Magic Is Dead, page 8
When we first met, Ramsay didn’t try to impress me by drowning me in magic. In fact, he did only a few tricks for me. To him, magic shouldn’t be flaunted; overdoing it could diminish the impact. But once, back in Blackpool, Ramsay had performed an effect just for me.
It was the last night of the convention and we had just eaten dinner. We made our way back to the Ruskin for a drink, as we had done every night. By 11 P.M., some members of our group started heading back to their hotels. Many of them, including us, had early flights the next morning. As Ramsay finished the last of his beer, we stood up and headed for the stairs. But before we went up, he pulled me aside and took a deck of cards from his back pocket. He shuffled and started to speak.
“I want you to imagine that we are in a room much like this. There is a table in front of us and on this table is a deck of cards. We are going to select a card together.” He fanned the deck. I chose a card. He motioned for me to hold it facedown in my palm and told me to not look at it. He put the rest of the deck back into his pocket. “If you had the choice to remove red or black from the deck of cards, which would you choose?”
“Black.”
“Leaving us only with?”
“Red.”
“I want you to imagine that we are going to put all the diamonds here”—he motioned to his right hand—“and the hearts here”—he motioned to his left—“and I am going to drop one of these two piles on the table. Either diamonds or hearts. You choose.”
“Diamonds.”
“Leaving us only with?”
“Hearts.”
“In the heart cards, there are number cards and picture cards. You’re going to imagine that the number cards are here”—he again gestured to his right—“and the picture cards are here”—to his left—“and you are going to toss one of these piles up into the air. Which would you choose? Numbers or pictures?”
“Pictures.”
“Imagine the picture cards leaving and, right here”—he looked up into the space above our heads—“they stop in midair. You have the jack, queen, and king levitating right in front of you, right here.” He raised his hand into the space between us. “I am going to grab two of them. Which two did I grab?”
“Jack and king.”
“Leaving only the . . . ?”
“The queen of hearts.”
He nodded to the card in my hand. I turned it over. I held the queen of hearts. I stared at the card and smiled. He grinned, too, and modestly shoved his hands into his pockets. We stood there in silence for a bit and then he said, “Let’s go,” and that was that.
This moment—shared between the two of us—came back to me when Madison and I were discussing my tattoo and subsequent announcement. I wanted to give Ramsay something like what he had given me. I wanted to give him an experience. And so I prepared for Vegas—a secret privy only to me.
Jeremy pulled off the highway, and we stopped at a red light. “So,” he started, “are you going to tell me what you have in store?”
I smiled. “You’ll see. Let’s just say I’m going to create a magic moment.”
8
Happy Pilgrims
Our first order of business in Los Angeles was to check out the Magic Castle, a cornerstone of magic history in the United States. Built in 1909, and a magician hangout since 1963, the massive venue is propped up on a small hill and built like an actual castle: a chateau-like structure with lattice-rimmed gables, wraparound balconies, and spires thrusting above the tree line. It glowed a bright yellow in the dark as Jeremy pulled his car up the steep driveway. We got out and he gave his keys to an awaiting valet. You must wear a suit to enter and, as I waited to get in, tightening the tie knotted around my neck, the evening sun burned through the smog hovering over downtown Los Angeles.
“Absolutely no cameras!” bellowed the bouncer. “No selfies, food porn, cocktail porn, belfies, Pokémon Go, Periscope, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, or anything that involves taking pictures with your phone! If you take photographs inside the Castle, we will show you the door!”
“A little strict, huh?” I whispered to Jeremy after getting past the doorman.
“Well, it’s a club for magicians,” he said. “You can’t keep a club secret if everyone is taking pictures inside of it!” We checked in at the front desk and Jeremy led me over to a bookcase.
“Where do we go in?” I asked.
“Right here,” he said, smiling.
“But there’s no door. This is a bookcase.”
“See that owl?” he said, pointing to the shelf. “Lean in and say, ‘Open sesame.’” I smiled, gave him a condescending glance, approached the shelf, and said, ‘Open sesame.’ The bookcase shot left, revealing an entryway into the club.
“After you,” he said, smiling, and I led the way.
Inside the Castle, men and women congregated around the main bar, which, dimly lit and lined in metal stools, anchored the room. I felt like I was in some sort of off-kilter church: stained-glass windows hovering above doorways, nooks and cabinets holding strange trinkets, the floors coated in dark paisley carpets, everything highlighted in polished wood and exposed brass. An air of quiet reserve engulfed the small pods of people—women in flashy low-cut dresses, men in eccentric suits, black on black or an eye-catching red—as if someone were watching their every move. Although it held a definitive panache, the Castle honestly felt kind of stuffy—hulking doors and narrow passageways packing in loads of people—making the place feel, at least at first, more claustrophobic than magical.
“Let’s go over here,” Jeremy said, gesturing toward an adjoining room at the rear of the bar. “I want you to meet Irma.” We walked into a small parlor. A black baby grand piano sat in the corner.
“Well, ask her to play something,” Jeremy said.
“But no one’s in here.”
