The Last Greatest Magician in the World

by Jim Steinmeyer

  “Yes, Thurston, I know. Another magician. I’ve seen it a hundred times.”

  “No, you haven’t seen me a hundred times. You wouldn’t see me once. But you’re going to see it now.” As he spat out the last few words, he was pumping through his card manipulations.

  The agent leaned back, watched, and was impressed enough to let Thurston continue: cards disappeared at his fingertips, tumbled from his hands, changed into other cards, or were effortlessly propelled across the office, snapping against the window behind the agent.

  Plimmer smiled and began scrawling on a piece of his stationery. “I can’t use you right now. But tomorrow, take this note downtown to Tony Pastor.”

  Grace and Howard walked out in a daze, giddy and celebratory, weaving down the sidewalks back to their apartment. After their years of struggle, it couldn’t really be that easy, could it? The right audition in the right office, and they’d suddenly heard the most magical name any variety act ever heard: Tony Pastor.

  TONY PASTOR didn’t actually invent vaudeville. It was forged out of the saloon variety entertainments, dime museums, and minstrel shows of nineteenth-century America. Pastor was one of a number of producers who worked hard to distill the very best and scrub clean everything else. But his acquaintances usually awarded him the honor because it made a better story. In a field of monsters and cads, Tony Pastor was beloved, an entertainment phenomenon and a New York institution.

  He was born Antonio Pastor in New York City in 1832 and worked for Barnum as a child prodigy singer, and then performed as a blackface minstrel, a clown and ringmaster in the circus, a trick rider or clog dancer. He was short and stout, with a long mustache and wavy black hair. By most accounts his dancing was slightly ridiculous and his voice was merely a raspy baritone. But he learned how to act a song, “putting it over” with exaggerated gestures and a graceful, friendly personality. In 1861, he managed his own theater and hosted the shows each evening. He was always the star. An evening might begin with Pastor’s latest songs. He specialized in funny or sweetly romantic ballads, as well as stirring patriotic tunes in support of the Union troops. Then the show would offer some variety acts and conclude with a comic afterpiece, a short parody of a popular play or opera. He marketed his shows to women, eliminating the worst qualities of the beer halls, the loose waitresses, blue humor, smoking and drinking. He was a fine judge of talent and had inspired instincts about the public’s tastes. Pastor is credited with discovering a generation of important stars, including the era’s most famous chanteuse, Lillian Russell.

  As New York’s theater district gradually moved uptown, to more respectable neighborhoods, Pastor relocated to better surroundings, out of the Bowery and on an inevitable march up Broadway. In 1881, he finally settled into Tony Pastor’s New 14th Street Theater, just off Union Square in the basement of Tammany Hall.

  The word vaudeville was a hybrid to describe the new phenomenon and brand it as a new product; it was probably derived from the French phrase for “voice of the city.” Tony Pastor himself avoided using the word for most of his career. He thought it sounded sissy and French. He preferred calling it variety. By the 1890s, his gradual innovations had been acquired by vaudeville entrepreneurs in uptown theaters, who systematized and popularized the entertainment.

  By 1896, it was Pastor who was racing to keep up and fill the seats at his thousand-seat theater. He adopted the latest vaudeville trend, continuous entertainment. This was a sort of all-day buffet of talent, in which a collection of dazzling acts followed, one after another, in cycles of performances from about noon to eleven p.m. Patrons could pay for a ticket and watch the whole cycle or any part of it. It was hard on the acts, but an attractive novelty for the public—entertainment as a factory assembly line. By July 1899, Pastor included American Vitagraph features on every bill, a few short subjects courtesy of the latest fashion, the motion picture.

  When Howard and Grace walked into his office, Pastor’s esteemed status had led them to anticipate some sort of titan, the toughest, most judgmental producer of all. “He could point you toward the big time, or doom you to the sticks,” Grace believed. Instead, they found the elder statesman, a sweet sixty-seven-year-old, sitting behind his desk in a small office of framed pictures and Victorian knickknacks. “You want an engagement?” he asked. “Billy tells me you’re the best magician he’s seen.” Thurston nodded. Pastor smoothed his brush mustache. “Come to rehearsal Monday at ten o’clock.” Quickly, Grace spoke up. “You realize that we’re two acts. I sing and dance in blackface. Can I come, too?” Pastor smiled. “Yes, my dear, you come too.” He turned back to Howard. “How much do you want for the act?”

