Jim Steinmeyer (23 page)

 

 

IN CALCUTTA,
Thurston caught up with his mail. Letters from fellow performers or back issues of
The Dramatic Mirror
kept him abreast of the latest news. Thurston was contemplating his return to the United States and anxious to read about his competition. Journals like
Mahatma
and
The Sphinx
, American periodicals devoted to magic, had been regularly reporting on Thurston’s world tour. Howard’s British friend P. T. Selbit was now editing a London magazine called
The Wizard
. Harry Houdini, a sensation in vaudeville with his escape act, was now a prominent part of the magic community as the editor and publisher of a New York periodical,
The Conjurer’s Monthly
. Houdini included reports of Thurston’s success in India. “Rumor has it that Howard is making several fortunes in the Orient,” Houdini reported, “and he has great prospects of making more money than any magician that has ever ‘gone the route’ through India.” No doubt Houdini’s positive notice was inspired by the fact that Thurston had finally sent him a check for twenty-five dollars, repaying the loan from London.

But as Thurston sat in the bright sun at a table outside of the Continental Hotel, reading through the journals, he was struck by the latest news from America. Even in faraway India, he could piece together the scraps of information, from one article to another. It was now clear what was happening with Harry Kellar and Paul Valadon.

Thurston began to feel sick to his stomach, helplessly double-crossed. Kellar was now retiring and had made his decision. He was about to name Paul Valadon as his successor. Howard Thurston—with one of the largest magic shows in history and a fat scrapbook filled with rave reviews—would return to America consigned to second place.

 

 

IN ALLAHABAD,
near the end of Thurston’s season in India, the company had moved the crates into a big, dirty old theater. Charlie Holzmueller and George White were cutting the necessary traps in the stage. They’d sawed through the holes and then jumped down about five feet, onto the dusty subfloor, to finish the job, when the manager of the theater came running to the stage. “Get out, get out! Hurry! There are cobras underneath the stage!” Charlie and George scrambled out of the hole, and the performances could only be accomplished, night after night, with a small brigade of Hindu boys under the stage with lamps and sticks, to drive away the snakes. That way, the assistants and the girls in the show were able to crawl around in relative safety, making their magical entrances and exits.

Thurston watched the near accident and shook his head. It seemed eerily significant. He knew that it was time to go home. But he had no idea what sort of show business snakes he’d find beneath his feet.

M
agicians didn’t get to pick their successors any more than they were allowed to select their competitors. It’s true that the American public seemed to accept only one great magician at a time. But there was no tradition of the heir apparent until Alexander Herrmann hinted, in 1896 interviews, that he might be retiring soon and that his nephew Leon was capable of taking over the show. With Herrmann’s sudden death, it was incumbent upon his widow, Adelaide, to turn that hint into a royal succession, to lavishly promote Leon, fulfill the dates, and keep the show rolling.

It was, of course, a cold business decision, and not an actual inheritance. And the public rejected it. Leon Herrmann never succeeded to his uncle’s lofty status. Harry Kellar fulfilled the role of America’s great magician.

In turn, Kellar had his own cold business reasons for choosing a successor and mythologizing the process. Kellar was now in his late fifties, with a comfortable bank account. He was looking forward to retirement. He loved to travel and adored fishing. His show had been carefully established as a theatrical entity—not only the props and scenery, but also the contracts with theater managers, agents, assistants, advance men, newspaper editors, and poster printers. Kellar was in a position to sell the show, and its all-important relationship to the public, by officially endorsing a successor. He could make money by selling the properties, as well as earning a weekly fee from the next magician.

Thurston may not have realized what Kellar was considering when he had his first exchange of letters in 1905. But by 1906, Kellar was in the midst of his second tour with Paul Valadon. And suddenly, all of the pieces fit together.

It was Valadon, the German sleight-of-hand artist, who had supplied Kellar with mechanical details for Maskelyne’s incredible levitation from “The Entranced Fakir.” He’d seen the equipment backstage and could describe it to Kellar. That’s how Kellar had his own version of the levitation just months before Valadon joined his show.

The timing was too coincidental. And as if to prove it, Kellar followed up, the next season, by extracting more information from Valadon and introducing another longtime feature from Egyptian Hall, Maskelyne’s comical illusion sketch, “Will, the Witch, and the Watchman.” In London, Valadon had costarred in both “The Entranced Fakir” and “Will, the Witch, and the Watchman,” suggesting that he had reconstructed these illusions for Kellar. Valadon’s part in the show was gradually increasing, and he had achieved equal billing with Kellar. He was being groomed as the successor.

Thurston first felt betrayed. He had sent wires to Kellar, asking him to consider him for future business opportunities. But now he realized that as he’d spent two years of hard slogging through Australia, the Orient, and India, Kellar had spent those same two years introducing Paul Valadon in the finest, plushest theaters across America. Thurston realized that he was helpless; the entire con game was being played on a level far over his head. If he had followed through with Kellar, could he really have been named as his successor? Probably not, for Valadon had already, secretly, earned that position through his treachery.

