Orson cued his audience to applaud the conclusion of each trick with what he explained was his “Applause Confetti." At moments he judged appropriate, he'd pull a handful from his right-hand pocket and toss it into the air.189
“Chained in Space" was Orson's title for a small miracle that he would experiment with for many years. Orson was using the Magic Welding method invented by British conjuror Louis Nikola and first published only one year before Orson adopted it by Will Goldston in his Tricks of the Masters.190
In one lengthy card trick, billed as “A Voice From the Dead", half the patter is ostensibly delivered by the voice of the centuries-old necromancer Cagliostro, seemingly through the large horn of an antique wind-up Victrola. In fact, it was the previously wire-recorded off-stage voice of Hans Conried, Orson's magician in Journey Into Fear. Orson introduces this effect by explaining that he got this trick from Cagliostro but, as he is long since deceased, he sent a phonograph record in his place. Orson opens the top of the Victrola, winds it up with the crank handle, puts the (dummy) record on, lowers the needle arm, and the voice of Cagliostro begins to supervise the trick:191
185 Brady (1989), 365.
186Hanlon interview, 12 Dec 91.
187Larsen (1943), 6.
188Wakeling telephone interview, 22 Apr 91.
189Red Baker interview, 14 Mar 92; confirmed by Variety, 4 Aug 1943.
190For the history of Magic Welding see Whaley (1989), 419.
CAGLIOSTRO: Are you ready?
ORSON: Yes!
C: Now get someone from the audience. I'll wait.
[Orson gets a girl up on stage.]
C: Now take a deck of cards.
O: Got it.
C: Shuffle them.
[Orson shuffles.]
C: Tell the young lady to take a card.
[She does.]
C: Tell the young lady to take a card. [click] Tell the young lady to take a card. [click] Tell the young lady to take a card.
O: I think he's stuck.
C: I've never been stuck in my life ... stuck in my life ... stuck in my life ... stuck in my life.
[Orson moves needle.]
C: Tear the card in two and put it in a box.
[Orson does so.]
C: Now take a gun.
[Orson takes a rifle from an assistant.]
C: Now aim the gun at the card case and pull the trigger.
[Orson does so but out pops a flag reading "CLICK".]
O: I must have forgotten to load it!
C: Never mind, I'll do it myself!
[Sound of a shot as a smoke ring appears from the Victrola.]
After further business, the card is restored. Orson may have known of the invention of this clever stunt by Boston magic dealer Frank Lane in the early 30's and its modification by Burling Hull; but he surely knew of its copy by Luis “Louis" Zingone just two years before when the Victor company had released an album of three 78-rpm phonograph records for the lazy “magician" who, guided by Zingone's accompanying 6-page instruction booklet, merely provides the secret preparations and actions (handing out a deck of cards, etc.) to match Zingone's recorded patter.192 Orson's use of the magnetic wire recorder, that precursor of the modern tape recorder, was probably the first application of this then brand-new technology to magic. (Today several magicians perform various interaction effects using audio or video tapes.)
Typical of Orson's constant switches on moth-eaten effects and props was his personalized Bang Gun—that all too familiar comedy pistol that discharges a flag reading “BANG". Rather than use that stock magic-shop item he sent Tommy to the prop department of Twentieth Century-Fox to have them custom build the world's first full-length Bang Rifle. Card Mondor recalls this as “my favorite bit" in the whole show.193
191 Hanlon interview, 12 Dec 91. Also Brady (1985), 365; and Card Mondor letter to BW, 23 Jul 91.
192Theo Annemann in The Jinx, No.129 [Feb 1941], 746; Holden's Magic, Catalog No.8 (1941), 55; Frank Lane ad in Conjurors' Magazine (Dec 1945), 8. Lane's claim of prior invention was verified by the late Sid Lorraine to Jeff Busby. Busby letter to BW, 10 Feb 1994. Zingone's records are Victor 27209-27211, the album originally selling for $3.
