The Last Greatest Magician in the World

by Jim Steinmeyer

  Thurston was an entrepreneur. Dale Carnegie used him as an example of business success through personal skills. “More than 60 million people had paid admission to his show,” according to Carnegie. “He had the ability to put his personality across the footlights. He was a master showman. He knew human nature. Everything he did, every gesture, every intonation of his voice, every lifting of an eyebrow, had been carefully rehearsed in advance. But Thurston had a genuine interest in people.”

  Howard Thurston was also an entertainment commodity, as a popular brand name, through the early 1900s. He was the renowned wizard of the Roaring Twenties. According to Walter B. Gibson, the originator of The Shadow and a ghostwriter for Houdini as well as Thurston, “In their day, Howard Thurston was every bit as well known as Harry Houdini. In fact, Thurston was probably better known than Houdini.” While Thurston toured with an elaborate magic show, Houdini had become famous as a vaudeville escape artist. But, according to Gibson, “every bit of Thurston’s publicity was about getting you into the theater to see the show. And Houdini’s publicity was about creating a legend. As each year passes, Houdini becomes more and more famous, and Thurston is forgotten.”

  “I wouldn’t deceive you for the world,” Thurston assured his audiences. It seems to be a ridiculous statement from a professional magician, but Thurston delivered the line with such warmth and sincerity that it became a sort of trademark for the great wizard. Of course, he did deceive them, for over forty years. He mystified children, and then their children and grandchildren. In fact, his most incredible illusion was not Princess Karnac, floating high above the stage, but the deception he never quite explained—the illusion of the con man and thief, the associate of petty criminals and the confidant of politicians and philanthropists. He fooled them all. Howard Thurston became the last, greatest magician in the world.

  TWO

  “CREATION”

  Willie Ryan gazed down at the floor, seemingly disinterested, arrogantly unrepentant, as William Round, the secretary of the New York Prison Association, shifted the papers in a do-si-do atop his desk. Round opened the file, gazed up at the boy, and then readjusted his glasses to look down at the handwritten report.

  Ryan was wiry and dirty, dressed in a pretentious pair of riding boots that, Round suspected, must have been stolen. Although the boy wouldn’t explain where he was from, or name his parents, his inquisitor noticed that his adolescent voice cracked with a deep, resonant baritone, without the usual Bowery slang. He wasn’t a New Yorker. His small bundle of clothes and personal possessions gave no clues to his background, although he carried a scuffed, well-thumbed copy of a book diagramming the secrets of sleight of hand and stage magic, Professor Hoffmann’s Modern Magic. Filled with diagrams on palming cards and concealing coins, the book provided further evidence of the boy’s proclivity for cheating. Willie Ryan had clearly come to the metropolis looking for trouble. Now he found it.

  Round shook his head as he scanned the paperwork. The boy was a sadly typical case. He had been living in flophouses in the Bowery, in lower Manhattan, circulating with a group of street toughs and thieves. This circle of criminals had dubbed him “The Nim Kid,” short for nimble. Small and deft, he could be lifted and shoved through transoms, headfirst, for quick crimes. He had also become a skilled pickpocket, although Round realized that the boy was not quite as skilled as he’d thought he was. One day in 1886, he boldly boarded a Broadway horse-drawn car, picked an argument with the conductor, and was caught trying to pick the conductor’s pocket. He was grabbed by a nearby policeman. The judge considered the boy’s youth, his handsome, placid features, and the nature of his first offense. He told the judge he was sixteen. In fact, he was seventeen. Otherwise, Willie Ryan had been clever enough to keep quiet, allowing the judge to suspect the best, not the worst, about him. Ryan received a suspended sentence and was sent to Secretary Round at the Prison Association on Fifteenth Street.

