Jim Steinmeyer (29 page)

Still, Jarrett continually clashed with Thurston, and the arguments started at the shop in Cos Cob, even before the show went out on the road. Jarrett agreed to build several of his own illusions for the tour. He suggested a small wooden cabinet that would produce nine people; Thurston was carrying a group of nine Arabian acrobats, the Haja Hamid Troupe, as a variety act. The cabinet would allow Thurston to make them all appear.

Jarrett’s illusions were famous for how small they looked, and the secrets depended upon tight little spaces that he had measured carefully. He allowed exactly eight inches of space for the bodies of the acrobats, squeezed in between two false panels in the cabinet. When Jarrett left the shop at the end of one day, Thurston added an additional twelve inches on the plans, telling the carpenters that he wanted to be sure the cabinet was big enough. Jarrett returned and saw the completed cabinet, stopping all the work. “It looked like a garage,” he later remembered. He cut apart the carefully doweled panels, reassembling them to the correct size. “I can’t remember a single time that Thurston was ever right.”

Perhaps the most incredible of Jarrett’s creations was called the Bangkok Bungalow. Thurston showed a small, narrow, two-story dollhouse, picking it up and putting it at the side of the stage. It was about the size of an orange crate on its side.

Jarrett stood atop a small pedestal. “I call your attention to this young man. He is the most remarkable man I have ever met,” Thurston told the audience. “He can be in two places at the same time. I would like to have you take a good look at his handsome countenance so you will know him the next time you see him.” The assistants held a cloth in front of Jarrett for a few seconds. When the assistants pulled the cloth away, he was gone.

“Now I want you to watch him and trace him, and see where I place him, for I’m going to hide him and you’re to find him! Here he is, in the Bangkok Bungalow!”

Thurston now picked up the little house, lifting it effortlessly. He mumbled out of the corner of his mouth, as if talking to someone inside. “Yes, he says he is in there. He wants to get out.”

The assistants now brought in a low platform on wheels, with upright posts and curtains hung around the sides. Thurston placed the house in the curtained cabinet, and the drapes were closed. Seconds later, they were opened again, and Jarrett was back, standing next to the house.

“Now, the next effect is the most astonishing of all.”

The cabinet was turned so that the curtains obstructed Jarrett. The assistants marched onstage, pulling away the curtains, one section at a time, and showing that he had disappeared again. Thurston stepped over to the cabinet and lifted the house in his hands, walking it to the wings and tossing it to an assistant offstage. Meanwhile, the audience noticed a suspicious lump in the last curtain on the cabinet. They’d located the missing assistant.

Thurston returned to the stage, as if proudly taking his bow. But he now noticed the murmur through the crowd. He turned back to the cabinet and pulled away the final layer of curtains. Jarrett had completely disappeared. “Where is he?” Thurston asked, as if he had puzzled himself.

“Here I am!” Jarrett shouted. He jumped high into the air, and as the spotlight hit him, he was standing in the center aisle of the auditorium.

The entire illusion took just a few minutes, and Jarrett’s magical transportation seemed to occur in split seconds. Like the very best Jarrett mysteries, the Bangkok Bungalow involved a series of clever principles to throw the audience off the scent. The most amazing part of the routine involved the little house. It was just large enough—barely—to contain Guy Jarrett, curled up inside. Even though Thurston’s routine suggested that the house was just a part of the con game, for the final phase of the effect Jarrett actually hid inside the house. It was sixteen by eighteen inches square, and twenty-eight inches high, carefully constructed of thin wood and metal to give Jarrett as much room as possible inside.

As the assistants entered to remove the curtains, one of them held a metal hook at the end of a long, thin piano wire that was hanging from the grid of the theater. When the scene was carefully lit, the wire, like the wires used to fly actors in aerial ballets, was completely invisible to the audience. The hook was clipped to the top of the house. An offstage counterweight, on the other end of the wire, allowed Thurston to lift the house and carry it as if it weighed only several pounds. When he placed it in the wings, he was actually taking Jarrett offstage, though no one could possibly believe it.

Jarrett emerged from the house and ran around to the front of the theater, sneaking down the aisle in darkness as Thurston completed the trick. A few simple wire loops provided the shape in the curtain, suggesting that Jarrett was still hiding on the stage. “The people never notice me,” Jarrett explained, “for they are so intent upon the bulge in the curtains on the cabinet. My speed was incredible.” When Jarrett finally appeared in the auditorium, the audience had been completely conned.

 

 

JARRETT LASTED
just one season with Thurston. He didn’t have much regard for Thurston or his magic. In addition, he was angered that his name was never included in the program and that he wasn’t paid any extra money to build the illusions in Connecticut, before the tour had started. Jarrett never understood that Thurston was pinching pennies with all of his employees.

But Guy Jarrett’s failure also represents a missed opportunity. He should have developed a perfect rapport with the magician. Both were Ohio boys who learned their skills as carnival talkers, performing the roughest form of magic and promoting a number of uncouth shows. Jarrett wore these experiences as a badge of honor. Thurston had completely erased them from his history; as the boss and the star of the show, he now adopted a pose of superiority and sophistication to retain the upper hand.

Years later, when Jarrett wrote about Thurston, he recalled him as maddeningly cool and confusingly pretentious. “Thurston did not play the market,” Jarrett wrote. “No wine, women or song came into his life,” efficiently proving how little Jarrett knew about his employer. If Howard had dropped his guard, confessed his financial worries, and laughed about his sideshow days, he probably would have found a lifelong ally in the mercurial Guy Jarrett.

