The Last Greatest Magician in the World

by Jim Steinmeyer

  THE NEW FEATURE for the 1910-1911 season was the Great Automobile Surprise. During the course of this three-minute pantomime, Howard and Beatrice arrived onstage in a two-seat roadster, an Abbott-Detroit 30. Howard got out of the car and entered the door of a café. Two robbers then appeared, dressed in long coats and masks, stealing Beatrice’s purse as she sat in the car. The robbers were distracted for a moment; when they returned to the car, they found that Beatrice had mysteriously turned into a policeman, who now attempted to arrest the robbers. Thurston returned to the stage and was overpowered and tossed offstage. When the robbers removed their disguises, they were revealed to be Thurston and Beatrice, who stepped back into their car and drove into the wings.

  These exchange illusions became a fashion for magic shows, introduced by vaudeville magicians and quick-change artists Fregoli and Lafayette, and Thurston’s friend Servais Le Roy. The secret involved overdressing, with costumes that could be quickly stripped away, and then switching one actor for another at the edges of the scenery. The exchanges were designed to go unnoticed because of misdirection—other action onstage that momentarily distracted the audience. Magicians referred to these tricks as “raincoat and whiskers dramas,” indicating the shabby costumes necessary for the exchanges. One of Thurston’s critics called them “leg drop comedies,” as the characters seemed to hover around the leg drops (the vertical curtains at the sides of the stage), waiting for their chance to switch for another person.

  Thurston’s auto trick was exactly the sloppy sort of magic that Kellar had feared. Spectators returning to see the show a second time would surely be able to follow the action and discern the secret; for Kellar, this was an anathema. Bamberg pointed out the flaws, but Thurston was stubborn, insisting on the big picture, the qualities the scene would bring to his show. Bamberg and Thurston spent many late-night meetings at Bamberg’s workshop in Brooklyn, plotting every sequence of action to make the illusion as effective as possible.

  Theodore Bamberg had been the perfect choice to work with Thurston. He loved magic and was both grand and discerning about its fine points. Offstage, he could come across as stuffy and patrician; he was hard of hearing and spoke with a clipped German accent, making him seem remote. “Theo acted as a brake on Thurston’s impractical impulses,” his son, magician David Bamberg, later explained. “It was a hard job that required tact, as Thurston had a strong will, but Theo’s common sense and inventive genius was what Thurston needed most.”

  When they were finished planning the trick, Theo was given the role of the policeman in the little scene. They had both been right. There was not much mystery, but the big picture was very effective. The entrance of the car drew applause. The scenery and action were unlike anything else in the show, earning favorable reviews. And Thurston had managed to wring out several nice commercial endorsements: Abbott-Detroit were happy to provide the car; Miller Tire paid to have Thurston’s throw-out cards imprinted with their logos. “Mr. Thurston uses Miller Standard Tires,” the program now read.

  Thurston was dogged and driven in surprising ways. He never stopped fidgeting with the Spirit Cabinet and the Levitation. Perhaps it was an effort to establish these illusions as his own. Or maybe, once they were established in his show, Thurston understood that he had to keep incorporating new surprises for his audiences. He suggested to Bamberg that they conclude the Levitation by adding Servais Le Roy’s trick, in which the lady is covered with a cloth, floats in the air, and disappears. It started another long, simmering argument with Theo. “Und vhy vood you choose to take diss great illusion, und just stitch on anodder trick? Do you stitch on anodder pair of pants mitt your best trousers? Does dott make ’em look bedder?”

  BEATRICE MISSED SECTIONS of the tour, staying home in Connecticut, and friends noticed that she avoided social dinners hosted by magicians’ clubs. Thurston offered her apologies, explaining that she hadn’t been feeling well. Her absence put an extra strain on the show, and the couple’s relationship. Fortunately, a group of Italian pantomime clowns, the Monte Myro Troupe, had joined the show. In 1900, they had been featured by Siegmund Lubin, an early film producer, in a short motion picture. One of Monte’s daughters, Lucille Myro, was exactly the right size for Thurston’s illusions. She was less than five feet tall, rail thin, and pretty, with magnetic, dark eyes. She was given the stage name Fernanda, and became Beatrice’s understudy, filling in as the lighter-than-air Princess Karnac, and her odd, exotic features suggested an Oriental princess.

