If they were going to perform it just before the show, it meant that the audience would be arriving in the auditorium. Herrmann would be standing on the stage, just a few feet from the trick. Thurston thought it was still worth a chance. He located the electrician, working in the wings. “I’m going to need your help. I can’t have the stage brightly lit.” The electrician stepped away from the tall iron control board studded with porcelain handles. “Tell me what you need, young man.”
“I’m going to call for lights. And I want you to bring up the borders. Slowly. Very slowly. I’ll call for more light. Just keep them coming. But when I put my hand in my pocket, like this, I want you to hold the lights right there. No matter what I say. Even if I call for more light, you hold it right there. Understand?”
“I watch for your hand in your pocket,” the electrician repeated.
“I can’t thank you enough,” Thurston told him. He pulled his hand from his pocket and tossed the man a ten-dollar gold piece. “Get yourself some cigars and a good drink after the show.”
A little after seven-thirty, the stage door swung open with a loud clatter and Thurston heard the sound of raised voices. The company manager, Edward Thurnaer, had just been told about the planned show onstage and he was loudly protesting. They wouldn’t be able to delay the curtain. But Leon Herrmann dismissed him with a wave of his hand. “Yes, yes, I know. If zee man is here now, I will see ziss treek!” Leon, his wife, Marie, and his aunt Adelaide, were still in their coats and hats. They pushed past Thurnaer and strode grandly onto the stage. Grace gasped to see the group pass beneath the stretched threads. Madame Herrmann’s feathered hat almost snagged, but fortunately no one noticed the threads. A small group of stagehands and assistants followed the magician onto the stage, as well as Billy Robinson, who stood at the back of the group.
“Mr. Herrmann!” Thurston greeted him like a long-lost friend. Thurston maneuvered the group so they were standing with their backs to the curtain. He could already hear some of the audience, beyond the drapery, arriving to take their seats. He knew that, in a matter of minutes, Herrmann would be pressed to go to his dressing room to change and apply his makeup, and Robinson would need to set the stage for the performance. He felt his heart racing.
“Let me have some light!” he called out to the electrician. The overhead rows of glass globes sparked with golden pinpoints, then glowed with a cool blue illumination. “More light,” Howard called out. The lamps grew brighter. Thurston pushed his hand into his pocket. “Still more light!” Thurnaer looked nervously at his watch. “We need to hurry,” he said. Herrmann made a casual gesture, flourishing his fingers above his shoulder, as if dismissing the remark.
Howard froze, with his hand in his pocket, “as if he were waiting for a streetcar, without a care in the world,” Grace recalled. “Brighter lights!” he called again. The electrician now understood the ruse. He yelled back, “You’ve now got all the power I can spare for you, young feller!”
He asked four people to withdraw cards from the deck that he was shuffling in his hand. They each looked at their cards and then replaced them in the deck. He stepped back several paces. Grace watched from the wings as he gestured casually with his hand over his head, contacting the first invisible thread. He smoothly lowered it to the edge of the cards.
Thurston asked for the name of the first card chosen. “It was the ten of diamonds,” Marie Herrmann told him. “Ten of diamonds, come forth,” Thurston called. And the card sailed up smoothly through the air. He caught it, and then tossed it forward, spiraling it into the hands of one of the attentive spectators.
He repeated the trick with each card, deliberately stepping to different positions on the stage. One of the stagehands, attempting to throw him, called the wrong card. Thurston knew that the man was trying to fool him; he said that he’d return to that one. He asked Herrmann for his card. “Zee ten of clubs!” “Up, up, up,” Thurston exhorted. The ten rose smoothly to his hand, and he stepped forward to present the card to the magician.
The young magician now took a spot several paces closer to his audience and asked again for the last card. “I was pulling your leg. It was really the jack of hearts,” the stagehand admitted. He had barely finished speaking the name of the card, and the jack of hearts sailed through the air into Thurston’s hand.
A few stagehands applauded. Robinson quickly turned away. “Fifteen minutes! Let’s strike this, and set the entrance drop! Props!” And the group scattered to the wings.
