Two Great American Magicians By Maskelyne
Harry Kellar—The amazing life of Howard Thurston
—What these famous magicians teach you—
Their lives of failure and success—
Practice, the key-note to success.
Nelson T. Downs, Houdini, Carl Hertz, and many other of the greatest magicians the world has known were Americans, Houdini being particularly proud of his American citizenship. In this chapter I propose to deal only with the lives of two American magicians. One is Harry Kellar, and the other is Howard Thurston.
Harry Kellar was born at Erie, Pennsylvania, U.S.A., in 1849, and he was one of the first magicians to work a permanent road-show. He was soon firmly established as an illusionist of outstanding ability, and he actually became a dollar-millionaire. It is said that Harry Kellar discovered W. E. Robinson, who is better known as Chung Ling Soo, and gave him employment as a mechanic while encouraging his magical skill. He was first succeeded in his road-show by Paul Valadon, but eventually Howard Thurston stepped into Kellar’s shoes and became America’s leading magician. Kellar died in Los Angeles in March, 1922, a wealthy and very much respected man.
Howard Thurston’s life-story is so intensely interesting that I feel I must sketch it at much greater length than I have done that of Kellar, who, after all, belonged more to the old school of magicians than to the new. Thurston was born in 1869, and when a lad of seven years of age he saw a performance by Herrmann the Great, a Frenchman who made many appearances in the United States, at the City Hall at Columbus, Ohio, Thurston’s home town. The small boy was thrilled to the core with Herrmann’s show, and he was consumed with a desire to become a magician himself, beginning at once to practise small tricks of his own invention. He did not stop at that, but began to study magic and illusions carefully. He studied, too, the art of gripping small objects in the palm of his hand, and after much practice he became skilled enough to snap a penny up his sleeve. Imagine the pride of this boy when he could do this! No wonder he thought he was on the royal road to fame as a magician. You have been told to practise in earlier chapters ; here is, indeed, an example of success gained in this way.
Thurston’s father was a carriage-maker and inventor, and there is no doubt that young Howard inherited his father’s genius for inventing things. Among other articles that the elder Thurston invented was a beefsteak-pounder, guaranteed to make the toughest rumpsteak as tender as the tenderest of its kind, and, when his father lost all his money in 1873 during the financial panic following the American Civil War, Howard came across the beefsteak-pounder and decided that he would go out and sell a number of them. The first person to whom he sold a pounder was the banker who had foreclosed on his father’s mortgage. The banker presented the son of the man he had driven into bankruptcy with a silver dollar and encouraged him to carry on selling pounders with the aid of his elder brother, who carried the stock-intrade from door to door. The two boys did not do badly, but naturally that kind of thing could not go on indefinitely, and eventually Howard Thurston became a bell-boy. He was nine years of age then, and at twelve he was a newsboy on a train and making quite a lot of money for his tender years.
Growing tired of this—for it was rather monotonous travelling over the same ground time and time again —this boy, who was afterwards to become the greatest magician in America, ran away from home with a young jockey who was several years older than himself. Mr Thurston confessed that the only reason that prompted him to run away from home was a consuming curiosity to see the world. Then followed many years of amazing adventures, of stealing rides on trains, of living in newsboys’ homes and hostels of various kinds, of helping to exercise race-horses, of practising endlessly with his palming and other tricks of magic, of being ill and getting well, of riding in races, and of roughing it in many of the States of America. On one occasion the trainers, hoping to get young Thurston down to the proper weight to ride in a race, wrapped him in a sheet and put him in a barrel of manure to sweat off five pounds of surplus flesh. The five pounds of flesh came off all right, but his night in the barrel left him so weak that he could not stand on his feet, much less ride in a racing-saddle. That left him sick and penniless in a place called Oskaloosa. On another occasion Howard Thurston, who undoubtedly had a stranger life than any other great magician, got into the company of two desperate criminals and was very nearly held in custody for being found with them. Luckily a farmer spoke for him, and he spent some time with that man and his wife.
