Orson Welles - The Man Who Was Magic: Part 1

by Barton Whaley

  When we finally met, I drew a deep breath and said, "Mr. Welles, I sent you a note at the Algonquin and you, either through fatigue or sheer rudeness, have failed to reply." He stared at me a moment and said, "It was probably sheer rudeness," and walked away.

  But Orson now played the recordings. Realizing he'd been both rude and wrong, he responded typically — like his earlier amends to Hank Senber, Paul Stewart, and Greg Garrison and would years later to others. He told Markle he loved the play and invited him to take over next week's Mercury Theatre slot with a guest presentation of Life with Adam — "And use all these Canadians you have down here in New York in the cast." And so, on July 19th, Orson's audience learned that their host could take a ribbing as well as deliver one.454

  The consequences for Markle were quick and considerable. For the next two years he worked for Orson and, through him, Alexander Korda as a radio and film script writer. He was, for example, an uncredited writer on Orson's Lady from Shanghai (1948). And through the following year he worked for CBS radio as a writer, director, and producer. His career then took off and his independent directorial career launched with Jigsaw (1949) and ended with Disney's super-profitable The Incredible Journey (1963). The final fringe benefit of Markle's appearance on the Mercury Summer Theatre was having met his co-actor Mercedes McCambridge. They soon married.

  Through Orson Markle opened a door to America for other Canadians to escape the narrow opportunities at home for radio, stage, and movie work. Markle led the way for talented performers like Lorne Greene, Lloyd Bochner, and Christopher Plummer. Americans tend, even now, to treat Canadians with condescending disregard; so Orson's championing of Markle and his fellow Canucks was as noteworthy for its time as his similarly concerned actions on behalf of blacks, Mexicans, Jews, women, and poor actors and musicians.

  454Drainie (1988), 40-42, 240. Orson was guest of honor at a dinner held by New York City magi in a mid-town 57th Street restaurant. Comedy magician Jay Marshall arrived between acts from his own nightclub show to perform briefly. Knowing that Orson's friend, Bruce Elliott, “looked a little bit like Orson", Jay played his part of the show to Bruce “as though I thought he was the guest of honor." On his way out Jay stopped by Orson's table to say, “Good to see you again, Bruce."455

  Orson agreed to co-author a magic book with Bruce who joked that “Our book will make you rich beyond the dreams of av[a]rice."456 However, as we'll see, this project would end next year a bit differently than planned.

  Although Bruce preferred close-up magic, he enjoyed Around the World. His review proclaimed majestically, “Although we are allergic to box tricks in general, Welles manages to get so much personal pleasure out of the things that he does that the feeling is communicated to you." Elliott particularly liked one fresh bit of business that Orson introduced in the Duck Vanish: “You know the feather duster that always hangs down below the table after the duck has vanished? Well, in his case the feather duster is a feather dart which he heaves at the table base after the anti-climax!"457

  The Duck Vanish is a sucker effect where two to four ducks vanish in plain view from a wooden box on a draped table. However, to the delight of the hecklers, some feathers are left protruding from the suspiciously deep table. After a mock show of reluctance, the magician dismantles the table to reveal only a skeleton frame and a feather duster—the fowl having truly vanished.

  This amusing and cunning stage illusion had been invented by Belgian illusionist Servais Le Roy (using white pigeons) in 1905 when he premiered it with his comedy partner “Bosco" asking “Now where are the pigeons?". It was shown as “The Impossible Duck Vanish" by Theo “Okito" Bamberg by 1908 and purchased from Le Roy by Harry “Dante" Jansen and first performed by him in 1911 in Hawaii. Then it was performed as “Where Did the Ducks Go?" in 1918 by Doc Nixon, Okito's former assistant. It had been a pet effect of Okito's son David “Fu-Manchú" Bamberg since 1935 when he created his own improved version, which even fooled his brilliant magician father. Perhaps Orson had gotten the trick from his friend David, but I have no evidence.458

  At one point Orson went “out into the audience to grab a protesting duck from the vest pocket of a protesting patron."459 Here was his chance to repeat the old Thurston trick that he'd had Hans Conried do five years earlier in Journey into Fear and done himself only two and three years before. For this duck-from-coat gag Orson had hired Dantini in New York as the audience stooge. Like Red Baker before him, all Dantini had to do was sit there with the fowl loaded in his coat until such time as the Great Foo San would step into the audience and “miraculously" produce the white bird. Vincent “Dantini" Cierkes, 46, was a minor pro mentalist and magician. Despite his tiny role, he proudly listed Around the World among his credits in his advertising.460

  455 Marshall letter to BW, 29 Feb 92.

  456Elliott telegram to OW, 29 Jul 46.