* * * Rita's debut was billed grandiloquently as “The Girl With The X-Ray Eyes: An Extraordinary Demonstration by Miss Rita Hayworth, of Strange Powers Recognized, but Unexplained by Science. Featuring Thought Transmission and Projection, Extra-Sensory Perception, Lightning Calculation, and Second Sight". This was the two-person mind-reading act she'd carefully rehearsed with Orson. Their act began with a comedy bit where a GI is invited on stage and Rita, sitting before him in her tight-fitting white gown, records his thoughts on a slate, which Orson reads, quickly erases, and runs the soldier off stage.194 Next, dropping comedy for the “real work", Orson leaves Rita blindfolded on stage and circulates through the audience, while having each of several GIs whisper a random number that he writes in a column on his hand-held slate. Rita promptly announces the correct total.195
In the routine titled “The Goose, the Guinea Pig and the Lady", Orson borrows five finger rings and a watch from six members of the audience. Dropping them into the muzzle of a musket, he aims and fires at a large box that had been suspended high above the audience from the front king pole since the beginning of the show. The box is slung to the stage, opened, and a second box taken out. When opened it reveals yet a third box, which contains a loaf of bread with a red ribbon sticking out from both ends. While two assistants hold the ends of the embedded ribbon, Orson crumbles the loaf and three rings are seen tied to the ribbon. He puts these on a tray, which an assistant carries out to their owners. With three objects to go Orson calls their owners up on stage. A Doll House is wheeled out. A light in one of its tiny windows comes on and, when Orson tries to peep in, its shade is drawn discreetly. The house is opened to reveal a guinea pig with a fourth object (a ring) tied to its neck. When the now empty house is closed and reopened, Hortense the goose is revealed with the fifth object (a watch) tied to her neck. Orson thanks the volunteers but the sixth owner demands, “My ring!" The empty and closed Doll House is again reopened and a fully dressed young woman stands up and steps out. She parts her floor-length side-split skirt to expose a leg with a garter to which the last ring has been tied, as verified by the eager GI owner when he examines it on her upper thigh.196 Orson had probably gotten the idea for the garter bit from having seen Blackstone perform it.
A top secret of the show was how Orson had contrived to get those first three borrowed rings into the overhead nest of boxes. Other magicians go through a clever bit of bother doing so; but Orson told his assistants, “Why go to all that trouble?" He had them merely put three similar rings on a red ribbon and place them in the loaf in the casket before the show. Then, during performance after the three real rings are borrowed, his backstage assistants just tied short red duplicate ribbons around each. The switch of the real rings for dummies was done by the tray-toting assistant.197
Two playing cards and a dollar bill are selected and vanished. The first card appears in an orange, the second card is found in a balloon, and the bill is found in an egg.198 193 Mondor letter to BW, 23 Jul 91; and Hanlon interview, 12 Dec 91.
194Variety, 4 Aug 1943.
195Schallert in Los Angeles Times, 4 Aug 43, Pt.I, p.14, col.3.
196Hanlon interview, 12 Dec 91; Larsen (1943), 6.
197Hanlon interview, 12 Dec 91.
198Larsen (1943), 6.
The Canary-into-the-Litebulb trick that he billed “The World's Fastest Canary" had been a Thurston effect. It now involved a trick on Orson of which he was never aware. Tommy Hanlon was responsible for buying the canaries. Noting that the bird flew up to the same spot in the tent after each performance, Tommy had Shorty shinny up to recover it. Orson bought the same canary again and again.199
In “The Death of the Silken Cords" after looping four long cords around Rita's neck Orson would have four GIs, two on each side, take hold of their tassele
d ends. On his command that they pull hard enough to choke Rita to death, she simply steps forward to free herself, leaving the volunteers holding the intact cords.200 This effect was the old Ropes Thru Neck effect that Tommy (using U. F. Grant's method) had taught Orson.
Supervised by Orson, Jo Cotten as “Jo-Jo the Great" climbs into the empty Sub Trunk. A moment later when it's opened, he has vanished and Rita Hayworth springs out. This fine effect was billed as the “Million $ Mystery: Miss Hayworth and Mr. Cotten Make You Doubt Your Senses in a Bewildering Display."
