The Last Greatest Magician in the World

by Jim Steinmeyer

  It was a line drawn in the sand. Thurston was the sort of magician who did not paint the insides of props. He used to tell colleagues, “Magic comprises only about thirty percent of a magic show.” To him, the tricks were only a small part of the formula. The rest was showmanship, presentation, stage deportment, and all those indefinable elements that intrigued an audience. But these were fighting words for Kellar, who had devoted his career to the finding the finest tricks and always making them shine.

  Kellar began petitioning Thurston in subtle ways. He recommended tricks that he’d seen, or magicians who might have good ideas for the show. When he felt Thurston brushed off his suggestions, Kellar would, in turn, buttonhole his friends and ask them, as a personal favor to him, to use their influence over Thurston.

  In 1910, Kellar hit on a plan. Theodore Bamberg, a third-generation magician from a famous Dutch family, who was living in New York, was established in vaudeville under the stage name Okito, performing an Oriental magic act. He was also a builder of magic equipment, famous for his meticulously built apparatus and his old-world perfectionism. Bamberg had known Thurston for years; he had worked with him in Paris just after Thurston’s success at the Palace Theater in London, and he admired him.

  Kellar felt that it was a perfect fit. Theodore Bamberg could join the show performing his hand-shadow act, creating the silhouettes of people or animals with his hands held in a spotlight. It was a perfect novelty for a magic show and wouldn’t compete with any of Thurston’s magic. And behind the scenes, Bamberg could make sure that the magic was up to Kellar’s standards. Kellar ended the proposal with an arm around Bamberg’s shoulder. “I know I can count on you, Theo.”

  Finally, Kellar had a spy on the inside.

  BUT FOR THURSTON, it was the spies on the outside that were creating the problems.

  Charles Joseph Carter was four years younger than Thurston, born in Pennsylvania and trained as a lawyer, before he decided to become a professional magician. He was pudgy and authoritative, an unlikely showman, but he was also tough and impervious to insults. Like many of his generation, he had constructed his show by modeling Kellar’s performances.

  Carter followed Thurston through Australia and India the year after Thurston, playing many of the same theaters and capitalizing on his successes. “Carter possessed no originality whatsoever,” wrote magician and critic Charles Waller, “but he was nevertheless a really good presenter of magic. He was almost the last of the old-time magicians. In later years, his show moved too slowly for the times.” Carter made most of his money overseas. After his first world tour, he returned to America for new material.

  Fritz and Carl Bucha were two brothers who had served as backstage mechanics for Kellar. They continued working with Thurston during his first season, but in 1908 they left the show. Thurston wasn’t surprised. They were old associates of Kellar, and Thurston now had his own men to supervise the work backstage.

  What neither he nor Kellar realized was that Carter had hired the Buchas away and paid them to build copies of the Kellar and Thurston marvels, based on their own experience with the show. The Levitation of Princess Karnac and the Spirit Cabinet were secretly duplicated in a New York shop. After four years of working with these devices, Fritz and Carl knew them inside and out.

  Kellar’s wonderful levitation, developed and improved by Otis Elevator Company, had been a mystery to many magicians. But the Bucha brothers had personally adjusted every bolt and spring on the precious levitation illusion, oiled the winch, and tightened the wires. They could reproduce it faithfully for Carter.

  Both Kellar and Thurston were left flat-footed when the rumor was reported, and then Carter took the new illusions on his second world tour in 1909. When Kellar heard the news in Los Angeles, he secretly fumed, but by rights he couldn’t really complain. He’d obtained the invention through a similar bit of trickery and now had to swallow his pride. “Carter had the nerve to telegraph me for the stuff to blacken wires,” Kellar wrote to Thurston. The chemical to dull the shine on the steel wires was an important part of the secret. “I didn’t even answer him as I might have said something I should have been sorry for.”

  Similarly, Thurston felt helplessly removed from the controversy. Kellar’s dealings—with Maskelyne, Valadon, and the Bucha brothers—had all been arranged long before Thurston joined the show. Now he was a victim of those old relationships, and powerless to repair them.