  457Elliott in The Phoenix, No.108 (21 Jun 1946), 436. Max Holden reported the show too generously as "breaking all records" in his monthly column in The Linking Ring (Aug 1946), 81.

  458A clue: Bamberg's prop was Thayer-built, a fact that may help some collector to answer this question.

  459Schwartz (1977), 228, quoting Howard Barnes review.

  460Mark Walker telephone interview, 15 Oct 91, based on his information from Dantini's magician friend McCarl Roberts. See also Mark Walker, Ghostmasters (Baltimore: by the author, 1991), 166. Also telephone interview with Art Emerson, 21 Oct 91, based on his conversations with the late Dantini.

  Orson's magic included the Rabbit Wringer effect where a live bunny is wrung through a wringer to come out flattened. This sight gag had been created four years earlier by his Unholy Five friend Audley Walsh, whose Rabbit Wringer device used Ted Annemann's earlier comedy cloth Flat Rabbit. Orson closed this act with his one big illusion: A juvenile in a canvas sack is hoist high above the stage where it vanishes, after which the assistant reappears at the back of the audience and rushes down the aisle. Fred Braue's review reported: “Good magic and the audience loved it."461

  Pro magician Bobby Baxter caught the show at the Adelphi and thought it “terrific". Baxter was currently working the top-of-the-line Cotillion Room nitery with small comedy magic, but because he'd started out as a carnival illusionist he was qualified to judge Orson's illusion show. He felt Orson “presented his illusions wonderfully."462 Howard Shonting, another pro, remembers the show as being “very good".463

  Few regular theatrical critics enjoyed the show and even they dismissed it as trivial entertainment. It took modernist German playwright Bertolt Brecht to see another dimension. After watching an afternoon performance in Boston he went backstage to introduce himself and declare: “This is the greatest thing I have seen in American theater. This is wonderful. This is what theater should be."464 (We shouldn't be surprised at the celebrated playwright's reaction, if we recall his low-brow fascination with American burlesque stage.) Brecht's enthusiasm was shared by young actor Tony Curtis who recalled it as one of his two most “explosive" experiences as a theater-goer, matched only by his seeing Brando next year on Broadway in A Streetcar Named Desire.465

  From early on Around the World had been on increasingly shaky financial grounds. Its New York opening during the hot summer saw much of its potential audience fleeing to cooler climes. Orson desperately tried to keep it going into, or at least reopen, that fall when better ticket sales could be expected.466 With unmemorable songs by Cole Porter (who was in a temporary slump), lackluster choreography, and playing to a weak critical response and shrinking audiences, Orson tried an old theatrical stunt to keep the show alive: He gave more of himself by performing an intimate solo encore after the final curtain, reciting a dramatic monolog or a poem, or doing a few extra magic tricks, or some combination of these.467

  Orson shamelessly plugged and defended this stage production on his Orson Welles Commentaries quarter-hour ABC radio show of June 16th:468 Around the World is made up of very old stuff—things that have enchanted me from t
he time I saw them under canvas, in a one-ring circus in the theater or a carnival. It's like hanging around the toy displays at a department store around Christmas time. Or going out and buying out a whole toy store. ... I haven't liked a musical since the old Ziegfeld days, when they had really funny men and lush women ... not that Around the World is a musical comedy—it's an extravaganza—musicals today are too smart ... too chic. Perhaps that is why we of the Mercury were greeted in some critical quarters with salvos of abuse.

  461 Braue in Hugard's Magic Monthly, Vol.4, No.4 (Sep 1946), 252.

  462Baxter telephone interview, 17 Oct 92.

  463Shonting telephone interview, 1 Nov 92.

  464Richard Wilson, an eyewittness, as quoted in Lyon (1980), 178. Wilson is quoted slightly differently in Welles & Bogdanovich (1992), 112.

  465Curtis (1993), 67.

  466Naremore (1978), 151; The Conjurors' Magazine (October 1946), 21.

  467Joe Delaney telephone interview, 14 May 91.

