But as Thurston sat in the bright sun at a table outside of the Continental Hotel, reading through the journals, he was struck by the latest news from America. Even in faraway India, he could piece together the scraps of information, from one article to another. It was now clear what was happening with Harry Kellar and Paul Valadon.
Thurston began to feel sick to his stomach, helplessly double-crossed. Kellar was now retiring and had made his decision. He was about to name Paul Valadon as his successor. Howard Thurston—with one of the largest magic shows in history and a fat scrapbook filled with rave reviews—would return to America consigned to second place.
IN ALLAHABAD, near the end of Thurston’s season in India, the company had moved the crates into a big, dirty old theater. Charlie Holzmueller and George White were cutting the necessary traps in the stage. They’d sawed through the holes and then jumped down about five feet, onto the dusty subfloor, to finish the job, when the manager of the theater came running to the stage. “Get out, get out! Hurry! There are cobras underneath the stage!” Charlie and George scrambled out of the hole, and the performances could only be accomplished, night after night, with a small brigade of Hindu boys under the stage with lamps and sticks, to drive away the snakes. That way, the assistants and the girls in the show were able to crawl around in relative safety, making their magical entrances and exits.
Thurston watched the near accident and shook his head. It seemed eerily significant. He knew that it was time to go home. But he had no idea what sort of show business snakes he’d find beneath his feet.
ELEVEN
“THE LEVITATION OF PRINCESS KARNAC”
Magicians didn’t get to pick their successors any more than they were allowed to select their competitors. It’s true that the American public seemed to accept only one great magician at a time. But there was no tradition of the heir apparent until Alexander Herrmann hinted, in 1896 interviews, that he might be retiring soon and that his nephew Leon was capable of taking over the show. With Herrmann’s sudden death, it was incumbent upon his widow, Adelaide, to turn that hint into a royal succession, to lavishly promote Leon, fulfill the dates, and keep the show rolling.
It was, of course, a cold business decision, and not an actual inheritance. And the public rejected it. Leon Herrmann never succeeded to his uncle’s lofty status. Harry Kellar fulfilled the role of America’s great magician.
In turn, Kellar had his own cold business reasons for choosing a successor and mythologizing the process. Kellar was now in his late fifties, with a comfortable bank account. He was looking forward to retirement. He loved to travel and adored fishing. His show had been carefully established as a theatrical entity—not only the props and scenery, but also the contracts with theater managers, agents, assistants, advance men, newspaper editors, and poster printers. Kellar was in a position to sell the show, and its all-important relationship to the public, by officially endorsing a successor. He could make money by selling the properties, as well as earning a weekly fee from the next magician.
Thurston may not have realized what Kellar was considering when he had his first exchange of letters in 1905. But by 1906, Kellar was in the midst of his second tour with Paul Valadon. And suddenly, all of the pieces fit together.
It was Valadon, the German sleight-of-hand artist, who had supplied Kellar with mechanical details for Maskelyne’s incredible levitation from “The Entranced Fakir.” He’d seen the equipment backstage and could describe it to Kellar. That’s how Kellar had his own version of the levitation just months before Valadon joined his show.
The timing was too coincidental. And as if to prove it, Kellar followed up, the next season, by extracting more information from Valadon and introducing another longtime feature from Egyptian Hall, Maskelyne’s comical illusion sketch, “Will, the Witch, and the Watchman.” In London, Valadon had costarred in both “The Entranced Fakir” and “Will, the Witch, and the Watchman,” suggesting that he had reconstructed these illusions for Kellar. Valadon’s part in the show was gradually increasing, and he had achieved equal billing with Kellar. He was being groomed as the successor.
Thurston first felt betrayed. He had sent wires to Kellar, asking him to consider him for future business opportunities. But now he realized that as he’d spent two years of hard slogging through Australia, the Orient, and India, Kellar had spent those same two years introducing Paul Valadon in the finest, plushest theaters across America. Thurston realized that he was helpless; the entire con game was being played on a level far over his head. If he had followed through with Kellar, could he really have been named as his successor? Probably not, for Valadon had already, secretly, earned that position through his treachery.
THE FIRST ONE to figure out the game had been John Northern Hilliard, the congenial reporter and magic fan whom Thurston had met on the park bench in Union Square.
In 1904, when Valadon joined the Kellar show, Hilliard reviewed it for the Rochester Post Express. In previous years, Hilliard had been tough on Kellar. He considered him an inferior magician—almost completely inept when it came to clever sleight of hand. But the addition of Valadon seemed to round out the program beautifully, and Hilliard’s 1904 review offered a fulsome endorsement of the show.
Mr. Kellar has attained perfection in his own particular line, and we have no hesitation in doffing our hat and hailing him as the Grand Old Man of Magic. Mr. Kellar, as we have explained many times, has certain limitations as a conjurer. He is not a manipulator, but essentially a magical entertainer, and in this field, he stands absolutely alone.
