10.28.2005

A cough and a blink

By the time I was fourteen I had been performing magic for a few years and felt very ‘at home’ doing it. We were now living near the South Coast town of Brighton and I was a proud member of the Sussex Magic Circle. This was an oddball collection of magicians who met every other Thursday in a small hotel on the waterfront. We swapped stories and tricks and generally indulged our mutual love of magic. The president was a large and dull man named Stan. Stan was a mind reader or as it is known in the magic world a mentalist. I learned a very important lesson from Stan, whenever Stan was about to do the dirty work, or ‘work’ as it is known amongst magicians, he would cough. It wasn’t a big cough, just a little dry cough, but the moment you heard it you knew something had happened. This was the first time I really noticed the mechanical nature of a fellow human being. It became a fascination to me watching Stan perform his mentalism, just waiting for the dry little cough that signaled his guilty action. Month after month I watched him perform and cough. How could anyone be so stupid that they didn’t know that they were giving the game away by a small mechanical habit? Two years later when my first real mentor was teaching me my first real magic I got a shock.
“Nicky every time you link the rings you close your eyes!” said Ken. I quickly argued that this wasn’t possible and went over to the mirror to see if this was so. I ran thru the routine but never noticed any closing of the eyes at key moments. He is wrong I thought, then I realized the reason I couldn’t see my closed eyes was because my eyes were closed! It was like a light bulb turning on in my head. The reason we don’t notice mechanical reactions is because they are mechanical. Years later when I was to read Mr. Gurdjieff’s description of the mechanical nature of Mankind it made perfect sense to me. Whether it was Stan’s cough or my closed eyes we didn’t notice it because our actions (and especially our reactions) were mechanical as soon as we stopped thinking about them.
If we couldn’t see what we were doing it was because our eyes were closed or we were to busy coughing. There is a Zen story of a Japanese master who would ride his donkey around the village at a great speed searching for something. If any one asked him what he was looking for he would reply that he was looking for his donkey. It is generally interpreted to mean that when you use your nervous system to search for the ‘truth’ that your truth is the nervous system you are riding on and searching with. As a magician you spend many hours standing in front of a mirror trying to make the impossible look not only possible but ordinary. It takes a long time to observe the coughs and blinks that give us away. When you discover the little things that give away your mechanical nature then it leaves you open to observe the BIG things that we also do. It was a great lesson in being a magician and a truth that I would explore and understand more when the time was right.

