Jim Steinmeyer

by The Last Greatest Magician in the World

  WHO CREATED THURSTON’S ACT? Years later, Thurston described his weeks of work at the shop near Bedford Square, insisting that he had invented each of the illusions and had even sought to patent them. But Grace recorded that Thurston greedily collected plans and drawings from other magicians, as well as designers in Paris, assembling his new act from their best ideas.

  Certainly, stage technicians were responsible for some of the wonders. “It was the first magic show to make extensive use of electricity,” Grace recalled. “Electric motors turned on many of the illusions, and sparkling filaments and fountains were part of several tricks.” Thurston also used chemicals for the fire effects, compressed air and pumps for the production of the balloons and the floating ball—which was held aloft as it tumbled and turned within a stream of air—and hydraulic systems for the flowing coconut. All of these were unusual and extravagant for magic shows in the early 1900s.

  It’s unlikely that any of the illusions were Thurston’s ideas. He was never inventive, although he highly valued the process of invention and used to exaggerate his own creations—perhaps this was a result of his father’s failed career as an inventor of household knickknacks. The magicians who later worked with him found that he had a surprisingly tin ear about evaluating new ideas. But as a performer, he had wonderful instincts about presenting these illusions for an audience.

  A number of the illusions were clearly the work of other magicians. Only a handful of clever performers could have supplied these ideas. Servais Le Roy, a creative Belgian magician, was not in London then and met Thurston for the first time about a year later, after the new act was complete. Neither Maskelyne nor Devant would have offered suggestions, as they were busy with their own shows. Charles Morritt, an inventive Yorkshire magician who had worked with Maskelyne and would later work with Devant and Houdini, might have met with Thurston and offered new illusions. But none of the highly scientific or experimental Thurston illusions feel like Morritt’s sort of magic.

  There are three likely candidates: Horace Goldin, the American illusionist; Percy Tibbles, the young London magician who worked under the name P. T. Selbit; and Fergus Greenwood, a British illusionist who appeared in music halls with the stage name Fasola.

  All of them were at the start of their careers and would have been enthusiastic collaborators, flattered by Thurston’s attention. Horace Goldin (his real name was Hyman Goldstein) was the most experienced of the candidates. A Polish immigrant to America, he had started his career in dime museums, often working alongside Houdini. Goldin premiered at London’s Palace Theater of Varieties in July 1901, with a magic act performed at a breakneck pace. He prided himself on his inventions, although he’d borrowed some of his best ideas from other magicians. Goldin’s creations were later featured in Thurston’s show.

  Selbit’s brother illustrated Thurston’s book on card magic, and the magicians met when Thurston was working at the Palace. T. Nelson Downs suggested that at least one of Thurston’s illusions—probably the coconut shell—had been shown to him two years before Thurston’s premiere by Selbit, who had a working model in a barn in London. Within several years, Selbit began specializing in large illusions and Thurston featured many of his greatest effects.

  Fasola had been assembling his own illusion act. We know that he discussed an idea with Thurston around this time, an illusion with a cannon and a nest of trunks, which was later featured by Fasola and Goldin, and then used by Thurston. But the most telling indication may be fashion: Fasola, like Thurston, performed wearing a turban and silk jacket, as an Indian prince. It was an unusual choice for a magic act, and suggests that Thurston had been influenced by Fasola’s suggestions. Fasola remained a close friend and confidant of the magician, and Thurston soon came to depend upon Fasola for new ideas.

  THURSTON’S LAVISH new act was a hit with the agents. Paul Keith, the son of vaudeville impresario Benjamin Franklin Keith, saw the performance at the Princess Theater in London and negotiated Thurston’s appearance at Keith theaters on the East Coast, starting the next spring. Grace and Howard hosted a late-night dinner for the cast and crew, and Howard offered a toast to everyone who made the Great Thurston possible.

  But the next day, Thurston’s dark moodiness returned. He roared at Grace, accusing her of encouraging other men and flirting with the vaudevillians at Number 10 Keppel Street. In the middle of his tirade, he reached out for her neck. She ducked, ran from the apartment, and hailed a cab for Keppel Street.

