The Last Greatest Magician in the World

by Jim Steinmeyer

  William M. F. Round played an essential role in young Howard Thurston’s life, but in his later biographies, Thurston included his name with only passing references. He was merely “a noted philanthropist” who worked at the Prison Association and then offered the boy work. Thurston was always embarrassed by his connection to the head of the Prison Association—it raised obvious questions—and he felt guilty by disappointing this important patron.

  THURSTON WAS LUCKY when he left the Burnham Farm and traveled through Albany, New York. There he happened to see a bright lithograph advertising Herrmann the Great, the Mephistophelean magician from his youth who had so inspired him. Thurston left the train and ran to the Hermanus Beeker Hall, where he bought a ticket for the show.

  That night, Herrmann’s performance was even more marvelous than Thurston ever remembered. Thurston waited by the stage door, but didn’t have the courage to actually speak to the magician. Instead, he followed Alexander and Madame Adelaide Herrmann to the Keeler Hotel, asking for a room as close as possible to the great man.

  Howard spent a sleepless night, pacing the corridor, trying to work up the courage to knock on Herrmann’s door, and listening at the keyhole. He wondered if he should give up any further studies and follow his heart to pursue a career in magic.

  Having overheard at the theater that the Herrmann company was traveling to Syracuse the next day, Thurston arrived at the train station in the morning to see the magician one last time. He opened the station door and was surprised by the great magician himself, pacing the lobby floor in a fur-collared coat, flourishing a gold-topped cane. As the Herrmanns walked to the trains, Thurston impulsively bought a ticket to Syracuse, paying the extra dollar for a Pullman car. He sat as close as he dared to the magician, watching him smoke one perfumed Persian cigarette after another, lighting each from embers of the previous cigarette.

  In Syracuse, he waited through the week as the show was moved into the Weiting Opera House and rehearsed. Then Thurston bought a ticket and watched the show again on January 13, studying the finer points of Herrmann’s magic. He had read the details of the tricks. He had studied Herrmann’s clever bits of misdirection. He made his decision. He would become a magician.

  MAGIC SHOWS were a staple of American theater, an established genre that attracted audiences in every major city. Like a circus, the nature of the show was family entertainment, not cloying or childish, but a mildly comic combination of verbal jests and visual wonders. And like a vaudeville show, musical revue, Wild West, or minstrel show, it had developed its own traditions and fashions—especially in America, where magic shows were designed to tour from city to city. They played in medium-sized theaters, of five hundred to a thousand people, and were organized in two or three acts. The show often started with small sleight-of-hand tricks, showing off the performer’s skill and personality. A topical theme was spiritualism. The magician might re-create a séance onstage or produce apparent manifestations in a curtained cabinet.

  Then a variety act or two might be included to offer a change of pace: a different magician, or an acrobat or comic. As the show proceeded, the scale of the mysteries gradually increased. Here the magician included cabinet illusions, the disappearance of a lady, or a levitation illusion. The show might conclude with a short comic sketch, or an illusion staged with operatic sensibilities and spectacle—a cremation or a decapitation.

  A show like Herrmann’s was complicated to perform and difficult to transport, depending upon trains to major cities. His performances would feature three or four changes of scenery and special curtains. The magician invariably dressed in formal evening clothes. A small group of male assistants, who helped move the cabinets or bring the props onstage, would be dressed as pageboys or bellboys; the magician’s wife often took the part of the principle assistant, with several elegant gowns and exotic costumes to match the illusions.

  Large or small, any magic show was designed around the magician and always accentuated the magician’s personality. Robert Heller was known for his droll patter and wit. Dr. Lynn, from England, indulged in deliberately silly, polysyllabic words and ridiculous presentations. Harry Kellar, a solid and dependable Pennsylvania-born magician, was never especially funny or chatty but chose his words carefully and emphasized the amazing marvels. And Alexander Herrmann, the public’s favorite, was wry and devilish, a European roué who seemed especially exotic to Americans. He managed to convince his audiences that his magic was both skillful and effortless at the same time, and his patter sparkled with amusingly tortured French-English that kept the theater bubbling with laughter.

