Jim Steinmeyer (10 page)

Although they were now man and wife, Howard could be strangely solicitous or shy. Shortly after their wedding, he bought her a doll and yards of gingham to make dresses for it. He also continued their “brother and sister” act in the beer halls, reasoning that it made Grace’s dancing seem more desirable to the local men.

Of course, the pretense actually provided a world of trouble. At a honky-tonk in Minnesota, Grace was expected to “work the house” after her dance, offering drinks, and maybe much more, in the private wine rooms. Thurston solved the problem by having a local friend whom he trusted sit with Grace in the wine room, buying bottles of beer so that she reached her quota of sales. In Montana, a group of toughs threatened to hang Howard—one of them had peered through the window of their boardinghouse and had seen him in bed with his “sister.” Grace raced to their room and produced the marriage license.

Grace was awed by Howard’s magic, his hard work and self-control. Her husband rose early each morning to practice, often standing before the mirror for hours at a time, repetitively running through each movement of the card routine. He was also meticulous about his hands. After spending months together, his wife realized that the “medicine” that he applied to his hands to soften them every night was actually his own urine. Thurston would wave his hands through the air until they were dry, and then wash them off before retiring for bed. Grace didn’t comment. She found his habits and obsessions “strange and amusing.”

 

 

REDUCED TO THESE
Small-town productions—in storefronts or beer halls—Thurston’s act now started with a few welcoming remarks and moved on to the back-palming routine. He would reach into the air, producing single cards or causing them to magically pass from one hand to the other. He combined the moves with traditional palming, so that it seemed as if he could effortlessly pluck cards from any direction. His hand movements were sweeping and graceful, with a dancelike quality that quieted the crowd and established his credential as an expert magician.

Thurston demonstrated card throwing, a favorite trick from the Herrmann show. He held a card at his fingertips and spun it out toward the crowd. In a small room, the card snapped against the wall with impressive and frightening force. The crowd whistled appreciatively. Thurston then delivered cards to specific spectators, or snapped them against lamps or door frames around the room.

Depending on the length of the show, he proceeded with some classic card tricks. Cards that were selected by spectators ended up in his pocket. Other cards, named by the spectators, magically changed into different cards. If the audience was a small one, Thurston might step down to the spectator to demonstrate some fancy shuffling, ending by dealing himself the four aces. Finally, three or four cards were selected by the audience and shuffled back into the deck. Thurston placed the deck upright in a goblet and waved his hand over it. One by one, the selected cards seemed to climb up and out of the deck, so he could pluck them free and toss them to the audience.

By this time, Thurston’s engaging patter and easy manner had completely charmed the audience. For his big finish, he brought up a local celebrity—it was best if it was the sheriff or mayor. Thurston looked into the man’s sleeves, deftly reaching inside to withdraw a fan of cards. More cards were pulled from his coat pocket, followed by a pair of red long johns, and ladies’ stockings and underwear. He opened the man’s coat and pulled out a wash line strung with baby clothes. Finally, Thurston grabbed his assistant’s shoulders, turning him so he was standing in profile to the audience. The magician reached straight down the man’s coat collar, withdrawing a live duck. “Why, it’s good old Socks, my pet duck! You weren’t trying to ... No, he must have taken a fancy to you and crawled into your hip pocket!” The appearance of the duck, squirming and flapping as he climbed from the coat, invariably made the victim whirl and fight, struggling to keep his coat on, then jumping from the stage and returning to his seat. Thurston could depend on gales of laughter to take him off the stage, and then bring him back for bow after bow.

When the Thurstons arrived in Belt, Montana, a boomtown next to a brand-new mine, they carried their trunks to the honky-tonk saloon. The bar had been stripped of glass, and the sheets of tin were ominously filled with bullet holes. Despite the tough clientele, Howard and Grace were a hit, and best of all the Belt audience showed their appreciation by throwing silver dollars. The next morning, over breakfast, Thurston told his wife about a new trick he’d wanted to try, an improvement on the old Rising Cards.