  Thurston arrived during dinner, while Grace sat at the table surrounded by her friends. He was calm and composed, quietly asking if he could speak to her in the lounge. Alone with his wife, Howard mumbled an apology. He wanted her to come back to the flat, as they had a special private show that night. Grace told him that she wanted a divorce.

  She avoided him for three days, convinced that he could deftly talk her into returning—the con man’s relentless salesmanship. She ignored his messages and left the house early in the morning to dodge his visits. She then booked passage for New York on the first available ship. When she arrived, she raced upstate to the home of Charles and Addie Champlin; Charles, a kindly theatrical producer, had employed Grace in his road companies. There was already a stack of telegrams from Thurston waiting for her. Somehow he had anticipated that she’d go to see the Champlins—or perhaps he had simply blanketed all of her friends with urgent messages. She burned the telegrams without reading them.

  When she looked back on their marriage, Grace suspected that Thurston’s conflicts stemmed from his early life, his mixture of criminal activity, the Bible classes at Moody’s school, and the years of “handling the suckers” in carnivals and sideshows. “Feelings of guilt and anxiety were with him always,” she later wrote. “He had a reasonable understanding of right and wrong, but I think that he spent his life worrying about the exact location of the dividing line. He carried his own torture chamber inside him, and those in close contact with him often writhed on the rack of his moods and outbursts.”

  Grace Butterworth Thurston, “Miss Gracie Texola, American Singer and Buck Dancer,” was just twenty years old, on her own after four years of marriage, a hardened show business professional, experienced and insightful beyond her years.

  THURSTON TOOK MONTHS to adjust his new act, perfecting the devices that were built in London. He omitted the card manipulations and the levitation, as a shorter act was easier to sell. Not everyone was charmed. When he opened at Keith’s Boston Theater on May 4, 1902, an unnamed reviewer for Mahatma, an American magician’s journal, complained about the elaborate elements of the act.

  It is unlike any other act of magic ever produced here, too much depending upon the stage electrician and not enough on the efforts of Mr. Thurston himself. There is nothing in the entire act which would require a great amount of skill in the operator, and much is dependent on mechanical devices. When Mr. Thurston becomes actor enough to carry out his ideas and presents them without appearing to be one of his own mechanical pieces, he will have a good act. It is on the whole a strange performance, and leaves one in doubt as to its excellence in its present condition.

  The review was disappointingly accurate. The act had plenty of magical things, but not much magic. Even more frustrating, in sheer logistics—cutting trapdoors, installing electrical circuits, and testing the lighting effects—Thurston’s new effects were too complicated for a touring show. He realized that the novelty of the act would buy him time as he added more material. Most important, he put the card manipulations back into the program and consulted his files on new illusions.

  The show played Philadelphia and then Keith’s Union Square Theater in Manhattan, opening in June for three weeks. Thurston couldn’t resist sauntering into the square and sitting on the same park bench—where he sat feeling sorry for himself, practiced his sleight of hand, and met John Northern Hilliard—just three years earlier. Now his name was in lights across the street, on America’s leading vaudeville theater.

  A newsp
aper reporter enthused about the good-looking young man who portrayed the eastern prince at Keith’s, and Thurston reciprocated with a string of press puffery. “He is the nephew of United States senator Thurston.” Or, sometimes, the son of Senator Thurston. “He is a native New Yorker, for he himself will admit that for many years he was [a resident of] Brooklyn.” Or a native of Boston, or Detroit, or Columbus, depending on whom Thurston was talking to. “For a fact he was educated for the ministry at the Moody School at Northfield, Massachusetts, but just before being ordained he attended a progressive euchre party in Brooklyn and there beheld a parlor pest doing tricks with cards.”

  Thurston moved the act to the theater at Willow Grove amusement park, near Philadelphia, for the summer. It gave him a chance to perform for a long, leisurely run at night and work on new illusions at a nearby shop during the day.

