The Last Greatest Magician in the World

by Jim Steinmeyer

  TWENTY-TWO

  “SEEING THROUGH A WOMAN”

  Cyril Yettmah was a stone-faced English magician of the old school, stiff and proper. But he had an encyclopedic knowl edge of magic and a knack for new ideas. He suggested an astonishing illusion to Thurston, which was first introduced in the 1929 season. Thurston called it “Iasia, The Unattainable Attained, the Impossible Realized.”

  A tall, rectangular skeleton cabinet was pulled onstage. It was a little larger than a phone booth, with a vague Oriental motif and a roof festooned with silk tassels. A rope was lowered from the ceiling of the auditorium and attached to the top of the cabinet. One of Thurston’s assistants, dressed as an Indian princess in a silk robe and veil, stepped inside. Two more assistants, standing onstage, tightened the ropes, which squeaked through a large metal pulley. The cabinet and princess were slowly lifted, swinging off of the stage, until they dangled several feet over the orchestra pit.

  The band quieted, and the flute continued with an Indian melody.

  “You see before you Princess Iasia, keeper of the secrets. Salaam Iasia!”

  The lady reached to a small cord within the cabinet. Pulling on it, she raised a curtained canopy, from the bottom to the top, which concealed her from view.

  “Swing forth the ancient Hindu prayer cage!”

  The band transitioned into a clanging Oriental march. Now the lady reached through slits in the curtain. She held bunches of lucky Thurston throw-out cards, the same cards, emblazoned with his portrait, that he scaled from the stage at the start of the show. Handfuls of these rained down onto the crowd as the cage was slowly raised, higher and higher. The children below squealed and grabbed for the cards. Thurston slowly followed the motion of the cabinet, walking out onto the runway over the orchestra pit as the audience craned their necks to watch the cage slowly ascend. It stopped at the top edge of the proscenium, brightly illuminated in the spotlights. The kettledrum rumbled and the music reached a crescendo.

  “Iasia, are you there?” The lady waved her hand from a slit in the curtain. “Garawallah! Begone! Iasia! Iasia!” Thurston raised his pistol, firing directly at the cabinet. As the shot rang out, the curtains suddenly dropped, showing the cabinet empty. At the same instant, the bottom of the cabinet hinged open, falling away like a trapdoor. Instinctively the spectators sitting under it ducked, then looked upward as the skeleton cage twisted and turned in the light, throwing angular shadows on the walls of the theater. The princess was gone.

  “Those above can look down upon the top of the cage, those that are below may look up through the floor. She is gone. Just... gone!”

  The trick was almost too good. Walter Gibson recalled how the first performances of Iasia, in 1929, ended with an uncomfortable pause. The illusion was so spellbinding, and the audience so bewildered by the empty cabinet, that Thurston’s final pronouncement generated only a stunned silence, then a smattering of applause. One night, Thurston hit upon the solution. After a long pause, he repeated, “She is gone,” and then added, “And night after night, I stand here gazing at that empty cabinet, wondering myself ... where ... she... could ... possibly ... be!”

  The notion of grand Mr. Thurston contemplating one of his own illusions, fooling himself, was pure bathos. The audience quickly laughed, and then, brought back to their senses, offered a resounding ovation.

  The ingenious secret was partly Yettmah’s work and partly Thurston’s. The lady was concealed in the top of the cabinet, lying in the roof. Thurston suggested positioning her on her stomach and concealing her bent legs in the decorative Oriental cornices, which made Yettmah’s cabinet even smaller and more deceptive. A folding ladder concealed inside allowed her to climb up to the top of the cabinet. When the Iasia cage reached the top of the auditorium, this hiding space was naturally concealed, as almost everyone was gazing up at the apparatus.

  The illusion was performed near the end of the show, and remained against the ceiling until everyone in the auditorium had left. Only then was it lowered to the stage and the assistant released. The Princess was billed as Christine Townsend. But the tight little enclosure was unbearable, and the top of the theater was invariably hot and stuffy. Neither Christine nor any of the other girls was willing to perform it. It was George Townsend, Christine’s husband and the stage manager of the show, who donned the wig, silk robe, and veil each night to become “Princess Iasia, the keeper of secrets.”

