Fooling Houdini, page 21
Ironically, church authorities would later anathematize all forms of magic, along with juggling and acrobatics, as the work of evil spirits. For centuries, magicians were persecuted for being in league with Satan, and sleight of hand was condemned as the devil’s pastime. Magicians feared death, and many fell victim to the witch-hunting crazes that regularly swept across Europe during the early modern period. The first English manual on sleight of hand, Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft, published in the late sixteenth century, was meant to save sorcerers’ lives by demystifying their tricks. Back when magicians ran the risk of being burned at the stake, this sort of exposure, which today might raise hackles among the anointed, was a strategy for dodging the pyre. In the Discoverie, Elizabethan masked magician Reginald Scot defends his fellow conjurers against charges of sorcery by explaining the secular methods behind the dark arts. (See, it’s not real magic; it’s just a trick. Put down the torch.) The book so infuriated witch-slaying Bible peddler King James I that he ordered all copies of it burned. But the book survived, and for the next two hundred years it reigned as the standard magic textbook in the English-speaking world.
Many modern religious figures have also used conjuring tricks to attract followers. Hindu fakirs and African medicine men have been caught trying to pass off tricks lifted from the Tarbell Course in Magic, an eight-volume encyclopedia, as divine works, and Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon Church, began his career as a treasure hunter who swore he could locate silver mines and lost Spanish gold with a divining rod. (He’d palm a lump of ore and plant it in the trawl.) Smith accumulated a healthy rap sheet before realizing that he could make more money—and have more wives—in the religion business. Still no word on those gold plates, though.
Uri Geller claims to have made his fortune in a similar manner, as a dowser for oil and mining companies. “My money I didn’t make from bending spoons,” he told an audience of two thousand magicians at the International Magic Convention in London, where he received the Berglas Foundation Award for his services to magic. “I made my wealth from finding oil and gold.”
While mentalism techniques go back at least two thousand years, the first recorded account of mentalism being marketed as a form of entertainment is of a 1572 exhibition by an Italian knight named Girolamo Scotto, who became the Holy Roman Emperor’s favorite court conjurer. In a command performance for Archduke Ferdinand II, Scotto picked out from an array of coins the very same one the archduchess had selected in her mind. He then proceeded to locate a thought-of word in a book—a book test, in mentalism lingo—and duplicate the archduke’s handwriting from another room. Scotto’s act killed.
Modern mentalism emerged in the nineteenth century, its growth coinciding with the rise of spiritualism. The word telepathy was coined in 1882, just as scientists were learning how to send signals wirelessly through the air. It was the dawn of vaudeville and radio, theosophy and spirit cabinets, turban acts and the telephone. Inspired by the discovery of electromagnetic waves and the advent of telecommunications, theories of thought transference and “mental telegraphy” became fashionable among many prominent thinkers. If one form of intangible communication was possible, they reasoned, why not others? For a while, executives at telegraph companies worried that telepathy might signal the death of their business.
In an attempt to capitalize on this trend, many performers began adding mentalism to their acts. In Paris during the mid-1800s, French conjuror Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin invented one of the earliest-known second-sight acts, a two-person mentalism routine in which a secret code is used to simulate telepathy. With his son Emile blindfolded onstage, Robert-Houdin would thread his way through the audience glancing at objects spectators had brought with them to the show. “Here’s an interesting object,” he would say. “Yes, please hand it over. I’ll ask you to concentrate on it.” His son would then identify the object from onstage. The code, which took years to perfect, worked by embedding information in the phrasing of the request. “Here, what is this?” for instance, might indicate that the object in question was a watch. Further specificity could be added by inserting extra words into the phrase. “Here, please, what is this?” might signify a gold watch, for instance, while “Here, look, what is this?” might mean the watch was silver. A similar set of cues could communicate letters and numbers, names and dates, and just about any common object. Forty years later, Yorkshire conjuror Charles Morritt and his partner, Lilian, improved on Robert-Houdin’s act by using a technique called silent thought transmission, in which the cues were embedded not in the words themselves but in the pattern of gaps between them. The length of a pause between two syllables, for instance, might denote the color of an object or the denomination of a coin. These classic code acts have inspired mentalists ever since.
We even see evidence of the mentalist’s toolkit leaking over into politics during the days of Boss Tweed, when crooked pollsters rigged ballots with covert writing implements known as swami gimmicks, which can be used to simulate precognition. In the 1920s, mentalists began appearing among the performers listed on cruise ship manifests, and radio mentalism became a staple of popular entertainment. Coming off the success of The Jungle, Upton Sinclair wrote Mental Radio in 1930, a book about his second wife’s psychic powers, to which Albert Einstein contributed a glowing preface.
One of the most popular and well-paid performers of the vaudeville era was a crystal gazer named Claude Alexander Conlin, who began his career as a black hat in Soapy Smith’s con man militia and later billed himself as Alexander, the Man Who Knows. The bit that minted him a fortune was his question-and-answer act. Draped in an Oriental robe, Alexander would answer audience questions scrawled on sealed slips of paper by holding them up to an invisible third eye on his forehead and using Barnum-esque language in his replies. He also made millions doing private readings for rich society types.
