out at us, one on each wing. It had the wingspan of a sparrow. Raf started shooting photos from different angles. We made various shooing motions, to no avail. It didn’t move again, so we decided to unpack. By the time we left the Pier House for dinner, the winged insect had flown away.
As we drove toward the Landings, I noticed a sign that said PETRIFIED LAKE. Had it been there earlier? Neither Raf nor I had seen it during the tour, and it seemed as if it would’ve caught our eye. I made a note to investigate it later. By the time we showed up in the Houdini billiard room, it was about ten minutes later than Copperfield had suggested. His vexation was palpable.
A couple of assistants were milling around, offering cocktails. His girlfriend, a gorgeous European model, sat next to him.2 She spoke about how her supermodel friends from Sports Illustrated and Vogue had loved their time on the island. One of them had said how coming here felt like coming home.
“That’s what Raf said when we were on the boat,” I added, neglecting to mention that he had been joking.
“That’s why I do this,” Copperfield said. “To make you feel like you’ve gone back to being a child again. That, and getting this reaction—” His jaw dropped.
He directed our attention toward the television screen. It showed us a promotional clip about his home in New York, a three-story penthouse apartment on Fifty-Seventh and Lexington looking over Central Park. It was an urban palace. The camera panned through a playroom full of penny-arcade games, carnival muscle-strength challenges, and other antique funfair curiosities. A tracking shot of the living room revealed a number of nude wooden people nailed to the two-story-high wall in various contortions.
“What are those?” I asked. The mannequins pinned up there like human creepy-crawlies made
me think of the dark butterfly in our room.
“They’re incredibly rare life-size models,” Copperfield explained.
“Models?” Raf asked, turning slowly to look at M.
“Around the turn of the last century,” Copperfield answered, “it was illegal for artists to hire real-life models, so they used articulated lay figures like those. I even have one that belonged to Cézanne.”
Watching the models dangling from the wall, I remembered reading something about his warehouse in Las Vegas, recently raided by the FBI during their investigation of the alleged rape: getting in requires tweaking a mannequin’s nipple.
Other weird contraptions flitted by on the screen. “Initiation devices,” he clarified.
“Like for what sort of initiations?” I checked.
“You know, trick chairs, paddle machines that whack you in the butt, novelty electroshock games, kind of benign hazing things like that. I also have tons of ray guns. You’ve gotta come out to Vegas and see my warehouse. It’s huge. I have a whole room full of ventriloquial dummies.”
He spoke about the excitement of having acquired the Mulholland Library of Conjuring and the Allied Arts. He also owned the world’s largest collection of Houdini memorabilia, including Houdini’s Water Torture Cabinet and his Metamorphosis Trunk. During his own lifetime, Houdini had possessed the world’s largest library of magical materials. Their respective era’s greatest magicians, they also both specialized in straitjacket escapes, and they both had Jesus complexes. (Houdini is most often visualized, his biographer Kenneth Silverman wrote, “dangling upside down from a tall building, arms outstretched in a pose of inverted crucifixion.”) They also shared a fascination with mutilated bodies: Copperfield’s living-room collection paled when compared to Houdini’s prized set of “revolting snuff snapshots that showed chunks of flesh being hacked from a woman tied to a stake.” I recalled coming across an article somewhere about Copperfield’s love of horror movies.3 Afraid of finding out just how much he had in common with Houdini’s dark side, I brought the conversation back to their joint interest in archiving the history of magic.
“Do you consider yourself a collector?” I asked.
“I don’t really like that term,” Copperfield said. “I’m not an accumulator. I love objects that carry with them amazing stories. But I don’t want to be seen as a collector.”
“Wouldn’t you like to start collecting women’s shoes, size nine and a half?” chided his girlfriend.
He pursed his lips and reached for a glass of water.
Raf leapt in. “Wow—nine and a half? You have big feet!”
“I know!” M groaned, growing self-conscious. “I’m so embarrassed about them.”
Her feet seemed perfectly normal to me. I shot Raf a “behave yourself” look. He’d been reading a how-to book about picking up women, based on the teachings of a magician and master seducer named Mystery. The most important technique was “negging,” a sleazy way of creating intimacy by jokingly pointing out someone’s insecurities. Copperfield handled it deftly and politely, talking about how all people have parts of themselves they are sensitive about, and how we all deal with them as children. He spoke of his own complex about having big ears, which explained his affinity for Super Mario, that Sri Lankan god statue with the huge lobes. “Childhood is what shapes us,” Copperfield said. “It’s how you use your markers and devastations that counts.”
He frequently dropped wisdom during our time together, sharing sayings about everything from forgiveness to decision making, such as “grudges hurt the grudger more than the grudgee,” and “the more successful you become, the harder it is to focus on family,” and “if you really want something to happen, you can force it to happen by your drive and your force, and that’s a kind of supernatural effect.”
As we moved over to the dining table, he told us a story about going to a camp in Warren, New Jersey, as a child. “At Camp Harmony, we spent two weeks searching for a guide who’d been kidnapped by Indians. It was just a game, but I was living it. That’s what I do here on Musha Cay. My whole life goes back to that camp experience when I was three or four. The yeti quest I’m working on, where Sherpas will make it snow on the beach, it’s just a variation on that. Everything is. Everything I do is about getting people’s jaws to drop. The canoe is cool—but not as cool as having that canoe come down from the ceiling full of sushi. That’s—kaw,” he said, dropping his jaw.