  468Quoted in Higham (1985), 231-232, giving the show's date incorrectly as the 15th.

  Bruce Elliott chastised the media scribes: “The job of the critic", he told his readers, “is to judge anything on the basis of what it is trying to be or do. Too often the critic sitting in judgement will criticize a book, or a trick or a play for some thing that he has in mind and woe betide you if your attempt isn't on his lines. Around the World, in Welles' words, is like a trip to the toy department of Macy's. If you don't like toys, don't come. But instead of the critics saying they didn't like toys, they compared it to things which it was not trying to be." Elliott added a cautionary note specifically to magicians: “Don't go expecting to see a magic show. The magic is incidental and is part of the story, it isn't dragged in by the heels just because he likes to do it."469

  Walter Gibson, Orson's old friend and current editor of The Conjurors' Magazine, enthused: “Whatever the past claims of various magicians as to the extent and importance of their New York or Broadway engagements, it would seem that Orson Welles is establishing an all-time high as a candidate for such honors."470

  Effusive blurbs like those of Elliott and Gibson and Orson's own desperate ploys failed to turn the trick and his show closed in early August after only 74 performances at the Adelphi. A financial disaster, Orson was $320,000 out of pocket and heavily in debt—a burden that would cripple him for years to come.

  Orson and Porter went their separate ways without public recrimination. Porter blamed the failure on “fluctuating backers and of Orson said:471 I have rarely admired a man so much. Welles did everything possible toward the success of Around the World in Eighty Days, going without sleep or food for one week, subsisting only on coffee.

  On his part, Orson wasn’t so kind to his composer. He complained to Herrick that the only mediocre songs Porter had ever composed were those done for Orson’s show and “blamed Porter’s music for the failure.”472

  A reporter interviewing Orson in his backstage dressing room on the eve of the show’s closing had expected to find the producer-director-actor alone in a funk. Instead he found a crowded room where Orson was chatting with several people (including magician “Okito", Dave Bamberg's illustrious father), signing autographs, kissing women, handling a stream of phone calls, and announcing his and Sir Alexander Korda's plan to take the show to London.473

  That plan collapsed financially when British unions wouldn't approve bringing in the original American-made costumes and sets. So next year Welles and Korda planned a movie of Around the World, Orson writing a script and even shooting a few days on location in Morocco.474 But Korda soon pulled out, selling the project to, of all people, Mike Todd, who eventually produced a lavish, starstudded, but weak movie version without either Orson or the magic circus.

  469 Elliott in The Phoenix, No.108 (21 Jun 1946), 436.

  470The Conjurors' Magazine, Vol.2, No.8 (Oct 1946), 21.

  471Porter quoted in David Grafton, Red, Hot & Rich!: An Oral History of Cole Porter (New York: Stein and Day, 1987), 155.

  472Herrick (1998), 108-109.

  473Ted Shane, "Awesome Orson", Liberty (11 Feb 1946), 16.

  474OW in Welles & Bogdanovich (1992), 109.

  Although Around the World had flopped on Broadway, the extensive and sometimes favorable publicity brought Orson several new offers. One report was that he would headline his magic act at a leading Manhattan nightclub.475 That was no doubt his intention and hope; but it didn't happen because he was diverted by even more lucrative offers to direct, act in, or narrate films.

  Twentieth Century-Fox asked him to direct and/or play the protagonist in Nightmare Alley. This was an adaptation of the acclaimed novel written by William Lindsay Gresham, a prominent amateur magician with a carnival background. The main character is a carnival conjuror who slides down a moral and physical slope to become, by stages, a pseudo-psychic mentalist, a fake spiritualistic minister, and ends up back in the carnival as a geek.

  Orson had read this shocking novel when it appeared earlier that year. Given his occasional dabbling in the pseudo-psychic and life-long fascination with ambiguous anti-heroes, he was strongly motivated to review it—his only book review—for Variety. It was a rave but ended by predicting that “As a movie, Nightmare Alley, however diluted, would be too rough and raw for the family trade."476 Orson's crystal ball had failed him. On the recommendation of Orson's friend George Jessel, Darryl Zanuck bought the movie rights for $50,000 from the author and brought Gresham to Hollywood at a fat additional $1,000 per week to consult on the project.477 Orson was offered the star role, but declined because he felt it wasn't right for him.478 When released next year this film noir starred Tyrone Power and proved to be that usually weak actor's favorite roles and certainly his most serious one. But the public demanded and got Power back into his familiar romantic parts.479