  IN MAY 1910, Howard’s divorce from Grace had been finalized and Howard and Beatrice decided to get married. Thurston told the press, “We agreed that if, after seven years, we should find we cared for each other as much as we did, then we should be married. That time expires and we are to keep our agreement.” It made for an attractive, romantic story—America’s Greatest Magician and his floating princess—that ignored the fact that he had been waiting out a divorce decree.

  If their marriage would provide a bit of calm rationality in the middle of his chaotic life, it was probably intended just that way. It was just weeks after Eva Kellar’s death and Valadon’s dwindling prospects, just as Thurston was trying to simultaneously rein in his businesses and expand his show. Unfortunately, before Howard and Beatrice were able to set the date, Thurston had to deal with another woman—an amazing, headline-making Neapolitan who had supposedly mastered the art of levitation. When Thurston met Eusapia Palladino, it was a controversy that he didn’t need.

  THIRTEEN

  “DO THE SPIRITS RETURN?”

  On a bright, warm, Sunday afternoon in Manhattan, Howard and Beatrice sat on the sofa in an uptown apartment, waiting patiently for something amazing to happen. It seemed incredible, impossible, that they were about to attend a séance. Wasn’t that supposed to be happening in the middle of the night, in a dark parlor?

  After they’d been ushered into the apartment, Thurston realized that he would have only a few moments before the others arrived. He jumped up and began searching the room, instructing Tommy to follow his lead. “Look for anything out of the ordinary. Threads, batteries, electrical wires along the walls. And don’t forget to turn back the carpet,” he whispered.

  Just as he had finished feeling the edges of the wainscoting, he heard the floorboards creak in the next room. The Thurstons froze as the door swung open and a small cluster of people entered. Hidden in the middle of the group was a tiny, elderly woman, wrapped in a long black taffeta skirt with a high-necked white blouse. Her face registered a deeply lined, permanent scowl.

  “Howard, let me introduce Eusapia Palladino,” Hereward Carrington said. Carrington was a friend of Thurston’s, an author and amateur magician. Thurston and Beatrice bowed to the medium as she mumbled something in Italian. A man at her side translated. “Yes, she says it is a pleasure to meet you.” But Thurston noticed, from her expression, that she probably had said nothing like that at all.

  Palladino was shaped like a fireplug and conducted her séances with a haughty attitude. She sat at the end of a small, rectangular wooden table that was a permanent part of the act. Howard was invited to sit at one side of the table, holding her hand to the tabletop and—she instructed him—placing his foot alongside of hers. Beatrice was positioned to the other side and held her other foot and hand. Palladino gave a few other instructions in Italian, which she reinforced by stamping her feet, coming down on Thurston and Beatrice’s toes. It was obviously important to her that their feet always remain in contact.

  The séance circle was completed with others sitting at the sides of the table. Carrington closed the drapes, but Thurston was surprised to see that the room was barely shaded. The sunlight ricocheted around the bright walls, allowing everyone to clearly see Palladino’s every breath, the slight twitching of her hands, and the nervous stamping of her feet.

  “She needs to reach her spirit contact,” Carrington narrated in a whisper. But within minutes, neither Carrington nor the lady’s translator was able to keep up or offer any explanations. A séance with Palladino was famous for bein
g unsettling and emotional. The little lady shut her eyes tightly, cursed, whispered, cried, complained, pulled her hands away, beat at the air with her fists, then roughly grabbed the hands of the people next to her.

  Thurston noticed how Palladino’s process was oddly untheatrical. It didn’t offer any of the comforts of a neat sermon, the prayers or talks about loved ones coming back to visit. In fact, his Spirit Cabinet provided a far better show, without any of the pretense of a real séance. Every night, Thurston stood in front of the empty cabinet, his fingertips held gently to his temple, calling upon the ghost of Katie King, the famous spirit guide. And every night, on cue, as the first violins played pizzicato, the gauzelike ghost appeared, sweeping through the cabinet. Katie King rattled a tambourine, drummed on the cabinet with a cane, and then disappeared as the doors were flung open, providing a gasp from the audience.

