Jim Steinmeyer

by The Last Greatest Magician in the World

  In 1917, Guy Jarrett sent a note to Burnside with a very good idea: “Startle press and public alike by vanishing an elephant.” Burnside instantly called him in. This was the perfect idea for the Hippodrome, who already had a group of performing elephants, often engaged for their elaborate productions. Jarrett demonstrated his trick with a model, a derby hat standing in for the elephant. He fooled Burnside with it, and Burnside considered the idea for several weeks. The temperamental Guy Jarrett probably didn’t help his cause when he refused to leave Burnside with the model, making it clear that he suspected the producer would steal the idea. Burnside finally told Jarrett that he didn’t need him, as he would be featuring the Thurston auto race. Those were the magic words that, to Jarrett, were like a red rag to a bull.

  I told Burnside that he would need me more than ever, if he wanted the auto race to work. I had often seen Thurston and his clowns working on that thing, and I knew they would never make it work on a full-size scale. Men, time and worry went into it, but not a chance. So, there was no auto race in the Hipp.

  Jarrett returned to the Hippodrome after the opening of the next show to razz the management about their failure. But they had the last laugh. Jarrett was surprised to hear, the next season, that a new show called Cheer Up! would feature Houdini and his Vanishing Elephant. Jarrett naturally felt that the idea had been stolen from him. But Charles Morritt, an inventive British magician, had also suggested the trick to Houdini. More than likely, the Hippodrome engagement was the result of a conversation between Burnside, quoting Jarrett, and Houdini, quoting Morritt.

  Jarrett’s idea had been for a Hippodrome production number, using hundreds of extras and elaborate scenery. Houdini’s trick was pure magic show. An elephant was marched onto the stage and up a ramp into an enormous, garage-sized wooden cabinet. The doors were shut, the cabinet was given a turn, and the doors and curtains were opened, so that the audience could see through the cabinet and see that the elephant was gone. Houdini took a bow and the show went on.

  It was, by all accounts, a terrible trick. Many in the wide auditorium couldn’t actually see inside of the narrow cabinet, which was like looking down the barrel of a gun. The audience had to take Houdini’s word for it, in his own distinctive phrasing, that “an-i-mile is gone!” But the trick received so much publicity, so many headlines and reviews across the country, that even publicity-mad Houdini was satisfied with the result. The Vanishing Elephant ran for nineteen weeks at the Hippodrome.

  Thurston had heard all about it; he’d heard it was disappointing and that Houdini had failed to convince the audience. But the publicity had finally gotten the best of him, and he contacted Houdini a week before the end of his engagement, innocently suggesting that he and Leotha would like to see the trick. Houdini provided passes for the show, with enormous pleasure. He took Thurston’s interest as another compliment.

  Although a bad illusion, Thurston realized that Houdini wasn’t playing it to the 5,200 seats at the Hippodrome, but the millions who read the newspapers. When Variety wrote “Houdini Hides an Elephant,” Houdini had effectively won the battle. It made Thurston even more resolved to find new features, and bigger features, for his show.

  Houdini used the publicity from the trick as a springboard for his ambitions. “Magic is now the vogue. My efforts are bringing it back into style,” he wrote to Kellar. “’Twill make it good for Thurston and all other illusionists.” But actually, of course, he was now including himself in the list of illusionists.

  KELLAR HAD SPENT much of his retirement tinkering with magic. One of his pet projects was an improved version of the Levitation. He experimented with different systems to pass the hoop over the lady, but finally ended up rebuilding the prop from his show—his cherished secret—with a state-of-the-art winch and neatly forged steel. Kellar was even less mechanically minded than Thurston, but he got the job done by visiting Los Angeles machine shops and hounding them, having each little piece adjusted and rebuilt. A friend visited Kellar in Los Angeles and was astonished to find him in dirty overalls, adjusting the bits and pieces of the new levitation. He asked the old magician why he was building it. “For the pleasure,” Kellar answered. “The work makes me feel happy.” When he was finished, he packed it all in gleaming cases and stored it in his garage, for no particular reason and no specific show.