All day, he and Grace worked out the new routine on the Belt stage, fidgeting with the apparatus and planning every move. It was the most elaborate trick he’d attempted, relying on special preparation and Grace’s hard work.

That night, as Thurston wrapped up his card routine, he told his audience that he was about to try an especially challenging trick. He shuffled the deck in his hands, then stepped into the audience, asking for five or six cards to be selected. They were replaced inside the deck, and Thurston boldly offered the cards to one of his spectators, asking that they be shuffled.

Unlike the traditional Rising Card Trick, Thurston didn’t bother with a glass goblet. He returned to the stage and simply held the deck in his left hand, at arm’s length. He waved his other hand over the top of the deck. “What was the name of the first card?” he said, pointing to a man in the audience. “Five of hearts!”

“Fine, fine.... Let’s see the five of hearts.” There was a pause, and then the five seemed to climb out of the deck. But now, it didn’t simply push its way up; it rose, straight up in the air, levitating through the air for about afoot and a half, into Thurston’s empty hand above the deck. The magician stopped to look at the card, then scaled it out to the audience, delivering it in the lap of the man who asked for it.

There was a long pause, and then a sustained burst of applause.

Thurston stepped to a different spot on the stage and called for the second card. This one was the jack of clubs. “Well, then, let’s see if the jack is listening!” He snapped his fingers. The card soared out of the pack, straight up into his hands, and was then propelled into the audience.

Thurston breathed a sigh of relief. With the first two cards, he knew the trick was a hit. Grace, watching from the wings, clapped her hands in excitement.

For the third card, Thurston paused, waving his fingers over the deck. He was now relaxed and playful. “Up, up, up, up!” he called. It was a little verbal trill, his voice rising in inflection, that he’d heard Dwight Moody use in his sermons. “I can see him now,” Thurston later wrote, “as he raised his voice and arms in describing the ascension of Elijah to heaven in his chariot of fire.” The card sailed upward, through the air. Moody’s words were now the perfect accompaniment to his magic, a mere card trick turned into a nearly religious experience.

“By the time he had caused the other cards to rise, and had thrown them to those who had called for them,” Grace remembered, “the audience was on its feet, cheering.” Silver dollars rained onto the plank flooring, and the audience grabbed Thurston, pulling him from the stage, lifting him to their shoulders and carrying him to the bar to offer drinks.

With the introduction of the Rising Cards on that night in 1897, Howard Thurston had achieved his boyhood dream, after more than a decade of hard work. He’d assembled the pieces of a magnificent new magic act. But the struggle had landed Howard and Grace precisely at the bottom of the entertainment ladder—in dives like Belt, Montana. “Up, up, up, up” was now Thurston’s admonition to himself. Ironically, he had lost sight of any way to rise to the top.

T
he Rising Card trick became mythologized by Thurston’s retelling. He claimed that he invented it in Boulder, Montana; as he was setting up the act, a fight broke out in the saloon and a bullet pierced the curtain, smashing the goblet in his hand. Thinking quickly, he improvised a new method for the Rising Cards, which didn’t need the goblet.

His fictional story was assembled from events in Belt, Montana, where the Thurstons did witness an argument and fatal gunfight in the saloon. But his new card routine had nothing to do with the gunfire, it was the result of deliberate planning and rehearsal. The key part of his fiction was the word
invent
. He didn’t invent it, he read it in a book.

New Era Card Tricks
was a collection of the latest ideas in card tricks, compiled by August Roterberg, a respected Chicago magic dealer. Thurston bought the book when it was published that year, 1897, and poured over the contents as he and Grace traveled through the West. The book was filled with inspirations for new tricks, not just the standard sleight-of-hand routines that had been popular for decades, but fascinating descriptions of how card tricks were being brought to stage shows, using new routines and techniques.
New Era
contained the first written description of the Back Palm. Roterberg didn’t mention Thurston—he didn’t know him at the time—but he praised Houdini and Elliott for their handling of the amazing new maneuver. He also omitted Elliott’s technique for showing both sides of his hand; the neat bit of sleight of hand that Thurston was using, as Roterberg wrote it, was “too difficult to describe.”

