THE WIZARD OF GRUNGE

By DAVID HANDELMAN

David Blaine desperately wants to be famous. After spotting Al Pacino in a Manhattan restaurant, the 24-year-old magician goes right over to introduce himself and do a card trick--but before he can start, Pacino brushes him off. Undaunted, Blaine tries again a few minutes later, sliding a deck out of his jeans pocket. "Pick a card," he says, quickly persuading the actor not only to count out 10 other cards but to sit on them as well. When the chosen card somehow "jumps" to his stack, Pacino pounds his fist on the table. "That is a beautiful thing!" he exults. Blaine leaves the restaurant triumphant: "That was a real movie-star reaction."

Blaine should know. In the past few years he has sprung his deadpan, charismatic sleight-of-hand in hip hangouts on both coasts, impressing some of the biggest names in show business--including Jack Nicholson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, David Geffen, Mike Tyson and Madonna. Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio have befriended him. At a party after the Grammys this year, Blaine sidled up to hot young singer Fiona Apple; today they are a couple. "David's magic reduces you to being three years old," says Apple, "that complete wonderment with the world."

But Blaine's best magic trick may be his own career. By updating corny card and coin feints and levitation stunts with post-grunge chic, he has leapfrogged from hustling sharpie to the star of his own sweeps-month network special, David Blaine: Street Magic (ABC, May 19, 8 p.m. E.T.). "It's a roll of the dice," admits ABC Entertainment president Jamie Tarses. "But David is very contemporary, of his generation, hip, cool. We think he can pull in the young, urban audience."

On the program, with DiCaprio as host, Blaine traipses across the country, performing his repertoire for a broad sampling of America's melting pot: old Chinese men in San Francisco; gangbangers in Compton, Calif.; Valley Girls, Wall Streeters, the Dallas Cowboys. "The secret, hidden message," he says, "is that all people are the same."

Most professional magicians scoff at Blaine's dime-store bag of tricks: making a chosen card rise out of a deck or reappear after being torn to pieces. But in magic, style is everything, and Blaine's intense, streetwise persona is nothing like your typical gabby Vegas showman in a cape. His deceptively low-key, ultracool manner leaves spectators more amazed than if he'd razzle-dazzled.

Where did he come from? Blaine likes to cultivate an air of mystery. In his short life, he has gone by several last names, including his grandmother's and his stepfather's, both of which he declines to disclose. Blaine (it's actually his middle name) was born in Brooklyn and started doing magic at age 4 when his mother Patrice White got him his first effect: a device that allowed a pencil to pass through a card without leaving a hole in it. He says he loved magic early on because "it made people smile. I've always had an ability to communicate with people, and magic was just a device that enhanced that." Blaine studied acting at New York City's Neighborhood Playhouse but started doing magic for rich people's private parties, earning, he says, as much as $300 an hour. Through a friend's roommate, he met the man who would become his ICM agent, Jon Podell (who also represents Michael Bolton and the Allman Brothers). When Podell doubted that Blaine's "close-up" magic would work on TV, Blaine hired his own video crew and shot a 10-minute demo to convince him.

But Blaine intends the ABC special to signal the close of his card-trick phase. "It's fun, but I'm starting to get depleted," he says. He has been consulting with more seasoned magicians to bolster his repertoire ("We discuss ways to make things possible," he says) and has begun putting together his theatrical debut, an ambitious show he plans to perform for the first time in a meat locker in Manhattan's meat-packing district. "It's going to be simple and street," he promises. "It will have a story, not just a bunch of assembled tricks."

Despite Blaine's immersion in the worlds of celebrity and illusion, he says his idol remains his mother, who died of cancer in 1994. "She raised me with the attitude you can do anything you want," says Blaine. "She told me, 'There's no logic--just follow your heart.'" Time will tell if that heart is an ace.