Jim Steinmeyer

by The Last Greatest Magician in the World

  Thurston lied to the press about Paula’s age. She was not twenty-seven at the time of the marriage, but twenty-five—younger than Jane. It was an uncomfortable fact that no one wanted publicized.

  After the ceremony the couple posed for photographs and then left for a Miami honeymoon.

  THE 1935 SEASON Started late, with an engagement in Clarksburg, West Virginia. It was exactly the sort of town Thurston had never played before, but these small cities offered enthusiastic audiences. This was followed by a four-day engagement at Charleston, West Virginia, at the Kearse Theater, opening Sunday, October 6.

  Herman Hanson had a difficult time at the Kearse. It was the first non-union house they’d encountered, and this meant that their three union stagehands and their orchestra leader couldn’t work. The scenery and cases had to be handled by a smaller crew and local stagehands.

  The backbreaking work started at six in the morning and everything was ready for the matinee. Thurston performed two shows and the theater was filled to capacity, grossing nearly $4,500. As Hanson walked by his dressing room, Thurston called out to him. “Hi, kid. You have had a tough day.” Hanson admitted that he was bushed, but suggested that they go across the street for a sandwich and a glass of beer. Howard, Paula, and Jane Thurston joined Herman and Lillian Hanson.

  Thurston stood and Herman helped him on with his coat. As he was placing his right arm in his sleeve, Thurston collapsed on the floor with a stroke. He was taken back to his hotel room, and the following morning a physician insisted that he be taken to the local hospital.

  Thurston had a paralyzed left arm. The doctors advised that it would be some time before he could appear on stage again, but Howard’s spirits were good. He joked to his new advance man, C. Foster Bell, that he would perform at the next town, even if he had to do it on crutches. Hanson and Jane finished the engagement in Charleston. Thurston was sure that Jane and Herman should be able to keep the show running and keep the company together. The theater managers from the next two cities came to Charleston and reviewed the show, approving Hanson’s performance.

  But suddenly, there was another opinion to be considered. Harry Thurston heard the news and dashed to Charleston before the end of the engagement. He watched the last show and hated what he saw. He immediately closed the tour, canceled future engagements, and arranged to have the equipment shipped back to New York. As a longtime investor in Howard’s projects, Harry could not be ignored, and his strong-arm tactics could not be dismissed. He wrote to an agent he knew, explaining his plan:

  I arranged with Howard that he and I would take out a 100 percent Thurston show, Howard to make his appearance at each performance to say a few words. We will then have a great Thurston show. I think he will be able to travel and we will be able to open in the early fall. He is improving, has his right mind, and I’m hoping he will be able to be wheeled around outside very soon.

  Harry’s notion of a “100 percent Thurston show” was ominous—although Jane was unaware that she was adopted, Harry knew, and obviously considered himself a more authentic partner for his brother.

  Paula took Howard to recover at Briarcliff Manor, New York. With no real direction, the family and crew seemed to drift apart, forming allegiances and enemies in mysterious combinations. George White and Kenneth Claude traveled back to Beechhurst with the show and stayed with the equipment, ensuring it would all be ready when Mr. Thurston, or Jane, resumed the show. They realized that it would be necessary to watch over the apparatus and keep it in good condition. Herman Hanson stayed in New York City until he heard back from Thurston.

  But Jane was prevented from seeing her father. Paula had no tolerance for her; Jane had made her feelings about their marriage clear. Harry also wanted her out of the picture, as Jane would be the logical performer to continue the show.

  Howard was taken to Biloxi, Mississippi, with Harry and Rae to recover. There he managed to send a letter to Jane.

  I know now that you were trying to keep the show going to help me. There were so many knockers all telling me different stories. You will be surprised to know that I actually believed many of my so-called-friends wanted me to die.

  Thurston hinted that a copy of his will had been stolen and his life insurance policies had been examined. He assured Jane that he would soon be well enough to resume the show, but ended the note cryptically. “Address care of McMahon [his attorney]. He is the only one who knows my address. I have reasons for not wanting others to know.”