10.25.2005

Remarkable Magicians #2. Houdini

Every young magician remembers his first ‘meeting’ with Harry Houdini or to give him his birth name Erich Weiss. My introduction to the greatest icon in the magic world was at the age of thirteen when my mother bought a book about him from a local library that was selling it’s excess reading matter. The book was called ‘Houdini: the Man who Walked Thru Walls’ and mum left it out for me to find on my return from school. Mum was away on her weekly trip to her Harley Street doctor in London. She visited a psychiatrist for my entire childhood and teenage years with no noticeable improvement to her condition, which was referred to in those days as manic depression. It wasn’t until after his death that she seemed to improve at all. Coincidence? I will be charitable and say maybe. She always tried to leave a little surprise or gift for me when she took the bus to his afternoon appointments at the busy Middlesex hospital in London. This time she had really picked a winner in Lindsey Gresham’s biography of this fascinating man. In fact to a young man already infatuated by the art of magic it was like pouring gasoline on a lit match! As soon as I found the book on the kitchen table I made a triple-decker peanut butter sandwich and began to devour them both. My mum’s paranoid nature began to assert itself however and she phoned me several times to making me promise not to experiment with any walking thru walls myself. This she assured me could be dangerous. After the forth or fifth call she began to believe me when I promised her I had no such plans!
Houdini was certainly an amazing man and like so many other young magicians I fell under his spell and decided that this was the life for me. As synchronicity would have it within that very week the BBC television network played the classic “Houdini” movie starring Tony Curtis. This brought the book to life for me in a very special manner. I was right up there in the screen with the tall, dark, handsome and debonair movie version of the great man. I was to later discover that as usual Hollywood got it all wrong and if you had to compare Houdini with anyone in a movie it wouldn’t be the loveable Tony Curtis, it would be closer to Joe Pesci in ‘Goodfellas’. Houdini was a short, rough, tough little fella’ with equal parts paranoia, delusions of grandeur and sheer guts! I was later to discover that Tony Curtis also wasn’t the godlike figure he seemed in the movies when I performed a private show for him and his guests at the Magic Castle. What started as a dreamlike experience sitting with the movie star and performing an hours worth of my very best close-up magic wound up as a major disillusionment when he stiffed me for my very modest fee! I discovered years later that he had a serious drug problem at the time which should have allowed me to forgive him, but hasn’t. The theory in Hollywood though is if you’re going to be stiffed it is better to be stiffed by a movie star than an average Joe!
My identification with Houdini was the final thing that sealed my fate as a professional magician. Houdini had been born in Budapest, was short, in great physical condition and dead. I on the other hand was a tall, overweight Londoner who was very much alive. You need lots of imagination to make it in magic though and the very fact that I identified with him at all was probably a large part of what I needed to follow in his deep footprints. The one piece of the Houdini myth that I didn’t understand was his fascination with the spirit world. It seemed strange and an unnecessary addition to his legend his continuing battles with spiritualist and spirit mediums but I forgave him this eccentricity. As for his weird insistence on continually rewriting and reinventing himself I certainly didn’t mind that, in fact I rather liked it. In future years my two major heroes shared this same character trait. I have even come to think that people who are consistent or tell too much of the truth about themselves are at the very best lazy. It seems to me that what we believe or create about our past is every bit as accurate as what actually happened. It is often more revealing and honest to the ‘I’ we currently are. If you can’t change your past then you don’t have much chance of shaping your future. Truth and time is like salt water taffy, it can be pulled and stretched into any shape without affecting it’s substance.

10.21.2005

The Thin White Duke and me.

In London I had a friend who was a true gentleman of the theater, his name was Ken Pitt. He was not only charming and cultured but had a fine and iconoclastic eye for fresh talent. He had helped discover James Dean in Hollywood, arranged tours for ‘Old Blue Eyes’ in the fifties and acted as publicist for Bob Dylan’s groundbreaking and earth shattering tours of England in the mid-sixties. Dylan certainly shook up English audiences, how many performers have had ‘Judas’ screamed at them from the crowd? That didn’t even happen to Judas! Ken was one Mr. Jones who certainly did know what was happening here. When I first met Mr. Pitt, he was nurturing the talents of an undiscovered cockney singer from the wrong side of town named Davey Jones. David later changed his last name on a Wild West whim to Bowie and the rest is rock ‘n roll history. I did meet David a time or two and spoke to him when he would occasionally answer the phone at Ken’s apartment. We never discussed the Spiders from Mars but explored our mutual admiration for Tony Newley. If you search out David Bowie’s first album you can listen to his very first single called the ‘The Laughing Gnome’ which sounds more like Newley’s early singles that it had any right too. Not only did David and I discuss Tony Newley but we also discussed Bob Dylan. How could two such different people have such identical thoughts about two such different people, it must have been blowin’ in the wind. Bowie discarded Ken Pitt as his show biz guru, and went on to become a worldwide phenomenon and I only ever saw him one more time. The truth of the matter is Ken freaked me out just a little too. All the wildly famous and brilliant people he had known and worked with, and the only time he really came to life was when as a young pre-war boy, he was introduced to Adolph Hitler. His eyes would take on a special sparkle as he discussed the sparkle in the Fuehrer eyes. I didn’t believe what David’s ex-wife Angie said about Ken but maybe, just maybe. Years later I was to perform at a private party for David at Los Angeles’ famous Ma Maison restaurant. Bowie had just completed a four-night engagement at L.A.’s massive Forum concert/basketball arena. I was hired to perform ‘wandering’ close-up magic for his guests. As not only a jobbing magician but also a giant fan of the thin white duke, I added what I considered a rather dashing touch to my performing outfit. I wore a bright red carnation in the buttonhole of my pinstripe suit. When I arrived at the restaurant I noticed that every waiter sported a similar botanical growth from his lapel. Being as socially contextually aware as the next guy I discarded my carnation in the kitchen trash can as discreetly and quickly as I could. Even in my twenties I was very aware of the social distinctions between a jobbing magician and an out of work actor, which is what most waiters are in Hollywood.
As you can imagine and after show party for David Bowie, in L.A. in the seventies was not your average audience. I performed card tricks for two thirds of Fleetwood Mac, Chevy Chase, John Belushi, Tom Waits, Bette Middler and Andy Kauffman. With a certain native cunning, I repeatedly performed a classic of magic known as the signed card in wallet. I figured with all those signed cards in my possession I would have a unique souvenir I would treasure for a lifetime. Which I did until it got lost during a house move a few years later.
My supreme moment arrived when Mr. Stardust himself joined the party somewhere after the midnight hour. I was standing in the middle of the room with my autographed deck in my hands, and in walked God (or Bowie, as he was known to this crowd) I was standing in the center of the room looking very much the non-star but performer that I was. A hush filled the room and everyone stared at me, well OK, they stared behind me at David. I turned around and was eye to miss matched eye of the man himself. David looked at me and said: “Don’t I know you?” “Nick.” I replied. “You must be, ah, ah, hum David?” He gave a thin smile, the conversations in the room continued. “ I was a friend of Ken Pitt, I explained to him. “Tonight, I’m just doing magic though.”
“No.” He said: “Not any more, just have fun and enjoy the party.”
It was a neat moment. Right up there with; “Just call me Nelson.” I put the cards back in my pocket. Sat down and had a drink. Let me rephrase that, I sat down at a table with Tom Waits and Bette Midler and started doing shots of rum with Tom. This was a game you could not win, but who wouldn’t want to try. The theatrical vision that has kept Bowie relevant and reinvented was probably born while watching the same plays I watched. Maybe it is time for me to revisit “East Side Story” and get in touch with my inner actor?

