I Lie for Money

by Steve Spill

  What I’m about to relate took place in South Africa. Since you’re wondering, leopards, panthers, and tigers are not indigenous to the continent, so, as usual, the show’s professional savage beasts were flown in from California.

  The Wild Coast Sun is surrounded by jungle for miles on the three sides that weren’t Indian Ocean, with no city and no airport. Most gamblers and vacationers from around the world flew to a big city, like Durban, or Johannesburg, and were bused or taken by limo to The Wild Coast. Next to the resort was a dirt airstrip with several small planes used by VIP gamblers and casino executives.

  I was recruited to promote Spellbound on a late night TV talk show in Johannesburg, the Manhattan of South Africa, a nearly two-hour flight from the remote Wild Coast Sun. Along for the ride with the pilot and me was a baby tiger named Lulu, weighing in at about 30 pounds, and Nicole, a pleasant animal handler, weighing in at about 110. There is a difference between an animal trainer and a handler. Trainers teach animals something, such as a new trick. Nicole was a handler, so her job was to manage and control the animals. Nicole sat in the cockpit next to the pilot. Lulu was in a carrier next to me, in the rear of the tiny four-seat flying machine.

  The plane bounced and bumped like a rubber dinghy on a rough sea. My stomach rose up into my rib cage every time we’d go higher and higher, then suddenly drop a hundred feet. Regardless of whether they were training or handling, everyone involved treated the cats with care and understanding. So I guess it was no surprise when Lulu growled and banged her head against the sides of the carrier that Nicole became concerned and wanted to comfort the little kitty. She turned around, opened the carrier, grabbed the cat, and cuddled it.

  In a fraction of an instant, the baby tiger was on the pilot’s head, the plane was in a nosedive, and we all had the same instantaneous thought: We are going to crash and die. The plane violently flipped on its side, wedging the squealing kitten between me and the window. Somehow, Nicole and I wrestled the little beast into the carrier. For the next few minutes the grim reality of all this didn’t quite hit me. Then I convinced myself I had believed all along that nothing was going to happen to us. There was not a spoken word until we landed. As we deplaned I kissed the pilot. I don’t often fly around in small private planes or jets, but when I do, even today, more than twenty-five years later, I go through every second of the little tiger nightmare again.

  The late night TV chat show was just like an American one. After my preplanned talk/jokes with the funny guy host, our show’s youngest star, Lulu, and her handler, Nicole, were introduced. The cat licked the host’s hand, then, as if on cue, leapt onto the host’s head. Nicole brought Lulu under control with a morsel of raw meat, but not before she peed on the couch (Lulu peed, not Nicole, or if Nicole also peed, I was unaware of it).

  What part did Lulu play in Spellbound? Well, at the end of the show, after the cast took their bows, she ran on stage, and that was it. The producer and director felt it added a “cute button” to the production.

  A day after the Johannesburg trip, I was still thinking about Lulu’s addiction to head humping, and how lucky we all were to have survived that flight. I was thinking those thoughts while bowing to an appreciative audience, when Lulu, playing the part of a cute button, pranced onto the stage, and took a flying leap into the crowd. That was the 30-pounder’s final appearance as a cute button. Fortunately, the only injury was to little Lulu’s ego.

  For me, witnessing this next Spellbound cat tail—uh, make that tale—a few times stands out in my memory because it not only features a sleek black panther, but it also features a beautiful showgirl at the top of her game, while simultaneously, it could be said that she was at the bottom of a sewer.

  A gorgeous girl in a slinky, skin-tight black dress danced and seductively writhed around on the stage like a wild animal with feline grace. She got into a clear glass box. A cloth hid the woman for a fraction of an instant, and when it was whisked away, in her place, there was a growling black panther. It was a great illusion, but too often this lovely talented lady paid the price.

  The cloth concealed a secret compartment that held the panther. Under the cloth cover the compartment gently slid to the bottom of the box, which allowed the panther to make its appearance. At the same time, the girl squeezed into a secret compartment in the deceptively thin tabletop that the box was resting on.

