Here Is Real Magic Read online

  In 1907, one hundred thousand workingmen and women of New York abandoned their posts in factories, shops, banks, and offices and flooded the streets to watch a straitjacketed Houdini dangle upside down on a rope suspended from a crane one hundred feet above Forty-Sixth Street. He swung back and forth, trying to leverage his body free of the jacket, and the arc of his swing grew wider and wider until he crashed through an office window, sending shards of glass glittering to the pavement below. But he escaped anyway. First one hand emerged. Then the other. Then he was free.

  Houdini could escape from anything, certainly, but his greatest feat was making those feats resonate with a strength and a power far beyond the simple mechanics of release. Don’t think of Houdini as a magician. Think of Houdini as the original Bruce Springsteen—an artist who rose to international superstardom as a living, breathing metaphor of the daily struggles of the working class. Houdini was the son of impoverished immigrants from Hungary. For a generation of other immigrants facing the daunting task of beginning a new life in a new country—or for a ten-year-old boy in our time trying to begin his own—Houdini stood as a glorious example of someone who set out to do the impossible and actually did it.

  I read everything I could find about Houdini. At some point I acquired a highlighter and, with a dim understanding that its purpose was to mark important passages so I could come back to them later for further study, highlighted an entire biography. When I was done, the whole book was yellow. Every word. It was all important to me.

  Houdini died in 1926, making way for David Berglas—the International Man of Mystery—who was born that year and would go on to become the greatest magician in the world. Now in his nineties, he lives in his home north of London, and even his neighbors don’t know that he used to be a superstar. But in the world of magicians, he is as revered as the Beatles are in the world of music. Magicians can be a fractious, argumentative group, and getting them to agree on anything is a challenge, but ask anyone who knows about the real work behind the magician’s craft and they will all agree on David Berglas—even today, he is the best.

  His life reads like a James Bond story. As the Gestapo knocked on their front door in Berlin, the teenage David Berglas and his family escaped down the back staircase and fled to London. There, he lied about his age and altered his passport in the army recruiting office so he could join the Allies and return to his homeland to fight the Nazis. After the war he could have done anything—he has a photographic memory and speaks three languages fluently—but chose to pursue a career as a professional magician. Quickly, his performances on the nascent BBC made David Berglas a household name in the United Kingdom.

  A list of his illusions reads more like a litany of biblical miracles than performances by a magician. He once stopped the traffic in Piccadilly Circus. All of it. A black-and-white film clip of the moment shows the whole thing, but it was even more astonishing for the hundreds of pedestrians there that evening who saw it in person—one minute the cars are rushing through the intersection of Regent Street and Shaftesbury, and then Berglas raises his hands and everything just stops. The cars sit in the road. A dog stands still, front leg raised in midstride. A cyclist balances on two wheels, motionless. For a moment no one moves. Then Berglas claps his hands and the world resumes its business.

  At a banquet in London, he made a grand piano vanish from the middle of the room while it was surrounded by party guests, leaving the piano player sprawled on the floor in shock. On a flight from London to New York, he pushed a playing card through the window of the airplane. It stuck there for a moment on the outside of the glass, just long enough for the reporter sitting next to him to identify it as the card on which he’d written his name, and then it caught the rushing air and peeled off into the sky.

  Berglas approached his work as an outsider, independent of the traditional ploys and stratagems magicians have developed over the past few hundred years to amaze their audiences. He invented original magic with his own secret methods, and even the best magicians in the world couldn’t explain it. Magicians flew to London from all over the world to watch Berglas work and returned home with accounts of his magic that sounded too incredible to believe.

  Recently I met the great man at his home in London. “Nate,” he said, before opening the door to his dining room, where we would spend the next five hours talking about magic, “you’re married, aren’t you?”

  “I am.”

  “What is your wife’s name?”

  “Katharine.”

  “Very good,” he said. “And of course you would know if she has a favorite flower.”

  “She does. Peonies.”

  Something happened then, and I’m not sure exactly what. Something shifted. He looked me directly in the eye, and even before he opened the door I understood why he was the greatest magician in the world. He had moved slowly as we walked down the hall, but now he was doing magic. He stood straight, filled with energy, and his words carried a weight that I have never been able to replicate.

  “Let’s sit in here,” he said as he opened the door to the dining room. Inside I saw a large mahogany table with a vase at the center. The vase was filled with peonies.

  “I love this room because it offers such a nice view of the garden,” he said as he crossed the room and pulled aside the curtains, revealing a garden filled with peonies, two rows of lush green bushes covered with white blooms. I felt my knees go weak and I sat down quickly in one of the chairs. I have seen great magic performed by great magicians all over the world, but I had never felt like this before. This magic felt—real.

  He sat down across from me and folded his hands in front of him. “I hope you’ll tell Katharine about the flowers, and give her my regards.”

