Jim Steinmeyer (9 page)

It was a story that Thurston told for the rest of his life, as if puzzling through it, attempting to reconcile the way his deep honesty and dishonesty could combine for the benefit of an audience. “I felt that it was right to tell the boy that I was Jesus.” This also demonstrated the essential difference between the brothers Harry and Howard Thurston. Harry was a master of the simple con game. But Harry could never have bamboozled the Georgia court, nor comforted the dying boy. He never would have tried.

 

 

IN 1896,
Howard Thurston was personally awestruck by a different kind of deception. Although he fancied himself an expert magician, his peripatetic fairground work meant that Thurston was an outsider to the world of magic. When he witnessed a young midwestern magician, T. Nelson Downs, perform an act with coins and playing cards, Thurston was surprised to see something new—genuinely unique—using just a few cards. Downs showed a fan of five cards and, one by one, made them disappear at his fingertips.

Thurston stumbled through an approximation of the trick, trying to re-create Downs’s movements. It wasn’t until he traveled through New York City later that year that he was able to track down the full story of the disappearing cards. It was Dr. James Elliott’s trick. In fact, as any magician of the time could have told you, it had to be Dr. Elliott’s.

James William Elliott was born in Maine in April 1874; he was the same age as Harry Houdini. He was famously devoted to magic. When rehearsing a new move, he would rent a room—separate from his apartment—with nothing in it but a table, a chair, and a deck of cards. No distractions. He’d lock himself in the room with instructions that he was not to be disturbed. And then, for four or five hours at a time, he would rehearse. He might then leave for a meal or a short walk, and then return and resume his rehearsals—analyzing each maneuver, solving minute problems, and repeating thousands of repetitions so that the magic became second nature to him.

He studied medicine at Harvard, and then attended Bellevue Hospital Medical College in New York City—which brought him in contact with the New York magicians.

Thurston arranged to meet with Elliott in New York, and found a big man with patrician pride and a “sweet, forceful character,” according to one of Elliott’s friends. Thurston and Elliott must have formed an instant bond. Elliott was a churchgoing Christian. Thurston was able to recount his years at Mount Hermon in Massachusetts with Dwight Moody. Then Thurston pulled out a deck of cards and demonstrated his sleight of hand. At that time, he performed the standard collection of sleights and flourishes, concluding by passing his hand over the face of the deck to make one card change into another. He presented these slights masterfully, for his years on the sideshow platforms had been a trial by fire for these delicate maneuvers.

Thurston knew he passed the test when he saw Dr. Elliott dip his fingers into his vest pocket and remove his own deck of cards. Elliott took a few steps back and stretched out his right arm. At his fingertips was a single playing card. He moved his hand up and down slightly, a sort of exaggerated wave. And the card disappeared. It was the same thing he’d seen Downs perform. Elliott held his hand flat, his fingers straight, so Thurston could see his empty palm. He repeated the action and the card reappeared at his fingertips.

Thurston shook his head and exhaled in surprise. It was amazing. He suspected what must be happening, even if he didn’t know how.

Elliott began again, pulling a chair close to Thurston and speaking with the tone of a professor. It was a move that he had titled the Backhand Palm (which later became known to magicians as the Back Palm). A single card was held horizontally at the fingertips, between the thumb and the middle two fingers. By bending his knuckles in, against the back of the card, and clipping its corners between his fingers, Elliott could suddenly open his hand, transporting the card to the back of his fingers. His palm was empty, his fingers held tightly together. In that position the card was pinched against the back of his hand.

Elliott then demonstrated his improvement, an amazing somersault that invisibly transferred the card from the back of the hand to the front. In required a specific series of moves—the hand didn’t just turn over, but rolled closed with a slight flourish. As this happened, Elliott twisted his wrist so that his knuckles were momentarily pointed away from Thurston. In that position, he was able to straighten his fingers, pushing the card back against his palm. He finished the move, showing the back of his hand. Reversing the motion, the card smoothly slid around his knuckles and was concealed behind his hand again. It required a specific knack and a neat sense of touch. Thurston’s hands were ideal for the maneuver, with long, muscular fingers.