  William Marshall Fitts Round had been leading a one-man campaign to change the prison system in New York. The son of a Baptist minister, he had studied medicine at Harvard and had worked as a novelist and a newspaper reporter in Boston and New York City. He was critical of the system of short sentences that filled New York prisons and did nothing to rehabilitate prisoners. He publicly noted that in the months before election years, prisoners were discharged in order to give the appearance of efficiency to whatever political party was in power. “It is no longer a question whether severe punishment is a deterrent for crime,” Round used to say in lectures. “It has no effect upon the criminal classes. It is an exploded idea.” He pointed out that New York State was then spending over $5,000 a year to protect society from each of its criminals; the total was more than Great Britain spent annually to support her army. Drawing upon his Baptist upbringing, Round advocated a system “in harmony with the principles of the Gospel,” treating prisoners with kindness, backed with severity in only the extreme cases. Above all else, he felt that prisoners needed honest labor that gave them a chance in the outside world. “If the inmates of our prisons are reduced to idleness, they will go insane.”

  Round knew that the New York courts had been glutted with young offenders like Willie Ryan. Many had scampered to the notorious Five Points area in the city, a crowded collection of bars, bordellos, and boardinghouses that served as a magnet for crime. But despite his tendency for Christian charity, William Round had to carefully consider whether the Ryan case called for kindness or severity. He later wrote that the boy who stood before him that day “was the most bold and brazen young thief I ever knew, and I know hundreds and have seen thousands.” He resolved to send Ryan to three weeks of honest effort at the House of Industry and Refuge for Discharged Convicts on Houston Street, and see the effect on him. At the House of Industry, Ryan would find honest work, making brushes and mats during the day. He had a simple cot at night, sharing a communal dormitory with the other workers around a potbellied stove.

  Resigned to his punishment, Ryan spent the weeks sullenly, mechanically going about his work as if mentally crossing days off a calendar, asserting his prominence in the hierarchy of the dormitory with loud curses and roughhousing—the little boy who insists on being the bully. He did not seem to be one of Round’s better examples, and with his workhouse duties coming to an end, he was aware that he was due for another evaluation. And then, one Sunday, January 16, 1887, Willie Ryan was corralled into attending the Broome Street Tabernacle. The church was an inner-city mission and a refuge for Bowery down-and-outs, run by a charismatic minister, John Dooly. That morning, William Round delivered a lecture, “There Is a Man in You.” Round’s sensible advice and Dooly’s intense and imploring sermon inspired the boy, as if the very vibration of the words reached deep within Ryan’s soul. More than likely, Ryan had never been forced to sit still for such honest advice or such stirring sentiment. Or perhaps he had just seen—in effect—another transom swinging open, through which he could maneuver a convenient, wriggling exit. When Reverend Dooly concluded his sermon, closing the Bible with a loud thud and asking if any listeners were ready, there and then, to pledge their lives and be born “under the blood of Christ,” Willie Ryan, with tears in his eyes, slowly raised his hand.

  In the final pages of Modern Magic, the manual on trickery that the boy had carried with him, the author advised, “Being perfect in the mechanical portion of the illusion, [the magician] must now devote himself to its dramatic element, which is by far the most important portion. The performer should always bear in mind that he fills the character of a person possessing supernatural powers, and should endeavor, in every word and gesture, to enter into the spirit of his part. As the true actor, playing Hamlet, will endeavor actually to be Hamlet for the time, [the magician] must learn to believe in himself.” If Willie Ryan’s transformation was nothing short of miraculous, “The perfection of conjuring lies in the ars artem celandi,” according to the venerable expert in deception, Professor Hoffmann, “in sending away the spectators
persuaded that sleight of hand has not been employed at all, and unable to suggest any solution of the wonders they have seen.”

  When he returned to William Round’s office, Willie Ryan had replaced Modern Magic with the Bible. In the course of just days, he had scoured the pages, committing long passages to memory, and could bolster his conversations with trenchant quotations from the Lord. Round was suspicious, and questioned the boy intensely about his conversion, but as a regular churchgoer and the son of a preacher, he was in a good position to judge the boy’s sincerity. Round confessed to being thunderstruck by the change. “There is no mistake to this,” the secretary of the New York Prison Association wrote to a friend. “We have seen him every day since, and he has been an example to us all, in the consistency of his life, in the humility of his new character.”