  I didn’t understand the full extent of this magic until that night, when I spoke with Katharine by phone. I had left the Berglas residence late but had holed up in a pub to write down every scrap of detail about my time with the great magician. I didn’t want to forget, and I didn’t want to go to bed. Two Red Bulls, a beer, and nine or ten pages of manic scrawling later, I made my way back to where I was staying and called Katharine. She had gone to bed early, and even with the time difference she was already asleep, but when I told her about the peonies she sounded wide awake.

  “You’re sure they were peonies?”

  “Yes. I’m sure. I know what peonies look like.”

  “Nate, that’s impossible.”

  “Katharine, I was there. I saw them. I even touched the petals of the flowers on the table.”

  “And you saw them in the garden as well?”

  “Yes. I’m positive.”

  For a moment she didn’t say anything. Then she spoke.

  “Nate, this is October. Peonies only bloom in May.”

  After Houdini and Berglas came a new breed of magicians who were recasting their art in the modern age. As I learned about magic as a teenager I discovered that the world I was trying so hard to enter was in the middle of a revolution. Around this time I heard the—apparently true—legend of Paul Harris, a magician who had lost everything in a house fire. Instead of rebuilding his home, he took to the road to answer one question: How do people respond to magic when they don’t know they’re watching a magician? He hitchhiked across the country doing magic for people in everyday situations and discovered how quickly a modern audience makes the jump from “magic trick” to “miracle” when they don’t know they’re at a magic show. His work was wild and unpredictable—not at all like the “showman” magic I had seen as a kid: no stage, no show, no performance. He’d just create impossible events and then walk away. Paul Harris was the Banksy of the magic world—a reclusive, enigmatic figure who emerged every once in a while with a masterpiece and then disappeared again into obscurity. His work was far more like a mural furtively spray-painted on a factory wall at night or a poem carved into the door of a bathroom stall with a pocketknife than a formal theatrical performance. The stories about his work were unlike anything
I had ever heard. One day at a gas station he paid for a bottle of water and then changed the signature of the U.S. Treasurer printed on the dollar into the actual signature of the gas station attendant. No buildup, no presentation, just a moment of impossibility created for a complete stranger, and then he moved on.

  When I was in high school, Paul Harris published a three-volume collection of his material for the magic community. I spent everything I had saved to buy a set, and when it arrived in the mail I stayed up all night to read it from front to back, all three volumes. He spoke of magic tricks as tools—“tools to unleash the moment,” as he put it. The art wasn’t in doing the trick, or even in making the trick, and it certainly wasn’t in deceiving the audience. The art was in using magic to create a moment of astonishment and then getting out of the way.

  Paul Harris’s most famous student was David Blaine, whose Street Magic TV special changed everything for me when I saw it as a teenager. Blaine stripped away the flash and the spectacle from TV magic and made it accessible to everyone. He didn’t need glitz to make people pay attention; he could build tension until it was almost unbearable with nothing but the force of his personality. A lesser magician would ease the moment with a joke, but Blaine just stood there waiting, like a gunslinger, and then he’d do the magic, break the tension, and everyone would just explode. With one hour of television Blaine showed that you don’t need million-dollar budgets and full theatrical lighting rigs to do world-class magic on TV. All you needed was a deck of cards and an imagination.

  These were my heroes, and in the beginning I tried to be just like them. The gulf between wanting to become a great magician and actually doing it is enormous, however, and the career of a young magician is marked as much by a growing list of humiliations and public failures as it is by the occasional success. In high school I staged a show in the auditorium and my entire world came out to watch—six hundred friends, family members, girls from school, everyone I wanted to defy or impress. They all looked on in horror, fascination, and pity when my attempt at Blackstone’s Floating Lightbulb illusion failed to float and in a panic I broke into an improvised dance to make it seem that nothing had gone wrong. I twirled about the stage, frantically trying to remember every bit of choreography from every David Copperfield special I had ever seen, and the audience sat mute, aghast, enduring the spectacle and waiting for the catastrophe to end.

  A few years later in college I staged a Houdini-style underwater escape in the river that flowed through campus. I stood on a boat in the middle of the river wearing nothing but biking shorts and a thick snarl of chain, padlocks, and weights around my wrists and ankles. The sky was dead and gray and the water was dead and gray and a frigid breeze blew across its surface. I had delayed this stunt by two weeks because the river was still frozen. Now the ice had cleared and spring had come, reluctantly, but the water was still only 52 degrees at the surface, and colder in the depths below.

  Technically, I succeeded. I jumped into the water, sank to the bottom, and escaped from the locks and the chains before swimming to the surface. But it didn’t feel like a success. When Houdini did it he had ten thousand people turn up to watch. I had about a dozen who had stopped on their way to class, and after I got out the police showed up because someone had thought it was a suicide attempt.

  I am living proof, though, that if you throw enough time and effort at something—maybe even anything—you can become good at it. Houdini once said, “The real secret to my success is simple: I work from seven in the morning to midnight and I like it.” This quote lived on a scrap of paper stuck to the wall by my bed for ten years. I had hit Malcolm Gladwell’s ten thousand hours of dedicated practice by the time I turned twenty-two, and he’s right—I got pretty good.

