Magic Is Dead, page 21
“I’d love that!” I told her. I felt a sense of maternal obligation coming from Laura, like she was holding all of this together, and I held a sense of pride that she wanted to keep me around as the52 progressed.
She reached out again a few days before I left. “Let’s meet up on Monday, the day after you get here,” she said. “I am going to be bringing someone, but you can’t tell anyone. It has to stay between us. Can you keep a secret?”
“Of course,” I said.
“Perfect. I will see you soon.”
During his months-long absence, Madison worked on a project related to The Expert at the Card Table, the 1902 sleight-of-hand classic by S. W. Erdnase. Despite his admiration for the text and all that it taught him about cards, Madison wanted to question people’s devotion to the book. He was, after all, never one to pray to false idols. The ethos of the52 had always been to shake things up—to propel magic forward—and he wanted to shoot an arrow through the heart of the industry. And so Madison filmed an eight-hour-long video detailing his thoughts on the moves depicted in the legendary book, and how he had improved on them over the years. It also came with an exclusive deck of playing cards and an annotated book delivered in a high-quality custom box that mimicked the original text: gold lettering stamped onto a forest-green case.
The project dropped a couple of weeks before I went to London to see Laura. On the launch date, he promoted it with a simple tagline: I am Daniel Madison. And I am better than Erdnase. That’s when the death threats started. “You’ll be sorry you acted like an arrogant prick mate. Too big for your boots. Something is coming for you, I swear. TWAT!” one text message read, coming from an unknown number. “You got a death wish bro? People down here talking about having you killed, no joke watch your back bro,” another anonymous magic vigilante wrote. The backlash—even apart from the physical threats—was swift and fierce. Card-handling legends like Jason England and Derek DelGaudio lambasted Madison on Facebook, with DelGaudio calling him “the Milo Yiannopoulos of magic.” Memes were created, jokes were made, and Madison loved every second of it. He used it as fuel for his fire.
As the old saying goes, however, any press is good press. The hundred-dollar project sold out in two days. And people raved about it. They loved Madison’s take on the historic book, and Ellusionist raked in tens of thousands of dollars from the stunt. Even David Blaine sent his praise. I called Madison the day the project came out and, to my surprise, he picked up.
“So that’s what you’ve been up to!” I said. “But, man, people are really hating on you for this one.”
He laughed. “It’s better to be loved or hated than anything in the middle. I was in a lull for a while, and I needed to put some fire under my ass. I needed to get back into my character and really push the envelope. What better way to do that than attack magic’s bible?”
Page 33: If nobody hates you then you’re doing it wrong.
Madison also had a mission for me: induct the52’s next two members. He and Laura had spent months debating. They decided on Nicolas Nargeot, a young sleight-of-hand aficionado and photographer from France, and Larry Fong, a highly respected director of photography and cinematographer in Hollywood. Larry literally makes blockbuster movies for a living. Both guys had plans to be in New York City soon. “Take them to get their tattoos,” Madison told me.
Nicolas came first. I called Xavior and the three of us went to a small shop in Manhattan for the ink. Nicolas, square-jawed and well dressed, beamed at the opportunity. “This is the best day of my life,” he told us in his lilting French accent, holding up his freshly inked finger: the Ten of Clubs.
Larry came a few weeks later. A longtime magic hobbyist, Larry has an intense Rolodex of films. He has manned the camera for big-shot movies like 300, Watchmen, Super 8, Now You See Me, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, and Kong: Skull Island. Larry always performs a little for the cast while they’re lounging around on set, and while filming Kong, he posted a photo of him performing to Brie Larson. Over the years, he also made it a point to hide a three of clubs in all his movies—his secret signature, hidden in plain sight, known only to him and a few friends. In Batman v Superman, the card is tacked up on the wall in Wallace Keefe’s apartment among a collage of newspaper clippings. In Kong: Skull Island, it’s laid atop a table in a Vietnamese bar, seen during an overhead shot. The list goes on.
