Jim Steinmeyer (49 page)

Thurston drove into the city for the first show of the day and asked Keating not to introduce him from the stage, which, Keating later explained, “if you knew him as well as I did, was just his way of making sure that I did.” In fact, Keating went one better, asking Thurston to join him onstage to assist with one of his card tricks.

Keating was honored by the presence of the World’s Greatest Magician. At the same time he was aware that the dapper, proud little man had just suffered a host of humiliations signaling the end of his career and the passing of an era in entertainment. Keating felt nostalgic for magic; Thurston seated in his audience represented just how times had changed.

After the performance, Thurston couldn’t resist admonishing him for his humor—Keating’s modern style was to adopt a sophisticated, supercilious attitude toward the audience. “Humility,” Thurston intoned with his famous ministerial baritone, waving a finger at his young protégé. He pointed toward the seats. “They are the ones who pay you.”

Keating knew he was right. He was reminded of the ritual he had witnessed so many years before: Thurston standing just behind the curtain and whispering a quiet prayer to his audience: “Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming to my show tonight. I hope you enjoy it. Thank you. God bless you. God bless you....”

“He meant it,” Keating later wrote.

THURSTON WENT BACK
on the road, working in smaller cities. When he played in Iowa in May 1933, he wrote to Abe Lastfogel, sheepishly admitting he had been wrong about his ticket prices. The Depression had devastated local families. “The manager in Davenport said the first afternoon two or three hundred families came but refused to pay the 25 cents [for each child’s ticket], and went to another show. They simply haven’t any money.” Adding to the difficulties, Abe Lastfogel reported that Harry Thurston had been appearing in the South with his own magic show. Of course, the billing was unclear. Many managers thought they had booked Howard Thurston, and then were “complaining.” He warned the magician that his brother was now jeopardizing the business.

Thurston was exhausted by the touring schedule, but exhilarated by the business, which often found the public lined up around the block. He was netting as much as $6,000 a week. He played through the South for the first time in his career, and fired off a list of suggestions to Lastfogel, relishing his role as the seasoned professional:

Thurston complained about the circuitous routes. “I cannot understand why it is necessary to travel half way across the country to play four towns which I have only played once or twice.” He suggested working at Radio City Music Hall for two weeks at $6,000 per week. Abe Lastfogel contacted Roxy Rothafel, the manager of the Music Hall, but Thurston’s show required so much work done to the stage—special trapdoors—that Roxy refused to accommodate him in his new theater.

After a swing through the South and Midwest, the show returned to the Valencia Theater in Jamaica, Long Island, just a few miles from Thurston’s home. Leotha had been in good spirits, and even arrived at the theater on the first day, Saturday, with some new costumes for the cast.

The following morning, Sunday, April 8, 1934, Thurston was at home with his wife before going to the theater. When Herman Hanson, the stage manager, announced “Fifteen minutes” for the matinee that afternoon, he noticed that Thurston was not in his dressing room. He spotted the magician walking down the aisle toward the stage, as if in a trance. He’d obviously just come from the phone in the theater manager’s office.

Hanson had the overture replayed so that Thurston had time to change backstage. The show began and Thurston went through the motions mechanically. It was obvious that something was wrong. At one point, during an illusion called Piercing a Woman, Thurston was required to push a long spike through Lillian Hanson. His line was, “There will be no pain, but there is danger.” As he stepped toward Herman and Lillian, he added, quietly, “Herman, there is more danger than we know.” Thurston left just after the performance, and Hanson was pressed into service to perform the evening show with Jane. Leotha was dead.

“Someone once said, ‘The show must go on,’” Jane later wrote, describing that night, “and it did. But I felt hatred for the audience and I didn’t care if they were due their money’s worth.”

L
eotha had been taking Medinal tablets, a coarse barbiturate, to help her sleep. When Thurston left for the theater that afternoon, he noticed a prescription bottle half filled with tablets. When he was called back home that evening, the only bottle that could be located was empty. An autopsy determined that she died of Medinal poisoning.

“Her capacity for withstanding tremendous doses of sedative drugs was attested by a local physician and also a consultant from New York who had treated her on previous occasions,” the medical examiner later reported. A friend and her maid were with her that afternoon, when she went into the bathroom and took an unknown number of tablets, dissolved in water. She became maniacal, then fell into a deep coma and died at six that evening.