  THURSTON’S MYSTERIES OF INDIA—the smaller type explained that it starred Harry Thurston—opened on May 18, 1931, in Harvey, Illinois. The show was a strange hybrid of a circus and magic show, with a beautiful new waterproof tent and a neat four-piece band. The tent was tested the first night, when rain drowned out most of the music and the opening dances. Eugene Laurant performed a short magic act and then introduced the star of the show, Harry Thurston.

  Harry sauntered on stage in an elegant tuxedo. Many in the audience did a double take. He looked a great deal like his brother Howard, though fatter and sloppier. A long cigarette dangled from his lips.

  “It’s great to see you all turn out tonight,” he snarled across the footlights. His voice, a deep nasal drone, sounded like a comic parody of the famous magician. “I mean, considering all the rain. That’s why we’ve got a waterproof tent, right? Well, I guess Roosevelt can’t take care of that sort of stuff. Rain. He ain’t got a government agency for that, does he? Anybody know? Geez, too bad for us.” Harry’s opening monologue soon became notorious with the company, a freewheeling improvisation by one of the stupidest men anyone had ever met. He would indulgently wheeze about the Depression, or a carnival he remembered working, his friends in Chicago, or a local “celebrity” in the audience, like the sheriff. “His ignorance was blatantly displayed so much that his splendid introduction was completely a lost cause,” recalled Percy Abbott, one of the magicians who had been hired to carry him through the performance.

  When he started performing magic, Harry was even worse. According to Abbott, “It was utterly impossible for Harry to memorize as much as three words of patter.” The assistants, standing nearby, were expected to cue his next lines. Harry signaled that he needed help by growling “Crack!”—carnival slang for “talk.” Harry never learned his patter. Night after night, he had every line and gesture fed to him. George Boston, an assistant on the show, recalled the ridiculous procedure, which seemed a sad parody of his brother’s famous levitation.

  “Crack,” Harry would snarl.

  “When I was in India...” Boston would start, under his breath.

  Harry picked up the cue: “When I was in India, I went out to the wheat fields. Crack.”

  “There I saw a peculiar sight,” Boston mumbled under his breath.

  “There I saw a peculiar sight. I saw a priest place a young girl on the points of two swords. Then ... Crack.”

  “Then he would cause her to float...”

  Harry repeated the words, with more and more frustration: “Then he would cause her to float. Crack! Crack, goddamn it. Crack!”

  When they finally got to the levitation, pretty, blond Rae Palmer was levitated using a much simpler mechanism to duplicate Howard’s famous trick. In the show, Rae was introduced as Rae Thurston, and everyone on the show assumed she was Harry’s wife—although his actual wife, Belle, was still living in Miami.

  Rae and Harry invariably started an argument as she floated in the air. As he passed the hoop over her, he would mumble to Boston, “George, don’t ever marry a woman, they’re all dumb.” This elicited a remark from the floating princess. “Harry, you son of a bitch, stop your complaining and get on with the trick.”

  Harry responded in a whisper, “Shut up or I’ll knock you off this thing.” He turned grandly to the assistants in Indian makeup. “Pray, Abdul! Pray as you prayed in the temples of Love in Allahabad! Pray, I command you!” And then, under his breath, he’d snarl, “Pray, or I’ll break your goddamned neck.”

  Percy Abbott never forgave Harry Thurston for destr
oying such beautiful illusions. During the last phase of the famous Thurston levitation, the lady beneath the cloth was replaced with a special metal form that could be levitated using fine threads. Harry Thurston was unable to locate the threads with his fingers, and his solution was to feel over the surface of the form to locate them. Abbott chastised him after the shows. “To the audience, that’s a lady under the cloth. You can’t run your hands over her body that way!” Harry blinked, uncomprehendingly. To him, it wasn’t a girl, but just a metal form. Abbott later wrote, “There is a romance and glamour that must be prevalent in the mind of the performer, in order that it can be conveyed to the audience. Harry Thurston had none of this.”