  Thurston had been advised by Clare Evans to always place a high value on his services, “if you want a manager to appreciate your work.” Thurston had rehearsed this moment and knew that he wanted to ask for the top price. “Eighty dollars.”

  Pastor looked at him, Thurston recalled, “with a quizzical smile and a twinkle in his kindly eyes.”

  “Young man, I have offered you an engagement. I don’t know what you can do, but from your looks I think you’re all right. As you’re a stranger in New York, your name will not add a cent to my business,” Pastor started. “Besides, I can engage all the well-known acts I want at eighty dollars. Fifty dollars is all that I can pay you. But I’ll give you a contract for eighty dollars, and charge you thirty dollars to put your name on the billboards. If your act’s a success, you can show the contract to other managers and it will establish your price.”

  “BY NOW, I was a capable entertainer in my own right,” Grace later wrote. “I was always adequate, the kind of act managers will keep on when they’re too lazy to book another.” But since Grace had secured her own solo act at Pastor’s, Howard needed a new assistant for his show. On Saturday, he borrowed eighty cents from his landlady and placed a small ad in the newspaper for a young man, a “colored assistant.”

  Thurston was following in the tradition of his idol, Alexander Herrmann. Herrmann had always featured a black assistant whom he nicknamed Boomsky, relying on him for exaggerated comic reactions or burlesque physical humor. For example, it was Boomsky’s job to borrow a hat from a man in the audience, and then “accidentally” trip on the way back to the stage, falling on the hat and crushing it. Herrmann would upbraid the assistant. Boomsky would roll his eyes with comic chagrin. The magician then proceeded with his trick, miraculously restoring the hat. Boomsky was a theatrical role filled by a number of African-American performers; the last was a young man named M. Hudson Everett, who continued to work with Adelaide and Leon Herrmann.

  On Saturday night, exactly one boy responded to the ad, knocking timidly at Thurston’s door in the rooming house.

  His name was George Davis White. He was then twelve years old, the oldest son of Mary (Helen) Davis and Tolliver White. His father may have been a freed slave from Virginia. George was born on February 2, 1887, in New York City, and had received a public school education. His family lived uptown, on Sixty-first Street; his brothers worked as elevator operators in apartment buildings. Thurston found George to be bright and serious; he had no hesitation about getting to work or learning the details of the act. The magician offered the boy room and board, and fifty cents a week, and the next day George was given a quick education in magic. Grace stitched a costume for him, showed him how to hold each prop and stand onstage.

  There was also quite a bit to do backstage. Howard and Grace had recently added an important new improvement to the Rising Card trick. Now, instead of having cards selected by the audience and shuffled back in the deck, Thurston stood on the stage and had spectators call out cards—any cards—that they wanted to see rise from the deck.

  This meant that George, hidden backstage, was ready, next to a large cloth banner that had been sewn with fifty-two pockets; each pocket contained a playing card that was a duplicate of Thurston’s deck. As he heard the cards named, George quickly plucked them from the banner, stacked them i
n a packet, and then walked onstage, under cover of handing Thurston a handkerchief to wipe out the goblet. He secretly delivered the duplicate cards to the magician, who palmed them onto the top of the deck. The subterfuge made the trick even more amazing and quickened the pace at a large theater like Pastor’s; Thurston no longer had to step off the stage to have cards selected. Now Thurston was starting with the cards in the goblet and then ending with them held in his hand.

  “Careful, don’t look up at the audience. Smile. Look only at Howard,” Grace drilled George as he ran through the maneuvers. “Don’t take the focus from the magician. Step to the back. Always behind him. Use your left hand, the closest hand. Never turn your back.”

