Jim Steinmeyer

by The Last Greatest Magician in the World

  Just three days later, Thurston wrote to a friend that his wife “has had a doctor and nurse for the past week, and is feeling much better than she has in the past, and we are all delighted.”

  IN 1933, Fred Keating was performing his act at the prestigious Capitol Theater in New York. Keating had started his career as the magic-mad boy who ran away to join Thurston’s show and arrived late for the pigeon trick. By the early 1930s, he had become a sophisticated actor, magician, and master of ceremonies, one of the few performers whose clever humor made the smooth transition from vaudeville to theaters and nightclubs. He invited Thurston, his old boss, to come and see his act.

  Thurston drove into the city for the first show of the day and asked Keating not to introduce him from the stage, which, Keating later explained, “if you knew him as well as I did, was just his way of making sure that I did.” In fact, Keating went one better, asking Thurston to join him onstage to assist with one of his card tricks.

  Keating was honored by the presence of the World’s Greatest Magician. At the same time he was aware that the dapper, proud little man had just suffered a host of humiliations signaling the end of his career and the passing of an era in entertainment. Keating felt nostalgic for magic; Thurston seated in his audience represented just how times had changed.

  After the performance, Thurston couldn’t resist admonishing him for his humor—Keating’s modern style was to adopt a sophisticated, supercilious attitude toward the audience. “Humility,” Thurston intoned with his famous ministerial baritone, waving a finger at his young protégé. He pointed toward the seats. “They are the ones who pay you.”

  Keating knew he was right. He was reminded of the ritual he had witnessed so many years before: Thurston standing just behind the curtain and whispering a quiet prayer to his audience: “Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming to my show tonight. I hope you enjoy it. Thank you. God bless you. God bless you….”

  “He meant it,” Keating later wrote.

  It is the fashion today among the young cynics who write with energy and blithe incompetence of magic and its past to sneer openly at tradition, dignity, and honest sentiment. But that is the only way to feel about audiences.

  THURSTON WENT BACK on the road, working in smaller cities. When he played in Iowa in May 1933, he wrote to Abe Lastfogel, sheepishly admitting he had been wrong about his ticket prices. The Depression had devastated local families. “The manager in Davenport said the first afternoon two or three hundred families came but refused to pay the 25 cents [for each child’s ticket], and went to another show. They simply haven’t any money.” Adding to the difficulties, Abe Lastfogel reported that Harry Thurston had been appearing in the South with his own magic show. Of course, the billing was unclear. Many managers thought they had booked Howard Thurston, and then were “complaining.” He warned the magician that his brother was now jeopardizing the business.

  Thurston was exhausted by the touring schedule, but exhilarated by the business, which often found the public lined up around the block. He was netting as much as $6,000 a week. He played through the South for the first time in his career, and fired off a list of suggestions to Lastfogel, relishing his role as the seasoned professional:

  The fact is, we should not have been booked with a picture. We are restricted to 35 minutes, which is not sufficient time for us to present an attractive show. Thurston with a one-hour show, properly lithographed, will do business anywhere. Children do not read newspaper ads but read lithographic pictures in windows and billboards, and the kids will bring their parents.

  Thurston complained about the circuitous routes. “I cannot understand why it is necessary to travel half way across the country to play four towns which I have only played once or twice.” He suggested working at Radio City Music Hall for two weeks at $6,000 per week. Abe Lastfogel contacted Roxy Rothafel, the manager of the Music Hall, but Thurston’s show required so much work done to the stage—special trapdoors—that Roxy refused to accommodate him in his new theater.

  After a swing through the South and Midwest, the show returned to the Valencia Theater in Jamaica, Long Island, just a few miles from Thurston’s home. Leotha had been in good spirits, and even arrived at the theater on the first day, Saturday, with some new costumes for the cast.

  The following morning, Sunday, April 8, 1934, Thurston was at home with his wife before going to the theater. When Herman Hanson, the stage manager, announced “Fifteen minutes” for the matinee that afternoon, he noticed that Thurston was not in his dressing room. He spotted the magician walking down the aisle toward the stage, as if in a trance. He’d obviously just come from the phone in the theater manager’s office.

  Hanson had the overture replayed so that Thurston had time to change backstage. The show began and Thurston went through the motions mechanically. It was obvious that something was wrong. At one point, during an illusion called Piercing a Woman, Thurston was required to push a long spike through Lillian Hanson. His line was, “There will be no pain, but there is danger.” As he stepped toward Herman and Lillian, he added, quietly, “Herman, there is more danger than we know.” Thurston left just after the performance, and Hanson was pressed into service to perform the evening show with Jane. Leotha was dead.

  “Someone once said, ‘The show must go on,’” Jane later wrote, describing that night, “and it did. But I felt hatred for the audience and I didn’t care if they were due their money’s worth.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  “FINALE: THE TRIPLE MYSTERY”

  Leotha had been taking Medinal tablets, a coarse barbiturate, to help her sleep. When Thurston left for the theater that afternoon, he noticed a prescription bottle half filled with tablets. When he was called back home that evening, the only bottle that could be located was empty. An autopsy determined that she died of Medinal poisoning.