Grace reached up, snagging the threads and pulling them free of the brads. She noticed Herrmann was taking several steps toward Thurston, with an expansive gesture, twirling his hand in the air. She suspected that he was guessing at the secret and feeling about for threads. But she was too fast; he just missed them.
Thurston moved Herrmann toward the reporter in the wings. “Did you like the trick?” he asked. “Très bien.” Herrmann shrugged. “Did it mystify you?” “Yes, M’sieu.” Thurston smiled and looked up at the reporter, who nodded. Relieved, Thurston followed up by whispering a few technical details to Herrmann. Yes, the trick was accomplished with threads, he told him, horizontal threads, and a special way of preparing the cards. Herrmann nodded. He was now uncomfortable with the discussion, which was going on too long. He was anxious to get to his dressing room. “Do you want to buy the trick?” Thurston called after him. “Mmm, ees poss-ee-buhl. Call for me at zee hotel!”
Madame Herrmann pushed her way past the young magician. “Very nice. Now please get off the stage. Please!”
He glanced back over his shoulder. The stage had been transformed into an elegant drawing room, ringed with tables full of bright scarves and shiny metal vases, in anticipation of Herrmann’s show.
The stage door slammed on Grace, Thurston, and the reporter and they were suddenly startled by the calm. Howard took a deep breath of the cool air. “Sure, we’ll print it,” the reporter told him nonchalantly. “He said you mystified him. That’s what my editor told me to get. I got it.”
AT THREE the next morning, Howard and Grace were pacing outside the newspaper office, waiting for the early edition of the Sunday paper. When the first copies were brought down to the office, he flipped through the pages to find his prize. He had two columns. A neat pen sketch showed Thurston, in profile, performing the Rising Cards for Herrmann and his group; the French magician was distinctive with his homburg and waxed goatee. The headline proclaimed, “Herrmann, the Magician, Mystified by Another Magician.” Thurston groaned. His name didn’t make it into the headline. But the reporter had done his job; the story was succinct and accurate, ending with a brief summation of Thurston’s résumé and the statement, “He had mystified the mystifier.”
Late that morning, Thurston foolishly stopped by the Palace Hotel to meet with Herrmann. Drunk with the excitement of the previous night, he had remembered that Herrmann invited him to talk about buying the trick. By the time Thurston arrived, Herrmann had seen the newspaper and realized that he’d been double-crossed. The meeting, such as it was, must have consisted of some brief, Parisian-accented American obscenities. Thurston slunk back to his room. “How did it go?” Grace asked. “It didn’t,” Thurston growled. “Leave me alone!”
They bought stacks of papers and spent the morning cutting articles to send to agents and theater managers, but they heard nothing from the East Coast agents and remained in the Denver area for months, circling through the same mining towns, honky-tonks, and sideshows, anxiously checking the mail every day.
By early 1899, Thurston had decided upon his plans. He would have his own magic show, one of the world’s greatest magic shows, in ten years. It would be the sort of show to rival Herrmann. He could only do it if he were a success in New York. Howard and Grace counted their money, packed their bags, and headed east.
THE BACKSTAGE SHOW at the Tabor Grand Opera House had been a magnificent con game. When Herrmann was fooled, it was because he had been fooled by the sneaky little touches—the multiple threads, the lit
tle show with the electrician, Grace’s deft work in the wings. Most of all, he was fooled because he couldn’t imagine that his own stage could have been prepared to deceive him, with his own stage manager supervising.
That strange backstage performance changed the fortunes of every magician who was there.
That night marked the beginning of the end for Billy Robinson, who had acted duplicitously with the Herrmanns. Oddly, he never mentioned the newspaper reporter who had been hidden backstage. It was Thurston’s inclusion of a reporter that should have angered Robinson. If Thurston had really wanted to sell the trick to Herrmann, if he needed the money, there would have been no reason to contact a reporter.
Robinson must have known about the reporter all along—as the stage manager, he must have seen him. Was Robinson’s intention to humiliate Herrmann? He later complained that Thurston had been ungrateful, and Herrmann vindictive. “I done it all against Herrmann’s wishes, also our manager’s. They raised hell to think I would do such a thing. Well, I had hell every day for months, and all on account of doing a good turn for a dirty loafer.” Early in 1899, he and Dot quit the show. It was the best decision Robinson ever made.