He actually got the call while filming The Predator, a reboot of the famed horror-monster flick directed by Shane Black, which hit the big screen in September 2018. When he saw the incoming FaceTime call, he scurried across set—smack dab in the wilderness of British Columbia—and locked himself in the crew’s blacked-out Suburban. He answered and saw Madison and Laura sitting together. “What do you think?” they asked after offering him membership. Larry giddily accepted, hung up, and ran back over to the cast and crew, who were waiting for him to begin the next take. He became the Seven of Clubs.*
Larry had just finished filming The Predator when he came to New York for his ceremonial ink. Xavior came along again to film the induction. Eric Hu, another friend and local magician who owns Baby Grand, a karaoke bar in Brooklyn, also joined. We stopped at a bar across the street before going into the tattoo parlor. Larry threw down a shot of tequila. “It’s an honor,” he told me, clutching his empty glass. “I know what this group is all about.”
We went over to the shop and Larry sat down. He grimaced in pain as the tattoo artist went to work. It was his first tattoo. A few minutes later, it was official. He held up his finger to the camera. “Welcome, Larry!” Xavior shouted, and we all gave a little round of applause. Everyone in the shop joined in and a chant rang out: “Larr-y! Larr-y! Larr-y!”
It’s not surprising, although not well known, that many in entertainment are magic geeks. “I have no idea what gave me the confidence to start performing magic shows, for money, when I was twelve,” said Ira Glass on the radio program This American Life, opening an episode dedicated entirely to magic. The segment came to be when Glass and his coworker David Kestenbaum realized they were both childhood magicians. They reminisced about hosting their own shows, compared techniques with cards and props, and talked method and sleight of hand. They also realized that they both were, as grown men, still captivated by magic. “Even as we have been writing and editing this story, like over and over, I’ve gotten that feeling of excitement about it that I used to get [as a kid] when I handled props or practiced the Cups and Balls,” Glass said. “I still regularly have dreams that I am supposed to do my act—I just had one two weeks ago.” Ira Glass is over sixty years old. He hasn’t officially performed magic in almost forty-five years.
Academy Award–winning actor Adrien Brody also fell in love with magic as a youngster. “I was more than a fan,” he told Deadline in 2015, an interview given to promote his role as Houdini in the History Channel series of the same name. “Not only did I have a fascination with magic, but I had aspirations of becoming a magician when I was a boy.” During the interview, he also drew parallels between acting and magic: “You understand the workings of a trick and you make it your own, you develop a patter and you tell that story uniquely, and that’s what makes a great show and a great magician.” He ended up getting nominated for an Emmy for his role as the great escapist, which made him nostalgic for his childhood ambition. “Receiving recognition for a heroic figure in my life and for something as meaningful as magic . . . for it to have led me into acting and then led me to ultimately play the key figure in that world is pretty remarkable,” he said. The actor Neil Patrick Harris is still a practicing magician. He has performed magic on daytime talk shows, including for Ellen DeGeneres and Kelly Ripa, and many of the characters he portrays on television have some loose connection to magic. He was also executive producer for Derek DelGaudio’s show In & Of Itself.
Weirdly enough, a few days after taking Larry for his ink, I popped into Tannen’s, the magic shop in Manhattan, to buy a few decks of cards. When I walked in, I found the director J. J. Abrams, a good friend of Larry (they worked together on Lost and Super 8), standing at the counter with his adolescent son. Abrams is also a big fan of magic, and even gave a TED Talk in 2007 about the Mystery Box, a cardboard box with a question mark stamped on its front that is sold at Tannen’s. It costs $15 but is filled with $50 worth of magic. The catch is, obviously, that its contents are a mystery.
In his much-watched speech, Abrams explained that secrecy is a constant theme in his films, and his obsession with mystery stemmed from the power of this box. His own box was a gift from his grandfather, the same man who bought him his first video camera. Onstage, he reached inside his bag and pulled out the same box he received as a kid. It still hadn’t been opened. “I realized I haven’t opened it because it represents something important to me,” he told the crowd. “It represents my grandfather. It represents infinite possibility. It represents hope. It represents potential.” To Abrams, mystery is sometimes more important than knowledge. He explained that the building blocks of magic can shape our understanding of the world and help influence other forms of art, like film. To him, mystery is the catalyst for imagination. “I realized, wow, mystery boxes are everywhere in what I do [as a filmmaker].”
