Jim Steinmeyer

by The Last Greatest Magician in the World

  THURSTON WAS DISAPPOINTED to hear that Harry Blackstone, a clever young American magician, had been copying several of his tricks, including the Girl and the Rabbit.

  Blackstone was a full generation younger than Thurston, born in 1885 in Chicago. He was bold and pugnacious on the stage, a roustabout with a rumbling bass voice and a charming swagger—precisely the opposite of Thurston’s ministerial presence. Blackstone was also garrulous offstage; he was suspicious of Thurston as a wily old pro, and detested Houdini as a clumsy hack. Thurston had been warned to keep an eye on Harry Blackstone, who would surely prove to be competition, and Harry Kellar had a habit of offering extravagant praise for Blackstone’s abilities. He’d seen him perform in Los Angeles and offered the quote, “Blackstone is the greatest magician the world has ever known.” It seemed a pointed barb at Thurston, his old associate, who had already been proclaimed the greatest.

  In November 1919, Blackstone received a letter from Thurston:

  I was surprised to hear that you were doing an exact copy of my Rabbit Trick with the little girl, exchanging to a box of candy. I have also been told that you are copying the red devils as used in my advertising. Those designs are copyrighted by the Strobridge Lithographic Company. Now, I think in the long run you would find it much to your advantage not to copy any of my tricks.

  Thurston now had perfected his “carrot and stick” act:

  I have always been interested in you, although I have never seen you work. From the reports I have had, I have been thinking that perhaps you would be a good man to succeed me when I retire in a few years. This may interest you and if so I feel sure it will be much to your advantage, for it is my intention to introduce someone as my successor. Now let us play this game square.

  Almost any magician would have been flattered into submission, but Blackstone was a battler. He complained to a friend, “Imagine that guy, telling me he hasn’t seen my show!” At a recent performance in the Bronx, Blackstone said, he had been walking through his lobby and noticed Thurston standing with his back to him.

  Blackstone could have interpreted this in a favorable way—that Thurston saw him, was impressed with the show, and was trying to avoid a confrontation, suggesting that he “was surprised to hear” about the Rabbit Trick. Blackstone took the opposite approach. “I don’t want to trade on another man’s reputation,” he told a friend. “I want to make one of my own!”

  Blackstone continued to use the little red devils, as well as the Girl and the Rabbit trick, determined to earn his own reputation his own way—with one of Thurston’s best tricks.

  IT WASN’T JUST BLACKSTONE; Thurston’s fellow magicians were a constant source of trouble. Samri Baldwin, born in 1848, was a revered old American professional. With his second wife, Clara, he’d developed the “question and answer” act, in which spectators wrote questions for which they sought psychic answers. The envelopes were sealed and placed in a bowl on stage. Envelopes were selected and, without being opened, Clara would divine the question and offer a suitably vague, or hopeful, or sensational answer.

  The act became especially successful with Baldwin’s later wife, Kittie, but when she divorced her husband, he continued the act. Thurston wired him in November 1920, asking if he’d join his show and perform a question-and-answer act. Thurston suggested that Baldwin would be introduced as a mystic and Thurston would hypnotize him, seating him in the Spirit Cabinet. Then Baldwin would answer questions and Thurston’s assistants would sell the usual fortune-telling books, as well as printed forms to answer questions by mail. This was basically a version of Samri and Kittie’s old act. Thurston offered him $100 a week, plus a split of the book and question sales.

  Baldwin traveled from San Francisco to join the show in Rochester, and the atmosphere backstage quickly turned icy.

  Baldwin was a tough old bird who had been around the world and done it all. He had no tolerance for any of the latest fashions, nor regard for a modern show. Although he made a very impressive mystic, with a mane of white hair, a white brush mustache, and a grandly theatrical manner, he was uncomfortable with Thurston taking control of the act—taking Baldwin’s old role on the stage. For some reason, Baldwin wasn’t billed under his own name but was called in the program “The Prophet of Nizam” and announced as being ninety years old. The pretense was demeaning, especially to someone who had been a star decades earlier.