“Oh, Irma is here. Watch.” He stepped up to the piano and said, “Irma, play a song by the Beatles.” A moment later, the keys began tinkling, despite the instrument’s seat sitting empty, and “Hey Jude” filled the room.
“Oh, right, a ghost,” I said, laughing. “Of course! I should’ve known!”
Jeremy smiled. “All right, let’s keep going,” he said, signaling me to follow him out of Irma’s parlor and down the hall, the piano’s hulking chord progression fading into the background.
“I basically grew up here,” Jeremy told me as we walked around the venue. “I had always been a huge magic geek as a kid, and I was part of the Junior Club in the 1990s.”
“I mean, yeah, magic is a big deal for kids, so I’m not surprised there’s a program here for them.”
“Exactly, it gives them structure, and access to history—the old-timers to talk to, the library downstairs, great shows on the weekends. But, as I got older, I kind of grew out of it,” he said. “I’m not really sure why, but it didn’t captivate me much anymore.” We cut left into another small room and took a seat on a sofa. “But then my dad passed away about five years ago, and I started getting into it again.”
“You know,” I started, “my father also passed away—I was a kid, but still.”
“Then you know what it’s like. I was very angry after he died, just pissed off at the world. You feel like you’ve lost a part of yourself, that a guiding force in your life is gone. It took a long time for me to come to terms with it, and to try and move on.”
“That’s the hardest part, moving on, realizing that you can still become your own person.”
“Well, that’s the thing—it’s weird really,” Jeremy said. “Turns out, my father actually practiced magic himself. He just never told me! He kept it a secret. He’d always critique my moves when I was a kid, and I’d always brush him off—I was a know-it-all. But after he died my mother told me that he was once a magician’s assistant. That really got to me. And with Instagram, I had a public outlet to showcase my progress. I could practice in private, feed my energy into this thing, and then film the final product and post it on social media. And I guess I’ve gained some semblance of notoriety from doing that,” he continued, flashing his Ten of Spades tattoo on the inside of his middle finger, “but I’ve also found something I was once passionate about, and that I’m now passionate about again. It feels really good, to know there are things out there that you can fall back on, that you can use to find yourself.”
“I mean, there is such a community in magic, like a brotherhood,” I said. “Just look at this place,” I added, looking around. “It’s kind of remarkable.”
“I mean, everyone has a soft spot for the Castle,” he said. “You can’t deny that. For decades, the best minds in magic came here, sat down, and progressed the art form. But, you know, it is still a business, and you have to be realistic sometimes in that regard. I hate to admit it, but sometimes it can seem more like a tourist attraction than a secret enclave. It’s very Disney-ish now, the way it presents magic. But it’s still a place for people who love magic to come and hang out. A lot of celebrities come around, too. Hell, Neil Patrick Harris, you know, the actor, has been a magician forever, and comes here all the time. He was once president of the board of directors.”
We continued to walk around the Castle. A small two-person sofa sat at the far end of the main room. A painting of an old man hung above it, all white hair and chunky-framed glasses. Clad in a gray suit, he held a deck of cards with a cigarette perched between his fingertips.
“You know who that is?” Jeremy asked me.
I squinted at the painting’s accompanying plaque. It read: This couch reserved for Dai Vernon when he’s in the club. “Oh yeah,” I said. “Of course. I was reading up on him, actually.”
“He is, without a doubt, the godfather of modern magic,” Jeremy said. “He died in 1992. He was ninety-eight years old, and he basically lived here for the last two decades of his life.”
It seemed, whenever I read anything about magic’s history, I came across Dai Vernon. He was a sleight-of-hand artist so intrinsically dedicated to magic that his every waking moment was spent obsessing over the innovation and perfection of routine, theory, technique, and performance. “Dai Vernon is to conjuring as James Joyce to the novel and Einstein to physics,” legendary magician Max Maven once said. “It’s a person who comes along about once a century and just changes the way people approach that field.” Everyone knew his name but over time he earned the moniker “the Professor.” In the nearly sixty years since he rose to fame, no one has come close to dethroning the hyperactive, quick-talking master magician who completely revolutionized card magic.
Born in 1894 in Ottawa, Canada, Vernon discovered an interest in magic at a young age after his father showed him a few simple card tricks. By the time he could read, Vernon had bulldozed through all the magic books at his local library and, once he was exposed to the stage acts of prominent touring magicians, he focused on card manipulations. By the end of World War I, fired up with the ambition of becoming a full-time magician, he moved to New York City. His ultimate goal was to elevate magic to the realm of high art—respected, revered, forever remembered, and forever changed. He became a premier entertainer for the city’s aristocratic elite, but when the stock market face-planted and the Great Depression hit the city, Vernon’s life as magician to the rich and famous fizzled out. And so he advanced his chops with a deck of cards largely in private or alongside the company of other top-tier magicians. By the 1940s, Vernon was consistently inventing new card tricks or refining other magicians’ work, and gaining more and more notoriety in the community.
