{SIDEBAR:} ORSON”S PARTICIPATION IN POPULAR FRONT AND OTHER ANTIFASCIST EVENTS 1937 Apr
1938 Feb 6
1939 Aug
1939 Sep
Nov 30
1941 Apr
Jun 22
Jun 25
Fall
Dec 6
Dec 7
1942 Nov
1943 Apr 6 Summer
Jun Narrates MacLeish’s anti-fascist radio drama, The Fall of the City. MCs a benefit concert for the Communist New Masses.
NAZI-SOVIET PACT ANNOUNCED.
NAZIS BEGIN WW II BY INVADING POLAND.
SOVIET ARMY INVADES FINLAND
With music promoter John Hammond and literary critic F. O. Matthiessen heads
a committee to protest the deportation of San Francisco Communist ILWU leader Harry ridges.
NAZI GERMANY INVADES SOVIET RUSSIA
Attends Blitzstein’s recital at Dalton Trumbo’s home in Beverly Hills. Orson & Dolores attend Hollywood fund-raiser for Britain.
Orson & Dolores attend LA concert for Russian medical aid.
PEARL HARBOR DAY — USA ENTERS WW II.
Chairs a forum to raise money to defend the Sleepy Lagoon Latino defendants. Orson’s Free Company broadcast
Speaks against the current black-white race riots in the USA at a meeting of the Hollywood Writers’ Mobilization.
Wrote the Foreword to a Sleepy Lagoon pamphlet protesting police bias against Latinos in Los Angeles County.
1943 Fall
1945 Fall
1944 Dec 1
1945 May 27
May 31
1946 Summer {END SIDEBAR}
Active in the anti-Fascist Free World Congress.
Featured speaker at the “Salute to Young Americans” dinner at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel sponsored by the American Youth for Democracy (successor to the Young Communist League).
Reception for OW at the California Labor School, San Francisco
Spoke to the LA chapter of the National Citizen PAC.
Broadcasts to protest blinding of black army veteran, Isaac Woodward.
144Welles (1941). THE TRADE OF THE TRICKS By moving to the City of Angels two years earlier Orson had found a conjuror's paradise, second in America only to New York City in the number and quality of local magicians, visiting magi, magic dealers, and manufacturers of small props and large apparatus. He was quick to explore these resources and use the props and persons he wanted in his own projects.
Local amateur conjurors associated with the movie industry included Charlie Chaplin (directoractor), Charles Coburn (character actor), Carter DeHaven (retired silent film star), Andy Devine (film comedian), Paulette Goddard (Chaplin's proté•ée film star), Peter Godfrey (director), Cary Grant (film idol), Jan Grippo (agent), Victor Jory (actor), Maury Kains (camera operator), Leon M. Leon (pro magician's assistant turned film sound technician), Harold Lloyd (famous film comedian and director), Robert Montgomery (film star), Chester Morris (film star and semi-pro magician), Jack Oakie (film comedian), Dolf von Rudin (film editor and semi-pro magus), Barbara Stanwyck (film star), James Stewart (film star), and Max Terhune (cowboy B-feature film star and pro ventriloquist-magician).
Local pros in magic included Bert Allerton (performing at The House of Murphy), Bess Houdini (Harry's widow), Dr. Edward Saint (Bess's business manager and a pro mentalist), Jay Ose (ex-hoofer), and Señor Maldo (living in nearby Santa Barbara). In addition Ray Muse was a distinguished semi-pro and John Hix, author of the “Strange As It Seems" Ripley-clone Sunday fact cartoon, was an enthusiastic amateur, as were Chaplin's two young sons.
Luckily for Orson, Hollywood as a magnet for entertainers drew its share of touring as well as resident magi. As he remarked late in life, he'd had few opportunities to do magic off-stage, because “I don't have friends who like magic very much."145 But he could indulge himself among fellow conjurors.