  The program also showed Thurston’s typical equivocations regarding any claims of psychic phenomena.

  Special announcement: Mr. Thurston specially announces that no claim is made to the possession or use of “spiritual” supernatural or superhuman forces or agencies in any part of this entertainment. The mental portion is a practical duplication of the most exclusive experiments given by renowned mediums and psychics and is a bewildering sample of intuitive, influential deduction based on observational knowledge and vast experience, but with no claim whatsoever to verisimilitude.

  Baldwin had long used his own general disclaimers about his act, but the suggestion that real psychics could perform these feats, but Baldwin could not, seemed to be a needling distinction.

  Actually, the friction between Thurston and Baldwin stemmed from an important misunderstanding. Baldwin thought that Thurston needed him on the show as an adviser, a special job for a seasoned old professional—the way Houdini would sometimes befriend and honor past magicians. Baldwin would have been given this impression from his old friend Kellar, who was still desperate to stage-manage Thurston’s staff from behind the scenes. Unfortunately, Thurston’s needs were cool and calculated; he just wanted a fifteen-minute act.

  Houdini heard about the tensions backstage and found the feud irresistible. The night that he attended Thurston’s performance in Brooklyn and was brought on stage as part of the levitation, he also saw Baldwin’s old-fashioned mind-reading act. The next day, when he wrote to Kellar about the levitation, he commented on Baldwin’s act. “Among the questions was one which made me sink back in my seat with embarrassment,” Houdini gleefully reported.

  It was as follows, “Does Houdini know as much magic is he is supposed to?” Baldwin replied, “Yes, Harry Houdini knows more about magic and magicians than anybody in the world.”

  Of course, the strange wording of the question—an insider’s inquiry about Houdini’s magical knowledge, not his achievements or skills—suggests that Houdini himself engineered the anonymous question to humiliate Thurston. Thurston’s audience probably just shrugged in response. But in Houdini’s mind, the situation took on an epic importance.

  There was a moment of tension (for me) and I wondered whether that statement would cost him his job. Can you imagine Thurston’s feelings, posing as the greatest in the world, to have one of his “employees” or “constituents” make such a prophecy. Figurez-vous!

  As always, Houdini’s comments were childishly easy to interpret. Thurston was “posing as the greatest in the world,” and Baldwin’s flattering comment was a “prophecy.” Houdini’s intentions were perfectly clear.

  When Baldwin’s ego had been bruised beyond repair, less than a month later, he stormed out of the show in Pittsburgh and hid in his hotel bed, instructing the front desk that he didn’t want any visitors. An old friend found him in his room, where Baldwin showed him a trunk of treasures—gold snuffboxes, jeweled watches, and framed proclamations—that had been presented to him by presidents, emperors, and tsars. “You see this trunk? I brought it with me from San Francisco and was going to give it and its contents to Thurston if we got along okay,” Baldwin grumbled. The pathetic conversation suggested how the old man had imagined a flattering, personal relationship with Thurston, perhaps even a surrogate father-and-son relationship.

  Both Samri Baldwin and Harry Kellar could now commiserate as rejected father figures. Kellar wrote to Baldwin:

  He may be the greatest magician on earth, but that may be only his opinion. He is financially successful, he has the big head and he is supremely selfish and jealous. How
you managed to wear the yoke as long as you did is a mystery to me knowing you as well as I do.

  OR MAYBE THURSTON’S priorities had simply changed. On January 1, 1920, just a year before his engagement of Baldwin, Thurston picked up a pen and paper and wrote a letter to his ten-year-old daughter, Jane.

  This is the first letter I have written this year of 1920…. It is nearly one o’clock a.m.

  You have seen ten New Year’s Days, I have seen fifty. I can remember when I was your age and thought how small I was and wanted to grow up like some other boys I knew. I also had no idea of the value of time or what it really meant. Time was something that seemed to have no end. It was an awful long while from breakfast to lunchtime, and one whole day seemed ever so long. I wanted time to pass rapidly in those days….

