I’m not a weak conformist, but a tired nonconformist.
—Rod Serling1
“Mark, I need to talk to you.”
It was the end of another opening-night set of three close-up magic acts. Each had been a killer show and after the crowd slowly filtered out of the room following my last performance, I noticed the Magic Castle’s booking agent leaning against the wall, watching me closely, a glass of bourbon in his hand.
I quailed briefly, wondering what the problem was. Everything had gone smoothly. I had even enjoyed shaking hands with a few of the happy spectators who had congratulated me on the show as they’d left the room. I was in high spirits.
“Hey, Joe, what’s up?” I asked as I began to pack up for the night.
With a look of dire concern, he said, “You’ve got to get rid of that pentagram.”
“Get rid of the pentagram? What do you mean? It’s the centerpiece of my routine and my signature bit, Joe. I can’t take it out. It’s having the right effect on the crowd and working the room like it’s supposed to. Why should I take it out? It’s a part of my act.”
“You need to take it out. We’ll get letters.”
“Letters from whom?” I asked, incredulous.
“Letters from club members. They don’t like that Satan stuff.”
“Joe, it’s a card trick! The pentagram is a recognized symbol of protection in magic. It’s been around for five thousand years. Besides, the audience loves it when I bring it out. Satan doesn’t have anything to do with it. This is a magic club, not a coven.”
“Yeah, I know. But I think you should take it out.”
He took a slurp of his drink. Joe looked like a paunchy version of the late clown Emmett Kelly, only for real and not in makeup. He was wearing a red plaid sport coat that was too small for him over a dingy yellow shirt complemented by a huge Western-style bolo tie. His eyes were swollen from years of severe alcoholism, and his speech was slightly slurred. I’m sure, in his day, Joe must have been a magician of sorts, but how he got to be in charge of booking the Magic Castle’s acts was anybody’s guess.
“Okay, Joe. If it means me not working my twenty shows this week, I’ll take it out.” I needed the money. It was the slow season, and there was no use arguing with management. Once you were on the bad-boy list at the Magic Castle, you were soon out for good.
I folded up the offending parchment pentagram and put it in my bag of tricks. It was quitting time and several bartenders were upstairs waiting for my financial support.
“Oh, by the way,” Joe added with a wink, “you’re working the Sunday brunch. Be sure to be here by nine thirty. Your first show is at ten.” He quickly turned and lurched past me toward the exit.
What fun. Now I’d get the pleasure of working Saturday night until two in the morning then coming back for the Sunday morning crowd, which would include plenty of darling little children with their doting parents. No wonder Joe wanted the pentagram out. Kids wouldn’t understand the greater magical context, but more importantly, neither would most of their parents. Ah, well, that would add up to twenty-five shows for the week and an extra fifty bucks, plus a free Sunday breakfast.
I marched up the ersatz grandeur of the Magic Castle’s main staircase, thinking there must be a better way to make a living. Magic was an ancient art. It deserved better than balloon animals, sequined coats, and pastel-dyed doves. Was I a magician or a Magician?
Ever since I’d outgrown my boyhood fascination with it, I had questioned standard magic. Professional magicians were a lost cause, in my opinion. A rabbit pops out of a hat, so what? Other than eye candy for Las Vegas-style entertainment, which is fine, what’s the reason for that to happen? Mentalism, and any form of psychic work, based its reasons in the existence of another world and some form of superior knowledge or higher power. Because of this association with the miraculous, anything goes.
This supposedly more arcane belief in the miraculous has always been held in higher regard by the average person than disappearing bunnies or card tricks. There are now ghostbusters and mythbusters, and degrees in parapsychology being awarded in universities around the world. In fact, the use of the pentagram has only recently fallen into disrepute, largely due to its misunderstood applications by occult practitioners like Aleister Crowley and hyped-up rock performers like Ozzy Osbourne and Marilyn Manson, but pentagram imagery has been used as an amulet of protection for thousands of years. Until the Church of Satan and other posers began turning it upside down to resemble a goat’s horns, it was quite acceptable in most spiritual contexts. So what could be so horribly wrong with me using a pentagram?
The pathos of my situation irked me, but I soon drowned my aggravation in a single malt scotch, joining the vast brotherhood of fellow magicians who had passed so gloriously before me in like fashion.
At the end of that week, on closing night, after my final show, a cocktail waitress entered the room to clean up the empty bar glasses, napkins, and swizzle sticks that littered the floor, and my friend Joe poked his head in again.
“What happened?” he asked, knitting his brows with a sorrowful look that even Emmett Kelly might have liked to appropriate—an exaggerated expression of pity, as if his plastic prop flower had just wilted.
“What do you mean what happened? Everything’s fine. I’m done for the week. I’ll see you around, Joe.” I continued packing my case, but Joe persisted.
“Wait . . . I mean, I watched your first show tonight and it just didn’t seem to have the same punch as when I saw it earlier this week. What happened?”
I summoned my last bit of energy and faced his bourbon breath head on. “Well, Joe, maybe it’s because I took the pentagram out of the act like you told me to.”
A faked spirit photo from the Houdini Séance Room
at the Magic Castle, Hollywood, CA, 1998.
A moment of semi-blank acknowledgement flashed in Joe’s eyes. He rubbed the stubble on his chin and looked back at me with an expression of epiphany. But then it was gone. He walked away, silently shaking his head.
