By now, the audience was in on the game. They laughed at each line as Keating slouched lower and lower into his seat. Thurston pointed a melodramatic finger at the boy, and his voice hardened to a comically icy accusation.
I pay him to be in that seat at the right time, and he’s late as usual! You see what I have to go through to bring you this wonderful show!
Thurston planted his feet, swung the net, and shouted, “Now!” Keating flipped the bird into the net and the audience erupted in cheers. Not a single person had been fooled, but each one had been privileged to watch Thurston’s improvised lecture. “The audience loved it,” Keating recalled.
Thurston always made them part of the show. There was a folksiness about him, to be sure, but [he was] no hayseed. You had the feeling of being at the home of a friendly and fatherly host whose table was as abundant as his heart. Young and old, peasant and patrician felt themselves honored guests.
Many people used the analogy of a minister, a man of great personal warmth and good humor, but also great dignity. Howard Thurston’s show was now filled with bubbling humor, from start to finish, although Thurston never told a joke. He presided over a magical party.
For example, the Rising Card Trick now accommodated bits of unexpected humor. When Thurston had asked for the name of a card, a stooge sitting in the balcony loudly called for the joker. Thurston dismissed him, saying “No joker,” as if he’d been caught, and couldn’t perform the trick with the joker. But the man in the balcony loudly repeated the request, causing the magician to roll his eyes. “Yes, the balcony is filled with jokers,” Thurston quipped.
Thurston asked the name of a small boy in the front row and had him stand on his seat. “I say, Gilbert,” he started, “place your hand very gently on top of father’s head. Now, don’t disturb father’s hair. You know, I want father to be happy. I want him to be proud of you and I want him to have a good time. Now raise your hand in the air and say, ‘Rise, Ace of Clubs.’”
The boy did it, but nothing happened. “That’s strange. Gilbert, just take a firm hold of father’s hair. Hold tight because I want dad to be happy. Say, ‘Rise, Ace of Clubs.’” The card started to appear. “Now Gilbert, just pull on father’s hair. Pull, pull, pull, pull, pull!” And as the little boy pulled, he seemed to make the magic, causing the card to float out of the deck.
When the joker rose from the deck, Thurston instructed someone else in the front row to tell the card to rise. “Go down,” the voice from the balcony interrupted. And, on cue, the card descended. “Rise, rise,” Thurston countered. The card began to rise. “Whoa,” the stooge yelled, and the card froze in midair.
Once Thurston had established his conflict with the mysterious man in the balcony, the situation led to further comedy. An hour into the show, when Thurston was presenting the Spirit Cabinet, the lights were lowered to a mysterious blue haze. “I shall now present the spirit that controlled Katie King more than forty years ago,” Thurston intoned. A gauzy, luminous face appeared floating in the cabinet, sending a collective shudder through the audience. Thurston continued, with a hypnotic purr:
I say, when the lights are all down and the house is dark and no one can see, I shall cause the spirit to leave the cabinet and float over the heads of the audience… and it will rise and rise … and go up in the gallery … and land on the worst sinner in the gallery.
There was an uncomfortable pause, and then the stooge in the balcony yelled, “Turn on those lights!”
“A magician is an actor playing the part of a magician,” the famous nineteenth-century conjurer Jean Robert-Houdin explained. Thurston had managed something even more remarkable. He played the part of a gentleman, businessman, entrepreneur, and a pillar of society who was a magician.
Thurston charmed his audiences as the dapper man in the tuxedo standing at the edge of the stage, with his hand raised in supplication—the gatekeeper between the comically ordinary, doubting rabble in the audience, and the rarefied wonders and profound magic just beyond the curtain. Howard Thurston was clearly part of both worlds, and the show consisted of him mediating between the two. What audiences may not have realized was that the real-world comments and reactions had been as carefully planned and plotted as the marvels of magic within the spotlight.
