by Steve Spill
His frustrations, torments, impulsive actions, and stubbornness could be colorful, but he also had as short a fuse as many short men have. People would literally shiver until they laughed when he erupted in a rage. You could love him profoundly and hate him entirely at one and the same instant. Many examples spring to mind, but here’s one that’s seared into my memory. Carlyle had a little finesse with a move we magicians call the Double Lift—secretly holding two cards so they look like one—and he liked to fool magicians with his subtle variation on this sleight. My friend and fellow card trickster Randy Holt, who had seen him do this before, and knew the gag, as a practical joke, sabotaged his efforts. Francis wasn’t amused.
“Feel the corner, just one card . . .” he demonstrated and then asked Randy to feel the corner. Randy deliberately separated the two cards and Carlyle loudly tore him a new a-hole. “You no-good bum, goddamnit, you son-of-a-bitch, what kind of a person feels the corner of a card like that, you ought to be arrested for impersonating a human being . . . ?!”
I shouted out, “He was just yanking your chain, don’t drive yourself crazy, it was a joke!” To his credit, Francis instantly looked pretty embarrassed, then exploded with laughter and said, “I was kidding too, just remember, I’m not always right, but I’m never wrong!” It was a quick-witted response; the rest of us cracked up at his mood swing and joke. The fact is, Carlyle was hilarious, a sweetheart, and a very talented artist, who used to drink a little. Actually he used to drink a lot.
When sober, he was an inspiring expert at sleight of hand. When drunk, his funny personality made up for his sloppy manipulations; either way audiences loved him. At one point the Castle cut him off and refused to serve him, but it didn’t matter—he would quench his thirst with a swig from a flask he carried in the inside breast pocket of his coat. I was about sixteen, with Francis in the tiny dressing room behind the Close-up Gallery, when he sneakily slipped his whisky out, touched it to his lips, peeked back, and offered me a sip. “It ain’t water,” he said, grinning.
At an appointed time, I showed up at Carlyle’s apartment so he could teach me a version of a complex card manipulation, the diagonal palm shift. When I got there he was inebriated, but still willing to instruct me. As he handled the cards, his glasses were the perfect barometer of how close he was to passing out. The sleepier he became, the farther down his nose the spectacles would travel.
I watched these descending glasses, and when they reached the tip of his nose, I would prod Francis. Then he would awaken with a little exclamation, adjust the spectacles, repeat the card sleight expressing a pointer or two, until the glasses once again commenced to slide and his voice dissolved into a loud snore. Then, when even my elbow failed to rouse him for perhaps the sixth time, it occurred to me that I had a felt tip marker in my pocket and that it would be funny to draw a little mustache or goatee on his face. But when he awoke I knew he wouldn’t take that well, so instead, I just tiptoed out.
Albert Goshman—He had been a bagel baker in Brooklyn, clearly a natural stepping-stone to being a magician, a demonstration of Darwin’s law of evolution in reverse. Albert was delightful, lovable, engaging, and looked like a giant dumpling with an oversized bobble head. The face on that head seemed as if it only exhaled, and never inhaled. He had sad, droopy eyes, a large nose, and a big, bushy mustache with waxed ends. He spoke with a lilting, cute, and funny Middle European Yiddish accent, which he exaggerated when performing. “Vahhtt’s your name?” Goshman would say to a woman, “I’m going to ‘magish’ for you.” He came in like a lamb but went out like a lion.
He called his presentations “Magic By Gosh” and his Close-up Gallery show, more than anyone else’s ever, was a cohesive theatrical beginning, middle, and end experience, complete with a musical score that emanated from a cassette tape player under the table that was operated by Albert’s foot. Goshman was arguably the most popular Magic Castle magician in his day. Probably nobody, before or since, has ever come close.
