Jim Steinmeyer

by The Last Greatest Magician in the World

  WHEN THE FAIR CLOSED in October 1893, the Dahomey Village moved to Coney Island in New York for the next season, and Howard Thurston moved with it.

  In the spring of 1894, he left Coney Island and headed back to the Midwest to find a good circus engagement. Now his magic show consisted of card flourishes, some ball and handkerchief tricks, and a new finale in which he reached down the collar of a spectator’s coat, withdrew scarves and a laundry line of baby clothes, and finished by producing a large black-faced doll. It guaranteed applause, and sent the audience away guffawing, but Thurston still hedged his bets by buying a box of can openers. It was always best to end the show with a little sales pitch.

  In Logan, Ohio, Thurston shared a torchlit spot on the city street with an itinerant tattoo artist named David Lano. When Thurston went into his act, Lano stepped back and watched. He was impressed. Lano explained that he was traveling with the Hurd and Berry Great London Sideshow, a ragtag assembly of freaks and variety acts.

  Lano brought the magician back to the fairgrounds and introduced him to Tom Hurd, the owner. Thurston was told that they had been looking for a magician because the sideshow was carrying a nicely painted banner advertising “Anderson, the Great Wizard of the North.” “There it is,” Hurd told him, unrolling the banner. “If you want to be with it, you get six dollars a week and grub. That’s if you can wiz.” Thurston joined the show in Logan. He remembered that he “sat in the train with my chest puffed out like a pouter pigeon’s, because at last I was a professional traveling magician.”

  They performed thirty or forty shows a day, every fifteen minutes, interspersing his performances with Lano, who was a puppeteer; Pop Samwell, with his troupe of trained dogs and monkeys; Big Hattie Boone, 465 pounds of feminine charm; Mademoiselle de Leon, the Circassian Beauty; Thardo, the knife thrower; Coffee, the skeleton dude…. Within weeks, Berry had proved an undependable drunk, so Thurston was pressed into service as the talker. “Gentlemen, as a special service to the gentlemen here today, I’m obliged to point out that Big Hattie Boone is available and willing to marry. The man who gets her, if she’s worth her weight in gold, will end up having the whole mine!”

  For months, Thurston overlooked the hardships. He was thrilled with his work as the Wizard of the North, and exhilarated by tents filled with audiences. Years later he remembered:

  All the members of the company ate and slept in the tent. We had breakfast at 8 o’clock and supper at night, with a cup of coffee and sandwich between times without skipping the performances. The tattooed lady and the snake charmer received extra pay for the cooking. An oilcloth was spread over one of the freak platforms and this was our table. The food was not of the best quality, but the fresh air and the hard work gave us huge appetites. I have since eaten all over the world, but as long as I live I shall never forget the smell of coffee coming from the cooking tent in the early morning.

  But late that year, friction within the sideshow troupe combined with Thurston’s growing sense of self-importance: “The two managers were no help at all.” He was now a better talker than the owner and could take charge of just about any aspect of the show. In the winter of 1894, as the company traveled through the Allegheny Mountains, Thurston led a revolt against the managers, Hurd and Berry, splitting the troupe in half.

  The new company—the Great Country Circus—worked in rented storefronts or public halls. They talked their way into the towns, convinced the residents to come to the performance, and relied upon borrowed lanterns to illuminate the show. “I sold tickets,” Thurston wrote, “‘worked straight’ in the opening comedy act (‘feeding the comedian’ as it is called), did an exhibition of [Indian] club swinging, lectured on the freaks, did an occasional talk outside the hall, acted as ringmaster for Pop Samwell’s trained animal act, did a magical turn, and worked in the concluding sketch.” If Thurston had been half as clever, or experienced, as he thought he was, he would never have tried to start his own show in the middle of winter, stranded in tiny Pennsylvania towns. It was miserably cold—Thurston could barely perform his manipulations; the audience, wrapped in coats and furs, could barely applaud.