10.16.2005

A view from the stalls

As somebody who really, doesn’t believe much in political correctness I do hate the word Gyp when used as a verb to describe the act of deceiving or ripping of people. I don’t just hate it because this is what I do for a living but because I have a direct relative through my mother who was Queen of the Gypsies. These were very unusual Gypsies, for a start they didn’t hail from Romany but were Scottish Gypsies. Another thing that made them unusual in the Gypsy world was the fact that they lived in a house. They had decided generations ago to quit the road and settle down. Finding that the local shortbread, pubs and scones were good they settled down in a big bright pink house in the centre of town. The Queen ruled the roost and made the decisions. That’s why they called her Queen. One of the Queens was named Jessie Blythe and that was the first names given to my mother as homage to the woman who ran the original Big Pink.
Maybe it was the Gypsy blood that kicked in when I hit my teens. Until I was twelve years old I would never have dreamt of putting on a magic show. I was having way too much fun presenting my own, highly involved, one-man shows. I didn’t have huge audiences just family, friends and the occasional major production for my class at school. At the time these shows seemed wildly sophisticated looking back I suppose they weren’t. Though with a true performers ability to rewrite the past, there is still a part of my brain that believes they were. My shows ranged from theatrical parodies such as my extremely well received “East Side Story” to cutting edge productions like the one where two other kids walked around me in clockwise and anticlockwise ellipses. I had some theory about atoms circling and making conversation. Years later I found a book in our attic written by an aged relative Henry Lewin where he discussed the cognitive and emotional qualities of the sub-atomic. It was pretty racy intellectual stuff for the 1920’s, and much more in vogue today. Without a drop of Jewish blood in him Henry was also a proud English Israelite and fully believed the English were the missing tribe of Judah. I later revisited this theory and invented a family tree descended from the Samsonites. The Samsonites were a small tribe in the Middle East who wandered in the desert for many years with very little food or water but wonderful luggage. I suspect that Henry Lewin was a deeply influenced by Theosophy and the works of Madam Blavatsky.
I was much more interested in theatre and movies then than I was in magic. In fact I still am. Living so close to London City it was possible to catch many matinees and shows in the West End theatres of London. My mother always considered it just as good for my education to attend plays or movies rather than just attend school like other kids. I certainly never tried to alter her ideas and while it left great hulking gaps in my education it exposed me to sights and sounds that have remained vivid right up until this day.
I have soaring theatrical memories such as watching “Fiddler on the Roof” when it was a new musical throbbing with passion and not a twentieth generation hand me down. Some of my theatrical joys were subtler and only registered their treasures when reviewed from the future. Among these pleasures was seeing Barry Humphries play Mr. Sowerberry the undertaker in Lionel Bart’s “Oliver!” For those of us who hadn’t grown up in, Australia this was our first chance to observe Dame Edna Everage, Les Patterson and the other members of the Humphries Conglomerate.
My first hero was Anthony Newley, another member of the elite team that did for theater in the swinging sixties what the Beatles and Stones did for music. The Cockney chic and cheek that Newley and Bart brought to musical theater with shows such as; “Stop the World--I want to get off!” “Oliver”, “The Roar of the Greasepaint—The Smell of the Crowd” “Blitz!” and even the highly maligned “Twang” were a breath of fresh air. Collectively and creatively they removed the same cobwebs that Harold Pinter, Keith Waterhouse, Alan Bennett and John Osborne dispatched from the floorboards of the non-musical theatre. They shared the services of a brilliant young scenic designer Sean Kenney. Wild Irish and a natural maverick it was Kenney who inspired the strangely backhanded review in the London Times; “You come out of the theater whistling the scenery!” Oh yes, by jingo, something new was afoot in the four or five streets surrounding Piccadilly that constituted London’s West End. Not only were these new wave shows innovative and ground breaking, but each contained song after song that scaled the British pop charts. I reveled in these shows and saw them each as often as I could. I saw Newley and Bricusses’ final play “The Good Old Bad Old Days” fifty three times. Don’t look for objectivity here!