By the end of the 1950s, Vernon had become more than a household name in the community—he was a living legend. He began hosting private lectures, earning a living by teaching other magicians his techniques. “I went to one with my friend, and we were astounded by what we saw. Our mouths just hung open,” magician Herb Zarrow once said, adding that Vernon was using sleight-of-hand moves that no one had seen before. His work made the moves more indecipherable, the performances more refined, and the magic more astounding for the spectator. To Vernon, true magic existed close up and in tight quarters, an experience far removed from the stage and replaced by a more exclusive and more impossible set of circumstances. If it was happening right under your nose, it must be a miracle, right?
Over the years, Vernon’s influence continued to flow not only outward, engulfing his peers, but likewise trickled down to subsequent generations. In the 1970s, he moved to Hollywood and took up residency at the recently opened Magic Castle, altering the geography of magic as an art form. “Vernon made happy pilgrims of us all,” famous magician Ricky Jay, who died in 2018 and studied under Vernon, once said. “He literally had the power to make people get up and move. We must have all felt it at one particular point: There was no choice, this is what we must do, and this is what we did.”
Jeremy touched the painting’s frame. “Yeah, man, this has been here for years. It never gets moved. He’s been dead for over twenty years, but you can’t do card magic without being influenced by Vernon. A lot of what everyone has been performing for the past fifty years or so came, in one way or another, from Vernon.”
The room had filled up around us, and Jeremy looked at his watch. “Oh, shit. We are going to be late for the show!” I followed him toward the front, around the bar, and we got in line for the next performance. I was eager to see a show at the Castle. There are a handful of performances every night in different rooms, each with a different style: the Close-Up Gallery, the Parlor of Prestidigitation, and the Palace of Mystery (the largest of the three, built for stage illusions). Paul Gertner, a legendary sleight-of-hand artist in his fifties, held court in the close-up room and Jeremy insisted that we see him.
We entered the tiny theater and grabbed a seat in the third row. Other patrons filed in, the lights dimmed, and the show began. Gertner, affable with spectators and comfortable onstage, presented some of his most memorable material, including his renowned Cups and Balls routine using steel balls inside steel cups (both a nod to his hometown of Pittsburgh as well as a distinct logistical hurdle, since you could potentially hear the balls knocking around under the designated cup before the reveal). He also performed Unshuffled, an effect he created that bowled over Penn & Teller on their television show Penn & Teller: Fool Us. The deck’s edge is drawn on with black marker and, after shuffling a few times, the scribbles magically transform into letters that spell out the spectator’s chosen card. He also performed Namerology, my favorite effect of the show.
For this he had a few spectators join him onstage. Each person chose a card, swapped cards with one another at random, and then switched seats at random. Next, everyone put their cards back into the deck. Gertner, using the number of letters in each person’s name, spelled down to each person’s chosen card—moving down the row in the order of their new seating arrangement. I was in awe. I couldn’t begin to figure out the method. If he was tracking the cards the entire time, he was doing so effortlessly. But the trick wasn’t over. When he flipped over the small piles produced from spelling each name, the cards of each small stack produced a Royal Flush.
“Oh, fuck that,” I said, turning to Jeremy and laughing in disbelief. He just raised his eyebrows and smiled, as if to say, Yeah, dude, I know.
I loved Gertner’s performance, but it also brought the fracture between current and past generations into focus for me. It wasn’t that Gertner was a bad magician—far from it—but there’s much more involved than skill these days if you want to be an ambassador of magic. The fact is, in terms of substance, the blueprints of magical effects have largely been the same for decades. There is only so much you can do with a deck of cards or a certain type of illusion, and many effects are just reiterations of old material. It is the presentation that has changed. “Performing magic is like ballet—all of the moves have already been created and there’s no changing what you can do,” magician Derek Hughes, who performed on season ten of America’s Got Talent, once said. “But how one choreographs these moves and effects into ballads of your own, makes them unique to us as individual performers. That’s how original magic is created.” How magic is given to an audience is what prompts its evolution.
Although magicians like Gertner are extraordinarily talented, it’s hard to imagine someone like Gertner—a middle-aged, happy-go-lucky dude who still uses a magic wand—crafting a brand that embodies the charisma and connectivity necessary to disseminate a contemporary take on magic to a broader (and much younger) audience, especially through a medium as judgmental, nuanced, and fast-paced as the internet.
Jeremy and I filed out of the theater and made our way outside. “Well, your first trip to the Magic Castle is complete,” Jeremy said. “What did you think?”
“I think I’m becoming obsessed, to be honest.”
9
An Actor Playing the Part of a Magician
It’s a fact: humans have forever been fascinated with individuals who possess powers beyond that of the common man. And although the notion of weaving deception into entertainment has always been present, magic—and the brand associated with the art form—has, like other types of performance art, continually evolved. But unlike dance or opera, magic has forever been under a cultural requirement to continually push the boundaries of illusion. Magic is only as good as how much better it was than the trick that came before it. “Magic cannot stand still,” legendary nineteenth-century magician Nevil Maskelyne once wrote. “It must either advance with the times or fall behind.” For magic to thrive—and survive—it’s become mandatory for the craft to be questioned, dissected, and innovated by the next generations of conjurors. As with Dai Vernon (and, now, the members of the52), those who propel magic forward—in both substance and style—are the ones who are revered.