  He added one of Fasola’s suggestions, an illusion that the two magicians had discussed in London. A large, colorfully painted trunk was hanging over the edge of the stage, above the orchestra pit. It was there, in front of the curtain, when the audience arrived and remained in place through the show. Near the conclusion of the act, Thurston brought one of his assistants to the edge of the stage. He cautioned the audience to examine the lady’s features and remember them so they could identify her when they next saw her. In order to help the identification, he borrowed a handkerchief from a man in the audience and tied it around the lady’s arm.

  Now the assistant was lifted to a table and covered with a screen. She disappeared, in the style of many other vaudeville illusions. But there was a unique surprise.

  The trunk was quickly released, and it slid down a loop of rope, bouncing onto the stage. Thurston pulled out a ring of keys and unlocked the trunk, and two assistants threw open the lid. Inside was a slightly smaller trunk. Using a long pole, which was slipped through two loops of rope on the trunk, the assistants lifted it straight up and placed it on the stage. This trunk was unlocked, revealing a third trunk inside. With the pole, this tiny trunk was also lifted out and placed on the stage.

  When Thurston unlocked it, he found the missing lady inside. She stood and was marched to the edge of the stage, where the spectators could identify her and the borrowed handkerchief could be returned.

  The Nest of Boxes had been an old trick from the early Victorians. In the original version, a small box, the size of a jewelry box, was shown. A borrowed watch or ring disappeared, and then was discovered inside the group of nested boxes. Fasola’s spectacular variation, using a person, was so good that it quickly became embroiled in a battle of magicians. Horace Goldin claimed that the trick was his, and even filed a patent for the mechanism to accomplish it. Fasola and Goldin became locked in pointless charges and countercharges within the world of magic.

  AT WILLOW GROVE, another priority was to improve the levitation illusion. From his file of ideas, Thurston pulled out sketches of a levitation that combined the Aga—the lady floating horizontally into the air—with an older idea called Astarte—a special metal corset that allowed her to pirouette in space. Harry (Henry) Couzens, Thurston’s mechanic, was entrusted with the job of creating the steel device. It was one of those awful jobs that needed jewelry-like precision in certain spots, and crude, solid work in others, the sort of mechanism that a stage carpenter could quickly repair with a hammer. After months of work, Thurston announced that there had been an eighth-inch mistake. Henry would have to rebuild the mechanism one more time. Couzens took off his apron, tears welling in his eyes. “That’s enough for me, Mr. Thurston, I quit. You’re impossible to please. You’re losing your money and I’m going crazy.”

  After thinking it over, Couzens returned and finished the job the next day. On stage, the illusion was always called Amazement. Backstage—where every trick with an exotic title is given a nickname by the stagehands—they called the trick “Henry.”

  Now the lady was hypnotized and placed in a low coffin on low legs, which was wheeled to the center of the stage. Thurston stood behind the coffin and gestured over it. Slowly, the lady rose from the coffin, straight in the air, until she was floating just in front of the magician’s chest.

  The assistants removed the coffin, allowing the audience to appreciate that nothing was holding her in the air. Thurston held his arms straight over her, as if holding her aloft by the sheer power of his gestures.

  The setting brightened with colorful shafts of light, demonstrating that Thurston and the floating harem girl were isolated in the center of the stage. And then, strangely, she began to revolve. Her rigid body turned a horizontal axis from her head to her feet. It was as if she were slowly twisting and tumbling. First she seemed to roll forward, and then she stopped, lying in space upside down, with her face and toes pointing toward the floor. Then her body twisted backward, making several smooth revolutions in the air. Thurston was handed a large, solid metal hoop. He swept it across her floating body twice and then tossed it to an assistant, who took it down to the first row of the audience for examination.

  The coffin was replaced and the lady slowly descended into it. Thurston’s assistants lifted her to her feet; the magician clapped his hands and she awoke.

  The weird illusion of Amazement was always noticed by newspaper reviewers and earned special praise for Thurston.

