Jim Steinmeyer (42 page)

In fact, the illusion is patently impossible in the open air, under the hot Indian sun. Thurston, like Devant, Selbit, Le Roy, and Goldin, attempted versions of it on the stage by using a combination of magic principles and relying on special lighting or scenery.

In Thurston’s version, a tall Indian archway was prominent in the center of the stage, which framed a black velvet background. Thurston and his Indian mystics showed a long, thick rope, which was coiled and then placed in a basket. Slowly, the rope rose into the air, until the top of it was about fifteen feet over the stage.

Now an assistant in a white loincloth and turban grabbed the rope and climbed to the top, where he could be clearly seen in the center of the archway. Puffs of white steam, suggesting clouds, filled the archway, momentarily obscuring the boy from view. As the steam disappeared, the audience could see him still clinging to the top of the rope. The boy waved to the audience and then instantly disappeared.

Ironically, this bit of supposedly ancient Indian mysticism required a great deal of costly twentieth-century technology. Thurston had first speculated that he could suspend a sheet of glass in the archway, and the glass could reflect an image of the boy at one side of the stage. This was the basic secret of many mirror illusions from the late 1800s, but enlarged to the scale of the Rope Trick, the system didn’t work. Instead, Thurston used a transparent movie screen, made of perforated material, unrolled over the top of the archway to cover the end of the rope. As this happened, the steam obscured the boy, who had to grab a black velvet support—invisible to the audience against the black velvet scenery—so he could be pulled up, out of sight behind the nearby archway. As the steam cleared, a motion picture of the boy—life-sized against a black background—was projected on the gauzelike movie screen. It gave the impression that the boy was still there, brightly illuminated.

When the movie flickered and stopped, the boy was suddenly gone.

At least, that’s the way it was supposed to work. The motion picture of the boy provided months of headaches. Thurston filmed the action and had it hand-tinted so that the picture of the boy had ruddy skin to match his makeup. The timing of the illusion was critical. If the smoke cleared too soon, the audience saw the flash of movement as the real boy escaped, or saw too much of the movie, which could look two-dimensional and suspicious. If there was too much smoke, the projected image wasn’t clear, and the audience thought that the boy just scrambled out of the way under cover of the bursts of steam.

It all depended on the precise motion of the puffs of steam, which was like depending on the weather. If the theater was cold, or the drafts on stage unpredictable, the illusion changed from performance to performance. Worst of all, the large boilers had to be held under the stage, and the steam piped twelve feet in the air so that it could obscure the boy, which made the timing difficult to coordinate. This was the boiler system that Tampa designed for the magician.

Thurston claimed to have invested thousands of dollars in the Indian Rope Trick, and there’s no doubt that the illusion was embarrassingly costly. There were many false starts and abandoned experiments, requiring several summers of testing at the Beechhurst workshop.

 

 

LEOTHA’S HEALTH
was a constant concern. Thurston suggested new doctors, advised her to take holidays, or cautioned her to avoid certain friends or situations that would provide aggravation. His letters indicate long stretches where she was unable to leave her bed, and she suffered a series of breakdowns, which inspired rounds of medications. “My Leo, Your depressed statements over the phone have given me the blues,” Thurston wrote in the spring of 1926. “Can’t understand you. You have me greatly worried. Do try to get well for Jane and me. You are all we have or love in the world.”

One of her treats was a small pet rhesus monkey, named Lord Pickwick, or Picky, that tucked himself inside her fur coat and traveled with her on the train when she visited the show. Picky was given the run of the hotel rooms where they stayed. Although he was only briefly featured in the magic show, produced from a trick table invented by Karl Germain, at special crippled-children’s matinees Picky would receive an introduction from Thurston and was a crowd favorite.

A second, larger monkey, named Mickey, was the source of problems. He would inhabit a tree branch near the Beechhurst house and could be unpredictably nasty. On June 26, 1926, as Thurston and the men were preparing the new show at the rented pavilion near his home, Mickey climbed over a fence and bit an eight-year-old boy, Henry Korfmann. Later that afternoon, his mother, Mrs. Eva Charous, a neighbor of the Thurstons, knocked on their door to complain. Thurston seemed mystified by the charge and offered the woman a simple balm that he’d used, suggesting that it would help to heal the bite.

The problem couldn’t be solved that simply. The family insisted that the bite led to medical problems for the boy; eventually they claimed that it triggered epileptic fits, forcing him to be institutionalized at Wards Island. A lawsuit followed.

 

 

THURSTON DELAYED
the start of the season in 1926 for his own operation. In August of that year, he arrived in Chicago and was met at the train station by his brother Harry. Together, they went to the office of Dr. Henry Schireson, and Howard scheduled another face-lift.

Dr. Schireson was a well-known surgeon who became famous for removing the distinctive bump in Fanny Brice’s nose in 1924—and, according to some critics, ruining her comedic career. After Thurston’s disappointing first face-lift, he decided to have the job performed by an expert. Schireson wanted to do a “full job,” removing the earlier lumps of paraffin and performing a “rotation lift” to tighten Thurston’s skin, as well as a peel to reveal fresh skin; it was a $700 job that Schireson offered to perform for $450. The operation required several visits to the office over the course of four weeks. Thurston stayed at the Sherman Hotel, and then moved to a quiet room at the Chicago Beach Hotel, overlooking Lake Michigan. For weeks he was helpless in the room, applying a white powder, zinc sterate, to the wounds every half hour to help them dry and scab, and resting in the sunshine. Harry and his secretary, Rae Palmer, attended to Howard, allowing him to dictate letters to Leotha and Jane.

