Jim Steinmeyer (3 page)

Gresham remembered the magical ritual that followed. “Thurston stands behind her. A rustle from the audience and he lays his finger to his lips. Silence, then soft chords ... a wave of his hand and surely, the girl has moved. She moved as softly as a sigh, gently, lovely, light as thistle down, Fernanda floated in mid air, up and up, above the magician’s head. When at last she came to rest with a spotlight centered on her face, the crowd was hushed with an almost religious awe.”

The sofa was lifted and taken offstage. Another assistant appeared with a short stepladder as Thurston picked up a large metal hoop. He took two steps up the ladder, so that his shoulders were just above the level of the floating princess. The hoop was passed horizontally, from the lady’s head to her feet, in one graceful swoop. Then Thurston paused, looking into the lady’s face as he held the hoop, and repeated the motion—head to toe—once more, slowly, smoothly. He stepped from the stool and rolled the hoop along the stage so that it fell into the audience, allowing spectators to examine it.

The movement of the hoop tumbling into the auditorium and Thurston’s steps forward invariably broke the spell, and the audience would start to applaud. But he immediately raised his hand, holding them in breathless anticipation.

There was a clatter of seats in the audience as five, ten, fifteen spectators took advantage of his invitation and made their way down the aisle. Thurston’s assistants and Abdul gathered the spectators into a crowd at one side of the stage as the magician turned his attention to his special guest on the aisle.

 

Would you like to come?

 

He stretched his hand toward the audience members at the side of the stage. Houdini smiled and shook his head. Now another delicate routine began, the dance of two professionals negotiating a performance.

 

You’re welcome to come onto my stage.

 

Houdini shrugged, and remained in his seat. He was now aware that the eyes of the audience were on him. It was the third request that would solve the problem. Any good showman knows the rule of three; three repetitions to the climax, three steps to the trick, three beats to the joke.

 

Mr. Houdini, please honor me as my guest.

 

And Houdini rose from his seat, bouncing lightly up the steps and onto the stage. “You know, I am very modest,” he wrote to a friend the next day—and of course, he was never modest. “I did not want [Thurston] to think that there was anything in his repertoire that baffled me, or that it was my intention to solve tricks. At the third request, however, I went up on the stage and became one of the committee of twenty to witness Princess Karnac at close range.” Houdini took his place at the side of the group of spectators, aware that everyone in the audience would be watching him. But Thurston turned his attention back to the action on stage.

“Surakabaja” was gobbledygook, a bit of slang that Thurston had picked up in India. But the word was intoned with such reverence that it had the feeling of a real spell. Abdul took his place in the center of the stage, prostrate, facing the floating princess. Meanwhile, Thurston selected a gentleman from the group on stage.

Abdul sat upright, chanting the word “Surakabaja, surakabaja,” as Thurston placed a hand on the man’s shoulder and led him beneath the floating lady, stopping in front of her so the man could reach his hand up to the lady’s ring.

The man was led to the auditorium steps, and he wandered back to his seat, gazing backward at the marvel and scratching his head.

Meanwhile, the group of spectators was slowly led across the front of the stage, from one side to the other, so that they could appreciate the vision of the floating lady. Houdini followed dutifully, now lost in the crowd.

Thurston found a young boy in the group, bringing him to the center of the stage.

He slowly walked the boy beneath the floating lady, and then lifted him straight up so that he could reach the princess’s ring. Abdul began a series of chants, “Surakabaja, surakabaja.” When Thurston lowered the boy to the stage again, his pumping legs immediately propelled him off the front steps, dashing back to his seat as if he’d seen a ghost. The audience giggled in approval. Then the applause started. A gasp, turning into a ripple of handclapping, rolling into a wave, to an ovation, to roars and cheers. As the assistants exited and the spectators were dismissed from the stage, Thurston reached over to Houdini, gripping him by the arm, so the two men were alone on stage with the floating princess.

Harry Kellar was the American magician who had developed this incredible illusion, and then turned it over to Thurston more than decade earlier. The little speech delighted Houdini, a fairy-tale fantasy wrapped up in show business lore. And then, Thurston made a grand gesture toward the princess, indicating that Houdini could step back and take a look for himself, without any guiding hand. It was the ultimate compliment to a fellow performer, a very public, ostentatious show of trust. Thurston crossed his arms, and Houdini took his cue. Slowly turning away from the audience, he took several steps and reached up to touch the ring. As he did, he was able to examine the astonishing, secret apparatus from the perfect angle, an incredible assemblage of steel, brass, and fabric, neatly tucked into the space behind the lady’s body.

Houdini turned, facing the audience again. He was grinning with giddy self-satisfaction but managed a stately bow to Thurston. He left the stage and returned to his seat. “He paid me a very pretty compliment,” Houdini wrote the next day, “of being alone with the apparatus. Knowing exactly how it is done, it seems to me that I admire it even more than the public, who have not the slightest inkling of the mechanical problems.”

