I Lie for Money

by Steve Spill

  Carazini portrayed a lovable lush who had a few too many drinks. Not falling-down drunk, but inebriated enough that you believed it when he first lit a cigarette that bobbled on his moist lower lip—and then he accidentally swallowed both it and the lit match, and started to burp smoke. Between multiple burps of smoke, he’d belch up other things, like strings of silk scarves and dozens of eggs. His performance of the act was perfection—nothing ever went down the wrong pipe, he never made any gurgling sounds, sneezed, wheezed, got hiccups, choked, hurled, or coughed up a loogy.

  When speaking with him it was hard to tell if he was staying in character by pretending to be a little drunk or if he really was, because he was always on. While we were in conversation I watched him put a match in his mouth and try to light it with a cigarette. Often Carazini would bend a spoon into the shape of a pipe and start smoking it. “Here Steve, you keep this as a good luck charm.” He handed me a wet bent spoon by the handle, which had just been in his mouth.

  On another occasion, I was forced to endure the story about his gallstones, which he carried around in a small bottle.

  The man was, in my opinion, a talent who exhibited such extraordinary timing and subtlety, Carazini should be recognized as one of the great comic performers of the time . . . make that all time. The Magic Castle was only a burp in the road on his way to a career as a star specialty act, performing between nude female dancers at the world famous Crazy Horse Saloon in Paris.

  Recently I found the old bent spoon Carazini had given me as a good luck charm more than forty years ago. My wife Bozena didn’t know what it was and when I wasn’t looking she threw it out.

  Tony Slydini—The unique thing about Slydini, a genius sleight of hand innovator, teacher, and a performer, was that he did not have a set sequence of tricks. Instead he allowed the audience and the situation to determine his program. In particular, his impromptu after-dinner performances using whatever was on the table as props were absolutely astonishing.

  Slydini had an enormous ego, but not offensively so. He talked much of himself and couldn’t believe there would be an empty seat in the Castle’s tiny Close Up Gallery when he was performing. Once, when I was in the audience, there was one empty seat in the front row. He just could not stand to see that empty seat. After his first trick, he stopped the show and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like you to take a minute and bow your heads in a moment of silence for this person who isn’t with us right now. I don’t know what happened to them, but they must be dead, or they never would have missed the great Slydini.”

  Slydini was an Italian boy, an Argentinian teenager, who as an adult mostly lived in New York, except for the year he spent at Hollywood’s Magic Castle between 1969 and 1970. His head always leaned a little to one side or the other, he spoke with his hands as much as his voice, and he talked from one side of his mouth, as though the opposite side were buttoned. He also smiled the same way, with only one side of his mouth (the other side was tight-lipped). At least once, in the unsmiling side of his mouth, I think I saw him carry a toothpick.

  More often than not it was difficult to understand what he was saying, but oddly enough, whenever he performed, or talked about himself, his enunciation became not only quite distinct but elocutionary in quality. Slydini didn’t have an accent until he came to the states, but his soft-spoken broken English had an original tone and sound, and so did his brilliant misdirection.

  Misdirection is what magicians call the skill of focusing an audience’s attention on one thing in order to distract its attention from another, and at this, Slydini was absolutely masterful. He so completely captured one’s attention that they were prevented from discovering how he did what he did. Nothing exemplified this more than his Paper Balls Trick, a version of which is in my working repertoire to this day.

  In this trick, the volunteer closely watching Slydini couldn’t see what was going on, but the rest of the audience could. Slydini crumpled one paper napkin after another into little balls and made each one disappear, one at a time, before the participant’s eyes. Every time, the audience saw that Slydini tossed the ball over the guy’s head, but the helper was continually amazed and couldn’t guess the secret.

  His force of personality when it came to misdirection was so strong that a person who had a paper ball tossed over their head was convinced that paper ball slowly, magically dematerialized into thin air.

  Normally magicians try not to overuse any certain secret method or technique for fear of getting caught red-handed. But because of Slydini’s superlative skills at misdirection, he was able to sort of overuse a technique, called “lapping,” to weave numerous miracles.

