The Last Greatest Magician in the World

by Jim Steinmeyer

  Thurston was interested in three of Devant’s recent illusions. The Problem of Diogenes was the production of a man from the interior of a sealed barrel. The New Page involved a tall, narrow cabinet, just large enough for a person. An assistant was strapped inside, against the back wall. When the doors were opened seconds later, the assistant had turned upside down. And finally, Thurston negotiated a price for the Mascot Moth, Devant’s amazing new vanishing lady illusion, in which she seemed to shrivel up and disappear as she was standing in the middle of the stage. Devant arranged a contract and pushed it past the old man; the prices were high and the terms strict. For example, the New Page was £52, plus £4 per month rental ($260 plus $20 per month), and the Mascot Moth was £104, and £8 a month ($520 plus $40 per month).

  Thurston’s contract for the Mascot Moth was particularly significant. Kellar had already managed to produce a poor imitation of Devant’s illusion for his 1906 show. Devant’s original Mascot Moth depended upon an ingenious mechanism and split-second timing. Kellar’s version, titled the Golden Butterfly, had none of this sophistication. A number of Kellar reviews noted that the lady had obviously disappeared through a trapdoor in the stage. Frustrated by this especially tricky trick, Kellar had given up on it. By negotiating a price for Devant’s original version, Thurston had officially trumped Kellar’s best efforts.

  Thurston and Devant vowed to keep each other informed of their best ideas and exchange material for their shows. Devant especially intrigued his American compatriot by telling him that he had solved the problem of the legendary Indian Rope Trick, the boy who disappears on the rope. Devant was already having the intricate mechanism built in Brighton.

  Before Thurston and Beatrice left for London on May 11, 1907, they had added one additional person to the company. Bella Hussan was a charming old Mohammedan fakir whom Thurston had imported from Bombay, the very best native magician he had seen during his travels. One of his specialties was a juggling feat with a long bow, like an oversized violin bow, that supported three wooden balls. As Hussan held the bow diagonally, pointed upward, and spun his body in a circle, the balls climbed the bow in various puzzling configurations. He was engaging on the stage but, according to Thurston, “we had to teach him half of his tricks; the best thing he did in his act was to wrap his turban around his head.”

  ONE OF THE GREAT PUZZLES of American show business was the sudden transaction, in May and June 1907, when Paul Valadon was pushed aside and Thurston quickly stepped in to inherit Harry Kellar’s show.

  For three seasons, Kellar had teamed with Valadon, featuring his skillful manipulations on stage and exploiting his knowledge of Maskelyne and Devant’s illusions. Kellar had hinted in print that he would be retiring and that Valadon would take over the show. At the end of 1906, Kellar even told a St. Louis paper that he may “put a big spectacular show on the road next season, featuring Paul Valadon.” The Sphinx, the magician’s journal, seemed set on this idea, promoting Valadon as Kellar’s successor.

  There had been friction backstage. Eva Kellar, Kellar’s wife, was often featured in the show in a mind-reading act she performed with her husband. She didn’t like Valadon, and was even frostier to Valadon’s wife, who worked as his assistant. Compounding the problem, both Eva Kellar and Paul Valadon drank, and then allowed the alcohol to saturate their arguments. “Mrs. Kellar was an awful souse, and a battler, one of those kind that just has to win a decision off of somebody each day.” Guy Jarrett, a stagehand and magic show insider, was repeating the gossip that he had been told. “One day Mrs. Kellar was dishing out some of her grandest, with the Valadons on the receiving end, and Valadon broke, and passed it back to her, plus.”

  If the story is true, it must have happened long before the end of the tour, for Mrs. Kellar left the show in the spring of 1906 for an extended vacation to her hometown of Melbourne, Australia. When she was there, she was told about Thurston’s success in Melbourne earlier that year—perhaps she even saw newspaper clippings.

  Back in the United States, according to Jarrett, Mrs. Kellar “came in one evening, all in a dither, and excitedly explained to Harry [Kellar] that she had found a successor to take over the show.”

  But the story can’t be that simple. In February 1907, just after Kellar and Valadon had performed in Baltimore, Henry Ridgely Evans, a friend of Kellar’s and a Baltimore author on magic, contributed an article for a British publication. Evans speculated about Kellar’s retirement. “Who will be Kellar’s successor? Go ask the Sphinx, and perhaps the stone monster will tell you,” Evans wrote. This was a joke on The Sphinx magazine, and their endorsement of Valadon. Evans had a different opinion. “If you ask me, I say Howard Thurston, by all means. I predict that upon Thurston, Kellar’s mantle will fall.” In February 1907, with Thurston touring in India, this was a shocking prediction, and it suggests that Kellar may have just provided the hint to his friend Evans.

