“Crack,” Harry would snarl.
“When I was in India...” Boston would start, under his breath.
Harry picked up the cue: “When I was in India, I went out to the wheat fields. Crack.”
“There I saw a peculiar sight,” Boston mumbled under his breath.
“There I saw a peculiar sight. I saw a priest place a young girl on the points of two swords. Then ... Crack.”
“Then he would cause her to float...”
Harry repeated the words, with more and more frustration: “Then he would cause her to float. Crack! Crack, goddamn it. Crack!”
When they finally got to the levitation, pretty, blond Rae Palmer was levitated using a much simpler mechanism to duplicate Howard’s famous trick. In the show, Rae was introduced as Rae Thurston, and everyone on the show assumed she was Harry’s wife—although his actual wife, Belle, was still living in Miami.
Rae and Harry invariably started an argument as she floated in the air. As he passed the hoop over her, he would mumble to Boston, “George, don’t ever marry a woman, they’re all dumb.” This elicited a remark from the floating princess. “Harry, you son of a bitch, stop your complaining and get on with the trick.”
Harry responded in a whisper, “Shut up or I’ll knock you off this thing.” He turned grandly to the assistants in Indian makeup. “Pray, Abdul! Pray as you prayed in the temples of Love in Allahabad! Pray, I command you!” And then, under his breath, he’d snarl, “Pray, or I’ll break your goddamned neck.”
Percy Abbott never forgave Harry Thurston for destroying such beautiful illusions. During the last phase of the famous Thurston levitation, the lady beneath the cloth was replaced with a special metal form that could be levitated using fine threads. Harry Thurston was unable to locate the threads with his fingers, and his solution was to feel over the surface of the form to locate them. Abbott chastised him after the shows. “To the audience, that’s a lady under the cloth. You can’t run your hands over her body that way!” Harry blinked, uncomprehendingly. To him, it wasn’t a girl, but just a metal form. Abbott later wrote, “There is a romance and glamour that must be prevalent in the mind of the performer, in order that it can be conveyed to the audience. Harry Thurston had none of this.”
Backstage, Harry was unpredictable and dictatorial, stingy and self-obsessed. During the tour, he seemed hypersensitive to any perceived slight from his brother. He complained to him in a letter: “You had to add more insult by sending on one of your stool pigeons to the
Billboard
. Not one word was mentioned about me, but they mentioned Jane, Lee [Leotha], and Rat Chase [Thurston’s company manager and Leotha’s nephew, George Chase]. Does this look like good will?” Harry recounted a list of necessary duties he’d been asked to perform—twisting the arms of Howard’s business associates. “This letter is a very unpleasant duty.” Howard responded:
I have given you more than good will. In fact, you would have had no magic show if it were not for me. Under no circumstances will I ever lay myself liable for lawsuits or debts to your show. The thing you call good will does not include such liabilities.
The first season of Mysteries of India was just twenty-one days, and it rained for twenty of them. The staff was shocked when Harry reassembled the show the following year. In 1933, the tents were abandoned and the performances took place at the Sparks Theater chain in Florida. By then, Harry advertised the show with three portraits, Howard (“Famous Magician”), Harry (“White Yogi”), and William Thurston, their father, who was credited as a “Spiritualist Magi.” The billing was ridiculous, as their father was neither a performer nor a mystic. It was a silly attempt at a new legacy, echoing the Herrmann, Kellar, and Thurston progression that represented a great tradition.
Assistants who traveled with Harry Thurston were convinced that he was smuggling liquor during Prohibition, in partnership with the Chicago or Cleveland mobs—the multiple trucks and the hiding places inside the magic cabinets would have made this an easy task. But it’s clear that Harry thought of himself as a performer and was satisfied only standing in the spotlight. Even if Harry Thurston’s Mysteries of India was not a crime, it remained an insult to the audiences and a humiliation to his brother.
WITH TICKET PRICES
dropping and theaters eliminating live shows for motion pictures, Thurston watched his profits dwindling. It was a domino effect. “Although we have a good show, and do more business than most shows, still we have a hard time of it,” he wrote to Dante, who was in Europe.