  I never played with boys my own age, as I remember I was always the youngest boy in the crowd and this continued in all my relations until I became a man. Now things are different. Time is the most valuable thing I know. My chief aim is to conserve time to get as much as I can of it. And to try to keep myself in good health so I can live longer and enjoy time. And I want younger companions, like you and mother. So you see Jane, all things change and we change with them.

  Thurston had joined the Masons in 1907 and reached the thirty-third degree; he was also a member of fifteen other organizations, including the Elks, Optimists, Lions, Kiwanas, the National Vaudeville Artists, and the Clearview Golf Club. One night, when his club associations found him too busy to take Jane to the motion pictures, he sat down and pulled many of the membership cards out of his wallet. “I made up my mind that I would resign from [those clubs]; I jumped in the car and rode home and that day we formed a new club. Jane became president. Mrs. Thurston and I became general managers, and that is the finest club I know.”

  THE AMERICAN PUBLIC of the 1920s was obsessed with unusual patent elixirs, diets, and health fads, creating a generation of hypochondriacs, and apparently curing them at the same time. Thurston indulged in many of these fads, as his schedule permitted, and a friend reported that the magician was always “mildly hypochondriacal,” obsessed with the right type of sleep, the perfect sort of breathing, and the latest mixture of meats, vegetables, and grains. His doctor advised only occasional cigars or alcohol, and Thurston was careful to eat plenty of vegetables and take regular spoonfuls of Wampole’s Preparation, a popular tonic medicine that he kept on his dressing room table.

  But the cures didn’t work fast enough for Thurston. One evening, during a performance, he stepped into the auditorium to borrow a handkerchief, and a small boy called out, “Why Mother, he doesn’t look at all like his pictures close-up, does he?” The boy was loud enough to cause giggles throughout the audience. Thurston laughed along with his crowd, but the incident embarrassed him. In fact, for years his photos had been airbrushed of lines and sagging skin. He decided to do something about it.

  Dr. Lutz of Rochester performed the plastic surgery. In the early years of the twentieth century, this consisted of softened paraffin, injected under the skin, to smooth out wrinkles. By 1920, the use of paraffin was already an old procedure and greatly discredited; Thurston should have been advised to avoid it. When newspaper reports exposed the dangers of paraffin injections, Thurston pointed this out to the doctor, who assured him that he had been using his own special compound.

  The operation was not a success, especially under the hot lights of a stage, where Thurston’s face visibly sagged. Thurston now looked oddly puffy and jowly; his vanity and the failed operation became a private joke with his friends. One day, Theo Bamberg and his son, David, saw a wax mannequin that had been slowly melting in a sunny window. “Look, it’s Howard Thurston,” David told his father, and they both fell over, convulsed with laughter.

  Thurston’s interest in his health encouraged his doting on his wife and daughter. Leotha was often ill, or under a doctor’s care, and she became dependent on depressants to reduce her pains or sleep. To Thurston, these drugs were just another category in the wonders of medicine—patent medicines, paraffin injections, or barbiturates. Howard recommended to his wife Émile Coué’s cure, the autosuggestion “Every day in every way I’m getting better and better,” which was then a fashion around the world.

  When Thurston was away on tour and Jane was in boarding school, Leotha and her friends might dash to a seaside resort for a short vacation, or Leotha would visit her sister in New Jersey, who now lived in her apartment building in Weehawken, or her brother in Halifax. Thurston followed with quick letters of cheery advice, urging her to get plenty of relaxation and eat only healthy food. She had her own way of feeling better. Like many socialites, she liked champagne, and when alcohol was banned under Prohibition, she traveled with bottles of bootlegged booze.

  EVER SINCE HIS AUSTRALIAN TOUR, Thurston had been intrigued by motion pictures, and he’d written several film outlines, attempting to mix magic into the plots. But it was probably Houdini’s involvement in the film business—a cliff-hanging serial called The Master Mystery produced in 1919—that galvanized Thurston to become a motion picture actor. Thurston’s film was completed in 1920.

