Jim Steinmeyer (6 page)

The sprawling, new campus was beautiful and bucolic, with redbrick buildings surrounding the lush, hilly grounds. It was more idyllic than anything Thurston had seen in Ohio, more inviting than the city tenements or train yards that had served as his homes for the last six years. Still, he admitted that he “suffered at Mount Hermon. The change from the nomadic life to the prosaic life of a student seemed unbearable at times.” He had already calculated the train schedule. “Night after night I debated with myself whether I would quietly leave the dormitory and catch the midnight freight that stopped at Mount Hermon. I attribute my resistance to the same comfort and strength that gave me the courage to kneel at my bed in the Bowery lodging house.” Professor Sawyer once showed him a letter in his file from William Round, which had detailed Thurston’s criminal career in New York. Sawyer was grandly making the point that no further punishment was necessary, but the memory of that letter, and his status as an outsider, haunted Thurston.

At Mount Hermon, he made a little extra money by cutting his fellow students’ hair and shaving them (a skill he learned from his father). He earned average to good grades. For example, his Bible courses began with excellent marks, but then faded to middling grades. Perhaps that was a sign of his expanding interests. He did poorly in singing (his voice had little modulation), but excellently in elocution (following the examples from Moody’s soaring sermons, he learned to add pauses or draw out his words for emphasis). He failed geometry and struggled with algebra. He learned to juggle Indian clubs, heavy wooden pins that were swung in graceful movements around his body. He was a star on the track team and intramural football team. He was also elected vice president of the Junior Middle Class (the equivalent of sophomore year).

During a special Christmas dinner at the school in 1890, at which young ladies from the Northfield Seminary joined the boys, Reverend Moody was on hand to join the small group for holiday toasts. After dinner, the students entertained themselves with songs, games, and recitations. There, Thurston performed his first public magic show. He grandly exaggerated this premiere, recounting later how he sliced off a student’s head and enhanced the illusion with a large knife dripping with red ink. “Four women in the audience fainted.” He also claimed to have reached into the pockets of Will Moody, the son of the evangelist, withdrawing handfuls of playing cards.

He didn’t do these tricks. “The sleight of hand performed by Thurston added greatly to the evening’s pleasure,” according to the school newspaper, the
Hermonite
. There was no knife, no blood, and certainly no playing cards on the Mount Hermon campus. Thurston probably performed several discreet, polite coin and handkerchief tricks.

He attended the school until 1891, where he was officially designated “class of ’93,” meaning that he was two years from full graduation. He was twenty-one. More than likely, Mrs. Thomas had exhausted her funds after paying for Thurston’s four years, and Round had now found a new project for the young man. His was not an unusual case. At that time, only ten percent of Mount Hermon students graduated. Thurston had endured a slow start with his academic work and many of his basic courses, like mathematics, elocution, and spelling, were necessary to his education but hadn’t counted toward graduation.

On June 10, 1891, Thurston sent a note to Professor Cutler, the new headmaster.

The misspelling of the school’s name was not just odd or careless, but may have been telling. His four years at Mount Hermon had given Thurston a taste for real education and respectful camaraderie, but he still longed for adventure and was anxious to try his hand in the tawdry, delicious world of show business. He actually found his life’s work through the effect of a very different “Herrmann.”

T
hroughout his life, Thurston’s press stories encouraged the idea that he had trained for the ministry or actually graduated as an ordained minister. Neither was true. His career in the ministry probably consisted of a few days of street corner mission work, in the Five Points district, when he was trying to impress William Round and Reverend Dooly with his piety. He certainly heard Dwight Moody preach. At Mount Hermon, Thurston took a course of Bible studies—perhaps planning to become a preacher—but gradually his choices shifted to other areas. When he left the school, Round may have suggested that he continue his education at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, studying to become a medical missionary. But this next step would have depended upon Round’s continuing largesse as well as Thurston’s academic achievements—failing to graduate from Mount Hermon, he would have needed to pass entrance exams in Philadelphia.

William M. F. Round had moved on to a different project. In 1887, while serving the New York Prison Association and petitioning for Thurston’s education at Mount Hermon, Round had also served as the corresponding secretary for the Burnham Industrial Farm in upstate Canaan, New York. Burnham was a reform school for adolescent boys, a project perfectly suited to Round’s theories about rehabilitation. In 1891, William Round was the superintendent of Burnham Farm. A flyer boasted of the institution’s success:

When Thurston left Northfield, Massachusetts, in the spring of 1891, he stopped in Canaan to visit William Round, who promptly recruited the young man to his cause. Round had introduced a new program to accept younger boys, aged nine to twelve. They were organized in a special “family” called the Lambfold and housed in a loft above the dairy on the Burnham grounds. He asked Thurston to become a charter member of a new fellowship called the Brotherhood of St. Christopher, and asked him to take charge of the Lambfold. Perhaps Round appealed to Thurston’s Christian charity, or perhaps he simply mentioned the considerable investment he, and his mother-in-law, had made toward Thurston’s education. Thurston realized that his future was still tied to Round and that he was obliged to repay the loan.