  “Her capacity for withstanding tremendous doses of sedative drugs was attested by a local physician and also a consultant from New York who had treated her on previous occasions,” the medical examiner later reported. A friend and her maid were with her that afternoon, when she went into the bathroom and took an unknown number of tablets, dissolved in water. She became maniacal, then fell into a deep coma and died at six that evening.

  The examiner noted, “There were no circumstances which suggested any homicidal action. However, suicidal or accidental is undetermined. The Physician, the husband and people in the employ of the deceased had never known of any suicidal attempt,” although this last statement was probably not true. During her illness, Leotha had made several distraught threats, including her letter to Jane. Some members of Thurston’s company, familiar with her breakdowns, believed that she’d committed suicide. Her drug use was concealed from reporters, and newspapers explained that she died of a sudden heart attack.

  Jane left the show and Hanson took over for Howard Thurston at the Valencia Theater. At the Wednesday matinee, unknown to anyone in the company, Thurston walked up to the box office, purchased a ticket, and sat in the auditorium, watching his own show. After the curtain fell, Hanson and Carl Chase, the company manager, were standing on stage by themselves when Thurston surprised them. “Herman, I knew I could trust you,” he said quietly. “You might as well finish the week.”

  There was something about the Great Thurston’s presence on that stage that sent a chill down Hanson’s spine. He was in a rumpled tweed coat and fedora: smaller, inconspicuous, and sad. His glowing face that had presided over so many marvels was sallow and ordinary. His straight back was hunched, his square shoulders arched. After years of proudly overcoming the impossible, he’d been beaten.

  “HOWARD, I am very much interested as to your future,” Harry wrote. “I know there is an aching void which cannot be replaced since God took Lee from you, and I hope that time will heal all wounds.”

  Howard and Jane found solace in the show, and busied themselves with the performances, but Thurston worried that he would not be able to continue for very long.
He was disappointed to find that Carl Chase, Leotha’s nephew and the show’s company manager, had given himself a salary increase from $45 a week to $100 a week, with the excuse that the raise had been approved by “Aunt Nina” just before she died. Thurston fired Chase, left the Beechhurst house, and he and Jane moved into Leotha’s apartment building in Weehawken. He sold his property in Connecticut, where he’d planned on building a retirement home with Leotha.

  Howard and Jane should have drawn closer, but Leotha’s death damaged their relationship. When she was a little girl, Jane had once run away from home. When she returned, she was shocked to receive a hard slap from her father. “Don’t ever do that to your mother again,” he growled. Now she wondered if her protracted, failed marriage meant she had failed her mother.

  “Mrs. Thurston’s death has upset me and I don’t know what I intend to do for the present,” Howard wrote to Dante, then in Singapore. “One thing is sure, I would like to be with you and I am thinking quite seriously of doing so.”

  THURSTON INTRODUCED an illusion that had been invented by Edward Morrell Massey, a magician and mystery writer. It was a large round drum, about four feet in diameter. A lady reclined horizontally within the drum; her head was visible on one side of the circumference and her feet on the other. Her body could be seen within the round center of the drum.

  Using blades, Thurston apparently sliced through the lady’s neck, then slid her head so that it was at the top of the drum. He repeated the action with the lady’s feet, pushing them down to the bottom. The result was a person apparently cut into three pieces.

  Massey called it Head Over Heels, and Thurston renamed it Vivisection, hoping that it would replace some of his other torture illusions. The apparatus involved several complicated mechanisms and had to be built from metal to accommodate the curved drum shape. Herman Hanson started constructing it as the show was on tour, slowly solving each problem as they moved from city to city. It was finally ready late in 1934. The finished illusion, the last one introduced into the Thurston show, was startling, but it offered none of the situational comedy that had made the Sawing in Half so successful.

  WHEN THURSTON PLAYED at the Publix Theater in Detroit, Howard was interviewed on WWJ Radio by Rex White. Thurston discussed his hundreds of appearances at orphanages and hospitals, perhaps three or four visits in a large city like Detroit, the public’s interest in magic, and the persistence of the supernatural. “Why do people believe in such things?” White was asked. Thurston answered,

  Why do they still buy stock in empty gold mines and dry oil wells? It’s just human nature. The public likes to be fooled.

  It was a curious analogy, especially since Thurston’s dry wells and expensive gold mines had occupied much of his attention. When he was asked about performing in movie theaters, he was equally honest.

  It’s a business proposition, for one thing. But what really won me over is the fact that the big movie houses allow me to show to more people in a day than the average theater does in a week. After all, I haven’t so many years left and I feel—without any vanity—that I sort of belong to the public, after 40 years of stage life, and more. Buy appearing in these vast houses, I can widen that public immensely.

  His old-fashioned formula had been to return to the same cities, year after year, and capitalize on advertising to generations of fans. But Lastfogel’s plan was different. Thurston found the new theaters and cities intriguing and hopeful—even the smaller theaters. He discovered new audiences who had been longing to see his magic.

