I Lie for Money

by Steve Spill

  Diana was perhaps half a dozen years older than I, very attractive, and most generous with advice to younger magicians. She did a novel magic act with albums, those round pieces of vinyl, which was how we used to listen to recorded music. She manipulated LPs—long play albums—as well as singles—78s and 45s—not unlike some handled cards.

  Her biz was making record albums float, diminish, and disappear, and for a finish she made a Victrola appear—a long out of production product from the Victor Talking Machine Company. Google it.

  Just after I was too old to join, she founded a junior magic society at the Magic Castle for the under twenty-one set, which I believe she still heads up today.

  Also to my dismay, as a young man I personally failed to get to know well or tutorially experience veteran performer and potential mentor Billy McComb, whose hilarious style as well as his superior magic had my utmost admiration. McComb moved to Los Angeles and joined the Castle fraternity in the seventies just as I was leaving the nest to relocate to Aspen. His artistry and the trajectory, consistency, and longevity of his career are attributes I aspire to.

  Mark Wilson, a popular TV magician in the sixties and seventies, and one of the only regularly working guys in our craft of the era, was either too busy being on TV and doing corporate events for me to get to know well, or was repelled by my very existence, but influential nonetheless. Wilson was sitting on a bench outside the Castle waiting for his car, a Lincoln Continental, when I first met him. “Success in magic,” Mark said, “is the sum of salesmanship plus talent. There’s no shortage of talent, and there’s no shortage of salesmanship. There is a shortage, however, of the combination of both talent and salesmanship in one person. You can have either one or the other and be a complete failure. You need both to succeed.” Wilson then added, “I was talking about professional success. As far as one’s personal private success is concerned, you need guts.”

  The master magicians on this list—colorful characters all—were what I consider to be my college professors, and the inspiration and guidance I got from them was tailored specifically for my consumption since they knew me personally.

  They offered real knowledge that came from the experience of doing tens of thousands of shows. Above all, the one thing I learned most from my professors is that it is the magician’s artistry and personality that give the audience an emotional response and sense of mystery, more so than the trick.

  With the exception of Dai Vernon, the really interesting magicians to me were not handsome men. It was the characters who were different, who had unique quirks and problems to overcome, whom I, and I think audiences, liked best. These were extraordinary men, vital and forthright, and each had within himself great powers. There was also a bit of madness in these great magicians, and if they were to surrender it, they might be forfeiting their greatest asset.

  When I arrived at the Magic Castle back in the Stone Age, these were the men who impressed me the most: Dai Vernon, Kuda Bux, Carazini, Tony Slydini, Charlie Miller, Senator Clark Crandall, Francis Carlyle, and Albert Goshman. If you’re not exactly sure who these guys are, or were, it is only fair that I bring them sharply into focus.

  Dai Vernon—“The Man Who Fooled Houdini” didn’t fool The Great One once or twice, but rather he did it seven times in a row with a single card trick. Houdini boasted that if he saw a trick performed three times in a row he would be able to figure it out. Vernon then showed Houdini the same trick over and over and over. Each time Houdini insisted that Vernon “do it again.” Finally Houdini’s wife and friends said, “Face it, Houdini, you’re fooled,” which gave birth to Vernon’s legendary designation.

  Mr. Dai Vernon, head of the class of my personal heroes, was a dapper man with one of the two finest heads of silver-white hair at the Magic Castle—the other one belonged to Bill Larsen. Dai also had a silver mustache larger than one of his eyebrows but not quite as large as the two, and eyes that sparkled with an imperial confidence. When people say, “He was in a class by himself,” they are talking about Vernon. Dai adored anyone who took a serious interest in sleight of hand and spent a large part of his life counseling and advising them with a dignified reserved indulgence.