  With Palladino there were no actual ghosts, just suggestions. She settled into a trance, suddenly froze, threw her head back, and stiffened her arms. Gentle rapping noises reverberated through the tabletop. These became louder, as if the legs of the table were vibrating. The table shook gently, from side to side. Her hands—along with Howard and Beatrice’s hands—pushed down firmly on the tabletop, as if she were defying it to stay in place. But the table wouldn’t obey. It jumped an inch, and then another, rising slowly until it was several inches in the air, with all four legs off the floor. As Thurston looked down, finding the medium’s hand still pressed against his own, the table fell back to the floor with a thud.

  THURSTON HAD BEEN LURED to the apartment by Hereward Carrington, who was in desperate need of publicity. Carrington was born in England and immigrated to the United States as a young man. He had been hired by Thurston to add publicity material and tricks to the latest editions of his souvenir books, sold in the lobby at his performances. During his time with Thurston at Cos Cob, he had engaged the magician in long discussions about psychic phenomena. Carrington had gradually come to believe in the reality of the supernatural, and he found Thurston surprisingly open-minded—Howard started his conversations with Moody’s ecumenical education and then peppered his stories with the marvels of the Indian yogi that he had almost witnessed.

  In conjunction with the British Society for Psychical Research, Carrington had recently become the manager of Eusapia Palladino. She had already enjoyed a long career in Europe. She was born in 1854 in Naples and had baffled respected scientists like Professor Cesare Lombroso, Oliver Lodge, Pierre and Marie Curie, Camille Flammarion, and author and spiritualist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

  She first visited America in 1908, and when Carrington brought her back in 1910, they were hired for a number of séances for scientists and magicians at Columbia University. Joseph F. Rinn, a boyhood friend of Houdini’s and an investigator of psychic frauds, supervised the tests and warned everyone what to watch for. The Columbia committee wasn’t impressed. It was apparent that the Neapolitan medium was extremely skillful in several devious tricks. For example, in the chaotic atmosphere of the séance room, she could move her feet together so that one foot could do the duty of two—contacting one spectator with her toes, and the other with the heel of the same foot. Once this occurred, her remaining foot was free. She gradually worked the leg of her table onto her toe, and then pressed down with her hand, forming a sort of “human clamp.” This was how the table levitated at Columbia University.

  When a published exposure was imminent, early in May 1910, Carrington quickly arranged the séance for Thurston. He was sure that if the magician were impressed, his credentials would cancel out the other lesser-known magicians like Rinn. Fortunately for Carrington, Howard and Beatrice had been fooled, and fooled badly. While the Columbia exposures were running in the newspapers, Rinn challenged Palladino to a test séance, to be conducted in an office at the New York Times, and offered her $1,000 if she could produce phenomena under special test conditions. At Carrington’s urging, Thurston offered a counteroffer:I have been a conjurer all my life and have always been able to expose all mediums producing physical phenomena in the past. I am so far convinced that this medium can produce genuine table levitations that I agree to forfeit $1000 to any charitable institution named if it can be proved that Mme Palladino cannot levitate a table without resort to trickery or fraud.

  Thurston’s offer was silly. As Rinn pointed out, “A complete negative could never be proved. The fact that he is a magician does not mean that he may not have been fooled at the sitting which inspired his offer.” Still, Rinn seemed to appreciate Thurston’s point of view. “Magicians generally regard mediums as frauds,” he later wrote, “although Howard Thurston did lean slightly toward a belief in Spiritualism. He told me, however, when he was on my Palladino committee, that he inclined that way only tentatively because he had witnessed some phenomena that he could not explain.”

  Palladino didn’t help her cause. As she negotiated the terms of the challenge, she confessed to fraud. “You see, it is like this: some people are at the table who expect tricks, in fact, they want them. I am in a trance. Nothing happens. They get impatient. They think of the tricks, nothing but tricks. I automatically respond. But it is not often. They merely will tell me to do them. That is all,” she admitted to the stunned reporters. Many of her admirers, faced with her exposures, had postulated that, as her powers waned, she had resorted to more and more fraud. “All mediums trick, all!” she said. “And it is not so easy to catch them. I say this from personal experience. All!”

