Jim Steinmeyer (22 page)

Thurston performed in the towns of the goldfields, Kalgoorlie, Coolgardie, and Southern Cross, then moved on to Hobart, Tasmania, and up the coast through the mining towns until the finish of their tour in Townsville. The brothers had been busy trying to book dates through the Far East, with the help of Louis (Doc) Henry, a colorful, seedy old show business character. Doc Henry had made promises and issued vague threats about the competition. In Melbourne he had tried to lure Le Roy to India “before Thurston.” Le Roy turned him down. Doc Henry then sold himself to Thurston as an advance man.

Geach considered Thurston a friend, not merely an investment, and he tried to discourage the tour of China. It was notoriously difficult to arrange contracts in the Orient, he warned, especially a profitable combination of dates, from city to city. And quality theaters that could support Thurston’s show were few. But Thurston was determined. The company traveled for two weeks to Manila in the Philippines, opening at the Zorrilla Theater on April 5, 1906. They crossed the bay to Cavite, and then Hong Kong and Macao. Thurston remembered the city as a microcosm of the Orient.

Howard was enchanted with the exotic spectacle. “I had never been happier in my life,” he wrote. It had all of the exciting jangle of a busy midway, the tempting mixture of money and adventure that had filled his dreams as a boy. Winfield Blake, the actor working with Thurston, didn’t share his fascination with Macao. “It’s nothing but a big, bad smell,” he told Thurston.

There they played for several days at the Portuguese Club, and then a wealthy owner of a gambling club approached Thurston; he wanted to hire him for some private performances. The businessman offered to build a special theater, near his house outside of Macao, just for his show.

Charlie Holzmueller, a young stagehand from San Francisco, had been hired as Thurston’s machinist, and he was dumbfounded to watch this special theater erected in forty-eight hours. “There wasn’t a nail driven in it.” Maude Amber called it the Aladdin Theater, as it had seemed to appear by magic. They performed three or four shows in the special structure. Holzmueller recalled that it rained during all the performances. The muddy grounds, combined with the springy stage—bamboo and fresh-cut lumber—made the large, heavy illusions difficult to perform.

They were relieved to return to a traditional Chinese theater, the Tai Ping, in Hong Kong. The latest films from Edison were waiting at the docks. A short film of the devastation from the San Francisco earthquake was of special interest to the American cast and crew. A number of them were from San Francisco and had received wires from their families while they were traveling. But the Chinese weren’t interested in the news footage. They preferred the short comedies, particularly one that involved a small baby crawling into a doghouse.

In Hong Kong the film was a hit, but Thurston encountered a new raft of problems with the magic—he had to slow down the pace of his performance, to allow the audience to chat about each illusion after he performed it. He allowed extra time for the translator, who seemed to elaborate on every simple phrase. Finally, he found it necessary to include careful excuses why women were appearing on his stage—or even worse, in bathing costumes—during the performance. Traditionally, women did not appear on a Chinese stage. When Thurston stopped to kiss the hand of Beatrice when she emerged from the water tank, the audience voiced a loud cry of disapproval. Thurston insisted that the women in his show were necessary, and the illusions depended upon them performing in a hypnotic state. That was enough to deflect the critics. The extra time for translations, discussions, and pantomime demonstrations of hypnosis, Thurston recalled, meant that the Tai Ping Theater show ran from nine o’clock in the evening to three in the morning.

Harry left the show in Hong Kong, traveling back through Japan and arriving in Vancouver, British Columbia, late in May. He’d indulged his sense of adventure and, within several months, had his fill of show business. More than likely, he’d also bristled at his older brother, the star, who made all the decisions and actually left nothing for the “business manager” to manage. Harry didn’t want to argue. He bid his good-byes and good luck. He made his way back to Chicago.

Thurston faced more personal problems when he appeared at the Lyceum Theater in Shanghai, starting on June 1, 1906. Before one show, Beatrice and Howard shared a long, loud argument. George White and Charlie Holzmueller didn’t know the cause of the squabble, but Thurston didn’t resolve it before he stepped onstage. Beatrice, taking matters into her own hands, walked out just before the second act. She timed her exit precisely to cause the most impact—Amazement, Thurston’s revolving levitation, was her special number, and she was the only person who could perform it.

