Usually, magicians jeer at fortune telling and tellers for the reason that they like to yell “Fake !” It remains, however, for fortune-telling to take the play at parties quicker than anything else. The alert magus (oh Mr Wolff !) can do no better than learn the subject well enough to use it. It will increase his personal popularity a hundredfold, and personal popularity has a lot to do with business success. Learn a mysterious looking layout or two and a meaning for each card. Let the millions of combinations take care of your stories, and you’ll never have any rest. First, however, get a copy of Grant’s Fortune Telling Card Trick and find out for yourself how people go for this brand of blarney. Another idea I had one time and passed on to a performer who told card futures is novel from a publicity standpoint. Get a deck of giant cards, and after any routine of fortunes by regular cards, introduce the large deck as a finish and for a single card reading of the present. Have them mixed and the sitter turns one over. He or she gets the reading and then autographs the face of the card. Always let this be fair and in time you’ll have the most novel deck in the world. The more prominent your sitters, the greater the deck, and you’ll get a kick out of seeing how percentages work out in the selections.
Giving exposers the ‘silent treatment’ will do the trick quicker and more effectively than the present ineffectual methods of any person or society. This ‘treatment’ is to be given in big doses to the exposer himself. Space forbids a detailed explanation of this remedy now, but it will be put forth in the next issue, provided I find that at least a few are interested. It has never been done before because magicians would rather ‘raise hell’ about it than be subtle.
Now Popeye, the Sailorman, is an exposer deluxe. In a late cartoon movie of this noted spinach destroyer, is an expose of the levitation with hoop moves, and the ‘fold up’ of the little lady in the sawing box. I’ve heard just a little bit too much about societies obtaining promises that it will be all stopped. Like international treaties, such correspondence amounts to but scraps of paper. It probably will never be banished in entirety, but I know that I have an angle by which it can be cramped.
In the meantime, I’d like all readers to send a copy of every expose they find in print. I’ll reproduce them if I have to add twenty pages. I have seen some exposes that gave better instructions than do magic books.
Every day or so I receive letters implying that my tiff with Stage Magic has something to do with Burling Hull. I write to him only as editor-in-chief, owner, publisher and almighty pooh-bah of Stage Magic and the products it advertises. Burling and I have had many interesting and informative sessions and personally I consider him a clever writer and performer. But when I start using these pages as an outlet for personal animosities, rather than information of monetary value to the world of magic, I’ll heed the first command to take my wand and go below.
Eventually, all tricks improve through constant use. I mentioned in a previous issue about a lock for the Glass Penetration frame. A letter from Frank Ducrot informs that such an improvement has been on frames sold by him since last February. For those who use it, here is a cute (and original, I hope) effect. After doing it once, lock and hand the frame to someone for the insertion of two new cards while you light a cigarette. Take the frame back, hold the cigarette at the center of your lips, and slowly bring the frame up to your face. The cigarette, burning furiously, is seen to appear through the front card, from where it is taken, and the frame handed back so the spectator can remove and keep the cards.
Sending me into a momentary fit of dispair, Phil Smith of Toronto writes that the pigeon idea in #10 won’t work at night because homing pigeons do not fly then. That makes it a matinée mystery. However, if you aren’t the worrying kind, why not put it out anyway and let it come home in the morning ? Every time I now think of birds, I can see the Gileegaloo Bird that Howard Albright has put on the market. This mechanical toy what-is-it hops around on the table (or bar) and stops with its nose on cards that are spread face down. A number of routines and methods are given, and this application of a toy shows an alert mind behind it for novelty in effects.
Being tactless at times calls for apologies. I never should have mentioned the name when I told of the Port Henry incident in #11. Mr Rouclere has always been pleasant and kind to me, my respect for him knowing no bounds. I felt like lashing in general some of the atrocious things I’ve seen, and wanting to emphasize how the smallest of things are noticed, unfortunately thought of that particular performance as it was told to me by one who had remembered it for twenty years. Mr Rouclere’s daughter, professionally known as Rouclere Jr, has made me feel very insignificant with her letter, and informs me that it never did happen. I’m sorry.
Lest I go mad, please don’t write anymore about an index of the effects which have appeared in The Jinx. I have had it planned for sometime and am preparing it at odd moments.
Lamenting upon the dearth of publicity-clever magicians (I know of only two who work as hard outside the theatre as in), a press agent working the metropolis of Waverly sipped his coffee while I gave him my idea of a publicity man’s dream, and then practically fainted from brain fatigue. The magician arrives at high noon and is unloaded from the baggage car in a coffin. Coming out of his trance, he is promptly arrested as a witch in modern dress. Securely locked within a cell at the local bastile, he escapes and rushes past his jailors who are on their way back to the office. They give chase and catch up with him at the fourth floor of the Department Store up the front of which he is doing a ‘human fly’. He is blindfolded, put into a straight-jacket, and hung upside down out of the window (much as they did in the good old Salem days, when a magus had to be clever to keep on living) but wiggles out and drops into a fire net as it is being carried by to the conflagration next door (timely started by the press agent). Still blindfolded, the escaping alleged witch jumps into the fire chief’s car and drives without eyes through the streets, chased by the reserves, an ambulance, and countless cameramen. Running out of gas at the ball park (where hundreds are watching the game) he deserts the car and dashes across the field towards the woods. An officer, stationed at the park, fires at him, (with a bullet initialed by the Mayor) but the superman turns, catches the bullet, and spits it out onto the home plate. This delay has brought the pursuers close, and in turning to flee again, the wonder worker trips over a rising card setup and falls into a ditch. By this time, the populace of the town realize they have the greatest of all witches with whom to contend so without further ado, and to the tune of clicking cameras, they bury him where he lies. The press agent now has two days in which to convince everyone that the man is of no relation to witches, but actually is the textbook tycoon of trickery and known to all and sundry as the Popeye of Prestidigitation. Whereupon the town fathers dig up this great man only to find him alive and well! And that evening, my friends, just happens to be Opening Night for the Gala Mystery Show at the local Opera House.
I ask you now, and in all sincerity, “Is there another publication in the whole of magicdom that will give you such original routines and practical ways for becoming famous ?”