With more hocus-pocus than prayer, Chicago`s magicians recently marked the passing of one of their own.
During his final hospital stay, Chuck Stanfield told visitors he didn`t want a burial service. He specifically enjoined them from gathering around a casket, listening to mournful dirges and sentimental sermons. His remains, he insisted, were to be quietly cremated. Yet those instructions didn`t mean Stanfield lacked religious belief.
Preparing for his memorial at Transfiguration Church on the Northwest Side, fellow performers recalled that Stanfield was convinced that after our earthly gigs we move to another existence. Conjurers and card tricksters, they were setting props on a makeshift stage in the church basement in accordance with Stanfield`s wishes. A puppeteer checked his marionettes` stringing. A magician set up a barrel, dotted with holes, into which his spangle-clad assistant would climb to be seemingly speared by sharp poles. A folding table held the only funereal sign: a floral arrangement set into an inverted magician`s top hat.
”Chuck had been involved with magic since he was a schoolboy back in Indianapolis,” recalled Jay Marshall, who organized the tribute. ”On his deathbed he said, `I`ve spent my whole life making audiences laugh and that is how I want to be remembered. In place of a funeral, how about if some of my buddies put on a show?”`
Just before the first act went on, Bob Parish explained to laymen among the 100 or so present that magicians have a traditional way of commemorating fallen members of their community. A performer for 60 years, Parish held up a magic wand, noting that an aspiring magician receives one with his very first magic set. His badge of office, it symbolizes the knack of making audiences believe, at least for a few moments, that rabbits can be plucked from hats. Or that young ladies can be cut in half yet miraculously live to be sawed another day.
”With a magician`s passing, this wand loses its powers,” Parish said,
”to become again a mere stick.”
Snapping the wand in two, he recited Harry Houdini`s epitath. It was composed, he explained, by Houdini`s attorney who, at the great escape artist`s funeral, took comfort in poetically imagining his client`s heavenly bows:
Out of an unbroken grave
Above unheeding mourners
He rose
And lightly sprinted down an aisle of air
Amid the relieved and welcoming applause
Of those already there.
Then magicians and mind readers took turns presenting the program their late colleague had requested. Sleight-of-hand artists performed Stanfield`s favorite card tricks, shuffling a deck with great fan-like flourishes, then mystifying a volunteer from the audience by stopping at the very card he had previously selected.
Jim Krenz, who works at Magic Inc., a nearby shop featuring tricks and instruction books, took four short strands of rope and tied them together with knots. He threw that assemblage into the air and presto: When it landed in Krenz`s hand, the knots were gone. Four pieces of rope had somehow been transformed into one.
Bill Smetak, who was serving as stage manager, whispered to a visitor that the basic trick is as old as the pharaohs. Archeologists have found it illustrated in Egyptian tombs. To professional magicians, it was long known as ”The Professor`s Nightmare.” Then Stanfield began fine-tuning the routine, dubbing his improved version ”Con-Fusion.” Now other performers refer to his trick that way, too, giving Stanfield a small measure of immortality.
”That`s every magician`s dream,” said the 64-year-old Smetak, a longtime performer, ”to leave behind some wrinkle or gimmick he`ll be remembered for long after he is gone.”
The show`s finale was provided by Bob Higa, whose specialty is known to the trade as ”large-scale illusions.” He made pigeons materialize, seemingly out of thin air, and had fire shoot out of his fingertips. With but a flick of his alchemist`s wrists, he transformed burning candles into long, flowing scarves. He ripped up a tiny bit of paper, wrapped his fist around the pieces, put it to his mouth and began to blow. A small stream of shreds issued forth, then grew and grew until the stage virtually dis-
appeared behind a cloud of confetti.
”That`s called `Snowstorm in China` and it is every stage manager`s nightmare,” Smetak explained. ”You try to schedule the bit at the end of the first act and hope to have the mess cleaned up before the curtain goes up again.”
Most magicians bombard an audience with one-liners and puns. Engage people with rapid-fire patter, performers say, and they don`t go looking for the ”gaff,” as a trick`s eye-fooling device is professionally known. Higa, though, went through his routine mute, heightening the mysterious-wizard-from- the-East image that is his performing trademark. But just before his windup, he stepped out of that persona to offer a brief confession:
”For the evening perhaps, we`ve made believers of you. But there really isn`t any magic to these illusions of ours,” Higa said. ”Audiences see only the finished routine, not the hundreds of hours of practice it takes. In the hospital, Chuck Stanfield showed me another kind of magic. He`d smile and tell one of those bad jokes he loved, which you who know his act recall. He never let anyone see what was going on backstage-the pain, the fears he had to be feeling.”
Keeping a sense of wonder
Long after being stricken with AIDS, Stanfield`s friends recall, he continued to attend the regular meetings of Chicago`s professional magicians. Saturdays, they gather around the counter tops at Magic Inc. to swap new ways of doing old tricks, flanked by the shop`s paying customers: young boys a quarter their age, spending allowance money on simple gimmicks tailored for novice hands.