  The girl was completely protected from the panther, but she was not always protected from his urine. On those occasions that the savage beast decided to improvise when the cloth was lowered, as if coming from a high-pressure garden hose a bright yellow liquid would be sprayed against the glass walls. To the audience, the yellow wash perhaps looked like an intended part of the trick. Unfortunately, the pee quickly drained into the secret tabletop compartment that hid the girl. When the cloth was whisked away, the relieved panther made his appearance with a mighty growl.

  Unbeknownst to the uninformed, the babe’s hair, costume, and body were marinating in a sewer of warm panther urine. After the applause, as always, the cat was walked along the apron of the huge casino stage. What followed that was a long choreographed bow where the panther stood on two feet and was rewarded with a piece of raw meat.

  By the time the curtain closed, and the glass box was rolled offstage, the girl had been soaking over two minutes in that smelly cesspool, but it must have seemed like days. Big cat urine has a pungent, long-lasting scent that doesn’t wash out easy. Sure, she looked like a hot young Playboy centerfold, but she smelled like panther piss. After these episodes, the pretty young lady unleashed a roar that sounded like it came from a tiger’s cage at feeding time.

  Then there were my experiences with internationally acclaimed dancing chickens at the Teenage Fair, Hollywood Palladium, in 1971. On a tiny outdoor stage surrounded by carnival attractions, several times a day over a long hot weekend, each show started with a fellow teen who played guitar and sang songs. I was the middle act, and the closer, the headliner, was Doolittle Wilder Jr. and his Dancing Chickens.

  I did not know then, nor do I now, if the idea for the chicken act and the method of training the chickens went back two generations in the Wilder family, but words to that effect were part of Doolittle’s presentation. After a bogus rap explaining the painstaking process of educating and choreographing the fowl, he whisked away a curtain, revealing a large cage sitting on a pedestal. Eight or ten hens were wandering around, cackling and pecking at corn kernels.

  Doolittle waved a conductor’s baton as the music started. Wings fluttered, kernels began to fly in all directions, and the chickens danced and danced and danced. At his command the music stopped, and there was silence. The poultry had ceased dancing at the last note of music and came to a standstill as if by agreement. Then they went back to wandering, cackling, and pecking, as Wilder stood with his face uplifted, and the assembled onlookers cheered Doolittle Wilder Jr. and his Dancing Chickens. The crowd was unaware that the floor of the cage was actually an electric hot plate, which was powered on and off at the same time as the music. For an encore, Wilder presented his performing rooster. The educated cock—the rooster, although that description also accurately describes the clucker, Wilder, minus the educated part—had a mathematical mind and could count up to six by pecking with its beak on a little bell.

  In 1990 I learned the pains of befriending your animal colleagues. I was in a magical revue, Kazzamm, or as I called it, Kablamm, at the Normandie Casino in Gardena, California. In that show, a handsome fellow named Brett Daniels magically materialized humongous macaws, parrots, and cockatoos. Their big, colorful fluttering wings were much more dramatic than the white doves other magicians worked with. When the birds appeared, they flew over and around the audience gracefully before returning to the stage.

  One of his birds, a blue and golden macaw named Floyd, was a big fan of mine. I was in the middle of my multiplying fingers routine, where extra fingers kept disappearing from one hand and reappearing on the other, unaware that F
loyd was watching me from the flies above. Flies are what we show folk call the ceiling high above the stage that houses hundreds of thick black wires connected to powerful lamps that hang from metal bars, and Brett was offstage trying to get the bird down.

  I knew all the beats of my fingers routine, and at a certain point it was obvious to me something was wrong. I hadn’t said anything funny, but the audience was laughing, whispering, and pointing. Then Floyd made a perfect landing on my shoulder.

  From his vantage point, the macaw alternately checked the fingers I was fooling with and peered at my face, back and forth and back and forth. Floyd was probably picking up a few pointers, and then, with his beak, he plucked a fake finger from my hand, flapped his wings and flew back up to the flies. I was glad he plucked a fake finger instead of one of my real ones. The incident helped make that one of my best performances ever, but the winged benefactor Floyd resigned from my act and went back to working with Brett.