Harry Kellar was famously temperamental off the stage, a colorful buffoon of a man who could alternately explode in profanity or offer friendly pats on the back. If a piece of equipment failed him onstage, he was likely to take it into the back alley and break it to bits with an ax, or throw it into the wings, where it often raised a bump on the head of his assistant, Fritz Bucha. The next day, Kellar would apologize profusely. He knew Bucha’s shoe size, and invariably bought a pair of expensive shoes as a peace offering. By the end of the season, Bucha used to joke, he was carrying a trunk filled with new pairs of shoes.
Kellar had been braced for another bad review from Hilliard, but was so thrilled by his praise that he typically overreacted, trying to recruit him as his friend. Kellar told Hilliard that he needed his help. He had been using an awkward paragraph in his program to promote his new levitation:Absolutely new in principle, it is the outcome of experiments extending over a number of years, and in which more than ten thousand dollars have been expended. Experts who have witnessed the mystery declare it to be the most inexplicable mystery that has ever come within their expertise.
Instead of crude boasts, Kellar needed real poetry with some two-dollar words, which he knew Hilliard could deliver. Hilliard agreed to write the program note for fifty dollars, and delivered a sparkling paragraph:The most daring and bewildering illusion, and by far the most difficult achievement Mr. Kellar ever attempted. Absolutely new in principle. The dream in mid air of the dainty Princess Karnac surpasses the fabled feats of the ancient Egyptian sorcerers, nor can anything more magical be found in the pages of The Thousand and One Nights, and it lends a resemblance to the miraculous tales of levitation that come out of India. The illusion is acknowledged by critics and historians of the goetic art to be the profoundest achievement of either ancient or modern magic. Its perfection represents fifteen years of patient research and abstruse study, and the expenditure of many thousand dollars. The result of these labors is a veritable masterpiece of magic, the sensational marvel of the twentieth century, and the crowning achievement of Mr. Kellar’s long and brilliant career.
Kellar thought it was very good, but suspected that it should be longer. It was hardly worth fifty dollars. So he sent Hilliard a check for twenty-five dollars, voicing his disapproval.
In their escalating argument, Hilliard managed to tweak his final draft of the paragraph, substituting the word “obtuse” for “abstruse.” T
he new sentence read, “Its perfection represents fifteen years of patient research and obtuse study ...,” which was now a nice insult to Kellar. Hilliard reasoned that Kellar, with his cursory grade-school education, would never notice the difference. Kellar didn’t notice, proudly printing the paragraph—and the word “obtuse”—in every program for his show for over a year. It was sweet revenge.
HILLIARD WASN’T EXAGGERATING when he described the Levitation of Princess Karnac as a masterpiece of twentieth-century magic.
It was the brainchild of John Nevil Maskelyne, who had been experimenting with different levitation devices throughout his long career. By 1900, there had been two distinct innovations in the illusion. The first secret was that the floating person could be supported with a strong, steel horizontal bar that supported a cradle, a metal support beneath the lady. This bar generally extended straight back from the lady, passing through a slit in the curtain where it attached to some upright gantry or lifting mechanism. Nevil Maskelyne, John Nevil’s son, had invented a clever twist on this, quite literally. By inserting a tight bend in the bar just behind the lady—it was a sort of dog leg or, to use the popular magical term, a gooseneck—a hoop could apparently be passed over the floating person. In fact, the hoop passed over one end, head to toe, where it was now linked onto the bent metal behind the lady. By casually sliding the hoop along the tracks of the gooseneck, behind the lady, it could be maneuvered back over her head and then passed back across her feet. The hoop was now unlinked from the metal support. It was this clever move—passing the hoop twice, while it was secretly linked onto the support between each pass—that created the illusion.
Maskelyne’s second innovation was a series of thin wires, used to suspend the lady on the cradle. Rather than using two or three thick cables to hold up a person, an array or fan of extremely thin steel wires could be used, if the multiple tiny connections could be carefully arranged so that every single wire supported part of the load. Each wire would be about the thickness of a sewing thread. If the wires were chemically dulled, and the lights on stage were carefully arranged, they were virtually invisible.
In 1901, Maskelyne was able to combine these ideas into an incredible invention. The assistant reclined on a steel cradle. Just behind the cradle, hidden from the audience by the floating assistant’s body, was Nevil Maskelyne’s shaped gooseneck, a piece of wrought iron. Two bundles of fine wires picked up the cradle on the upstage side of the gooseneck—the side away from the audience. Above the stage, the ends of the wires were attached to a steel grid hidden behind the curtains.
Of course, this didn’t quite work. Hung in this way, the cradle would have tipped, spilling the person forward onto the stage. Maskelyne ingeniously solved this problem by using the wires going up as a fulcrum. Then, another group of wires, pulling down, were attached a few inches further upstage on the cradle.
The wires going down passed through a narrow slot cut into the stage, where they were attached to a steel-framed box of weights. By adjusting the weights, Maskelyne had created a sort of invisible lever on stage, and the cradle could be perfectly balanced. By lifting the entire system with an offstage winch, the lady seemed to levitate.