Having completed his scene with Houdini, Thurston returned to the fairy tale that he’d arranged onstage. He stood to one side, undulating his hands in hypnotic gestures, and Fernanda slowly descended. The assistants entered with the sofa, placing it beneath her. Her body nestled into the cushions, suggesting that the illusion had been nothing more than a fantastic dream. Thurston’s men lifted her to her feet; he snapped his fingers and her eyes opened again.

Thurston raised his hand dramatically, and the lady fell backward into the arms of the two assistants, so her shoulders were supported, as two more assistants entered with a large silken sheet. This was draped over the lady. The assistants lifted her, horizontal, and then slowly removed their hands, stepping back so that the covered lady was once again floating over the stage.

Thurston stepped just behind Fernanda, waving his hands over her. As he took several careful steps forward, approaching the orchestra, the lady followed his gestures, hovering closer and closer to the audience. He turned on his heel, and the floating lady, just beneath his hands, turned with him.

Now Fernanda rose into the air, higher and higher. She drifted to the right side of the stage, and then to the left, finally describing a soft circular sweep, revolving in space so that the audience could see the floating lady from each angle. It seemed as if gravity had been suspended: no longer a person, but a flower petal turning pirouettes in a spring breeze.

Still floating beneath the sheet, Fernanda raised her right hand, and then lowered it again.

Thurston reached up to grasp the lower edge of the sheet. He twitched it and it fell away, revealing that the lady had disappeared in mid air. Thurston tossed the sheet to his assistant and bowed a deep, solemn bow. It took the audience several seconds—a tense moment of stunned silence—until they came to their senses and remembered that they’d been watching a magic show. The crowded theater erupted in applause, and then cheers. In the fifth row, Houdini joined in the happy ovation.

 

 

HARRY HOUDINI HAD BEEN FLATTERED,
flummoxed, and outmaneuvered by a master of the art. Just like when they were boys at the World’s Fair, Thurston had proved a little more experienced and a little slicker, neatly sidestepping his competition and distracting him with pure theatricality.

It was a typical con game, first appealing to the pride or cupidity of the mark, and then offering a reward that makes the sucker complicit in the fraud. Of course Houdini wasn’t one of just three men; he didn’t even know how the levitation worked when Thurston coaxed him onto the stage and offered his wheedling praise. The quick glances as he stood in front of the princess might have been interesting, but it never showed Houdini the complicated machinery, concealed above and below the stage, that actually accomplished the illusion. Thurston knew that he had to satisfy Houdini’s ego, not his curiosity.

More important, Houdini missed the fact that he’d just been publicly knee-capped. If he had ever been scheming to copy Thurston’s Princess Karnac mystery, he now had been shown so much, so generously, that he would be forced to avoid the floating lady illusion in the future.

That night in December 1920, Houdini had seen the World’s Greatest Magician.

 

 

WHO WAS HOWARD THURSTON?
He was the hero of generations of American boys, like Orson Welles and William Lindsay Gresham, who sat spellbound in a theater, and pledged their lives to magic. Remembering Thurston’s inspirations, many of them went on to make their own sort of magic. Thurston was a real innovator and a real adventurer. Every boy who studied the souvenir program knew that the great magician had been to India, and seen the photos that portrayed him in a pith helmet, studying the wonders of the Indian fakirs.

Thurston was an entrepreneur. Dale Carnegie used him as an example of business success through personal skills. “More than 60 million people had paid admission to his show,” according to Carnegie. “He had the ability to put his personality across the footlights. He was a master showman. He knew human nature. Everything he did, every gesture, every intonation of his voice, every lifting of an eyebrow, had been carefully rehearsed in advance. But Thurston had a genuine interest in people.”

Howard Thurston was also an entertainment commodity, as a popular brand name, through the early 1900s. He was the renowned wizard of the Roaring Twenties. According to Walter B. Gibson, the originator of
The Shadow
and a ghostwriter for Houdini as well as Thurston, “In their day, Howard Thurston was every bit as well known as Harry Houdini. In fact, Thurston was probably better known than Houdini.” While Thurston toured with an elaborate magic show, Houdini had become famous as a vaudeville escape artist. But, according to Gibson, “every bit of Thurston’s publicity was about getting you into the theater to see the show. And Houdini’s publicity was about creating a legend. As each year passes, Houdini becomes more and more famous, and Thurston is forgotten.”

“I wouldn’t deceive you for the world,” Thurston assured his audiences. It seems to be a ridiculous statement from a professional magician, but Thurston delivered the line with such warmth and sincerity that it became a sort of trademark for the great wizard. Of course, he did deceive them, for over forty years. He mystified children, and then their children and grandchildren. In fact, his most incredible illusion was not Princess Karnac, floating high above the stage, but the deception he never quite explained—the illusion of the con man and thief, the associate of petty criminals and the confidant of politicians and philanthropists. He fooled them all. Howard Thurston became the last, greatest magician in the world.