The Entertainer

by Margaret Talbot

  • • •

  WHAT HE LONGED FOR, longed for so much that it made his throat go dry and his fingertips tingle sometimes when he thought about it, was to be up onstage himself. And how would he get there? Well, maybe that didn’t matter so much. In the spring of 1919, Lyle was back in Omaha with his grandmother, back at Commerce High, restless as a kitten. One afternoon, as he thumbed idly through the World-Herald, an ad caught his eye. Maybe it wasn’t exactly what he’d had in mind, but he grabbed his jacket and headed out the door anyway. If he got it, it’d be a job onstage, all right, and he would have gotten it all on his own, with no help even from his pop.

  “Wanted: hypnotist’s subject. Steady employment for the right sort of boy. Travel required. Apply to MacKnight, the Hypnotic Fun Maker,” the ad read. It gave the address of a boardinghouse in town.

  MacKnight, when he answered the door, proved to be a tall man with a florid complexion, a long face, and waves of Brilliantined hair. His gaze was unnerving, appropriate for a hypnotist, Lyle thought, except that it looked less like he was peering into the depths of your soul and more like he was straining to see who might have snuck up on his coattails—a bill collector, perhaps, or an irate husband. MacKnight had shed his first name somewhere along the way, and for all Lyle knew, even the last name had been filched. Lyle got the impression that until recently a man who looked an awful lot like MacKnight had been running a haberdashery in Omaha. Maybe it was while fitting men’s hats, running his fingers authoritatively over each distinctive skull, that he had first conceived the idea of reinventing himself as “the man who knew.” Or perhaps he had become aware of an uncanny ability to make people buy hats they didn’t want. In any case, hypnotism was a way for a certain kind of man to get ahead in those days, and MacKnight must have recognized in himself the sort of qualities—a reliably unblinking gaze, an air of moonstruck gravitas, romantic hair, scruples as bendable as cheap spoons—that would be useful in that line of work. At that moment, he was the man who knew that this earnest, good-looking kid on his doorstep would be a good sleeper for his act. Audiences would like the boy’s wide blue eyes, his wet-behind-the-ears look. MacKnight gave him a soda pop and hired him.

  Many years later—my father was in his seventies by then—he remembered MacKnight this way when some college students in Texas asked him about his early days in showbiz. MacKnight, he said, “had sort of landed in Omaha and was living in this rooming house. He couldn’t get a job, and you know a hypnotist out of work is a pretty sad thing. And he couldn’t pay his rent, but he courted the landlady and she had fallen in love with him and that took care of his rent. So now he tells her, ‘Oh, I’m a hypnotist and I think we can take out a show.’” And either she was pretty well besotted with MacKnight or pretty bored with her life as it was, or it was an intoxicating combination of the two, but she decided to sell the rooming house to finance MacKnight’s show, and away they went, with Lyle in tow. Lyle and his girlfriend, Peggy, whose father was a banker in Norfolk, Nebraska. Peggy was seventeen, chestnut-haired, and musical. “Her family were rather influential people,” my father would recall, “and they didn’t want their daughter going off into show business, but she was determined to go, so she just kind of left home.” Peggy played the piano, and MacKnight had said, why yes, he surely could use a little mood music for his show.

  When I was a kid, I didn’t take much interest in the stories my father sometimes told about these early years. They seemed so far away and small, like images glimpsed through the wrong side of the binoculars. If you have a father who is much older than other fathers—mine was nearly sixty when I was born—the idea of the distance he has come and the decades he has lived through before he even thought of you can make you feel a bit peculiar. It’s a little like when you learn how short a time human beings have lived on this planet compared with the age of the planet itself. As compelling as your reality is to you, you’re just a sliver on the timeline, a hiccup, a shrug. My father never made me feel that way, but sometimes his past did sound dauntingly crowded with people and events that had little to do with the benign and very domestic figure I knew. It seemed, when you went back far enough, to have more to do with what Greil Marcus calls “the old, weird America” than I could get my head around sometimes. I was a teenager before I started asking my dad to tell me those stories, and then I couldn’t get enough of them—their very weirdness, his role as an emissary from a past that really was like a foreign country, fascinated and delighted me.