  The name Fernanda seemed to fit the illusion as well. Thurston had vaguely referred to the assistant: “The young lady comfortably rests in mid air.” But now he gradually began to incorporate the new name; something about the sharp triple syllables made it irresistible. Thurston’s neat baritone transformed it into a poetic chant that rippled throughout his routine: “Rise, Fernanda, rest, Fernanda, dream, Fernanda. Dream of the banks of the Ganges.”

  KELLAR CONTINUED pulling strings behind the scenes. He wrote to Karl Germain, a clever Cleveland Lyceum performer, urging him to contact Dudley McAdow and “join forces with Thurston.... I do know that it would be the strongest magic show in the world.” Germain was elegant and artistic, a famous perfectionist on and off the stage, but he was a friend of Thurston’s, and he ignored Kellar’s offer, telling an associate that there was something “rotten in the state of Denmark.”

  Dudley McAdow, Kellar’s longtime director, left the show in 1912, at the end of his prearranged five-year contract. Like all of the Kellar associates, he’d become used to the old system and was uncomfortable with Thurston’s business. Charles Carter instantly hired him to direct his upcoming U.S. tour. Presumably, any scrap that fell from Kellar or Thurston’s table, or could be pried away, was a delicious treasure for Carter’s magic show.

  Kellar followed up with another clever recommendation for the 1912 season. Guy Ellsworth Jarrett was a thirty-one-year-old magic builder and sideshow performer who had recently arrived in New York from San Francisco. Born in Ohio, he had operated a sideshow in California, and then joined T. Nelson Downs when the coin magician briefly attempted a vaudeville illusion act. Downs wasn’t successful, but magicians noticed Jarrett’s new illusions. When Kellar met Jarrett in New York City during one of his annual visits east, he thought he’d found an ideal addition to Thurston’s show.

  Jarrett was an interesting contrast to Bamberg; he had no airs about classic magic, nor did he fuss over lacquer or catches. Jarrett loved innovative secrets that challenged the audience and he loved dependable apparatus. Kellar used to have a rule about how magic apparatus had to be made: “Make each piece of apparatus twice as strong as required, and then double that strength.” Jarrett produced well-made props and had developed a knack for hiding people in impossibly small spaces.

  Still, Jarrett continually clashed with Thurston, and the arguments started at the shop in Cos Cob, even before the show went out on the road. Jarrett agreed to build several of his own illusions for the tour. He suggested a small wooden cabinet that would produce nine people; Thurston was carrying a group of nine Arabian acrobats, the Haja Hamid Troupe, as a variety act. The cabinet would allow Thurston to make them all appear.

  Jarrett’s illusions were famous for how small they looked, and the secrets depended upon tight little spaces that he had measured carefully. He allowed exactly eight inches of space for the bodies of the acrobats, squeezed in between two false panels in the cabinet. When Jarrett left the shop at the end of one day, Thurston added an additional twelve inches on the plans, telling the carpenters that he wanted to be sure the cabinet was big enough. Jarrett returned and saw the completed cabinet, stopping all the work. “It looked like a garage,” he later remembered. He cut apart the carefully doweled panels, reassembling them to the correct size. “I can’t remember a single time that Thurston was ever right.”

  Perhaps the most incredible of Jarrett’s creations was called the Bangkok Bungalow. Thurston showed a small, narrow, two-story dollhouse, picking
it up and putting it at the side of the stage. It was about the size of an orange crate on its side.

  Jarrett stood atop a small pedestal. “I call your attention to this young man. He is the most remarkable man I have ever met,” Thurston told the audience. “He can be in two places at the same time. I would like to have you take a good look at his handsome countenance so you will know him the next time you see him.” The assistants held a cloth in front of Jarrett for a few seconds. When the assistants pulled the cloth away, he was gone.