  IN 1903, Thurston took the magic show back on tour through vaudeville theaters in the Midwest, and then returned to Willow Grove for another long run and experiments in the workshop. He still wasn’t satisfied with the act and enhanced it with a number of cabinet illusions. His months on the road allowed Thurston to evaluate every trick carefully. What was the audience reaction? How did each piece of apparatus hold up backstage? How long did it take to prepare in each city? Gradually, he was working out the most elaborate and temperamental lighting effects and fountain effects, pruning the show down to the best tricks.

  The last addition to the show was an amazing new illusion called Dida. Contrary to Thurston’s claims of originality, Dida originated in Germany several years earlier and had worked its way to London, where it made a minor hit at the Alhambra, and then appeared in New York vaudeville. Thurston might have seen it himself, or copied the apparatus from accounts of the London show. A large, low horizontal glass tank was wheeled onto the stage and then filled with water from buckets. Thurston covered the tank with a sheet, which was pulled away seconds later, disclosing a lady assistant, wearing a bathing costume and submerged in the water. She stood and stepped out of the tank. Thurston took his bow, and then asked if the audience would like to know how he did it. Invariably the audience answered yes. He returned to the tank, repeating his motions. He covered the tank a second time and pulled the cloth away to produce a second lady. Despite Thurston’s disarming presentation, the audience still had no idea how it was accomplished.

  When Houdini reminded Thurston of his loan of twenty-five dollars, Thurston responded with a cheery note. “I am delighted to hear of your continued and great success. The name Houdini will live forever in the history of magic. Now, about the five pounds you loaned me….” Thurston begged him to wait. He was still scraping together money for his new show and had been addressing debts of “over $3,400 since I returned to America.” He had been busy paying back other debts, and presumably Harry Thurston was also clamoring for his money.

  IN MAY 1904, Harry Kellar brought his show to the Grand Opera House in Philadelphia, just before Thurston reopened at Willow Grove amusement park. After Alexander Herrmann’s death, Kellar was regarded as America’s greatest magician. But in style, he couldn’t have been more distinct from Alexander or Leon Herrmann.

  Kellar was tall and bald, with rounded shoulders, big, fleshy hands, and a continual twinkle in his eye. His charm consisted of his familiar, avuncular style.

  His childhood had been a neat match for Thurston’s, a boyhood on the streets. He had been born Heinrich Keller in Erie, Pennsylvania, in 1844, the son of German immigrants. When he was eleven, he ran away from home, fi
rst to Cleveland and then to New York City. A benefactor, Reverend Robert Harcourt, befriended the boy and offered him an education if he would pledge his life to the ministry. Magic intervened. Young Harry saw the Fakir of Ava’s magic show. The fakir was Isaiah Hughes, a Buffalo, New York, magician. The boy ran away to join the fakir as an assistant, and those years provided his education in magic.

  Keller—later spelled Kellar, to avoid comparisons with the magician Robert Heller—had a rough-and-tumble education in traveling shows. He toured through the Midwest with his own magic show, then joined the Davenport Brothers as their stage manager in 1873.

  The Davenports were stars, and represented a particular American phenomenon: spiritualism as entertainment. In the late 1850s, these two brothers developed a novel act in which they were tied into a large wooden cabinet, a sort of armoire, and apparently produced spirit manifestations, an actual séance onstage.

  Of course, the Davenports were frauds. Kellar learned their secrets, and then set out with William Fay, another Davenport employee, with their own spirit cabinet act.

  In partnership with other magicians or on his own, Kellar traveled extensively—through Europe, South America, India, and Australia. By 1885 he returned to America and took on Alexander Herrmann. By now, Kellar was a seasoned show business professional and a daunting adversary, famous for hardheaded resolve and an explosive temper. Their rivalry was genuine and acrimonious. Kellar thought that Herrmann was a ridiculous, dandified fraud, and he insisted on calling him Niemann—he believed that Alexander was not actually a member of the famous Herrmann family of magicians. Herrmann, tired of his rival’s outbursts to the press, insisted that Kellar’s name not be mentioned in his presence. Billy and Dot Robinson, working between the two magicians, just added a level of espionage.