  When we flipped the magic lantern of memory back to his stint with the hypnotist, the scenes it lit up were strange indeed. From the 1890s through the early 1920s, the country underwent a hypnotism craze, and in his way my father was part of it. This was the era of the unconscious mind, or rather of its scientific and popular discovery, of the trickling in of Freudian ideas, of the fascination with lie detection, autosuggestion, and other manifestations of hidden desires and motivations. As Alice Hamlin Hinman, a psychologist at the University of Nebraska, wrote in an early-twentieth-century essay on hypnosis, scientists realized that “no consciousness is single,” and our old ideas of personal identity could no longer hold. More and more, we “perceive within ourselves the double and multiple selves, potential in the wider scope of mental life,” of which actors, children, and hypnotic subjects were already aware. At Harvard, William James undertook experiments with hypnosis, and Gertrude Stein participated in research on automatic writing, letting her subconscious dictate what her hand would write and trying to pay as little conscious attention as possible. (“Strange fancies began to crowd upon her,” Stein later wrote of the experience in third person, “she feels that the silent pen is writing on and on forever.”) In Boston, James and his colleagues at the American Society for Psychical Research, including Alexander Graham Bell, investigated mediums, thought transference, and other occult phenomena in a spirit that was skeptical but not really debunking. Meanwhile, the sensational popularity of George du Maurier’s 1894 novel Trilby, the story of a timid young woman who could sing like a diva when controlled by a hypnotist named Svengali, lent even practitioners like MacKnight a certain frisson. (Svengali, meanwhile, entered the language as a synonym for a manipulative mentor, though the character in the book had been an anti-Semitic stereotype.) And oddly, electricity gave hypnotism a boost. Hypnotists often compared the mesmeric force to electricity and incorporated electrical devices into their shows, and early explicators of electricity often compared it to magic (both Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla had the nickname “Wizard”).

  Hypnotists had been around since the eighteenth century, practicing their soporific art with varying degrees of efficacy and legitimacy. But in the early twentieth century, even the ones who were in it purely to entertain often called themselves “Professor” and draped themselves in the mantle of science, of modernity as well as mysticism. Not that most people were thinking about, say, William James as they watched some so-called Professor in evening dress put his entranced subjects through their ridiculous paces—making a stout and dignified man of business crawl around on all fours and bray like a donkey, or a couple of joshing, muscle-bound lads mince around like winsome girls in trailing dresses—until he’d snap them out of it, and they’d stand there befuddled, claiming to have no memory of the spectacle they’d just made of themselves.

  But the spectacle was not limited to the theater. This was the period when hypnotists who came to town drummed up business for the evening show by means of extreme measures in the heart of town. One such stratagem was to place a supposedly hypnotized subject in a shop window for twenty-four hours. Sometimes he’d be lying in an open casket, rosy lips sewn shut. Townspeople would gather around to stare at the sleeping subject—his fluttering eyelids, the soft exhalations of breath lifting his chest—and the hypnotist would swirl his cape and doff his top hat, and announce that “tomorrow, this sleeping boy, now in a deep slumber which I, Professor So-and-So, have induced, will be revived, ag
ain by me, on the stage of your own fair Opera House!” Other times, the mesmerized boy in the window might be, for example, pedaling a bike that had been suspended from the ceiling by wires for hours and hours on end. That was the window display offered by a hypnotist called The Great Griffith in Gary, Indiana, in 1914. It didn’t go well, though. The “sallow, slender youth” who was Griffith’s paid subject pedaled himself into exhaustion, the Chicago Tribune said. A mob threatened Griffith when the boy fell off the bike, “his hair hanging in his eyes,” perspiration “soak[ing] his natty bicycle suit,” but his legs still milling madly. MacKnight, the hypnotist my father went to work for, would later gin up a more wholesome version of the boy-in-the-window: he’d supposedly put one of the guys in his act under his telepathic control, set him up at a table in a store window all day, and have him play checkers with any challengers.

