Jim Steinmeyer (40 page)

As Thurston introduced the Fire and Water Illusion and opened the curtain, Leon stood up in the auditorium and pointed a finger toward the stage. “You’re a thief and a liar!” Leon shouted. “You’re a pirate. That’s my illusion.”

The audience naturally assumed that the argument was intended as part of the show and began laughing. But Houdini instantly recognized Leon’s wheezy East Side accent and slid his chair to the shadowed corner of the booth.

Thurston was trapped. He stopped the music and gazed across the footlights as Leon continued his rant. “You took that illusion from me. It’s my illusion, and you’re a pirate.” Thurston protested politely. “Mr. Leon, I believe you’ll find that the illusion is mine, and in fact, tonight we happen to have a great historian of magic, Mr. Harry Houdini.” Thurston gestured toward the box, but noticed Houdini crouching in the shadows, his hand shielding his face. Thurston immediately changed his tactics. “And sitting next to him is Theodore Bamberg, the famous European magician. He is an expert in such matters, and can assure you that the illusion is mine.”

Bamberg, of course, was hard of hearing. He had picked up just enough of the quarrel to lean over to his son, David, asking him what was happening. But David couldn’t translate fast enough. Leon shouted, Thurston implored, and the spotlight swung onto Theo, who smiled serenely and, not realizing what was being asked, nodded toward Thurston and responded, “Yes!”

There was an awkward pause, and the spotlight wobbled back to Thurston. Leon collapsed into his chair and the show resumed. After all, the audience just wanted to see Thurston’s magic. The band resumed the music, and the show proceeded. When David Bamberg finally managed to explain to his father what had happened, Theo was indignant that he’d been dragged into the argument. Even worse, for years after that, Leon wouldn’t forgive him for the humiliation.

Fire and Water was indicative of Thurston’s dilemma in finding new material. Thurston hadn’t calculated the importance of the routine to Leon. In Thurston’s show, it was just another trick, four or five minutes of quick magic. It could have been replaced by dozens of other quick tricks. In Leon’s twelve-minute act, Fire and Water had become his trademark, and he depended on it for his career. After one season, Thurston removed the trick from his show.

 

 

THE DANTE SHOW,
which premiered in 1923, became a steady success in the market. Dante was able to play smaller cities that were too difficult to include in Thurston’s route. His program consisted of a mixture of favorites from Thurston’s show, Dante’s favorite illusions, and experimental new effects. In their letters, the two magicians developed a perfect collaboration; they regularly discussed the best staff, audiences, new ideas, and their competitors. They collaborated together on a number of illusions, which Thurston took steps to patent.

Writing to Thurston, Dante could be sharply honest; he was blunt in a way that few of Thurston’s men had ever been. “You must remember,” Thurston responded to one of Dante’s letters, “there are times when you have a nasty temper, especially when you drink and you have said several things to me that have hurt me very deeply, but you have so many fine qualities that I am always the first to overlook your fit of temper.” In 1925, while in Jacksonville, Florida, Dante attempted to place an ad in the local newspaper that compared him, favorably, with competitors like Houdini. An editor refused the ad and sent it on to his friend Houdini, who then sent a blistering note to Thurston.

Overall, the Dante and Thurston partnership was so successful that, by 1925, the two magicians were already discussing the possibility of a “Thurston Number Three” show, a smaller unit that could feature Thurston’s illusions in vaudeville theaters. Thurston considered his friend Dornfield, McDonald Birch, Jack Gwynne, Herman Hanson, Hathaway, Eugene Laurant, and a handful of other talented vaudeville magicians for the task, and debated the possibilities with Dante. He finally settled on a Pittsburgh magician with the unimpressive name of Raymond Sugden, and Thurston suggested the billing “Tampa, England’s Court Magician.” Through Harry Thurston, Howard had recently invested in some Tampa, Florida, orange groves, and he considered the name a lucky charm.

Tampa was neither more talented nor more aggressive than Grover George, and it’s difficult to understand why Thurston sought to recruit him to the cause. More than likely, he was flattered by Tampa’s helpfulness with some of his illusions. For example, Thurston’s experiments for the Hindu Rope Trick required a steam generator to provide the requisite puff of smoke; Tampa quickly designed a steam manifold and suggested a company to provide the boiler. Thurston announced Tampa with the similar praise that he’d used for Dante. In 1923 Thurston advertised:

The announcements must have ruffled Dante’s feathers. Even worse, the selection of Sugden galled him. After struggling to establish his own show on the road, he began to fret that Tampa’s cut-rate vaudeville show would undermine his own chances for success. Tampa could provide some of Thurston’s latest illusions, under the Thurston banner, for a fraction of the price. Dante wrote to Thurston:

The Tampa show had seemed like an ideal business plan. But Thurston’s men—his fellow magicians and business partners who were so important to expanding his business—were now slowly pulling the business apart.