Not only because of bad business conditions, but the fact that many theaters are closed and our railroad jumps have been very long with heavy expense of fares. We let five people go to get the show down to one baggage car.
The magician had borrowed on his life insurance policies and even considered filing for bankruptcy. Thurston was now desperate for money—attempting one last appeal for the Monkey Case, repay debts to Harry, and support his failing investments. “Be careful in any correspondence or cables about mentioning the Monkey Case,” he warned Dante, “as Mrs. Thurston is so very ill that it would be dangerous to tell her.”
When the show resumed that fall, Abe Lastfogel, of the William Morris Agency, provided an ingenious solution. Working at the Publix theaters, a chain of motion picture presentation houses in the New York area, Thurston performed a forty-five- or sixty-minute show in conjunction with a first-run feature. By the early ’30s, the large theater chains were looking for live shows to offer, luring audiences to attend.
The venture gave Thurston a new opportunity, but the work was especially hard. Thurston started at eleven a.m. in the theater and occupied all his time onstage, or resetting props and resting in his dressing room backstage. He finished each night around midnight, after performing four or five shows a day. It was grueling work for a man over sixty. “At last they have me in jail,” he grumbled to his attorney.
The situation was made even tougher by Thurston’s stubborn insistence on including all of the features of his show. The program included Thurston’s card routine, the Levitation of Princess Karnac, Sawing a Woman in Half, Iasia, the Vanishing Automobile, and the Water Fountains. He also included two new illusions, Out of a Hat, in which dozens of parasols and several ladies were produced from oversized top hats, and Seeing Through a Woman, in which a lady was apparently sliced into three pieces, and her torso disappeared. “Picture house magicians have to frame a show in a flashy and spectacular nature,” he told
Billboard
. “The usual smaller tricks will not be effective.” For this collection of wonders, Thurston’s crew was required to cut trapdoors, suspend boxes over the auditorium, hang scenery and special equipment in the grid. “We have the satisfaction of playing to the biggest business they ever had, though it does not increase our salaries.”
The new Publix theaters were often enormous, seating as many as three or four thousand people. When Thurston presented his full show in theaters, tickets could be a dollar or more, but in movie theaters in some cities, tickets might be offered to children for ten or fifteen cents. For Thurston it was an entirely new audience, and they responded enthusiastically. John Mulholland went to see one of Thurston’s shows in Brooklyn and was dumbfounded by the audience response. He wrote in
The Sphinx
, “Trick after trick was applauded in a way I have never seen in a movie house. This tour has proven that in a theater or in one of these tremendous amusement factories, he is still The Great Thurston.” The tour of movie theaters took Thurston across America and to the West Coast—more than thirty years after he’d played Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Jane and Harry Harris settled into an apartment in Pittsburgh, but the marriage was doomed. In 1932, Jane returned to Beechhurst, reporting that she was afraid of Harry. Howard contacted an attorney and Jane filed for divorce.
Jane’s parents suggested that she take a job as a singer with the Isham Jones Band. Jones was Thurston’s friend, a popular bandleader who was a famously proper family man. He had also composed a number of hit songs, including “It Had to Be You.” A job with Jones seemed to be a good compromise as Jane sorted out her divorce, which was finalized in the autumn of 1932. When Thurston’s tour resumed around the same time, Jane was billed as a special attraction.
AN UNEXPECTED SURPRISE
arrived from the J. Walter Thompson Agency in Chicago, who arranged a profitable contract for Thurston to appear on the NBC Radio Blue Network. For years the magician had made radio appearances to promote his show. His distinctive voice carried well on the radio, and his entertaining stories about his travels and adventures enhanced any interview. The radio shows, titled
Thurston the Magician
, were sponsored by Swift and Company, a meatpacking firm. Each episode was a dramatized adventure—some loosely based on events from Thurston’s early career—in which he solved a crime or emerged as the hero of a situation. He introduced each story, often playing off of adolescent sidekicks, and incorporated a “do-it-yourself” magic trick into the show. Additional tricks, or packets of tricks in distinctive orange envelopes, could be ordered through the sponsor.