  He was a man who had always lived his life by his wits, and made friends everywhere and in all social climates—a very skilled raconteur with a vast repertoire of interesting anecdotes. I spent many enjoyable hours sitting with Vernon listening to him relate countless stories about the legendary magicians he had known. He would speak with the freshness one has for yesterday morning’s happenings of celebrities he encountered like Billy Rose and various Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Astors, and Roosevelts—stories about actors, crooked gamblers, circus folk, pickpockets, vaudevillians, and carnival grifters. I didn’t know about any of those people; they were all new to me.

  Dai Vernon and me in a manly embrace.

  He was in his seventies when we met, and he lived to be ninety-eight years old, passing away in 1992. Probably the greatest contributor to the art of close-up magic who ever walked the earth, due to his extraordinary knowledge of and skill at sleight of hand, everybody affectionately called Dai Vernon “The Professor.”

  And The Professor had a nickname for me: Spill, short for my real last name, Spillman. He affectionately said he dropped the “man” because I was a boy magician. Spill. Vernon called me that, boy and man, all his life. The nickname stuck and eventually became my legal name. Funny, when Vernon first called me a boy magician, I felt like a man. Now, as a sixty-year-old magician, I feel like a boy.

  Like me, The Professor started the study of magic when he was six years old. “I wasted the first six years of my life,” he was fond of telling people. Having an interest in magic since we were small boys was all we really had in common. Among aficionados and experts in the field, he became the all-time single most world-renowned innovative artistic genius of magic that others wrote books about. I became a working guy who had to write his own book about himself. Sure it’s best to have one’s vanity served by others. But when all else fails, you do it yourself.

  Before making Hollywood his permanent home, Vernon spent a lot of his life traveling all over the United States of America looking for card cheats, even arranging to interview ones who were jailed convicts because he felt the sleight of hand used by gamblers was superior to that used by magicians. His rationale was that a magician might get away with something sneaky because in a show one can misdirect by word or gesture and do anything within the limits of acting. Even if the audience saw something fishy they might be polite, take it in stride, and not mention it. But at a card table, where people were betting money, you’re under the closest observation, and players generally are not polite if they see something suspicious. If a gambler cheated by using a secret sleight, he/she had to be very clever.

  Vernon had a way of meeting any crooked gambler he wished to know and of winning that person’s confidence, learning their methods, and applying them to his magic. An entire book, 2005’s The Magician and the Cardsharp by Karl Johnson, was written about Vernon’s search for a gambler who invented a sleight known as the “center deal.”

  The Professor was perhaps the single most influential card magician of the twentieth century, partly because he used card cheat sleights with which other magicians were unfamiliar, but also because he could take a second-rate trick and turn it into a masterpiece. Vernon twisted, changed, and made things more logical and more magical. Whatever trick he did became his own.

  Besides tricks with cards, he is credited among magicians with inventing or improving many other standard close-up tricks with coins and other small items. The “standard” Cups and Balls routine is his, and his 6-ring “Symphony of the Rings” remains one of the most popular Chinese Linking Rings routines in use to this day.

  The Castle became a landmark for magicians, hallowed ground, and that fact was accelerated by Vernon’s arrival. Magicians around the country started moving to Hollywood to be near him. Old magicians came to see
Vernon before they died and young magicians came to see him before he died.

  Nearly every Wednesday between 1969 and 1973, I ditched school and hitchhiked (traveling by thumb was then the popular teenage mode of transportation) to the Magic Castle. The Castle wasn’t open in the afternoon, and therefore the steady flow of tricksters who started to move to LA to be near Vernon were nowhere to be found, so I had The Professor mostly to myself. I’d sneak in through the kitchen and go straight to the music room in time to meet my guru, Dai Vernon, who would be finishing up his piano lesson—given to him by Ray Grismer—a retired teacher and expert magician himself, who traded piano lessons for sleight of hand instruction. I was there for the same reason, lessons in sleight of hand.