  Backstage, Harry was unpredictable and dictatorial, stingy and self-obsessed. During the tour, he seemed hypersensitive to any perceived slight from his brother. He complained to him in a letter: “You had to add more insult by sending on one of your stool pigeons to the Billboard. Not one word was mentioned about me, but they mentioned Jane, Lee [Leotha], and Rat Chase [Thurston’s company manager and Leotha’s nephew, George Chase]. Does this look like good will?” Harry recounted a list of necessary duties he’d been asked to perform—twisting the arms of Howard’s business associates. “This letter is a very unpleasant duty.” Howard responded:I have given you more than good will. In fact, you would have had no magic show if it were not for me. Under no circumstances will I ever lay myself liable for lawsuits or debts to your show. The thing you call good will does not include such liabilities.

  The first season of Mysteries of India was just twenty-one days, and it rained for twenty of them. The staff was shocked when Harry reassembled the show the following year. In 1933, the tents were abandoned and the performances took place at the Sparks Theater chain in Florida. By then, Harry advertised the show with three portraits, Howard (“Famous Magician”), Harry (“White Yogi”), and William Thurston, their father, who was credited as a “Spiritualist Magi.” The billing was ridiculous, as their father was neither a performer nor a mystic. It was a silly attempt at a new legacy, echoing the Herrmann, Kellar, and Thurston progression that represented a great tradition.

  Assistants who traveled with Harry Thurston were convinced that he was smuggling liquor during Prohibition, in partnership with the Chicago or Cleveland mobs—the multiple trucks and the hiding places inside the magic cabinets would have made this an easy task. But it’s clear that Harry thought of himself as a performer and was satisfied only standing in the spotlight. Even if Harry Thurston’s Mysteries of India was not a crime, it remained an insult to the audiences and a humiliation to his brother.

  WITH TICKET PRICES dropping and theaters eliminating live shows for motion pictures, Thurston watched his profits dwindling. It was a domino effect. “Although we have a good show, and do more business than most shows, still we have a hard time of it,” he wrote to Dante, who was in Europe.

  Not only because of bad business conditions, but the fact that many theaters are closed and our railroad jumps have been very long with heavy expense of fares. We let five people go to get the show down to one baggage car.

  The magician had borrowed on his life insurance policies and even considered filing for bankruptcy. Thurston was now desperate for money—attempting one last appeal for the Monkey Case, repay debts to Harry, and support his failing investments. “Be careful in any correspondence or cables about mentioning the Monkey Case,” he warned Dante, “as Mrs. Thurston is so very ill that it would be dangerous to tell her.”

  When the show resumed that fall, Abe Lastfogel, of the William Morris Agency, provided an ingenious solution. Working at the Publix theaters, a chain of motion picture presentation houses in the New York area, Thurston performed a forty-five- or sixty-minute show in conjunction with a first-run feature. By the early ’30s, the large theater chains were looking for live shows to offer, luring audiences to attend.

  The venture gave Thurston a new opportunity, but the work was especially hard. Thurston started at eleven a.m. in the theater and occupied all his time onstage, or resetting props and resting in his dressing room backstage. He finished each night around midnight, after performing four or five shows a day. It was grueling work for a man over sixty. “At last they have me in jail,” he grumbled to his attorney.

  The situation was made even tougher by Thurston’s stubborn insistence on including all of the features of his show. The program included Thurston’s card routine, the Levitation of Princess Karnac, Sawing a Woman in Half, Iasia, the Vanishing Automobile, and the Water Fountains. He also included two new illusions, Out of a Hat, in which dozens of parasols and several ladies were produced from oversized top hats, and Seeing Through a Woman, in which a lady was apparently sliced into three pieces, and her torso disappeared. “Picture house magicians have to frame a show in a flashy and spectacular nature,” he told Billboard. “The usual smaller tricks will not be effective.” For this collection of wonders, Thurston’s crew was required to cut trapdoors, suspend boxes over the auditorium, hang scenery and special equipment in the grid. “We have the satisfaction of playing to the biggest business they ever had, though it does not increase our salaries.”