  All Sunday, they paced back and forth in the rooming house, repeating each step of the act: George’s entrance, how to style (a flashy, quick way of taking a bow), arranging the packet of cards, delivering the duck load, invisibly, to Thurston. Throughout the day, George barely spoke a word. He listened to each instruction, nodded, and repeated the actions perfectly, meticulously.

  The next morning, August 21, 1899, Grace and Thurston pulled their trunk down the street and George followed, lugging the duck in his crate. As they turned the corner to see Pastor’s Theater, Howard absentmindedly asked, “Have you ever been in a theater before?” George answered, “No, sir.”

  Thurston almost stopped on the street to give him a short lecture on stage fright, but then thought better of it, realizing how lucky they were. George had never even considered being nervous.

  THURSTON AND GEORGE walked mechanically through their rehearsal and then retired to the wings to double-check each prop before their twelve-thirty premiere. Grace was scheduled to start on the dinner show; her engagement at the dime museum overlapped Pastor’s engagement for one week, so she dashed between the theaters to honor both contracts. At Tony Pastor’s, Thurston faced the problem of music for the act. He’d never carried sheet music, using whatever Grace could pound out on the piano, or the local band would choose from their repertoire. When asked what he wanted, he had always simply said, “A waltz.” He said the same thing to Pastor’s house orchestra, a notoriously ragged collection of Pastor’s old friends who seemed to specialize in popular melodies played out of tune.

  That morning, he was the third act on the bill at Tony Pastor’s, a safe spot that didn’t promise too much to the audience. As Thurston sauntered onto the stage for his premiere, the orchestra swung into “Zenda Waltzes,” a feather-weight tune that had been written by Frank Witmark four years earlier, for a play based on the popular novel The Prisoner of Zenda.

  Howard struggled through the act. He hesitated on a few of the early moves, and then began to fret about the mistakes, stumbling over his lines. He broke out in a chilling flop sweat that quickly soaked through his collar and left his hands trembling as he walked offstage. There was a smattering of polite applause.

  “My God, Grace,” he told her in the wings. “I muffed it.”

  She knew better. She knew that the act was fine and her husband’s nerves were frayed. “It’s fine. It’s just all new. You’ll have them jumping on the tables tonight.” Little George, however, was precise and unflappable, moving with an admirable, otherworldly detachment. He circled back around the curtain, holding the duck. Without any need for congratulations or any prompting, he quietly went about preparing the props for the next show and re-sorting the cards.

  Grace was right. By the evening show, Thurston had steeled himself, managing to sweep every bit of his experience—the carnival platforms, beer halls, and lantern-lit performances in general stores—onto Pastor’s New York stage. “Then, too, George’s ease had a tonic effect on me,” Thurston recalled. That night, the card manipulations drew stunned silence. The Rising Cards inspired gasps. The card throwing earned cheers. When he finally finished the show by pulling handfuls of cards and a string of baby clothes from a spectator’s coat, the audience stamped their approval. Socrates the duck, pushing his way to the top of the man’s collar and flapping his wings as he tumbled onto the stage, stopped the show with peals of laughter, and then loud applause. George chased the duck, scooting after it with arms outstretched, then holding it high so it flapped its wings manically, just as George had been trained. Thurston took three steps, approaching the footlights, turned his chin upward, toward the balcony, and offered a deep, self-satisfied bow.

  Tony Pastor himself followed Thurston from the wings into his dressing room. “Well done, my boy. Fine job.”

  Howard Thurston was always prone to finicky superstitions. At Pastor’s, he adopted two more that served him well. His song was now “Zenda Waltzes,” and he insisted that it always accompany his card routine. And George White, a new lucky charm, guaranteed success. George was alongside him onstage—his principal assistant—in every performance for the rest of his life.

  THURSTON WAS HELD OVER at Tony Pastor’s, and then offered work, through the agent William Morris, on leading vaudeville circuits—Proctor, Keith, or Orpheum. With the benediction of Tony Pastor and the ironclad contracts of the fashionable new vaudeville chains, Thurston had leapfrogged over virtually every other magician in America.

