The dazzling end was when all 52 cards were thrown, serially, into the audience. He would then call up certain cards-the king of spades, the ten of clubs-and they would rise two feet in the air, into his hands. But expectations turned upside down when Thurston put the deck into a glass goblet. One, called the "Rising Card," started with an audience member choosing certain cards, as if for a regular card trick. In his white tie and tails, Thurston performed incredible tricks. “They say ‘If you don't take him, he's at the end of his game.’ And ‘I really think this guy is redeemable, but he's the roughest case I've ever seen.’” Thurston overcame those early trials, hiding his background to become, by the time he reached his early 30s, a stage magician whose success rested in part on his gentlemanly demeanor, what Steinmeyer calls his "bank president" grandeur. “It's kind of jaw-dropping what they write about this kid,” he says. Steinmeyer unearthed correspondence between authorities about the high-school aged Thurston. While contemporary accounts reported that he'd been training for the ministry when he decided upon magic, biographer Jim Steinmeyer says that the young Thurston was a near-criminal who escaped institutionalization by saying he had found religion. "Thurston-that's what it was."īorn in Ohio, in 1869, Thurston had a rough childhood that included some time riding the rails. "It's sort of like the hype of everybody that wanted to see Hamilton," says Rory Feldman, a magician with a Thurston collection of more than 65,000 pieces. Today, he's all but forgotten, eclipsed in history by his contemporary Harry Houdini, even though Houdini was more of an escape artist than a magician. In the 20th century's first decades, Howard Thurston thrilled people with his own brand of stage magic, a giant production requiring 40 tons of equipment.
Dale Carnegie included Thurston in his famed self-help book How to Win Friends and Influence People, because Thurston had told Carnegie that before every show, he stood behind the curtain, saying over and over, "I love my audience." Through it all, the audience felt Thurston's affection. At the magician Howard Thurston's show, the world flouted nature.
A horse and rider vanished, floating away as if in a dream, spangles sparkling in audiences' eyes. Cards hovered, and a box of candy became a rabbit.
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