  The original Levitation kept Thurston busy, especially through the years of World War I, when the fine wire was difficult to purchase. He sent a round of letters to friends and colleagues across the country—including Harry Thurston, Kellar, and even Fritz Bucha, his old assistant—asking them to visit local hardware shops and purchase all of the spools of wire they had in sizes 6 and 8.

  The precious nature of the wire just compounded problems. One night a member of the crew, thinking he was settling a score with the magician, crawled out onto the theater grid during the illusion, some sixty feet over the floating princess. He sprinkled sneezing powder onto Fernanda’s face. She resisted as long as she could, twitching her nose and contorting her features, but eventually she erupted in a violent sneeze. She nearly fell off the precarious cradle. When Thurston saw what was happening, he rushed across the stage, grabbing to keep her from falling onto the stage. She was unhurt, but it was too late for the apparatus. One wire snapped, and then another, and another…. The nature of the illusion meant that there was a domino effect with each wire as the load was shifted. Twenty wires had snapped and cascaded to the stage before the curtain was lowered and the trick stopped.

  After the show, there was an extra special school session. Thurston lined up the crew and delivered a fusillade of profanity that, according to one visitor, “I have never seen equaled.” When Thurston was provoked, he could recall every four-letter epithet that he’d heard from the carnival fairgrounds, and deliver them with a loud ringing oratory worthy of Dwight Moody.

  KELLAR MIGHT HAVE UNDERESTIMATED Thurston’s self-confidence and his resolve. Thurston continually tried to apply his formula—mixing fairy tale and challenge—to the levitation. By 1919, he had ignored Bamberg’s advice and created a complicated mixture of illusions. He invited a committee of spectators onto the stage as the princess floated, and had them stand at the sides of the stage to watch the illusion. “This is such a strange, weird, wonderful affair and I am so anxious to convince you that she actually floats in space, that I shall ask onstage a number of ladies and gentlemen. Anyone may come.” Thurston boldly ushered one or two of them around the floating lady as part of the Indian ritual. Finally they were all dismissed from the stage and the lady descended onto the Oriental couch. Thurston then continued with Le Roy’s floating and vanishing lady: she was covered with a cloth and caused to float again. She disappeared as the cloth was pulled away.

  Kellar had intended to give his levitation to Thurston, and Thurston hinted that he was expecting a new, expensive illusion from the master magician in retirement. But when Kellar heard about Thurston’s new presentation, it was the old magician’s turn to explode with profanities. He suspected that Thurston was exposing the trick to a handful of people every night, for beyond the glare of the footlights, the shine of the fine wires was visible against the dark wings of the stage. Even if the spectators didn’t quite understand what they were seeing, the careless exposure was an affront to Kellar’s great mystery and an insult to his fabled perfectionism. Thurston had reasoned that it was more important that a thousand people in the audience were dumbfounded; he was unconcerned if six or eight people might have a suggestion of how it was done.

  Kellar was right, and the spectators could easily see too much. One of those spectators who walked around the levitation was magician John Hunniford, who remembered the experience years later. As Thurston escorted him to the back of the levitation, he gripped his neck firmly so that Hunniford couldn’t look upward. As usual, Thurston had been directing the reactions on the stage.

  He said to me in sotto voce, “When you leave the stage, walk backwards and scratch your h
ead as though in bewilderment.” [I] just couldn’t help seeing all those fine silver wires. I considered this a bad piece of business. True, it was showmanship, but quite unnecessary.

  Even worse, Kellar hated what had happened to the trick. The Oriental fairy tale had been a powerful image—the silk-wrapped princess, the methodical, trancelike procedure, and the Indian yogis who rushed onto the stage, knelt, and then chanted prayers throughout the ritual. Now, Kellar complained, there were just a lot of “crummy-looking people milling around on the stage.” According to Jarrett, Kellar “could have killed him.” David Bamberg, Theo’s son, agreed that including the spectators “proved nothing and completely ruined the mysterious presentation; this was Kellar’s main gripe.” Kellar no longer had his own spies in the show, and Thurston was no longer taking his advice.