  “Now I want you to watch him and trace him, and see where I place him, for I’m going to hide him and you’re to find him! Here he is, in the Bangkok Bungalow!”

  Thurston now picked up the little house, lifting it effortlessly. He mumbled out of the corner of his mouth, as if talking to someone inside. “Yes, he says he is in there. He wants to get out.”

  The assistants now brought in a low platform on wheels, with upright posts and curtains hung around the sides. Thurston placed the house in the curtained cabinet, and the drapes were closed. Seconds later, they were opened again, and Jarrett was back, standing next to the house.

  “Now, the next effect is the most astonishing of all.”

  The cabinet was turned so that the curtains obstructed Jarrett. The assistants marched onstage, pulling away the curtains, one section at a time, and showing that he had disappeared again. Thurston stepped over to the cabinet and lifted the house in his hands, walking it to the wings and tossing it to an assistant offstage. Meanwhile, the audience noticed a suspicious lump in the last curtain on the cabinet. They’d located the missing assistant.

  Thurston returned to the stage, as if proudly taking his bow. But he now noticed the murmur through the crowd. He turned back to the cabinet and pulled away the final layer of curtains. Jarrett had completely disappeared. “Where is he?” Thurston asked, as if he had puzzled himself.

  “Here I am!” Jarrett shouted. He jumped high into the air, and as the spotlight hit him, he was standing in the center aisle of the auditorium.

  The entire illusion took just a few minutes, and Jarrett’s magical transportation seemed to occur in split seconds. Like the very best Jarrett mysteries, the Bangkok Bungalow involved a series of clever principles to throw the audience off the scent. The most amazing part of the routine involved the little house. It was just large enough—barely—to contain Guy Jarrett, curled up inside. Even though Thurston’s routine suggested that the house was just a part of the con game, for the final phase of the effect Jarrett actually hid inside the house. It was sixteen by eighteen inches square, and twenty-eight inches high, carefully constructed of thin wood and metal to give Jarrett as much room as possible inside.

  As the assistants entered to remove the curtains, one of them held a metal hook at the end of a long, thin piano wire that was hanging from the grid of the theater. When the scene was carefully lit, the wire, like the wires used to fly actors in aerial ballets, was completely invisible to the audience. The hook was clipped to the top of the house. An offstage counterweight, on the other end of the wire, allowed Thurston to lift the house and carry it as if it weighed only several pounds. When he placed it in the wings, he was actually taking Jarrett offstage, though no one could possibly believe it.

  Jarrett emerged from the house and ran around to the front of the theater, sneaking down the aisle in darkness as Thurston completed the trick. A few simple wire loops provided the shape in the curtain, suggesting that Jarrett was still hiding on the stage. “The people never notice me,” Jarrett explained, “for they are so intent upon the bulge in the curtains on the cabinet. My speed was incredible.” When Jarrett finally appeared in the auditorium, the audience had been completely conned.

  JARRETT LASTED just one season with Thurston. He didn’t have much regard for Thurston or his magic. In addition, he was angered that his name was never included in the program and that he wasn’t paid any extra money to build the illusions in Connecticut, before the tour had started. Jarrett never understood that Thurston was pinching pennies with all of his employees.

  But Guy Jarrett’s failure also represents a missed opportunity. He should have developed a perfect rapport with the magician. Both were Ohio boys who learned their skills as carnival talkers, performing the roughest form of magic and promoting a number of uncouth shows. Jarrett wore these experiences as a badge of honor. Thurston had completely erased them from his history; as the boss and the star of the show, he now adopted a pose of superiority and sophistication to retain the upper hand.

  Years later, when Jarrett wrote about Thurston, he recalled him as maddeningly cool and confusingly pretentious. “Thurston did not play the market,” Jarrett wrote. “No wine, women or song came into his life,” efficiently proving how little Jarrett knew about his employer. If Howard had dropped his guard, confessed his financial worries, and laughed about his sideshow days, he probably would have found a lifelong ally in the mercurial Guy Jarrett.