I first met Albert, not at the Castle, but in the men’s restroom of The Sportsman’s Lodge, in Studio City. As an obsessive magic nut, I recognized him immediately. Albert was about forty-five years old. I was thirteen. We were in the restroom for different reasons, but at the hotel’s ballroom for the same reason—Eddie Shlepper’s bar mitzvah reception. Well, not the same reason—I was a guest, and Albert was there in a professional capacity as entertainer. Of the two magicians in the restroom, I was the only one there to do number two. Albert was there with a wet paper towel dabbing what appeared to be a food stain on the front of his ruffled tux shirt.
Albert’s tabletop production had two human costars, women volunteers, who sat on either side of him. He also had two inanimate co-stars—a salt shaker, which was on the table in front of one of the women, and a pepper shaker in front of the other. As the music came up, the show got underway.
Goshman pulled a couple half-dollars from an invisible purse and asked each woman to say “Go.” They did, and the coins vanished, as Albert said “Gone.” He glanced at the shakers and asked the women to say “Please.” They did, and when they lifted the shakers, the vanished coins were underneath. The coins vanished again, Albert glanced at the shakers, the women picked them up, but there were no coins. “You forgot to say please.” The women said “Please.” This time when they lifted the shakers, the coins were there. This opening sequence foreshadowed some of the highlights that followed.
Exotic Middle Eastern music played when Albert took out an ornate jewelry box. He shook the box, and verbally imitated the sound, “. . . chinka chink, chinka chink.” Then he dumped the contents onto the table, four bottle caps. “Vahhtt? You ver expecting rubies?” The caps were arranged on the table in a square, about a foot apart. Goshman placed each hand over a cap and wiggled his fingers. The caps danced, appeared, and disappeared, in an amazing fashion, eventually assembling one at a time under a single hand. Then they vanished again, and appeared under the shakers.
Albert popularized magic with sponge balls, not only by performing them expertly, but also by manufacturing them and selling them worldwide. His sponge ball company eventually became one of the most financially successful manufacturing businesses in the field of magic tricks, was carried on by his family, and still flourishes as a dominant force today.
He used pale yellow sponge balls in his act, referred to as matzo balls that appeared and disappeared in the women’s hands, and seemingly transposed themselves under a bowl. Had the balls transformed into a bagel, or had they disappeared and a bagel appeared in their place? That must have been it, because the balls were found wedged under the shakers.
My favorite of his tricks was when he made a huge coin vanish like magic. In unison the women said “Please,” prompting it to reappear under a shaker. It was one thing to have missed the trick with half-dollars, sponge balls, or bottle caps, but this happened, just inches from their eyes, and that coin was the size of a dinner plate! I know, it flabbergasted me with openmouthed astonishment! And I wondered then, as I do now, how he could get away with such an audacious bit of trickery? How I envied him! How I still do!
In 1973, five years after our initial meeting, I was booked to do my close-up act and a lecture at two magic conventions, the Pacific Coast Association of Magicians in Hawaii and Tannen’s Jubilee in New York. My expenses were covered, but unfortunately recognition, adulation, and money don’t always come together. My show and lecture were received well, but the applause was not bankable. The way magician’s magicians make money at a magic convention is to have a ton of stuff that all the attendees want to buy. I was ill-equipped in that department. As I bowed to the clapping, I thought to myself, If each of you would just throw me a few dollars, I could get my car fixed.
The headlining all-star performer at both conclaves, who made a bazillion dollars selling the then newly manufactured sponge balls of every size and color to all his fans, was none other than Albert Goshman. At the Jubilee, each evening I sat next to him at ou
r prefix dinner. That’s when spaghetti changed my life. It wasn’t the spaghetti itself—I’d had better—but it was more meaningful than the chop suey we’d had the night before because of the conversation surrounding the spaghetti.
When he sat down to a meal Goshman appeared as if he felt surrounded by enemies who would snatch his food if he didn’t gobble it up first. He clutched his fork and knife as if they were weapons. It was Italian night and Albert speared two meatballs with his fork, the other hand squeezed a sausage and a chunk of bread, half a cannoli smeared his wrist, and strands of spaghetti curled around his tie. But what was most important was his wise-sounding advice.
