The Heart of the World

by Nik Cohn

  Were they any good? Good enough to pass, it seemed. A booker for some Southern club circuit had heard them and mumbled wet air: ‘Is praising with faint damn,’ Sasha said. ‘But not to give up day jobs.’

  Still he hoped. The moment had come, he sensed, to draw back, take his act on the road. Then, when he returned to the Main Stem, he would come to it refreshed, without scars. The second time around, he would conquer. ‘This I know,’ he said. It might be as a drummer, it might be as a magician. But he was fated to wind up a star, his name in lights: ‘And spelled right,’ he said. His scar lit up at the thought. ‘This I know,’ he said.

  The mention of magic was not cheap rhetoric. ‘Affordable, yes, but not cheap,’ Sasha said. Since his first lessons with Max Gambon, he had been practicing, practicing. Of late, when Hannah wasn’t watching and the weather suited his clothes, he had even turned street performer, working outside Broadway theaters.

  His proficiency was still erratic, a thing of rags and patches. Juggling and fire-swallowing escaped him. So did telepathy. But he had a drummer’s gift for sleight of hand. He worked harmoniously with playing cards and silken scarves, tumbling dice. In particular, he was skilled at turning coins into notes, then causing both to vanish: ‘Like Liberty Booster,’ he said. ‘Then for encore, I make trousers to fall down.’

  ‘Not here, you don’t,’ said Jimmy Glenn.

  ‘Of course not here,’ said Sasha, shocked. ‘Only on Great White Way.’

  It was a Wednesday afternoon; matinees were his best speed. Retiring to the bathroom, he went in a nobody and came out the Mad Monk Rasputin, complete with beard, black robe, and black-tinted contact lenses, which turned his eyes into Darth Vader zap-guns. ‘Is stinging like ten thousand bitches, but what hell, is for art,’ he said.

  ‘Bitches don’t sting,’ said Jimmy. His eyes stayed shut; his big hands did not move. ‘Bitches bite.’

  ‘Not these bitches,’ Sasha said.

  Gathering up his robes, he swept outdoors, stage right. West Forty-fourth was still lashed by the chinook, but he braved its blast head-on, Rasputin’s beard gusting over his shoulder like a schoolboy’s scarf.

  At Shubert Alley, we were joined by a juggler in a Bugs Bunny suit; outside Les Misérables, two blind boys from Alabama sang hymns a cappella. Otherwise, Sasha held the field unopposed, for these were lean times in the busking trade. Street performers were not corporate. In New York City these days, that made them a health risk.

  Ten years before, the policy had been different. Before the Clean Up Times Square campaign, magic men were not proscribed. On the contrary, amusement was encouraged. There were intermission shows outside every Broadway theater, and the top acts, like Mal Cross, grew into curbside celebrities: ‘Stars of street and subway.’

  Cross was a Cyrano de Bergerac figure in flowing silk cape, waxed moustaches, and furl-brimmed chevalier’s hat, who had been working theater crowds since the early seventies. His father, once a big-time Broadway gambler, had left him ‘profoundly broke, exceptionally witty and charming, but with no way to make a living. Rather like a defunct duke.’ So he had paid his dues by running a penthouse poker mill, then adapted his dealer’s touch to street magic. And the magic had been good: ‘Oh, you should have seen me,’ he sighed, ‘I was a galaxy.’

  At his peak, he’d averaged a hundred dollars a night. But the glamour had long since soured. ‘There used to be romance. The old sock and buskin,’ he said. Now he surveyed the remnants – one rabbit, two blind boys, and Sasha – and he raised his eyes to heaven or the Minolta sign, whichever came first. ‘A galaxy,’ he said.

  In these hard times, old magicians took shelter inside the Edison Hotel on West Forty-seventh, where they could be found huddled around a back table in the coffee shop.

  Every weekday lunchtime, the table filled with mages – conjurers and closeup men, masters of misdirection, drop stealers and flat palmers, purse framers and imp passers, all-purpose escamoteurs. Their average age was somewhere past seventy; around the Edison, they were known as the Merlin Mob.

  By consensus, their grand wizard was Mike Bornstein, né Kolmar, the Magical Mandarin. A brisk and pragmatic man, he did not seem born to hocus, but he had been turning tricks for half a century: ‘Had my own magic shop, right on Broadway at Fifty-first,’ he said. ‘Next door to the Capitol and half a block from Lindy’s.’ He paddled in his soup du jour, stared fixedly at the ripples. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘that was before the plague.’