  In April 1907, Harry Houdini repeated the speculation in his own magazine, The Conjurer’s Monthly. “What do you think about Kellar’s retiring? Is Valadon going to succeed him? Would you like our opinion? From all signs and indications, the dark horse in the race seems to be Howard Thurston.” Houdini had also been hearing rumors.

  THURSTON LATER CLAIMED that the partnership with Kellar had been set, by telegram, before he left India. But this story is also much too simple. Thurston could not have had his deal when he contracted to purchase illusions from Maskelyne and Devant, because he made tentative arrangements for the Mascot Moth, an illusion that Kellar had just produced. He also wrote that when he returned to New York, he raced to Blaney’s Theater in Brooklyn to see one of Kellar’s last performances that season and to greet the master from the front row. But this was also untrue. Howard and Beatrice boarded the Etruria, from Liverpool to New York, on May 11, 1907, and only reached New York on May 20. Kellar and Valadon’s last engagement had already taken place in Atlantic City two days earlier, on May 18. Thurston never saw Kellar’s show after 1904 and never watched one of Valadon’s performances in America. When he later wrote of these events, Thurston must have realized that his fast-paced negotiations, behind the scenes, looked unpleasant and suspicious.

  When they finally sat down to dinner in May 1907, the two magicians must have made an instant connection. In many ways, they had shared the same childhood, selling newspapers in midwestern cities, contemplating the ministry, and sharing remarkably similar tours, a generation apart, through Australia, the Orient, and India. And Kellar’s decision probably involved a combination of elements—personalities and temperaments, Kellar’s impatience, Eva’s reports from Australia, as well as Thurston’s occasional telegrams. But the ultimate reason for Thurston’s success with Kellar is much simpler: money.

  Valadon had agreed to slowly pay off Kellar’s show. Thurston was willing to pay for Kellar’s show. When Kellar told a St. Louis newspaper that he would consider producing “a big spectacular show ... next season ... starring Paul Valadon,” it suggested that Valadon was not in a position to buy Kellar’s show, but would be hired as an employee and would be working off the investment. More than likely, this was the reason for the protracted seasons with Valadon. But Thurston now had all the money he needed and was ready to write a check to Kellar. He didn’t need Kellar’s investment. It would be a perfect way for Eva and Harry Kellar to start their retirement, and a comfortable, flattering way to contract a successor.

  THEIR CONTRACT was dated June 8, 1907, and Thurston was to pay $7,000 for all the illusions, props, and scenery, as well as permission to perform the famous levitation. Thurston agreed to credit Kellar for the illusion whenever it was presented. In exchange for his work on next season’s tour, Thurston would receive $150 per week. Thurston would take possession of the show at the end of the next season, in June 1908, and if, at any time in future, he desired to “strengthen the show,” he could arrange for Kellar to take part, when convenient.

  According to the contract, Thurston would also engage Dudley
McAdow for five years; he had been Kellar’s manager for sixteen years in conjunction with Stair and Havlin, a theater chain. And if Kellar desired, Thurston would not prevent him from establishing a permanent magical entertainment in a large city. Kellar had long fantasized about establishing a permanent magic theater, the way Maskelyne had with Egyptian Hall in London.

  Once the contract was in place, the partners finalized the arrangements of the next show. George White would be Thurston’s principle assistant. Beatrice Foster was to assist both Thurston and Kellar, taking the role of Princess Karnac in Kellar’s famous levitation. Thurston hired his own assistants and technicians, and two identical twins, the Terry brothers, which allowed him to produce some very surprising illusions. Bella Hussan would be included on the bill with a short act.

  Thurston contracted for Devant’s barrel illusion, Diogenes, and the New Page, but did not purchase the Mascot Moth, as Kellar had now warned him off of it. Kellar, in turn, wanted to purchase Maskelyne’s latest feature from London, the Spectres of the Sanctum, an elaborate séance effect in which a ghost slowly materialized in a cabinet. Thurston facilitated the contract with Maskelyne and Devant. After stealing dozens of Maskelyne effects for his show, this was the first one Kellar had ever paid the inventor to use.