  Howard and Paula took an apartment in Miami near Harry and Rae. By now, Thurston had shaken off Harry’s suggestions and was making plans to resume his own tour. He sent brief notes back to his cast and crew, assuring them that he was recovering steadily and inquiring about their availability for future dates. In December 1935, he wrote to George White, asking him to assemble checkbooks and contracts, as they would probably resume the tour in the South in March. Soon after this, the Associated Press announced that Thurston would soon be returning to the stage, with his first engagement in Charleston, West Virginia, where he had been forced to cancel shows.

  Thurston contacted his old attorney, James Wobensmith, asking him to help drawing up a new will. Wobensmith suggested that Thurston compose a short note of what he wanted to include, so that the lawyer could turn it into a legal document, and in response Thurston produced a paper that chastised the people around him and made stipulations that his wife, Paula, would have to stop drinking. Wobensmith thought that it was ridiculous. “I told him that wasn’t a will.” He advised Thurston to find someone else to draw it up.

  ON THE MORNING OF MARCH 30, Thurston suffered another stroke while he was sleeping. His condition improved, but it was then complicated by pneumonia. Howard Thurston died at the Casa Casuarina Apartments in Miami at 1:39 p.m. on April 13, 1936, with Paula at his side. He was sixty-six years old.

  The body was sent to Columbus, Ohio, his hometown, for burial. Jane arrived with Ada Wolfe, Thurston’s cousin, and found that “the family” had left instructions that she was forbidden to visit the mortuary. However, the mortuary director, E. E. Fisher, proved understanding. He phoned her when the family had left, and she arrived to pay her respects to her father.

  The funeral was held the next day, on the eighteenth, and the Columbus paper remarked on the sparse attendance; barely one hundred people arrived at the Broad Street Methodist Church. Jane arrived with Ada Wolfe. Paula arrived with Thomas MacMahon, Thurston’s attorney.

  After the eulogy, S. W. Reilly, the president of the local Society of American Magicians club, read a short tribute. George White, Thurston’s lifelong assistant, stepped forward and picked up Thurston’s ivory-tipped wand, breaking it in half—the SAM ceremony was used to symbolize the end of a magician’s career, and George performed the ritual for “The Governor.” A group of local policemen, out of uniform, served as pallbearers as the casket was taken to a mausoleum at Green Lawn Cemetery.

  OBITUARIES INVARIABLY dwelt on Thurston’s status as the World’s Greatest Magician, his ability to entertain children, his greatest illusions, like the Levitation, and the countless benefit shows at orphanages, crippled children’s hospitals, and veterans’ homes. But no one had perspective to recount the astonishing range of Thurston’s career—from street peddler to carnival talker, itinerant showman, vaudeville star, film exhibitor, illusionist, and radio performer. He had managed to negotiate some of the tightest curves of show business, steering clear of fashions that had dashed many famous performers from the pinnacle of fame to a rocky failure. No one was able to calculate how much of this winding, bumpy path actually created the World’s Greatest Magician.

  Ed Sullivan, then a columnist for the New York Daily News, reported on Thurston’s career:

  It was his boast that no theater ever lost money on him, and on infrequent occasions when it happened, Thurston would stay an extra day and work for nothing. Millions of children have seen the slight, scholarly-looking magician scale a card from the stage to the top ti
er of the balcony, or float a girl’s body to the footlights and back again. Death exceeded Houdini, and now Thurston. The stage is poorer for their passing.

  Author Fulton Oursler had been in the audience when Kellar introduced Thurston as his successor at Ford’s Theater in Baltimore. Oursler wrote of Thurston’s sincere friendship—as a fellow magician, a fellow Mason, and a man intrigued by the occult.

