by Hazel Flynn
We couldn’t re-do our music — the whole act was synchronised to specially chosen backing tracks — but we did tone down the more intensely beat-driven tracks in the mix and that helped. I’d noticed that any routine with a narrative to it resonated particularly well. I tested out this observation with a bit more talking, specifically setting tricks up with introductory pieces. The audiences seemed to really enjoy it. Story-telling wasn’t something I’d previously done much — it wouldn’t have worked at all in the shopping centres and it would have slowed the school shows down too much. But it was just what this crowd wanted. I relished the challenge of having to quickly develop my story-telling skills in a way that seemed organic to the carefully structured show, using only the gear I had brought with me.
I thought back to when I had first seen David Copperfield and recalled how powerful his stories had been, particularly the personal ones. He must have told those tales hundreds of times but because they were genuinely meaningful to him they felt fresh and potent. I mentally worked my way through the two halves of my act, letting my mind wander over the many associations each trick and routine had for me. I was looking for opportunities to take people on a journey and my linking rings piece was perfect. As I explained the next time I performed, this was my mother’s favourite illusion, the first trick that really wowed her when I was a kid starting to delve into magic. I had promised her, I told my audience, that when I made it I would keep the rings in the show and I was keeping my word and performing it in tribute to her belief in me. The story really touched a nerve; the audience absolutely loved it and it became an important part of the act.
My ambition was so strong it was almost a separate entity.
But the response from the people who were sitting in front of me clapping didn’t seem to be reflected in the cruise director’s feedback. Adam and I had become friends with some of the other entertainers, particularly singer Bobby Black. We checked, but no-one else seemed to be experiencing the same disconnect. It was mystifying. I called the booking agency and assured them we were continually tweaking and changing what we could. That was how Adam and I always approached things, continually analysing ourselves in an effort to improve, but now we brought a new intensity to the process. Our agent made general noises of encouragement but didn’t say much beyond that and clearly didn’t feel the need to reach out to the cruise director, who kept bringing up the way I looked: my hair and my clothes. Adam and I would replay those meetings in minute detail trying to figure out how we could fix the situation. In the end, as Adam said to me in frustration, ‘They don’t even care about the act, it’s just because you’ve got a freaking mohawk!’ I didn’t want to cause any ripples but since the agency wasn’t pointing out the obvious I had to politely do so myself: I’d been booked for the ship based on stills and video footage that clearly showed what I looked like and what kind of act I did. Still the tension continued to build. We tried to just focus on doing a great job in our shows but we did start to wonder what was really going on.
The dress requirements for employees could be a real pain: there were a few Saturday nights when I skipped dinner rather than have to get dressed up in a suit just to eat. On a couple of other occasions I pushed the boundaries. A series of staff-only passageways ran through the ship so employees could move around out of sight of passengers. One of these provided access to the buffet. I’d just been working out at the gym and was famished. It was a casual-dress night but I didn’t want to go all the way back to my cabin to change out of my trackpants so I ducked through the back entrance, quickly filled a plate and ducked back out of sight again. Not quickly enough, apparently: a note was delivered the next morning saying I’d been seen by someone in management and had consequently received a cross against my name for breaking the ship’s rules.
A couple of weeks later I got another cross, this time for wearing jeans on a non-jeans weekday. In one sense it was completely fair enough: the rules had been spelled out right from the start. But the thing was, other employees were doing exactly what I’d been chastised for yet they weren’t being penalised for it. And the appraisal disconnect continued to grow: in person the feedback from the audience was great and many of them made a point of saying they would give us high praise on their appraisal forms. But we got far less approving feedback from the cruise director. I tried everything I could to turn my mind to positive thoughts. Working out in the gym helped so I did it twice a day. I was eating a lot and putting on a lot of muscle: during our time on the ship I went from seventy-two to eighty kilograms. No matter how many weights I lifted, though, I couldn’t ignore that things were going from bad to worse behind the scenes.
Neither Adam nor I have ever been given to paranoia but increasingly we felt like we were being targeted, for some unfathomable reason. When Adam’s girlfriend joined the ship in San Diego six weeks in we saw the chance to test our concerns. He moved to her cabin for the duration — two people in the cabin meant two lots of appraisal forms each day. For the fortnight she was aboard they filled in forms, Adam’s under a pseudonym, some of his girlfriend’s under her own name and some under assumed names. The appraisals ranged from the mildly positive to rave reviews like, ‘Cosentino is the best!’ In confirmation of our suspicions, none of the high praise showed up in our weekly summaries. They had all been removed at some point in the chain, leaving only mediocre or critical comments. There was nothing we could do about it, other than to keep putting on good shows and doing everything else by the book.
