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Now you see it ... a tricky world 11:30 AM CDT on Monday, October 10, 2005
In 1997, magicians Penn and Teller came to Dallas to show off a fun new
trick. They shot each other in the face with revolvers.
Known as the "bullet catch," it's actually an old trick, more than 100
years old. Typically, Penn and Teller boosted the theatricality with
.357 Colts, shooting at each other like duelists, "catching" the rounds
in their teeth. Even so, the risks they took were real enough. Several
magicians, in fact, have died performing the catch.
Most prominent among these was Chung Ling Soo in 1918. In a colorful new
book, The Glorious Deception, Jim Steinmeyer tells us not only
how the trick worked and how it failed disastrously, but also how Soo,
once almost as famous as Harry Kellar, led a life of hidden identities
and marriages – secrets that unraveled with his death.
It's not true, as is commonly believed, that conjurers never tell their
secrets. A little library research can quickly take anyone beyond the
rabbit-in-a-hat guidebooks to such classic sources as Mulholland's
Book of Magic.
But in the past two years, books about magic have taken a smart new
turn, splitting off from biographies of Houdini or how-to manuals, which
currently fill the shelves (not counting Ricky Jay's wonderfully quirky
antiquarian volumes, such as Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women).
The Glorious Deception and Hiding the Elephant, both by
Mr. Steinmeyer, Peter Lamont's The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick
and Karl Johnson's The Magician and the Cardsharp: Whatever else
they do, these books track the development of a single piece of
stagecraft. To varying degrees, they are about the meanings of
magic.
And inevitably, the meanings of myth. With The Indian Rope Trick,
British historian Peter Lamont traces the lineage of the famous illusion
in this delightfully chatty, free-ranging book. You may know the rope
trick from cartoons. A magician throws a rope into the air; it stands
fast like a pole. The magician or his assistant climbs up – and
disappears.
The teensy problem here, Dr. Lamont notes, is that it's
impossible. The rope trick never happened, not in full view. What his
story follows is the confluence of several legends, the traditional
tricks of Indian fakirs and – the final spark – an 1890 hoax during a
Chicago newspaper war.
But like the nonexistent welfare queen driving her Cadillac, the
nonexistent rope trick persisted as "real" for the public despite
several debunkings. The appeal of Western fables about the "Mystic East"
was too strong. To a degree, we want to believe there is a land
where such magic exists.
Western delusions were also partly behind Chung Ling Soo's success. He
was really an American, William Robinson, and his stylish act melded
"Oriental" stereotypes, borrowed tricks and gibberish (even his name,
Chung Ling Soo, meant nothing). Yet it made Robinson (or rather, Soo)
famous.
But what might seem like harmless if mildly racist entertainment had
consequences. There was a real Chinese wizard named Ching Ling Foo, and
in a would-be showdown in London, he was trumped by Robinson. Robinson
didn't know a word of Chinese, but Foo was now the fake. He never toured
England again.
While Deception concerns the conflicted interactions of East and
West, showmanship and secrecy, Mr. Steinmeyer's Hiding the Elephant
follows an involved "arms race" between science and stagecraft. In the late
19th century, competing magicians slowly combined advances in optics
with several mirror tricks that permitted "ghosts" to appear onstage –
to the awe of spiritualists. This ultimately led to the surprisingly
simple mechanism that can "vanish" objects in front of an audience.
With these two books, particularly the fascinating Hiding the Elephant
, Mr. Steinmeyer has written what amount to rich, cultural histories of
Golden Age magic. They both examine and evoke the feel of the period
when the magic show as we know it grew out of vaudeville. But Mr.
Steinmeyer, a professional designer of illusions, does use that wider
frame as license to stuff in all sorts of anecdotes, tangents and
profiles. Sometimes, as in Deception, to distraction.
It's Karl Johnson's The Magician and the Cardsharp, though, that
suffers the most from such padding, perhaps because it began life as a
magazine story. But it also has an appealingly different, hard-boiled
locale for magic: Depression-era Kansas.
That's where Dai Vernon, an elegant card-trick artist hitting hard
times, heard a jailhouse tale of a small-town gambler who could do the
impossible. He dealt from the center of the deck. Perfectly.
If another player cuts the deck, the dealer can still pull a second or
bottom card but he won't know what it is. Dealing from the center means
he can pluck just about any card he wants.
Much like the other three books, Cardsharp has a central
narrative (Vernon's quest) that lets Mr. Johnson switch back and forth
over a wider topic, in this case, the testy relations between
sleight-of-hand artists and gamblers. Card conjurers are a bit of an
elite in magic. Their tricks are, by nature, small-scale. They have to
be done close-up, making them harder to pull off (Houdini's blunt
fingers, for instance, made him notoriously bad with cards).
Yet clearly, these wizards share the same skills as the worst of
low-life hustlers. Despite their mutual wariness, the two groups have
influenced each other over the decades, and Mr. Johnson details many of
the era's gritty cons and gambler's slang.
That's one reason, amid all of the wonders and trickery in these books,
Cardsharp feels more down-to-earth. Not better, just different, almost
noir-ish. Typically, the other three books sift through layer after
historical layer of showbiz or myth to find what truly happened (or
didn't).
Cardsharp tracks a legend – and finds that it was true.
E-mail jweeks@dallasnews.com
How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to Disappear
Jim Steinmeyer
(Carroll & Graf, paperback, $14)
The Double Life of William Robinson, aka Chung Ling Soo, the
"Marvelous Chinese Conjurer"
Jim Steinmeyer
(Carroll & Graf, $27)
How a Spectacular Hoax Became History
Peter Lamont
(Thunder's Mouth, $22)
The Search for America's Greatest Sleight-of-Hand Artist
Karl Johnson
(Henry Holt, $26)
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