  Vernon was very generous with certain secrets if he was convinced you had a genuine interest. If I mentioned how much I admired a trick he performed, he taught me the rudiments. I practiced the sleights, came back, showed him, or I had rearranged the sleights and made them into my own trick. I’d ask him not how good, but how bad he thought it was. I’d say, “Don’t tell me if I’m good. Tell me when I‘m bad, criticize me severely.” Sometimes he liked it or said the plot of the trick was confusing, or it needed some misdirection to hide a secret maneuver.

  If you practiced and learned, he gave you more and more. I learned dozens of different methods of palming, forcing, controlling cards, false deals, false cuts, false shuffles, double lifts, the pass, the hop, and the shift. Like jazz, these techniques could be combined in numbers of ways to create different tricks, I learned.

  The Professor helped me become a dedicated craftsman, and encouraged me to experiment and explore and try to find my way with trial and error. And no matter how foolish I might have looked trying to do a trick or how poorly I might have performed some sleight, Vernon would push me on the next attempt to be more focused, more confident, and more relaxed. And his training was far from just mechanical—he taught me how thought and soul find their way into sleight of hand. He looked at playing cards as living, breathing beings.

  Often the party moved to one of several nearby coffee shops; sometimes Vernon supplied transportation. He was still driving his old MG convertible with the leather seats and the walnut gearshift back then—it was always an adventure when we pulled away in a cloud of carbon monoxide. He never jumped a curb or grazed a tree, but it seemed to me that The Professor was often narrowly missing various things, like pedestrians. Never without his dashing nature, Vernon would look at me and nod confidently whenever we almost collided with something or someone.

  Dai had a monthly column, “The Vernon Touch,” in Genii Magazine, a periodical for magicians published by Castle founder Bill Larsen. Of all the great qualities Vernon had, and there were so many more than I have room to share in this book, there was one thing that set him apart from everything else. He really thought I had a future as a magician, and he wrote complimentary things about me in his column.

  Those kind words sprinkled throughout “The Vernon Touch” led to a small magic dealer publishing a little book of my original tricks. Even though I was still a teen, as a result of that publication in 1973, My Hands Can Be Yours—a bad title with which I went along—I was invited to perform my close-up act and lecture to other magicians at a couple of national conventions.

  About five years ago I received an email that read: I recently attended an auction and bought a collection of magic books. Inside a copy of My Hands Can Be Yours are the words “Property of Dai Vernon,” would you like to own it? When I look at Vernon’s familiar fancy handwritten block-lettered autograph in that book now, it brings back memories of our visits in the happy times of long ago. Sometimes The Professor would gaze upon me as I held a deck of cards and seem to be reliving his own early ambitions to be a magician. Vernon liked to sip brandy, puff on cigars, and discuss yesterdays, usually with a little grin on his face, the sort of half-smile that seemed to say, “I know something you don’t know,” which was always true.

  Kuda Bux—“The Man with the X-Ray Eyes” covered each eye with a half-dollar, on top of which he put soft bread dough balls which he squished into his eye sockets, put strips of surgical tape over the dough, wrapped bandages around his head, followed by multiple layers of thick cloth napkins, and yet somehow the master mystifier still was able to see.

  With all that stuff wrapped around his head he looked like the “Jack” character from the Jack in the Box fast food restaurants, but without dots for eyes and the line for the mouth. In that condition he fired a rifle at targets indicated by a volunteer, duplicated handwriting or drawings, played tic-tac-toe on a blackboard with a spectator, added columns of numbers, read aloud from books, and described accurately the contents of purses, wallets, and coat pockets. It was he who drove, blindfolded, through city streets in search of a hidden needle.

  Then, after each and every performance, he mislaid his cigarettes and lost his glasses, and couldn’t find them. Without the blindfold, he looked like a very dark-skinned Pakistani cross between Jamie Farr from the old “Mash” TV series and Wolfman from old horror movies. He smelled of curry and tobacco, had deep-set eyes, big bushy eyebrows, and had lots of hair growing on and out of his ears—not little tufts, but full crops that he brushed back and blended with his full of head of hair.