Following a short “Intermission and Concert", Orson works the Orange Tree using his original presentation: A dollar bill is borrowed from a volunteer who is instructed to record its serial number. The bill is vanished. Orson turns to a tiny one-foot tall sapling in a large pot. He pours some water in the pot and the sapling grows quickly into a four-foot dwarf tree, which then proceeds to produce oranges. To prove them real the magus “plucks" several (having palmed real ones concealed at the back of the apparatus) and tosses them into the audience. He then points to the person holding one of the oranges. Retrieving it, an assistant cuts it open to reveal the borrowed bank note.201
Orson next supervises the Sawing, which was billed as “Painless Surgery". One of the female assistants is placed in a coffin-shaped box and two volunteer servicemen, wielding a long two-handed lumberjack's saw, proceed to saw her through the middle. The box was the standard large-sized model introduced by British illusionist Horace Goldin 22 years earlier and later featured by Thurston among many others.202
Typically, Orson made his own contribution to this familiar effect. In this case it throws light on his deep understanding of the principles of magical deception and invention. During early rehearsals of the Sawing with Rita, Orson was puzzled by the lack of justification for the two steel plates that are conventionally thrust through the cut center of the box after the sawing and before the two halves are separated and came up with a plausible explanation.203 He later talked Tommy through this problem and solution: “Now, before you pull the two sections apart, why do you put those two plates there?" Of course he knew it was done to hide the secret insides of the halved box, but it had no justification from the audience point of view. This constitutes what magicians term a “discrepancy"—a clue that could lead viewers to figure out the trick's secret method. Consequently all discrepancies should be disguised in some manner. In this case Orson solved the problem by telling Tommy, “We'll do it as an operating scene. We're all doctors." During performance, which was now appropriately billed as “Painless Surgery", Orson spoke through his face mask that had a hole in it for his cigar. He'd say, “Florence, bring out the roentgenograph!" and Shorty would come out dressed like Florence Nightingale pushing the box that was a pretend X-ray machine. And the two masking steel panels had become somewhat more plausible X-ray plates of the sawee.204
199 Hanlon telephone interview, 14 Dec 91; and Card Mondor letter to BW, 23 Jul 91.
200Hanlon interview, 12 Dec 91.
201Schallert in Los Angeles Times, 4 Aug 1943, Pt.I, p.14, col.3; Hanlon interview, 12 Dec 91.
202For history of the Sawing see Whaley (1989), 587-588.
203Undated (May 1943) 20th Century-Fox draft press release by Bloecher.
Orson followed the Sawing by restoring the bisected woman and floating her up into mid-air where she vanishes.205 He billed this bit “Princess Nephrotite". Although inspired by Thurston's Levitation of the Princess Karnac that had thrilled him as a child, Orson had wanted a somewhat different effect. He told Tommy he wanted the Princess to be hypnotized while standing, then rise straight up, completely rotate in mid-air where she would then vanish. This new effect required a new method that the two men worked out: After Orson pretended to hypnotize the assistant, she stood stock-still just inside the large walk-in Black Art Cabinet. The woman was then imperceptibly switched for an identically costumed dummy. This light-weight, rigid figure was attached at the small of its back to an invisible black pole operated by two black-clad Invisible Assistants who stood at the back of the cabinet raising and rotating the dummy. To end the illusion the (dummy) Princess is vanished under cover of a burst of Flash Powder when the assistants suddenly pull her backward into the dark cabinet at the instant a black velvet flap falls unseen in front of the figure.206
“The Human Sewing Machine" was Orson’s performance of Houdini's celebrated Needle Trick. The effect: He swallows a packet of sewing needles and a wadded up length of thread, leaving one short end dangling from his mouth. Standing at one side of the stage he instructs a volunteer to hold the loose end and stand where he is. Then, while furiously chewing, Orson slowly steps backward some 15 feet to the other side of the stage, as the needles emerge from his mouth one by one threaded on the long strand.207
The grand finale, titled “Voodoo!", was billed as “A re-enactment of Mr. Cotten's Interesting Experiences Among the Witchdoctors in Dark Africa." This was a short, fast-paced, comedy melodrama that pitted Jo Cotten as an heroic pith-helmeted explorer against a cannibal witchdoctor (Orson in a skull mask). Jo saves his own life by magically changing places with Orson. Bill Larsen reported, “This quick change illusion is very colorful and has been worked out with great patience. Almost the entire cast participates therein, yet the ultimate effect is not lost on the audience."208 (The magical transformation between Orson and Cotten is an old effect popularized early in the century by The Great Lafayette that had been most recently revived by Dariel Fitzkee in his 1939-40 West Coast tour in a courtroom scene where the Judge, the Lawyers, and the Murderer successively transpose with each other.)
