Jim Steinmeyer (14 page)

Robinson must have known about the reporter all along—as the stage manager, he must have seen him. Was Robinson’s intention to humiliate Herrmann? He later complained that Thurston had been ungrateful, and Herrmann vindictive. “I done it all against Herrmann’s wishes, also our manager’s. They raised hell to think I would do such a thing. Well, I had hell every day for months, and all on account of doing a good turn for a dirty loafer.” Early in 1899, he and Dot quit the show. It was the best decision Robinson ever made.

After the Robinsons left, the Herrmann show rattled apart. Less than a year later, Adelaide Herrmann had lost all her patience with her nephew and developed her own act. It made her a star and began a long successful career for this famous woman magician.

Several years later, Leon adopted the billing “Herrmann the Great,” promptly generating a lawsuit from Adelaide. Herrmann the Great was the title of her husband, she insisted. The judge was confused by the case, reasoning that Herrmann was Leon’s real name and he could use his own discretion if he wanted to call himself great. Leon put together a shorter act and then returned to Europe several years later. He was just forty-two years old when he contracted pneumonia and died in Paris in 1909.

When Thurston walked out of the Tabor Grand, he was only months from real stardom. The
Denver Post
article disappointed Thurston, but he and Grace managed to concoct a billing, “The Man Who Mystified Herrmann,” from the headline. It proved to be just enough of a boast to call attention to the handsome new card magician, the modest snowball that began rolling down the hill. By the time they arrived in New York in 1899, they were in the middle of a new sort of avalanche, called vaudeville.

H
arry Thurston settled back in his easy chair and lifted a glass of beer. “To my big brother, the great magician!” He then let out a small laugh that made Howard and Grace slightly uncomfortable. As Howard tipped his glass, he realized that problem was inevitable—Grace had to meet Harry sometime. But Harry’s freewheeling conversation had worked Howard to the edge of his seat: he would ask about Howard’s business—the take in the mining towns, or the sideshow attractions in Denver—and then suddenly lose focus, interrupting the answer with some embarrassing story from their past. “Remember how we tished those showgirls in St. Louis?” he’d chuckle. “I worked with that little blonde from the kootch show. The one you liked. She’s still got some moves, lemme tell you!”

A warm spring breeze was blowing off Lake Michigan, and Harry’s downtown apartment offered a beautiful view of Chicago. But Grace couldn’t take her eyes off her strange brother-in-law. He definitely resembled her husband, and even spoke with the same warm, nasal hum. But Harry was fatter, coarser, and nastier. His words were slurred and sprinkled with street slang; his interests were narrowly focused, from dime museum attractions to petty crime. He exhibited all of Howard’s worst traits, and Grace waited, in vain, for any of the redeeming qualities. “During the years that followed I never became friendly with Harry,” Grace wrote, “and he never showed much enthusiasm for me, either. Proving, perhaps, that first impressions are important.”

Harry had returned to the Midwest and worked for a season as a bill poster for Ringling Brothers Circus. He settled in Chicago and began buying interests in dime museums, the cheap little urban sideshows that had served as the last refuge for his big brother: ten, twelve, sixteen short shows a day, in quick rotation. Harry’s dime museums naturally focused on the Oriental kootch dancers and supplemented the shows with games of chance and slot machines.

Harry was making money, and a reunion with him was a small sacrifice to inspire his largesse. Howard hinted about a little loan, and discreetly asked about booking their act in the Midwest. Harry was only too happy to help; his check, and his promise that he knew the slickest agents in Chicago, were his upper hand in a friendly game of sibling rivalry. Thanks to Harry, a Chicago agent gave Howard and Grace a short tour of small cities through Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio.

With their new bookings, Thurston ordered fancy new posters from the Donaldson Litho Company of Newport, Kentucky. The pretty one-sheet stone lithograph was printed in full color and portrayed the scene backstage at the Tabor Grand, as Thurston performed before Herrmann with his Rising Cards. Their new letterhead advertised “America’s Premier Card Manipulator,” “The Man Who Mystified Herrmann,” as well as “Texola, Comedy Buck Dancer.”