  I remember we talked long and deep about the mysteries of religion. He believed that men lived many lives, coming back to earth again and again as children return to school after a summer of play. I hope that he was right and that he is finding death only a vacation. The feeling that I have about Howard Thurston now is more convincing an argument for immortality than all of the mumbo-jumbo of spirit mediums. I simply cannot believe that he and I will not meet again.

  George White contributed a short tribute to The Sphinx magazine:

  It might seem strange that as his assistant I always thought of him as my pal, but I am certain that the Governor would have been the first to acknowledge that association. I worked hard for the Governor but he was very generous and there was never a magazine article that he did not mention my name, and I tell you, I always appreciated it. For more than fifteen years the Governor had a habit of doing something that added to my love for him. No matter who he was talking to, if I came to him with a question, he would stop his conversation to answer me immediately. I am proud that the Governor felt that way about me.

  Dante was traveling through Europe when he was told of Thurston’s death. Unable to return for the funeral, he penned a long, effusive memorial to his friend and business partner. In it, he noted:

  To me, the greatest mystery of Howard Thurston was that he could carry on as long and as successfully as he did, so tirelessly. He was a man who could accomplish more by silence and endurance than any other man with less control. A catastrophe, emergency or bad business venture, of which he experienced many, would result in only a smile. Had he confined himself and his investments to magic, I am certain he would have retired ten years earlier and perhaps lived ten years longer.

  It’s not surprising that Dante’s assistants noticed their boss burst into tears upon hearing of Thurston’s death. But Harry Blackstone also cried, silently, in his dressing room when he heard that his old nemesis was gone.

  Blackstone didn’t admit it, of course; he was famous for his offstage swagger. But as he heard the news, his brother Pete happened to walk past the room and was surprised to see him sobbing, facedown, on the dressing table. Blackstone had longed to be America’s most popular magician, but was devastated to lose his competition. Thurston had challenged him as a gentleman, set the goals, established the market, and kept Blackstone’s show as professional as it could possibly be.

  HARRY THURSTON had been too uncomfortable to attend the funeral. Like many tough personalities, he was prone to fits of maudlin tears, and he worried that would have presented a spectacle, sitting and bawling in the pew at the Columbus church.

  There’s no record of Harry’s reaction to his brother’s death—no written tribute from Howard’s oldest partner in show business. He must have realized that the focus would be shifting—the press would talk about Paula and Jane, and show business publications would speculate about the next great magic shows. Harry had been able to stand in his brother’s shadow for several years, but after Howard’s death, even those shadowy opportunities were finished.

  But it’s also possible that, had Harry Thurston attended the funeral, he would have found opportunities to guffaw. After Howard’s death, every commentator believed the story that he had been trained for the ministry, and offered this as evidence of his smooth presentations and his sincere knowledge of human nature. No one but Harry could have believed that he had actually been schooled as a pickpocket and confidence man; this was even better evidence of his smooth presentations and his sincere knowledge of human nature.

  In fact, once Howard Thurston had become successful and re-created himself, he managed to gain fame for qualities that were, debatably, some of his worst: an entrepreneur, businessman, family man, inventor, and investor. It was a scam that Harry would have appreciated, and one of the few parts of his brother’s personality that he ever understood.

  GEORGE MARQUIS was an itinerant magician, and a friend of both Howard and Harry Thurston. Shortly after Thurston’s death, he happened to be in Charleston, West Virginia, and snapped a picture of the remnants of the magician’s twenty-four-sheet poster pasted on a tall fence. In the slang of the bill poster, Harry’s old job, a stand was a wall of advertising; this fence in Charleston was literally Thurston’s “last stand.”

  In his scrapbook, Marquis pasted a copy of the sad photograph, and then attached a typed poem that he’d composed. It was a traveling showman’s ode to the World’s Greatest Magician—part lingo, part poetry, without any high-flown folderol or philosophical exaggerations.