”A magician is someone who never let go of the sense of wonder all kids have,” Higa said at the service, seeming to rewrite physics texts by bending a mirror in two. ”So come, step into the special world that Chuck knew.”
After the show, Jay Marshall observed that in magic circles
”professional” means a state of mind as well as a way of earning a living. The dean of Chicago`s magicians and proprietor of Magic Inc., Marshall has been performing since 1936. During TV`s golden age, he appeared on ”The Ed Sullivan Show” 14 times.
With vaudeville`s demise, he noted, the opportunities today are slimmer. Few members of the Mazda Mystic Ring, the magicians fraternity that sponsored the memorial show, can make ends meet through wizardry alone. So they take whatever bookings are to be found, performing at kids` birthday parties and entertaining conventioneers at industrial trade shows. But to pay the mortgage, most magicians find they need a day job too.
Trial by fire
After college, his colleagues recalled, Stanfield performed at Opryland, the Nashville theme park. Then he joined the Clyde Beatty circus, replacing a magician who had to leave the show.
”It was a fire-eating act, which Chuck had never done before, and that kind of magic leaves you with terrible heartburn, if you don`t know what you`re doing,” Marshall recalled. ”The fellow gave him 20 minutes of instruction and Chuck went out into that circus ring to do his first show.”
But after coming to Chicago in 1976, Stanfield hedged his bets and started doubling as a computer programmer. Similarly, Mark Holstein, who took part in Stanfield`s memorial, is a lawyer. In seasons when bookings are good, he somehow manages to squeeze in three or four magic shows a week after workdays devoted to courtroom performances.
”I love the drama involved in doing magic and being a trial lawyer,”
Holstein explained. ”Both depend on the art of persuasion. With a jury or an audience, the whole secret is getting people to focus on what you want them to.”
The third Tuesday of every month, Mazda members practice that same trick on one another. Upstairs of Magic Inc., they have a clubhouse whose walls are lined with hundreds of photographs of magicians, each celebrated for a unique contribution to the craft. One end of the room is rigged with stage lights, under which a guest artist is invited to stand up and test his illusions in front of a jury of his peers.
The vow of silence
A recent meeting opened with a moment of silence for Chuck Stanfield, who had just died at age 38. Then Randy Wakeman, a visiting performer from Joliet, presented a series of card tricks. First, he did his act at normal performing speed. Afterward, he doubled back in slow motion, anotating his sleight-of-hand maneuvers while demonstrating which of his routines depend upon an
”Elmsley Count” or ”Ed Marlo`s Bluff Ace Assembly.”
”For this trick, I`ve adapted an old Harry Riser idea,” Wakeman said, as audience members nodded in admiration.
Each generation of magicians builds on its predecessors` innovations, a member of the group explained, asking a visitor to help keep the evening`s secrets (needlessly, though; even at half speed the cards were still moving too fast for a layman`s eyes to follow). Professional ethics require that magicians safeguard a fellow performer`s gimmicks, as Stanfield`s mother recalled at her son`s memorial.
Making small talk while visiting him in the hospital, she remarked that she`d seen David Copperfield doing his magic act on a television show.
”I said: ”Chuck, how the dickens does he do some of those tricks?`
” JoAnn Stanfield recalled. ”He said: `Mom, I can`t tell you that. I`m a magician.”`
That code of secrecy is not really burdensome, most magicians note. Once in a while, they come up against a wise guy, determined to unmask their illusions. But most audiences want to be stumped, said Holstein, the lawyer-magician, adding that he and his fellow performers are not exempt from that psychology.
A longing to believe
”Most of us got into this as kids after being fascinated by magicians doing the impossible,” Holstein said while packing up after the show. ”Even now it`s a kick for me to see, as I did tonight, another performer do a bit that leaves me saying, `I can`t believe what I just saw!”`
We all feel burdened by this life`s limitations and by a gnawing sense of inevitable decline, said Rev. Celena Duncan, Stanfield`s former pastor, who came back to Chicago for his memorial from her new church post in Kansas. So it is no wonder that we long to believe that, with a wave of a wand, everyday reality can be magically suspended.
”There is a bit of leftover magic in many church services,” Duncan said. ”Historically, we know that religion developed out of magic.”
That is sometimes still the case, noted one of Stanfield`s buddies during the refreshment hour after the service. For 35 years, Bob Brown was an itinerant magician, doing traveling shows across the country. But three years ago, he ran out of steam, on and off stage. Then someone steered him to a community of Catholic volunteers, the Oblate Connection, who live and work in Chicago`s ghettos.
Brown didn`t come here looking for religion, he recalled. Yet unlikely as it seems, doing magic tricks for kids trapped in West Side housing projects, he recalls, somehow convinced him of God`s existence. So he converted to Catholicism and suddenly discovered, he says, what he been looking for since his very first magic set.
”There I was, an aging cynic,” the 55-year-old Brown said. ”But as I took my first communion, it hit me: `Wow, this is for real. There is no gimmick!”`