His audience assembled clues about his personality and came to their own conclusions about his respectability and probity, which was part of his incredible deception. Even young Keating, who worked with him for a season and befriended him in later years, got it wrong.
He was a man of affairs, a leader of men, who could rub elbows as an equal with the builders of industry, Rotarian Resplendent. Henry Ford was his God, not Robert-Houdin. He did not produce fishbowls or cards or pigeons, he produced commodities.
His audience—indeed, even Fred Keating—could never have imagined him as a poorly educated street urchin, a carnival confidence man, a failed performer whiling his time on a Union Square park bench, or a magician so desperate that he would pawn his entire show to a loan shark. Those were the real secrets. Once he proved himself a great magician, fame had insulated him from his past.
Keating lasted one season with the show, and did, indeed, learn a lot about magic. On Thanksgiving, as the show passed through Trenton, New Jersey, Leotha, Jane, and Howard hosted Keating’s mother at a local restaurant. The Thurstons knew that she had been ill; they planned the entire day carefully and treated her grandly—inviting her to the show, where she was presented with roses and introduced to the audience as the “mother of the future world’s greatest magician.” After the show, Thurston told her confidentially, “If Fredrick wants to be a magician, let him. Neither you nor anyone else can stop him.” Keating’s mother died shortly after that meeting. “I think she died happy,” Keating later wrote, “because she had sensed something of the beauty, of the drama, of what I saw in magic.”
DURING HIS SEASON with the show, Keating also learned about his boss’s sense of humor. Howard Thurston was an inveterate practical joker, and his magisterial presence only made the situations funnier. For example, shortly after Keating joined the show, the boy was sent on an urgent mission from backstage. He dashed down the street, one theater to another, to locate the “key to the curtain,” so that they could begin the performance. Every theater manager seemed to play straight man to Thurston’s practical joke, listening earnestly to the boy’s request, sadly noting that their key wouldn’t fit, and sending the frantic boy to the next auditorium.
Thurston’s patter often displayed his sense of irony. “Surakabaja,” the Hindustani word that Thurston uttered endlessly during the levitation, was, his friends recorded, an unprintable, and physically impossible, command that he had learned in India. One of Thurston’s scripted lines explained, “Surakabaja means, among other things, that those who love shall be loved,” which was a sly acknowledgment of the real meaning. Similarly, in one illusion his script refers to the lady assistant as “Eileen.” But there was no Eileen in the cast. The trick was accomplished when the lady would secretly lean out of the way to avoid a sharp blade; hence “I lean.”
He similarly used words that he had learned in his Masonic initiations, sprinkling his patter with impressive-sounding spells and winking at all of his brother Masons.
IN 1915, Thurston finally managed to sell the farm in Cos Cob at a loss. Leotha Thurston searched for a home closer to New York City and located a cottage near the water’s edge at Whitestone Landing, Beechhurst, Long Island, across the East River from Manhattan. When Howard saw the lot, he was shocked to realize that it was on the property owned by Alexander Herrmann, whose mansion had been across the street. To him it was one of those incredible premonitions. They moved into the cottage on the property and the following year built a large, three-story house there.
Beechhurst was a small suburban community that had become a haven for a number of actors and theatrical producers. Leotha supervised the grounds and the furnishings, splitting her time between the show and the family
’s new property. Jane was alternately neglected and spoiled. For most of the year, she was sent away to boarding schools—first to the nuns at Mount Saint Agnes College in Baltimore and then at the Academy of the Holy Child in Manhattan. Leotha offered the nuns gifts whenever she passed through town—candy, handkerchiefs, and, at least once, according to Jane’s recollections, black silk negligees. Mrs. Thurston had a surprising, bubbly sense of humor to match her husband’s, but Jane noticed that there was no joke intended by the presents. The nuns seemed very happy to accept these provocative garments.
Jane received daily letters from her mother and father; when she was old enough to write responses, her parents harangued Jane when they didn’t hear from her—when she didn’t report on her classes, or grades, or her health. “To my blue-eyed violet,” Leotha addressed her letters, “From her brown-eyed Susan, Mother.”