  Lapping is secretly ditching small objects into your lap while seated at a table. Slydini could also secretly retrieve and exchange objects from his lap and you would never know it. Utilizing his amazing misdirection together with his lapping technique, Tony could tear a cigarette apart and put the paper on top of the loose tobacco in his hand and magically the cigarette would restore, then bam, it was back to a little pile of loose tobacco again. He would change salt to pepper and pennies to silver dollars.

  I went out to an elegant dinner with a bunch of magicians and Slydini was the guest of honor. The great Tony Slydini blew everyone away all night doing tricks. Even waiters and people from other tables were watching. Spoons changed to knives, bread crumbs assembled themselves to a dinner roll, granulated sugar fused into cubes, and napkin balls appeared and disappeared under the bread basket. The show went on and on and on and Slydini was a king.

  When we got up to leave I happened to glance under the table; the floor was covered with trash. Slydini had done tons of tricks during dinner and they all ended with him secretly tossing stuff into his lap and then onto the floor. Scattered under the table were wadded up napkin balls, bread, sugar, silverware, carrots, a salt shaker, a shot glass, a cream dispenser—you name it. It was like someone dumped a garbage pail on the floor. I wondered what the busboys must have thought when they found all that stuff?

  Charlie Miller—Charlie Miller, Charlie Miller, Charlie Miller, was a man who liked to see his name spelled thrice, signed his name thrice, and when introduced he would say his name thrice. But he asked his friends to call him Chuckie, and when angry, referred to himself in third person, as Mad Dog Miller. He was a soft-spoken, introverted, timid sort. When he became your friend, you were buddies forever and he treated you with an almost fatherly kindness. By all accounts, including his own, he had never smoked or tasted liquor, and never cursed, told, or listened to any dirty jokes or off-color stories. In front of an audience he was charm personified.

  Plump, with a pasty complexion, cherubic face, sparse light hair, and twinkly eyes, Charlie looked like a partly melted snowman. His skill with cards was equal to that of Vernon, and like Vernon he mastered sleights used by card cheats, but Miller was also a master at what we magicians refer to as stand-up, parlor, or cabaret magic—tricks done for larger audiences than what we call close-up and smaller than stage magic. Most professional magicians fall into this category.

  Miller was Mr. Charisma when he performed the Chinese Rice Bowls. He said one time the band didn’t show, so he provided his own accompaniment by whistling, which he’d been doing ever since. Chuckie showed two china bowls and wiped them with a little towel. One was filled with rice and the two were placed mouth to mouth.

  Charlie would whistle his original tune; when the bowls were separated the rice magically doubled in quantity. The bowls were put back together, more whistling, the rice vanished, and in its place was cool clean water. Having heard him whistle his score so many times, I knew it well, and once started to whistle along with him. Horrible idea.

  I could not sing the notes of the musical scale, but boy could I whistle! Not good, but shrill and loud. Charlie didn’t miss a beat; he shook his head in a way the crowd thought was hilarious, kept whistling, and the magic continued. After the show I puckered my lips and began to whistle. Chuckie arched on
e eyebrow and chuckled a kinda nervous chuckle. Not a happy one, but a chuckle that sounded as though he couldn’t think of anything else to say or do—reading between the lines it cured me of ever doing anything that might distract attention from another’s performance, even if that interruption was meant fondly, like my whistling was. Nowadays that old tune, long forgotten, sometimes springs to mind. The melody rises from the past as songs oftentimes do and I recall in clear detail the lesson learned from my stupid whistling.

  Holding up an empty hand, Charlie would say, “Imagine I’m showing you an invisible spool of thread,” and, unwinding some nonexistent thread, would ask, “Do you see it?” Two volunteers pretended to hold the ends of long invisible thread, “Don’t drop it.” Chuckie placed a pencil on his hand, so the point extended over the end of his fingers and the eraser end was in his palm. He placed the tip of the pencil over the imaginary thread. “Now, gently lift the thread and see if you can move the pencil.” They both moved their end of the nonexistent thread and the pencil magically moved upward as if being lifted by the imaginary thread.