 

 

THE FIRST ONE
to figure out the game had been John Northern Hilliard, the congenial reporter and magic fan whom Thurston had met on the park bench in Union Square.

In 1904, when Valadon joined the Kellar show, Hilliard reviewed it for the
Rochester Post Express
. In previous years, Hilliard had been tough on Kellar. He considered him an inferior magician—almost completely inept when it came to clever sleight of hand. But the addition of Valadon seemed to round out the program beautifully, and Hilliard’s 1904 review offered a fulsome endorsement of the show.

Harry Kellar was famously temperamental off the stage, a colorful buffoon of a man who could alternately explode in profanity or offer friendly pats on the back. If a piece of equipment failed him onstage, he was likely to take it into the back alley and break it to bits with an ax, or throw it into the wings, where it often raised a bump on the head of his assistant, Fritz Bucha. The next day, Kellar would apologize profusely. He knew Bucha’s shoe size, and invariably bought a pair of expensive shoes as a peace offering. By the end of the season, Bucha used to joke, he was carrying a trunk filled with new pairs of shoes.

Kellar had been braced for another bad review from Hilliard, but was so thrilled by his praise that he typically overreacted, trying to recruit him as his friend. Kellar told Hilliard that he needed his help. He had been using an awkward paragraph in his program to promote his new levitation:

Instead of crude boasts, Kellar needed real poetry with some two-dollar words, which he knew Hilliard could deliver. Hilliard agreed to write the program note for fifty dollars, and delivered a sparkling paragraph:

Kellar thought it was very good, but suspected that it should be longer. It was hardly worth fifty dollars. So he sent Hilliard a check for twenty-five dollars, voicing his disapproval.

In their escalating argument, Hilliard managed to tweak his final draft of the paragraph, substituting the word “obtuse” for “abstruse.” The new sentence read, “Its perfection represents fifteen years of patient research and obtuse study ...,” which was now a nice insult to Kellar. Hilliard reasoned that Kellar, with his cursory grade-school education, would never notice the difference. Kellar didn’t notice, proudly printing the paragraph—and the word “obtuse”—in every program for his show for over a year. It was sweet revenge.

 

 

HILLIARD WASN’T EXAGGERATING
when he described the Levitation of Princess Karnac as a masterpiece of twentieth-century magic.

It was the brainchild of John Nevil Maskelyne, who had been experimenting with different levitation devices throughout his long career. By 1900, there had been two distinct innovations in the illusion. The first secret was that the floating person could be supported with a strong, steel horizontal bar that supported a cradle, a metal support beneath the lady. This bar generally extended straight back from the lady, passing through a slit in the curtain where it attached to some upright gantry or lifting mechanism. Nevil Maskelyne, John Nevil’s son, had invented a clever twist on this, quite literally. By inserting a tight bend in the bar just behind the lady—it was a sort of dog leg or, to use the popular magical term, a gooseneck—a hoop could apparently be passed over the floating person. In fact, the hoop passed over one end, head to toe, where it was now linked onto the bent metal behind the lady. By casually sliding the hoop along the tracks of the gooseneck, behind the lady, it could be maneuvered back over her head and then passed back across her feet. The hoop was now unlinked from the metal support. It was this clever move—passing the hoop twice, while it was secretly linked onto the support between each pass—that created the illusion.

Maskelyne’s second innovation was a series of thin wires, used to suspend the lady on the cradle. Rather than using two or three thick cables to hold up a person, an array or fan of extremely thin steel wires could be used, if the multiple tiny connections could be carefully arranged so that every single wire supported part of the load. Each wire would be about the thickness of a sewing thread. If the wires were chemically dulled, and the lights on stage were carefully arranged, they were virtually invisible.

In 1901, Maskelyne was able to combine these ideas into an incredible invention. The assistant reclined on a steel cradle. Just behind the cradle, hidden from the audience by the floating assistant’s body, was Nevil Maskelyne’s shaped gooseneck, a piece of wrought iron. Two bundles of fine wires picked up the cradle on the upstage side of the gooseneck—the side away from the audience. Above the stage, the ends of the wires were attached to a steel grid hidden behind the curtains.

Of course, this didn’t quite work. Hung in this way, the cradle would have tipped, spilling the person forward onto the stage. Maskelyne ingeniously solved this problem by using the wires going up as a fulcrum. Then, another group of wires, pulling down, were attached a few inches further upstage on the cradle.

The wires going down passed through a narrow slot cut into the stage, where they were attached to a steel-framed box of weights. By adjusting the weights, Maskelyne had created a sort of invisible lever on stage, and the cradle could be perfectly balanced. By lifting the entire system with an offstage winch, the lady seemed to levitate.

The assembly—the floating assistant, steel cradle, weights, and grid—weighed over four hundred pounds. Maskelyne increased the number of wires to accommodate the weight. In Kellar’s version of the illusion, for example, he used two bundles of fine wires to lift the apparatus—a total of fifty-four wires—and another bundle of thirty-two wires extending down through the slit in the stage to provide the counterweight. A wonderful combination of physics, metallurgy, engineering, and mechanics, the illusion was ultimately enhanced with great dollops of theatrical fantasy.