  It was the universal Times Square lament. The name of the plague was uncertain. Depending on the plaintiff’s generation and/or line of work, it might be war or Prohibition, gangsters, blacks or realtors, welfare hotels or AIDS. But the basic tale never changed. Once upon a time on Broadway, there had been a magical world. And now it was lost, gone to dust.

  At its memory, Mike Bornstein’s bald skull crinkled, glowed deep red like embers. ‘There was a carnival; it ran night and day,’ he said. ‘Any hour of the twenty-four you could take a walk, you’d see wonders. What I’m saying, amazements. And characters! Don’t talk to me! All the big-time comedians at Lindy’s. Walter Winchell, Milton Berle. And the hoodlums, the wiseguys. Some maybe murderers, or maybe just bad actors. Of course, they kept to themselves back then, didn’t bother nobody that didn’t want bothering. What I’m saying, they were just part of the show. Your Show of Shows! And the crowds they had, the motley I guess, you never saw such crowds. Day and night. The thousands and the millions. Three, four in the morning, they’d still be up and down, up and down. Get out of the theaters and take a stroll, never get home till dawn. And on every block almost, there’d be a magic shop, some kind of novelties. Tricks and mystifications. Just foolish things. Innocent. Like rubber snakes, false noses, that manner of stuff. Or harmonicas. A whole lotta harmonicas then. People look in the window, they see something silly. So what the heck? It tickles their fancy. So they buy, what the heck? They pay good money; they have a few laughs. And they’re not scared of nothing. Nothing! Because they’re out here on Broadway, see, and not a thing can touch them.’

  And the name of the plague? ‘Minorities,’ he said. Before the war, like all downtown Broadway, Times Square had been strictly vanilla. Harlem jazz musicians, if they were good, were let out to play Fifty-second Street: ‘And shoeshine men, porters, maids,’ Bornstein said. ‘But only in line of service, see. There was no confusion. No fuss.’

  Fuss was putting it mildly. Quite suddenly, people who had always known their place, Negroes and so forth and such, started sweeping down Broadway, a flood tide. And these people were upset. Just kids, most of them, but mean. A chip on their shoulder as big as the Empire State Building. In the past, their sort had seemed content to drift, live on hope. They’d had a Broadway of their own, 125th Street, jammed solid with theaters, night clubs, fine restaurants. But the city had abandoned Harlem, let it die. The theaters and hot spots were boarded up, and the crowds, dispossessed, spilled downtown. They acted outraged, like someone done them wrong. What I’m saying, a bad attitude. As if, whatever they wanted, they’d better grab it themselves: ‘Which they did. With both hands,’ Mike Bornstein said, ‘and then some.’

  The wind change came after the war. Up till the late forties, he kept his store open till three in the morning and used a simple padlock. By 1950, he was closing at midnight and using bars. Then it was ten and rolldown gates, and then he just gave up: ‘I’m out of there on a bagel,’ he said. ‘So long, sayonara, farewell.’

  Since then he had worked magic shows all around America, given private lessons, published books such as Money Magic and Mike Bornstein’s Triple Threat Reverse. But jobs came and went; these daily lunches at the Edison, so close to Broadway, were constant: ‘A center. A core,’ he said. He crumbled breadcrumbs in his soup. A strong-built man, with capable hands, he frowned. ‘The still point in the circle,’ he quoted, ‘Tony Slydini said that.’

  He spoke of Slydini often. All magic men did. As the great maestro of modern closeup, Gran
d Master of Misdirection, creator of the imp pass and the revolve, he was a magicians’ magician: ‘The essence,’ said Mike Bornstein.

  The reverence was not for his physical skills. Strictly as a sleight-of-hand artist, he was rated as just average. His genius lay in psychology: ‘The magic of the mind,’ Bornstein said. ‘What I’m saying, he’d give you just one look and you were an open book, he could play you like a pipe organ.’

  Slydini was now in extreme old age, confined to a home upstate. Till recently, however, he had endured in a West Forties apartment block. It was there that I’d gone to meet him.

  He had lived in half-light. Behind double-draped blue curtains, his demonstration room was bathed in a dim roseate glow. Soothing music played, off; there was a faint scent of cedarwood. Overall, the effect was not unlike an undertaker’s chapel.

