The Magic Boom: New Sorcery

Dorothy: "You're a very bad man."

Oz: "Oh, no. I'm a very good man. I'm just a very bad wizard."

--The Wizard of Oz

Oz was born a century too soon. Today he would have bought himself an act, taken lessons from experts and played the Emerald City to standees. Across the country, magic is enjoying unprecedented fortune. Says Dai Vernon, 80-year-old dean of American magic: "I've been conjuring for six decades; I don't know when the field has been so fertile." James Randi, a prestidigitator who tours with the Alice Cooper show, agrees: "Magic has had red-letter days. But this is a red-letter year." The prediction is no illusion.

> On Broadway, The Magic Show is a smash, the first such full-length production in Manhattan in 35 years. Says the star, Doug Henning, "It's not just me; every magician I know is working."

> In San Francisco, the Magic Cellar has an answer to Dai Vernon: "Paris," a five-year-old magician with an ageless routine.

> In Los Angeles, the Magic Castle, an eleven-year-old theater-restaurant devoted to the art and craft of legerdemain, is enjoying its most successful year. Says Resident Card Wizard Charles Miller, "Magic is surging; the rewards are better both financially and what you might call soul filling. Even the oldtimers are better." In North Hollywood, Magician Mark Wilson employs a full-time staff of 20 to devise and build special effects to astound audiences at conventions and trade shows.

> In Boston this month, the Society of American Magicians doubled the attendance of previous meetings and announced its greatest membership growth. Says Tad Ware, part-time magician and full-time manager of creative services for the Pillsbury Co.: "People are baking bread again, buying pianos for their parlors, and doing card tricks. It's a sort of back-to-basics thing."

> In New York, the basics--plus a bewildering range of electronic paraphernalia--are sold at Lou Tannen's, the largest magic shop in the world. "Our business has never been better," says Co-Owner Tony Spina. "We gross $500,000 a year, and many days we have no room or time for all our customers."

It was not always this lively, in Tannen's or at any other stop along the sorcery circuit. Just a few years ago, conjurers met at the bottom of nightclub bills and bemoaned the state of their business. All were afflicted with the magician's disease: ancestor worship. Gone was the golden age, they sighed. Television had consumed their best acts; film had taken the magic out of life. They spoke in the jargon of the trade: there were no tricks, only "effects"; a disappearing object was a "vanish"; a suddenly appearing object was a "production"; a nimble-handed move was a "sleight." The masters of all these effects and sleights had vanished. Houdini, who could get out of a steel coffin, could not escape from his wooden one; Cardini, who commanded the attention of a jammed theater with nothing but a deck of cards and a pack of cigarettes; Thurston, Dunninger, Blackstone, Dante: all, all were gone or retired. People wanted facts, not illusions; it was the age of the scientist, not the alchemist.

Chop-Chop Cups. The conjurers had forgotten that their heroes were also afflicted with nostalgia, that Houdini himself had borrowed his name from an earlier performer, Jean-Eugene Robert-Houdin, a 19th century French prestidigitator. Moreover, as the magicians should have known, scientists are the easiest to fool. They seek rational explanations for contrived phenomena, connections where none exist. Magicians were in fact doing what they had always persuaded their audiences to do: they were looking the wrong way. "We magicians are notorious for staring in the rear-view mirror," says Semipro Charles Reynolds, picture editor of Popular Photography. "As I figure it, all the evidence indicates that one day people will look back at this period and call it a magicians' renaissance." Reynolds is putting his money where his math is. This fall he will open a theater-restaurant `a la Magic Castle in New York's Greenwich Village.

If the boom continues, he may have to drive off customers with a wand. The professionals are once again besieged by autograph freaks, inundated with requests for magic lessons and invited to appear on TV. In some respects, it is a return to the good old days and a few of the bad ones. Successful show magicians still live out of hotel rooms making tense one-night stands. A broken prop remains a major disaster, and one rude kid who announces that the coin is up the left sleeve can ruin an evening.

Still, the number of TV and stage performers remains a fraction of the conjuring work force. Most well-paid magicians work at trade shows, parties and conventions where the fees can reach $2,500 per diem. Dick Gustafson, a former chemist, derives a nearly six-figure income from trade shows. "It's no trick," he insists. "For example, I link steel rings together at a show to demonstrate how a chemist will link molecules together to make fibers for, say, Du Pont. Sometimes I float my wife in the air to emphasize the lightness of a fabric." Conjurer Milbourne Christopher, historian of the art, has floated a cake of soap in mid-air for Procter & Gamble, and produced a sales manager out of an empty box for American Motors.