Russell Swann, a star nightclub comedy magus, arrived to play the fashionable 1,000-seat Coconut Grove dinner-theater in the Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire in November 1939. Needing an assistant he hired Frank Herman away from his meager job as commissions-only manager at Bert Wheeler's magic shop. Frank, who'd already written some patter for Swann, was taken on as stage assistant and made the key improvement in the Disecto arm chopper that eliminated the embarrassing risk of the volunteer getting locked into the apparatus. Between song sets by Morton Downey, Swann did two 45-minute shows nightly. Each show was different, the first featured the Snake Basket and the second featured Disecto. He pleased his audiences with these rather ordinary tricks through sheer comedy showmanship. Orson, along with Bill and Gerrie Larsen, caught Swann's performance. Frank appreciated Orson's booming enthusiasm: “He and Edward Arnold, another great actor with voice, competed to express their pleasure with the act."146 By an extraordinary goof, one press review of the Swann show named the performer as Orson Welles. The editor later published Swann's amusing letter saying he needed the publicity and Orson didn't.147
Orson was now as familiar a face among the hangabouts at the local hanky-pank shops of Hollywood as he was in those of New York.148 It even seemed he was able to be on both coasts at the same time—a miracle made possible by those radio commitments, which in the beginning had required him to fly East once a week. And incidently, in 1940 Orson had clocked a startling 311,425 miles in transcontinental round trips aboard TWA. (The airline had previously named him their best customer of 1939.)
145 Ward (1983), 35. Also OW in Welles & Bogdanovich (1992), 180.
146Herman letter to BW, 14 Jul 92.
147Parker Swan telephone interview, 17 Oct 92.
148Annemann in The Jinx #137 (undated, but 13 May 1941), 782.
Los Angeles was home to Owen Magic, America's leading manufacturer of professional quality apparatus. This small factory had been founded near the turn of the century by Floyd Thayer who'd sold it in the early 1930s to the Owen brothers, Carl and Emmett. These two master craftsmen still owned and operated it as Owen Magic when Orson first began shopping there.149 Regular customers included Edgar Bergen, Chester Morris, Peter Godfrey, Ray Muse, and Jack Oakie.150
Among the many local merchants of abracadabra, the leading retail shop and main gathering place for professional and celebrity conjurors in Los Angeles was the Thayer Studio of Magic. It was run by Floyd Thayer out of the back of his “Brookledge" mansion at 929 South Longwood Avenue. Orson had befriended Thayer, shopped at his studio now-and-then, and the two would occasionally dine among the throng of celebrities at the fashionable Brown Derby restaurant on Vine just below Hollywood Boulevard, then the hub of the movie universe.151
Located in the up-scale Wilshire residential neighborhood, the Thayer Studio was safe from the usual Hollywood Boulevard and Santa Monica Boulevard magic shop walk-in kids and curious adults. It drew only the elite of the local magic crowd. The regulars were Edgar Bergen, Chester Morris, John Calvert, Jack Gwynne, The Great Leon, Loring Campbell, Ben Chavez, Bess Houdini, Edward Saint, and an occasional talented youngster like Bill Chaudet. Their get-togethers were sometimes joined by Charlie Chaplin or Harold Lloyd, and, less often, Orson.152 Preferring one-on-one conversation to group chatter, he would usually leave after a quick visit, inviting Calvert to meet him later for lunch or coffee at the Brown Derby for serious conversation about magic. Otherwise Thayer noticed that when Orson found the shop free of customers, he'd hang around to browse alone.153
Young Marvyn Roy was employed demonstrating tricks there around 1942 when he sometimes waited on Orson and found his magical knowledge to be quite sound and his manipulative skills fairly good. One day Orson came in with his (and Thayer's) magician friend The Great Leon, and Thayer asked Marvyn to demo the Devil's Card Rise. This is a small miracle where the spectator freely selects three cards that are placed in a card case with the rest of the deck. Then, on the wonder worker's command, each selected card in turn rises slowly from the case. “Popsie" Leon, Orson's prize-winning magic inventor fri
end, thought it over and said "Radio control?" Orson added “That's the only way, because no one was pulling a thread." They were wrong. Marvyn had beautifully “flummoxed" both experts' logical analyses by modifying this old standard so that it operated by pushing on the thread with his body. Instead of attaching the control thread in the conventional manner to his clothing, he'd attached it to the back of a chair standing unnoticed behind the table on Thayer's stage.154
The other local dealers were the Magician's Supply Company (Len Gunn) and Conley's Magic Studios (Jim Conley) on Santa Monica Boulevard and The Magic House of Charles (Charlie Silber) and Hollywood's Magic Shop (Bert Wheeler) on Hollywood Boulevard. Wheeler, originally a distributer of hardcore pornographic movies (illegal in those days when they were called “stag films" or “blue movies"), had opened his magic shop in 1938 (on Hollywood Boulevard opposite the Pantages Theatre) as a front. But when the hocus-pocus business quickly prospered, Wheeler dropped the porn, began to learn some magic for the first time, and moved to larger quarters on a corner of Hollywood and Vine. In Wheeler's first year of operation, when Frank Herman managed the magic department on straight commission, Orson's older brother, Richard, dropped in from time to time—this was before Orson went Hollywood. Remembered by Frank as a “sad case", Dickie “had no interest in magic or show biz—just wanted to be noticed as Orson's brother, mostly wanted sympathy."155
149 The histories of Thayer's and Owen's magic factories are Smith & Smith (1992) and Buffum (1977).
150Buffum (1977), 214-215; Marvyn Roy interview in Jeffreys (1990), 86.