Backstage, Thurston flew into a rage but resolved to carry through with the show. He grabbed Charlie, telling him to get word to the electrician out front. “Tell Percy to run an extra film, and we’re going to rehearse someone else.” Looking around, Thurston had spotted a slender stagehand, a Chinese boy hired that week in Shanghai, who was just small enough to fit into the metal harness. It was his only possible solution.

The boy was bolted into the steel harness and given a little extra padding around the hips to fill it out. Then he was thrown into the princess’s costume and hurried to the stage.

As the film flickered out front, Thurston nervously rehearsed the steps of the levitation. Fortunately, the stagehand had spent the last few performances watching the trick from the wings and could repeat all of the action—being hypnotized, falling backward, and remaining expressionless during the routine.

When the motion picture screen lifted on the scene, the audience instantly recognized the boy as native Chinese. “In their amazement a lot of them just stood up in their seats, gaping,” Holzmueller recalled. They had excused a lot of Thurston’s magic as mysteriously foreign: the fairy-tale Arabian scenery and costumes, the cast of flamboyant Americans, and Thurston’s apparent ability to hypnotize, or otherwise control, his weak-minded assistants. But the inclusion of the Chinese boy onstage, in the middle of this fantasy world, suddenly made the illusion seem dangerously real and challenging.

He played his part perfectly, and Thurston had to stifle a laugh when he saw the boy’s accurate impersonation of Beatrice—fluttering his eyes, or pretending to fall asleep, cocking his head to one side with a sweet smile on his face. As the boy floated in the air and began to revolve in space, the Shanghai audience was held spellbound. After the trick concluded, they brought the performers back for one bow after another—both the boy and the magician. Thurston and his new princess finally stepped into the wings, inspiring even more whoops of congratulations from the crew, who had been watching the scene anxiously. The surprising ovation soothed Thurston’s temper.

At the hotel with the rest of the cast, Beatrice heard about the Chinese stagehand. The next day she returned for the show. As she was slinking back through the stage door of the theater, feeling embarrassed, Thurston sidled up to her. “Tommy, these Chinese are a funny group. Of course, I want you back in the show. But I have to listen to the audience, and I’m afraid that they liked it better without you,” he teased. “Wasn’t I lucky to find that out?”

Despite the incident, Beatrice Foster was now an essential, irreplaceable part of the show, and Thurston couldn’t afford any arguments. He was running the occasional advertisements in the American theatrical journals
The New York Dramatic Mirror
and
Billboard
, boasting of his success overseas and noting that “Miss Foster” was his chief assistant. He had dropped the husband-and-wife act, especially if Grace or any of their friends could read about it.

The Thurston company traveled to Kobe and Yokohama, Japan. Then they returned through Hong Kong to Saigon for a week of engagements, passed through Singapore, and headed to Batavia, and then Surabaya, Java, in September 1906. In Java, the show traveled from the wharf with the heavy crates piled high on twenty oxcarts. The following month they performed in Rangoon, Burma. In Calcutta, India, they opened at His Majesty’s Theater on October 22, 1906.

 

 

HOWARD THURSTON
was fascinated by India, and over his months of travel he had been anticipating his tour there. Howard had been told that the famous Indian fakirs, the street magicians throughout the country, would show him marvels unseen by any Westerner. He passed word among the Calcutta magicians that he would welcome them at his hotel. A number arrived, but he was disappointed in their magic. “Many of them were very clever at sleight of hand,” he wrote, “and had highly developed personality and showmanship.” But invariably, they relied on a small set of skills like palming or misdirection, as they crouched on the ground. He asked if any of the magicians could perform the famous Indian Rope Trick, in which a rope rose in the air and a boy climbed to the top. Most of the fakirs had never heard of it, and none could show him. In search of anything that he could use in his performances, Thurston auditioned performers during his free time in Calcutta. Finally, he was told that the very best magicians would come to see him. They arrived, dressed in bright, theatrical costumes, and proceeded to show him their best routines. After the show, they explained that they’d learned them in Chicago, when they worked at the 1893 World’s Fair, a little farther down the midway from Thurston’s platform at the Dahomey Village.

