Jim Steinmeyer (51 page)

Ed Sullivan, then a columnist for the New York
Daily News
, reported on Thurston’s career:

Author Fulton Oursler had been in the audience when Kellar introduced Thurston as his successor at Ford’s Theater in Baltimore. Oursler wrote of Thurston’s sincere friendship—as a fellow magician, a fellow Mason, and a man intrigued by the occult.

Dante was traveling through Europe when he was told of Thurston’s death. Unable to return for the funeral, he penned a long, effusive memorial to his friend and business partner. In it, he noted:

It’s not surprising that Dante’s assistants noticed their boss burst into tears upon hearing of Thurston’s death. But Harry Blackstone also cried, silently, in his dressing room when he heard that his old nemesis was gone.

Blackstone didn’t admit it, of course; he was famous for his offstage swagger. But as he heard the news, his brother Pete happened to walk past the room and was surprised to see him sobbing, facedown, on the dressing table. Blackstone had longed to be America’s most popular magician, but was devastated to lose his competition. Thurston had challenged him as a gentleman, set the goals, established the market, and kept Blackstone’s show as professional as it could possibly be.

 

 

HARRY THURSTON
had been too uncomfortable to attend the funeral. Like many tough personalities, he was prone to fits of maudlin tears, and he worried that would have presented a spectacle, sitting and bawling in the pew at the Columbus church.

There’s no record of Harry’s reaction to his brother’s death—no written tribute from Howard’s oldest partner in show business. He must have realized that the focus would be shifting—the press would talk about Paula and Jane, and show business publications would speculate about the next great magic shows. Harry had been able to stand in his brother’s shadow for several years, but after Howard’s death, even those shadowy opportunities were finished.

But it’s also possible that, had Harry Thurston attended the funeral, he would have found opportunities to guffaw. After Howard’s death, every commentator believed the story that he had been trained for the ministry, and offered this as evidence of his smooth presentations and his sincere knowledge of human nature. No one but Harry could have believed that he had actually been schooled as a pickpocket and confidence man; this was even better evidence of his smooth presentations and his sincere knowledge of human nature.

In fact, once Howard Thurston had become successful and re-created himself, he managed to gain fame for qualities that were, debatably, some of his worst: an entrepreneur, businessman, family man, inventor, and investor. It was a scam that Harry would have appreciated, and one of the few parts of his brother’s personality that he ever understood.

 

 

GEORGE MARQUIS
was an itinerant magician, and a friend of both Howard and Harry Thurston. Shortly after Thurston’s death, he happened to be in Charleston, West Virginia, and snapped a picture of the remnants of the magician’s twenty-four-sheet poster pasted on a tall fence. In the slang of the bill poster, Harry’s old job, a stand was a wall of advertising; this fence in Charleston was literally Thurston’s “last stand.”

In his scrapbook, Marquis pasted a copy of the sad photograph, and then attached a typed poem that he’d composed. It was a traveling showman’s ode to the World’s Greatest Magician—part lingo, part poetry, without any high-flown folderol or philosophical exaggerations.

J
ust weeks after the magician’s death, his estate made headlines: “Thurston’s Will, a Strange Document, Admitted to Probate Court.” According to the document, Thurston had left $500 to his “adopted daughter, Jane Jacqueline Thurston,” with this explanation:

Paula wasn’t spared any embarrassment. The remainder of the estate was left to his widow, but she was required to agree to “discontinue a personal habit” of which he disapproved. Should she fail, the money would go to building a mausoleum in Columbus, Ohio. Later articles explained that Paula’s habit was drinking. Paula shrugged it off to reporters.

Thomas MacMahon, Thurston’s attorney, was quick to explain that Thurston had intended to change the will. It was drawn up, he claimed, when Thurston was angered that his wife left him to be with her sister during an operation. At the same time, he had been quarreling with his daughter over her desire for a movie career. Jane filed a suit to protest the will, insisting that her father “was not in proper mental condition” to draw up the will during the last months of his life. For reporters, she demonstrated her relationship with her father by playing a phonograph disc that Thurston had recorded a year earlier—he pledged his love for her and reminisced about her childhood.

