Fascinating History of Stage Magic Appears on the January/February 76

To some, "stage magic" means a man in a sequined vest doing a series of cheap tricks one after another, to the accompaniment of fast and repetitive music. But to Jim Steinmeyer -- a professional "illusion designer" for nearly three decades, and now the author of the January/February 2004 Book Sense 76 pick Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to Disappear (Carroll & Graf) -- stage magic is one of the legitimate performing arts, with a fascinating history and a surprising integrity.

"It's an honest trickery," explained Steinmeyer, who was born and raised in the Chicago area and now lives in Southern California. "Someone tells you that you're going to be deceived, and you understand that those are the rules and you accept it -- as opposed to, say, used-car salesmen, who supposedly aren't deceiving you.... It's really pure about what the intentions are, and, hopefully, when the deception is carried out, you're happy to receive it."

Steinmeyer first received such happiness from his older brother, a magic hobbyist who passed along his books and props to Jim when they were growing up in Illinois. Steinmeyer did magic at children's parties in grade school and kept performing through college, though he had no plans for magic as a career. After graduating from Loyola University, though, Steinmeyer, who had begun freelancing material to Doug Henning, got an employment offer from the famous illusionist.

"It was to be six months on a Broadway show, and six months on a television special," recalled Steinmeyer. "[Henning] said, 'I'll hire you for one year, and then you're free and clear.' So I couldn't really resist doing that. And I ended up working for him for seven years. Then when he retired, I went on to work for Disney, and then a bunch of other magicians."

Steinmeyer started writing about magic "on a technical level" while still in college, where he did the research and annotations for the republication of a historical book on the subject. He has written several articles over the years and is a contributing editor to Magic magazine. "A friend of mine who I worked with at Disney read some of my material and said, 'Now I really understand what you do," said Steinmeyer. "'Really, you should write about this for the general public.'" The success of some lectures he gave to non-magician groups further encouraged the illusion designer to consider writing a general-interest book.

Steinmeyer contacted an agent, who put him together with Carroll & Graf editor Philip Turner, who, said the author "had some really fantastic insights into how these technical stories and these sort of 'in the shadows' show-business stories could be combined into a story about magic that has a continuity."

In "kind of a slow way," Steinmeyer said, he'd been researching these topics for about 30 years. As his book took shape, its framework became what professionals call the Golden Age of Magic: "That late Victorian/early Edwardian period that sort of ends in the 1920s, with vaudeville. What I really focused on is something I've arbitrarily called 'optical conjuring,' which first suggests itself in the 1860s and is really played out by 1918, 1920. It's a whole new category. Before that, there was sleight-of-hand, and there were mechanical tricks: false containers, trap doors, things like that. In the 1860s, something happened: people realized that you can be using optics on stage to create magic -- and it just revolutionized everything. It starts a whole new field of exploration and adventure.

"So this book traces this whole idea of optical conjuring: who the people were that were doing it, how these secrets were guarded and refined and stolen and changed over the years, how they made careers for people and in some cases how they ruined careers."

Hiding the Elephant (whose title refers to an effect performed by Harry Houdini in 1917, when he seemed to make an elephant vanish from the stage of New York's Hippodrome Theater) is in part a history and in part a science work, said Steinmeyer: "You have to talk technically about these things, and then at the same time culturally -- to tell why there's an interest in ghosts at a certain time, or why there's an interest in sawing somebody in half at a certain time, and how showmen were responding to this."

Steinmeyer-the-author worked in constant consultation with Steinmeyer-the-magic-designer, he said, in "a bit of a tightrope act": needing to explore trade secrets while still maintaining the intrigue of the performing art. "I have been careful about it -- because, of course, that's my profession. It's something that I faced with this book on every page.

"Every secret that is in this book is a secret that I found when I was a boy in the library; there isn't anything that's explained that hasn't been explained before, and in books to the public.... But this puts it in a context that kind of gives the meaning behind it."

Some other books and "notorious" TV programs that have explained stage illusions -- unlike an A&E history of magic which Steinmeyer himself produced a few years ago -- have explained away magic's appeal, noted Steinmeyer. "When you say, 'Here's how it works,' you immediately deflate the interest in it."

Jim Steinmeyer said the response his book has been getting from people in magic has been very positive. "The real story, the one that real magicians appreciate, is how these crude, simple, basic scientific principles can be used to fascinate a thousand people at a shot -- and the next night, a thousand more. How a simple scientific principle became a performance. How it became art." --Tom Nolan