  Herrmann was considered a respected man of the theater, a professional on the level of Edwin Booth or Joseph Jefferson. He was born in Paris in 1844, into a German Jewish family of great magicians; his father, Samuel, and his oldest brother, Compars, were both professionals. Alexander appeared as an assistant in his brother’s show; Compars and Alexander performed for Abraham Lincoln in Washington, D.C., in 1861.

  Working on his own in the 1870s, Alexander Herrmann was billed as Herrmann the Great. Our modern image of a magician, the tall, angular man in silk stockings and a swallowtail coat, the goateed performer who flexes his long fingers and mumbles fractured bits of French, is Alexander Herrmann.

  Herrmann’s sleight-of-hand tour de force that opened the show, a long sequence titled A Bouquet of Mystic Novelties, consisting of amazing manipulations with his kid gloves, cards, coins, bouquets of flowers, and rabbits. Another Herrmann specialty was card throwing. The magician had a knack for scaling ordinary playing cards, hurtling them individually through the air with a quick snap of his wrist. He could deliver cards to specific seats in the theater, even up to the balcony as spectators shouted their approval, or send them careening off the filigree plasterwork in the dome of the theater, which earned wild cheers.

  His pretty, redheaded English wife, Adelaide Scarsez, had appeared as a dancer in Paris. In the 1880s, when Thurston first saw Herrmann’s show, she played the part of the “slave girl,” levitated over the stage with her elbow touching a vertical pole.

  By 1893, when Thurston found Herrmann in Albany, the magic show had swelled to spectacular proportions. He still included his Bouquet of Mystic Novelties and The Slave Girl’s Dream. But his new illusions included Ya Ko Yo, the transposition of a Chinese assistant from one suspended wooden cabinet into another, and Herrmann’s marvelous spirit séance. “He duplicated, absolutely and convincingly, all of the manifestations of the so-called spiritual cabinets,” a Boston critic commented on the new wonders. “In a word, he gave an amazingly elusive, delicately droll and vastly amusing exhibition of powers that two centuries ago would have given Herrmann a very warm berth indeed.”

  IN LATER NEWSPAPER ARTICLES and his autobiography, Thurston managed to enhance the simple story of encountering Herrmann from Albany. In Thurston’s improved version, he was traveling to the University of Pennsylvania, having vowed to continue his education and become a medical missionary. Watching Herrmann’s performance in Albany reminded him of his interest in magic. That night, he was racked with self-doubt. Should he continue his education or become a magician? He finally decided upon traveling to Pennsylvania and starting college, but at the train station he stumbled across Herrmann again.

  I heard the guard say to Herrmann, “Syracuse, eight-twenty.”

  My train left for Philadelphia about the same time. Now comes the strange part of the whole incident, which bears out what I have often said, that a man is not his own master in certain critical moments.

  I went to the ticket window, laid down a twenty-dollar bill, and asked for a ticket to Philadelphia. I placed the ticket in my pocket and counted the change.

  “You’ve made a mistake,” I said to the agent. “The price to Philadelphia is five dollars and twenty cents, and you have charged me only two dollars and eighty cents.”

  He replied in a gruff voice, “You said Syracuse!”

  I looked at the ticket—then at Herrmann.<
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  “All right,” I said, “I’ll go to Syracuse!”

  God knows I asked for a ticket to Philadelphia, so the sin rests with the ticket seller!

  Gazing at my ticket in a dazed sort of way I walked slowly toward the gate. I boarded the train for Syracuse....

  Fate had cast the die for me. There was no use in trying to thwart destiny. Had I been a free agent I should have been in Philadelphia at that moment, making arrangements for my future work as a medical missionary. But I was not a free agent.

  It was probably Thurston’s brilliant publicity agent, John Northern Hilliard, an experienced magician, who later concocted this version of the story. Elements of the account seem especially suspicious because they so nicely echo the story of Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin’s introduction to magic. Hilliard had known Herrmann and was an avid reader of magic history.

