Jim Steinmeyer (33 page)

 

 

DURING HIS SEASON
with the show, Keating also learned about his boss’s sense of humor. Howard Thurston was an inveterate practical joker, and his magisterial presence only made the situations funnier. For example, shortly after Keating joined the show, the boy was sent on an urgent mission from backstage. He dashed down the street, one theater to another, to locate the “key to the curtain,” so that they could begin the performance. Every theater manager seemed to play straight man to Thurston’s practical joke, listening earnestly to the boy’s request, sadly noting that their key wouldn’t fit, and sending the frantic boy to the next auditorium.

Thurston’s patter often displayed his sense of irony. “Surakabaja,” the Hindustani word that Thurston uttered endlessly during the levitation, was, his friends recorded, an unprintable, and physically impossible, command that he had learned in India. One of Thurston’s scripted lines explained, “Surakabaja means, among other things, that those who love shall be loved,” which was a sly acknowledgment of the real meaning. Similarly, in one illusion his script refers to the lady assistant as “Eileen.” But there was no Eileen in the cast. The trick was accomplished when the lady would secretly lean out of the way to avoid a sharp blade; hence “I lean.”

He similarly used words that he had learned in his Masonic initiations, sprinkling his patter with impressive-sounding spells and winking at all of his brother Masons.

 

 

IN 1915,
Thurston finally managed to sell the farm in Cos Cob at a loss. Leotha Thurston searched for a home closer to New York City and located a cottage near the water’s edge at Whitestone Landing, Beechhurst, Long Island, across the East River from Manhattan. When Howard saw the lot, he was shocked to realize that it was on the property owned by Alexander Herrmann, whose mansion had been across the street. To him it was one of those incredible premonitions. They moved into the cottage on the property and the following year built a large, three-story house there.

Beechhurst was a small suburban community that had become a haven for a number of actors and theatrical producers. Leotha supervised the grounds and the furnishings, splitting her time between the show and the family’s new property. Jane was alternately neglected and spoiled. For most of the year, she was sent away to boarding schools—first to the nuns at Mount Saint Agnes College in Baltimore and then at the Academy of the Holy Child in Manhattan. Leotha offered the nuns gifts whenever she passed through town—candy, handkerchiefs, and, at least once, according to Jane’s recollections, black silk negligees. Mrs. Thurston had a surprising, bubbly sense of humor to match her husband’s, but Jane noticed that there was no joke intended by the presents. The nuns seemed very happy to accept these provocative garments.

Jane received daily letters from her mother and father; when she was old enough to write responses, her parents harangued Jane when they didn’t hear from her—when she didn’t report on her classes, or grades, or her health. “To my blue-eyed violet,” Leotha addressed her letters, “From her brown-eyed Susan, Mother.”

“Dear Jane Girl,” Thurston used to start his letters, often counting down the days until they’d see her again. “Only two more days. Mother is here helping with the new water act. It is beautiful. Mother will call you Saturday. Love, love and a kiss. Daddy.”

Her happiest times were the summers, when Jane’s school was out of session and her father was home. Then the Beechhurst home became a beehive of activity. Illusions were repaired or built at a nearby warehouse. Blanche Williams, the sometime wardrobe mistress of the show, became the family’s maid and nanny; Abdul, the somber dark-skinned Indian who prayed during the levitation, was the family’s butler, answering the door with a solemn sense of duty and silently circling the rooms to polish the furniture. George White was available to play with Jane, perform songs on a guitar, apply bandages to her cuts and scrapes, and repair her toys.

Thurston indulged Jane with tricks, practical jokes, and stories about the little red devils on his posters. “Hocus Pocus” and “Conjurokus” were the good little devils, he told her, and “Beelzebub” was the one who made the trouble. Thurston’s qualities as a father came naturally to him and seem to have developed from his work with children on stage—in many ways, each performance in which he invited a boy or girl on stage and then charmed them with his magic had served as an audition for his life with Jane.

“My greatest thrill is standing on the run-down [from the stage to the aisle of the theater], watching the swaying, happy children screaming with delight, and I often tell my audiences that our show is for children from four to ninety-four,” Thurston wrote. “I think it is my deep affection for Jane which makes me delight so in the company of children. She has revealed to me all the beauty and glory of the child mind.”

Since 1908, when he was called to entertain at the sickbed of a little girl in Atlantic City, Thurston regularly sought out orphaned or hospitalized children. He started traveling to the institutions with a suitcase of tricks, and then, by the late teens, turned the procedure on its ear. Now he offered special matinees at his theaters exclusively for these children, performing his full show of marvels. The children were brought in donated cars, buses, and ambulances; the aisles were often filled with children on stretchers. At a time when polio was still a scourge, it was not uncommon for individual hospitals or hospital wards to be devoted exclusively to crippled children. Thurston was eager to perform these benefit shows, and they earned him headlines in every city.

 

 

HARRY THURSTON
had a different approach.

He owned thriving dime museums in Chicago, Indianapolis, and Cleveland. These were storefront assortments of seamy entertainment in the worst part of the city. “Freaks and strange people” were regularly featured on the program. Slot machines lined the walls. And initiates knew that they should ask for the back room, where the Maid of Mystery—the failed coin-operated attraction—had found an ignominious new home. Harry’s solution was simple. Inside was a naked lady, who writhed and wriggled as the coin-operated shutters fluttered up and down. “She may have been wearing shoes,” one fan of the attraction later speculated.

Harry and his wife, Isabel, and daughter, Helen, lived briefly in Cleveland but established their home in Chicago, where Harry bought and sold commercial real estate.