  If he was even more daring, a hypnotist would bury an entranced subject alive for a few days. The sleeper would be placed in a coffin fitted with ventilation shafts, which visitors could also peer through. Though subjects were supposed to be in such a deep reverie that they would not need to eat or drink, the truth was the shafts were also used as conduits to slip food and drink underground when no one was there to see. The effect was a slumber that looked a lot like death, the fascination of which owed a great deal to that resemblance, as well as to the echo of fairy tales.

  Sometimes the subjects rebelled. Wives who traveled with their hypnotist husbands and had to undergo repeated burials tended to get irritated after a while. Thrilling as it might be for spectators, the stunt must have been damp, dull, and more than a little creepy for the subjects, even those who saw it as a good chance to catch up on their sleep. And sometimes, if the money wasn’t coming in, they went on strike. A reporter from The Atlanta Constitution described this scene, a kind of Lazarus moment as interpreted by the Three Stooges: “‘I say on deck there,’ yelled Wilcox from the grave. ‘What are the receipts so far?’ ‘Seventy cents,’ came the answer from the ticket puncher. Then again from the cheerless grave: ‘Well, I guess we’ll call it off, there’s nothing doing,’” whereupon the pragmatic Wilcox insisted on having himself disinterred immediately. Still, though the trick clearly had its hazards (“Buried Hypnotist Nearly Drowns During a Rain,” read one headline), concerned locals who tried to put a halt to it rarely got anywhere. “Hypnotist Has Right to Bury Wife Alive,” declared a headline from Emporia, Kansas, where somebody had tried in vain to find a city ordinance forbidding such a thing.

  The lure of a hypnotist became in these years an accepted explanation for why spouses strayed, teenagers ran away, nice young salesgirls went off with strange men they met on trains. “Was Hypnotized and Then Wedded,” read a headline in The Atlanta Constitution in 1896. “Man Used Occultic Power to Win Himself a Bride.” Hypnotism was the explanation the Los Angeles Times offered in 1919 for why a young woman named Thelma Steinbrenner, whose husband was a soldier in France, found herself in thrall, and in a hotel room, with an older, married hypnotist. It was the reason that a family of seven lay virtually comatose in an Illinois farmhouse for four days while a mob gathered outside calling for their reawakening (“Rudolph Bartag and His Entire Family Put Under Hypnotic Influence Last Tuesday at Ticona, Ill., by Leo Lenzer, Who Tries Vainly Day and Night to Arouse Them”). It was the excuse offered in 1910 by a Wall Street employee accused of stealing stocks and bonds from the strongbox at his office. “Says Broker Is Hypnotist,” the headline read.

  Particularly when sons and daughters left home in a hurry, their parents sometimes latched onto the halfway comforting idea that they must have been hypnotized. A fourteen-year-old boy from Azusa, California, who wandered off with a footloose ranch hand must have been hypnotized by the older man, his mother told the papers. A toolmaker in his early twenties who left a fiancée in Detroit to travel with a hypnotist for a year, and who was finally brought home by his family “in a very nervous condition,” must have been under some sort of powerful mental enchantment. Of course, children and young people were occasionally taken by brutes and pedophiles—and maybe, given how familiar the notion of hypnotism was in those days, some of these abductors tried or pretended to hypnotize their captives. But many of the teenagers and young men and women in their twenties who crop up in these stories were probably willing accomplices, tugged along on the rope of their own desire for a fascinating stranger or by a dream of what it would be like to wander from town to town, strangers themselves. If they were caught and brought home, or sheepishly returned on their own, they and the people who loved them could always invoke the irresistible power of hypnotism. At the turn of the century, when more young men and women had the possibility of living anonymously in big and disorderly cities than ever before in American history, there was just more decamping and disaffection, more seduction and disappearance, for families left behind to try to make sense of.