The assembly—the floating assistant, steel cradle, weights, and grid—weighed over four hundred pounds. Maskelyne increased the number of wires to accommodate the weight. In Kellar’s version of the illusion, for example, he used two bundles of fine wires to lift the apparatus—a total of fifty-four wires—and another bundle of thirty-two wires extending down through the slit in the stage to provide the counterweight. A wonderful combination of physics, metallurgy, engineering, and mechanics, the illusion was ultimately enhanced with great dollops of theatrical fantasy.
ONCE HE had been cheated out of his twenty-five dollars and his hackles were up, John Northern Hilliard discovered the truth about the Levitation of Princess Karnac, that it had been purloined from Egyptian Hall. The crowning achievement of Kellar’s career was actually his most brazen bit of espionage.
Surprisingly, it took a year before this became apparent. Few magicians had actually seen both levitations, and as they occurred in different settings on stage, it was difficult to compare them directly. Even Maskelyne was confused when he heard about Kellar’s illusion. Maskelyne’s only solution was to have the steel wires delicately looped around projections on the cradle, and the trick took days to set up on stage. In fact, Kellar had hired the Otis Elevator Company to develop the illusion; they were responsible for engineering the wire connections, allowing Kellar to pack the illusion in cases and move it from city to city.
In December 1905, Hilliard reviewed Kellar’s new show for The Sphinx:Although Mr. Kellar naturally claims the really wonderful levitation as the offspring of his own brain, it is really none other than the Maskelyne Levitation, which for several years puzzled the habitués of Egyptian Hall. I make this statement advisedly, for I have it on unimpeachable authority that this is the Maskelyne illusion.... The brain of John Nevil Maskelyne is responsible for yet another feature of the Kellar program, the cabinet trick known as Will, the Witch and the Watchman, including the insufferably tedious dialogue and its lamentable and pathetic attempts at humor. This was a deadly bore as presented by the insufferable actors of Egyptian Hall, although the trick itself is mechanically clever. Mr. Kellar would have shown better judgment had he rewritten the sketch and enlivened it a little for American audiences.
In the middle of this wholesale pan, there is another Hilliard twist of the knife: he knew very well that Kellar was not capable of rewriting anything or evaluating a script.
Kellar performs his handkerchief tricks as atrociously as ever.... He introduces a ridiculous card trick, during which he harangues his audience on the idiotic subject of forcing a card.... His patter is so absurd [that] I was about to call it asinine.... Paul Valadon is the feature of the Kellar show this season; indeed, he was last year.
Kellar reddened by the time he’d finished the review: Hilliard again. The magician ripped the magazine to shreds, erupting in a long string of profanities.
THURSTON COMPLETED his two-year tour at a theater in Delhi, India, in March 1907. Several days before their last engagement, one of the sheets of glass in the water tank, Creation, cracked when the water poured inside was too hot. Charlie and George located a large mirror in the theater lobby and brought it backstage, scraping away the silvering on the back so that it could be used to replace the glass. The repaired tank was used for the two final performances.
In an effort to economize, Thurston sold a number of illusions that were particularly heavy, or broken, or unusable. For example, the hastily repaired Creation tank never left India. He also sold stacks of his lithographs that had been produced for the India tour. The company traveled back to Bombay before splitting up and going in their separate directions. Standing on the docks at the end of his long adventure, Thurston spoke, surrounded by his loyal workers. His voice cracked with emotion. “I want to thank you, but I also want to tell you what you’ve done for me,” he said. “I landed in Australia two years ago completely broke. And right now, I can sign a check for fifty thousand dollars.” There were cheers and hearty pledges of friendship. Maude Amber and Winfield Blake returned to Australia. Doc Henry remained in India. George White and Charlie Holzmueller supervised the return of the remaining equipment to the United States, arriving in May 1907. The props and scenery were sent on to Chicago, where Harry Thurston was ready to warehouse them.
Harry had returned to Chicago with a handful of gems and a trunk of Oriental knickknacks. Of far more value was a practical inspiration from the Great Thurston show—the Edison motion picture machine that was featured at every performance. Harry used his profits from the tour to open the Five Cent Theater on South State Street, one of the city’s first permanent movie theaters. Harry remarried and settled down with his new wife, Isabel. He was becoming an influential businessman in Chicago’s famously crooked First Ward, a hotbed of nasty, big-city political
intrigue. Harry fit right in.
HOWARD AND BEATRICE took a more leisurely route back to America, stopping in London. In 1904, Maskelyne had moved his theater from the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly to St. George’s Hall, just off Regent Street. Maskelyne’s new partner was David Devant, Thurston’s good friend.
John Nevil Maskelyne, the old man of British magic, was of the same generation as Harry Kellar, and over the years they had squared off in a simmering rivalry. But Devant and Thurston were both a generation younger, bristling with new ideas and anxious to develop a new style of magic. Although Maskelyne had always been too stubborn and high-handed to negotiate with Kellar, Devant saw his job as expanding the Maskelyne and Devant franchise, and retaining a cool, diplomatic relationship with all his fellow magicians. These important British magicians found a new ally in Thurston: he was now cash rich from his world tour and had an opportunity to buy some of the greatest magic in the world.
The Last Greatest Magician in the World Page 17