  In the fall of my senior year of college, my friend Megan and I drove back to school after a short break and she asked me about my plans for after graduation. Megan and I knew each other in high school. She went to college to pursue her dream of becoming a writer—she published poetry under a pseudonym in a local literary magazine—and I went to pursue mine of becoming a magician, so when it came to the likelihood of finding gainful employment after graduation, we were perhaps two of the least promising students in the entire university.

  “What are you going do when you’re done?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, what are you going to do after graduation?”

  “I’m going to be a magician.”

  She looked at me and I couldn’t read her expression. Compassion, maybe, or sympathy.

  “I know, Nate,” she said, softly, “but what are you really going to do?”

  “I think I’m going to Los Angeles.”

  “To do what? Just start doing magic for people?”

  I had no idea. I hadn’t thought that far ahead. Just north of here they filmed the movie Field of Dreams, and the film’s tagline—If you build it, they will come—had epitomized my approach to working as an artist. If I became good enough, I reasoned, at some point someone would offer me a good salary to make my art.

  “I guess, Megan. I’m sure it will work out.”

  “Nate,” she said. “I don’t think it works like that.”

  We sat in silence for a while.

  I had been hearing this a lot, from everyone. I wanted to become the greatest magician in the history of the world. Making this declaration as a nine-year-old is adorable. Making it as an adult is not, and I didn’t have a backup plan. There was nothing else I wanted to do.

  Highway 6 stretches and rolls across the most beautiful parts of Iowa—hills and fields, grazing sheep, weathered barns on well-worn lots—and in October the corn is high and ready for harvest. There’s dust in the air from the farmers who have already taken in their crop, and when the sun is low in the sky the shafts of light shine down on everything and the whole world swells, expands, rises to the occasion. I think the animals could sense it, too. We watched a horse race across his field—playfully, joyfully at first, and then more purposefully—laying on speed, building up momentum, as though he wanted to leap over the fence and just keep going.

  HOW TO BE A STARVING ARTIST

  The week after I finished school I drove from Iowa to Los Angeles to begin my career as a professional magician. I lived in a dorm for Japanese students studying English. My rent was cheap and it bought a closet-sized room with a desk, a chair, and a mattress on the floor with a sheet and pillow. These I shared with the cockroaches. My window was barred with vandal-proof grating, and everything looked broken and ugly, but above the neighboring buildings I had a good view of the sky and the perfect California sun, which is nice everywhere.

  My room was down the hall from the bathroom and directly across from the shared kitchen. I became good at squeezing as much flavor as possible from cheap ingredients. Somewhere I got a box of fast-food mustard and pickle relish packets, and if you mix one of each into a can of tuna you get a kind of tuna salad you can eat with a fork. My staple was my own invention I called Magic Gruel and made in large batches: one can of black beans, one bag of cooked rice, and one jar of salsa all mixed together in a bowl and warmed in the microwave. I bought the ingredients in bulk and worked my way through them the whole summer.

  My living arrangements were not the problem. My show was the problem. No one came. Every Thursday night I did a show at a rented theater in North Hollywood. This was my only form of employment, and it didn’t pay well. My marketing budget was limited to a thousand postcards and one corner ad in LA Weekly announcing the show. I spent one afternoon sticking postcards on coffee shop bulletin boards and handing them to anyone who made eye contact and hoped this would be enough to pull in an audience. It wasn’t. The theater held a hundred seats but I never filled more than forty of them, and after the cost of the rental I was just barely scraping a profit. This wasn’t nearly enough to cover rent or food, so I was paying a lot to be a starving artist. Still, I was in Hollywood.

  I probably should hav
e gotten a side job but worried that I had only this one shot to make it as a professional magician and wanted to put every waking moment to good use. I spent most of the time inventing new magic and reading. I found a Blockbuster Video store a few miles away and rented a DVD set of the greatest speeches of all time. A good magician works with ideas more than props or tricks, and to communicate ideas you need to know how to use words. I watched Churchill, MLK, JFK, RFK, and Reagan, over and over, memorizing their speeches. After working on magic all day, I’d climb into my ailing Honda Civic and take the 101 through North Hollywood to the 405 and blast down through Beverly Hills with the windows open, delivering those speeches to the city below until I understood how they worked and why they succeeded. Churchill was a master. He preferred short, powerful words because they hit with more force than longer ones, and he fired them out at his opponents like cannonballs. I loved the Churchill speeches. RFK was the best, though. He used silence better than anyone else in the world, creating tension, releasing it, making the audience hang on every word. He would have been a world-class magician.

  I also discovered a magic shop a mile or so from my apartment. They sold the cheap jokes and gags in the front of the shop but in the back they had a vast collection of magic books by some of the greatest magicians in history. Once I proved I wasn’t just looking for a stunt to do at a party, the owner of the store warmed up and started recommending books. I bought them with a credit card and took them back to my room. I’d read them that night and then again the next day before going back to the shop to tell him what I thought. He had found a good customer but I believe he was also thrilled to find such a voracious student. I was spending money that I didn’t have, but I learned a lot.