  Kellar would tour one final season, splitting the performance with Thurston. And Kellar would finally, unequivocally, introduce Thurston as his successor. The swift transaction gave the impression that Paul Valadon, the loyal soldier, had been unfairly treated, as he was left scrambling for vaudeville dates. It seems that Valadon suffered the surprise that awaited many spies—once the game becomes treacherous no player is actually safe.

  THE NEWSPAPERS BILLED the show as “Kellar and Thurston, The World’s Greatest Magicians, Presenting All That Is New in the World of Magic,” but their rehearsals in Yonkers, New York, suggested trouble. Kellar was a perfectionist who never took chances with his magic. The Spectres of the Sanctum was a complicated trick of lighting and reflections, using an array of electric bulbs and a large sheet of mirror that slid onstage, invisibly, in a special metal track. It called for meticulous drilling, but Kellar wouldn’t give up the stage until it was perfect. Thurston was left cooling his heels.

  After days of work, just as Kellar was satisfied with the Spectres, and Thurston was bringing his own staff on the stage, the city electrical inspector arrived and explained that the Spectres’ light sockets needed rewiring. All the rehearsals stopped again, and Thurston waited patiently until Kellar’s trick was perfect. Thurston’s first shows were awkward and underrehearsed, but Kellar seemed to take it all in stride. “It’s all right, Thursty,” he told his new associate. “It was all my fault, but don’t worry.”

  Thurston could be temperamental, but he tended to fall into black moods and sulk. Kellar’s temper was something completely different, a source of continual amusement to the people around him. He exploded in firework displays of profanity, stomped, screamed, and then slinked back into the theater for mumbled apologies and pats on the back. At a dinner at the Astor Hotel in New York, Kellar ordered baked potatoes for himself, his wife, and the Thurstons. When the waiter bungled the order and delivered small boiled potatoes, Kellar erupted in fury. “Eva, look at that! Thursty, look at that!” He stuck a fork in the potato and held it over his head, rushing through the dining room and calling out to anyone who would listen. “You call that a baked potato? A baked potato?”

  At the end of the dinner, Kellar had been deflated again, as sheepish and foolish as a schoolboy. Thurston noticed that he left a generous tip. “I am a fool, Thursty. I am a big fool. But I don’t mean any harm, do I?”

  WHEN THE SHOW played in Rochester, New York, John Northern Hilliard wrote another review for the Post Express.

  Mr. Howard Thurston made his initial bow to a Rochester audience as a master magician.... This season he is the feature performer with his own program, and challenges attention as the most skillful sleight of hand performer and worker of illusions on the stage today. Curiously enough, since the death of Alexander Herrmann, America has had no representative magician, save the hanky-pank men of vaudeville, the clumsy performer of unwieldy mechanical illusions, or the itinerant performers of the streets, the parks, or the fairs. When Alexander Herrmann died, magic in America died.... This period of dubiety has passed, however, for Howard Thurston has taken up the wand of the dead magician, and claims the honor of successor by right of skill and fitness.... Thurston, in a word, has arrived. He is the master magician of the day.... Among those who also appeared was Mr. Kellar, who performed his usual little bag of tricks, the same that he has been doing for the last quarter of a century. He made a brief speech announcing his retirement from the stage at the close of the present season, which was warmly applauded.

  The next day, Kellar showed the article to Thurston. As Thurston read it, he braced himself for the gale. Instead, the old magician surprised him by seeming remarkably sanguine. But that night, as Kellar was standing onstage, he happened to spy Hilliard sitting in the audience, and this lit the fuse of his temper. Thurston was standing next to Barney, Kellar’s longtime assistant, as they watched from the wings. Kellar sauntered offstage to prepare the next trick, and Thurston noticed the magician approaching him. Kellar was red with rage.

  “There he is, Thursty! There he is!” he mumbled. Kellar grabbed Barney by the throat and began shaking him. “Help me, Barney! Help me! Help me think of something to call that god damned miserable son of a bitch who’s sitting there, just sitting there in my god damned audience!”

  Thurston was dumbfounded, but Barney was long accustomed to his boss’s strange rages. Barney collapsed to the floor with laughter as Kellar turned and walked back onto the stage with a loud harrumph. If only he could have thought of some of those two-dollar words to berate Hilliard.

