Dai Vernon, magician

[George H. Smith]

I recently brought up the subject of magic and magicians on another thread, so I want to mention Dai Vernon, a magician's magician who is widely regarded as the greatest sleight-of-hand artist of the 20th century.

I had the good fortune to attend a Phoenix seminar by Dai Vernon in 1966, one with a fairly steep price tag that was open only to members of the International Brotherhood of Magicians and was limited to 20 participants. During this seminar, Vernon went through his most famous routines, mainly with coins and cards, and explained in detail how they should be done. The seminar was supposed to last from 7 p.m. to midnight, but it went on for nearly 12 hours.

It was an astonishing experience. I saw Vernon do things with coins and cards that I barely believed to be possible. And no matter how much I practiced some of the sleights, I never could approach his level of skill. In addition, Vernon was a delightful gentleman of the old school.

Here are two videos of Vernon. The first is quite brief and shows him in his prime. (Note the comment at the end.) The second I chose mainly because of the good resolution. The basic routine -- the classic "Cups and Balls" -- is very common and not all that difficult to do. But Vernon added some marvelous and more difficult touches, such as the "wand spin" (beginning at 1:48) and the dramatic finish. (He explained the "wand spin" in detail at the seminar, and he made it look oh-so-very easy, but it is not, believe me.) Vernon's version of "Cups and Balls" became the standard routine among accomplished magicians.

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Ghs

[Starbuckle]

George, so you are a magician? Do you perform?

[Starbuckle]

Cute when he talks the audience their applause is "very kind" but all they have to do is not their heads.

[George H. Smith]

George, so you are a magician? Do you perform?

Not for a long time. I started in the 6th grade and continued through my second year in college. I did quite a few shows, some for pay and some for charity, but I haven't kept up. I can still do some sleight-of-hand stuff with cards, but nothing very impressive. I still enjoy watching a good sleight-of-hand artist, but I never cared all that much for stage magic. The latter is more performance than skill.

A childhood friend of mine -- a fellow magician who stuck with it and became absolutely top-notch with coins (the result of practicing hours virtually every day for many years) -- was a member of the Magic Castle in Hollywood for many years, and he used to get free tickets for me and my girlfriend. I saw some amazing stuff there.

I specialized in cards and got quite good with them, but I never was very good with coins. Here is a version of the "4 Aces" card trick (there are many variations) that is identical to the one I used to perform, but I wouldn't even attempt it any more. It takes a lot of practice to do well. There are actually a couple minor glitches in this performance (e.g., at 0.26), but with a camera always focused on the hands and with no patter to distract the audience, it can be a very difficult trick to pull off.

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Ghs

[George H. Smith]

Here is an amusing story that occurred at a UA Students of Objectivism meeting in 1969.

The meeting, which was held in the spacious home of a friend, had wound down until there were seven of us left. In addition to my girlfriend and myself, there were Greg (the magician friend that I mentioned before) and four other guys. These four guys, close friends who hung out together, were nice enough, but they still had a bit of Randroidism in them.

Somehow the discussion turned to psychic ability, and the four guys began denouncing it as irrational "mysticism." I looked at Greg, he looked at me, and, without any previous planning, we knew what to do. I said, "Well, Greg has remarkable psychic powers; I don't know how he does it, but I've seen it many times." Howls of protest filled the air: "Bullshit! Prove it!' etc.

I asked for a deck of cards, and Greg, a real showboat, went into a routine we had done many times before. We always considered this a gag more than a real trick, and we normally didn't do it more than two or three times at most, after which we would reveal the very simple secret.

Anyway, after I got the deck of cards, I told Greg to go into another room. I shuffled the deck and laid nine cards face-up on the floor in three rows of three each. I then told one of the four guys to point to one of the nine cards without touching it. Then Greg came back in the room, and with an appropriate waving of the hands and a few nonsense magic words, he named the correct card.

This is an old trick that requires a "confederate" -- one Ghs in this case. The secret is extremely simple. I was still holding the deck in my left hand, so after the card was chosen, I placed the tip of my left thumb on the top of the deck in the position that corresponded to the chosen card. Thus when Greg returned, all he needed to do was to glance at my left hand, after which I could put the deck down or do anything else I wanted in order to allay suspicion, thereby leaving Greg free to go through his mental gyrations.

Okay, enough for the mechanics. What happened over the next 30 minutes was hilarious. At first the four guys screamed "coincidence:" and demanded that Greg do it again. So Greg did it again and again and again -- at least eight times -- and each time Greg got more dramatic and long-winded before identifying the card. Greg and I knew we were pushing our luck -- you should never repeat a trick that many times -- but we figured we would milk the situation for all it was worth.

Sure enough, someone finally got suspicious and demanded that I not be the one who shuffled and dealt the cards. Of course, these had nothing to do with the trick, but if I didn't deal the cards I no reason to be holding the deck. So I looked at my girlfriend, who had seen Greg and I perform this gag before, and I handed the deck to her, hoping she could carry on. And though her thumb positioning struck me as very obvious, no one else noticed, and Greg repeated the trick another four or five times. During the last couple times I actually left the room with Greg, thereby removing any suspicion that I was somehow involved in the results.

By this point all hell had broken loose. The four guys got quite agitated, claiming that none of this could really be happening. Meanwhile, Greg and I played innocent and befuddled, as we admitted that we had no rational explanation for Greg's remarkable psychic ability.

Then one of them finally got a rational idea: If Greg really had psychic powers, then it should not be necessary for the card chooser to physically point to a card; he should be able to think the card and not reveal his choice to anyone else.

Greg and I were probably cooked. He looked at me, and I shrugged. We both knew that Greg had a 1 in 9 chance of guessing the next card, but, boy, if he happened to guess right on this single occasion, it would seem to validate all his previous selections, and we would have struck O'ist gold. Greg said okay, but his mind was getting tired, so this would absolutely be the last demonstration.

So Greg left the room, one of guys thought of a card, Greg returned, went into his Swami routine, and -- Bingo! -- he beat the odds. You could hear an audible gasp from the chooser as his mouth fell open. The other three guys kept asking, "Was that really your card? Really? He really got it right?"

All this was too good to be true; as I expected, the one lucky coincidence seemed to validate all the previous rigged "guesses." Greg and I were asked about this episode repeatedly over the next few months, but we never revealed the trick. We simply repeated what we had said before -- that we had no explanation. This caused some frustration, needless to say, but we were not about to spoil this once in a lifetime opportunity.

Ghs

[Starbuckle]

Great story. Thanks. Reminds me of one or two "Columbo" episodes in which magic/alleged psychic ability played a part, except Columbo never doubted that the trick was a trick.

[Starbuckle]

GHS: "You could hear an audible gasp from the chooser as his mouth fell open. The other three guys kept asking, 'Was that really your card? Really? He really got it right?' "

For all you know, the card was wrong but the third guy decided to play along and stick it to the other two.