“Dear Jane Girl,” Thurston used to start his letters, often counting down the days until they’d see her again. “Only two more days. Mother is here helping with the new water act. It is beautiful. Mother will call you Saturday. Love, love and a kiss. Daddy.”
Her happiest times were the summers, when Jane’s school was out of session and her father was home. Then the Beechhurst home became a beehive of activity. Illusions were repaired or built at a nearby warehouse. Blanche Williams, the sometime wardrobe mistress of the show, became the family’s maid and nanny; Abdul, the somber dark-skinned Indian who prayed during the levitation, was the family’s butler, answering the door with a solemn sense of duty and silently circling the rooms to polish the furniture. George White was available to play with Jane, perform songs on a guitar, apply bandages to her cuts and scrapes, and repair her toys.
Thurston indulged Jane with tricks, practical jokes, and stories about the little red devils on his posters. “Hocus Pocus” and “Conjurokus” were the good little devils, he told her, and “Beelzebub” was the one who made the trouble. Thurston’s qualities as a father came naturally to him and seem to have developed from his work with children on stage—in many ways, each performance in which he invited a boy or girl on stage and then charmed them with his magic had served as an audition for his life with Jane.
“My greatest thrill is standing on the run-down [from the stage to the aisle of the theater], watching the swaying, happy children screaming with delight, and I often tell my audiences that our show is for children from four to ninety-four,” Thurston wrote. “I think it is my deep affection for Jane which makes me delight so in the company of children. She has revealed to me all the beauty and glory of the child mind.”
Since 1908, when he was called to entertain at the sickbed of a little girl in Atlantic City, Thurston regularly sought out orphaned or hospitalized children. He started traveling to the institutions with a suitcase of tricks, and then, by the late teens, turned the procedure on its ear. Now he offered special matinees at his theaters exclusively for these children, performing his full show of marvels. The children were brought in donated cars, buses, and ambulances; the aisles were often filled with children on stretchers. At a time when polio was still a scourge, it was not uncommon for individual hospitals or hospital wards to be devoted exclusively to crippled children. Thurston was eager to perform these benefit shows, and they earned him headlines in every city.
HARRY THURSTON had a different approach.
He owned thriving dime museums in Chicago, Indianapolis, and Cleveland. These were storefront assortments of seamy entertainment in the worst part of the city. “Freaks and strange people” were regularly featured on the program. Slot machines lined the walls. And initiates knew that they should ask for the back room, where the Maid of Mystery—the failed coin-operated attraction—had found an ignominious new home. Harry’s solution was simple. Inside was a naked lady, who writhed and wriggled as the coin-operated shutters fluttered up and down. “She may have been wearing shoes,” one fan of the attraction later speculated.
Harry and his wife, Isabel, and daughter, Helen, lived briefly in Cleveland but established their home in Chicago, where Harry bought and sold commercial real estate.
Harry and Howard Thurston had both started in show business as virtually the same person, sharing the same shady carnival businesses. But Howard’s distinct skills differentiated him. Harry never really changed. He was something of a genius of downtown museums and strip shows, wearing every scar and stain from his career. He had become a big-city con man, a notorious wheeler-dealer in Chicago’s First Ward, who skirted the edges of the law and paid off the police. One of his best friends in Chicago was Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna, the notoriously crooked First Ward alderman who had organized the graft-ridden First Ward Ball.
Howard’s success meant that he had been gradually repaying loans to his brother, although he still relied upon him to warehouse his illusions above one of Harry’s Chicago dime museums. But Howard’s success had also emboldened his brother, and Harry’s advertisements gradually incorporated the word magic into various attractions. His new Chicago museum was titled Thurston’s World Museum, and the publicity boasted that it was managed by the brother of the famous magician.
