Jim Steinmeyer (25 page)

Once the contract was in place, the partners finalized the arrangements of the next show. George White would be Thurston’s principle assistant. Beatrice Foster was to assist both Thurston and Kellar, taking the role of Princess Karnac in Kellar’s famous levitation. Thurston hired his own assistants and technicians, and two identical twins, the Terry brothers, which allowed him to produce some very surprising illusions. Bella Hussan would be included on the bill with a short act.

Thurston contracted for Devant’s barrel illusion, Diogenes, and the New Page, but did not purchase the Mascot Moth, as Kellar had now warned him off of it. Kellar, in turn, wanted to purchase Maskelyne’s latest feature from London, the Spectres of the Sanctum, an elaborate séance effect in which a ghost slowly materialized in a cabinet. Thurston facilitated the contract with Maskelyne and Devant. After stealing dozens of Maskelyne effects for his show, this was the first one Kellar had ever paid the inventor to use.

Kellar would tour one final season, splitting the performance with Thurston. And Kellar would finally, unequivocally, introduce Thurston as his successor. The swift transaction gave the impression that Paul Valadon, the loyal soldier, had been unfairly treated, as he was left scrambling for vaudeville dates. It seems that Valadon suffered the surprise that awaited many spies—once the game becomes treacherous no player is actually safe.

 

 

THE NEWSPAPERS BILLED
the show as “Kellar and Thurston, The World’s Greatest Magicians, Presenting All That Is New in the World of Magic,” but their rehearsals in Yonkers, New York, suggested trouble. Kellar was a perfectionist who never took chances with his magic. The Spectres of the Sanctum was a complicated trick of lighting and reflections, using an array of electric bulbs and a large sheet of mirror that slid onstage, invisibly, in a special metal track. It called for meticulous drilling, but Kellar wouldn’t give up the stage until it was perfect. Thurston was left cooling his heels.

After days of work, just as Kellar was satisfied with the Spectres, and Thurston was bringing his own staff on the stage, the city electrical inspector arrived and explained that the Spectres’ light sockets needed rewiring. All the rehearsals stopped again, and Thurston waited patiently until Kellar’s trick was perfect. Thurston’s first shows were awkward and underrehearsed, but Kellar seemed to take it all in stride. “It’s all right, Thursty,” he told his new associate. “It was all my fault, but don’t worry.”

Thurston could be temperamental, but he tended to fall into black moods and sulk. Kellar’s temper was something completely different, a source of continual amusement to the people around him. He exploded in firework displays of profanity, stomped, screamed, and then slinked back into the theater for mumbled apologies and pats on the back. At a dinner at the Astor Hotel in New York, Kellar ordered baked potatoes for himself, his wife, and the Thurstons. When the waiter bungled the order and delivered small boiled potatoes, Kellar erupted in fury. “Eva, look at that! Thursty, look at that!” He stuck a fork in the potato and held it over his head, rushing through the dining room and calling out to anyone who would listen. “You call that a baked potato? A baked potato?”

At the end of the dinner, Kellar had been deflated again, as sheepish and foolish as a schoolboy. Thurston noticed that he left a generous tip. “I am a fool, Thursty. I am a big fool. But I don’t mean any harm, do I?”

 

 

WHEN THE SHOW
played in Rochester, New York, John Northern Hilliard wrote another review for the
Post Express
.

The next day, Kellar showed the article to Thurston. As Thurston read it, he braced himself for the gale. Instead, the old magician surprised him by seeming remarkably sanguine. But that night, as Kellar was standing onstage, he happened to spy Hilliard sitting in the audience, and this lit the fuse of his temper. Thurston was standing next to Barney, Kellar’s longtime assistant, as they watched from the wings. Kellar sauntered offstage to prepare the next trick, and Thurston noticed the magician approaching him. Kellar was red with rage.

“There he is, Thursty! There he is!” he mumbled. Kellar grabbed Barney by the throat and began shaking him. “Help me, Barney! Help me! Help me think of something to call that god damned miserable son of a bitch who’s sitting there, just sitting there in my god damned audience!”

Thurston was dumbfounded, but Barney was long accustomed to his boss’s strange rages. Barney collapsed to the floor with laughter as Kellar turned and walked back onto the stage with a loud harrumph. If only he could have thought of some of those two-dollar words to berate Hilliard.

I
n December 1907, when Kellar and Thurston appeared at McVicker’s Theater in Chicago, Houdini was appearing in a local vaudeville house. Thurston made arrangements for Houdini’s wife, Bess, to have a box seat—Houdini was busy that afternoon at his own theater and planned to attend later in the week. But Thurston accidentally offended Harry by inviting Dr. Wilson, the editor of another magic magazine and, at that moment, one of Houdini’s archrivals. Houdini was happiest when he was embroiled in melodramatic alliances or competitions. When he heard that Wilson had been at the show, he chafed at Thurston’s insult and wouldn’t attend McVicker’s Theater.

Houdini, a magazine editor—publishing
The Conjurer’s Monthly Magazine
—was happy to report on Thurston and Kellar. But he privately had his doubts about Thurston’s new role. His fellow vaudevillian, the coin manipulator Tommy Downs, encouraged Houdini’s skepticism. “I note what you say regarding Thurston and Kellar,” he wrote to Houdini, “all that B.S. about Kellar retiring in favor of Valadon I never believed. Kellar will never retire, he will die in harness, same as Herrmann did.”