  Finally, to wrap up this chapter I’m going to share something that doesn’t involve savage jungle beasts or exotic feathered ones, but it does involve a flying creature. This took place in 1991 at the Beverly Wilshire, a hotel, as you might guess from its name, on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills.

  To be more specific, it took place in their hotel ballroom, in front of five hundred people, on a nice, but makeshift, proscenium stage. I mention “makeshift” because this was a portable theater of sorts, and I was told the uneven stage floor led to the accident that created the situation I’m about to share. The occasion was a big birthday bash for March Fong Eu, who at the time was the Secretary of State in California, and I was the magical emcee for this after-dinner show.

  Being the emcee, and the only speaking act in this case, made me responsible for keeping things moving once the program started. If something went wrong or for some reason more time needed to be added to the show, the emcee went out and entertained to fill in the cracks.

  A beautiful Chinese girl was riding a tall unicycle as if it were a choreographed dance. That would be enough, but then she began tossing metal bowls with her knees and was catching them one at a time on her head. She slipped, fell off her unicycle, and broke her leg right on stage in front of the audience.

  The curtains closed and I went out with a rope trick to fill some time while the girl got first aid and the next act prepared to perform sooner than expected. I had plenty of funny to do with the rope trick so I could cover whatever time was necessary. Although the audience just witnessed an accident where a girl was obviously hurt, the job at hand was to go out and get some laughs.

  I started fooling with my rope, but the audience was still thinking about the accident. Enunciating in fine style, my mouth was wide open when a fly flew in. It was a big room, not everyone was watching closely, and a lot of folks saw nothing. Closer viewers may have seen a speck, and certainly only the people up front really saw the fly.

  The whole audience, though, saw me choked up and coughing, but of course I kept delivering my lines. I received compliments about what a caring person I was. “Mr. Spill was so moved by the plight of that unicycle girl that he was in tears. God bless him,” one woman said.

  WHEN TRICKS GO WRONG

  In 1990 the closing bit to my show, Magic Trap, a self-produced non-extravaganza in a tiny 99-seat Hollywood dump of a theater, was a parody of the classic Bullet Catch trick. I did the show six weeks, four times a week, for a total of twenty-four performances. Twenty-three times the routine went as planned. In the traditional version of the trick, a bullet is fired directly at the magician, and he catches the bullet—in a handkerchief, in a bottle, on a plate, or even at the tip of a sword. I preferred the more contemporary method, catching the bullet with my teeth.

  On stage was a large TV that was an interactive element throughout the show and provided the finish for my Bullet Catch routine. Normally, I introduced a former army MP as my marksman for the stunt. He had a bullet marked by an audience member so it could be identified later. We stood facing each other and the marksman fired at my face. The explosive bang of the shot popped everyone’s ears in the tiny theater. Blood squirted out of my mouth as I collapsed, apparently dead. There was a horrifying offstage scream, the curtains quickly closed, the TV lit up, and the audience saw me deliver this prerecorded onscreen message:

  “Earlier today I went ahead and made this video so I would be able to thank all of you for attending my show. I never even tried that bullet catch trick before tonight. I just think it’s better to fail at something you love, than to succeed at something you hate. That’s it. Take it easy, everybody. Thank you. Good night.”

  So you see, this was a trick planned to go wrong, but one time it went wrong in an unplanned way. When the marksman pulled the trigger on this particular occasion, nothing happened. Being the absent-minded bonehead that I am, I had neglected ahead of time to double-check that the firearm had been loaded with the usual blanks. Frantically, he pulled the trigger a few more times, but still nothing happened.

  Sensing what was wrong, I did what I usually do when I slip on one of my own banana peelings: I thought of something stupid, in this case, making my cheeks really big and hollering BANG! Instead of doing that, though, I bit the blood capsule that was hidden in my mouth, grabbed my neck, fell to the floor, and screamed something stupid, “There’s been a mistake, I’m dying—it was an invisible magic bullet.” Someone in the audience shouted, “Invisible magic bullet, my ass; he scared you to death!”