  The new Publix theaters were often enormous, seating as many as three or four thousand people. When Thurston presented his full show in theaters, tickets could be a dollar or more, but in movie theaters in some cities, tickets might be offered to children for ten or fifteen cents. For Thurston it was an entirely new audience, and they responded enthusiastically. John Mulholland went to see one of Thurston’s shows in Brooklyn and was dumbfounded by the audience response. He wrote in The Sphinx, “Trick after trick was applauded in a way I have never seen in a movie house. This tour has proven that in a theater or in one of these tremendous amusement factories, he is still The Great Thurston.” The tour of movie theaters took Thurston across America and to the West Coast—more than thirty years after he’d played Los Angeles and San Francisco.

  Jane and Harry Harris settled into an apartment in Pittsburgh, but the marriage was doomed. In 1932, Jane returned to Beechhurst, reporting that she was afraid of Harry. Howard contacted an attorney and Jane filed for divorce.

  Jane’s parents suggested that she take a job as a singer with the Isham Jones Band. Jones was Thurston’s friend, a popular bandleader who was a famously proper family man. He had also composed a number of hit songs, including “It Had to Be You.” A job with Jones seemed to be a good compromise as Jane sorted out her divorce, which was finalized in the autumn of 1932. When Thurston’s tour resumed around the same time, Jane was billed as a special attraction.

  AN UNEXPECTED SURPRISE arrived from the J. Walter Thompson Agency in Chicago, who arranged a profitable contract for Thurston to appear on the NBC Radio Blue Network. For years the magician had made radio appearances to promote his show. His distinctive voice carried well on the radio, and his entertaining stories about his travels and adventures enhanced any interview. The radio shows, titled Thurston the Magician, were sponsored by Swift and Company, a meatpacking firm. Each episode was a dramatized adventure—some loosely based on events from Thurston’s early career—in which he solved a crime or emerged as the hero of a situation. He introduced each story, often playing off of adolescent sidekicks, and incorporated a “do-it-yourself” magic trick into the show. Additional tricks, or packets of tricks in distinctive orange envelopes, could be ordered through the sponsor.

  Each show was fifteen minutes and ran on Thursday and Friday evenings; the series premiered on November 3, 1932. When his tour resumed, he sometimes managed to dash to the local NBC studios for the broadcast, but when he was unable to accommodate the schedule, the producers used an actor for Thurston’s lines. Leotha, now at home listening to each show, gave notes to her husband. In November 1932, after one episode, she sent a telegram with blunt suggestions: Dearest,

  Radio story last night weak. Not enough mystery. Another man in cast talks too much like yourself making story and characters hard to follow. You started
off big, falling down now.

  The radio shows rewarded the magician with an even larger audience. His life story had been serialized in Collier’s magazine, and he worked on a talking film script, titled Jimmy or Blind Baggage, which was a lightly fictionalized version of his childhood adventures. Working with other writers, Thurston also developed scripts on supernatural or occult themes. One, titled The Wolfman, was written with playwright Fritz Blocki. It was an interesting pastiche of Egyptian myths and mysterious crimes, unrelated to the later Hollywood horror film of the same name. In each of Thurston’s outlines, it’s easy to identify the character that he would play. He was writing roles as well as stories. Unfortunately, none of these scripts were produced. He explained to Billboard:Whenever I approached the picture people on an idea, they explained, politely but firmly, that personally I was a swell fellow ... but they could do better tricks with their cameras than I could ever hope to do with magic.

  On March 14, 1933, the Chicago Society of American Magicians hosted a special dinner in honor of Thurston, celebrating twenty-five years since his acquisition of the Kellar show. At the Nankin Restaurant, Werner Dornfield closed the evening with a special performance. The curtain opened on Guy Jarrett, Thurston’s argumentative old assistant, standing on stage in makeup to look like Harry Kellar. Dornfield joined him on stage, now made up to look like a young Howard Thurston. The two men re-created the mythic moment in which Kellar placed the “mantle of magic” on the shoulders of his young protégé.

  Dorny then proceeded with a long, funny burlesque of Thurston’s famous card act, performing the maneuver faultlessly, but without a single card. Jarrett stepped back onstage, pulling the mantle off young Thurston’s shoulders. “I’ve changed my mind,” he announced. “This isn’t for you.” He reached under the cloak. “This is for you!” He magically produced a Swift ham, presenting it to Dornfield. Thurston, sitting at the head table, laughed loudly in approval.