524 Darensbourg (1988), 100-101.
525Central Avenue Sounds: Jazz in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 308.
526Elliot Paul, That Crazy American Music (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957), 263.
* * * Orson’s next big project was to film Shakespeare’s Macbeth. He contracted with Republic Pictures to script, direct, and star in this movie for $150,000. Of this, $50,000 was due on completion and the remaining $100,000 from profits after distribution. Filming ran from late June through mid July, and he’d finished the principal photography a day early and far under budget.
* * * With Lady from Shanghai in the can and having shot Macbeth, Orson was in New York City on Sunday, July 27th, talking with Bruce Elliott, convivial editor of The Phoenix. In his magic magazine's next issue Bruce reported that his visitor “was brooding about the fact that out in Los Angeles the skies these days are being sullied by sky writing. Orson was brooding about how pretty the ace of clubs would look spelled on high."528
Orson would later claim that he'd once paid a New York sky writer $75 to inscribe the Seven of Hearts above Central Park at three in the afternoon. When that hour came Orson was in the park with a young woman he was courting:529
I asked her to take any card. She took the card I wanted [her] to and I asked her would she like the card in her purse or in my pocket or—would she like it written in the sky! ... She said, “Written in the sky." And I pointed à la Houdini to the heavens. And she looked up and there, sure enough, written in the heavens over New York was the Seven of Hearts. ... She said, “Well, you must have seen it up there before you did the trick."
Orson's original and publicity-grabbing method for a magician to reveal a spectator's secretly chosen card reminded Bruce of an old unpublished story about Orson that had been circulating through the hocus-pocus crowd:
It happened at a lawn party in London during the blitz. Orson waited till the crepuscular light was waining and then had a giant card selected and returned to the deck. Holding the deck aloft in the gathering darkness, he commanded the chosen card to rise. It did—and kept on rising for he had fastened it to a string which [led] to a barrage balloon!! The card went up and out of sight.
Another grand story but, like so many about Orson, either unfounded or twisted beyond recognition. Not only had he missed the 1941 London Blitz but he'd left England long before the balloons had been put up and didn't return until two years after they'd all been hauled down. Still, the idea was clever—the ultimate extrapolation of the Thurston Rising Cards, which Orson had performed in America during the war. And he would actually experiment with a variant of this sky's-the-limit levitation four decades later.
527 Herb Jeffries interview in Donald Bogle, BrightBoulevards, Bold Dreams: The Story of Black Hollywood (New York: Ballantine, 2005), 250.
528Elliott in The Phoenix, No.131 (1 Aug 1947), 528.
529OW on Orson Welles' Sketch Book, Episode 3 (1955).
(By charmed coincidence, three decades later Orson spent three days in England doing his one scene for Where Is Parsifal? in which he plays the role of Klingsor, a Gypsy magician who is trying to buy the rights to a color 3-D laser sky-writing machine.)
* * * Orson's magic sessions with Bruce Elliott included some advanced card work. Bruce showed him Paul Curry's “Touch",530 a clever prediction effect using a tricked deck that “Orson liked so much that he brooded on it and came up with an addition to the Curry miracle."531 Curry, a brilliant young amateur inventor of card magic, had soon found that many lesser colleagues are unconscionable thieves. “Touch” was his first trick to be marketed, brought out by U. F. Grant a week after it had been sold to him by a magician who'd overheard Curry explain the secret of his trick to Max Holden and rushed over to Grant's shop. When Grant discovered the swindle, he paid Curry the same royalty that Holden would have. But Grant was a more honest dealer than most. After similar incidents that ended less happily, Curry told Bruce that “I had been screwed by more pirates than a girl stowaway on Captain Kidd's ship." Bruce liked the line and tried to put it in The Phoenix but his wife, "Bunny", blue-pencilled it.532 Their daughter, Judy Elliott, assures me that "Bunny was not a prude" and would have shared Bruce's enjoyment of Curry's whimsy. She points out that Bruce tended to be far raunchier than most of his magician friends and subscribers and suggests that Bunny simply convinced him that it might be too raw for his readership.533 This is as true of most magic societies and magazines today, as Mike Rogers audaciously reminded his compeers of their darker secrets.534
Orson's plans to co-author a magic book with Bruce had died, probably at the same time as Around the World when financial desperation forced him to concentrate his energies on quick moneymakers —a reward denied to all but a handful of conjuring manuals. Bruce recognized from their recent correspondence that his good friend was in need of cheer:535
From the way you sound your name probably should be Welleshmerz these days. The Atom Bomb got you? Or is it just your manic depressive cycle? Anything I can do? Write you gay witticism or the like?
