Jim Steinmeyer (32 page)

Thurston and Leotha were married on November 5, 1914, in a simple ceremony at Niagara Falls.

 

 

LEOTHA’S INFLUENCE
on the show was immediate. The famously meticulous producer, Ziegfeld, was the inspiration, and John Willadsen, her first husband, provided the example, for she now fulfilled some of the duties of a company manager. Leotha insisted on new scenery and suggested new costumes from Lenore Schulz, a seamstress and friend of Leotha’s. Thurston’s new wife offered an attention to detail that Thurston had always lacked—the complaint of Kellar, Bamberg, and Jarrett. Whenever she visited the show, Leotha watched from the front row or a box.

Thurston acknowledged her in the audience with their own special “love code,” a simple gesture of holding up his hand and crossing his first two fingers as he smiled in her direction. Leotha sat with a pad of paper balanced on her knee. She would scribble notes—a drape that had not been hung straight, a hinge that squeaked, a costume that needed pressing, or an assistant who needed a haircut. This pad was then handed backstage to Thurston at the end of the show for a formal critique. A visitor to the show recalled a typical “school session”:

A smudge on an assistant’s pants would start a chain of finger pointing. If the assistant had brushed against a dirty prop, was it the assistant’s fault, the wardrobe department’s fault, or the property man’s? Every problem was addressed and solved for the next performance. The process was later expanded, adding pads backstage to record problems during the performance. These school sessions—reading and discussing Leotha’s notes—made everything better, and her influence gradually pushed away the last cobwebs of Kellar’s stodgy Victorian magic show. Thurston’s production was put on a trajectory where it could compete with Broadway’s touring reviews.

Bamberg noticed a new efficiency to the production. For a Detroit matinee, Thurston’s show arrived late at the theater, at one p.m. for a two-thirty matinee. As the trucks were being unloaded, there were already people in line at the box office. Theo objected that it would be impossible to have the show ready. Thurston smiled. “Watch my system, and time exactly when the curtain rises.” Thurston’s fourteen assistants worked in a sort of precise ballet: the show’s switchboard was brought backstage, backdrops were unloaded and hung, and tons of apparatus was uncrated and assembled. Thurston stepped into the dressing room just three minutes before the show, knowing that George White had unpacked his clothing and makeup. The curtain went up twenty-five minutes late; illusions in the second act of the show were still being assembled backstage during the first half. Theo was dumbfounded that this massive show could be handled so efficiently.

Like all of the magician’s friends, Theo noticed that this marriage was different. Leotha’s independence seemed to earn her special respect from her husband. Unlike his previous wives, she didn’t rely on him for friendship or her career. He listened to her advice and doted on her wishes.

And then there was the little girl, Jane, whom Howard formally adopted. He was delighted to suddenly become a father. He wrote letters to his “Jane Girl” nightly, sent trifling gifts back from the road, or, failing that, enclosed dollar bills or funny poems. On stage, he increasingly found opportunities to mention her during the show. “What is your name?” he’d ask a little girl from the audience. “I have a daughter named Jane. She’s a little younger than you are. She takes after her dad. I suppose you take after your dad. All nice girls take after their dad.” And then Thurston would glance over the footlights at the little girl’s father. “Don’t they, Dad?”

The audience laughed. If Jane was in the audience, she giggled with delight at being mentioned from the stage. Thurston intended it as a simple joke, of course, and never realized just how much little Jane would take after her dad.

W
hen Fredrick Keating was a teenager, he ran away from home to join a magic show. He’d studied card tricks and fancied himself a card manipulator, and of course, Thurston was his idol.

Thurston rejected the boy several times, instructing his company manager to put him on a train and send him back to his mother. But when Keating left Peekskill Military Academy and arrived backstage in Bridgeport, Connecticut, dirty, hungry, and still in his military uniform, Thurston tried another tact. “Give him a dollar a day,” he told his company manager, “and see that he damn well earns it!”

Keating earned it by painting props, distributing playbills, cleaning Thurston’s shoes, and catching Fernanda as she fell through a trapdoor beneath the stage, so that seconds later, he could close her into a trunk that was shoved back through a different trapdoor. This was the understage action of the Triple Mystery, and it earned bruises for both Fernanda and Keating. He also washed the ducks—Thurston used a bit of Hindustani, calling him the keeper of the ducks, “my duck-wallah.”

One of Thurston’s opening tricks was called Birds of the Air. Thurston would stand on the stage and swing a long-handled butterfly net; a white pigeon would appear in the net, as if it became visible the moment it was caught. The bird was dropped into a small cage that George was holding in his hands. This was repeated, producing two more birds.

Birds of the Air was an ingenious mechanical trick using a trick net and trick cages. Thurston had devised a special finale to punctuate the mystery. He would step down into the audience, as if spotting an invisible bird over the audience’s head. Standing in the aisle, he swung the net. His stooge, sitting next to him in a theater seat, had a pigeon concealed in his cap, holding it in his lap. When Thurston swung his net in a low arc, the stooge would drop the bird inside, so that the audience saw the bird as the net reached the top of the swing and was illuminated by the spotlight. One of Keating’s jobs was to be that stooge, with a pigeon in his cap, sitting in his seat at the start of the show.