  Slydini himself was then eighty-eight, stooped and very fragile, his eyes already filming. He had been the most elegant man, and grace was on him still. His features, always fine drawn, had worn away to silhouettes, his flesh thinned to a silver-blue translucence. In repose, his face against the light, it gave him the look of a death’s head. His long hands, with nicotine-stained fingers, shook uncontrollably.

  His English was halting, heavily accented. Born Quintino Marucci in Italy, he had grown up in Buenos Aires, only came to America in his thirties. For ten years, he got nowhere. In 1940, while staying in Boston with a sister, he was reduced to taking a five-dollar date at a local church: ‘Just to buy some present,’ he said. ‘And, believe me, I am feeling sick. Always I am a failure, nothing it ever breaks. But the church is beautiful. This I must say. It is plain but white and shining, and the dressing room so clean.’

  Having got there early, he practiced his act alone. Then another man arrived, a man with a heavy suitcase, which he sat upon, looking angry: ‘Like the world gives him the pain. The big stink in his nose,’ Slydini said. ‘I’m asking him when the show starts, how many will be in the audience, dumb questions all like that, just to be friendly, you understand, and show I am the good fellow. But all the man does, he stares and talks very gruff, not nice.’ Remembering, he shut his eyes. The lids were frail as butterfly wings. ‘A very rude man,’ he said. ‘Believe me.’

  The man’s name was Sayso; he was the show’s comedian. When Slydini went on stage, Sayso watched from the wings, but he still did not smile, gave no sign of approval: ‘Afterwards, back in the dressing room, all he said was, “Meet me tomorrow, twelve noon. The corner of Tremont and Boilstone.”’

  Next day came up a blizzard. Ploughing through the snow-drifts, Slydini showed up a half hour late. ‘But Sayso, he is still waiting. Without he speaks, not a word, he takes my arm, he leads me to an agent; the agent is waiting with a contract, fifteen dollars a day, the Queens Theatre in Quincy. Then after I’m playing Joyland, a night club, twenty-five dollars, and then all over, everyplace. I am, what you like, a headliner. A made star.’

  The word gave no seeming pleasure. Fastidious, the thin lips curled, the eyelids drooped, as if at an unseemly odor. He was no braggart, his look implied, no man for cheap vainglory. ‘If fortune does not send me one good angel, believe me, I am not going nowhere. Forever I am just sitting,’ he said, ‘waiting for Sayso.’

  This type of mystical intervention had marked his whole career. According to Mike Bornstein, who had once shared an apartment with him, Slydini had always been a man of gentleness and quietude, a child within a man, lost in wonders. So a whole series of angels – Sayso, Nat Bernstein, Blanca Lopez, and Murray Celwit – had orchestrated his fame, while he himself was left free to ponder mysteries: ‘Pure magic of enormous cerebral content, “Intelligence made magic,”’ wrote Ascanio, the great Catalan illusionist. ‘A magic of repeated and repeated destroying impact, visual magic, spectacular with unending surprises, with effects that disarm one and again, always in crescendo, always more astonishing… .’

  These effects, direct and sharp as a rapier’s thrust, were achieved with the simplest tools – a cigarette, some coins, a few paper balls. The secret, said Slydini himself, lay purely in the timing. ‘Picture a murder,’ he said. ‘A gun goes off; a dead body falls to feet. So the audience, the watching men, what are they to think? The gunshot killed the body, no?’

  ‘Makes sense.’

  ‘Sense, yes. But maybe not truth.’ His rheumy eyes crinkled; his spatulate yellow fingers sat shaking in his lap. ‘Suppose if the death comes before. Only nothing announces it. No movement, no sound. What then? In effect, it does not exist.’

  ‘Until the bang?’

  ‘The misdirection, yes.’ He smiled then, very faintly, with the most civilized regret. ‘Illusion, magic, what you like, all the secret is the moment. Not how or why, only when,’ he said. ‘The anatomy of time.’

  On a plain white table sat a plain white tablecloth. Behind it, Slydini sat slightly askew. His fingers spasmed, stark against the white. Then he picked up a cigarette, made a pass. In an instant, he was steady as a metronome.