  If you were living in Canada in 1986, there is a possibility you may have seen Holiday Magic Spectacular, the only twenty-seven cities, three-month, Canadian tour of a magical revue in which I ever appeared. As was usual when I appeared in these sorts of shows, I was not the star, but merely the token comedy act.

  The star illusionist had a very dramatic Houdini-type escape to close the show. The exciting emotional impact of the bit depended in large part on an explosion. That explosion was ignited by a squib, which is an electrical match, in this case, remote controlled from offstage. About a half dozen times during the tour something went wrong and there wasn’t any explosion. Bad squib, low remote batteries, bad gunpowder mix, remote interference from an airplane in the area, forgot to press the button—the possibilities were endless.

  Dressed as Indiana Jones, our headliner closed each performance with the Coffin of Doom. His feet, hands, waist, and neck were chained to a piece of plywood cut in the shape of a coffin. Attached to the plywood was a bundle of dynamite with a long burning fuse. The coffin, with our star chained to it, was hoisted high above the stage; below was a stuntman’s crash pad.

  The Indiana Jones movie theme was cranked up to a blasting rock-concert volume. Our guy frantically wiggled around in the chains, showgirls were on the side leaping about, “Hurry, hurry! She’s gonna blow!” they screamed. He squirmed, twisted, scraped, jiggered, as he jangled the chains. The fuse quickly burned toward the dynamite. He wasn’t going to make it. The girls shrilled, “Oh no! Faster! It’s getting close!”

  He was just a breath away from being a fountain of gore, when abruptly the music ceased. Eyes bulging, sweat gushing from his pores, wordlessly, expertly, he freed himself from the chains and jumped to safety with only a fraction of an instant to spare. Nothing seems so emphatic as a deafening quiet as when you are expecting the crescendo of a boom, impact, explosion, flames, and the flying wooden shards of a coffin caused by a massive dynamite blast. But in that particular moment of stillness, that dreadful silence, we clearly heard the soft sound of a match that wanted to light, but didn’t. Pffftt . . .

  Near the end of the nineties, I was the emcee for a big illusion spectacular presented at a convention of Nissan car dealers where the finish didn’t go as planned. In rehearsal, our star illusionist made mystical gestures in front of a white picket fence as Nissan theme music played. There was a puff of smoke, and a new Nissan Maxima appeared in front of the fence as a recorded announcement said, “The new Nissan Maxima, built better to
last longer.” When the Nissan appeared a glamorous showgirl got out and caressed the car as the music came to a crescendo. It was a spectacular illusion and a highly entertaining way to advertise a new car. I knew the audience would be impressed.

  Here’s how it worked: Before its magical appearance, the car was behind the fence. The background was black and the car was draped with a big black velvet-covered nylon cloth. The Nissan was a super lightweight replica—just a shell of a car on a big skateboard, the heaviest part being the showgirl inside. With the aid of special lighting and under the cover of the puff of smoke, when the announcer said, “The new Nissan Maxima, built better to last longer” the white picket fence opened as a gaggle of hooded stagehands dressed in black whisked away the black cloth covering the car and pushed it into view and the picket fence closed behind it. The illusion required split-second timing to coordinate the lighting, smoke, stagehands, and showgirl.

  A thousand dealers from around the world had enjoyed the show, and it was now time for the big finish. Nissan executives were in the front row eagerly awaiting their commercial. They’re all excited about the application of magic to their advertising and public-image needs, congratulating themselves on this promotional triumph. Anticipation was high as we saw a puff of smoke and heard the words “The Nissan Maxima, built better to last longer.”

  Unfortunately, the timing was off. As the smoke cleared one of the stagehands tripped and his end of the black velvet got caught in the door at the same instant the flimsy car was pushed forward. The mix of the cloth pulling one way as the car was being pushed the other way in combination with the girl’s actions caused the lightweight door to fall off and the showgirl to stumble forward as the last part of the black cloth was whisked away, taking the front bumper with it. “The Nissan Maxima, built better to last longer.”