  Having seen Slydini make a big deal about doing a show with one empty seat in the Close-up Gallery, I was surprised when I saw Charlie perform there with a half-dozen empty seats and only about fourteen people in the audience. He worked his heart out in one of the finest performances I’d seen, and those fourteen lucky ones in the audience will never forget it. Neither will I. When I mentioned the Slydini incident, he said gently, “You know, Steve, when someone comes to see you, he’s entitled to the best you’ve got, even if he’s the only one in the audience.” That night I vowed to never fail those who came to watch me perform. I like to think this is one promise I have kept.

  In the beginning I would get flop sweat before every show. I used to think that nervousness would disappear, but Miller cautioned me against that. He said that when your nerves disappear, it’s time to get out of the business. He was probably right. Fear is a good motivator.

  Chuckie was meticulous about writing his monthly column called “Magicana” in Genii Magazine, the same periodical for magicians in which The Professor had featured me. One Magicana was devoted to a card sleight I devised called the Push Thru Change.

  Having contributed to other magic publications throughout my teenage years, I knew the drill. What might take a couple of hours to translate into print elsewhere took Miller and me days. I performed my creation for him dozens of times, and he’d watch it from every possible angle. Laying on his back to my left, standing on his toes to my right, looking from behind me over my shoulder, and so on. Chuckie was both respectful and a straight shooter with his comments and critiques.

  “Now try it with your fingers on top and thumb on the bottom to hide the elongation of the card during the change . . . instead of palming the extra card at the end, see if you can secretly leave it face up in the deck.” By the time my little doodad saw print, it had been reworked by Charlie into a masterpiece.

  Late in life Miller started a new career as a cruise ship magician. He enjoyed entertaining passengers onboard, and developed an interest in ballroom dancing, which kept him in contact with the ladies. As if the lady thing wasn’t enough, I asked him, “Why is it cool to be a dancer?” Chuckie’s answer was clear, “Because no one tells you off for having too much attitude.”

  Senator Clarke Crandall—The senator was a tall, heavyset, sarcastic, condescending guy, with a Salvador Dali waxed mustache, who always had a crooked little rum-soaked cigar in his mouth, and was not a real senator. His moustache wiggled as he talked and his eyes had two definite expressions; one was out-and-out mischief and the other plain lechery. Although the senator never swore, was never overtly graphic, and never exposed himself in public, he liked to label his shows X-rated, which I guess was true compared to the humor of other Magic Castle magicians. When I first met him he passed along to me the advice he said his father gave to him as a young man, “Son, try everything in life but incest and folk dancing.”

  The guy spoke in a gruff sort of under-his-breath way and sprinkled his performances with a lot of double-entendres. When he did the Cut & Restored Rope trick he’d ramble along in a stream-of-consciousness style: “It’s an ordinary rope, just like you’d find at home in any bedroom . . . I did this trick on a cruise ship . . . where I learned women and seamen don’t mix . . . when my ship finally came in, my pier collapsed . . .”

  His rendition of the classic Cups & Balls trick, “. . . uhh, I got my balls screwed up . . . please grab hold of my magic wand . . .” and he would mumble about unrelated topics like octopuses that made love to bagpipes, clams that made love to castanets, before taking a big pocket watch out of his fly to check the time, then putting it back, and zipping up.

  Part of his old grouch character was that he took umbrage at absolutely anything that was said. If someone said, “Happy Birthday,” Crandall would reply, “What’s happy about it?” or something equally grumpy. He talked down to people, and they liked it. “I’m not too crazy about you as an audience, but I’ll do you a favor and show you a couple of tricks.” If someone were amazed and exclaimed, not really expecting an answer, “How did you do that?” The senator would address the question, “It is part of my philosophy never to discuss matters of state with a commoner.”

  He said he had nothing against the people in his audience individually, it was just when they gathered that he didn’t like them. To Crandall, everyone was a spoiled child, the guy insulted men and women alike, ogled sexy girls, and when he finished with a volunteer in his show, often they left unaware that there was a big chalk X mark on their back.