Downs voiced the opinion of many magicians, that Kellar simply wanted a chance to push Thurston out of the picture. “Kellar is a foxy Pennsylvania Dutchman and is probably afraid of Thurston as a possible competitor,” he confided to Houdini.

Both Downs and Houdini were passing judgment from a lofty, rickety perch. The vaudeville circuits had provided a false sense of security for many twelve-minute marvels. Houdini had anticipated that his handcuff act was just a short-term novelty, but he was ambitious and clever enough to keep expanding the scope of his act, adding bigger challenges and grabbing more headlines. He freed himself from a straitjacket, and was about to introduce an escape from an oversized milk can, filled with water. By 1907, he had become one of vaudeville’s genuine stars. In contrast, his friend Thomas Nelson Downs had proven to be a one-trick pony, and that trick was the Miser’s Dream—plucking half-dollars from the air. After his act had been seen, and then imitated, around the world, Downs returned to Marshalltown, Iowa, looking for the next good idea. He was having trouble finding it. “As far as I am concerned, I have no ambition to be styled ‘The Great.’ The game is not worth the candle. I don’t see what Kellar wants with Thurston,” he wrote to Houdini, still grumbling about Thurston’s tour. “Thurston is a case of lucky boy, falling into Kellar’s show. I know at least a half-dozen magicians better qualified. I don’t believe he will succeed with the public. Thurston is a nice fellow, but not a genius and not original.”

Neither Downs nor Houdini understood that the relationship, and the creation of America’s next great magician, was no longer about Kellar’s stubbornness or Thurston’s originality. Thurston and Kellar had come to admire each other. One afternoon at McVicker’s Theater, as the magicians arrived at the stage door, Thurston suddenly remembered something. He led Kellar down the alley, examining the long expanse of dirty bricks. Thurston located the dim scratches of two initials: HT. He explained to Kellar that twenty-three years earlier, he had been working as a newsboy with Reddy Cadger in that alley, waiting for the bundled first editions of the
Chicago Tribune
. They were hungry and cold, huddled on the iron grate above the warm air of the
Tribune
press-room. Thurston had watched a group of swells, in their silk hats and furs, leaving the theater. He vowed, one day, to perform there, and scratched his initials on the side of the building. Kellar’s eyes twinkled with recognition. It was as if Thurston had been describing a chapter from Kellar’s own childhood.

 

 

KELLAR AND THURSTON
performed their last engagement together at Ford’s Opera House in Baltimore on May 16, 1908. The entire tour had been organized with a magisterial sense of inevitability, a royal succession, and the final performance provided the emotional climax. At the finish of the show, Kellar threw his arm around Thurston’s shoulder and walked him forward. He thanked his public for their support, recalling his forty-five-year career as an entertainer and his most famous feats—summoning the spirits in his old cabinet act, growing rose plants inside a cardboard tube, and transmitting his thoughts to his beloved wife, Eva. While touring the faraway lands, he’d been proud to bring sophisticated American mysteries to the people of the world. Thurston noticed him leaning more heavily on his shoulder. As he began to predict a glowing future for his young associate, Kellar turned to look at his successor and his voice cracked. Kellar paused, and then solemnly handed over his wand to Thurston with a deep bow—the symbol of the magic being passed from one generation to the next. The band played “Auld Lang Syne” and ushers rushed down the aisles with floral tributes, filling the stage with wreaths of bright roses.

As the audience stood as a group and sang one final chorus—“We’ll take a cup of kindness yet, for auld lang syne!”—the notes rang through the theater. Kellar wiped his eyes. Thurston turned away, surprised to find that he, too, was looking out at the audience through shimmering tears. He stepped back, allowing the old master to indulge in one final bow at the footlights, and the curtain fell.

The next day, the company took the train back to Philadelphia. Kellar and Thurston sat in the train car and talked. Kellar seemed tired and morose. After the warm reception of his last performance, he was saddened to contemplate the end of his career, but his colorful recollections seemed to enliven his spirits. He had worked hard over every one of his illusions. He spoke fondly of each piece of apparatus, every routine, the careful string of words that had been refined for the introductions, and the sequence of maneuvers. They’d all been labors of love. Thurston realized that these prized mysteries were, in many ways, the children that Kellar had never had.

“He was the kindliest and biggest hearted man I ever knew,” Thurston recalled. He attributed Kellar’s blunt, decisive manner to the many challenges he encountered through his career. Kellar had been endowed with thick, awkward fingers, a speech impediment, and very little natural grace to enhance his stage performances, but he had overcome every challenge. “Kellar was the last of the old-school magicians,” Thurston wrote years later. “Mystery came first with him. Entertainment was not considered.”

As a sign of his devotion to Kellar, and the slippery, fluid qualities of his own biography, for several years Thurston changed his childhood story, insisting that it was a performance of Kellar, not Herrmann, that had initially inspired him in Columbus. This not only omitted the awkward reference to Herrmann, Kellar’s longtime rival, but it completed the father-and-son analogy with some poetic publicity.

In his year of touring with Kellar, Thurston had seen the old wizard at his most stubborn, argumentative, and old-fashioned. But he also understood how, above all else, Kellar had been devoted to magic. He fussed over it, defended it, and loved bringing it to his audiences.