10.05.2005

Remarkable Magicians # 1. Mr. Miller

The only true card cheat I ever met, I think, was an elderly gentleman named Charlie. In his later years he was known as ‘Twinkle Toes” Miller due to his light-footed prowess on the dance floors of the cruise ships he performed on. Charlie was a superb comedy magician who could entertain royally with his unique renditions of the great old classics of magic.

He performed some tricks that were so old they were practically new again, many youngsters in magic including myself, had never even seen the “Rice Bowls” or the “Mutilated Parasol” let alone performed them. Charlie did them with a grace and twinkle in his eye that made them irresistible. I could have watched him for hours and I did, as he graced the stage of the “Magic Castle” with the charm of slightly rogue uncle. A magical legend in his own time, Charlie was a big man, larger than life, with a waistline to match. After Charlie suffered a mild heart attack his doctor gave him an ultimatum, lose weight or suffer the consequences! I think it was probably a tough decision for Charlie, who loved his food almost as much as he loved magic. This is where I got to know him a little better. As a callow young magician in his early twenties I realized how close I was to letting another of Magic’s greats disappear while I was only on a nod and smile basis with them. Heck, I wasn’t totally sure he really knew my name! So I plucked up my courage during Charlie’s recuperation and asked him if I could assist him in anyway. Charlie asked me if I had a car, when I said I did, we were off and running. He said he wanted to go to a favorite restaurant about five miles from his home and have lunch. He wanted me there not so much for the transportation or the company but to help keep him on his diet. I was ecstatic a luncheon date with Charlie was a serious step up in the magic world for me. I arrived at his Hollywood home at the appointed time and there he was waiting on the curbside, dressed up in
clothing that would have been suitable for weather that was twenty or thirty degrees colder.