I instantly determined that if I wanted to perform audience-pleasing magic, whether it included a psychic reading or not, I should not pay attention to what anyone else told me. This, I knew, was doubly true with anything another magician might tell me. I would be myself. I would go with my gut. Why not, when this advice holds true with all of life’s other battles, psychic or not?
Séancing in the Houdini Séance Room, 1998.
The next weekend I was booked for two séances in the Houdini Séance Room at the Magic Castle, instead of the close-up room. At least in the séance room I was free to explore all the acting abilities I could muster in my role as the Medium. I would have two fifty-minute mini-plays to develop my persona and also do what I was really starting to enjoy, playing up my character as “a medium with a message.” My dramatic presentations were re-enactments of what a traditional Victorian séance looked like and included the standard rattling tambourines, floating spirit voices, and thirteen people sitting around a circular table holding hands. I occasionally even had the opportunity to use a tantalizing lever that can push the sitters from the merely magical to the truly mystical: giving an accurate and believable psychic reading.
I was fast becoming immersed in time-honored mediumistic talents such as reading tarot cards, palms, and runestones, and performing handwriting analysis. I was learning the oldest form of magic, originally spelled with a k: Magick. More and more often I was offering quick but dramatic psychic readings for attractive single women, instead of vanishing a coin and then producing it from some kid’s dirty little ear.
That weekend I was having a dram before performing my first of the two séances in the Houdini Séance Room. I was minding my own business when one of the Castle’s founding fathers and the builder of the Séance Room, Milt Larson, sat down next to me and offered to buy me another round. Never one to look a gift horse in the mouth, especially when it involved one of the owners of the club, I took him up on his offer.
Milt had already imbibed quite a few drams himself that night and he chummed up to me in an unusual show of attention. Something was up.
He slid onto a barstool and started in with a friendly, “Hi, Mark. So you’re séancing tonight, eh?” This was his usual intro.
“Yep. I’ve got two tonight, actually,” I replied proudly. Each séance brought in about nine hundred dollars for the Castle.
“I need to ask you to do me a favor.” He stared straight ahead.
What could I do? This was an icon of one of Hollywood’s most famous private clubs. Taking a thoughtful sip from my drink, I ventured, “Sure, Milt. Anything. What’s up?”
“Well,” he said, “I’d like you to start wearing a turban.”
I was not sure I had heard him correctly. “A turban?”
He looked at me very closely as he said, “Yes. You know, a turban like mediums used to wear.”
I thought for a moment, wondering if he was having a joke at my expense, but his unwavering glare was dead serious. Hoping to make the best out of this situation, I asked, “You mean, like a stylish, modern sort of over-the-shoulder thing like Orson Welles wore in Cagliostro?”2
“No, I mean the big headdress style, like Johnny Carson wore when he was doing his Karnak thing with all the jewels and baubles dangling off of it.”
Early mentalist days, Hollywood, CA, 1975.
“I see. Well, I don’t know. Isn’t that a bit dated or comical for these days?” I was secretly trying to assuage my fears by convincing myself that Uncle Milty was just in his cups and not really serious. But he was serious.
“That’s the whole point, Mark. I mean, look at you. You just don’t look like a medium. Your hair is too short. The way you dress is off. We need you to look more like a real medium.”
This verged on insulting, even if the drinks were on the house. There had never been any question of my style or concern about any image problems during the previous fourteen years I had performed at the Castle, and I always prided myself on the fact that I was one of the best-dressed entertainers appearing in Milt’s magical playhouse. My hair and grooming were upscale. The shade or two darker that I had chosen to take manifested itself in a slightly more sinister persona, with more Goth-like dress as well as more attention paid to authentic antiquarian props than to magic-shop items. I wondered what in the world had come over Milt.
“Well, we want you to start wearing a turban from now on.” He was scanning my reaction through the bottom of his wineglass.
I couldn’t imagine the effect this would have on patrons of the club, not to mention my already shaky standing with the rest of my peer group of magicians since I had started doing psychic readings. In very short order, if I did what he was asking, I would be the laughingstock of the Castle.
I was incredulous. “Really. And who’s picking up the tab for this little item?”
“Oh, well . . . you can go out to any of the costume shops around town and pick one up for fairly cheap. Just make sure it has some sort of jewel or something on the front of it. Maybe a feather too.” As an afterthought, he added, “Maybe you don’t have to wear it outside of the Séance Room, but definitely while you’re in there. We’ll see how it goes.”
“Eh . . . yeah . . . hmm. I see. I’ll have to give it some thought, Milt.” I pushed myself away from the bar and away from a friendship that I had honored many times over with favors and concessions. This was it. I couldn’t play a parody act like a buffoon for what they were paying me, and he knew it. Plus, I couldn’t be put into such a ludicrous Hollywood stereotype and remain true to myself. I had spent way too much time developing a believable character to throw it all away on such silly joke-shop theatrics. I wanted people to believe that I might be real, and what Milt was asking of me would only detract from that goal.
It was time for me to leave the hallowed halls of the Academy of Magical Arts and venture forth to where I was free to expand upon what I had learned. I didn’t know then that one day I would return to the Magic Castle to perform more standardized mentalism, but my goal at that time had been to absorb all I could from magic and magicians and take those methods as far I could in the world of the “professional psychic.”
1 Marc Scott Zicree, The Twilight Zone Companion (New York: Bantam Books, 1982).
2 A 1949 film (more widely known by the title Black Magic) adapted from an Alexandre Dumas novel.