There is no one better at the drummer's art than Karrell Fox, a master magician who once wangled an appointment with Henry Ford Jr. He arrived at Ford's office, gave a predictable spiel about the wonderful world of Ford magic, then asked his victim to pick a card, any card. Fox then shuffled, threw the deck on the floor, spread the pack with his foot and smugly selected--the wrong card. Crestfallen, he asked Ford if he could at least see the famous garden on the balcony behind his desk. Henry drew the curtains. There, in skywriting, was the number and suit of Ford's choice. Fox has been pitching at the company's trade shows ever since.

Scarcely less Foxy than Karrell are the salesmen at Lou Tannen's magic shop. All are masters at the special effect of separating an onlooker from his money. "We have kids come in here who never quit buying," says Tony Spina. "Twelve-, 14-year-olds think nothing of spending $50, $100 on magic. Anything new becomes an instant sellout."

Tannen's most popular numbers are close-up effects, magic that can be done around coffee or conference tables. "Half and 20 centavo" ($12.50) turns a copper coin into a quarter--while the customer clutches it. "Chop-chop cups," little changed from the days of ancient Egypt, produce spheres from plum to orange size. "Spooky, the spirit handkerchief makes a ghost wander around under an empty little blanket of silk.

Even more popular than the effects is the vast array of magic literature. Some dozen magazines promise knowledge that only the ancients possessed. Perhaps the least savory is Chaos, a Canadian publication devoted to blue magic--a handkerchief under its direction can easily be folded into the shape of female genitalia. The most conscientious is the brilliantly edited monthly the Pallbearers Review. Despite its name, the Review is a shrewd, technical publication that separates the amateurs from the prose. Editor Karl Fulves has no patience with those who boast of occult powers, and specializes in explaining the mechanics of the beyond.

In the pages of such periodicals a pageant of figures appear, anonyms to the general public, but legends to the expanding magicians' fraternity: Derek Dingle, an air-conditioning engineer whom most magicians consider the greatest card manipulator extant; Percy Diaconis, a Harvard Ph.D. in statistics and inventor of more than 100 card sleights that have fooled professional gamblers; Martin Gardner, a science writer who can make the language of numbers appear as easy as pi (see box); Robert Hummer, a mathematical genius who would sleep on the floor rather than rearrange the cards on his bed.

Other American amateurs are better known: Will Rogers, who had a trick secreted in a pocket when his body was lifted from a plane crash; the late literary critic Edmund Wilson, who fooled his dinner guests with effects; Gary Grant, who likes to perform as the Great Carini at meetings at the Magic Castle.

Currently, the biggest name in the business is also the newest: Doug Henning. Dressed like a counterculture urchin, the possessor of a small voice and a stature that makes a pencil appear mesomorphic, Henning has proved that the magic boom is bankable--his show grosses some $60,000 per week. At 17, too young to perform in the nightclubs of his native Winnipeg, he flew to Barbados, where he acquired a motorcycle and a sign: MAGICIAN. HAVE RABBIT, WILL TRAVEL. He roamed the island, picking up work as he went. Seven years later, after earning a degree in psychology, he convinced the Canada Council that magic was an art form in need of further investigation. The council, which provides governmental funding for the arts, bankrolled his studies of legerdemain with Professor Dai Vernon at the Magic Castle. In three months, he had mastered the trade of the tricks. Two producers caught his act in Toronto and built a hit around him. Today, with a combination of optical illusions, paraphernalia and misdirection, Henning holds audiences in the palm of his sleight of hand.

Yet, as polished as Henning is, The Magic Show's success lies not with the star but with ourselves. In an epoch of uncertainty, people need a fraud they can believe in. Magic, with its cheerful promise of mountebankery, offers a kind of low comic relief. An audience that is fooled invariably laughs, delighted that its attention has been misdirected. To Magician-Historian Robert Lund, it is "a rebellion against science." To James Randi, it is "a sign that our society is still healthy. When people stop being enthralled by a magician who can make a lady vanish, it will mean that the world has lost its most precious possession: its sense of wonder."

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