After the Robinsons left, the Herrmann show rattled apart. Less than a year later, Adelaide Herrmann had lost all her patience with her nephew and developed her own act. It made her a star and began a long successful career for this famous woman magician.
Several years later, Leon adopted the billing “Herrmann the Great,” promptly generating a lawsuit from Adelaide. Herrmann the Great was the title of her husband, she insisted. The judge was confused by the case, reasoning that Herrmann was Leon’s real name and he could use his own discretion if he wanted to call himself great. Leon put together a shorter act and then returned to Europe several years later. He was just forty-two years old when he contracted pneumonia and died in Paris in 1909.
When Thurston walked out of the Tabor Grand, he was only months from real stardom. The Denver Post article disappointed Thurston, but he and Grace managed to concoct a billing, “The Man Who Mystified Herrmann,” from the headline. It proved to be just enough of a boast to call attention to the handsome new card magician, the modest snowball that began rolling down the hill. By the time they arrived in New York in 1899, they were in the middle of a new sort of avalanche, called vaudeville.
SEVEN
“THE MAGICIAN’S ASSISTANT”
Harry Thurston settled back in his easy chair and lifted a glass of beer. “To my big brother, the great magician!” He then let out a small laugh that made Howard and Grace slightly uncomfortable. As Howard tipped his glass, he realized that problem was inevitable—Grace had to meet Harry sometime. But Harry’s freewheeling conversation had worked Howard to the edge of his seat: he would ask about Howard’s business—the take in the mining towns, or the sideshow attractions in Denver—and then suddenly lose focus, interrupting the answer with some embarrassing story from their past. “Remember how we tished those showgirls in St. Louis?” he’d chuckle. “I worked with that little blonde from the kootch show. The one you liked. She’s still got some moves, lemme tell you!”
A warm spring breeze was blowing off Lake Michigan, and Harry’s downtown apartment offered a beautiful view of Chicago. But Grace couldn’t take her eyes off her strange brother-in-law. He definitely resembled her husband, and even spoke with the same warm, nasal hum. But Harry was fatter, coarser, and nastier. His words were slurred and sprinkled with street slang; his interests were narrowly focused, from dime museum attractions to petty crime. He exhibited all of Howard’s worst traits, and Grace waited, in vain, for any of the redeeming qualities. “During the years that followed I never became friendly with Harry,” Grace wrote, “and he never showed much enthusiasm for me, either. Proving, perhaps, that first impressions are important.”
Harry had returned to the Midwest and worked for a season as a bill poster for Ringling Brothers Circus. He settled in Chicago and began buying interests in dime museums, the cheap little urban sideshows that had served as the last refuge for his big brother: ten, twelve, sixteen short shows a day, in quick rotation. Harry’s dime museums naturally focused on the Oriental kootch dancers and supplemented the shows with games of chance and slot machines.
Harry was making money, and a reunion with him was a small sacrifice to inspire his largesse. Howard hinted about a little loan, and discreetly asked about booking their act in the Midwest. Harry was only too happy to help; his check, and his promise that he knew the slickest agents in Chicago, were his upper hand in a friendly game of sibling rivalry. Thanks to Harry, a Chicago agent gave Howard and Grace a short tour of small cities through Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio.
With their new bookings, Thurston ordered fancy new posters from the Donaldson Litho Company of Newport, Kentucky. The pretty one-sheet stone lithograph was printed in full color and portrayed the scene backstage at the Tabor Grand, as Thurston performed before Herrmann with his Rising Cards. Their new letterhead advertised “America’s Premier Card Manipulator,” “The Man Who Mystified Herrmann,” as well as “Texola, Comedy Buck Dancer.”
They arrived in New York City in the summer of 1899 and settled into a cheap boardinghouse on Lexington Avenue. Harry Houdini was also in New York that summer and renewed his acquaintance with Thurston. Houdini’s career had almost paralleled Thurston’s, from their earliest meeting at Chicago’s Columbian Exposition. They had both been mired in small-time show business—Houdini had toured with a circus and specialized in dime museum shows—and were poised for imminent success. Houdini was naturally circumspect of Thurston, who had been working small towns out west, virtually unnoticed by any other performers. After Houdini’s own failure as the “King of Cards,” it was typical of his personality that he scoffed at Thurston’s achievements and still felt possessive of the Back Palm and card flourishes.