It turned out that wasn’t enough. Just shy of two months in to what was to have been our three-month gig we got a shipboard call from our agent to tell us we had been sacked and were being taken off the vessel. Despite our building concerns we had never entertained the idea that things might go this far and Adam and I were both in shock. ‘What do you mean? Why?’ we asked the agent, stunned. ‘We don’t know,’ he said. ‘You’ve just got to get off.’ ‘Wait, wait, hang on,’ I said. ‘What reasons have they given? We need to know what we’re meant to have done wrong. We think something else is going on.’ The agent said he would try to get some more answers but that wouldn’t change anything: the decision had been made.
We met with the cruise director who repeated what the agent had told us. We protested that we’d been putting on good shows and getting good face-to-face feedback from passengers and we knew there had been extremely positive appraisals, so why hadn’t they been included in the feedback? He said he had no idea what we were talking about; the reason we’d been fired was because we had received a third strike in addition to the two warnings about clothing: an (unnamed) person in management had decided that my execution of the trick in which I made the doves appear wasn’t being done smoothly enough. I didn’t think there was any basis to this claim: the routine was good. But even if such specific criticism had been warranted, wouldn’t that be something the cruise director should have spoken to me about and asked me to improve? None of it added up.
To add insult to injury the cruise director then told us that not only were we fired and would not be paid for the remainder of the contract — costing us more than $US7000 in income — we were to leave the ship at the next stop, which happened to be Vancouver, and we had to take the birds and rabbit with us. Our gear would remain aboard until the ship returned to San Diego. It was our responsibility to get ourselves back from Canada to the US and to reclaim our equipment at the docks.
If the same thing happened now I would handle it very differently. I would push harder aboard the ship to find out what was really going on and to be treated fairly, and I would demand that the agent stand up for us by ensuring the cruise line paid out the contract. I would also expect them to find us a replacement booking on a ship that catered for younger travellers or families where we would have been a big hit. But I was just twenty-one and Adam was only a couple of years older. We were far too stunned and upset to know what to do and we felt powerless, both with the ship’s management and with our agency, who clearly cou
ldn’t wait to drop us. We shared a feeling of anger at the injustice but much stronger was our absolute mortification at having been perceived to have failed.
Adam and I were shattered. We’d flown out of Australia feeling like we were going to conquer the world but we had failed and now we’d be heading back with our tails between our legs. The fact that I truly did not know why I’d been sacked made everything so much worse. If there’d been a specific problem the experience still would have stung, but at least I could have set about trying to fix whatever wasn’t working. This way my confidence was shaken to the core. I couldn’t help but feel maybe I had blown my one big chance and let everyone down. Leaving the ship was a surreal experience. We’d made friends with people all over it, including the crew, the security guys, other performers — pretty much everyone, in fact, except the cruise director and the captain. As I left my cabin and walked down the crew hallway for the final time a most unexpected thing happened: the employees came out and applauded me in a show of support as I went by.
In the couple of days we had before we reached Vancouver, Adam and I tried to figure out our next move. The friends we’d made aboard, including Bobby Black and lounge-singer husband and wife duo Ray and Melissa, offered sympathy and practical help, suggesting we head for Vegas, where they lived. Ray and Melissa, who would be leaving the ship when it returned to San Diego, offered to let us crash at their place for two weeks. Going there would cost us the flights back to Australia that the cruise company was supposed to pay for: any change to date or departure point meant the tickets would be forfeited. But we decided it was worth it. Having had some time to adjust, Dad suggested we store our gear in the US for a while in the hope that we might pick up some other kind of gig over there. Vegas was the most likely place for this to happen and John and Jilda made a plan to meet us there. Bobby would arrive not long after them and promised to take us out on the town to try to help us forget our troubles.
‘And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places.
Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.’ — Roald Dahl
In other circumstances it would have been great to spend some time relaxing in Canada. Vancouver was always our favourite stop on the cruise: we had waited eagerly for it every two weeks. But we were too worried about our equipment: specifically, whether whoever was behind our sacking might try to sabotage it or frame us by planting something in it. We’d locked all the road cases up as securely as possible before we got off the ship but it was still an anxious few days until we were able to reclaim everything and confirm all was as we’d left it. In that time we took the rabbit to the new home we’d organised — a school where he became everyone’s favourite pet — and we gave the doves to the local vet we’d seen, who had some new owners lined up to take care of them. After checking our gear and putting it into storage we headed to Vegas.
We were still bruised by what had happened but we had to put on a brave face. In private Adam and I reassured one another we’d had enough independent confirmation from passengers, performers and other ship employees to know the act really had been solid. In public we tried to keep everything easy, avoiding any whiff of desperation. We set about salvaging whatever we could from the trip by making new connections and strengthening the ones we already had in Vegas. I called up the prop-builders I had met on my last visit and they welcomed me back with open arms.
But by spending time with Bobby and my prop-builder friends, I felt like a real Vegas insider. Bobby seemed to have pals in every show in town. He took us out to some of the biggest productions around and introduced us to the showgirls and other performers afterwards. As a tourist Vegas seems packed with strangers, but if you’re lucky enough to be let in through the town’s ‘stage door’ you quickly realise what a small community it is: everyone knows everyone, at least among the performers.