Backhand palm was a ridiculous name, of course. Before this time, if a magician concealed a card in his hand, he palmed it, holding it in his cupped palm with the back of his hand facing the audience. The art was in the naturalness of this motion. So it’s only logical that to palm a card, you use the palm of your hand. But Elliott’s misnomer indicates the unexpected and innovative nature of the discovery. There was no good way to describe it. It was a way of palming a card while your palm was empty.

The move hadn’t started with Elliott, but with a Mexican magician who wandered into a Bowery magic shop on June 2, 1892, and showed the proprietor, Otto Maurer, how he could make a card disappear. Maurer showed Dr. Elliott and Harry Houdini, and each of them began performing the maneuver. To Elliott goes the honor of refining it. Before Thurston saw it, Elliott’s achievement had already spread, like wildfire, to a group of top magicians: Barney Ives, Alexander Herrmann, Billy Robinson, Servais Le Roy, Lawrence Crane, and T. Nelson Downs—all professionals who were in a position to march onto the stage with it.

These magicians swooned over it, but only a few performers used the Back Palm; even then it was merely a fussy little interlude in the middle of a rarefied vaudeville routine. It had little impact with audiences and might have languished as a mere novelty. Houdini, who had tried to perform as a “King of Cards” several years before, boasted about performing the move, and even tried to take credit for inventing it. Ultimately Houdini had no use for the Back Palm—his act was now devoted to escapes.

To be successful, the Back Palm needed a champion—someone who would make it special for an audience and, in the process, make it practical. This is where Howard Thurston, the carnival worker and part-time confidence man, had the advantage.

 

 

IN CHICAGO,
Howard and Harry Thurston settled on a new business plan. Thurston’s Original Oddities was a midway show, according to their letterhead, offering “Original World’s Fair Oriental Dancers... Turkish Orchestra ... Beautiful Maidens of the Orient ... Life in a Turkish Harem.” They were running a “hoochie kootch” show.

Based on the success of Little Egypt and the exotic dancers at the 1893 Columbian Exposition, the kootch show (to use the sideshow slang) became a new attraction at fairgrounds. It was cheap to produce—aspiring dancers could be recruited, costumed, and enhanced with a few pennies’ worth of dark greasepaint. Besides, they didn’t really need to be good dancers. They just needed to wear abbreviated costumes and shake their hips.

The secret of the show was to promote it as vaguely cultural or exotic—to give the small-town gentlemen an excuse to queue up and pay their dimes. Once inside, the show was as efficiently lascivious as the crowd insisted or conditions allowed. Costumes could always be buttoned up, or gyrations slowed down, if there was the slightest indication of trouble from local lawmen. Of course, that was part of the con game: local lawmen could be bribed by a special audience with the exotic women.

Howard and Harry offered colored lithographs to advertise the show, promising that it would be “billed like a circus.” Howard performed as the talker out front, to “run ’em in and run ’em out,” the carnival phrase for coercing the crowd into the tent, and then efficiently ending the show and pushing them through the exit so that the new group could enter. “She’s sensational ... sen ... sa ... tion ... al!” Howard intoned from the bally platform. “She’s the world’s best Oriental dancer, brought to you direct from the midway of the Chicago World’s Fair. She twists, turns, and vibrates in ways that you never thought were possible. Let her show you! She can move every muscle, every bone, each and every part of her body!”

The show moved up through the Midwest, booked as a special attraction with fairs and carnivals. Howard insisted that his small group of dancing girls and musicians wear their makeup and exotic costumes whenever they were traveling by train, to advertise the attraction.

As Harry counted the receipts, Howard would slip into the tent and stand onstage, performing his card manipulation act. He was now adept at the Back Palm, testing each of Elliott’s moves in front of his audiences. In many ways, it was the perfect audience, for no one was there to watch card tricks. The crowd of men, shoulder to shoulder inside the tent, hooted, whistled, or impatiently stamped their feet, waiting for the girls. If Thurston could learn to impress them with his card productions, he could impress anybody. He spent every available moment, that fall of 1896, waving his hands up and down, tracing arcs around his body, twisting his wrists, and then deftly plucking playing cards from thin air. His training with Indian clubs, from his Mount Hermon days, was an inspiration—big, graceful movements of his arms concealed the smaller manipulations with the cards, and also enhanced the trick, creating a poetic flow to his motions. He was slowly becoming the world’s greatest card manipulator.