  As spring brought warm weather, it also brought the new manager a renewed determination. He needed reinforcements. He wired Harry Thurston in Chicago, urging him to join the show and help with its management. He knew he could count on Harry. Harry would be hardworking, clever, tough, and fiercely loyal to his brother. Most of all, after his fascination with the Columbian Exposition, Howard suspected that Harry would like a taste of real show business.

  Howard was right on every count. And it was a decision he’d regret for the rest of his life.

  FOUR

  “THE MYSTIC FOLLIES”

  Harry Elias Thurston was born in Columbus, Ohio, on November 3, 1871. He was two and a half years younger than Howard, a few inches taller, and a little heavier. The brothers shared a natural intrigue with deception. In Harry’s case, it began a and ended with con games, business expedicase, it began and ended with con games, business expediencies, or little white lies to carry him through the day—he could never be bothered by the meticulous rehearsal to turn tricks into magic. Harry was a city boy, whose show interests ran from dime museums to gambling parlors. The “hoochie kootch” shows of the Chicago midway were perfectly suited to his tastes.

  Harry idolized his older brother and was drawn to Howard’s exciting lifestyle, but he had none of Howard’s personal charms. Harry was Howard without the wealth of experiences, or perspective. But he was also Howard without the contradictions. Harry was simply a tough customer.

  Howard needed just this sort of discipline behind the Great Country Circus, his loose collection of acts that was struggling through Pennsylvania. He also needed quick cash, and Harry brought a pocketful of money to save the day.

  In Williamsport, Pennsylvania, the brothers made arrangements to rent a local tent and drivers. Under the big top the little circus took on a new luster, but rain limited the number of performances, and the local sheriff moved in to attach the circus’s possessions. Harry studied a map. They were midway between New York and Pittsburgh. He knew a nice little dime museum in Pittsburgh, operated by Harry Davis, that just might be looking for a big attraction. The Thurstons dashed to the Western Union office and wired Davis, offering a sale price of $150 a week for their show, promising a collection of marvels, including “the world’s greatest magician,” and concluding, “answer immediately.” Then they returned to the Great Country Circus tent and waited nervously.

  At eight o’clock that night, Davis finally wired his response. “All okay, open Monday.” Fortunately, Harry had saved just enough money for two bottles of whiskey. They got the sheriff good and drunk, then snuck out of the tent with their possessions, running to the train station.

  In Pittsburgh Thurston borrowed a dress suit from John Harris, the treasurer and box office attendant at Harry Davis’s establishment. The show ran for three weeks, but it was a victim of its own success. After a long, hard winter, most of the troupe saw their profitable Pittsburgh appearance as a chance to finally escape, using their profits to run back to other sideshows.

  BOTH HOWARD AND HARRY had developed their own ways of making money. Howard regularly purchased boxes of cheap jewelry, watches or brooches that were flash-plated with a thin layer of gold. He also purchased one expensive watch—an exact match—made in real gold with a quality movement. He used his skills as a pitchman to lure his customers, and his skills as a magician to make the sale. The buyer examined the quality watch, studied the movement, and admired the gold. Howard invisibly switched it for a cheaper watch—the simple work of some palming—just before the sale. This little con game was especially useful when the brothers were pressed to pay a hotel bill or a fine. Invariably Howard’s “family watch” came out of his pocket as a tear came to his eye. After apparently weighing this painful option, he would finally agree to offer the watch as security on a loan, switching the watch and skipping out of town.
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  Howard’s smooth good looks and placid demeanor earned him many female admirers. He cultivated a wardrobe of elegant clothing—silk ties, navy jackets, crisp white shirts, and straw hats—so that he always looked prosperous and desirable. He taught his brother Harry how to “tish” the girls; it seems to be the only sleight of hand that Harry ever learned, his kind of deception. While propositioning a showgirl or dance-hall floozy, Harry would smile, pull a five-dollar bill from his pocket, fold it into a neat bundle, wrap it in a piece of tissue, and then discreetly tuck it beneath the lady’s garter. This little gesture usually earned a special favor. The next morning, the lady discovered that the bill had been switched for a piece of paper. The showgirls in cities like New York or Chicago were already on to this trick, but Howard and Harry discovered that it still worked in Pittsburgh or St. Louis.

