AFTERTHOUGHT
The great illusionist
JOHN WELLS
Haroldini is now generally acknowledged to be the greatest stage magician of the twen- tieth century, and despite the unfortunate publicity that surrounded his recent volun- tary retirement there are many grateful fans who will welcome the first volume of his autobiography, Some of the People, published this week by the Official Receiver at f15.75. Here at last Haroldini reveals fully and frankly the almost incredible amount of hard work, rigorous self-discipline and quiet piety that lay behind the carefree facade: the heartbreak and agony behind those dazzlingly successful tricks that kept au- diences gurgling with pleasure, all through the Silly Sixties and into the Serious Seventies.
In those madcap, romantic days of Dr Barnard and the mini-skirt, of the Moon- rocket and the Third Programme, it was fashionable to feel sorry for Haroldini's comic stooge, `Mr Edward', a plummy- voiced duffer with a happy knack of mishandling every trick he attempted. Eggs broke in his pockets, cards fell from his sleeves, and water flooded from his hat whenever he raised it. It was only years later that `Mr Edward' admitted to having been a fun-loving millionaire playboy all the time who had only acted out his part in order to gratify a secret lust for humiliation. Now, with the publication of Haroldini's own
story, it is clear that those sympathies were entirely misplaced: it was the magician himself, and not his infinitely sophisticated stooge, that we should have felt sorry for.
Few who saw him will ever forget the round-shouldered lope onto the stage, the black top hat (spinning) on a white-gloved finger, the silver hair glinting in the spotlight, the long starched cuffs and the flying black tails: then the bewildering succession of tricks, while 'Mr Edward' stood gloomily on one side of the stage, breaking his eggs, los- ing his cards or soaking himself with water every time he lifted his hat. Haroldini would stand in a blur of coloured scarves and white handkerchiefs, white doves inexplicably fluttering from his coat, rabbits pulled pink- eyed and twitching from the hat, full packs of cards shuffling themselves effortlessly into his outspread palm, jugs of milk arching out and splashing into paper hats only to be crumpled to nothing and vanish. Then `Mr Edward' would break another egg, and the audience would rise and cheer.
And yet, all the time, we now learn, the great Haroldini was going through moral agony. Indeed, the more they cheered, the more he suffered. As a child, he tells us, he always shunned the limelight, and studied late into the night, barefoot and shivering in the flickering glow of a single candle, to prepare himself for a responsible self-effac- ing role in the running of the country. He writes movingly of the summer evening when, as a boy of five, he was first tempted to entertain and impress an elderly aunt who refused to take his political ideas seriously and kept putting him on her lap and tickling him.
`I suppose I was desperately anxious to engage her attention on more important matters, and I remember, almost without thinking, that I took three thimbles from Mother's workbasket and the dried pea out of Grannie's whistle. I asked my aunt to watch carefully, and to tell me which thimble covered the pea. In a matter of moments she was fascinated, and I was able to explain to her in very simple terms why she was unwise to trust either the Conservative or the Liberal party to maintain the value of her tiny pension. Since then I have been under constant pressure, throughout my life, to develop dexterity and agility at the expense of tough-minded application and stead- fastness.
`There have been times, and I will be absolutely frank about this, when I have longed to go to the footlights and say to the people quite openly : "Look, this top hat is not empty as it may appear: it has little springs all round the inside containing col- oured handkerchiefs. Look at this wretched rabbit stuck away in a secret pocket in the seat of my trousers, look at these pathetic doves trussed up under my armpits: they do not really appear by magic, it is all a rotten trick designed to make you part with your money. Let us sit down together and talk about the ultimate verities!" But economic pressures have never allowed it, and I have been forced to continue this idiot charade. There have been times too when I prayed that my touch would desert me, that I might be permitted to break one egg, to put my hand into the hat and bring it out holding nothing. But even this has been denied me.'
All this, of course, does much to explain the more 'political' tricks of the later years like the Vanishing Incomes Policy, and their growing savagery in the case of the American-inspired Indochinese Human Torch trick and the original Sawing a Biafran in Half, both of which were fre- quently fatal. It also explains the darkness which in recent years seems to have descended on his mind. If only, one feels, looking at the airily smiling, magically successful performer pictured on the back of the book, so bravely concealing his secret despair, if only he'd told us he wanted to be a politician : what great things he might have achieved!
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