Howard resisted criticizing his brother—who had financed the show many times—but Thurston’s World Museum was too much to endure. He sent a long letter pointing out his own efforts as a family entertainer, a Broadway star, and America’s popular magician. Harry sent a grudging response to his older brother:
Will say I closed the Thurston Museum a week ago and have got my old place back, the Royal. I call it Wonderland Museum. If I open the other place again I will never mention magic in any way if you think it hurts you in any way. I am doing fine. I am not running any kootch dancers at all.
The last statement, of course, was a mere technicality. Howard was happy to know that his little brother was flush; he didn’t actually want to think about how he was making his money.
IN 1917, Kellar sent Howard Thurston a warm letter from Los Angeles, congratulating him on a full decade since their first association.
Hearty congratulations on your splendid success. May it continue for many seasons to come. Don’t mix up with any schemes outside of your own business. Put away your money where it is absolutely safe and increase your store every year and you will at a near date awake one morning and find yourself independently rich. Good luck, old man.
It was wonderful advice from one of the few magicians who retired wealthy. Unfortunately, Thurston didn’t follow it. One of his most costly schemes was about to leave the door open for his main competitor in the magic field, Harry Houdini.
It had started, innocently enough, with Thurston’s special effects business. Capitalizing on their success with Mile a Minute for the Shubert show, Thurston and McCormick went on to produce the effect in a short vaudeville play. Thurston patented a smaller version, a race between a motorcycle and a car, and incorporated it into Thurston’s 1917 show. It was a “raincoat and whiskers” play called Villa Captured.
During Villa Captured, George White played Poncho Villa, the Mexican rebel who was featured in newspaper accounts. George wore a handlebar mustache, a sombrero, and crossed bandoliers. The play was two simple scenes. A policeman raced to Villa’s hideout to find the notorious Mexican bandit. Then Thurston’s lighting effects portrayed the chase down the mountain. The motorcycle and car arrived onstage at the same time, but Villa seemed to have escaped. The characters tossed off their costumes, revealing that Villa, now in a magical disguise, had actually been captured.
Villa Captured meant very little in the magic show, but it inspired Thurston, who had been tinkering with different automobile effects. He patented an elaborate auto race, in which multiple autos would race around the stage, entering from the right, whizzing across the stage, and exiting on the left. A motion picture screen, in the center of the stage, synchronized the action, giving the impression that the audience was watching the cars as they reached the far side of the track, in the distance, and then returned for another lap.
It was just the sort of overblown, impractical idea they were looking for at the New York Hippodrome. The Hippodrome on Sixth Avenue was the largest theater in the country, an enormous white elephant that dwarfed almost anything that was put on its stage. At its premiere in 1905, the first production was titled A Yankee Circus on Mars, which allowed the producers to pitch a full-sized circus tent on stage as well as creating science fiction fantasy lands—that was the sort of desperate madness that was required to fill the stage. Later productions included earthquakes, a baseball game, Civil War battles, air battles, and even sea battles (when the massive stage was withdrawn, revealing the water tank). All of Broadway knew that the new producer, R. H. Burnside, was desperate for new ideas, any sort of sensation that could form the center-piece for the next Hippodrome show.
Burnside had seen Thurston’s auto race in The Honeymoon Express. Coincidentally, the Hippodrome had staged a show in 1907 called The Auto Race, which was something of a flop, as the actual race was just a disappointment. Now Thurston proposed something much more ambitions. His cars would be full-sized lightweight cars attached to long arms that moved at a center point, like the hands of a clock. Motors in the center of the stage were supposed to keep the cars spinning.
Thurston filed a patent for the new auto race, and the legal papers suggest numerous, desperate solutions to make the invention work. For example, the cars lost momentum as they reached the back of the stage, so stagehands were forced to push the cars up an incline so that they could gain speed before the arms pulled them around to their next entrance. The effect worked just fine in the scale of a model. That’s how Burnside saw it and approved it. But when Thurston’s mechanics returned to Whitestone and started building it full-sized, they faced an onslaught of mechanical problems.
Jim Steinmeyer Page 24