Even worse, the New York agents continued to doubt Thurston. The sleight of hand impressed them, but invariably he was told that card tricks were far too small and cheap for the stage—it was the sort of thing only suitable for a garden party or a men’s clubroom. Thurston realized that the act needed an audience; if only the agents could have seen how it worked for the rough-and-tumble miners in the tar-paper saloons of Montana, they would have been convinced.
Grace’s blackface tap-dancing act was an easier sale. A pretty, perky little minstrel was still fashionable at the end of the century. She was offered a job at Heck and Avery’s, a New York dime museum, and Howard reluctantly agreed that she should accept.
Thurston spent his evenings sitting in Union Square, waiting for Grace to finish her turns, deftly practicing his card sleights with his arm tossed over the back of a park bench. He was there in July, on his thirtieth birthday, feeling sorry for himself, surrounded by the twinkling electric lights that outlined the theaters on Broadway, and imagining his own name illuminated brightly. He felt all the more foolish for reaching middle age with such adolescent fantasies. Thurston recalled watching the Broadway swells pass him by, “wishing I could go to Dennett’s, for a cup of coffee or a plate of griddle cakes; but I did not have enough money even for this indulgence.” One evening, a stout man with a sparse brush mustache and tortoiseshell glasses, stopped and introduced himself. He hadn’t recognized the magician, but he recognized the card moves. He was a fan of magic himself, a writer for the New York World. John Northern Hilliard was Thurston’s age; he shared his recollections of great magicians he had seen and offered encouragement for Howard’s efforts.
Thurston received another invitation to audition for two agents, this time on a Monday morning at the roof garden at the New York Theater, on Forty-fourth Street. Here was the same problem; he’d be facing another empty theater with a couple of silent, cigar-chewing faces staring back at him, trying to decide if the act was funny, or original, or big enough to entertain.
Thurston put a small ad in the Sunday paper: “Wanted, 1000 men. $1 for 1 hour. Apply 10 a.m. Monday Morning. The N
ew York Roof.” When Grace heard about the plan, she knew that it was coldhearted. She told Howard it “would be hard on a lot of men looking for work.” But she realized that the ad was a good idea, concluding, “It’s a hard world.”
When Howard and Grace arrived at the New York Roof the next morning, the seats were filled with noisy men and the lobby buzzed with even more hopeful applicants. The agents were huddled behind the curtain. “What’s going on here?” they asked Thurston. “We’re supposed to be using this theater, but those men told us they’d read an ad in the paper offering them work.” Thurston blinked slowly, the picture of innocence. “Well, I certainly can’t imagine! But then, you’re auditioning some new acts, aren’t you? That’s an old amateur night trick, filling up the theater. These non-professionals will try anything to get attention.”
The agents decided to cancel the audition. “No, no. I’ll handle it,” Thurston told them, shooing the agents into the auditorium. He walked onstage. “Gentlemen, there is some sort of misunderstanding.” The crowd grew quiet. “Until the man in charge arrives, I wonder if you’d like a little entertainment?” They cheered. He performed the act—the card manipulations, the Rising Cards, and the duck finale, with their new Socrates—winning laughter from the crowd and gratitude from the agents. They reciprocated with some out-of-town bookings.
BUT THE MAN Thurston had set in the crosshairs was Walter Plimmer, a British theatrical agent who booked vaudeville. He was younger than Thurston and was a notoriously tough judge of talent. He was also impossible to see and wouldn’t return messages. One day in August 1899, Thurston grew tired of waiting. He and Grace walked past the secretary into Plimmer’s office. He slammed the door as Grace spun around and turned the lock. Plimmer looked up with his eyes wide. Thurston had already pulled the cards from his pocket and begun his manipulations. “Good afternoon, I’m Howard Thurston.”
The Last Greatest Magician in the World Page 10