Harry and Howard Thurston had both started in show business as virtually the same person, sharing the same shady carnival businesses. But Howard’s distinct skills differentiated him. Harry never really changed. He was something of a genius of downtown museums and strip shows, wearing every scar and stain from his career. He had become a big-city con man, a notorious wheeler-dealer in Chicago’s First Ward, who skirted the edges of the law and paid off the police. One of his best friends in Chicago was Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna, the notoriously crooked First Ward alderman who had organized the graft-ridden First Ward Ball.

Howard’s success meant that he had been gradually repaying loans to his brother, although he still relied upon him to warehouse his illusions above one of Harry’s Chicago dime museums. But Howard’s success had also emboldened his brother, and Harry’s advertisements gradually incorporated the word
magic
into various attractions. His new Chicago museum was titled Thurston’s World Museum, and the publicity boasted that it was managed by the brother of the famous magician.

Howard resisted criticizing his brother—who had financed the show many times—but Thurston’s World Museum was too much to endure. He sent a long letter pointing out his own efforts as a family entertainer, a Broadway star, and America’s popular magician. Harry sent a grudging response to his older brother:

The last statement, of course, was a mere technicality. Howard was happy to know that his little brother was flush; he didn’t actually want to think about how he was making his money.

 

 

IN 1917,
Kellar sent Howard Thurston a warm letter from Los Angeles, congratulating him on a full decade since their first association.

It was wonderful advice from one of the few magicians who retired wealthy. Unfortunately, Thurston didn’t follow it. One of his most costly schemes was about to leave the door open for his main competitor in the magic field, Harry Houdini.

It had started, innocently enough, with Thurston’s special effects business. Capitalizing on their success with Mile a Minute for the Shubert show, Thurston and McCormick went on to produce the effect in a short vaudeville play. Thurston patented a smaller version, a race between a motorcycle and a car, and incorporated it into Thurston’s 1917 show. It was a “raincoat and whiskers” play called
Villa Captured
.

During
Villa Captured
, George White played Poncho Villa, the Mexican rebel who was featured in newspaper accounts. George wore a handlebar mustache, a sombrero, and crossed bandoliers. The play was two simple scenes. A policeman raced to Villa’s hideout to find the notorious Mexican bandit. Then Thurston’s lighting effects portrayed the chase down the mountain. The motorcycle and car arrived onstage at the same time, but Villa seemed to have escaped. The characters tossed off their costumes, revealing that Villa, now in a magical disguise, had actually been captured.

Villa Captured
meant very little in the magic show, but it inspired Thurston, who had been tinkering with different automobile effects. He patented an elaborate auto race, in which multiple autos would race around the stage, entering from the right, whizzing across the stage, and exiting on the left. A motion picture screen, in the center of the stage, synchronized the action, giving the impression that the audience was watching the cars as they reached the far side of the track, in the distance, and then returned for another lap.

It was just the sort of overblown, impractical idea they were looking for at the New York Hippodrome. The Hippodrome on Sixth Avenue was the largest theater in the country, an enormous white elephant that dwarfed almost anything that was put on its stage. At its premiere in 1905, the first production was titled
A Yankee Circus on Mars
, which allowed the producers to pitch a full-sized circus tent on stage as well as creating science fiction fantasy lands—that was the sort of desperate madness that was required to fill the stage. Later productions included earthquakes, a baseball game, Civil War battles, air battles, and even sea battles (when the massive stage was withdrawn, revealing the water tank). All of Broadway knew that the new producer, R. H. Burnside, was desperate for new ideas, any sort of sensation that could form the center-piece for the next Hippodrome show.

Burnside had seen Thurston’s auto race in
The Honeymoon Express
. Coincidentally, the Hippodrome had staged a show in 1907 called
The Auto Race
, which was something of a flop, as the actual race was just a disappointment. Now Thurston proposed something much more ambitions. His cars would be full-sized lightweight cars attached to long arms that moved at a center point, like the hands of a clock. Motors in the center of the stage were supposed to keep the cars spinning.

Thurston filed a patent for the new auto race, and the legal papers suggest numerous, desperate solutions to make the invention work. For example, the cars lost momentum as they reached the back of the stage, so stagehands were forced to push the cars up an incline so that they could gain speed before the arms pulled them around to their next entrance. The effect worked just fine in the scale of a model. That’s how Burnside saw it and approved it. But when Thurston’s mechanics returned to Whitestone and started building it full-sized, they faced an onslaught of mechanical problems.

In 1917, Guy Jarrett sent a note to Burnside with a very good idea: “Startle press and public alike by vanishing an elephant.” Burnside instantly called him in. This was the perfect idea for the Hippodrome, who already had a group of performing elephants, often engaged for their elaborate productions. Jarrett demonstrated his trick with a model, a derby hat standing in for the elephant. He fooled Burnside with it, and Burnside considered the idea for several weeks. The temperamental Guy Jarrett probably didn’t help his cause when he refused to leave Burnside with the model, making it clear that he suspected the producer would steal the idea. Burnside finally told Jarrett that he didn’t need him, as he would be featuring the Thurston auto race. Those were the magic words that, to Jarrett, were like a red rag to a bull.

Jarrett returned to the Hippodrome after the opening of the next show to razz the management about their failure. But they had the last laugh. Jarrett was surprised to hear, the next season, that a new show called
Cheer Up!
would feature Houdini and his Vanishing Elephant. Jarrett naturally felt that the idea had been stolen from him. But Charles Morritt, an inventive British magician, had also suggested the trick to Houdini. More than likely, the Hippodrome engagement was the result of a conversation between Burnside, quoting Jarrett, and Houdini, quoting Morritt.