The Real Secret Out

In the course of reading about tricks, you have probably realized that there is a lot more
to being a magician than the mere act of doing a trick.
Of course this is only too true. Besides a knowledge of magic, you
need self-confidence when you step up in front of a group of people.
You need a command of English, you need a flow of patter which fits your personality.
Only too often a boy of sixteen will step out on a stage and preface a magic effect by
saying, "When I was in the Orient, a fakir showed me a remarkable experiment in
deception . . . " Of course this is ludicrous. Why does the boy use this patter?
Because he has seen some older, professional performer use it. The worst fault of the
beginning magician seems to be that he concentrates all his attention on the tricks and
none on the presentation.
When he gets around to thinking of presentation he just thinks of some professional
whom he has seen and swipes the professional's approach and patter.
So many things come into presentation. For instance, does the beginner stop to think that
there are almost as many presentations as there are tricks? Rarely does this occur to him
and yet every topflight magician has a presentation that is completely different from
every other performer's.
In the field of big-stage magic, Blackstone and Dante do somewhat the same type of
show and yet what a difference there is in presentation! Blackstone is a white-haired
gentleman who seems to get a gay amusement from performing his tricks. Dante
deliberately accents his Mephistophelian appearance by cultivating a goatee and a
curled moustache. His eyebrows are inverted V's that extend upward
in satanic amusement as he saws a woman in half. In the field of sleight of hand, Cardini
is probably the top exponent of small magic for large audiences. What is his approach?
He comes out on stage in tails with an evening cape draped hazardously over his
shoulder, a monocle in his eye, and a wobble in his step. He is a gentleman who has
clearly had one drink too many. Teetering delicately around the stage, things happen to
him. He is not the magician; the objects which appear from nowhere, which plague him,
are the magical things. As far as Cardini is concerned, he is puzzled and upset by the
queer fans of cards that pop out at his fingertips, he is made irascible by the lighted
cigarettes that insist on materializing between his fingers.
Russell Swann? A debonair figure, good looking, suave, who gets roars of laughter
because of a curious incongruity. Just because he looks so cultured and suave, the gags,
corny as can be, which he uses to get laughs, are doubly effective. There is some basic
element of humor at work for him. You expect from his appearance a sophisticated
approach. You get wild gags, horseplay, pratt falls. This, of course, is a very subtle
approach to presentation and yet it is one that has paid Swann well.
As proof he has worked at every first-class hotel in America and England.
We could extend the list endlessly, and yet these men whom we have mentioned prove
the point we are trying to make. All of them are doing magic, each is doing it differently.
Your presentation, then, whatever you make it, is the peg on which you hang your magic.
No one has ever done it, but it seems to us that a smart act could be rigged up that would
be like Will Roger's old act. Rogers came out and spun a rope. In the course of the rope
spinning he gagged about current events. It was, as you know, an act that swept the
country.
It seems to us that a performer could come out and, while delivering
thoughts on the passing parade, could perform various magic
tricks as though he were completely unconscious of what his hands were doing.
Good or bad, that would be a new presentation. We think that a performer made up in a
wildly checked vest, with phony diamonds on his hands and a big diamond stickpin on
his tie, with a derby cocked to one side of his head, and a cigar stuck in the
corner of his mouth, could walk into the swankiest entertainment
spots in America and take the audiences by storm by simply performing
old carnival tricks and delivering a spiel about snake oil or Dr.
Bunko's Indian Water.
If you are thinking about performing magic, we beseech you to
try and inject some novelty into your presentation. Presentation is
one of the real secrets of magic.
It is said that Herrmann the Great claimed that an elephant could
walk across the stage behind him while he performed without the
audience seeing the pachyderm, if the trick that he was doing was
strong enough. If, in other words, his misdirection was strong
enough.
In all of the tricks in this book the misdirection is, in a sense,
built in. The tricks are so constructed that any sleight you have to
do is done under the cover of some other action. This is, of course,
not true of all tricks.
Misdirection can be as subtle as the relative speeds of two objects.
For instance, a basic coin sleight is one known to magicians as the
French Drop. In this you pretend to take a coin from the left hand
into the right hand How do you make the audience think you have really taken the coin?
You look at the right hand, you act as though the coin were in the right
hand, but most importantly, you move the right hand which is supposed
to contain the coin, faster than you let the seemingly empty
left hand fall to your side.
You do this because psychologists have found that the human
eye follows the more rapidly moving of two objects.
Misdirection then, can be as simple as moving one hand faster
than the other. This, incidentally, brings up the old cliché about the
hand being quicker than the eye. No hand is faster than any eye.
Take that for granted. We might almost say that in magic the hand
is slower than the eye, as has been established in the French Drop
coin trick.
Violence or shock can be used for misdirection. This can be done
by shooting off a gun to make the audience blink at the moment when you want to do
something in front of it without it seeing you
do it. If you don't indulge in gun play, the same effect can be
achieved using flash paper. This is paper that has been soaked in
acids and then dried, with the result that when heat is applied to the
paper it will go up in a burst of flame and leave no ash.
