Paul Daniels (34 page)

The eight performances a week featured brilliant singer and impressionist Karen Kay who closed the first half with a superb Shirley Bassey number. Sometimes her son would turn up, a nice lad who grew up to become the world-famous pop star Jamiroquai. Jean-Claude with Yvette managed to juggle full-size footballer puppets, plus two footballs, with his feet while lying upside down. The Philippe Genty Company presented a dazzling array of black art and ultra-violet puppets.

In a very long run, there are so many stories. We were well into the run when, as usual, half-way through the magic and after a particularly good trick I walked forward and asked, ‘Any questions?’ This was a regular set-up as someone inevitably would ask, ‘How did you do that?’ and I would answer, ‘Beautifully.’ OK, it’s not the greatest gag in the world but it served a purpose at the time. On one show, however, a hand could be seen waving in the air when I asked if there were any questions. I pointed to the man underneath the hand and said, ‘Yes, sir. You have a question?’

A Middle Eastern gentleman stood up and said, ‘Excuse mee. Thees ees not
Eveeta
?’

This man had sat through the whole of the first half of the show, magic, puppets, foot jugglers, impressionist and the second half ’s opening dance and magic routines
in the wrong theatre.
As I explained that
Evita
was in the Prince Edward Theatre, the usherettes checked his ticket. He had been seated, coincidentally, in the only empty seat that exactly matched his ticket for the other place. The whole audience exploded in
laughter as I sang ‘Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina’ to him. I wonder if he ever got to see the real thing.

Several famous people came to see this show which was a real oddity in the West End, home of great drama and fabulous musicals. Sir Alec Guinness brought his grandchildren and when I announced in glowing terms that he was in the ‘house’, he wrote me a lovely letter saying that, like the rest of the audience, he was craning his neck to see who I was talking about and was very appreciative that it turned out to be himself.

I am rarely thrown but my heart missed a beat when I entered one night to see Michael Caine’s so very famous face sitting dead centre of row C in the stalls. It kind of puts you off when someone you admire so much comes in to see you.

Another night you would have found me sitting in my dressing room after a performance totally dumbfounded and only able to come out with ‘But I … but I … but I …’ like an idiot. The problem was the woman in my room who was raving about my performance and demanding to know why I had never appeared in America and so on. My problem was that I had never met a star of the magnitude of Ingrid Bergman who was in to see the show with her daughter. Eventually I found a talking point. I had met Gladys Aylward, the amazing missionary, when I was in Hong Kong and Ingrid Bergman had played her in the film
Inn of the Sixth Happiness.
Miss Bergman was such a fan I should have made her my agent.

One of the great sadnesses was to get a letter from a man who had really enjoyed the show but I never got to meet him. When I read the letter, I dashed round to the front of house and they confirmed that they had had a man in a wheelchair (not easy to do in the Prince of Wales Theatre) two nights before. They had not recognised him, so I never got to meet James Cagney, for that was who it was.

For a magic show to be entertaining, you don’t really need big illusions and in many cases people prefer the smaller magic. As a small boy, I remember seeing The Great Levante, an Australian illusionist, use a block of wood, threaded on to a piece of rope and when it magically came off you could hear a great gasp of surprise from his audience just before the applause came. You had to be there because you can’t explain why the surprise was so great. Timing, I guess. Similarly, I know I can entertain several thousand people at a time with just a cup and ball routine. Most magicians have had the trick or tried it out at some time but it’s the presentation that is vital, not the size of the trick. I studied the classics like the ‘Chinese’ Linking Rings. With some of the tricks, when I was in a long run or a season of shows, I would actually try to lose the audience and then bring them back again by changing the timing.

It’s a fact that illusions are far harder to perform than sleight of hand or close-up magic. A lot of the public would probably find that hard to believe and there are even a number of magicians who won’t buy it either. The reasoning behind the thought is simple. When performing a big illusion, the audience is watching you top to toe, arm to arm, the full image, rather than just looking at your hands. The rhythm and timing of your body doesn’t matter so much in close-up, the audience are looking at the trick. On stage, it’s a totally different ball game. The whole scene has to be ‘sold’ to an audience.