  The final séance was scheduled for the evening of May 24. Thurston, Rinn, and the other magicians, scientists, and reporters waited in the newspaper office. At the last moment Palladino refused to show up. The next day, she responded to reporters with “a choice array of Neapolitan expletives,” insisting that she would not go through with the test. In fact, she wouldn’t even perform for Thurston, who had supported her. She asked, “Am I a prize pig, to be made an exhibition of, to have persons bet on what I can or cannot do?” Palladino feared that, if she had been successful at the Times,the next day, the next week, somebody will say that one of the magicians helped me produce my phenomena, and that I paid him to do it. No, I am not going to be caught that way. And for that reason, I do not wish Mr. Thurston to be at the table when I give my séance in the Times Tower. In Europe, I have only the greatest scientists for my investigators, and not the jugglers of the country fair.

  Thurston later clarified his point of view:Of course, Palladino is a trickster. She will even acknowledge it herself and many of her methods have been made public in the magazines. Nevertheless, she is able to do some things which are not explained by trickery or magic. I myself saw her levitate a table and I am positive that it was done without mechanical means. On the other hand, she will often resort to trickery in this very matter of table levitation when she cannot get control of the other power, whatever it may be. It seems to me that it is a great deal better to believe in it. I think the world would be a great deal better off if more people would devote their time to studying this psychic force. Such a study is more likely to be of use than airships, for instance. It doesn’t seem to be that they will ever be of practical value.

  Thurston had begun a curious dance, postulating the supernatural even when the circumstances disappointed him. Palladino not only admitted that she cheated, but hinted that Thurston might be accused of cheating for her. Just like his encounter with the yogi of India, he was capable of twisting his arguments like pretzels, ultimately believing his own con.

  He had also overstated his qualifications. Like most magicians, he was not an expert in all deceptions, but only knew what would work on a stage, in his own show. Palladino’s erratic séances, which proceeded in fits and starts, and her odd technique, squeezing the table while lifting it, were hardly part of a magician’s arsenal.

  The quote is especially interesting as Thurston’s psychic researches predated Houdini’s; it was another three years before Harry Houdini would discover his crusade against fra
udulent mediums and turn this issue into a prominent part of his career. Still, Houdini may have been in Thurston’s thoughts when he made the dismissive remark about “airships.” Just months earlier, Houdini had been grabbing headlines with his new hobby, aviation. That spring, he had become the first man to fly over the continent of Australia.

  JUST FOUR DAYS after the failed séance, on May 28, 1910, Howard and Beatrice walked to the Marble Church at Fifth Avenue and Twenty-ninth Street in Manhattan and were married. During the publicity about Palladino, Beatrice had been called alternately “Mrs. Thurston” by some observers and “my assistant” by Howard. In fact she had been both since 1904, and the couple finally formalized their relationship.

  It was a rare, pleasant moment of stability. No one understood that Thurston had mastered the amazing illusion of seeming to move forward, while he was actually sinking in debt. His businesses were deeply in the red, and the continual salaries kept him scrambling for money. Thanks to Harry Thurston, Howard’s new partner in the amusement company was now William H. Swanson, who ran a Chicago film exchange and had formed Rex Studios, which was later one of the small studios that would be merged into Universal Studios in 1912. In the summer of 1910, Thurston’s bills seemed endless. He needed money to file the patent for his amusement park ride, to develop new illusions, and continue a venture with scenic designer and melodrama writer Langdon McCormick. And he was still looking for cash to pay for the changes to the property at Cos Cob.

  Houdini had just returned from Europe, with tales of a triumphant world tour. Thurston quickly asked for a loan of $250 to $300. Houdini turned him down, with pleasure, meticulously explaining how he’d been slighted in Chicago years earlier. Like many of Houdini’s associates, Thurston was stunned by his ability to carry a grudge. Thurston wrote to Houdini:I am glad of our talk today; the talk has done much to explain matters between us. I am indeed sorry to have offended you in Chicago and I assure you it was not intentional. I have always had the greatest interest in your career and it has been a pleasure to think of you as a friend. I must confess I was disappointed and somewhat hurt today to learn that you would not do for me what would have been a pleasure to have done for you, had the positions been reversed between us.