Jim Steinmeyer (35 page)

Thurston showed a simple trick with a handkerchief and concluded by reaching beneath it and producing a small brown bunny. As the children oohed and aahed, Thurston asked if there was a little girl in the audience who wanted to take it home.

Invariably a little girl bounded up onto the stage. Thurston asked her name and told her about his own daughter, Jane. He instructed the girl how to hold the rabbit. “It’s very cold out. Would you like me to wrap him in a piece of paper and keep him warm?” George stepped onstage with a sheet of brown paper, and Thurston told the girl to wrap the bunny up herself—the animal was folded into the paper and the ends were twisted shut. “For Jane’s sake, you wrap him up yourself.” He handed her the bundle, but then stopped her as she left the stage. “Oh, you shouldn’t do that!” Thurston held the bundle to his ear. “He’s stopped breathing. Poor little fellow.” He slowly unwrapped the paper. The rabbit was gone, and in its place the magician discovered a nice box of chocolates. He awarded this to the little girl and dismissed her from the stage.

The audience gradually realized that the performance had been taking place on the little girl’s face. She was excited to receive the bunny, careful and mindful of all of his admonitions, fearful that the rabbit had been hurt, and then resigned when it disappeared. The little girl—like everyone in the audience—had seen it coming. Of course, it was just a trick. Of course he was not going to give her a real rabbit.

She took her chocolates with a shrug of visible disappointment and set off for her seat. “Don’t let him wrap that up, little girl,” the stooge in the audience yelled, and Thurston looked up, offering the noisy man in the balcony a dirty look. As the little girl reached her seat, Thurston told her to stop. “I see that you want a little rabbit. Do you know any gentleman in the audience?” The girl identified her father.

“Father, you don’t mind if your girl takes a rabbit out of your coat, do you?” Standing at the edge of the stage, he instructed his volunteer to stand on her chair, reach down her father’s collar and say, “Come rabbit, come rabbit, come rabbit.” As the scene became more ridiculous, Thurston told her, “I think I had better do that for you. You know, I have a certain way of doing that.” Thurston took the candy, tossing it to a nearby boy, and then reached down the father’s collar, withdrawing another rabbit, this one snow white. He presented it to the little girl with an exaggerated bow. “Feed him oats, water, hay, and bread, and he will live forever.” Thurston followed with free passes for the Saturday matinee. “Come back Saturday with your friend, take front seats, see the show, and see someone else get the rabbit.”

Traveling with a menagerie of animals—pigeons, ducks, geese, chickens, and a lion—created its own problem. But finding a regular supply of small bunnies to give away to children was a continual source of frustration. Thurston told about arriving in a town and discovering, to his horror, that the last two rabbits had died on the train. He asked the theater manager where he could find someone who raised rabbits. Howard and an assistant were directed to a small farm out of town where rabbits were sold for food. At the farm, Thurston found an old Dutch farmer wearing wooden shoes. The farmer was leery of two city swells arriving in such a hurry, but Thurston patiently explained the situation: he needed tiny bunnies. The farmer sold him two. In gratitude, Thurston offered him a complimentary pass for his show in town. He pulled out the pass—theater folks always called them “Annie Oakleys”—and signed the front of it. When the farmer took it, he noticed the little red devils cavorting across Thurston’s printed name and shook his head. “No, I von’t sell dem,” he said. “I vill not haff my rabbits in a thee-ater!”

 

 

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:

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.