The examiner noted, “There were no circumstances which suggested any homicidal action. However, suicidal or accidental is undetermined. The Physician, the husband and people in the employ of the deceased had never known of any suicidal attempt,” although this last statement was probably not true. During her illness, Leotha had made several distraught threats, including her letter to Jane. Some members of Thurston’s company, familiar with her breakdowns, believed that she’d committed suicide. Her drug use was concealed from reporters, and newspapers explained that she died of a sudden heart attack.

Jane left the show and Hanson took over for Howard Thurston at the Valencia Theater. At the Wednesday matinee, unknown to anyone in the company, Thurston walked up to the box office, purchased a ticket, and sat in the auditorium, watching his own show. After the curtain fell, Hanson and Carl Chase, the company manager, were standing on stage by themselves when Thurston surprised them. “Herman, I knew I could trust you,” he said quietly. “You might as well finish the week.”

There was something about the Great Thurston’s presence on that stage that sent a chill down Hanson’s spine. He was in a rumpled tweed coat and fedora: smaller, inconspicuous, and sad. His glowing face that had presided over so many marvels was sallow and ordinary. His straight back was hunched, his square shoulders arched. After years of proudly overcoming the impossible, he’d been beaten.

 

 

“HOWARD,
I am very much interested as to your future,” Harry wrote. “I know there is an aching void which cannot be replaced since God took Lee from you, and I hope that time will heal all wounds.”

Howard and Jane found solace in the show, and busied themselves with the performances, but Thurston worried that he would not be able to continue for very long. He was disappointed to find that Carl Chase, Leotha’s nephew and the show’s company manager, had given himself a salary increase from $45 a week to $100 a week, with the excuse that the raise had been approved by “Aunt Nina” just before she died. Thurston fired Chase, left the Beechhurst house, and he and Jane moved into Leotha’s apartment building in Weehawken. He sold his property in Connecticut, where he’d planned on building a retirement home with Leotha.

Howard and Jane should have drawn closer, but Leotha’s death damaged their relationship. When she was a little girl, Jane had once run away from home. When she returned, she was shocked to receive a hard slap from her father. “Don’t ever do that to your mother again,” he growled. Now she wondered if her protracted, failed marriage meant she had failed her mother.

“Mrs. Thurston’s death has upset me and I don’t know what I intend to do for the present,” Howard wrote to Dante, then in Singapore. “One thing is sure, I would like to be with you and I am thinking quite seriously of doing so.”

 

 

THURSTON INTRODUCED
an illusion that had been invented by Edward Morrell Massey, a magician and mystery writer. It was a large round drum, about four feet in diameter. A lady reclined horizontally within the drum; her head was visible on one side of the circumference and her feet on the other. Her body could be seen within the round center of the drum.

Using blades, Thurston apparently sliced through the lady’s neck, then slid her head so that it was at the top of the drum. He repeated the action with the lady’s feet, pushing them down to the bottom. The result was a person apparently cut into three pieces.

Massey called it Head Over Heels, and Thurston renamed it Vivisection, hoping that it would replace some of his other torture illusions. The apparatus involved several complicated mechanisms and had to be built from metal to accommodate the curved drum shape. Herman Hanson started constructing it as the show was on tour, slowly solving each problem as they moved from city to city. It was finally ready late in 1934. The finished illusion, the last one introduced into the Thurston show, was startling, but it offered none of the situational comedy that had made the Sawing in Half so successful.

 

 

WHEN THURSTON PLAYED
at the Publix Theater in Detroit, Howard was interviewed on WWJ Radio by Rex White. Thurston discussed his hundreds of appearances at orphanages and hospitals, perhaps three or four visits in a large city like Detroit, the public’s interest in magic, and the persistence of the supernatural. “Why do people believe in such things?” White was asked. Thurston answered,

It was a curious analogy, especially since Thurston’s dry wells and expensive gold mines had occupied much of his attention. When he was asked about performing in movie theaters, he was equally honest.

His old-fashioned formula had been to return to the same cities, year after year, and capitalize on advertising to generations of fans. But Lastfogel’s plan was different. Thurston found the new theaters and cities intriguing and hopeful—even the smaller theaters. He discovered new audiences who had been longing to see his magic.

 

 

JUST WEEKS LATER,
during the 1934 tour, Thurston opened a package that had been addressed to him with childish script. Inside was a broken doll with a note.

It reminded him of when he knew a little girl named Jane, who depended upon him for similar miracles. That’s when he’d felt like a real magician. He told his secretary to run to the toy store, picked up a sheet of paper, and wrote a quick response.