Hollywood directors and producers, when crewing up for a big-budget film, have likewise employed many of the community’s most savvy magicians. These experts in illusion worked behind the scenes for the Now You See Me franchise and consulted for the Tom Cruise–led action film Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation. Directors understand that magicians have unique minds and can come up with clever ways for heroes to escape certain situations or save the day. “It really gets me excited to work on things that people would not associate with magic,” Blake Vogt told me; Vogt lent his expertise to Ant-Man and Now You See Me 2. “The true identity of Ant-Man was a con artist,” he said. “He was a deceiver. We can’t go out and hire a professional con artist, so what’s the next-best thing? A magician!”
Ocean’s 8, the newest, all-female installment of the famed heist series, released in 2018, also employed a magician: the Portuguese sleight-of-hand artist Helder Guimarães. The film’s production team saw his off-Broadway show Verso, later approached him to consult for the movie, and sent him a copy of the script for input. Then they had him on set for more hands-on involvement. “I spent hours training both Cate Blanchett and Sandra Bullock, explaining all the details about the con, the psychology of con artists, other related scams and tricks used by hustlers as well as some card handling,” Guimarães told me over email. “They were both fantastic, hardworking, and wonderful to work with. It was very collaborative. They were always very receptive to my ideas and my comments throughout all the process. When I am consulting, my job is to help someone else with their vision. Producers, directors, actors: they all have their specific ideas and I am merely helping with them, using my knowledge.”
The Now You See Me franchise is gearing up to release its third installment in 2019. During preproduction, Madison got a call. Would he want to come on board and consult for the film? In classic Madison fashion, he turned the offer down.
I got to Bike Shed, a motorcycle bar in Shoreditch, London, and ordered a coffee while I waited for Laura. My body was still on New York time and I was exhausted. Tucked underneath a brick-arched traffic overpass, the joint boasted a brushed steel bar, polished concrete floors, and a pair of bloodred leather couches smashed against the back wall. Stylish patrons in skinny jeans and knit sweaters clutched pints of beer and ate burgers. It was a hipster hangout not unlike most of the bars near my apartment in Brooklyn. A light rain fell outside, typical for London in springtime.
Laura trotted in. She wore a see-through black top and skintight black jeans tucked into knee-high leather boots. She beamed that wide grin at me and her crimson-red bangs swung over her eyes. Behind her, clad in a loose-collared T-shirt that flashed tattoos running under his collarbones, with a shearling jacket wrapped around his shoulders, stood Daniel Madison. They both gave me a hug, sniggering at Madison’s surprise appearance. He had taken the train from Leeds that morning. “I couldn’t pass it up, coming down to see you,” he said as we took a seat on a couch. He looked much better than the last time I saw him, in New York. They both ordered a beer; I asked for another coffee.
I had just put in the two newest members, so we talked about the next wave of inductees for the52. “We need to find undiscovered talent, people that are doing great things,” Laura said. “That’s the whole point. We’ll get there. We’re going to get the next round going over the summer.” Laura signaled over the waitress.
“Hey, love,” she said, “could we be moved over to a booth? We have a few more friends coming and, ah, well, we might need a bit of privacy, yeah?” Laura told her that Dynamo, their longtime friend who is also one of the most famous magicians in England, was popping in to have lunch with us.
The waitress arched her eyebrow. “Oh, yeah. Yeah, sure, let me open one up for ya.” A minute later, Dynamo walked in with his longtime manager, Dan Albion. Everyone in the bar shot glances as we walked to our booth. A father and daughter approached Dynamo for a photograph. Our waitress took our order and brought over a round of burgers.