  Crandall had absolutely no inhibitions about himself. He talked freely and colorfully, and to me his magic was poetic. Among my favorite tricks he did was the Six Card Repeat. He’d slowly count six cards, and didn’t seem to notice, apparently by accident, that a few cards fell on the floor. When Crandall counted the cards again, there were still six. This went on and on and on until the floor was covered with cards, but there were still six cards in his hand. I guess it was no accident.

  One day I ran into Clarke at Berg’s Magic Shop. He asked if I wanted to tag along while he went downstairs to the old Woolworth’s on Hollywood Boulevard to get some props for a trick he was working on. At the notions counter he perused the thimble collection, trying various ones on his finger and then putting them in his ear. “May I help you?” the saleslady asked. After a breath, he responded, “Yes. Please. My name is Senator Crandall and I’m looking for a thimble that will fit in my ear.” The lady walked away a little disgusted and confused.

  Senator Crandall was the most ornery lovable man I have ever known. I did not quite understand him . . . then. He hid none of his faults from the world. In fact, he hid nothing except perhaps what he planned to do with those thimbles.

  Francis Carlyle—Picture a small ball of a man. With his short neck and pudgy body, he looked like a turtle that had somehow got out of its shell and was standing upright and walking around. He had a squirrel-like face, red-veined nose, a fiery temper, and a thick, punchy New York accent. When speaking loudly he would open his jaws until I had an oral surgeon’s view of his throat and often spit in my face when he talked, but I didn’t care, because he was one of the stars of magic. He was also a fan of mine when there weren’t many others.

  One of Carlyle’s missions in life was not to bore or be bored. He muttered and spewed and cackled, coughed and wheezed and acted like he expected five thousand a show but always settled for somewhere in the high two figures. The man had a blunt sense of humor, and was a superb sleight of hand artist whose tricks never beat around the bush—they were always right to the point. He was also a lot of other things—none of them were shy.

  Most of all, though, I loved watching him steal watches. In the course of showing someone a coin trick, he was able to gain possession of their wristwatch without their knowledge. At the end of the trick Carlyle would ask, “Can you guess whether the coin is head or tail? If you
do, I’ll give you a little prize.” The prize was the volunteer’s own watch, and the surprised look on the helper’s face was always priceless.

  During another great trick, Carlyle would twist a dollar bill into a little cone and use it to cover a stack of quarters on the back of a woman’s hand. The quarters seemed to penetrate her hand and fell one at a time onto the table. When he removed the dollar from her hand, you’d see four pennies there. He’d say, “Sales tax!”

  He was also a master at repeatedly fanning cards in a way that made the deck appear to shrink gradually into nothingness. He’d fan a normal deck of cards several times, and with each fan the cards repeatedly diminished, to half, then a quarter, then an eighth, and finally one sixteenth the original size. Then the deck vanished altogether.

  Francis loved classical music, particularly Chopin played solo on piano, and listened constantly on a tiny cassette tape recorder in his apartment at the Nirvana, a building where a lot of the old timers like Miller and Crandall also lived. He seemed to find some great escape in the music as he shuffled a deck of cards. I remember his face losing its anxieties, he became serene as he shuffled, and he closed his eyes.

  Once while visiting him, I saw him play chess with no board. The two men memorized the positions of all the pieces and spoke the moves to each other. Not a joke, it was a real game.

  Francis was one of the first to do the Sponge Balls trick and the guy who taught it to one of my top eight favorites, Albert Goshman, who fashioned his performance of it into a masterpiece. Everybody wasn’t doing it in the old days because you had to cut the balls from foam rubber or natural sponge. It was difficult and time-consuming to make a nice round matched set. Goshman came up with a way to mass-produce them.

  I was with Carlyle when he was handed one of the first manufactured sets. “Here you are, Francis,” Albert cried out as he presented the thin box containing four little sponge balls, “I wanted you to be the very first one to own a set.” Carlyle was amazed, happy, and depressed all in the course of a minute or two. He couldn’t believe how uniform the balls were and that they could be made in any size—and how well they handled. Then he became angry and depressed when he realized this unique trick would become widespread.