Hanging around the Castle in those years, I learned that magic was a brutally competitive profession, and there were very few jobs to go around. Sure you pal around with the guys. But according to Goshman, most magicians kept their big important business ideas to themselves. It was rare to meet someone like Goshman who was willing to share secrets that had nothing to do with how to do magic tricks.
I was eighteen, living in a tiny no bedroom dump of an apartment with a couple of roommates. I felt old enough to support myself, but it wasn’t easy, and I hated taking even the smallest amount of money from my parents. Besides doing a few of these fraternity of magicians-type events, I was doing magic in rock clubs and also worked at Pants Galore, but I was still having a very tough time making ends meet. Goshman knew how to make money and kindly gave me several tips.
“When you quote $150 and the guy on the other end of the phone offers $100, stick to $150, say, ‘I need the money more than you do.’ That works most of the time. If it doesn’t work, lower your price. You’re never worth more than the money you can get. Get the money, get the job.”
“If a potential client is on the fence, it’s sometimes helpful to tell them you need a decision because you’ve got five other offers,” Albert said, “. . . even if it’s a slight exaggeration, and you have no other offers.”
“Charge an extra fee per half hour for wait time. You will book gigs with a start time at ten; you don’t go on until eleven, get paid extra for that.”
“On outta town gigs always demand first class travel, exchange the airline ticket they provide for an economy seat, and pocket the difference.”
“Right now, the best-pay gigs for magicians are in a brand new field, and the good news is, it’s wide open, the surface has barely been scratched. Trade shows.”
I got a chill. Same then as now, very few earn a living as magicians. It was reminiscent to me of the scene in The Graduate where the guy tells Dustin Hoffman to get into the plastics industry, because it’s the wave of the future. Unlike Dusty, I was paying close attention. “What’s a trade show?”
“A trade show is an exhibition where companies in a specific industry promote their products and services. I just did the auto show for Champion spark plugs, got a biz machine deal coming up for IBM.”
“What do you do?”
“Every company has a booth. I do shows in front of my sponsor’s booth. The magic attracts a crowd. To get people interested in the company, I deliver a marketing message as part of my act. It’s like an in-person TV commercial. And I do it over and over and over, eight to ten hours a day.”
“Eight to ten hours a day?”
“I drink quarts of black coffee and perspire like a pig. But I don’t get those soaking discolored rings of sweat you’d expect to see under my arms; I got a trick for that. Kind of a trade show, trade secret . . .”
“Yeah, okay, what’s the secret?”
“Under my shirt, under each arm, I tape an absorbing sanitary napkin panty pad.”
MY FIRST “HAND JOB”
I gave my first “hand job” at the age of fourteen. I did it for the man from Glad. When I say Glad, I’m not talking about Gays & Lesbians Against Defamation. I’m talking about the company that makes plastic sandwich and garbage bags.
Back in the day, there was a TV commercial for Glad sandwich bags that featured a guy known as the Man from Glad. He was dressed in white pants, a white shirt, white jacket, white shoes, white socks, and probably underwear that’s white and fresh and soft as newly fallen snow. At one point he demonstrated how to close the sandwich bag. You’d see a close-up of white gloved hands demonstrating, and hear the words, “. . . fold this flap in, and this flap over . . . that’s all there is to it.”
The guy doing the “hand job,” or if you prefer “body double” work, as the white gloved hands, was Leo Behnke. When I was growing up Leo was a popular magician at the Magic Castle and had gained a reputation doing “hand jobs” for Glad television commercials.
On screen, he made those sandwich bags look easy to close in two seconds. Sounds simple, but the flap-folding system was an acquired knack, unlike the simple zip lock concept that eventually evolved.
When Glad started manufacturing garbage bags, one of their first commercials featured a boy raking leaves. Leo Behnke arranged auditions to cast a pair of boy’s hands for the close-ups, and he’s the one who put me in front of the producers, and ultimately the guy who got me the job. I got my first “hand job” from a Magic Castle magician!