151Dolf Von Rudeen telephone interview, 30 Sep 91. Rudeen (then spelled Rudin) met Orson only once, when introduced by Thayer at the Brown Derby.
152Calvert tape letter to BW, May 1992.
153Calvert tape letter to BW, May 1992.
154Marvyn Roy telephone interview, 24 Sep 91.
By early 1941 Orson himself was shopping regularly at Wheeler's along with Edgar Bergen, Harold Lloyd, and Chester Morris.156 Among the many visiting magi he met there over the years was Leon Mandrake who, with this newly coined stagename, was on his first tour down the Pacific Coast.157 Sometimes Orson would turn up just at closing to be greeted by Will Desmond, who'd replaced Frank Herman as Bert's manager. On these occasions Desmond would lock up, leaving Orson inside to browse freely for tricks in both the show and stock rooms or spend half the night together talking magic until Desmond had to leave.158 Orson thoughtfully gave Bert a simple endorsement: “I like your magic and your service." The latter proudly published it in his catalog.159.
It was inevitable that Orson would both meet and befriend Dick Himber, minor Guy Lombardotype schmaltz big-band leader, fanatical semi-pro magician, notable eccentric, and world-class practical joker.160 A regular customer at Wheeler's (as well as the New York shops of Holden's and Robson's), his proud motto was “I get a kick out of fooling other magicians." He'd begun marketing his own line of effects and props and Orson kindly endorsed one: “The Himber WONDER BOX is the first forward step in years for magic."161 (The effect: Two boxes are shown empty; but, after one is nested inside the other, the magician proceeds to produce an impossibly large volume of silk cloth.)
Orson now devised a card-discovery effect that Himber began marketing in July through Bert Wheeler's shop. Cutely titled “Orson Welles & Richard Himber's Man From Mars" it was Orson's first of two marketed tricks. And evidently he was the sole inventor, judging from the fact that when Wheeler readvertised it four years later it had become “Orson Welles and Bert Wheeler's Man From Mars". The effect, which sold for $3.50, is described in Genii Magazine. 162
The trick's title was also Orson's, recycled by him from a movie proposal called The Man from Mars that some of the RKO big shots thought should be his first Hollywood film, an unoriginal idea he'd pushed aside the previous year.163
155 Frank J. Herman letters to BW, 14 Jul & 3 Aug 92. Richard continued to hang around magicians. Around the mid-1960s he was a neighbor in San Francisco of famous amateur magician Jack McMillen who found him "pleasant", interested in magic but not as a performer, skilled at stringing and working puppets, and suffering from severe diabetes. (McMillen telephone interview, 25 Oct 92.) Richard died in San Francisco in 1975.
156 Endfield (1943).
157Mandrake telephone interview, 2 Nov 92. His tour reached Hollywood in 1943. Card Mondor letter to BW, 7 Sep 93.
158David Charvet telephone interview, 28 Jun 93.
159Wheeler (1945), 1.
160On Himber as practical joker see Zolotow (1952), 94-115. The two men had met and corresponded with each other about magic intermittently since at least as early as 1941. See Himber telegram to Jack Moss, 30 Jul 41.
161Wheeler (1945), 122.
162Ad in Genii, Vol.5, No.11 (Jul 1941), 351. Also in Wheeler (1945), [5].
163Brady (1989), 201, 202, 203, 251.