But it was a single word in the will that had rattled Jane: “adopted.” It was the first time she understood that she was not Thurston’s daughter. At the time, she was living in Weehawken with her “Aunt Lady,” Leotha’s sister, Emma Van Blarcom. Emma explained that Jane had been born at that same apartment building, and that her last name was Willadsen.

A month after Thurston’s death, Jane traveled to Los Angeles and met her father, John Willadsen, who was then living in retirement with his second wife.

 

 

THERE WAS
the expected ridiculous publicity. The day after Thurston’s death, Dunninger, a New York magician and mind reader, claimed that his friend had made a pact that he would return from the grave, and break a small Egyptian statue of Ramses that he had given Dunninger many years before. The article, “Awaits Sign from Thurston,” ran in the New York
Sun
.

Not to be outdone, the following day Mrs. Houdini posed for a picture in the New York
Daily News
, holding a pair of locked handcuffs. The caption explained that she was still waiting for Houdini to return “in a life-after-death compact between her and her late husband-magician.” Presumably, the ghosts of the magicians were still battling each other for publicity.

In the last few months of Thurston’s life, Tampa had been sending letters to him, seeking a financial settlement on their failed contract. After Thurston’s death Tampa filed a lawsuit against the estate, claiming damages for expenses, lost contracts, as well as “damage to his reputation as a magician.” Newspapers reported that he was suing for $599,474. Most of this, of course, was based on Tampa’s inflated sense of the opportunities he had been denied.

The suit was settled a year later for $1,000. Tampa could continue using the name, and also utilize the illusions he still had in his possession.

Another mind reader, Rajah Raiboid, produced a contract from March 1936, when Thurston was recovering in Miami Beach. Presumably he was arranging a partnership with Thurston for that fall. Thurston would supply the illusions and the title would read, “Thurston the Magician with Rajah Raiboid.” Raiboid wrote to
Billboard
, claiming that he would be taking out the show with the billing, “Successor to The Great Howard Thurston.” But the estate ignored his claim and, without any of Thurston’s props, Raiboid had no show.

 

 

IN THE END,
there was very little money. The Beechhurst property had been lost to foreclosure. The Florida land had been ruined in a hurricane. Most of the investments had already dissolved, but there was still stock left from the Canadian gold mines, just over $20,000 in “good assets.” Thurston owed back taxes for the last three years of income, and taxes on the ruined Florida property. Paula received just over $8,000.

As the Thurston estate was settled, Jane discovered that she had been named the beneficiary of a small insurance policy, and that props and scenery of the Thurston show were now in her name. Working with George and Herman Hanson, she learned the intricate choreography of her father’s famous Floating Ball and Spirit Cabinet routines, intending to sign a new act with producers Fanchon and Marco. But as the project dragged on, Jane became impatient. She was tired of the association with the illusion show, and embarrassed by the Thurston family squabbles.

 

 

PAULA THURSTON
remarried in 1938. Around that time, a magician and an admirer of Thurston’s, John Booth, met her at a nightclub. It was apparent to Booth, from her slurred speech, that she had continued to overindulge in drinking, despite her promises. She died in 1943.

DURING HIS TOUR
with Thurston, John Northern Hilliard had been carrying his memorial from city to city. He had gathered together many of the best tricks from hundreds of magicians, compiling them into a bulging manuscript for a projected book. Through the efforts of Thurston, and then editor Jean Hugard and publisher Carl Jones, it was published as
Greater Magic
in 1938, a book of more than a thousand pages and one of the most enlightened texts on the practice of magic.

 

 

DANTE HAD
a long, successful career in magic. He returned to the United States in 1939, upon the outbreak of the Second World War, with his assistant, an elegant Australian showgirl named Moi-Yo Miller. His magical review,
Sim Sala Bim
, appeared on Broadway at the Morosco Theater in 1940, where critics praised the old-fashioned fun of his magic. Dante continued touring across America, also appearing in fairgrounds, on television, and occasionally in films. He retired to a ranch in the San Fernando Valley, outside of Los Angeles, and died there in 1955.