Whenever I have designed a full evening magic show I have always included illusions. You ‘pays your money’, you should see as wide a range of entertaining magic as I can put together for you. Several illusions were featured in
It’s Magic
at the Prince of Wales including a dramatic
Star Wars
levitation, which closed the show each night. Lying flat on a flashing metallic box, I was covered with a silver sheet by the chief ‘space-man’, one of three creating the effect. As the chief space-man raised his arms,
the music intensified and my body rose six feet in the air, as the metallic box was removed.

Floating, literally in space, deep tones boomed out over the auditorium, ‘ladies and gentlemen, what you are about to see, you will remember for the rest of your life!’

With this, the chief space-man pulled the silver cloth off my body. I had instantaneously vanished!

The chief space-man walked forwards to centre-stage, took his space helmet off and I said, ‘ladies and gentlemen, I hope you’ve enjoyed my show. Goodnight!’

Originally booked for its single-week run,
It’s Magic
opened on 10 December 1980 and ran for 15 months. It was the only production in the history of the Prince of Wales Theatre where every critic praised the show and it closed on 6 February 1982. During that time, I had also made several training films for banks on the recent innovation of credit cards, a couple of television series and was a BBC Radio 2 disc jockey on Sundays for six months. Oh, yes, I was also on radio with a quiz called
Dealing with Daniels.
Having appeared at nearly 500 consecutive stage performances as well, no wonder I was tired, but the bookings were still very strong. I desperately needed a holiday and asked to take two weeks out, even offering to return with a completely new show.

It was decided by Delfonts that it would not be possible to keep the theatre ‘dark’ for a fortnight, as it would cost far too much money. I decided to leave and handed in my notice. It had been a fabulous time of my life. Towards the end of the run, there was some discussion with an American producer who wanted to take the show to Broadway. This wasn’t any old producer, this was Alex Cohen, who was about as big as you can get.

He came to see a matinee performance and out I sailed on to the stage as usual. By now a couple of the acts had moved on
and I was doing a bit more magic. The show was flying. In the second half, I got two men on to the stage and I asked them where they were from and what they did for a living. One came from Yorkshire but he had a wonderful suntan, which raised a laugh and I played around with that for a while. Then he told me that he had worked in Saudi Arabia and I expected him to be in the oil business.

‘No, I train Arab pilots to attack Israel.’

You could feel the audience cool off immediately and I was well aware that Alex Cohen would not be a Methodist. I didn’t make any gags about it (would you?) and simply moved on with the cogs whirring in my brain trying to arrive at a way to reverse this state of affairs.

About ten minutes later in the act, I always whip out a dishevelled handkerchief and normally say something about them also making these in white. On this occasion, I said to the pilot trainer, ‘You’ll recognise this, it’s an Arab flag.’ The audience roared at the ten-minute-late response and probably thought that I had worked it out, but it was just an ad-lib.

At the end of the show, I gave a farewell curtain speech as usual and said, ‘that’s it, ladies and gentlemen. I do hope that you have enjoyed a wonderful afternoon with us here at the Prince of Wales Theatre. If you have, then you must tell all your friends that you have. If you have not, then you must tell all of your friends that you have.’ A laugh.

‘And there’s something else you must do. You will remember that when I came on, I asked where you were all from. What a mixture we had today. We had Russians and Americans, Iranians and Iraqis and even a gentleman volunteer on stage who said that his job was to train pilots to attack Israel and I know that we will have Jewish people sitting out there. In other words, we have had just about every warring faction in the world sitting in this theatre. When you all go home to your various countries,
will you please tell everyone, and remember for yourselves, that this afternoon you all laughed together?’

Alex Cohen was in my dressing room faster than I was.

‘That was amazing, that was wonderful. Do you always give that curtain speech?’

‘No, Alex, only when you’re in the house.’

I went to America to have a look at New York but the idea never came to fruition because it would have meant staying in America for whole year. They wouldn’t accept a shorter contract and I had big family ties in England and I didn’t want to be stuck anywhere for a year. I wasn’t disappointed; I had enjoyed the London run enormously.