The man widely considered to have set the standard for contemporary mentalism was Joseph Dunninger, a New Yorker who popularized himself as a radio performer in the 1940s and read the minds of six presidents and one pope. “Never have I witnessed anything as mystifying or seemingly impossible,” Thomas Edison said of Dunninger’s thought-reading act. Not only was Edison fooled, but so were many scientists—along with millions of laypeople who listened to his weekly radio show and later watched him on television. “For those who believe,” he would say, “no explanation is necessary; for those who do not believe, no explanation will suffice.”
Dunninger’s heyday in the 1940s and ’50s marked the end of what might properly be called the second wave of mentalism. The third wave hit in the 1970s, when Uri Geller started bending spoons and restarting broken watches on television. Geller’s arrival in New York in the mid-1970s was, according to Bob Cassidy, “a big revolution.” Mentalism was officially added as an event at the Magic Olympics in 1979, and spoon-bending parties, a staple of the swinging ’70s, persist even to this day. University of Arizona parapsychologist Gary Schwartz threw a psychokinetic jamboree as recently as 2001.
The secret to mentally bending a spoon is not, as was suggested in The Matrix, to realize that there is no spoon, but to realize instead that you’ve got to bend the spoon with your bare hands when no one is paying attention. Unless you’re using a fancy magnetic metal-bending apparatus, called a PK system, the standard method is to introduce a small bend in the head of the spoon before the trick even begins, hiding this action behind a smokescreen of misdirection. Once the spoon is bent, you hold it vertically by the tip of the handle with the bend facing the spectator—it’s best if no one is at your sides—and gradually rotate it downward toward the audience, while twisting it along the vertical axis. Done correctly, the spoon looks like it visibly liquefies in your hands. The illusion is so strong you’ll fool yourself with it.
The best metal bender in the world is a ferociously talented mentalist named Banachek, aka The Man Who Fooled the Scientists. In 1979, while still a teenager, Banachek (born Steven Shaw) and magician Michael Edwards conned a team of scientists at St. Louis’s Washington University into thinking the two could bend spoons, keys, and other metal objects with their minds. After 120 hours of tests conducted inside a $500,000 state-of-the-art research facility funded by the McDonnell Douglas Corporation and overseen by a physicist, the researchers were convinced beyond all doubt that Shaw and Edwards had telekinetic powers. The infamous hoax, nicknamed Project Alpha, was made public in early 1983, when Shaw and Edwards confessed that the whole thing had been a put-up job engineered by skeptic James Randi.
Today, interest in mentalism is once again on the uptick, in part due to the sluggish economy. When the market goes south, demand for mentalism rises as people seek solace and an easy escape from their woes. Like guns and booze, gambling and the lotto, mentalism is a countercyclical industry, peaking in times of crisis. These days, more magicians are turning to mentalism as a hedge against a gloomy future. Meanwhile, a new crop of paranormalist shows has hit the airways. “Financially the rewards are much higher right now doing mentalism than doing magic,” Docc Hilford, a Miami-based mind reader, told a group of magicians at the Ronjo magic store on Long Island in March 2009. “Just the glimmer, the slight flicker of a possible hope in something, anything, is enough that people will pay for it right now.” Hilford is known for being a wicked cold reader. Some years back, he and magician Simon Lovell were stranded at a magic convention without any money. Hilford told Lovell not to worry, and he shuffled off to a local hair salon to do some readings. “Two hours later,” Simon recalls, “he came back with $600 in cash.” (“He’s a carny at heart,” Wes said of Hilford.)
A magic store clerk from LA, with whom I had a lengthy conversation about the lure of mentalism, summed up the temptation succinctly: “Why bother doing magic shows when I can make three times that much doing readings for old retired ladies?” he asked. The only answer I could come up with was that I’m the wrong kind of liar.
ON THE LAST DAY OF MINDvention, I got my hair cut at a barbershop down the road from the Palace Station. Next to the barbershop was a karate dojo and a palm reader. Call it fate. I’d never been to a psychic before, and given what I now knew about mentalism, I was especially curious. So I walked in and paid forty bucks for a reading.
The psychic’s name was Stephanie and she was middle-aged and slightly overweight, with dark hair and dark eyes and a face pitted with acne scars. She led me into a back room filled with Bible knickknacks: cherubs on harps, dancing angels, and a plastic Jesus with the words “Divine Miracle” printed on it. The walls were plastered with tarot drawings, and I noticed that the calendar hadn’t been turned in months. I sat down at a wide glass table, and she asked me for my name and my birthday.
“Good boy,” she said, in a hoarse voice. “Now make two good wishes.”
I did.
“Good boy. Let’s see your right palm.”
I held it out.
“Good boy.”
She took my hand and told me she sensed movement. In the past two years things had kind of gone upside down for me. It seemed like everything I tried to do was three steps forward and four steps back. I didn’t sleep well. I tossed and turned at night. I worried about all kinds of stuff that was going on in my life. I also had a bit of a hot temper, although it never lasted long. I was kindhearted and I liked to help people. But sometimes when I needed help, there was no one around I could depend on, and I had to fend for myself.