  Standing before Round’s desk, his head held high, the boy now spoke with shy deference but newfound pride. Determined to no longer be the bully or the criminal, he was unsure about his new role. He started by quietly admitting that his name wasn’t Willie Ryan. It was actually Howard Thurston. Howard Franklin Thurston. Yes, he had a family, in Columbus, Ohio.

  HOWARD FRANKLIN THURSTON was born on July 20, 1869, in Columbus, Ohio, the middle child of William and Margaret Thurston. His father, William Henry Thurston, served briefly as a private in the Third Ohio Regiment during the Civil War and then became a wheelwright and carriage maker. His mother, Margaret Cloude, was the daughter of an Ohio farmer. The couple had five children, daughter May (Myrtle) born in 1865, and then sons Charles, Howard, Harry, and William, the youngest, born in 1876.

  This should have been a happy, successful, middle-class family, but William Thurston’s business suddenly collapsed in the financial panic of 1873. An amateur inventor, he was forced to tinker several ideas in desperation, which he then abandoned in boxes around the house. His inspirations included a curling iron, cigar-making machine, two-wheeled roller skate, and a fire escape. Each was a source of failure and frustration, the right idea at the wrong time, a near miss, of no interest to manufacturers. William had something of a nervous breakdown that left him unable to work or, it seems, direct the family finances. He often escaped to the corner saloon.

  The boys were naturally fascinated by their father’s inventions, even if his financial straits confused them. Nine-year-old Charles and seven-year-old Howard discovered a discarded box of beefsteak pounders in the attic, one of his father’s failed products. It consisted of a round board with pointed projections and a wooden mallet with matching points. Two or three quick blows made even the cheapest cut of meat delectable—at least, that was the theory. Without telling their parents, the boys set out across the neighborhood, lugging the box. Reasoning that the people who ran the local bank must have money, they pushed their way in and demanded to see the president. When he heard they were Bill Thurston’s boys, he seemed to take pity and quickly rewarded them with a silver dollar. Their success was tempered, that evening at the dinner table, when their father told them that the same bank president, that morning, had just foreclosed on their house.

  Howard and Charles continued selling the pounders for pennies, or even better, trading them for bread or meat to support the family. One day Howard had his earnings, a princely eighty cents, converted to nickels. That night, he dug into his pocket, telling his mother that he’d found a nickel, and then another, and another, slowly piling silver coins on the table. This bit of showmanship resulted in one of Thurston’s rare memories of laughter and joviality around the dinner table.

  William Thurston liberally beat his sons, and was probably abusive to his wife. In a lightly fictionalized story written many years later, Howard recalled being beaten for hopping a train car and dropping $2 on the siding. He was beaten for riding, and then losing control of a horse that his father was using for a sales job. He was even beaten, inexplicably, when his younger brother broke a window. His mother interceded in these punishments, and Howard adored her. “Ma, I hate to see you cry. Has Pa been mean to you again?” he recalled asking her. “I like to sit in your lap. You know, Ma, when you die, I want to die, too.”

  When they were a little older, Charles and Howard found jobs as bellboys at the American House in Columbus. At twelve, Howard was working as a newsboy on the trains between Columbus and Akron, or the more prestigious business line from Columbus to Pittsburgh. One of Thurston’s earliest memories of magic was, as a boy, when he saw a school performance of the Ink to Water Trick. The secret was then explained to the audience of children, and Thurston was fascinated by the deception.