Curtain! A large fireproof curtain is lowered. It had come with the legend “ASBESTOS". At Tommy's suggestion Orson had it modified so the audience would read “WE DID ASBESTOS WE COULD".209 Throughout his performance Orson had changed costume 23 times. He repeatedly heckled the audience, working so hard and so fast that a succession of dry towels had to be tossed to him on stage to mop up his perspiration.210
* * * The show had its usual share of opening-night “nerves". Indeed, one reviewer reported “more slips at the actual premiere than the preceding dress rehearsal, which went very smoothly by comparison. But even the faux pas were well covered by Welles, despite the fact that he probably had some worried moments."211 Hollywood gossip queen Hedda Hopper observed favorably in her column that “When some sleight-of-hand trick didn't come off, he became the little boy putting on a show in the family barn; but next second, he was Orson, the Magnificent."212 Her fair judgement was a decent gesture, coming from a columnist who'd been miffed with Orson two years earlier over Citizen Kane.213 204 Hanlon interview, 12 Dec 91. Joe Hayman in The Conjurors' Magazine, Vol.1, No.1 (Feb 1945), 13, also credited Orson's Sawing as having "a new twist."
205Larsen (1943), 6; Schallert in Los Angeles Times, 4 Aug 43, Pt.I, p.14, col.3.
206Hanlon interview, 12 Dec 91.
207Red Baker interview, 14 Mar 92, describing Orson's presentation the following year.
208Larsen (1943), 6. Also Denton & Crichton (1943), 15; Berch (1943), VI, p.11.
209Hanlon interview, 12 Dec 91.
210Berch (1943); Daily Variety, 4 Aug 43.
* * * The morning brought welcome press reviews. Edwin Schallert of The Los Angeles Times enthused, “While [Orson] himself does not quite out-Dante Dante in the positive effectiveness of his illusions, he is on the way to that goal, and is just about equally spectacular." This was high praise indeed. And the near-comparison to Dante would have particularly pleased Orson who, as we've seen, considered the Danish-American illusionist one of the “greatest".214
Variety 's anonymous reporter was lukewarm. He thought the lighting “bad" and the tricks got a “not-to[o]-professional going over" but conceded overall that, “It should prove a pleasant stopover for servicemen and its novelty lure enough pay customers to get past operating expenses and rack in a few extra bucks for its charity auspices."215
An astonishing feature story about t
he show appeared in Louella Parson's celebrity gossip column in Hearst's Los Angeles Examiner. While naming Rita Hayworth and Jo Cotten, it made no mention of Orson. He had become a virtual non-person in the mighty Hearst newspaper chain two years before when it was learned that the publisher was a main model for Citizen Kane. Louella's columns would name him only occasionally and then always disparagingly. The only way the Examiner’s readers could learn of Orson's connection with the show was through his paid advertisement.216
THE SHOW MUST GO ON The good news in the morning press was followed by bad news that same day. Rita's boss at Columbia, Harry Cohn, ordered her to quit the Wonder Show. His official, legalistic, and false excuse was that she was needed full-time at the studio. The tyrant's real motive was to demonstrate the power he had over her through her contract. He had co-created the “Love Goddess" image of Rita Hayworth from Spanish-American Gypsy dancer Margarita Cansino and, frustrated by her persistent refusals to give him sex, now hoped to force her to end her affair with Orson. Despite Rita's face-to-face plea to be allowed to continue, Cohn refused. So Rita was off the show. But Cohn's scheme backfired. That evening Orson, to console his despondent lover, proposed marriage.217
211 Los Angeles Times, 4 Aug 43, Pt.I, p.14, col.4.
212Hopper's "Looking at Hollywood" syndicated column in Los Angeles Times, 6 Aug 43, Pt.I, p.6, col.3.
213Hedda Hopper and James Brough, The Whole Truth and Nothing But (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963), 69-70.
214Hansen telephone interviews, 19 Dec 91 & 27 Jan 92.
215Daily Variety, 4 Aug 1943.
216George Eells, Hedda and Louella (New York: Putnam's, 1972), 216-217.
217Leaming (1989), 88-89.
Urgently needing a female star to replace Rita he telephoned friend Marlene Dietrich. To his plea to join the show, Miss Dietrich said simply “Come teach me the tricks and I do it."218 And she did. Her rugged French film-star lover, Jean Gabin, joined the company backstage where he could keep his infamously but justifiably jealous eyes on her and help with the props. He replaced Agnes Moorehead who switched to arranging the nightly stream of celebrity guests.219
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