  Robert-Houdin was the great nineteenth-century French magician, an inventor and performer who enjoyed a brief, spectacular career in Paris and in tours of Europe. His innovations were copied by his contemporaries. His colorful autobiography, The Confidences of a Prestidigitator, published in 1858, inspired generations of important magicians. In his memoirs he recounted an incident from 1826, when he was about twenty years old, training to be a watchmaker.

  I went into a bookseller’s shop to buy Berthoud’s Treatise on Clockmaking, which I knew he had. The tradesman being engaged at the moment on matters more important, took down two volumes from the shelves and handed them to me without ceremony. On returning home, I sat down to peruse my treatise conscientiously, but judge my surprise when I read, “The way of performing tricks with the cards, how to guess a person’s thoughts, to cut off a pigeon’s head, to restore it to life,” et cetera. The bookseller had made a mistake. Fascinated, however, by the announcement of such marvels, I devoured the mysterious pages.... How often since have I blessed this providential error, without which I should have probably vegetated as a country watchmaker!

  Robert-Houdin’s memoirs are filled with fictional embellishments, and none was more convenient than this tale: his nineteenth-century readers would have wondered why a young man, born to a good family and trained in a respectable field, would be drawn to the disreputable world of conjuring.

  It’s unlikely that Thurston was actually traveling to the University of Pennsylvania. He must have left Canaan, New York, without any real prospects and was lucky to cross Herrmann’s route. It’s easy to see how the combination of allures—the train travel, magic show, impulsive change of schedule, and obsessive desire to see one show after another—provided delicious reminders of his most carefree childhood adventures. After years of supervision and responsibility at Mount Hermon and Burnham Farm, encountering Herrmann must have seemed empowering.

  By retelling the story as Robert-Houdin did, with a heavy dose of fate to excuse his irresponsibility, Thurston left his decision in someone else’s hands. It made the incident more memorable, more dramatic, and more flattering for him, who, at twenty-three, was now expected to act like an adult.

  Besides asking what elements were added to the story, we might wonder what elements were left out. Thurston’s account of shadowing Herrmann sounds perfectly accurate, right down to the gold-topped cane and Herrmann’s chain-smoking. But after leaving Mount Hermon and Burnham Farm (where he assertively clashed with the decision-makers), Thurston was no longer the hopelessly shy, socially intimidated adolescent portrayed in his autobiography. His intention must have been to plead for a job with Herrmann. More than likely, at the Albany stage door, at the hotel, or on the train to Syracuse, Thurston cornered the magician, pulled out his playing cards, performed a few flourishes, and offered his services as an assistant. Under these circumstances, Herrmann certainly would have dismissed him. Magicians avoided magic-mad amateurs; only dependable, experienced professionals were considered for such important jobs. And Thurston, humiliated by the rebuff, would never have admitted it.

  HIS WEEK of high living, following Herrmann across New York state, must have exhausted Thurston’s limited funds. He took a train back to Detroit to spend the winter with his father as he planned his professional career.

  William Thurston had remarried the year after Margaret’s death. His new wife, Emma Dearth, was seventeen years his junior. The couple moved to Detroit, Michigan, with Emily, one of Emma’s daughters by her previous marriage. William worked as a tailor, making women’s clothes, and the Thurstons ran a boardinghouse.

  Howard lasted only several weeks with his family. As he assembled some magic props—a small case with rubber balls, thimbles, and seven decks of cards, his stepmother thought that his plan to be a magician was disappointing and his father found it merely laughable. “My father and I did not get along well, so finally I left,” Thurston later said. When the weather was warm enough to travel, Howard put on his only suit of clothes, picked up his valise, and walked to the front door, announcing that he was “going to start.” William Thurston thought his son was joking. Howard nodded, and then dropped his voice, admitting, “I’m broke.” His father grandly put his hand in his pocket and brought out a quarter. “Here,” he said, “never let it be said that your father didn’t help you.” Thurston never forgot his father’s cruel joke.