  In 1906, The New York Times reported the tale of Eleanor Balliet and Grace Hemstreet, both fourteen, who had the misfortune, the Times implied, to live on Staten Island, and worse than that, in Tottenville, which the paper portrayed with condescending sympathy as a slough of tedium set among mosquitoey marshes. Eleanor believed herself to be an elocutionist with an attractive voice; Grace had taken piano lessons; and both girls dreamed of careers onstage. But “not even the faintest reflection of the glamour of the Great White Way can be caught on the Tottenville horizon,” the Times noted sadly, “and in the scenes they light Tottenville has no share at all.” One Fourth of July weekend, the two girls tried to leave Tottenville behind. Eleanor and Grace had taken in two performances by a visiting hypnotist named Professor Santinelli, who employed as subjects a couple of young men of some charm, both named William. While hypnotized onstage, the Williams sang and played the piano and violin “at the ‘Professor’s’ pleasure.” The two girls, “their hearts . . . sick with yearning for brighter things,” as the Times put it, responded warmly to a letter from one of the Williams imploring them not to waste their talents in the marshes of Staten Island. A couple of days after they ran away to meet Santinelli and the two Williams at the train station, Grace and Eleanor were found by detectives sent by their parents. The detectives had to break down the door of the hotel rooms where the starstruck Tottenville girls were staying with the young men.

  I suppose my father was more like Grace and Eleanor than he was like some of the other teenagers in these tales. There were no William equivalents in his story, but like the Tottenville girls, he saw hypnotism as a way to get onstage. He was not under MacKnight’s spell, not even when he conscientiously tried to be. But he was, as it turned out, a pretty convincing pretender. During the first half of the show, Lyle would do a few magic tricks. He wasn’t much good at them, but MacKnight kept trying out different personae for him—“The Singing Magician,” “The Nutty Magician,” “The Magical Chatterbox,” and in a moment of desperation, “The Silent Worker”—with the hope that the singing or talking or conspicuous muteness would make up for Lyle’s disappointing sleight of hand. “Then in the second half of the show,” my father recalled, “MacKnight would hypnotize subjects who came up from the audience, and he’d get them to do all kinds of things, and some of them I think he really did hypnotize but others would sort of fake it. He had people who traveled along with him, and I was one of them. I was supposed to sit in the audience and then come up onstage. And the audience must have known very well that I was a phony, because I had just done my magic act in the first part of the evening! But then I went out and sat in the audience, and he said, Will any volunteers come up, and up I would jump along with someone else. Of course, I was supposed to be hypnotized, but I never was. I wanted to be. I thought, Gee, I mustn’t fake this, because it was supposed to be for real, but he could never get me to be really hypnotized, so I always did have to fake it.” (Or, as he told a fan magazine in the 1930s, “The only person who had ever hypnotized me was some extraordinarily good-looking girl.”) Mac
Knight instructed Lyle to wear simple clothes, to look nervous on the way onstage, to twist his cap in his hand, maybe trip on the ramp with an abashed glance back at the audience. And at all that, Lyle excelled. The audience couldn’t wait to see what MacKnight, the Hypnotic Fun Maker, would make this poor country boy do.

  The advertisements for MacKnight’s show promised a farce comedy between acts—something called “Fooling Father” was a frequent offering—and an evening that combined “Mystery, Fun, and Science.” MacKnight served up a little of everything, starting with telepathy. As “The Man Who Knows,” he invited audience members to write down their questions about business affairs or the whereabouts of missing relatives, and to hand them in at the door. MacKnight had perfected the generic answers—you will be reunited with the one you are missing; your investments will pay off—but he delivered them with enough brio to nourish hope, however false.

  The hypnotist and his subjects, rendered ridiculous.

  The centerpiece of the act, Lyle’s big moment and MacKnight’s, was when Lyle had a rock broken on his chest. MacKnight would grip one of Lyle’s hands and stare fixedly into his eyes, commanding him, limb by limb, to go rigid, and to sleep, SLEEP, sleep. With an assistant’s help, he would lay Lyle down with his feet on one chair and his head and shoulders on another. All Lyle had to do was hold his body taut (he was supposed to be in a state of paralysis) and keep his eyes shut, while his girlfriend, Peggy, played spooky music on the piano and MacKnight set the rock on his chest. The hypnotist would call up the town blacksmith, or somebody else who looked strong, and have him swing a mallet and break it.