  With the Great Country Circus disbanded, Harry had no work, and he returned to the Chicago to search out dime museums. Howard realized that his best prospects were still on the road. Through the fall and winter of 1894, he jumped from one small show to another, performing magic in the sideshow or working as a pitchman with another new product. First, he tried selling hot dogs (a delicacy that had just become a fairground favorite) and carpet cleaner, which could be mixed in big batches in a hotel bathtub. But he was always more comfortable working with a partner. He teamed up with a showman named Sam Meinhold, who played the zither to accompany the magician. The partners headed south for the rest of the winter, first with Colonel Routh Goshen’s Circus (Goshen was one of Barnum’s giants), and then on their own.

  When Thurston and Meinhold presented their sideshow in a small Georgia town, the local constable assembled a list of fines and charges, designed to extort money from anyone who stumbled through the community. Thurston couldn’t pay the fine. Howard and Sam were marched into court that morning, and Howard began addressing the judge with a long, impassioned plea, detailing the unfair way they were treated. He concluded:

  We are strangers to you, and I know you want us to leave your beautiful city feeling that we have been fairly treated and that your honor and the honor of your fair city have not been debased by the actions of unscrupulous officials. Who knows, your own boys may be in similar positions sometime.

  He paused, noticing that everyone in the courtroom was speechless. They stared back at him, awaiting his next words, apparently blindsided by the sideshow worker’s unexpectedly pure rhetoric. Thurston pulled his handkerchief from his pocket, wiped his eyes, and continued with a voice that trembled with theatrical emotion.

  I am glad this thing has ended so happily for us all and that we can leave the city feeling we have your friendship and good wishes. I want to thank you for your kindness. I want to bid you all good-bye, and I hope to see you all some day.

  He and Sam pushed their way through the court and out the door. No one raised their voice or attempted to stop them. “I had been the accused, I opened the case, did the pleading, closed the case, returned the verdict and acquitted myself,” Thurston later wrote. “To borrow an expression from my own profession, I had forced a card on everyone in that room.”

  It was another incident in a small, deeply segregated Georgia town that left the strongest impression on the young magician. As they were preparing their show in a small hall opposite a train station, Thurston and Meinhold heard a train rumble through town, and the sudden screams of a boy. The magician dashed across the street to the station as a crowd assembled. There, an adolescent black boy lay screaming on the tracks. The train had run over his legs and nearly severed them completely.

  The assembled crowd, a group of mostly black faces, was horrified by the scene. Thurston admonished them to pick up the boy and carry him to the drugstore. “I’m a magician. I’ll put the magician’s curse on all of you unless you help at once!” A few volunteers carried the boy across the street; he was bleeding profusely and sobbing. There was nothing that the local doctor could do for him. Thurston knelt by the side of the boy. He tried to comfort him with a showman’s trick, simple suggestion, telling him that he would take away all his pain. “Rest and sleep,” Thurston repeated. They were the same lines he would use, years later, while performing the Levitation Trick. The boy looked into Thurston’s face, and asked, “Are you Jesus?”

  Thurston hesitated, and then answered quietly, “Yes.”

  He told the boy to close his eyes, repeating that the pain would leave. As he looked up, he saw the stunned crowd outside the drugstore kneeling in prayer. “The boy was dying,” Thurston remembered. “With a feeling I hope I shall never experience again, I walked slowly through the praying Negros and awestruck whites, and climbed the stairs.” He walked back into the little hall and then performed his magic show.

  It was a story that Thurston told for the rest of his life, as if puzzling through it, attempting to reconcile the way his deep honesty and dishonesty could combine for the benefit of an audience. “I felt that it was right to tell the boy that I was Jesus.” This also demonstrated the essential difference between the brothers Harry and Howard Thurston. Harry was a master of the simple con game. But Harry could never have bamboozled the Georgia court, nor comforted the dying boy. He never would have tried.