Kellar’s spies in the Thurston show didn’t provide him any peace of mind. Instead, they just gave him excuses to indulge his colorful temper. The old showman naturally played to his audience. “Kellar was so disappointed with the way Thurston botched up the show,” Jarrett wrote to a friend, “he would take me out to eat somewhere and sit and cuss.” After Jarrett’s season with the show, he worked in the back room of Clyde Powers’ Mysto Magic Shop on Broadway. When Kellar visited the shop, Jarrett showed him a new fishbowl production that he’d just invented. Kellar was so delighted with the craftsmanship that he paid thirty-five dollars, buying it for Thurston. He asked Jarrett to deliver it to Thurston when he next passed through New York.

Thurston arrived and Jarrett proudly showed him the prop that Kellar had bought for him, but Howard dismissed it. “Oh, I already have a bowl production, so if it’s the same to you, I’d rather take the same amount in little accessories that I can use in the show.” Jarrett waited until he saw Kellar again before pulling him aside and whispering, “I’m going to tell you something, and you are going to be sore as hell.” And, of course, he was. “Did he think I was just making him a present of a lousy thirty-five bucks?” Kellar roared. “I wanted him to have one good small trick in his show.”

Jarrett somehow had retained access to Thurston’s workshop in Whitestone; more than likely he had befriended the assistants and was allowed to visit and take a look at their latest projects. In 1915, when Thurston was developing a special illusion for the Miller Tire Company—an automobile tire that seemed to float in the air—Jarrett saw the awkward invention in Thurston’s shop. He made a few suggestions about improving it, which were promptly ignored, and he retaliated by selling his own version of the floating tire illusion to Kelly Springfield Tires. Of course, this served to ruin the novelty of Thurston’s illusion for Miller. It was an act of commercial espionage that hopelessly corroded Jarrett’s relationship with Thurston.

When Kellar met Bamberg in his workshop, and heard about Thurston’s plans for new illusions, he reddened and then quietly reached over to an ashtray. “You see this match?” he growled to Bamberg. “I wouldn’t waste it to burn down the whole damned Thurston show!”

 

 

FORTUNATELY,
Kellar was unaware of the real problem: Thurston’s debts had already surrounded him like a roaring inferno, licking at every investment and threatening to engulf his career. In August 1912, Thurston mortgaged the entire show to Hyman Fish, a New York commission salesman, for a quick $1,000. Included in the loan was a full accounting of the show, including the crates containing Kellar’s levitation, the props from Maskelyne and Devant, the Lion Cage, electric equipment, backdrops, tools, and Thurston’s personal trunks. Mr. Fish now owned it all, until Thurston paid it off—nearly one hundred cases, baskets, and crates—a train-car load of specialized equipment, the parts and pieces of the America’s greatest magic show.

Hyman Fish is a surprising name. He was convicted by the New York State Supreme Court in early 1915 for forging a set of books in conjunction with another 1912 loan, then charged again for perjury during the case. He was a loan shark. Apparently Fish was unrelated to Thurston’s business. When the magician found him, it was for the same reason anyone went to a loan shark: they’d reached the limit from friends, associates, and family members.

Howard Thurston had returned to America just five years earlier with $50,000—and he was a millionaire by today’s standards. Now he was forced to pawn one last property. And, of course, he couldn’t let any of his partners or acquaintances know what he’d just done, or have anyone in show business gossiping about such a loan. The situation suggests that Thurston may have simultaneously, dangerously, mortgaged the show for similar loans.

“Don’t worry, George. Never worry,” Thurston habitually advised his loyal assistant. Now he knew that he had to keep his eyes forward, trusting that one of his business ventures would succeed. Something would work. Something would finally pay off. After all, it couldn’t get any worse.

W
hen Thurston appeared at the Imperial Theater in Chicago in January 1912, he heard a knock on his dressing room door, and George White’s voice. “Governor, there’s someone here to see you.” The door opened slowly, and a sad, skeletal figure, wrapped in an oversize dress coat, tottered into the room. Thurston stood and quickly pushed his chair toward his guest. It was only when the old man looked up and smiled that he recognized Paul Valadon.

He’d been brought from the Cook County hospital so that he could see the show, but now Valadon was offering apologies. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to stay, and felt weak and dizzy. He was suffering from tuberculosis, penniless and homeless. The doctors told him that his only hope would be to move to a southern climate, but ... Valadon simply shook his head. It seemed to Thurston as if he’d completely given up.

That afternoon, Thurston sent a letter to
The Sphinx
:

In conjunction with Dr. Wilson, the editor of
The Sphinx
, Thurston established a Valadon Fund for his welfare. Thurston was the first contributor, offering $50, and then additional money as the months progressed. Members of Thurston’s company offered several dollars more, including one dollar from George White. Kellar contributed $100. When the cause was promoted by Will Goldston, a British magic editor, contributions were made from Maskelyne, Devant, and the performers who remembered him from Egyptian Hall.

Could Valadon have been a success with Kellar’s show? World War I would have sealed his fate with the American public, as Valadon’s German accent always identified him as an outsider. His style might also have doomed him; he had a classic approach to magic, favoring the purely Victorian wonders. His contemporaries, like Devant, Thurston, Bamberg, and Downs, had been working hard to modernize their shows.

Valadon and his young son, Paul Junior, were able to move to Phoenix in February, but their bad luck continued. In August 1912, the hotel they were staying at caught fire, and Valadon escaped the building with only his nightshirt. He was taken to a local tuberculosis hospital. Dr. Wilson warned his readers that his health was perilous and that further contributions should now be sent directly to the magician in Phoenix.