  Over the course of his career, Kuda was a magnificent charlatan and mystic of esoteric skills who had been many things in many places. He was a master of thought transference, a clairvoyant, a firewalker, could stop his pulse at will, toured with his own full-evening magic and illusion show, and he had the newspaper clippings in his scrapbook to prove it.

  I spent some time turning the pages of the scrapbook. Several newspaper articles written in foreign languages were pasted in. There were both English and American ones from the 1930s depicting Kuda walking across burning hot coals—that’s over fifty years before Tony Robbins and others of his ilk popularized the pastime as a symbol of students’ courage and personal empowerment. Bux’s feet were checked before and after the fire-walking demonstration to verify that no protective chemicals, topical creams, or herbs were used. “There’s nothing to it,” he told me. He said moving quickly with self-confidence was the secret. “I think that’s true of a whole lot of other things, too,” he added. “Moving quickly with self confidence.”

  That was definitely a quotable quote, but unlike Vernon, he certainly wasn’t forthcoming about many of his other secrets. I once said to him, “Kuda, I’d give five years of my life to learn your x-ray eyes act.” He answered, “Would you indeed? I gave all of my life to do that.” What a kick in the nuts—yet for the remainder of his life, his was one of the acts I still admired most, but the secret to his mystifying x-ray eyes was never revealed.

  Sadly and ironically, in the last years of his life “The Man with the X-Ray Eyes” suffered a gradual loss of his eyesight. The last time I saw him perform, he was legally blind from advanced glaucoma, but wearing his elaborate blindfold, Kuda Bux was still able to read the tiny serial numbers on my dollar bill.

  The firsthand reminiscences of Mr. Bux became fixed forever in my memory. He was not boastful or given to swaggering. Rather he spoke with a frank exactitude concerning his many feats, neither praising himself nor belittling. A man who walks barefoot on thousand-degree coals is a realist even if he mostly deals in trickery.

  I vividly remember the most important magic lesson I learned from Kuda. He said to me there was one “. . . pure magic moment in your show tonight. Do you know what it was?”

  I had no idea what he was talking about. “Was it the moment when the first big tomato appeared under the soup can and . . .”

  “No,” Kuda interrupted.

  “Was it when the coins vanished from my left hand and appeared in my right?”

  “No,” Kuda interrupted again.

  I was quickly out of guesses. Evidently, a pure magic moment had gone right by and I’d never spotted it.

  I had done a trick where a selected card was lost
in the deck. When I made it appear and said, “Here it is,” it was the wrong card. Next I inquired, “What was your card?” then wiggled my fingers and the wrong card magically changed to the right one. A very standard card trick plot . . .

  But on this particular occasion, when asked, the guy named another wrong card, then corrected his error and named the right one. When he named the wrong card, I really believed I’d made a mistake and it showed on my face, but when he named the right one the relieved look on my face also showed. Then it occurred to me to make things right with a little magic. . . . Those few seconds encompassed the pure magic moment.

  I couldn’t immediately repeat those looks on my face that made the whole routine look realistic, but when Kuda pointed this out, I understood, and in the future strove to get myself again into a state of not anticipating what was next. Easier said than done. It was a little detail, but as I learned, of such details are great performances made.

  Carazini—They say Carazini’s real name was Jim Williams. The same first name as Jim Carrey, and Carrey sounds a little like Carazini, and this guy had a command of the same sort of rubber-faced characterizations that Jim Carrey is famous for.

  Carazini had wrinkled fluttering eyelids, a pencil-thin mustache on a long lip, and his jaws worked constantly, whether or not he was speaking. His thrashed old black fedora hat, a size too big, was perched upon slicked back black hair. I admired what he did and it made a lifelong impression on me. Carazini was prepared to do his act at the drop of a hat, any time, anywhere, and that’s what he did.

  At the Castle, he might perform in the lobby, outside in the driveway, or at the bar, in a doorway. And he didn’t need an introduction, didn’t need a table, didn’t say anything, didn’t use any music, and the few props he used were in his pockets.