  IN 1896, Howard Thurston was personally awestruck by a different kind of deception. Although he fancied himself an expert magician, his peripatetic fairground work meant that Thurston was an outsider to the world of magic. When he witnessed a young midwestern magician, T. Nelson Downs, perform an act with coins and playing cards, Thurston was surprised to see something new—genuinely unique—using just a few cards. Downs showed a fan of five cards and, one by one, made them disappear at his fingertips.

  Thurston stumbled through an approximation of the trick, trying to re-create Downs’s movements. It wasn’t until he traveled through New York City later that year that he was able to track down the full story of the disappearing cards. It was Dr. James Elliott’s trick. In fact, as any magician of the time could have told you, it had to be Dr. Elliott’s.

  James William Elliott was born in Maine in April 1874; he was the same age as Harry Houdini. He was famously devoted to magic. When rehearsing a new move, he would rent a room—separate from his apartment—with nothing in it but a table, a chair, and a deck of cards. No distractions. He’d lock himself in the room with instructions that he was not to be disturbed. And then, for four or five hours at a time, he would rehearse. He might then leave for a meal or a short walk, and then return and resume his rehearsals—analyzing each maneuver, solving minute problems, and repeating thousands of repetitions so that the magic became second nature to him.

  He studied medicine at Harvard, and then attended Bellevue Hospital Medical College in New York City—which brought him in contact with the New York magicians.

  Thurston arranged to meet with Elliott in New York, and found a big man with patrician pride and a “sweet, forceful character,” according to one of Elliott’s friends. Thurston and Elliott must have formed an instant bond. Elliott was a churchgoing Christian. Thurston was able to recount his years at Mount Hermon in Massachusetts with Dwight Moody. Then Thurston pulled out a deck of cards and demonstrated his sleight of hand. At that time, he performed the standard collection of sleights and flourishes, concluding by passing his hand over the face of the deck to make one card change into another. He presented these slights masterfully, for his years on the sideshow platforms had been a trial by fire for these delicate maneuvers.

  Thurston knew he passed the test when he saw Dr. Elliott dip his fingers into his vest pocket and remove his own deck of cards. Elliott took a few steps back and stretched out his right arm. At his fingertips was a single playing card. He moved his hand up and down slightly, a sort of exaggerated wave. And the card disappeared. It was the same thing he’d seen Downs perform. Elliott held his hand flat, his fingers straight, so Thurston could see his empty palm. He repeated the action and the card reappeared at his fingertips.

  Thurston shook his h
ead and exhaled in surprise. It was amazing. He suspected what must be happening, even if he didn’t know how.

  Elliott began again, pulling a chair close to Thurston and speaking with the tone of a professor. It was a move that he had titled the Backhand Palm (which later became known to magicians as the Back Palm). A single card was held horizontally at the fingertips, between the thumb and the middle two fingers. By bending his knuckles in, against the back of the card, and clipping its corners between his fingers, Elliott could suddenly open his hand, transporting the card to the back of his fingers. His palm was empty, his fingers held tightly together. In that position the card was pinched against the back of his hand.

  Elliott then demonstrated his improvement, an amazing somersault that invisibly transferred the card from the back of the hand to the front. In required a specific series of moves—the hand didn’t just turn over, but rolled closed with a slight flourish. As this happened, Elliott twisted his wrist so that his knuckles were momentarily pointed away from Thurston. In that position, he was able to straighten his fingers, pushing the card back against his palm. He finished the move, showing the back of his hand. Reversing the motion, the card smoothly slid around his knuckles and was concealed behind his hand again. It required a specific knack and a neat sense of touch. Thurston’s hands were ideal for the maneuver, with long, muscular fingers.

  Backhand palm was a ridiculous name, of course. Before this time, if a magician concealed a card in his hand, he palmed it, holding it in his cupped palm with the back of his hand facing the audience. The art was in the naturalness of this motion. So it’s only logical that to palm a card, you use the palm of your hand. But Elliott’s misnomer indicates the unexpected and innovative nature of the discovery. There was no good way to describe it. It was a way of palming a card while your palm was empty.