The icing on the cake of our time in Vegas was the fact that an international magic convention, Magic Live, just happened to be on when we were there and, again through the builders, I got to attend. The buzz and energy were palpable; it was a very different world to the conventions I’d been to in Australia. Seeing big names such as David Blaine and Portugal’s Luis de Matos wandering around certainly helped with the sense of excitement, but there was more to it than that. The ideas, the apparatus, the tricks: everything about it was bigger than life and the effect was electrifying.
I wasn’t ready to leave behind the world of magic that I loved so much. So I was going to have to find a way to absorb the hard, hard lesson of being sacked and bounce back.
After two weeks at Ray and Melissa’s place Adam and I moved to the hotel where John and Jilda were staying for a week. It was the huge and impressive Monte Carlo but it was affordable because gambling is the revenue-raiser in Vegas, not accommodation. Following through on our determination to turn our situation around, while we were at the hotel Adam contacted US theatrical agents hoping to secure representation. Just like something from a 1940s or 1950s movie, he made most of the calls from phone booths in the hotel lobby — it looks a lot more glamorous on film than it is in real life, believe me — and followed up by sending out information packages.
We got a call back from one who said he was really interested in our act and wanted to meet us when next we were in New York — he was based in New Jersey. John and Jilda had already booked to go on to New York but Adam and I, trying to conserve what we had left of our clipped cruise ship gig income, had been planning to go straight to LA and then home. However, this was too good an opportunity to pass up: landing a US agent could be the start of something huge. So all four of us flew out to New York. Jilda, ever patient and encouraging, agreed to let Adam and me sleep on the floor of her and John’s room for a night to save money.
Pierre Baroni
Wilson Du
It was a lightning trip but we couldn’t bear to fly into New York without seeing at least a little of the city. We landed and jumped straight into some updated On the Town–style sightseeing, racing from the Statue of Liberty to Ground Zero to Broadway, taking it all in. The next day John, Adam and I got on the train to Jersey, to go see the agent at his home office. He turned out to be a very strange character with a long list of things he didn’t like about the act and a short list of positive comments. Hours went by until finally he got to the point: he wanted to sign us up, in fact he had a contract right there which we could sign right now. We might have been young and relatively inexperienced but we knew far better than that. We politely said how great it was that he was interested and we’d like to take the contract away and review it. No, we weren’t permitted to take it away. ‘Well hang on,’ said John, ‘you can’t just expect the boys to sign it without having read it.’ ‘No, of course not,’ said the agent. ‘Take all the time you like to read it. But you have to do it here.’ ‘Why?’ we asked. ‘Because,’ he said, ‘I spent a lot of time and money getting this contract drawn up and I’m concerned that someone might steal the content.’ Wait, what? This supposedly professional agent was concerned someone would steal the wording of a boilerplate contract? With that, the meeting was over.
John said, ‘We’re just not prepared to sign a contract under these conditions. This isn’t going to work out,’ and we got up to leave. The agent started waving his arms around and yelling about how we had wasted his time and how we’d be finished in the business because of this. When we finally escaped back to the street all we could do was look at each other in astonishment. This guy was the only agent who had responded to our mail-out and we’d had to pay our own way and fly almost right across the States to find out what a weirdo he was. The whole thing was nuts, like something out of Entourage, but a lot less funny when you were living it rather than watching it on TV.
We’d left Australia as an international act, booked to play in a professional 800-seat theatre where we could stage big illusions. Back in Melbourne, there was
no choice but to return to the van and the grind of school shows plus whatever shopping centre gigs we could land. Well, that’s not quite right. There was a choice. The new university year would be starting soon. I could have returned to my studies and Adam could have found a corporate job and we could have filed away eight years of performing as youthful adventure we’d outgrown. But my sense of destiny and the belief Adam shared in my potential was too strong for that.
Many years later at an awards ceremony where I was performing and the singer-songwriter Paul Kelly was being honoured, someone who knew him when he was starting out described his ambition as so strong it was almost a separate entity. That’s what it was like for me too. I remember once playing charades with my family. I was on the team trying to guess what the other team was acting out. The word was ‘star’ and when we twigged to it I said without thinking, ‘Oh, you mean like me.’ Dad turned and said, ‘Whoa! Hang on there, what do you mean?’ I can understand his reaction; my comment must have sounded arrogant and egotistical. But that’s not what it felt like from the inside. Plenty of people dream about being rich and famous, but that’s not what being a star meant to me. A star was someone who had reached a pinnacle in their work and was so exceptional that the world had no choice but to acknowledge and embrace them. I was nowhere near being a star yet but deep inside me was an unshakeable certainty that I would be, one day.
So even after the cruise ship debacle there was no real question of giving up. We’d thrown the dice and landed on what seemed like a ladder of opportunity, only to hurtle back down. It hurt a lot but it was no reason to quit. No-one who ever achieved anything great had an easy ride. I was going to make it, I told myself. Maybe not this year, maybe not next year, but it would happen and if I continued to push myself I would be ready when my big chance came.