By the summer of 1947 their book project had become transformed into Bruce writing his first of four quite good magic volumes, Magic as a Hobby, with Orson backing off to agreeing to contribute only the Foreword. He no doubt welcomed this rare opportunity to expound on a subject forever avoided by his many interviewers. After much delay, Orson responded to Bruce's “My Dear Errant Child" telegraphic appeals with lengthy typescript.536 Published early next year it reveals several of Orson's views on conjuring:537
530 Hugard's Annual of Magic: 1937 (New York: Max Holden, 1937, 44-47, and then as "Infallible Prediction" in John Northern Hilliard, Greater Magic (Minneapolis: Carl Waring Jones, 1938), 442-443. Jeff Busby identified this trick from Elliott's mention that it was a Curry effect using a deck of Double Facers.
531 Elliott in The Phoenix, No.142 (9 Jan 1948), 572.
532Curry letters to Jeff Busby, 21 May 81 & 2 Apr 84.
533Judy Elliott telephone interview, 12 Jun 2001.
534Mike Rogers, "Fifty Undeniable Truths about Magic," Epoptica (Sep 1989), 571.
535Elliott telegram to OW, 3 Sep 47.
536Elliott telegrams to OW, 27 Aug 47 & 3 Sep 47. Elliott had first invited Orson to write the intro in an open letter in his The Phoenix, No.123 (11 Apr 1947), 495.
537Elliott (1948), vi-viii. Curiously only the 1953 French translation is reported by Orson's biographers: Cowie (1973), 250; Higham (1985), 345; Brady (1989), 621, who also misspells Elliott's name as "Elliot"; and Wood (1990), 274. I suspect that none had read it, merely (continued...)
Defining the function of the magician, he wrote, “A real magician's task, it seems clear, is to abolish the solution, the possibility of any solution in the minds of those he seeks to amuse." This is sophisticated thinking. It states the basic principle of the art at least as clearly and in far fewer words than any other magician I know of. Next best is what a British magic expert had written in the previous century:538
The conjuror must start with the one principle firmly fixed in mind that he is to deceive his audience in every way possible. At no time is he actually to do that which he says he is doing. Every look and gesture, besides every word, should tend to lead the [spectator's] mind into the wrong groove. Misdirection is the grand basis of the conjuror's actions; and the more natural the performer's movements in this particular, the more complete will be his success.
Orson had become a member of the Pacific Coast Association of Magicians (PCAM), the Los Angeles Society of Magicians, the International Brotherhood of Magicians (IBM)539, and a member of the oldest American magic association, the Society of American Magicians (SAM).540 Although he wasn’t active in their monthly meetings, membership in these secrete societies had its privileges, namely automatic subscriptions to their informative members-only magazines and newsletters. Even so, Orson argues that “you don't get to be a magician by joining a magic club or living in a magic store. You can only be a magici
an by putting on a magic show." Although this opinion was based on his close personal observation of such clubs and shops, it's a narrow view that would exclude many admirable amateurs and a few superb ones. But it does prove that Orson wanted not just to understand the methods of magical deception but to actively practice them.
He regrets that “This art has fallen into decadence." And attributes this to two causes: First, the disappearance of live entertainment in theaters where parents could take their children — “magic's source and meaning". Second, the rapidly increasing diffusion of the secrets of magic to the general public. This was a time when newspapers often exposed magic secrets, advertisers such as Camel cigarettes and Quaker Oats were giving away booklets of tricks, and the probing cameras and hosts of the infantile television industry were gleefully showing previously hidden methods of the art.
These were Orson's personal opinions and, although magicians have squabbled over these points for more than a century, they prove his deep understanding of, respect for, and commitment to the art. And magicians Clayton Rawson and John J. Crimmins, Jr., praised Orson's Foreword as, respectively, “a little gem" and “probably the most brilliant ever written for a magic book."541
* * * Soon after filming on Macbeth had wrapped that July Orson moved into Charles Lederer’s home at 445 Ocean Front in Santa Monica. Lederer had recently separated from Virginia, Orson’s ex-wife, and then worked for Orson as one of the three witches in Macbeth. The two men discussed several potential film projects and became firm friends.
537 (...continued)
copying from some other bibliography or each other.
538Edwin Sachs, Sleight of Hand (1st ed., London: "The Bazaar" Office, 1877), 28.
539As verified by his membership cards now in the Lilly Library.
540Richard Blowers (SAM National Administrator) telephone interview, 13 Feb 92. OW held Registration No.3755.
541Rawson letter to Elliott in The Phoenix, No.147 (26 Mar 1948), 592; Crimmins in Hugard's Magic Monthly, Vol.5, No.2 (Apr 1948), 415.
* * * Maurice Cion, a boy of 10 in Weehawken, New Jersey, wanted to become a magician. When his mother mentioned that Orson Welles was one, Maurice wrote him in Hollywood to ask advice. To the lad's surprise a large manila envelope soon arrived stuffed with several small magic tricks, two books, and a letter. The books, both standard ones designed for beginners by Orson's ghost-writer friend Walter Gibson, were nominally authored by Thurston and Blackstone. Orson's letter recommended visits to the New York magic shops. Dr. Cion didn't become a magician; but, as he concedes, “I did go into a related field of magic—psychiatry."542
542Cion telephone interview, 29 Nov 92.
Orson Welles - The Man Who Was Magic: Part 1 Page 43