{SIDEBAR:} Magic collectors, particularly Himber fans, had long sought the “Man from Mars” trick without success164 until 1993. The Ken Klosterman Collection then included some 6,000 pieces of apparatus dating before 1955. After checking Himber's ad in Genii at my urging Ken thought he recognized a small figure in his collection. Molded from some composite substance, it is 3 1/4-inches tall, hand painted, with a magnet concealed in the base (that apparently is missing an attached stand). It was most likely originally bought from Wheeler's shop in the 1940s by wealthy amateur magic collector Charles Larson, who was then buying every prop advertised. Larson donated these to the Ringling Circus Museum in Ringling's winter quarters in Sarasota, Florida. Charlie Kalish bought the bulk of the Larson props in 1971 from the museum after it closed and passed them on to Klosterman.165 As the original instruction sheet is missing, we can only speculate on the exact method; although, as Jeff Busby suggests, a strip of iron in or under the selected card was used to make the magnetic figure pivot to face it. If so, Orson almost certainly had simply copied the effect and method from a forgotten French prop first described in English and diagramed in a popular magic book published 50 years earlier.166
{END SIDEBAR}
Orson's demand for new tricks and quality props was insatiable. Having exhausted the shops of Hollywood, he turned to mail order. A telegrammed order brought him the new 25-page catalog of Jim Sherman's magic shop in Chicago. His follow-up three-page telegram listed a large order, which he specified be shipped air express—at the then steep cost of $146.167 Then or later he was even ordering magicians' special soft rope from Mike Kanter's shop in Philadelphia.168 By early 1941 his Mercury office at RKO was cluttered with magic props in addition to a puppet theater, electric train, dart board, pop guns, and a bean bag.169
He associated closely with and eventually joined, one of the world's more exclusive magic clubs. This local Hollywood group, Los Magicos (The Magicians), had been founded in the early 1930s. Regular full membership was (and still is) by unanimous invitation only and had grown to about 40 members and associates by the end of the decade. The 25 regulars included several amateurs involved with the film industry: director Peter Godfrey, popular song writer Bert Kalmar, movie star Chester Morris, radio & movie comedian Edgar Bergen, cowboy actor/ventriloquist/magician Max Terhune, and camera operator/actor Maury Kains. Other regulars, a mix of amateur and pro magicians, were Jim Conley (pro and magic dealer), Caryl S. Fleming (a judge), Jack Gwynne (pro), Gerald Kosky (a costume accessory salesman and semi-pro magician), William Larsen Sr. (lawyer and semi-pro magician and mentalist), The Great Leon (retired pro), George McAthy (semi-pro), Harry Mendoza (pro), and Earl Rybolt (amateur). Los Magicos would invite local non-members and visiting magi to its monthly meetings, which rotated among the members' homes. These guests included Andy Devine, Charles “Think-A-Drink" Hoffman, Charles Larson (wealthy retired auto dealer and magic collector), and Dr. Saint.170
His most memorable evening at Los Magicos had been at it's gala party on 28 April 1941. The occasion was a special Ladies Night arranged that Thursday by star pro magician Jack Gwynne an
d amateur Walter Pratt. They'd set up a small circus tent in Pratt's backyard on Acama Street in North Hollywood. They even included a mini-midway with a popcorn machine and a ballyhoo run by Bess Houdini's manager, Ed Saint. Announced as a costume party, most guests wore circus garb. Besides Orson they included Edgar Bergen (in Keystone Kop uniform), Bess Houdini and Anne Gwynne (as Siamese twins), Gerrie Larsen, Harold Lloyd, Chester Morris, and Max Terhune.
164 Telephone interviews with Ed Brown and Phil Varricchio, 1993.
165Klosterman letter to BW, 2 Jul 93.
166Albert A. Hopkins, Magic: Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions (New York: Benjamin Blom, Inc., 1897), 391-392.
167Ted Annemann in The Jinx, No.147 [late August 1941], 822, citing his recent conversation with Sherman.
168Kanter's Catalog of Magic, No.10 (1958), 120.
169LIFE, 26 May 41, 108.
170Ed Alterman (Secretary of Los Magicos) telephone interview, 17 Apr 91; monthly column reporting Los Magicos meetings in Genii magazine. Although, according to Alterman, Los Magicos no longer has any record of OW’s membership, I have verified it from the list of 30 “Members” on their advertisement in the Jean Hugard Testimonial (1945), 91. Thus the questioned statement in The Magic Castle Walls of Fame (1988), 533, that Orson was "one of the early members of Los Magicos" is evidently correct.
The main act featured Gwynne presenting his own Temple of Angee illusion. To his surprise, his partner-wife Anne emerged backwards from the miniature temple and both Jack and the audience were convulsed when she proceeded to drop her panties to reveal a face painted on ample buttocks—everyone there knowing that the Gwynnes were famous for their practical jokes. The evening closed with tightrope, trapeze, and trampoline acts. A grand time was had by all, and Orson would remember and revive its magic circus theme two years later and would himself perform Jack's Temple illusion 15 years hence.171
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