Howard’s letters made the process sound endless, miserable, and painful. He nervously made inquiries about the new tour and was anxious to return home again. Schireson was concerned about the paraffin; he was not able to easily cut it out, and suggested removing it later with an “electrical needle.” When the press was alerted to Thurston’s presence in Dr. Schireson’s office, Thurston and his friend Alvin Plough, a publicity agent, concocted a story that he had been burned by steam during his experiments on the Rope Trick. Schireson was tending to the magician’s scars.

In September, as Howard was still healing, Harry Thurston also decided to have plastic surgery. He started with an abdomen tuck, and then arranged to have Dr. Schireson perform facial surgery. For several days, both Thurston brothers shared the same room at the hotel, recuperating from their operations. Howard might have been glad to have the company; he should have wondered why his brother, the Chicago businessman, booking agent, and dime museum operator, was suddenly concerned about his appearance. He didn’t ask what Harry was planning.

 

 

AT THE END
of his stay in Chicago, Thurston called on an agent, and happened to pass Grace, his first wife, as she was leaving the same office. They had met each other occasionally over the years. Grace had continued happily in show business, working as a dancer, performing in stock companies, and even performing small parts in an occasional motion picture. Noticing the bandages that surrounded her husband’s handsome face, she momentarily felt the old motherly instincts that had carried them through the worst elements on their western tours. “Howard, what happened?” she instinctively cried out to him. “Oh, your poor face!”

“Hello, Grace.” Thurston turned away momentarily. “It was just a small explosion. One of my illusions blew up,” he mumbled.

But Grace had noticed the regularity of the bandages and her expression changed. “You’ve just ... had your face lifted, didn’t you?”

Thurston turned to her and chuckled. He still couldn’t fool her. “Actually, yes. I did. We can’t afford to grow old, can we, Grace?”

 

 

IN OCTOBER,
both Thurston and Houdini were back on the road with their shows. Houdini’s tour had been plagued by a number of odd accidents. In Albany, New York, as he was lifted by his feet in the massive stocks during the Water Torture Cell, Houdini fractured a bone in his ankle. Houdini halted the escape, bandaged the ankle, and carried on with the show, sitting in a chair during the lecture on spirit frauds.

Several days later, in Montreal, Houdini lectured to students at McGill University on spiritualism and magic. He looked tired and pale, with dark circles under his eyes. He now hobbled through his performances, trying to allow his fractured bone to knit. The next day, several students from McGill called on him backstage and engaged him in an animated conversation as Houdini reclined on a couch. They talked about Houdini’s film career, biblical miracles, and mystery stories. One of the boys was busy making a sketch of the magician. Another, a tall, strong young man named J. Gordon Whitehead, asked Houdini about his claim to be able to tighten his stomach muscles and withstand a punch.

Houdini was still exhausted, but he confirmed to the boy that he could do it and foolishly offered to try. Before the magician was able to rise from the couch and tighten his muscles, Whitehead offered a fusillade of quick punches. Houdini collapsed back onto the couch and then regained his composure before the boys left.

It now seems that Houdini’s appendix had already been ruptured, and this injury exacerbated the situation. By the time the show closed in Montreal and moved to Detroit, Houdini struggled through one show, performing the magic and spiritualism lecture, before he was taken to the hospital.

Thurston was shocked to hear the news reports. At first, doctors warned that Houdini was in grave condition, but the stories of his injuries seemed maddeningly unclear and trivial. Thurston wired the hospital for reports and inquired after Bess. Houdini rallied briefly, and headlines seemed to indicate his imminent recovery. But the effects of peritonitis were fatal. He died on October 31, 1926. Harry Houdini was fifty-two years old.

Dante never liked him. He’d run up against Houdini several times and had only faced the professional brickbats and jealousies—the arrogance that made Houdini a star and defined his prominence as an escape artist. In an unpublished manuscript, Dante wrote:

But Thurston had known the young magician, the Midway performer at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, so brashly proud of his magic and so insistent on demonstrating his own skills with playing cards. Throughout all the years, as they both achieved success and challenged each other, Thurston continued to perceive that young man, bristling with every perceived slight, ready to proclaim his superiority to the rest of the world.

“I was very much upset about Houdini’s death, and could hardly realize it even at present. I was in constant touch with his condition during his illness in Detroit and sent wires and flowers to Mrs. Houdini,” he wrote to Dante. Thurston couldn’t help but consider his own fate. “It surely is a warning to me, and I wonder how I have managed to survive all these years under the great strain.”

To the newspaper reporters, Thurston offered his own tribute: “The world has lost a great mystifier and a useful, forceful character. We were friends for 35 years, starting at the bottom together and climbing toward the top. As a showman he was in a class with Barnum, in force of character, he resembled [Theodore] Roosevelt.”

Curiously, he described his compatriot as a “mystifier,” a “useful character,” and a “showman” but never quite a magician. Two days later, when the Associated Press asked Thurston about the rumor that Houdini’s precious secrets would accompany Houdini to the grave, Thurston seemed to be growing weary of the legend and tried to put it in perspective with a sensible answer.

William Hilliar, the early associate of Thurston and a friend of Houdini’s, was upset that Thurston wouldn’t indulge in Houdini’s beloved publicity boasts after his death. “I think Thurston showed cheap showmanship when he announced that Houdini did not take his secrets with him,” Hilliar wrote to Mrs. Houdini with his condolences. “The secret, the big secret of Harry’s success was Harry himself.”

Previous feuds between magicians had involved theaters, routes, personnel, or tricks. In the 1880s, when Herrmann and Kellar raced through a territory ahead of each other, or pasted over the other magician’s posters, the battles represented an embarrassment of riches. They were prospectors charging into a gold field, shoveling their way to success. But Thurston and Houdini had faced a different time in show business. Vaudeville was dying. Motion pictures were slowly squeezing out traveling shows. As their world kept shrinking, they were forced to become allies and rivals at the same time, continually fighting over the last few golden nuggets.