  Part of Thurston’s motivation seemed to be his love of the illusion; he was obsessed with wrapping the trick in his oratory. In his notebook is a long, fascinating, experimental script from 1920. Had he really tried such an elaborate presentation, it surely would have taxed Thurston’s acting skills, with earnest recitations of Indian magic words, love spells, invocations, and challenges to the audience. It indicates his ideal mix of reality and fantasy—what he had been striving to create on his stage.

  Unfortunately, Thurston’s new presentation never reached his ideal and was never more than shambling and complicated. Through the 1920s he gradually simplified the routine, inviting just two spectators at the end of the effect and walking one boy to the floating princess to touch her ring and make a wish. In a later interview, Thurston came close to confessing his error:

  [In] my levitation trick, I could easily give up half an hour in talking, trying to convince the audience that it was a great feat. But I say very little. In doing the illusion almost in silence, the audience’s powers of logic don’t have a chance to get to work until the trick is over. They get a thrill even if they know there isn’t such things as the miracle they are seeing.

  Still, Thurston always took advantage of any friend who happened to be in the audience. Werner C. Dornfield was a young vaudeville comedy magician, known to his friends as Dorny. He once found himself invited onto the stage for Princess Karnac’s ascent. Thurston took him by the arm and stood him behind the cradle—the place of honor, directly in front of all the wires. Then Thurston dramatically stepped away. “Look up!” he told Dornfield. Dorny did, and he saw the myriad wires disappearing into a system of shiny oiled springs in the dark grid. “Look down!” Thurston told him. He did, and saw a matched set of wires that passed through a narrow slot in the carpeted platform. Dorny felt a chill run down his spine. Those few seconds were some of the most astonishing he’d ever experienced in magic, a rare view of an incredible mystery, and he didn’t want them to end. “Young man, in a loud voice, tell us, what holds her up?” Thurston asked.

  “Well, I could have made him look like a bum, right there,” Dorny recalled years later. “But you just didn’t. I knew what I was supposed to do. I said, ‘Nothing!’ And the audience cheered.”

  SIXTEEN

  “THE GIRL AND THE RABBIT”

  Thurston’s first Broadway engagement was in 1919 at the Globe, a chance at one-upmanship after Houdini’s Hippodrome vaudeville run. But it was also an unfortunate scramble.

  Thurston had regularly played around New York and the boroughs, but an actual Broadway theater was another matter. In August 1919, Actors’ Equity had declared its first strike, and forty-one of forty-five theaters were shuttered. The Globe, at Broadway and Forty-sixth Street, was forced to cancel its current show, She’s a Good Fellow. The Shuberts were desperate for touring shows, like Thurston’s, that weren’t covered by Actors’ Equity. Thurston already had a relationship with the Shuberts through The Honeymoon Express.

  Thurston rushed his show into the theater before his usual season started, but when stagehands and musicians were called out, expanding the strike, the opening was delayed. On September 8, Equity accepted the terms of the show and Thurston’s show finally ran. Even taking the strike into account, the New York Times sniffed about finding a magic show in one of Broadway’s top theaters:

  New York is quite likely to regard an exhibition of magic as a somewhat naïve entertainment in these times, but there are nevertheless a number of ingenious tricks in the repertoire of the veteran Howard Thurston, who has been carrying his show up and down the country these many years…. Like most magicians, Thurston is happiest when he performs, and saddest when he talks. Of talking he does quite a little and, since he was generally inaudible, there was a feeling that the entertainment was being unduly spun out. But the exhibition has its moments. Thurston’s trick of levitation, while basically the same as that performed by previous showmen, is a particularly uncanny piece of work, and his picking of pigeons from the air was also an illusion well sustained.

  The reference to his talking was odd, for most people found him perfectly clear and engaging. But Thurston always fussed over his voice and was not above stopping the show to step into the wings and spray his throat or ask someone in the audience to close the door so that he could avoid a draft. He sometimes complained that his voice was not at its best.