  Thurston wisely realized that his magic did not translate to the screen, where special effects could easily dazzle audiences. He wrote a script, first titled Eternity, about a fake spiritualist who encounters genuine marvels. The press reported that it “dealt largely with Thurston’s experiences in India and China” and depicted “the truth of spiritualism as demonstrated by the Yogis of the Hindustan.” It was shot at the Hal Benedict Studios on Long Island and directed by George Kelson.

  The finished film, at six reels in length, was ultimately titled Twisted Souls. It was never released, and only a few segments of it survive, including Thurston as the rumpled and distraught medium, brandishing a gun and encountering Indian mystics in a ramshackle mansion. Several years later, Thurston attempted to recut the film, renaming it The Spirit Witness, but distributors weren’t interested. It offered none of the derring-do from Houdini’s film adventures, although the film encouraged Thurston to try his hand at additional scripts.

  EARLY IN 1920, Jane was diagnosed with the flu, a serious threat after the recent influenza epidemics, and was hospitalized. At the same time, Leotha’s cold developed into flu, and she was put under doctor’s care at their home. Thurston, on the road at the time, rushed from the theater each night, waiting for telegram updates about their conditions.

  Suffering from a lack of sleep and raw nerves—this was also the time when the impatient Samri Baldwin was performing with Thurston’s show—on February 3, Howard was standing on the stage just before the curtain was about to rise, and he glanced into the wings. His company manager was trying to catch his attention, frantically waving a telegram. Thurston felt his knees weaken. He ran to the edge of the stage, grabbed the telegram, and opened it. His younger brother, Charles, had just been murdered.

  The company manager had the overture repeated several times, as Thurston stood behind the curtain, trying to collect his thoughts. He was frozen in place by the shocking news.

  Charles had been working as a railroad detective in Columbus the night before, examining the seals on freight cars in the Pennsylvania Railroad yard. Sometime after six p.m., shots had been heard, and Charles was found hours later with eight bullet holes in his back. He’d left a widow and three sons. The murderer had escaped, but police suspected a group of boxcar thieves.

  The cast gathered around Thurston and watched him expectantly, wondering if the magician would be able to continue with the show. After a few minutes, Howard took a deep breath and went on the stage, mechanically going through all the motions, the smiles, and the little drolleries with the children as his mind raced over the situation. He had lived his life by omens and now wondered if Charles’s murder would start a cascade of misfortune with Jane and Leotha. For the next hour he was crazed with grief, wanting to dash from the theater. He felt it was only the decorum of the performance—the expectant a
udience staring back at him, the regimented movements of the assistants, and the laughter that arrived perfectly on cue—that kept him sane. As the curtain fell, the adrenaline that he had summoned seemed to drain from his body; in the darkness backstage, he collapsed onto George’s shoulder.

  Fortunately, Jane and Leotha recovered within days. Harry Kellar brushed aside past differences and sent a fatherly note, filled with soothing advice from an old friend.

  It was with deep sorrow that I read that your brother met an untimely death while doing his duty as an officer of the Pennsylvania Company…. Then on top of it all your dear wife and baby Jane being down with the flu. I only hope they will have both recovered when this reaches you and if my ardent prayers are of any avail, they will be. Please remember me very kindly to both. Little Jane was such a sweet girlie, the sunshine of your beautiful home, that I don’t want to think of her being ill.

  Be of big heart, old man, and don’t worry over what can’t be helped. I hear only good reports of your show…. I am always interested in your successes. I read in the papers that you intend to retire at the end of the season. If that be your intention and you are going to sell out your paraphernalia, let me have first bid on all my old show; I do not want anyone else to have it.

  IN LETTERS TO HOUDINI, Kellar had exhibited far less goodwill. “I am afraid of Thurston being able to hold his own,” Kellar wrote, “as he has greatly improved his work and works smooth now, but I am afraid competition would worry him to death, as he lacks that self confidence so very essential to success in magic.” Kellar heard that Thurston had been approaching other magicians like Harry Blackstone and Harry Jansen, to follow him into the marketplace—Thurston even considered retiring from the stage. The last few seasons had been profitable, and he was looking forward to spending time with his young daughter. Houdini loved these rumors, and he imagined that he would soon be able to step into the role of America’s leading magician.