  It’s not a surprise that Howard Thurston was looking for various means to escape his childhood—first opportunities to bring money to his family, and then escapades that allowed him to avoid his dreary Columbus home. It was around this time that he discovered the most delicious escape of all. It was customary for newsboys to work in pairs. On the trains, Howard was teamed up with a large, dull boy nicknamed Tugger who could be trusted for the heavy lifting. As a reward for a successful day, Howard and Tugger decided to treat themselves to their first magic show. Today the record of this event has been muddied by Thurston’s many official accounts, interviews, and adjustments to the legend. It may have been at the old City Hall Theater in Columbus, or at an unnamed theater in Cincinnati, where the newsboys were working. Tugger was satisfied to see it once. Howard insisted on returning on the following two nights, spending his dimes lavishly on seats in the balcony and marveling at his first “Arabian Night’s dream,” as he later recalled it, where the “footlights were fairy lamps and the stage was peopled with wavering shapes, with fairies and elves, with witches and demons, for [all] I knew. Magic had gripped me in its spell, and its hold never has loosened.” If the legend is right, Howard Thurston was twelve or thirteen years old, and he saw a performance by Herrmann the Great, a wildly popular American magician who had a sophisticated comic, devilish persona. Thurston recalled that the matinee was a “gift show,” in which cheap novelty gifts were awarded to children in the audience. He patiently stood in line to obtain his wrapped bundle, which contained a brass collar button. Thurston treasured it as if he had received it from the master magician himself.

  WITH A LITTLE extra money earned from selling newspapers, Thurston was drawn to the fairgrounds, then the races—he was just small enough to fantasize about being a jockey. Together with a friend, he found work as a stable boy and secured assurances that he could learn to ride. When the racing circuit left Columbus for Cincinnati, Howard left home without telling his parents. He knew that his decision would crush his mother. He pictured her standing by the window, waiting, sobbing. But he had come to fear his father’s erratic behavior and violent discipline.

  Once he joined the races, the stable duties were too hard and too humiliating. Instead, he found another newsboy partner in Cincinnati, a redheaded adventurer who introduced himself as Reddy Cadger. Cadger was a fearless and seemingly invincible companion, “the shiftiest youngster on his feet I have ever known,” Thurston later recalled, “a wonder at jumping freights. I have seen him swing on passenger trains under circumstances that would make the most expert hobo think twice before risking his bones.” They were both fourteen. Cadger taught him the finer points of “beating the rattlers,” which suddenly made every midwestern city available for adventure, free of charge. They jumped “blind baggage,” the space between the engine and baggage car, sometimes rode the cowcatcher, just beneath the sight of the engineer, or “hit the decks,” clinging to the top of the passenger cars. The most dangerous procedure was to ride the “ticket,” a long board under the car, where they could lie just above the track. Climbing beneath the train, the boys endured the roar of the rails and the squeal of the trucks; they were pelted with dust, pebbles, ashes, and cinders; they clung perilously to the boards until their knuckles became numb, because with a sudden lurch they could be thrown beneath the wheels. “Boring through the night on a teetering, racketing, plunging locomotive is very much wh
at I imagine riding a cannon ball might be like,” Thurston wrote.

  The boys bounced from Chicago, to Cleveland, and then back to Cincinnati. Howard thought about returning home, feared that his father would confine him to a house of corrections, and instead followed Cadger to St. Louis for the summer. They effortlessly earned money by selling papers, slept with the hoboes, stole food when necessary, or took advantage of the big-city newsboy charities. Reddy bought a copy of Modern Magic for his friend, who carried it with him everywhere as the pages became dog-eared.

  One night the two boys jumped “blind baggage” on a train out of Chicago, but the brakeman chased them off. They dashed back as the train lurched from the train yard. Thurston scrambled up to the second baggage car. He thought he saw Cadger swinging onto the “ticket” underneath, but he couldn’t find him when the train reached Kansas City, Missouri. It was nearly a year later, in St. Louis, when Thurston heard from their friends that Reddy Cadger had been thrown to the tracks that night and killed.

  He returned to the races, moving on to Iowa. In Oskaloosa, he was humiliated by a popular hazing ritual, “an old stable trick,” inflicted by the wise-guys at the track. At eighty pounds, Thurston was told that he would have to lose some weight, so he was confined, up to his neck, inside a tall barrel of manure for a full day. When he was pulled out and scrubbed clean, he was too weak to stand, let alone sit upright on a horse. The trainer gave him twenty cents and told him to “beat it.”