Thurston informed Tampa that he was to finish his present engagement, and then remove the feature illusions from his show so that he wouldn’t interfere with Dante’s program—undoing his contract. Tampa was baffled by the messages, but like Grover George before him, he refused to go down without a fight.

Actually, there was already a potential “Thurston Number Four” show, put in place many years before: Gustave Fasola. When Thurston and Fasola became friends, they pledged to exchange illusions. Fasola had been touring small cities in the United States with his own illusion show, enjoying the good business and plotting to return to England. There he would duplicate the Thurston illusions for a grand new production. “I intend coming to England at the end of this year,” Fasola wrote to a friend in 1925. “I and Thurston have more illusions than all the other magicians put together.... I will study it out with Thurston to arrange a great show for England.”

Fasola’s enthusiastic plans were now a ticking time bomb. Thurston had forgotten their arrangements. Dante never heard about them.

 

 

THURSTON’S MOST DANGEROUS
threat materialized in September 1925. Harry Houdini finally left vaudeville and opened his new touring show, “An Entire Evening’s Entertainment,” according to his program, in which the famed escape artist and “Master Mystifier” assembled “three shows in one.”

Houdini’s show was an odd combination of his greatest hits and loftiest ambitions. After his failed experiments with a magic show in 1914, Houdini split the evening into distinct sections. The first part of the program consisted of magic. By all accounts, it was the least impressive part of Houdini’s performance. He stepped on stage in black tails and promptly pulled away his sleeves, which were attached with snap fasteners. His odd short-sleeved formal wear was supposed to create a unique distinction: other magicians used their sleeves to accomplish their magic. But those sleeves also served as metaphors for Houdini’s awkward approach to magic: ripping, tugging, and challenging the most elegant aspects of the art, so that he could stand apart from the crowd.

Many of the magic effects were historical, or as the program explained, “Mysterious effects that startled and pleased your grand and great-grandparents.” For example, one of the illusions, Paligenesia, was a comical effect in which a man seemed to be cut up; Houdini had seen it performed in the 1880s when he was a boy. Other effects, like the production and disappearance of lamps, bouquets of flowers, rabbits, and dancers dressed as flappers, came across as slapdash and trivial for the famous escape artist—trying to be something that he wasn’t. In the magic section, Houdini also included card manipulations. “Houdini was the first to perform the forward and back palm,” the program noted, an odd distinction that seemed pointed at his competition.

The entire evening was arranged around this self-congratulatory tone. For example, one of the act curtains consisted of sewn ribbons and awards that Houdini had received during his career as a vaudeville escape artist. Real illusions didn’t call for such boasts, dates, or dares. It was supposed to be magic.

The second part of the program consisted of Houdini’s famous escapes, like Metamorphosis, his instantaneous transposition with his wife after he was locked inside a trunk, and the Water Torture Cell, his upside-down escape from a tall tank of water. The third part of the program consisted of a dynamic lecture exposing spiritualism. Houdini gave demonstrations of how fake mediums wrote on slates, rang bells during a séance, and produced gauzy spirits in a darkened room. A section of this demonstration was devoted to Houdini’s recent exposure of Margery, the famous Boston medium, who had almost won the
Scientific American
challenge to produce genuine phenomena. Finally, Houdini answered questions from the audience and issued challenges to the local mediums. His staff had often visited the most prominent mediums of the city, which allowed him to personalize his attacks. Here Houdini’s brash style suited the performance perfectly. His spiritual exposures were a perverse sort of revival meeting. As he acted out the séance deceptions and ridiculed the foolishness of believers, like his former friend Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Houdini solicited cheers and laughs.

The show moved to Broadway at the end of the year. A reviewer in
The Sphinx
found the result overlong and self-important: “The word ‘I’ is overworked throughout.... There was too much denunciation to be palatable. The least said about his presentation of magic, the better.” But the force of Houdini’s personality had a great appeal for audiences. Dr. Wilson of
The Sphinx
, who had publicly picked fights with both Houdini and Thurston, privately told Houdini that his show packed in more magic than Thurston had in his entire evening. It was exactly what Houdini had been waiting to hear.

“We’re going to shove Thurston right off the boards,” Houdini boasted to a friend.

T
he week of Christmas 1924, Thurston was summoned to the White House for a holiday party for President Coolidge, his wife, and about twenty of his guests. A special stage was erected in the East Room, and the magician brought a handful of assistants and a truck filled with illusions, ducks, and rabbits. For the occasion he’d made special plans for a small trick.