Later in the book, Roterberg included the Cards Rising Through the Air, an improvement on the old Rising Cards routine. The trick had been invented by Carl Soerenson, a magician from Hamburg, Germany, but, oddly, Roterberg published it without any credit.

Soerenson’s secret involved a thin, invisible black silk thread stretched horizontally across the stage, just over the magician’s head. At either end, the thread passed through a small pulley or eyelet, and was then attached to a small bag of shot, to hold the thread under tension. In this way, the thread was a sort of invisible clothesline.

Certain cards had small clips on their backs, attached to the upper corners. In waving his hands over the pack, the magician contacted the thread, pulling it down. He then slipped it beneath the clips on the back card. By releasing his grip, the horizontal thread smoothly lifted the card, so it would soar into the magician’s waiting hand. The rest of the trick was accomplished by the traditional magician’s fare: forcing cards and palming cards.

Like any good trick, it probably didn’t appear suddenly, as if by magic, in Boulder or Bolt, but was worked out through trial and error as the Thurstons traveled west. As Howard grew confident with the new trick, he and Grace discovered ways to improve it. By placing several horizontal threads across the stage, Thurston could change his position, moving closer or farther from the audience. Grace also suggested a simpler system of weights offstage and a neater cardboard flap on the back of each card. Magic is like any work of art. The tiniest, subtlest brushstrokes are perceived by the viewer and influence our impression of the entire picture. Their final flourish—a wonderful touch that would make the trick uniquely Thurston’s—was still months away.

 

 

A GOOD NEW TRICK
like the Rising Cards might have inspired the couple to reverse course, heading back east. But instead, Howard and Grace had set off in the direction of the Klondike, where gold prospecting had created boom-towns starved for entertainment. They were first tempted by stories of the goldfields and performances that had been rewarded with piles of gold nuggets, but by the time they’d reached Montana, Howard and Grace had met entertainers who had just escaped from the Klondike. They shook their heads over the primitive conditions and the dangerous men, telling the couple not to bother. Instead, Howard suggested that there were small mining towns in the western states, towns that the railroad didn’t reach, where money could be made.

Grace was now an important part of their success, not merely standing next to her husband and handing him the props for the card act, but as “Texola, Coon Songs and Comedy Buck Dancing.” Buck-and-wing was a flashy form of early tap dancing that had its roots in African-American performers. She bought her early lessons from a black dancer named Deyo in Montana. In many saloons and beer halls, it was the pretty, shapely Grace who the managers wanted in the show—they reluctantly agreed to also take the magic act. Grace had become a tough professional on and off the stage. She learned the formula of steps and smiles that would charm her audience and encourage tips. She also became adept at another kind of tap dance, taking a subservient role, flattering her husband and soothing his ego or quieting his temper when he felt ignored by the audience.

In Butte, Montana, the Thurstons shared the bill with Clare Evans and Mabel Maitland, a husband-and-wife dance team. They quickly became friends. Clare was a tall, thin, handsome Texan who performed in blackface with buck-and-wing dancing. Mabel Maitland was the daughter of a Seattle sea captain. Double-jointed, she performed an acrobatic act, and also teamed up with her husband for some dances. Grace noted that there was very little musicality to Mabel’s performances; she “could not carry a tune in a roll of music, and had to watch her timing carefully.” Evans and Maitland were recruited to join the Thurstons for their tour of smaller mining towns. Even more important than their dancing, Clare Evans was an expert horseman and had saved a little money, which he volunteered to finance their adventure. The couples bought a narrow-gauge wagon, reasoning that it would be easier to maneuver through the rough mountain trails, and a team of four sturdy ponies. They stocked the wagon with a tin Klondike stove, pans, kettles, cups, dishes, and sleeping cots, as well as their theatrical trunks and costumes. On the side of the wagon they painted their names and advertised “Thurston’s Original Oddities, High-Class Specialty Artists ... A Show of Great World Interest and Educational Value.”