We drove up Highland Avenue to a restaurant, which looked as if it had been frozen in time since Hollywood’s long gone golden era. The staff greeted Charlie with the excitement and respect that Jerry Lewis must receive when he walks into a cinema in Paris. We were ushered into a dark booth at the rear of the restaurant and menus were brought to the table. Charlie peered at the menu and ordered a very healthy meal. He ordered something from every part of the menu: soup, salad, pasta, and steak with baked potato. He then looked at me and asked if I thought he could add a desert to the list. I said that I thought that would be just fine. I realized that was what he wanted to hear, so I went right ahead and said it! I figured that this was the reason I was there in the first place. After washing down the meal with a couple of cups of coffee, Charlie leaned back in his chair and said; “This dieting thing isn’t too bad at all. That was a good meal!” He called over the waiter and I assumed he was going to ask for the check. However this was far from being his intention. “That was good,” he said. “Bring me the same again.”
That was exactly what happened. The waiter brought the exact same meal from soup to coffee and Charlie ate it again with obvious relish! Having found a healthy meal to his liking he was going to stick with it. While more than a little surprised, I was along for the ride, and second time around I took the opportunity to ask him a question or two about our mutual craft. I can’t say he said anything that I found too earth shattering at the time but in years to come I realized just how profound his thoughts were in spite of their simplicity. The secret to magic according to Charlie was to choose strong tricks, don’t be afraid to perform the classics, know everything you are going to do and do it well. Most important of all was to make sure people knew you were having fun doing it.
We repeated our luncheon ritual once more a few weeks later. It was identical, not only the two meals but he also ordered and ate the exact same food. I would have happily repeated the proceedings on a regular basis, but before I knew it the Charlie Miller recuperation was complete and “Twinkle Toes” Miller was back on a cruise tripping the light fantastic.
It was a pleasure to have spent some hours with this very special gentleman and I treasured our all too few hours together. I was delighted to realize I must have made some impact on him because in the future when we met at the “Castle” he always greeted me with a cheery; “Hi, Nick.” That was the kind of thing that made you feel like a million bucks when it happened.
There was just one thing that I couldn’t quite fully understand about Charlie. When observing him in his daily activities he had the slightly nervous and bumbling manner that suggested someone who, if not past his prime, at the very least must be having a bad day or at least wearing the wrong glasses. In all honesty for a man his age this should not have been any great surprise. What didn’t quite jibe with this was the fact that amongst the upper echelon of sleight of hand magicians, Charlie was considered to be one of the very finest card manipulators living. He was reputed to perform the smoothest second, middle and bottom deals in the business. This in spite of the fact that when you saw him handle playing cards he usually looked more likely to drop the deck than perform miracles with it.
After he had passed on, I gradually pieced together a very different picture of Charlie. It didn’t arrive all at once but bit by bit from people I would expect to know exactly what was what.

Aside from being the fine comedy magician that he was, able to produce a brimming mug of beer under your nose, Charlie was a gambler. Well maybe not a gambler, but what was known as a ringer in gambling circles. A ringer is someone who is introduced into private card games and can be relied upon to deal the right card at the right time. A good ringer can make a lot of money for a lot of people at the right time, as long as he doesn’t do it too often and above all if he doesn’t get caught doing it. Well the story I heard was that Charlie got caught at the wrong time with the wrong people with a ‘hold out’. Now, if you don’t know what a hold out is then you probably will never need to know. Keeping it brief, it is a mechanical device used to change out cards during a game. A genuine ‘hold out’ is something most magicians never see in their entire lives. They might see a magician’s version of this device, but a real one is a different story. It can range from a very expensive contraption, to a couple of skillfully used rubber bands. The story goes that after his cover was blown Charlie decided, like so many others, to take a cruise for his health. He just stayed away a little longer than most, and got a paycheck at the end of each cruise for publicly demonstrating his flawless performances of those classic magic tricks from the back pages of the magic world. Is this story true? I certainly couldn’t swear to it, but others do, people who knew Charlie a lot better than I did. Heck, I was just happy he knew my name. As I had sat with him, watching him eat his marathon meals, I knew he reminded me of someone. Only later on did I place the resemblance, it was my grandmother. They had the same slightly abstracted manner and bumbling quality that seemed out of place with their obviously razor sharp minds. Now as I told you before, I really don’t think my grandma was a cheat. And only once or twice a year does it run through my mind that Charlie was anything more than he appeared, but I sure would have loved to watch them as bridge partners. Maybe I would have known for sure. Maybe.