After five years of roughing it, and taking life as it came, he returned home with quite a large sum of money ; but during the period he was away he had never once forgotten his resolution to become a magician. Whenever possible he watched the tricks of museum and side-show illusionists, and he became quite clever at palming coins and performing cardtricks. He had the right kind of hands for the latter work and was not afraid to practise patiently for hours on end. As I write this history of Howard Thurston, I am hoping all the time that you will benefit by it, particularly those of you who are very young and on the brink of a magical career—professional or amateur.
Do not forget that the amateur magician, although he asks no payment for his work, receives plenty of payment in kind, because he becomes extremely popular wherever he goes—and popularity is half the battle of life.
To continue with the adventures of Howard Thurston, during the whole of the winter following his return home he was practising sleight-of-hand, watched by his mother, who constituted his entire audience— an audience that was eventually to grow into millions of people in the vast country known as the United States of America. Thurston had Hoffman’s Modern Magic, and that helped him greatly. This book, although published as long ago as 1889, is still the authoritative treatise on the subject, and it is well worth getting if you are fortunate enough to obtain one of the few remaining copies now in existence. While on the subject of books on magic, I think I will break off to give you a list of some of the volumes that will help you with your work. Naturally I cannot get everything connected with the magic art between the covers of a single work, so that it is necessary for you to acquire a regular library of books. Professor Hoffman also wrote Drawing-Room Conjuring and a later work called Magical Tit-bits, while Nelson Downs produced a little volume called Conjuring with Coins, as well as other useful text-books on various branches of the magic art. Card-tricks, by L. Widdop, is another good book to have in your library, and David Devant has quite naturally written several excellent books on his profession during his lifetime. One is Tricks for Every One, and another My Magic Life, which is especially well worth reading, because it shows exactly how my grandfather’s one-time partner came to adopt this great profession of ours. There are also books by Norman Hunter and others, and a visit to any large bookshop should give you a large selection of useful volumes for the beginner and the semi-established magician. I will deal more fully with your library in a later chapter.
But to return to Thurston’s trials and troubles, he again left home for the race-courses—on which he had made the money he took home—and finally wound up in New York with very little left and no real friends. Meeting a young ex-convict, however, Thurston was introduced to a Mr W. M. F. Round, who was a noted philanthropist. This led to another meeting, this time with a lady named Mrs Thomas, who wanted to send him to a school in Massachusetts. At this point the youngster, who had led such a wild life, even if it was an adventurous one, had a complete change of thought and became a Mission-worker. So keen was he that he preached from soap-box pulpits in the slums of New York. Then Mrs Thurston died and brought sorrow for the first time into the seventeen-year-old Howard’s life. A few months later he entered the Mount Hermon School with the intention of becoming a medical missionary, and it was here that he gave his first conjuring-performance on Christmas night in the year 1887. His show was a tremendous success, although some of the ladies who were among the audience fainted when he did a decapitation-trick. He gave many more shows after that—all of them without the decapitation illusion!
He then prepared to take the examination for the University of Pennsylvania, but, stopping at an industrial farm directed by Mr Round on the way, he forgot all about the examinations and stayed at that farm for eighteen months. Leaving it in 1892, with the intention of going to Philadelphia, he came across a picture of Herrmann the Great at Albany. That did it; the lure of magic was too strong to be thrust aside, and the long and short of it was that he tracked down the great magician and travelled in the same train with him—to Syracuse.
It is very odd how people take up this profession of magic. I was a farmer, you will remember, and many other magicians have started life in jobs quite different from magic. The trip with Herrmann the Great did not do young Thurston much good except to send him home to his father, who had married again, and give him a chance to practise and practise again with small objects such as cards, coins, and billiard balls.