Each show was fifteen minutes and ran on Thursday and Friday evenings; the series premiered on November 3, 1932. When his tour resumed, he sometimes managed to dash to the local NBC studios for the broadcast, but when he was unable to accommodate the schedule, the producers used an actor for Thurston’s lines. Leotha, now at home listening to each show, gave notes to her husband. In November 1932, after one episode, she sent a telegram with blunt suggestions:
Dearest,
Radio story last night weak. Not enough mystery. Another man in cast talks too much like yourself making story and characters hard to follow. You started off big, falling down now.
The radio shows rewarded the magician with an even larger audience. His life story had been serialized in
Collier’s
magazine, and he worked on a talking film script, titled
Jimmy
or
Blind Baggage
, which was a lightly fictionalized version of his childhood adventures. Working with other writers, Thurston also developed scripts on supernatural or occult themes. One, titled
The Wolfman
, was written with playwright Fritz Blocki. It was an interesting pastiche of Egyptian myths and mysterious crimes, unrelated to the later Hollywood horror film of the same name. In each of Thurston’s outlines, it’s easy to identify the character that he would play. He was writing roles as well as stories. Unfortunately, none of these scripts were produced. He explained to
Billboard
:
Whenever I approached the picture people on an idea, they explained, politely but firmly, that personally I was a swell fellow ... but they could do better tricks with their cameras than I could ever hope to do with magic.
On March 14, 1933, the Chicago Society of American Magicians hosted a special dinner in honor of Thurston, celebrating twenty-five years since his acquisition of the Kellar show. At the Nankin Restaurant, Werner Dornfield closed the evening with a special performance. The curtain opened on Guy Jarrett, Thurston’s argumentative old assistant, standing on stage in makeup to look like Harry Kellar. Dornfield joined him on stage, now made up to look like a young Howard Thurston. The two men re-created the mythic moment in which Kellar placed the “mantle of magic” on the shoulders of his young protégé.
Dorny then proceeded with a long, funny burlesque of Thurston’s famous card act, performing the maneuver faultlessly, but without a single card. Jarrett stepped back onstage, pulling the mantle off young Thurston’s shoulders. “I’ve changed my mind,” he announced. “This isn’t for you.” He reached under the cloak. “This is for you!” He magically produced a Swift ham, presenting it to Dornfield. Thurston, sitting at the head table, laughed loudly in approval.
THE LOCAL MAGICIANS
assumed that Thurston was in Chicago to plan his latest radio shows. Actually, Leotha had suffered a serious breakdown, and in January she was confined to a room at the Parkway Hotel under a doctor’s care—secretly treated for barbiturate addiction. Leotha was in Chicago for over a month, and Howard was with her for most of this time. On February 6, she composed a long, confused letter to Jane back at Beechhurst, indicating her state of mind, and then sent it special delivery:
They have taken everything from me. They have lied about me (that I can’t help). Dad has broken me down. I wish I had taken my own way out long ago, I have only remained here to keep you. They won’t lick me dear. I may pass on. I wish I could. I’ve tried to be a good mother but through hard work I’ve broken down. I never took medicine except through a Doctor’s orders (and I needed it because my nerves are broken down from hard work.) I am slowly dying; the end cannot come too soon for me. If only I could get out of here. I’m in a terrible fix and God knows there’s no use for it; they are killing me for no reason. Please destroy this and please for God’s sake, yours and mine, don’t tell Isham. Just please tear it up; it may be the last request I may ever make.
Just three days later, Thurston wrote to a friend that his wife “has had a doctor and nurse for the past week, and is feeling much better than she has in the past, and we are all delighted.”
IN 1933,
Fred Keating was performing his act at the prestigious Capitol Theater in New York. Keating had started his career as the magic-mad boy who ran away to join Thurston’s show and arrived late for the pigeon trick. By the early 1930s, he had become a sophisticated actor, magician, and master of ceremonies, one of the few performers whose clever humor made the smooth transition from vaudeville to theaters and nightclubs. He invited Thurston, his old boss, to come and see his act.