  JUST WEEKS LATER, during the 1934 tour, Thurston opened a package that had been addressed to him with childish script. Inside was a broken doll with a note.

  Dear Mr. Thurston, will you please put arms on my baby doll? I would like to see you saw the woman in two. Are you coming to our Weirton show? If you put magic arms on my baby will they stay? With love to you, Virginia L. Thomas

  It reminded him of when he knew a little girl named Jane, who depended upon him for similar miracles. That’s when he’d felt like a real magician. He told his secretary to run to the toy store, picked up a sheet of paper, and wrote a quick response.

  Virginia, I have your doll baby, and I have had Hokus Pokus change your doll so that you will hardly know it.

  ACCORDING TO Thomas Chew Worthington, Thurston’s lifelong friend, the magician had suffered a minor heart attack during that tour. When Worthington found him backstage at the Century Theater in Baltimore, Thurston was lying on a couch in his dressing room. The magician took his hand and told him, “Tom, you are the only one in this world who really cares for me, and the only one who will care a damn when I am gone.”

  Months later, before his sixty-fifth birthday, Thurston arranged to see Dr. Harry Benjamin of New York City for a full health evaluation and a treatment of injections. Dr. Benjamin advised him on diet, sleep, and exercise. He told Thurston to limit his drinking to beer, avoid drugs, and smoke no more than six or seven “nicotine free” cigars daily. He also felt that the magician should gain eight to ten pounds.

  Thurston boasted to Modern Living magazine that he would devote a year to rejuvenating his health, as an experiment, and he praised the diet cards. “Next year at this time, I will look and feel twenty years younger.”

  Still, he complained when his age became a matter of discussion. “People are beginning to think I am older than you,” he wrote to his advance man, John Northern Hilliard, accusing him of an indiscretion.

  One newspaperman said I was 70 years old. It is not good psychology for an old pap to be prancing around the stage as if he was 30 years old, and I do not look a day over 35. I advise you do not mention my age or number of years I have played in theaters.

  Hilliard wrote back, incredulous. “I am not aware that I have been telling any newspaperman your age. In fact, I don’t know your age. Should they ask me, however, I will tell them that you are 35, per instructions.” In fact, Hilliard was three years younger than Thurston.

  On March 14, 1935, Hilliard finished his day in Indianapolis, preparing for Thurston’s appearances in that city. He’d left press releases with the local reporters, arranged stands of colored lithographs, and spoken to the theater manager about the chairs and tables that Thurston would require in his dressing room. Hilliard returned to his room at the Lockerbie Hotel and suffered a heart attack, dying in his bed.

  Several days earlier, he had shared a dinner with a friend and magician in town, Doc Brumfield. Hilliard told him, “Doc, I think that the greatest tragedy in life would be to die, and suddenly wake up and realize that you had never lived.” Brumfield nodded. “I have lived,” Hilliard told him.

  The company avoided telling Thurston the bad news until he had left the theater that night and was on the train for Indianapolis. He was devastated by the loss of his friend, whom he considered a brilliant writer and a talented magician. Hilliard’s contributions to Thurston’s career, often anonymous, were essential to how the public perceived the magician. His honest, poetic phrases and elegant tales enhanced Thurston’s reputation and attracted audiences to see his magic.

  AT THE CLOSE of the 1935 season, Thurston married Paula Mark. The ceremony took place at midnight on May 25 in Harrison, New York. The bride, newspapers reported, was twenty-seven years old. The groom was sixty-six. During the ceremony, which seems to have collected a handful of curious reporters, the justice of the peace left out the word “obey.” He explained that he hadn’t used it for so long that he forgot where it went in the sacrament. Thurston insisted that his wife still had to agree to “obey.”

  The reporters had a field day. First, there was Paula, a former assistant on the show, who explained that she had first met Thurston many years before when she was one of the little girls who volunteered to come onto the stage. He presented her with a rabbit.

  Then there was the groom, the old master showman, who mused on the secret of youth:

  I had been in India years before and had gained the confidence of the yogis. In
exchange for the secret of my levitation trick, the priests had told me how, although toothless and bald, they were able to carry trunks and baggage like boys. Well, I got out my old notebook on the trip and started to put their secret into practice, and today I feel young again.

  The whole affair could have benefited from John Northern Hilliard’s good taste. Paula’s grandmother later explained that the story about winning a rabbit in Thurston’s show was pure publicity. Paula had met the magician when she auditioned to be an assistant with the show in the late ’20s. She was Paula Hinckel, of North Adams, Massachusetts, one of a pair of twins who had been employed by Thurston. She used the stage name Paula Mark, and then married Kenneth Claude, Thurston’s chauffeur. Kenneth and Paula were divorced in July 1934.

  She had since become notorious, among the company, as a loose woman. Thurston’s cast was suspicious when she returned to woo the boss. Jane was shocked that her father would consider a relationship with someone like Paula, especially after the death of her mother. To her, it was a sign of rejection—Jane protested to her father and hissed insults to Paula backstage.