In December 1891, after he had been at the Burnham Farm for over six months, he wrote to his old headmaster at Mount Hermon, Professor Cutler, “I came to the Burnham Industrial Farm when I left the school last June. I have joined the Brotherhood of St. Christopher, an organization to train young Christian men for institutional lives, that is, to work or take charge of other institutions. The time of service is three years. The brothers receive no salary, only a small fee for necessary things. Most everything is furnished us by the Farm. I suppose you are somewhat acquainted with the Burnham Industrial Farm.”

He later remembered that he earned five dollars a month at Burnham, and his time there was productive, as he helped obtain a herd of cattle for the boys and raise funds for a new silo and gymnasium. But the duties at Burnham Farm satisfied him only in that he had no other plans for his future. As he wiled his days in Canaan, New York, weeding the onion field or driving the horse cart, he decided that he’d had enough of the peaceful, institutional life of the country.

He lasted eighteen months at Burnham, certainly not the three-year term that he had pledged. It seems that Round’s tenure at Burnham, and the Brotherhood of St. Christopher, were slowly unwinding. Thurston had reached an elevated position within the hierarchy, but, “being sort of an independent individual, I had an idea how things should be run and I tried to run the institution,” he later recalled. “Anyhow, I didn’t agree with the rest of them, so we decided that I would leave.” When he departed on January 5, 1893, a cold, snowy day, all the boys lined up. Thurston bid them an affectionate good-bye, then climbed into a sleigh and was carried to the train station.

William M. F. Round played an essential role in young Howard Thurston’s life, but in his later biographies, Thurston included his name with only passing references. He was merely “a noted philanthropist” who worked at the Prison Association and then offered the boy work. Thurston was always embarrassed by his connection to the head of the Prison Association—it raised obvious questions—and he felt guilty by disappointing this important patron.

 

 

THURSTON WAS LUCKY
when he left the Burnham Farm and traveled through Albany, New York. There he happened to see a bright lithograph advertising Herrmann the Great, the Mephistophelean magician from his youth who had so inspired him. Thurston left the train and ran to the Hermanus Beeker Hall, where he bought a ticket for the show.

That night, Herrmann’s performance was even more marvelous than Thurston ever remembered. Thurston waited by the stage door, but didn’t have the courage to actually speak to the magician. Instead, he followed Alexander and Madame Adelaide Herrmann to the Keeler Hotel, asking for a room as close as possible to the great man.

Howard spent a sleepless night, pacing the corridor, trying to work up the courage to knock on Herrmann’s door, and listening at the keyhole. He wondered if he should give up any further studies and follow his heart to pursue a career in magic.

Having overheard at the theater that the Herrmann company was traveling to Syracuse the next day, Thurston arrived at the train station in the morning to see the magician one last time. He opened the station door and was surprised by the great magician himself, pacing the lobby floor in a fur-collared coat, flourishing a gold-topped cane. As the Herrmanns walked to the trains, Thurston impulsively bought a ticket to Syracuse, paying the extra dollar for a Pullman car. He sat as close as he dared to the magician, watching him smoke one perfumed Persian cigarette after another, lighting each from embers of the previous cigarette.

In Syracuse, he waited through the week as the show was moved into the Weiting Opera House and rehearsed. Then Thurston bought a ticket and watched the show again on January 13, studying the finer points of Herrmann’s magic. He had read the details of the tricks. He had studied Herrmann’s clever bits of misdirection. He made his decision. He would become a magician.

 

 

MAGIC SHOWS
were a staple of American theater, an established genre that attracted audiences in every major city. Like a circus, the nature of the show was family entertainment, not cloying or childish, but a mildly comic combination of verbal jests and visual wonders. And like a vaudeville show, musical revue, Wild West, or minstrel show, it had developed its own traditions and fashions—especially in America, where magic shows were designed to tour from city to city. They played in medium-sized theaters, of five hundred to a thousand people, and were organized in two or three acts. The show often started with small sleight-of-hand tricks, showing off the performer’s skill and personality. A topical theme was spiritualism. The magician might re-create a séance onstage or produce apparent manifestations in a curtained cabinet.

Then a variety act or two might be included to offer a change of pace: a different magician, or an acrobat or comic. As the show proceeded, the scale of the mysteries gradually increased. Here the magician included cabinet illusions, the disappearance of a lady, or a levitation illusion. The show might conclude with a short comic sketch, or an illusion staged with operatic sensibilities and spectacle—a cremation or a decapitation.

A show like Herrmann’s was complicated to perform and difficult to transport, depending upon trains to major cities. His performances would feature three or four changes of scenery and special curtains. The magician invariably dressed in formal evening clothes. A small group of male assistants, who helped move the cabinets or bring the props onstage, would be dressed as pageboys or bellboys; the magician’s wife often took the part of the principle assistant, with several elegant gowns and exotic costumes to match the illusions.

Large or small, any magic show was designed around the magician and always accentuated the magician’s personality. Robert Heller was known for his droll patter and wit. Dr. Lynn, from England, indulged in deliberately silly, polysyllabic words and ridiculous presentations. Harry Kellar, a solid and dependable Pennsylvania-born magician, was never especially funny or chatty but chose his words carefully and emphasized the amazing marvels. And Alexander Herrmann, the public’s favorite, was wry and devilish, a European roué who seemed especially exotic to Americans. He managed to convince his audiences that his magic was both skillful and effortless at the same time, and his patter sparkled with amusingly tortured French-English that kept the theater bubbling with laughter.