 

 

HARRY AND HOWARD
overspent on their attraction, and the following season they decided to consolidate their show with the DeKreko Brothers Congress of Eastern Oddities, a traveling tent carnival—George DeKreko had been the manager of the Streets of Cairo exhibit from the Chicago World’s Fair. This left Harry without a job, so he returned to Chicago dime museums. Howard planned the new season, contracting the dancers, musicians, and canvas men. In August 1897, as Howard was getting ready to go back on the road, he traveled from a meeting with Harry to Cincinnati for a new stock of cheap jewelry.

When the train traveled through Indianapolis, a young girl boarded, carrying her tiny tin trunk. Howard struck up a conversation. She explained that she was on her way to visit her aunt and was now a trained dancer—this was an exaggeration, as she had just learned a castanet dance and won an amateur talent contest. Howard explained that he “employed a number of dancers.” Another exaggeration, for those girls only shook their hips. He convinced her to join his show.

Born in September 1881, Grace E. Butterworth was just fifteen years old, pretty and petite, with green eyes and a mass of blond curls. She was instantly in awe of Thurston, captivated by his handsome features, his commanding voice, and his amusing sleight of hand, which he used to entertain her on the train.

Grace was also sweetly naïve. When they arrived in Cincinnati and found a hotel, Thurston signed the register, “Howard Thurston and wife.” She asked him, “When is your wife going to join us, Mr. Thurston?”

In fact, Thurston was awestruck by Grace’s chaste, girlish charms, and he surprised himself by acting the perfect gentleman. He paid for her own hotel room and began introducing Grace as his sister. They traveled to Sparta, Wisconsin, where he rejoined the DeKreko Congress of Eastern Oddities.

The brother and sister act was good cover, as it prevented Grace from being recruited for the kootch show. Meanwhile, realizing that a detective was on his trail, Thurston began to arrange their marriage. It was the masterful work of a con man. On August 14, 1897, he wrote a letter to Grace’s widowed mother, Lida Butterworth, in Indianapolis—Grace had conversationally provided the details of her family. The letter started with an obvious untruth. “I suppose Grace has told you about me and spoke of our relations to each other,” and quickly moved on to, “We want to be married ... we love each other. Am awaiting most patiently for a favorable reply.”

But Thurston didn’t want a reply; he arranged to have the letter sent from another town, so Mrs. Butterworth would be unable to trace the couple. Grace, of course, knew nothing of the letter.

Over dinner several nights later, he sweetly mumbled to Grace about how he loved her, and then kissed her on the cheek. She responded indistinctly, “Oh, I like you a lot.” The next day, as they walked through town, Thurston steered her to a Seventh-day Adventist church. He interrupted the service to suddenly announce, “We want to get married!” The minister stopped his sermon and questioned the couple briefly. Thurston claimed that Grace was sixteen, the legal age to marry in Wisconsin. After a perfunctory exchange of vows, the minister pronounced them man and wife. Grace had not discussed marriage, but was now too astonished to object.

“Never the straightforward way for him,” Grace later explained. “He played so many angles that he was always imagining a great many that were not there.”

 

 

THE DEKREKO SHOW
folded in the next town, Rhinelander, Wisconsin, and Howard and Grace organized their own small show. Grace was a quick study and a determined performer, learning the twists and turns of a kootch dance, as well as the skillful steps of a buck-and-wing, to augment her castanet dance. He billed her as Texola—he later explained that his grandmother had once seen the strange name in a dream and always considered it a good-luck charm. Grace also played the piano to accompany his act. And, of course, she learned her part in the “selling the watch” routine, which Howard still employed, as necessary, to skip out on a hotel bill.

Grace realized that Thurston was a mass of contradictions. In Duluth, Minnesota, he was thrown in jail because of his associations with a dealer in cheap jewelry. Thurston charmed the jailer, even if he failed to talk his way out of the charge. Grace visited him daily, until other friends raised the bail and transported him safely out of town. Grace noticed that Howard never returned to Duluth.