They arrived in New York City in the summer of 1899 and settled into a cheap boardinghouse on Lexington Avenue. Harry Houdini was also in New York that summer and renewed his acquaintance with Thurston. Houdini’s career had almost paralleled Thurston’s, from their earliest meeting at Chicago’s Columbian Exposition. They had both been mired in small-time show business—Houdini had toured with a circus and specialized in dime museum shows—and were poised for imminent success. Houdini was naturally circumspect of Thurston, who had been working small towns out west, virtually unnoticed by any other performers. After Houdini’s own failure as the “King of Cards,” it was typical of his personality that he scoffed at Thurston’s achievements and still felt possessive of the Back Palm and card flourishes.

Even worse, the New York agents continued to doubt Thurston. The sleight of hand impressed them, but invariably he was told that card tricks were far too small and cheap for the stage—it was the sort of thing only suitable for a garden party or a men’s clubroom. Thurston realized that the act needed an audience; if only the agents could have seen how it worked for the rough-and-tumble miners in the tar-paper saloons of Montana, they would have been convinced.

Grace’s blackface tap-dancing act was an easier sale. A pretty, perky little minstrel was still fashionable at the end of the century. She was offered a job at Heck and Avery’s, a New York dime museum, and Howard reluctantly agreed that she should accept.

Thurston spent his evenings sitting in Union Square, waiting for Grace to finish her turns, deftly practicing his card sleights with his arm tossed over the back of a park bench. He was there in July, on his thirtieth birthday, feeling sorry for himself, surrounded by the twinkling electric lights that outlined the theaters on Broadway, and imagining his own name illuminated brightly. He felt all the more foolish for reaching middle age with such adolescent fantasies. Thurston recalled watching the Broadway swells pass him by, “wishing I could go to Dennett’s, for a cup of coffee or a plate of griddle cakes; but I did not have enough money even for this indulgence.” One evening, a stout man with a sparse brush mustache and tortoiseshell glasses, stopped and introduced himself. He hadn’t recognized the magician, but he recognized the card moves. He was a fan of magic himself, a writer for the
New York World
. John Northern Hilliard was Thurston’s age; he shared his recollections of great magicians he had seen and offered encouragement for Howard’s efforts.

Thurston received another invitation to audition for two agents, this time on a Monday morning at the roof garden at the New York Theater, on Forty-fourth Street. Here was the same problem; he’d be facing another empty theater with a couple of silent, cigar-chewing faces staring back at him, trying to decide if the act was funny, or original, or big enough to entertain.

Thurston put a small ad in the Sunday paper: “Wanted, 1000 men. $1 for 1 hour. Apply 10 a.m. Monday Morning. The New York Roof.” When Grace heard about the plan, she knew that it was coldhearted. She told Howard it “would be hard on a lot of men looking for work.” But she realized that the ad was a good idea, concluding, “It’s a hard world.”

When Howard and Grace arrived at the New York Roof the next morning, the seats were filled with noisy men and the lobby buzzed with even more hopeful applicants. The agents were huddled behind the curtain. “What’s going on here?” they asked Thurston. “We’re supposed to be using this theater, but those men told us they’d read an ad in the paper offering them work.” Thurston blinked slowly, the picture of innocence. “Well, I certainly can’t imagine! But then, you’re auditioning some new acts, aren’t you? That’s an old amateur night trick, filling up the theater. These non-professionals will try anything to get attention.”

The agents decided to cancel the audition. “No, no. I’ll handle it,” Thurston told them, shooing the agents into the auditorium. He walked onstage. “Gentlemen, there is some sort of misunderstanding.” The crowd grew quiet. “Until the man in charge arrives, I wonder if you’d like a little entertainment?” They cheered. He performed the act—the card manipulations, the Rising Cards, and the duck finale, with their new Socrates—winning laughter from the crowd and gratitude from the agents. They reciprocated with some out-of-town bookings.