  TWELVE

  “MAGICIANS PAST AND PRESENT”

  In December 1907, when Kellar and Thurston appeared at McVicker’s Theater in Chicago, Houdini was appearing in a local vaudeville house. Thurston made arrangements for Houdini’s wife, Bess, to have a box seat—Houdini was busy that afternoon at his own theater and planned to attend later in the week. But Thurston accidentally offended Harry by inviting Dr. Wilson, the editor of another magic magazine and, at that moment, one of Houdini’s archrivals. Houdini was happiest when he was embroiled in melodramatic alliances or competitions. When he heard that Wilson had been at the show, he chafed at Thurston’s insult and wouldn’t attend McVicker’s Theater.

  Houdini, a magazine editor—publishing The Conjurer’s Monthly Magazine—was happy to report on Thurston and Kellar. But he privately had his doubts about Thurston’s new role. His fellow vaudevillian, the coin manipulator Tommy Downs, encouraged Houdini’s skepticism. “I note what you say regarding Thurston and Kellar,” he wrote to Houdini, “all that B.S. about Kellar retiring in favor of Valadon I never believed. Kellar will never retire, he will die in harness, same as Herrmann did.”

  Downs voiced the opinion of many magicians, that Kellar simply wanted a chance to push Thurston out of the picture. “Kellar is a foxy Pennsylvania Dutchman and is probably afraid of Thurston as a possible competitor,” he confided to Houdini.

  Both Downs and Houdini were passing judgment from a lofty, rickety perch. The vaudeville circuits had provided a false sense of security for many twelve-minute marvels. Houdini had anticipated that his handcuff act was just a short-term novelty, but he was ambitious and clever enough to keep expanding the scope of his act, adding bigger challenges and grabbing more headlines. He freed himself from a straitjacket, and was about to introduce an escape from an oversized milk can, filled with water. By 1907, he had become one of vaudeville’s genuine stars. In contrast, his friend Thomas Nelson Downs had proven to be a one-trick pony, and that trick was the Miser’s Dream—plucking half-dollars from the air. After his act had been seen, and then imitated, around the world, Downs returned to Marshalltown, Iowa, looking for the next good idea. H
e was having trouble finding it. “As far as I am concerned, I have no ambition to be styled ‘The Great.’ The game is not worth the candle. I don’t see what Kellar wants with Thurston,” he wrote to Houdini, still grumbling about Thurston’s tour. “Thurston is a case of lucky boy, falling into Kellar’s show. I know at least a half-dozen magicians better qualified. I don’t believe he will succeed with the public. Thurston is a nice fellow, but not a genius and not original.”

  Neither Downs nor Houdini understood that the relationship, and the creation of America’s next great magician, was no longer about Kellar’s stubbornness or Thurston’s originality. Thurston and Kellar had come to admire each other. One afternoon at McVicker’s Theater, as the magicians arrived at the stage door, Thurston suddenly remembered something. He led Kellar down the alley, examining the long expanse of dirty bricks. Thurston located the dim scratches of two initials: HT. He explained to Kellar that twenty-three years earlier, he had been working as a newsboy with Reddy Cadger in that alley, waiting for the bundled first editions of the Chicago Tribune. They were hungry and cold, huddled on the iron grate above the warm air of the Tribune press-room. Thurston had watched a group of swells, in their silk hats and furs, leaving the theater. He vowed, one day, to perform there, and scratched his initials on the side of the building. Kellar’s eyes twinkled with recognition. It was as if Thurston had been describing a chapter from Kellar’s own childhood.

  KELLAR AND THURSTON performed their last engagement together at Ford’s Opera House in Baltimore on May 16, 1908. The entire tour had been organized with a magisterial sense of inevitability, a royal succession, and the final performance provided the emotional climax. At the finish of the show, Kellar threw his arm around Thurston’s shoulder and walked him forward. He thanked his public for their support, recalling his forty-five-year career as an entertainer and his most famous feats—summoning the spirits in his old cabinet act, growing rose plants inside a cardboard tube, and transmitting his thoughts to his beloved wife, Eva. While touring the faraway lands, he’d been proud to bring sophisticated American mysteries to the people of the world. Thurston noticed him leaning more heavily on his shoulder. As he began to predict a glowing future for his young associate, Kellar turned to look at his successor and his voice cracked. Kellar paused, and then solemnly handed over his wand to Thurston with a deep bow—the symbol of the magic being passed from one generation to the next. The band played “Auld Lang Syne” and ushers rushed down the aisles with floral tributes, filling the stage with wreaths of bright roses.