I went to work in Las Vegas instead. The way I got the booking was interesting. Mervyn and Howard went to Los Angeles to try to see agents who would get me into Las Vegas. I wanted to go there because I wanted to find out whether Americans thought I was funny. Don’t ask me why this was important to me. I don’t know. Maybe it was because the BBC had said that they wouldn’t sell my shows there as they had been told that I was ‘too fast for the Americans to understand me when I spoke’.

Mervyn telephoned me and said they were having no success so I suggested that they go to Vegas and find the equivalent of a working men’s club’s concert secretary. ‘Somebody in the casinos must do the booking of the acts.’ They went to the Tropicana and, sure enough, there was a man responsible for booking acts. He agreed to see them and they left him a video to watch. That evening he put it on but went to the bathroom to get ready to go out. His wife watched it and called him back in. She thought I was funny so I got the job, a month in
The Folies-Bergère Show
at the Tropicana Hotel. More than that, because of my track record I got a really unusual contract for the time, I was down to do a 35-minute spot when nobody got more than ten minutes.

I went out to Los Angeles two weeks early with Joyce, my secretary, Mervyn and Howard. Joyce Waldeck was easily the best secretary anyone ever had except for one thing – she wouldn’t learn computers. Somehow, that didn’t matter and she did, very simply, point out one of the great reasons many people are frightened of the machines: ‘I have never wanted to process words, I only want to write letters.’

One of the national daily newspapers sent a reporter and photographer with us to cover the trip. We nicknamed him ‘scoop’. The first day’s coverage was so ridiculous with a story about me leaving home in the early hours of the morning accompanied by a mysterious woman in black with black stockings. There were also two dark-jowled ‘heavies’ with me, obviously there as bodyguards. This was quite a description for a small conjurer, his secretary, his manager and his fixer, none of whom would have said ‘boo’ to a goose. Ah, the wonders of journalistic fiction.

The reason for going early was to ‘learn’ the language. Just as years before I had learnt that all areas of the UK have different rhythms and dialects, I knew that America would be the same. An example of this was when I used to call home.

‘Good morning, how can I help you?’

‘I’d like to speak to London, England, please.’

‘Certainly, sir, may I have your name?’

‘Daniels.’

‘Could you spell that for me, please?’

Every day I would spell my name until, after a week, the operator said my name back to me after I had spelt it, and I heard the difference. The next day the conversation went almost the same.

‘Good morning, how can I help you?’

‘I’d like to speak to London, England, please.’

‘Certainly, sir, may I have your name?’

In ‘American’ I said, ‘Dayniyells.’

I was put straight through without being asked to spell my name.

From that moment on, I changed the pronunciation of the vowels and realised why the French teacher, way back at school, had tried to get us to create the vowel sounds over and over again. It is the sound of the vowels, not the consonants, that make the ‘sound’ of the language. So the Tropicahna (English) became the nasal Tropicayna (American). There were other rhythm and sound changes but I’m sure you get the idea.

We moved from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. Some acts go there and become gamblers. Not me. I took one look at the incredible display of hotels, casinos and lights with the greatest performers and shows in the world and thought to myself, ‘Nobody pays for this but losers.’

Another week of language acclimatisation and the day before I was due to open, I went to the Tropicana and found my way backstage. A man with a clipboard, who turned out to be one of the many assistant stage managers, asked me to leave because the public are not allowed into the performers’ area. I told him my name and that I was to open there the next night. He checked his board.

‘Right, Dayniyells. Magician. Right?’

I agreed that I was and he yelled, ‘OK, FELLAS, OPEN THE DOORS, WE GOT A MAGICIAN COMING IN.’

The shows in Vegas are enormous. If you haven’t been you cannot begin to imagine how huge the scenery is or how much of it there can be. On his command, the tallest, widest doors that I have ever seen slid open and a line of stagehands stood looking out of the gap into the bright sunshine. Me, too. I didn’t know what was happening so I stood on the end of the line and looked with them.