The kitchen staff served each of us a braised-lamb dish, except for Copperfield, who was brought a platter of breaded chicken fingers. He would eat the same thing each night, while the rest of us were treated to a variety of seafoods and other meats. Copperfield’s fondness for chicken fingers goes way back. Shortly after he proposed to Claudia Schiffer, a journalist joined them on a limo ride to Planet Hollywood in Manhattan, where he watched them “feast” on chicken fingers.
Over dinner, David spoke of magic’s illustrious past, mentioning how magicians had been kings’ confidants, and how they’d always held high posts throughout history.
“So what position do you want in Obama’s cabinet?” Raf nibbled.
“Well, Ronald Reagan did offer me a post after a show in Ford’s Theatre,” said Copperfield. “He wanted me to make things vanish.”
“Like his wife,” added his girlfriend.
“Now, now,” chuckled Copperfield.
When the staff cleared our plates, he asked what we wanted to do.
“Should we people watch?” I joked.
“You can’t do that here,” he sniffed petulantly, and suggested we play board games or do some karaoke.
“Raf is incredible at karaoke,” I jumped in, trying to get back to an upbeat place.
“We’ll see about that,” said Copperfield.
“I have my own machine at home,” Raf retorted, unperturbed.
As Copperfield moved inside to set things up with a gaggle of helpers, Raf and I lingered on the dock, looking down at the sharks drifting through the waves below. Raf wondered what M thought of all those models crucified on the wall.
“She’s so beautiful I can barely look at her,” I said. “It’s like watching the sun.”
“Through diamonds,” Raf added. “She’s too beautiful. The whole island is. You almost need to turn your eyes away. Or talk about how big her feet are.”
On the way into the karaoke room, I noticed an illustrated map of Musha. I couldn’t locate the Petrified Lake, but did find a body of water marked The Sanctuary in its general vicinity. A sanctuary? A consecrated place where sacred objects are kept?
“Did we see the Sanctuary today?” I asked, walking into the room.
“No,” Copperfield answered definitively. His seriousness made me reluctant to press the matter, while simultaneously affirming my hunch. Whether sanctuary or petrified lake, its liquids would be worth exploring.
The karaoke machine readied, a diminutive young male assistant tested out the system by singing a flamenco song in a pretty alto voice. Copperfield went up next, with a smooth rendition of Sinatra’s “Love Isn’t Just for the Young.”
When he finished, he spoke about how much he admires Vegas crooners. I remembered Martha’s telling me that he likes to sing Rat Pack songs. “I mean, he gets up there in front of guests and sings ‘Candy Man.’4 He’s just not tuned in.”
Raf went up next. He chose “I Believe I Can Fly” by R. Kelly. “If I just believe it . . . I can fly.”
“He’s pretty good,” conceded Copperfield, mentioning his dislike of hip-hop.5
As Raf soared into an R&B falsetto, Copperfield mentioned that a famous rap producer had recently stayed on Musha.
“Which one?” I inquired, playing along.
“I can’t tell.” Copperfield smiled. “He watched Scarface at the Drive-In on the beach.”
“Did he do any karaoke while he was here?”
“No,” said M, “but he heard us covering an Eminem song he produced.”
“Sshhhh,” stage-whisper
ed Copperfield.
That Dr. Dre had been here was precisely what Copperfield wanted me to be writing about. He took that opportunity to drop a few more names. The old guest book belonging to the previous owners, he said, was full of messages from comedians such as Billy Crystal (“The crackers were stale”) and Steve Martin (“What? No tobogganing?”).
My song came up next: “Just an Illusion,” an old disco hit. The lyrics were simple and repetitive: “Is it really magic in the air? . . . It’s just an illusion . . . in all this confusion?”
M followed with a heartfelt rendition of “I Will Always Love You.”
“Will you really, though?” Raf whispered at one point.
Pretty soon, Raf and Copperfield were belting out duets. We took lots of photos, drank too much, and had a lot of fun. Some of us ended up wearing capes. As Copperfield belted out a Dean Martin number, Raf turned to me and said, “I can’t not get a photo of me piggybacking him, then—switch!—him piggybacking me.”
After an hour or so, it was time for bed. Copperfield and M slipped into a golf cart and headed up toward Highview. It took us a little longer to get going, as Raf couldn’t remember how to start the cart’s engine. He’d been drinking shot after shot of sambuca and ouzo (“to finally understand the difference”).
“I guess it isn’t drunk driving if it’s just a golf cart,” I said.
“And if there’s no police,” added Raf, “’cause you own the roads.”
We caught another glimpse of Copperfield zipping up the hill.
“It’s so funny watching him roll away in his golf cart,” said Raf, fumbling with the ignition. “So undignified somehow.” Raf didn’t realize his foot was on the accelerator, and as soon as he’d turned the cart on, he sent us crashing straight into a dense thicket of shrubbery. “We’re gravy,” he cackled. He then backed into a Tibetan prayer pot, veered through a grove of palm trees, and finally managed to steer us back to the Pier House intact.
* * *
1. Houdini, who didn’t believe in “real magic,” exposed numerous mediums and spiritualists as frauds.
Book of Immortality Page 24