Finally he came to his big decision and made up his mind to become a professional magician, his capital being exactly one shilling, or approximately a quarter of a dollar in American money. Dropping off a trolley-car at a place called Wyancotte, he bought some potatoes and proceeded to do conjuring-tricks in the street and, when his audience were interested, sold them patent potato-peelers he had made. Then followed a period with a circus as ‘Anderson, Wizard of the North’—and the magician in him was well and truly born. He had to do other jobs as well as give his magic-show, one of them being to introduce the fat lady to the audience. This went on for some considerable time, but at last business was so bad that the circus was broken up, and the young magician obtained an engagement in a small museum in Minneapolis. This was followed by other engagements at fees that rose with Thurston’s growing reputation. It was at a place called Boulder near the Canadian line that Howard Thurston became an inventor of illusions. It is strange how a magician grows keen on inventing tricks ; just at first the ordinary ones on sale seem clever enough to satisfy him, but gradually there comes the desire for something as up-to-date as to-morrow, and invention follows quickly.
JASPER MASKELYNE
Before Magic Edition
PDF | 301 Pages
Jasper Maskelyne, the famous illusionist, presents a practical book that enables the curious to become expert entertainers in the art of magic. A guide filled magic effects you can perform with cards, coins, handkerchiefs, pieces of paper, rope and other common objects are described in detail. Chapters are also provided on stage management, thought-reading, disappearing tricks, apparatus, chemical tricks, entertaining in dress-clothes, jugglery and ventriloquism, and the art of make-up.
Coming from the famous Maskelyne family of magicians, Jasper also shares some excellent advice on rehearsing, structuring, writing, and booking a magical performance.
At Boulder Thurston discovered a new method of doing the famous rising-card trick and performed it for the first time on any stage. The effect of this trick is as follows : a number of cards are drawn, the cards are replaced, and the pack is shuffled. The pack is then placed in a goblet standing on the table, and one by one the cards rise mysteriously from the pack to the top of the glass. This form of the trick is as old as the hills, but one night at Boulder a member of the rough audience fired a revolver while Thurston was setting the stage for his act. The bullet broke the specially made goblet, and in a flash the great magician hit upon a method of doing the trick in his bare hands, making each card rise out of the pack and float through the air to the fingers of the other hand held high above.
The trick was a great success that night, and eventually the illusion helped Howard Thurston to fame and fortune. After this the magician toured all manner of out-of-the-way spots with a small variety show, which also included a short sketch featuring a music-hall entertainer and his wife. Shortly afterwards he was playing at a variety-theatre when a man named Billy Robinson happened to spot his show and introduced him to Herrmann the Great’s nephew and successor, who was playing at another theatre that week. To cut a long story short, Thurston showed Herrmann his rising-card trick on that magician’s stage, got a friendly newspaper-man to write up the story of how he fooled the great man, and derived a great deal of publicity from this one act. It was a master-move, but it was some time before Thurston was really repaid for his trouble. It is always the same with magic—you have to be patient both with the performance of tricks and chances of showing them to worth-while audiences.
After a time Thurston sold his half-interest in the show for one hundred dollars, and on the day he did so he decided to leave the side-show and concert-hall for ever. He said to his late partner, “In ten years from to-day I shall have the biggest magic-show in America.”
Time passed, and with it came many engagements, some big and some small, and finally Thurston managed to get enough money together to go abroad, playing all over Europe, in London, and goodness knows where else. Then he returned to America, gave many more successful shows, and made up his mind to tour the world with a magic-show. It was an ambitious programme, but that did not worry Howard Thurston. Naturally the great magician had many experiences, some gay and some quite the reverse, and in the end he set sail for America, home, and beauty once more.
Then came his association with Harry Kellar, whom he described as one of the most beloved entertainers of of his era, and in the course of time Thurston bought out Kellar upon that magician’s decision to retire. And, as I have said, Thurston became Magician No. I of the United States. He had achieved his ambition and should be regarded as a model to all those who find the going hard and feel like giving up the unequal struggle against disappointment and disaster.
I have gone to great lengths to tell you the story of Howard Thurston’s life, chiefly because he was such a trier. Other men have risen to giddy heights in the profession, but only Thurston could have risen from such depths of misery into which he sank from time to time during his early struggles. I do not suggest that you should pack a bag with a few tricks and take to the highway as a magical tramp, or anything of the sort, but I do suggest that you should aim high, as he did, and never lose sight of your far-away goal or lose your confidence in yourself.