Not unlike the funky flap-folding system that preceded the zip-lock sandwich bags, before the simple twist ties used to close garbage bags came along, Glad had a crazy little device to do the job. It was a sliver of plastic, one end was jagged, the other end had a slot cut in it, and to close the bag, you’d wrap the plastic sliver around the top of the garbage bag then pull the jagged end through the slot.
If you were in the waiting room at the audition, you would have seen some frustrated teenage boys attempting to operate these plastic slivers on foam-filled garbage bags. To make a long story short or a short story long, I got the gig.
Even though only my hands would be seen in the commercial, and nobody in the world would know they were my hands, and they’d only be on screen for a fraction of an instant, I was still very excited. The day before the shoot I was thinking about what interpretation I could bring to my part.
The commercial was shot on the front lawn of a nice house on a tree-lined street. The freckled teen actor with red hair looked perfectly natural raking leaves. In another shot he held the sides of the garbage bag while his foot stomped inside, making room for more leaves and effectively demonstrating the rugged durability of the Glad product.
They’d been shooting over six hours before my turn came. My years of sleight-of-hand training were about to be put into practice. I needed to be calm, I needed to be focused, and I needed to remember to breathe. Finally the shot was done. We did it in three takes, for a total of about five minutes, but it took the life experience of a boy magician to make my first onscreen starring role look easy.
DR. Q’s HYPNOTIC ACT
One afternoon I was in the Magic Castle library, flipping through a stack of books, when Bill Larsen poked his head in.
“Can I be of some assistance?”
“Next week I’m doing a Cub Scout show and I need a new trick idea. Something really big . . . something that I can close the show with . . . something in one of these books . . . something that doesn’t cost any money. What can I do?” Bill had the answer.
The year was 1969, and I was almost fifteen years old. Outside of the one twenty-minute show a week I was doing for free at the Castle on Sunday nights, this was one of my very first professional gigs. I was offered seven dollars, which also made it one of my very first well-paying jobs.
An audience of seventy-five people, a much larger group than I was used to in the Close-up Gallery, was expected to attend the annual Cub Scout Blue & Gold Banquet at Shakey’s Pizza Parlor. I’d seen the piano and banjo duo that entertained regularly at this particular Shakey’s, so I knew what to expect. No stage and a very close audience on three sides surrounding the performance space in front of the piano.
Bill said the answer was in a manuscript written by his father, William Larsen, Sr., in 1944, Dr. Q’s Hypnotic Act. Not real hypnotism,
but a routine that looked like it to the audience. Best of all, there were no secret assistants, no prearrangements, and no apparatus or props needed. I could present this celebrated act and give the Cub Scouts a hypnotic exhibition. Or could I? Here now are the first two paragraphs of the manuscript.
“Thayer’s Studio of Magic is pleased to be able to offer the magic fraternity, Dr. Q’s own Hypnotic Act—together with his inimitable method of presentation.
“We wish first to warn the reader not to let the extreme simplicity of Dr. Q’s unique hypnotic methods scare you from using this sensational act. Give it a try on your very next show, and we feel sure you will keep it in the act ever after. Dr. Q’s Hypnotic Act has been successfully performed before every type of audience . . . its daring audacity being the key to its very brilliance.”
What followed was the inimitable presentation, which started with a two-page monologue describing the many then-current articles (in 1944) appearing about this phenomenon called hypnosis that was sweeping the country, and how the best hypnotic subjects were persons with very high intelligence. The script was conceived to sell the audience almost instantly on the fact that you knew your subject, and interest them intently in what you were about to do. Also, it placed the volunteers at ease about participating, removed them from any later criticism, and made them feel smart and eager to cooperate.
“Science has proven that only the most intelligent and creative people respond to hypnosis, and those who participate in my demonstration will be treated with the utmost in courtesy and respect. And now, without further ado, I wish to invite several of you gentlemen up on this stage to participate in these demonstrations in hypnotism. Will five gentlemen please step forward? Thank you, sirs.”