  Early vaudeville, from the 1880s, had been about songs, dance, and sketch comedy. It also accommodated short, sensational variety performers like jugglers or acrobats—transplants from the circus. But magicians were never an easy fit. The great tradition of magic in America, as personified by Heller, Dr. Lynn, Herrmann, or Kellar, was the tradition of the “great man,” a performer who enchanted the audience with a long, full program of marvels. The magician’s skills took time to develop, required tables filled with apparatus, and often indulged in chatty patter to make his points.

  It was tough to boil it down to twelve, fifteen, or twenty minutes for a vaudeville bill. The first vaudeville magicians, like Imro Fox, Fredrick Eugene Powell, and Carl Hertz, performed short versions of the “great man” act, squeezing together a little of everything to remind their audiences of other popular magicians. Leon Herrmann ended up with the same approach to vaudeville, and so did his aunt Adelaide, the “great woman” in the field.

  But as vaudeville became a real commodity in big cities through the 1890s, there was a need for new acts and a desire for new fashions. The trend was toward specialists, handsome young men in tails who marched onto the stage, used very little apparatus, and presented a narrow range of marvels in a simple, memorable act—striking, precise, and crisply modern.

  That’s why Martin Beck, the manager of the Orpheum circuit, told Houdini to stop performing magic tricks and to concentrate on the handcuff and locked trunk escape that made his performance unique. It was Beck who pulled him from the dime museums and put him on the vaudeville stage. He made Houdini an “escape artist,” and then made him a star.

  T. Nelson Downs, who Thurston had seen demonstrating the Back Palm, had spent his youth as a telegraph operator in Marshalltown, Iowa, learning sleight of hand with the coins in the cash drawer—stacks of silver half-dollars performed flashy somersaults in his hands, or disappeared and reappeared at his fingertips. Magicians told him that he was mad to concentrate on an act with just coins; those small tricks were considered only suitable for drawing-room performances. They were proved wrong. Tommy Downs’s “The Miser’s Dream,” twelve minutes of dazzlingly pure coin manipulations, premiered at the Hopkins Theater in Chicago in 1895. He was billed as the “King of Koins.”

  Thurston was now exactly at the right place, at the right time. And he had the right act. His flashy new letterhead listed the elements of his vaudeville routine, “Time of act, twenty minutes; Twelve minutes in one (that is, in front of the front curtain, allowing the stage to be set for the next act); Elegant photos for lobby, Special lithographs; Assisted by Colored Attendant,” and included an odd boast, “Not a Magic Act.” It was important that these new acts were perceived as much more than traditional magic—a bold new sort of art. An early reviewer noted, “Howard Thurston is a thorough artist, an
d presents his performance in a very neat and a very entertaining manner. You do not know, you cannot imagine, how he does it.”

  HOWARD AND GRACE moved down the street to a pretty apartment on Lexington Avenue. Thurston had full-length triple mirrors installed, so that he could rehearse. According to Grace, “he arose at five each morning and spent two or three hours before the mirrors, his teeth clamped on one of his midget cigars, repeating the sleights over and over again.” She had hoped that success would bring him relaxation. It didn’t. He was still nervous, and unpredictably jealous of Grace’s affections, becoming temperamental if she spoke to another man, suspicious of how she spent her money or what she said about her husband. Adding to the tension was the boorish Harry, who arrived for an extended visit, basking in his older brother’s success and sniffing around for business prospects in New York.

  Grace’s success in vaudeville, her independence, contributed to Howard’s fears. After the couple joined some show business friends for a late dinner, Thurston ended the party with some impromptu magic, managing to pick the men’s pockets. He returned their wallets with a laugh. Later, Grace complimented him on the feat. “They should have met the Nim Kid,” she told him, referring to her husband’s early days in a crime gang. Thurston scowled. “I want you to forget all about that. Forget about our past, the western trip. Now I want to show the public the right picture.” After a pause, he asked her about the pages in her diary, his long, confessional autobiography. Where were they? She realized why he was asking and changed the subject.

  On another evening, after Grace had been trapped in an argument with Harry, she overheard him in the next room growling to Howard. “She’s so damn smart. I’d like to wring Grace’s neck.” She couldn’t clearly hear Howard’s reply. For years, she wondered about how he responded to his brother.