Eventually, Thurston was told that the mere street fakirs were not the keepers of the secrets, and he and his company were introduced to a yogi, a holy man, who was supposedly capable of self-levitation. Talking through an interpreter, the yogi solemnly informed Thurston about his careful ritual; the yogi needed to spend five days in the mountains, living on nothing but lamb’s blood and engaging in prayer. Then he could sit cross-legged, breathe deeply, and rise into the air. If Thurston would pay the man’s meager expenses, he promised a demonstration. Thurston paid him and awaited his return.

Winfield Blake laughed it all off, pointing out how the only thing that the yogi managed to raise was a donation for the lamb! Beatrice found the promise ridiculous. She’d now seen too many fakirs with their elaborate promises and disappointing tricks.

But Howard seemed convinced by the wizened old wizard, and over the weeks, he gradually talked himself into believing the man’s powers. “If this man can do it, if he can really accomplish this, then I have to learn it. I’ll stay here in India and learn his secret, copy his diet and his prayers, even if it takes years,” he told his company.

Thurston was a canny enough con man to have recognized a swindle, but his ecumenical education at Dwight Moody’s school had morphed into a very different point of view. If Grace Thurston’s account was correct—that her husband had developed no personal faith to sustain him in difficult times—it suggests that his principle education from Mount Hermon was the pose of a sophisticate and a young man of faith. By the turn of the century, Thurston’s London society shows and New York vaudeville successes had allowed him to rub elbows with real society. There he saw that Moody’s open-minded acceptance of other religions had been supplanted by a new fashion, Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophy. The root of true religious wonders, according to Theosophy salons, could be found in India, and manifested in the occult. Thurston’s professed interest in these phenomena was a sign that he had erased his past as a hard-boiled carnival talker. If Thurston didn’t really believe in the marvels of Indian magic, he had learned the value of this pose and learned to con himself.

The cast was surprised by their boss’s willingness to trust the yogi; it seemed incredible to them that he might be willing to forgo his career for such ridiculous promises. Inevitably, the yogi failed to return for the demonstration, and Thurston realized that he’d been taken for a handful of rupees.

In fact, the newspaper reviews made it clear that the greatest magic in India was Thurston’s performance at His Majesty’s Theater. The sleight of hand was more astonishing than any fakirs; the levitation feat, Amazement, was more imaginative than the usual Indian legends. There they played to European audiences—not to the natives—and worked to capacity crowds for four weeks before moving on to Bombay.

The show then returned to Calcutta, where they settled at the Classic Theater for twelve weeks. At the Classic, Thurston quickly learned a new set of taboos. The trick in which he pulled eggs from the mouth of a boy from the audience earned him murmurs and shouts. Hindus considered the egg unclean. Even worse was a cute little routine called Feeding the Baby, in which a piglet seemed to slurp down a big bottle of milk. Pigs were considered offensive by many in the crowd, and during an early performance, when Thurston’s pig jumped from the stage, the audience scattered for the exits. George chased the squealing piglet into the auditorium and removed it from the theater before Thurston could lure the Indians back inside.

Planning ahead, Howard hit on an ingenious scheme. He commissioned a tent to be made in Calcutta, a three-post monstrosity that seated two thousand people. His company located a Chinese tentmaker who was willing to take on the job, and Thurston supervised the work, producing a perfect replica of the wonderful American circus tents of his youth. The name “Thurston” was painted in large letters on the big top, and an American flag flew on the center pole. This way, the Great Thurston show would be guaranteed to find audiences even in the cities where a theater was not available—Lall Bagh, Benares, and Lucknow. It was a return to the old Thurston Brothers tent show days—the circus and sideshow business that he had shared with Harry.