  Quietly and at ease, with an unbroken flow, he began to move his hands. They opened, they shut, they fluttered. The cigarette hovered in mid-air, then it passed through the table. Then it was broken in the middle. Tobacco spilled loose on the tablecloth. Then the cigarette was whole again. It was lit; it was extinguished. The hands rose once and fell, and the cigarette was a coin. It disappeared into Slydini’s closed hand, a single quarter, and came out as three. Then one was in my breast pocket, a second behind his ear, and the third jumped out of his mouth. The hands fluttered, and there was just one again. They fluttered once more, and it was a cigarette. Then Slydini smiled, inclined his head. He spread his hands flat, palms up, and then there was nothing at all.

  Afterwards, he was exhausted. A very old man, he mopped his face with a silk handkerchief, licked spittle from his lips. When his hands dropped back in his lap, they were shaking again, worse than ever. ‘So you writing a book on magic?’ he asked.

  ‘On Broadway.’

  ‘What’s a difference?’

  Now, at the back table in the Edison Hotel, Mike Bornstein drank fresh coffee, crumbled another roll. ‘What I’m saying, the man was a pro,’ he said, and the subject turned to the New York Mets.

  The coffee shop had once been the Grand Ballroom, for the Edison’s past was sumptuous. Even now, flaking gilt ceilings and marble balconies overlooked the blue plate specials. Rumor had it a major facelift was planned. For the moment, however, the great lobby was drab as a carpark, reeked of stale disinfectant; and two doormen in unpressed maroon uniforms stood disputing. ‘So tell me this,’ said one. ‘Who killed Izzy Grove?’

  Izzy Grove! At that name, the glum present vanished and Broadway past, in all its raucous splendors, rose up renewed. I had not known he was gone. But if it was true, it was like the passing of the Automat or Dempsey’s. For Izzy Grove, alive, had defined Times Square.

  Like so many of its veterans, he had started out a prize-fighter. In the 1920s, a middleweight billed as the Ghetto Avenger, he had scored the first KO ever at the second Madison Square Garden and beaten three world champions. Afterwards, he’d turned booking agent, handling Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway. Then he had run singles’ dances out of the Edison Theater, which now showed Oh! Calcutta! Most important, he had hung out at Lindy’s.

  It was the new Rector’s, the bedrock of Broadway Cafe Society. As such, it symbolized everything that Prohibition had changed. Rather than theatrical deities and Wall Street tycoons, it served newspapermen and gangsters, comedians and racetrack touts, Tin Pan Alley, burlesque, and the fight crowd. Champagne and stuffed lobster was not their speed. No orchestra piped them to their tables. Instead, scrunched into booths, they lived on sturgeon and knishes, cheesecake and strudel.

  To be Jewish at Rector’s had been wolfbane. A lifetime’s striving might not suffice to overcome the curse. At Lindy’s, however, it was a free pass. Strudel was a quarter, a dime if you were Kike, said Izzy Grove.

  This was the
Hebrew halfworld that Damon Runyon chronicled, the hometurf of Harry the Horse and Regret, Little Isadore and Spanish John. In deference to his mass readership, Runyon toned down both the Jewishness and the harshness. But Izzy Grove and his ilk felt the fallout just the same. Of a sudden, they found themselves called Runyonesque. Like all generic labels, it was an idler’s word. ‘Whatever I am,’ Izzy said, ‘esque I’m not.’

  The originals of Runyon’s heroes – Gyp the Blood, Dago Frank, Big Jack Zelig, Lefty Louie – were not exactly the lovable lugs of the stories: ‘They didn’t like your face, or the way you handled your knife, you went home to the wife on the installment plan.’ Arnold Rothstein, the man that fixed the World Series, was lured from Lindy’s to be shot. Herman Rosenthal, another regular, took eighty-three bullets outside the Metropole. ‘But the sturgeon was out of this world.’

  Broadway’s machine-gun phase had carpeted two decades, stretched neatly from war to war. The Volstead Act turned it loose in 1920; Fiorello La Guardia pulled its plug in 1939. In between, to hear Izzy tell it, Times Square was hell on the halfshell.

  On January 16, 1920, the last wet night, he had been in short pants but already working on Broadway, a message boy at the I. Miller Shoe Corp. ‘They let me off early – get safe home, kid, case it might be some trouble. A course, I just nip around the corner, try to catch the action.’

  The night came in like a witch. ‘A bitterly chill wind swept around the corners,’ Stanley Walker wrote in The Night Club Era. ‘Derelicts huddled in hallways, and tried to sleep under piles of old newspapers. The blanketed horses arched their backs and hobbled along on the icy pavements. After midnight the temperature in the city went down to six degrees above zero.’