  * * * One of Orson's most admired magicians around this time was suave Bert Allerton. Among the world's great close-up artists, he was house conjuror at the posh Pump Room in Chicago's Ambassador East Hotel where he would table hop, performing privately on request (seven tricks per table for $5). His sleight-of-hand skills were so great that Orson held him in awe. Sessioning one day in Allerton's Chicago apartment, Orson broke off in the middle of practicing a trick. “I can't do it Bert," he exclaimed, “I get nervous in front of you." As a memento of their session, Orson gave him a photo of himself inscribed, “To a real wizard, from a fake."480 He also supplied a sweet blurb that Allerton featured in his advertising: “Bert Allerton has evidently sold his soul to Mephisto. There is no other logical explanation for what he does with a pack of cards."481

  475 [Walter B. Gibson] in The Conjurors' Magazine, Vol.2, No.8 (Oct 1946), 21.

  476OW's undated [1946] draft review for Variety.

  477Bruce Elliott in The Phoenix, No.117 (10 Jan 1947), 472.

  478Brady (1989), 393.

  479Guiles (1979), 220-225.

  480Louis M. Starr, "Boutonniere Wizard" [Allerton], The Chicago Sun, 25 May 1947. Allerton gave the same account to his magician friend Martin Gardner around that same time. Gardner letter to Jeff Busby, 7 Jul 91. [OW was in Chicago with Dolores del Río for the Chicago premier of Citizen Kane on 6 May 1941 and with Rita for a war rally 10 Sep 1943.

  481Allerton promotional flyer, undated but sometime around 1946.

  TOWN SKRYER His magician friend Bruce Elliott remarked at the time that Orson “is much more interested in effect than method. He's more interested in presentation than any other thing."482 To prove his point, Bruce published (in the April 5th issue of his Phoenix magic magazine) a clever card trick invented by Orson titled “The Town Skryer". The trick's punning name no doubt honored Alexander Woollcott, Orson's early influential supporter, well-known for his recent weekly radio interview, review, and commentary show titled “The Town Crier", substituting “skryer" (or scryer), meaning a reader of crystal balls. Bruce pointed out that the trick “is big in effect and not very worrisome as to method" and challenged his
readers to try to think of another “that can be accomplished as easily and still entertain a crowd of five thousand." Particularly when “there are not many card tricks that will hold the attention of a big audience just as well as it will a small one."483

  THE EFFECT: Mr.A (who can be anyone) shuffles a deck (any deck) and hands it up to Orson. A second volunteer, Mr.B, stands behind him, looking over his shoulder. Only he can see the fan of cards in Orson's left hand. Orson asks him to think of a card, any card. He then says “I'd like you to shuffle the cards", demonstrating with a casual shuffle and handing him the deck. While Mr.B is busy shuffling, Orson asks for a third volunteer and, while Mr.C is walking on stage, picks up a glass and takes a drink of water. Still holding the glass, Orson asks Mr.B if he has his card clearly in mind. When he assents, Orson turns to C who is now on his right, holds out the glass of water, and asks him to stare into its depths, which, Orson intones, controlled by his powers will reveal the true image, the veritable picture, the actual projection of B's thoughts. To Orson's left is B, clutching the deck of cards and concentrating hard. To his right is C, staring into the water. Orson asks the latter if he's getting any impression from the water. Is the master mentalist's scrying ability making the image of B's thought appear? When C says yes, Orson asks him if he can name the card in B's mind. Mr.C again says yes and names the card out loud.

  THE METHOD: A bold swindle. (1) Orson forced the “thought" card using Dunninger's version of the Reverse Fan. This makes all the cards in a fanned deck appear to be blank except for the face card, which was clearly seen by Volunteer B looking over his shoulder. A mere wink just before making the fan was enough for Orson to coopt the man. (2) Then, while sloppily shuffling (few in an audience would later recall that Orson ever so much as even touched the cards) Orson brought the “mentally" selected card to the top of the deck and palmed it—automatically face up—into his left hand. (3) Finally, he revealed the card to Volunteer C by placing the glass on the palmed card, using the bottom of the glass to magnify its face in the same way as the crystal ball is used in the old Crystal Vision stunt.