  I’d rather dream and secretly scheme

  Of a way to the top and dough

  Than remember the lights of yesteryear’s nights

  When I was the hit of the show

  In a great game, where name and fame

  Will be mine probably never

  I’d rather have plans, than be forgotten by fans

  Living in the past forever

  TWENTY-FOUR

  “THE FLIGHT OF TIME”

  Just weeks after the magician’s death, his estate made headlines: “Thurston’s Will, a Strange Document, Admitted to Probate Court.” According to the document, Thurston had left $500 to his “adopted daughter, Jane Jacqueline Thurston,” with this explanation:

  I am mindful of the fact that my adopted daughter has caused me great mental anguish and suffering and has caused me to spend large sums of money on her behalf through her whims and caprices.

  Paula wasn’t spared any embarrassment. The remainder of the estate was left to his widow, but she was required to agree to “discontinue a personal habit” of which he disapproved. Should she fail, the money would go to building a mausoleum in Columbus, Ohio. Later articles explained that Paula’s habit was drinking. Paula shrugged it off to reporters.

  He was not a prohibitionist. I never drank to excess and have no intention of ever doing so. The agreement which I signed willingly really didn’t mean a thing. I’ll be moderate in the use of liquor, just as I always have been.

  Thomas MacMahon, Thurston’s attorney, was quick to explain that Thurston had intended to change the will. It was drawn up, he claimed, when Thurston was angered that his wife left him to be with her sister during an operation. At the same time, he had been quarreling with his daughter over her desire for a movie career. Jane filed a suit to protest the will, insisting that her father “was not in proper mental condition” to draw up the will during the last months of his life. For reporters, she demonstrated her relationship with her father by playing a phonograph disc that Thurston had recorded a year earlier—he pledged his love for her and reminisced about her childhood.

  But it was a single word in the will that had rattled Jane: “adopted.” It was the first time she understood that she was not Thurston’s daughter. At the time, she was living in Weehawken with her “Aunt Lady,” Leotha’s sister, Emma Van Blarcom. Emma explained that Jane had been born at that same apartment building, and that her last name was Willadsen.

  A month after Thurston’s death, Jane traveled to Los Angeles and met her father, John Willadsen, who was then living in retirement with his second wife.

  THERE WAS the expected ridiculous publicity. The day after Thurston’s death, Dunninger, a New York magician and mind reader, claimed that his friend had made a pact that he would return from the grave, and break a small Egyptian statue of Ramses that he had given Dunninger many years before. The article, “Awaits Sign from Thurston,” ran in the New York Sun.

  Not to be outdone, the following day Mrs. Houdini posed for a picture in the New York Daily News, holding a pair of locked handcuffs. The capt
ion explained that she was still waiting for Houdini to return “in a life-after-death compact between her and her late husband-magician.” Presumably, the ghosts of the magicians were still battling each other for publicity.

  In the last few months of Thurston’s life, Tampa had been sending letters to him, seeking a financial settlement on their failed contract. After Thurston’s death Tampa filed a lawsuit against the estate, claiming damages for expenses, lost contracts, as well as “damage to his reputation as a magician.” Newspapers reported that he was suing for $599,474. Most of this, of course, was based on Tampa’s inflated sense of the opportunities he had been denied.

  The suit was settled a year later for $1,000. Tampa could continue using the name, and also utilize the illusions he still had in his possession.

  Another mind reader, Rajah Raiboid, produced a contract from March 1936, when Thurston was recovering in Miami Beach. Presumably he was arranging a partnership with Thurston for that fall. Thurston would supply the illusions and the title would read, “Thurston the Magician with Rajah Raiboid.” Raiboid wrote to Billboard, claiming that he would be taking out the show with the billing, “Successor to The Great Howard Thurston.” But the estate ignored his claim and, without any of Thurston’s props, Raiboid had no show.

  IN THE END, there was very little money. The Beechhurst property had been lost to foreclosure. The Florida land had been ruined in a hurricane. Most of the investments had already dissolved, but there was still stock left from the Canadian gold mines, just over $20,000 in “good assets.” Thurston owed back taxes for the last three years of income, and taxes on the ruined Florida property. Paula received just over $8,000.