  Howard Thurston spent fifteen cents on a streetcar to Wyandotte, Michigan. At six o’clock that evening, he gave his first professional performance, standing on a box in front of a store, trying to catch the eye of people hurrying home from work. It was such a failure that the next day, when he walked to Detroit, he remembered his prayers and asked God for guidance. As he looked up, he saw a pitchman selling wire potato peelers. The man showed him how the peelers were made and boasted of how much money he managed to procure. That evening, Thurston visited a hardware store, bought a few supplies, and sat in his cheap hotel room, twisting up potato peelers.

  He headed to Cleveland for his debut as a potato-peeler-selling magician. He had read that Sells Brothers Circus was working there, and he hoped to get some work on the circus grounds. The activity of the circus provided a steady stream of customers, and Thurston gradually became adept at his card-trick, ball-trick, handkerchief-trick, potato-peeler act.

  Sells Brothers Circus wasn’t interested in card tricks and didn’t want a potato-peeler salesman, but they were impressed with Thurston’s smooth voice and slick mannerisms. He became a talker for the sideshow, the man who stands out in front and coerces the crowd into the tent. He followed the show through the Midwest and into Wisconsin and Minnesota, then jumped to other small carnivals if they could offer him a spot performing magic.

  Throughout the early months of 1893, outdoor entertainers were drawn, as if magnetically, to Chicago. The World’s Columbian Exposition was to open that spring, and attractions and concessionaires were being assembled. It was a beautiful world’s fair of imitation white marble palaces, offering many important innovations—the modern Otis elevator, Edison’s kinetoscope, Tesla and Westinghouse’s alternating current dynamo, which illuminated the fair buildings at night—as well an astonishing array of new products—Cracker Jack, carbonated soda, and the hamburger. The precise mixture of exotic displays and unabashed fun served as an inspiration to a young Walt Disney, who attended that summer. The twinkling domes and colonnades that surrounded the Jackson Park lagoon also provided the dream of an imaginary city called Oz; author L. Frank Baum attended the fair as well.

  But one of the fair’s most lasting legacies was the Midway Plaisance, the world’s first midway, a collection of popular American fairground shows, exhibits, and mild con games, scrubbed clean and lined up in a mile-long approach on the western edge of the fairgrounds. Young Harry Houdini came to Chicago looking for a place to feature his magic act; instead, he donned greasepaint and played the part of an Indian fakir in the Algerian and Tunisian Village. Thurston couldn’t sell his card tricks, but he was able to find employment as a talker for the African Dahomey Village, a little further down the midway.

  The Dahome
y Village was the work of Xavier Pené, a French entrepreneur who had provided African performers for fairgrounds. Like many sideshow attractions, the lure of the show was the promise of lasciviousness, concealed within an overt cultural appeal. Photos suggest that special shows at the Dahomey Village allowed audiences to ogle the bare-breasted native women.

  The crowning jewel, the astonishing attraction of the midway, was the original Ferris wheel. Houdini and Thurston spent the days of 1893 listening to the roar of the wheel’s engines and the whooping cheers of its crowds. It was the creation of engineer George Ferris, intended to best Paris’s Eiffel Tower of 1889. At 264 feet tall, it was positioned precisely midway in the midway, a hulking, awe-inspiring, animated marvel. Its thirty-six train car-sized cabins each accommodated forty people.

  At the base of the Ferris wheel was another attraction that has become enshrined in American folklore: The Streets of Cairo. There, a Syrian-American dancer named Farida Mazar Spyropoulous danced the scandalous belly dance, twisting and undulating in a provocative display. It was a hit, jamming the Streets of Cairo and making a star of the dancer. Her stage name was Fatima, but she became famous under the nickname Little Egypt. The melody that accompanied her gyrations, played on Oriental flutes, has become equally famous as “The Snake Charmer Song,” often starting with the lyrics, “There’s a place in France / Where the ladies do a dance.” It was the first “hoochie kootch” show.