  Houdini wrote to Kellar, “I am surprised to hear that Thurston will act as strikebreaker for the Shuberts. He ought to know better.” Both Houdini and Kellar sided with the actors and were disappointed to hear that Thurston, and other producers like George M. Cohan, took advantage of the situation.

  PERHAPS ONE TRICK that had disappointed the New York reviewer with “quite a little” talking was the Girl and the Rabbit. Thurston included it in his show as early as 1912, but after he became Jane’s father, the trick took on a special significance. The presentation stretched and became more conversational, focusing on the girl’s reactions and her relationship to her father in the audience—as if he were performing it to Jane every night. For most audiences it was a highlight of the show, a small bit of magic enhanced with Thurston’s natural rapport with children. The Girl and the Rabbit gradually moved to a place of honor near the end of the show, proof of its success.

  Thurston showed a simple trick with a handkerchief and concluded by reaching beneath it and producing a small brown bunny. As the children oohed and aahed, Thurston asked if there was a little girl in the audience who wanted to take it home.

  Invariably a little girl bounded up onto the stage. Thurston asked her name and told her about his own daughter, Jane. He instructed the girl how to hold the rabbit. “It’s very cold out. Would you like me to wrap him in a piece of paper and keep him warm?” George stepped onstage with a sheet of brown paper, and Thurston told the girl to wrap the bunny up herself—the animal was folded into the paper and the ends were twisted shut. “For Jane’s sake, you wrap him up yourself.” He handed her the bundle, but then stopped her as she left the stage. “Oh, you shouldn’t do that!” Thurston held the bundle to his ear. “He’s stopped breathing. Poor little fellow.” He slowly unwrapped the paper. The rabbit was gone, and in its place the magician discovered a nice box of chocolates. He awarded this to the little girl and dismissed her from the stage.

  The audience gradually realized that the performance had been taking place on the little girl’s face. She was excited to receive the bunny, careful and mindful of all of his admonitions, fearful that the rabbit had been hurt, and then resigned when it disappeared. The little girl—like everyone in the audience—had seen it coming. Of course, it was just a trick. Of course he was not going to give her a real rabbit.

  She took her chocolates with a shrug of visible disappointment and set off for her seat. “Don’t let him wrap that up, little girl,” the stooge in the audience yelled, and Thurston looked up, offering the noisy man in the balcony a dirty look. As the little girl reached her seat, Thurston told her to stop. “I see that you want a little rabbit. Do you know any gentleman in the audience?” The girl identified her father.

  “Father, you don’t mind if your girl takes a
rabbit out of your coat, do you?” Standing at the edge of the stage, he instructed his volunteer to stand on her chair, reach down her father’s collar and say, “Come rabbit, come rabbit, come rabbit.” As the scene became more ridiculous, Thurston told her, “I think I had better do that for you. You know, I have a certain way of doing that.” Thurston took the candy, tossing it to a nearby boy, and then reached down the father’s collar, withdrawing another rabbit, this one snow white. He presented it to the little girl with an exaggerated bow. “Feed him oats, water, hay, and bread, and he will live forever.” Thurston followed with free passes for the Saturday matinee. “Come back Saturday with your friend, take front seats, see the show, and see someone else get the rabbit.”

  Traveling with a menagerie of animals—pigeons, ducks, geese, chickens, and a lion—created its own problem. But finding a regular supply of small bunnies to give away to children was a continual source of frustration. Thurston told about arriving in a town and discovering, to his horror, that the last two rabbits had died on the train. He asked the theater manager where he could find someone who raised rabbits. Howard and an assistant were directed to a small farm out of town where rabbits were sold for food. At the farm, Thurston found an old Dutch farmer wearing wooden shoes. The farmer was leery of two city swells arriving in such a hurry, but Thurston patiently explained the situation: he needed tiny bunnies. The farmer sold him two. In gratitude, Thurston offered him a complimentary pass for his show in town. He pulled out the pass—theater folks always called them “Annie Oakleys”—and signed the front of it. When the farmer took it, he noticed the little red devils cavorting across Thurston’s printed name and shook his head. “No, I von’t sell dem,” he said. “I vill not haff my rabbits in a thee-ater!”