I had to admit: for the most part, she was spot-on.
There was also someone in my family who was sick (check), although there were no immediate deaths on the horizon. I, for one, had a very long life ahead of me. I’d had my heart broken in the past and was tired of playing games (check). I wasn’t getting any younger, after all. (Who is?) It was time to settle down and start a family. (Sure, why not?) There would be traveling in my future (yep), profitable investments (no joke?), and a visit from an old friend or relative on the horizon (you mean Nick?).
“Do you often see things people should be worried about?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she sighed.
I raised my eyebrows at her.
“Would you like to know about it?”
I nodded. Pray continue.
“I pick up that there’s some people that are gossiping about you,” she said. “I don’t know why. You never tried to do anything bad to them. But they just like gossiping about you.” Who were these gossipers, I thought to myself with a shudder, and what were they saying? Seconds later, the rational side of my brain lurched into action and, like a stern boxing coach, chided me for letting my guard down.
Marshalling my thoughts, I decided to shift the focus of the conversation away from my issues and instead train the spotlight on Stephanie. If nothing else, I wanted to know how she’d gotten into the mentalism business in the first place.
I asked her how she had discovered her gift, and she shrugged. “It’s something you’re born with,” she said. “I was about eight years old, and I seen this old lady. She was walking. I told my mom that I feel something dangerous was gonna happen to her. And then my mom approached the lady and told her, you know, and she didn’t believe her. And me and my mom and the old lady was walking across the street and a truck came and almost hit the old lady and my mom pulled her back. It’s a gift that you’re born with. It’s called the third veil. You’re born with a layer of skin on your face, like a little mesh. My mom had it, my grandma had it.”
After we finished, she led me out past a room with a massage table and a Tibetan singing bowl for chakra cleansing, and I thanked her and shook her hand.
“Good boy,” she said. “You’re ready to go.”
Later that day, I caught myself brooding over what Stephanie said—that is, until I remembered the source and pushed those thoughts aside. And yet, no matter how hard I tried to dislodge them, they had a stubborn way of creeping back into my consciousness. My memory was playing tricks on me, it seemed. Had I told her where I was from, or had she guessed it? (She’d asked me about my life in New York.) And how did she know my mother was ill? Confirmation bias set in, reinforcing the hits—what she’d gotten right—while disguising the misses. She said I’d be traveling soon, I recalled, as I boarded a plane back to New York that afternoon. Lying awake that night, I remembered how she’d said I had insomnia.
One of the scariest things about mentalism is that even after you understand how it works, it still feels believable. Subsequent Forer experiments have even shown that the perceived accuracy of sham personality descriptions shoots up when the readings are ascribed to mystical sources such as astrology and palmistry. People want to believe.
In 1988, a young performance artist named José Alvarez catapulted to stardom in Australia by posing as a spirit medium. He called forth phantoms on national television and spoke in tongues at the Sydney Opera House. In the process, he attracted a massive cult following. Later that year, Alvarez announced publicly that he’d made it all up—in fact, it had been yet another prank hatched by serial hoaxer James Randi, of Project Alpha fame. And yet many of Alvarez’s fans continued to insist that he was for real.
I had a similar experience some months ago, while doing magic at a friend’s dinner party. A few card tricks and a watch steal later, the topic of mind reading came up, and I mentioned that I’d dabbled in the psychic arts. Immediately, one of the guests, a writer in her late twenties whom I’d only just met, asked me to show her something.
At first I was hesitant. After my initial bout of experimentation, I’d cut back on the mind-reading thing. It was a little too creepy. But she wouldn’t let it go, and finally I agreed. What’s one more reading? I thought. She wrote a name down on a scrap of paper and folded it up while I averted my gaze. Then I tore the paper to shreds. The name was Julia.
“It’s not a family member, is it?” I asked, picking up some subtle negative cues. “No, not a family member,” I continued. “But like family in a way.” Here I was using a technique called the vanishing negative. By phrasing the negation as a question—“It’s not a family member, is it?”—with ambiguous inflection, I sound right regardless of what the answer turns out to be. If I sense a yes coming, I go with it—“Yes, that’s what I thought.” And if the answer is no, I simply restate the question as a declarative statement: “No, it’s not a family member,” and add, “but like family.” And again, you only want to be right 85 percent of the time.
“I think that’s what I’m picking up on,” I said. “I’m sensing an almost maternal bond between the two of you.”
She was blushing a little. I was getting warmer.
“A close family friend, yes?”
She smiled and uncrossed her arms.
“Her name starts with a J—like Judy or Julie.”
“Julia!” she cried, ecstatic. “She’s my aunt. I mean, she’s not my aunt, but she’s like my aunt. She’s my mom’s best friend from high school. I’ve known her forever.”
“I can see her now. She’s roughly your height, darkish hair.”
She nodded enthusiastically.
“She’s good natured, loyal, has a warm sense of humor. You two are a lot alike, I can tell.” (We tend to believe that our friends and, to a lesser extent, our loved ones, are either exactly like us or exactly the opposite.)
She was eating it up.
“I’m also sensing some distance—emotional or geographic. Does Julia live nearby?”
She shook her head. “She lives in England.”