One evening, it all went wrong. Keating left the stage door with a bird in his cap and hit a patch of ice on the pavement. The cap flew from his hands, and the dove skidded on the ice. Luckily, its wings were clipped. He chased the bird around the ice, tumbling head over heels as he lunged for it. By the time he had the exhausted bird back in his clutches, the boy was scratched and panting. He dashed for the entrance of the theater, but Thurston’s manager wasn’t there to let him in. The local house manager didn’t recognize him and wanted a ticket. The boy gave him a shove and careened through the lobby.

As Keating reached the back of the aisle, his heart sank. He was too late. The show had started. Thurston was standing in the auditorium, waving the net helplessly. “Anyone but him would have simply gone on with the next trick,” Keating later wrote. “But not Howard Thurston.”

“Welcome home!” he snarled at Keating as he took his seat. By now, of course, the trick was botched, but Thurston wouldn’t give up. He signaled for the orchestra to stop.

By now, the audience was in on the game. They laughed at each line as Keating slouched lower and lower into his seat. Thurston pointed a melodramatic finger at the boy, and his voice hardened to a comically icy accusation.

Thurston planted his feet, swung the net, and shouted, “Now!” Keating flipped the bird into the net and the audience erupted in cheers. Not a single person had been fooled, but each one had been privileged to watch Thurston’s improvised lecture. “The audience loved it,” Keating recalled.

Many people used the analogy of a minister, a man of great personal warmth and good humor, but also great dignity. Howard Thurston’s show was now filled with bubbling humor, from start to finish, although Thurston never told a joke. He presided over a magical party.

For example, the Rising Card Trick now accommodated bits of unexpected humor. When Thurston had asked for the name of a card, a stooge sitting in the balcony loudly called for the joker. Thurston dismissed him, saying “No joker,” as if he’d been caught, and couldn’t perform the trick with the joker. But the man in the balcony loudly repeated the request, causing the magician to roll his eyes. “Yes, the balcony is filled with jokers,” Thurston quipped.

Thurston asked the name of a small boy in the front row and had him stand on his seat. “I say, Gilbert,” he started, “place your hand very gently on top of father’s head. Now, don’t disturb father’s hair. You know, I want father to be happy. I want him to be proud of you and I want him to have a good time. Now raise your hand in the air and say, ‘Rise, Ace of Clubs.’”

The boy did it, but nothing happened. “That’s strange. Gilbert, just take a firm hold of father’s hair. Hold tight because I want dad to be happy. Say, ‘Rise, Ace of Clubs.’” The card started to appear. “Now Gilbert, just pull on father’s hair. Pull, pull, pull, pull, pull!” And as the little boy pulled, he seemed to make the magic, causing the card to float out of the deck.

When the joker rose from the deck, Thurston instructed someone else in the front row to tell the card to rise. “Go down,” the voice from the balcony interrupted. And, on cue, the card descended. “Rise, rise,” Thurston countered. The card began to rise. “Whoa,” the stooge yelled, and the card froze in midair.

Once Thurston had established his conflict with the mysterious man in the balcony, the situation led to further comedy. An hour into the show, when Thurston was presenting the Spirit Cabinet, the lights were lowered to a mysterious blue haze. “I shall now present the spirit that controlled Katie King more than forty years ago,” Thurston intoned. A gauzy, luminous face appeared floating in the cabinet, sending a collective shudder through the audience. Thurston continued, with a hypnotic purr:

There was an uncomfortable pause, and then the stooge in the balcony yelled, “Turn on those lights!”

“A magician is an actor playing the part of a magician,” the famous nineteenth-century conjurer Jean Robert-Houdin explained. Thurston had managed something even more remarkable. He played the part of a gentleman, businessman, entrepreneur, and a pillar of society who was a magician.

Thurston charmed his audiences as the dapper man in the tuxedo standing at the edge of the stage, with his hand raised in supplication—the gatekeeper between the comically ordinary, doubting rabble in the audience, and the rarefied wonders and profound magic just beyond the curtain. Howard Thurston was clearly part of both worlds, and the show consisted of him mediating between the two. What audiences may not have realized was that the real-world comments and reactions had been as carefully planned and plotted as the marvels of magic within the spotlight.

His audience assembled clues about his personality and came to their own conclusions about his respectability and probity, which was part of his incredible deception. Even young Keating, who worked with him for a season and befriended him in later years, got it wrong.

His audience—indeed, even Fred Keating—could never have imagined him as a poorly educated street urchin, a carnival confidence man, a failed performer whiling his time on a Union Square park bench, or a magician so desperate that he would pawn his entire show to a loan shark. Those were the real secrets. Once he proved himself a great magician, fame had insulated him from his past.

Keating lasted one season with the show, and did, indeed, learn a lot about magic. On Thanksgiving, as the show passed through Trenton, New Jersey, Leotha, Jane, and Howard hosted Keating’s mother at a local restaurant. The Thurstons knew that she had been ill; they planned the entire day carefully and treated her grandly—inviting her to the show, where she was presented with roses and introduced to the audience as the “mother of the future world’s greatest magician.” After the show, Thurston told her confidentially, “If Fredrick wants to be a magician, let him. Neither you nor anyone else can stop him.” Keating’s mother died shortly after that meeting. “I think she died happy,” Keating later wrote, “because she had sensed something of the beauty, of the drama, of what I saw in magic.”