Keith Clark used to open his act by coming out with some crumpled
flash paper in each hand. He would gesture in the air and a burst of
flame would emanate from his right hand. He would look astounded
and gesture with his left hand. Another burst of flame would go off.
He was not using the flash paper in this case for misdirection, but to
get attention.
There are, however, multitudinous tricks wherein you wrap some
object in flash paper and then have a spectator set fire to the flash
paper. It bursts into flame and you have no trouble in dropping the
object which you have palmed out of the paper into your pocket or
wherever you want it to go.
Surprise is a factor in misdirection. The surprise can be as above
in a flash of flame or a pistol shot, or it can be the fact that the trick
takes an unpredictable turn. If you have allowed your audience to
think that a vanished wristwatch is going to appear in a loaf of bread,
and then you have a spectator open the loaf of bread and find in it
a rabbit instead of a watch, you have surprised the audience, and
under cover of that surprise you can get the wristwatch into a box.
You can then drop the rabbit into the box and have it turn into the
wristwatch.
Curiously enough, as Dariel Fitzkee has pointed out, boredom can
afford misdirection. Let us say that you have a card palmed in your
hand. (We have made this point earlier in reference to Malini.)
You might fear that the spectator suspected the presence of the card
in your palm. You can't make it vanish by "the hand being quicker
than the eye." You can, however, ask the spectator to do a series of
movements with the deck of cards from which you stole the card.
You can have the spectator cut the deck, shuffle it, and on and on.
Somewhere along the line his attention is going to wander, because
of boredom, from the hand which holds the card. You can then,
under cover of his inattention, get rid of the card.
Dunninger, the master-mentalist, uses the misdirection of his
magnetic personality. By sheer force of personal power he makes you think that
something is happening when really the diametric opposite
is going on.
Al Baker seems like such a nice old gentleman that you can't
harbor the idea that he would indulge in chicanery. While you are
being lulled by Al's personality, he proceeds to perform miracles.
This is the reverse of Dunninger's misdirection, and yet it works
just as well for Al.
Misdirection can be founded on your own personality if you know
how to apply it.
We don't have the space to go into a treatise on misdirection, but
these random notes will give you some idea of how practical performers
use one of the real secrets of magic.
Routining to us is the third of the real secrets of magic. Presentation
and misdirection are the other two.
We have made the point over and over again, in the course of this
book, that a good trick is made better by being part of a routine, and
that even a weak trick can be bolstered up by the aid of one.
The reason for this is clear. If you present a single trick the audience
can then apply its analytical powers to that individual effect
and may deduce how the trick was worked.
In a routine, where one trick leads by natural steps into the next,
the audience has not time to examine each trick on its own merits.
When you finish, the audience has a confused picture of what has
really happened.
If they try to tear a trick apart, they have to wrench that trick out
of context. It is difficult and serves to protect your secrets.
Liaison is an important element of any routine. Literally, liaison
means linking. Let's say you intend to do a handkerchief trick, a ball
trick, and a trick involving a deck of cards.
If you start by showing that the handkerchief can knot itself while
hanging in the air, and then lay the handkerchief down and pick up
the ball and make it float in the air and then put the ball in your
pocket and take out the deck of cards, there is no liaison.
On the other hand, if you start by reaching out into the air and
producing the handkerchief from nowhere, and then make it tie itself
into a knot; and finally roll it between your palms and make the
handkerchief turn magically into a ball, you begin to have a liaison.
If you make the ball float in air and finish by magically turning the ball into a deck of
cards, you see that each trick is linked to the next,
each becomes part of the other, and you have achieved liaison.
We have taken a simple little routine in order to make our point
clear. If you have the chance to see Cardini work, you will see how
he blends each trick into the next so that there is no feeling of his
doing separate tricks. To the audience, the multitude of single tricks
which Cardini has blended into his card-fan routine is a single trick.
The cornerstone of good magic is threefold: presentation, misdirection,
and routining. Having grasped that, the world of magic is
your oyster.
This book has made no pretension to being a textbook on the
whole of magic. It has been written assuming that you have no access
to stage illusions, that you do not intend to perform as your first
trick the levitation of a woman, or the trick wherein you impale a
girl on spikes.
It has been taken for granted that you have to walk before you
can run. That you have to be able to do small tricks before you can
do big ones.
With the magic in this book you will be able to fool your associates,
you will be able to make a good impression, you will be able
to do magic with commonly found objects, and you will be able to
perform with people all around you.
In other words, you will be able to do the kind of magic that the
average person wants to do and under the conditions that prevail in
the home or at the banquet table.
Some of the tricks like those in the slate chapter, or the one on
telepathy, can be performed in front of an auditorium full of people.
Such a condition, we have assumed, will be rare for the beginner.
We hope that never do you lose the indicator card in a deck . . .
that never does the palmed coin fall from your sweaty hand . . .
that never in your audience do you have the wise guy who loudly
explains exactly how you are doing your miracles.
But these things will happen and the time will come when they
won't upset you in the least, when you will be able to turn the worst
accident to your advantage.
On that day you will be a real magician—so until then, good
luck, and happy magic.