I made more money in high school than I ever have since.
Or so it seems.
Entranced by a pitchman at the Nebraska State Fair when I was 11, I bought a trick deck of cards, known to magicians as a “Svengali deck.” It set me back a dollar and a quarter and before I wore it out, it paid for itself a hundredfold — and more.
Magic became my life.
Let me assert right here that magic may be the greatest hobby for a kid. It’s all-consuming. Get your problem child interested in it. The first time your kid masters a trick and performs it — and an adult, genuinely amazed, says, “How in heck did you do that?” — your potential juvenile delinquent will be hooked and too absorbed in the new hobby to steal hubcaps.
I’m not saying a Svengali deck given as a bar mitzvah present would have spared us Bernie Madoff. Nor am I claiming that a magic deck popped into Dick Cheney’s or Donald Rumsfeld’s Christmas stockings would have spared the world their predations. But it’s possible.
As I got more stuff from those newly discovered wonders — magic catalogs — I developed an act. Shows in church basements, Elks Clubs and birthday parties in Lincoln, Neb., and environs jumped quickly from free gigs to netting a princely $10! Soon, my fee jumped to $25. Eventually I hit $35. And they were 1950s dollars. I was rolling in it.
When my schoolteacher parents’ decrepit ‘38 DeSoto finally threw a rod, “Cavett, the Magician” (as my business cards read), their early-teens son, was able to lend them $750 toward a new Studebaker. (No youthful reader, or youthful parent, will believe the following statement, but here goes: This amount, a few years later, equaled three-quarters of my freshman tuition at Yale. Where did that world go?)
By great luck a wonderful man named Gene Gloye, studying at the university, financed his graduate work expenses working as a local conjurer and took me under his wing. I owe him a lot. He opened my world to the wonders of magicians’ magazines, national magic organizations, magic books, magic catalogs and, best of all, magicians’ conventions.
At one of these, in St. Louis in 1952, I won, at 15, the “Best New Performer” trophy in the rope category, beating out the new president of the International Brotherhood of Magicians. The Lincoln Journal headline screamed, “Young Lincoln Sharpie Bests Magicians’ Group Head.” (Taking out the fading remains of that clipping — complete with three photos of a beaming, bow-tied youth — can still send me into a dream state.)
I’m just old enough to have seen and met some of the last of the legendary mystifiers from an earlier time. Blackstone (the elder) came to Omaha with his full evening show. I cut a day of school to see it twice. (The great old style full-evening touring magic show — with its pretty girls and its handsome assistants, its floating ladies, and other grand illusions — is a thing of the past, killed largely by the musicians’ union’s demands for a full pit orchestra.)
Other greats I got to see (I feel I should say “witnessed”) were the legendary Cardini (in his last performance ever), Dai Vernon, Okito, The Great Virgil, Bert Allerton, Al Flosso and Jack Gwynne. Not household names to you, but gods to me.
I was too young for Houdini, of course, and Thurston, and Chung Ling Soo (William Robinson on his passport) — a man who affected offstage and on his Chinese guise, including (onstage) a wide-stance walk in Chinese robes and make-up. Without revealing anything, the stance made it possible for Chung to produce a huge, tub-sized, gleaming crystal bowl of swimming goldfish from, seemingly, thin air.
All magicians have had a trick go wrong, but Chung paid the highest price. He was accidentally shot to death on a London stage by an audience volunteer while performing “The Bullet Catching.”
I couldn’t have imagined that a life without magic would ever happen, but my new magical worlds — Yale and New York City and the theater and television — pushed magic out of my heart and mind.
Years later, when I had a show on PBS, I went to see the late Doug Henning’s evening of magic on Broadway. Backstage in his dressing room after the show, I barely I noticed a smallish man standing to one side. Suddenly he said what sounded like, “You D. Cava?” I horripilated. Before me stood the god I haven’t mentioned yet. There, in the flesh, stood Slydini.
Instant gooseflesh. He’d been one of the giants in the Pantheon of magic for decades; I would sooner have dreamed of meeting Beethoven.
Slydini. Just typing those three syllables even now gives me a frisson.
This legendary conjurer, born Quintino Marucci in Italy, found close-up magic wanting and simply re-invented it (“I wanted to take out all the phony-looking stuff”). He toured the world, working in several languages.
What had sounded like “D. Cava” was, of course, my name, and I loved that Slydini knew it. I knew that he refused to do television. A bad experience in Europe, with cameras in wrong places and lousy editing, had soured him on that and, a perfectionist, he wouldn’t risk again having his work tainted.
I was thrilled when, having heard I knew magic, he said that maybe I would “be the man to give me what I need” and asked if he should consider doing my show, “If-a you are interested.” (Guess.)
Suddenly Doug Henning said, “Tony’s doing a special demonstration for some magicians tomorrow night at Vesuvio restaurant. Come.”
Tomorrow night finally came. For the magicians, sitting for nearly two hours at that table, sudden gasps and intakes of breath abounded.
It was like seeing a man walk up a wall. Nothing prepared you for it. Right at the start, a solid, heavy silver dollar, held before my eyes, vanished into thinnest air. And by no method I knew of. Certainly no sleeves. The two hours flew too quickly.
What you’ll see is the first of two half-hour PBS shows he did with me. Tony wanted a few people at the table and I invited actor friends I’d just worked with on Broadway. I think they may have tired of hearing me rave about my new friend and wondered if anyone could be that good. It became a case of, “Those who came to scoff remained to pray.”
I could go on and on about Tony — and will, if you want part two. But first things first.
I hope I haven’t, as they say in showbiz, over-introduced him. See what you think. Note especially the graceful, yet strong, beauty of his hands.
Here’s Slydini.
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Video: The Dick Cavett Show (Nov. 7, 1977); Slydini, a legendary magician, performs for Cavett.
http://cavett.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/27/conjuring-slydini/
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Full article: http://cavett.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/27/conjuring-slydini/