 

 

BUT THE MAN
Thurston had set in the crosshairs was Walter Plimmer, a British theatrical agent who booked vaudeville. He was younger than Thurston and was a notoriously tough judge of talent. He was also impossible to see and wouldn’t return messages. One day in August 1899, Thurston grew tired of waiting. He and Grace walked past the secretary into Plimmer’s office. He slammed the door as Grace spun around and turned the lock. Plimmer looked up with his eyes wide. Thurston had already pulled the cards from his pocket and begun his manipulations. “Good afternoon, I’m Howard Thurston.”

“Yes, Thurston, I know. Another magician. I’ve seen it a hundred times.”

“No, you haven’t seen me a hundred times. You wouldn’t see me once. But you’re going to see it now.” As he spat out the last few words, he was pumping through his card manipulations.

The agent leaned back, watched, and was impressed enough to let Thurston continue: cards disappeared at his fingertips, tumbled from his hands, changed into other cards, or were effortlessly propelled across the office, snapping against the window behind the agent.

Plimmer smiled and began scrawling on a piece of his stationery. “I can’t use you right now. But tomorrow, take this note downtown to Tony Pastor.”

Grace and Howard walked out in a daze, giddy and celebratory, weaving down the sidewalks back to their apartment. After their years of struggle, it couldn’t really be that easy, could it? The right audition in the right office, and they’d suddenly heard the most magical name any variety act ever heard: Tony Pastor.

 

 

TONY PASTOR
didn’t actually invent vaudeville. It was forged out of the saloon variety entertainments, dime museums, and minstrel shows of nineteenth-century America. Pastor was one of a number of producers who worked hard to distill the very best and scrub clean everything else. But his acquaintances usually awarded him the honor because it made a better story. In a field of monsters and cads, Tony Pastor was beloved, an entertainment phenomenon and a New York institution.

He was born Antonio Pastor in New York City in 1832 and worked for Barnum as a child prodigy singer, and then performed as a blackface minstrel, a clown and ringmaster in the circus, a trick rider or clog dancer. He was short and stout, with a long mustache and wavy black hair. By most accounts his dancing was slightly ridiculous and his voice was merely a raspy baritone. But he learned how to act a song, “putting it over” with exaggerated gestures and a graceful, friendly personality. In 1861, he managed his own theater and hosted the shows each evening. He was always the star. An evening might begin with Pastor’s latest songs. He specialized in funny or sweetly romantic ballads, as well as stirring patriotic tunes in support of the Union troops. Then the show would offer some variety acts and conclude with a comic afterpiece, a short parody of a popular play or opera. He marketed his shows to women, eliminating the worst qualities of the beer halls, the loose waitresses, blue humor, smoking and drinking. He was a fine judge of talent and had inspired instincts about the public’s tastes. Pastor is credited with discovering a generation of important stars, including the era’s most famous chanteuse, Lillian Russell.

As New York’s theater district gradually moved uptown, to more respectable neighborhoods, Pastor relocated to better surroundings, out of the Bowery and on an inevitable march up Broadway. In 1881, he finally settled into Tony Pastor’s New 14th Street Theater, just off Union Square in the basement of Tammany Hall.

The word
vaudeville
was a hybrid to describe the new phenomenon and brand it as a new product; it was probably derived from the French phrase for “voice of the city.” Tony Pastor himself avoided using the word for most of his career. He thought it sounded sissy and French. He preferred calling it variety. By the 1890s, his gradual innovations had been acquired by vaudeville entrepreneurs in uptown theaters, who systematized and popularized the entertainment.

By 1896, it was Pastor who was racing to keep up and fill the seats at his thousand-seat theater. He adopted the latest vaudeville trend, continuous entertainment. This was a sort of all-day buffet of talent, in which a collection of dazzling acts followed, one after another, in cycles of performances from about noon to eleven p.m. Patrons could pay for a ticket and watch the whole cycle or any part of it. It was hard on the acts, but an attractive novelty for the public—entertainment as a factory assembly line. By July 1899, Pastor included American Vitagraph features on every bill, a few short subjects courtesy of the latest fashion, the motion picture.