Over the past decade, Dynamo has become the face of magic in England. From 2011 to 2014, he starred in his own television show, Dynamo: Magician Impossible, which racked up more than 20 million viewers. His subsequent British show tour sold half-a-million tickets, and his Australian leg sold another 100,000. Although they had taken wildly divergent paths as magicians, Madison and Dynamo were still two kids from Bradford who loved to geek out over moves and new tricks. They sat across from one another and tinkered with a deck of cards. Dynamo showed Madison a few new routines (which will remain secret), and he listened intently as Madison gave his opinion, embracing the rare one-on-one with his old friend.
Dan Albion and I talked about Dynamo’s career trajectory, including how, before Dynamo was famous, the BBC rejected their show idea. “We were in the room, showing them the reel, and the executives weren’t really even paying attention,” Albion told me, adding that it took more than a year to successfully sell their vision for the show. They wanted to embody the raw, unscripted nature of a traditional street magic show, but also have Dynamo embody someone with otherworldly powers, who could perform impossible large-scale stunts in public. They also wanted to humanize Dynamo by digging into his hardscrabble past and his chronic health problems—to show how he overcame all the odds to become a famous magician. It was eventually picked up by Channel 4, who took a risk on the unknown talent, and became an overnight success.
“I’d like to see more women on television doing magic,” Laura interjected, adding that misogynistic stereotypes—the busty assistant, the cutesy add-on—remain a plague in the industry. Laura had recently made some headway on the small screen, starring in the British show The Next Great Magician. She admitted there was still a long way to go. Laura had always championed her female counterparts in the community and at that point had already inducted some of the best female performers around into the52: Cat Boult (the Queen of Diamonds), a blond, high-cheekboned close-up magician from Los Angeles,* and Billy Kidd (the Three of Clubs), a Canadian stage performer known for her Prohibition-era tomboy style, all newsboy caps and tweed blazers. Billy has a range of skills, from cards to escapes to comedy, and has seen substantial screen time on television shows in the United Kingdom, where she lives full-time.
Laura idolizes Mercedes Talma, a British magician who rose to prominence in the early twentieth century and performed in the world-famous act Le Roy, Talma & Bosco, a troupe that included the famed Belgian conjurer Servais Le Roy, who also happened to be her husband. Although her career began as an assistant to her spouse, over time she herself became extremely accomplished. She eventually started performing alone as “the Queen of Coins.”* Houdini called her “the greatest female sleight of hand performer that ever lived.”
Journalists covering her performances, however, still labeled her an ancillary figure, secondary to her male counterparts. “Leroy had very capable support from [Mercedes] Talma and his large colleague Bosco,” a reporter for Evening Post, a New Zealand newspaper, wrote in 1914. “The lady showed herself a very capable conjurer and a sprightly comedian.” Other magicians were similarly conditional in their praise. In a 1902 letter to Houdini, George Little, editor of Mahatma Magazine, wrote, “Servais Leroy opened here at the Orpheum (Brooklyn) with his triple alliance (Leroy, Talma, Bosco) and they scored pretty well. I would much rather see Leroy all alone in his own act—I feel certain he would be better appreciated, and you could see something of him, as I have always considered him a very exceptionally clever performer. I may say, that Talma received the biggest share of applause and for a woman, she deserved it.”
Laura wishes that women who dedicated themselves to magic weren’t still viewed this way. “The term ‘female magician’ is a problem in and of itself,” Laura said at lunch between bites of french fries. “It’s bullshit, really, being caught up in the simplification of labels and whatnot, trying to make it easier to mass market us just because we are women. I want to be known as a sleight-of-hand artist,” she said, taking a deck of cards from her purse and slamming it down on the table, “not a female magician.”
Laura holds a weekly residency at Café de Paris in West London’s Piccadilly neighborhood. First opened in 1924, the two-tiered space is modeled after the Titanic’s extravagant ballroom and was a mainstay for London’s elite during the city’s jazz age. The space was destroyed by falling bombs during World War II but was subsequently rebuilt, reclaiming all of its former splendor. It’s become quite a celebrity hangout and has hosted the likes of Harry Styles, Rita Ora, Hugh Grant, and Simon Cowell.*