  Kellar’s spies in the Thurston show didn’t provide him any peace of mind. Instead, they just gave him excuses to indulge his colorful temper. The old showman naturally played to his audience. “Kellar was so disappointed with the way Thurston botched up the show,” Jarrett wrote to a friend, “he would take me out to eat somewhere and sit and cuss.” After Jarrett’s season with the show, he worked in the back room of Clyde Powers’ Mysto Magic Shop on Broadway. When Kellar visited the shop, Jarrett showed him a new fishbowl production that he’d just invented. Kellar was so delighted with the craftsmanship that he paid thirty-five dollars, buying it for Thurston. He asked Jarrett to deliver it to Thurston when he next passed through New York.

  Thurston arrived and Jarrett proudly showed him the prop that Kellar had bought for him, but Howard dismissed it. “Oh, I already have a bowl production, so if it’s the same to you, I’d rather take the same amount in little accessories that I can use in the show.” Jarrett waited until he saw Kellar again before pulling him aside and whispering, “I’m going to tell you something, and you are going to be sore as hell.” And, of course, he was. “Did he think I was just making him a present of a lousy thirty-five bucks?” Kellar roared. “I wanted him to have one good small trick in his show.”

  Jarrett somehow had retained access to Thurston’s workshop in Whitestone; more than likely he had befriended the assistants and was allowed to visit and take a look at their latest projects. In 1915, when Thurston was developing a special illusion for the Miller Tire Company—an automobile tire that seemed to float in the air—Jarrett saw the awkward invention in Thurston’s shop. He made a few suggestions about improving it, which were promptly ignored, and he retaliated by selling his own version of the floating tire illusion to Kelly Springfield Tires. Of course, this served to ruin the novelty of Thurston’s illusion for Miller. It was an act of commercial espionage that hopelessly corroded Jarrett’s relationship with Thurston.

  When Kellar met Bamberg in his workshop, and heard about Thurston’s plans for new illusions, he reddened and then quietly reached over to an ashtray. “You see this match?” he growled to Bamberg. “I wouldn’t waste it to burn down the whole damned Thurston show!”

  FORTUNATELY, Kellar was unaware of the real problem: Thurston’s debts had already surrounded him like a roaring inferno, licking at every investment and threatening to engulf his career. In August 1912, Thurston mortgaged the entire show to Hyman Fish, a New York commission salesman, for a quick $1,000. Included in the loan was a full accounting of the show, including the crates containing Kellar’s levitation, the props from Maskelyne and Devant, the Lion Cage, electric equipment, backdrops, tools, and Thurston’s personal trunks. Mr. Fish now owned it all, until Thurston paid it off—nearly one hundred cases, baskets, and crates—a train-car load of specialized equipment, the parts and pieces of the America’s greatest magic show.

  Hyman Fish is a surprising name. He was convicted by the New York State Supreme Court in early 1915 for forging a set of books in conjunction with another 1912
loan, then charged again for perjury during the case. He was a loan shark. Apparently Fish was unrelated to Thurston’s business. When the magician found him, it was for the same reason anyone went to a loan shark: they’d reached the limit from friends, associates, and family members.

  Howard Thurston had returned to America just five years earlier with $50,000—and he was a millionaire by today’s standards. Now he was forced to pawn one last property. And, of course, he couldn’t let any of his partners or acquaintances know what he’d just done, or have anyone in show business gossiping about such a loan. The situation suggests that Thurston may have simultaneously, dangerously, mortgaged the show for similar loans.

  “Don’t worry, George. Never worry,” Thurston habitually advised his loyal assistant. Now he knew that he had to keep his eyes forward, trusting that one of his business ventures would succeed. Something would work. Something would finally pay off. After all, it couldn’t get any worse.

  FOURTEEN

  “THE PIERCING ARROW”

  When Thurston appeared at the Imperial Theater in Chicago in January 1912, he heard a knock on his dressing room door, and George White’s voice. “Governor, there’s someone here to see you.” The door opened slowly, and a sad, skeletal figure, wrapped in an oversize dress coat, tottered into the room. Thurston stood and quickly pushed his chair toward his guest. It was only when the old man looked up and smiled that he recognized Paul Valadon.