Fooling Houdini Read online

  FOOLING

  HOUDINI

  Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks

  & the Hidden Powers of the Mind

  ALEX STONE

  Dedication

  For my parents, Carmen and Bill Stone

  Epigraph

  The most beautiful thing

  we can experience

  is the mysterious.

  —Albert Einstein

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1 - The Magic Olympics

  Chapter 2 - Mystery School

  Chapter 3 - Miracles on Thirty-fourth Street

  Chapter 4 - The Touch Analyst

  Chapter 5 - The Hype

  Chapter 6 - Breaking the Code

  Chapter 7 - It’s Annoying and I Asked You to Stop

  Chapter 8 - How to Steal a Watch

  Chapter 9 - The Mentalists

  Chapter 10 - Clowning Around

  Chapter 11 - The Perfect Shuffle

  Chapter 12 - Flight Time

  Magic Terminology

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  The Magic Olympics

  In the foyer of a hotel in downtown Stockholm, a stunning twenty-two-year-old Belgian girl with dark brown eyes and long chestnut curls had attracted a small crowd. She held an ace in each hand, and as she twirled her arms through the air, the cards transformed into kings. The audience had seen this sort of thing before—they weren’t the kind of people who would go wild for a single change. But then, in one fluid sequence, she coiled her wrists again and the kings became queens. The energy in the room quickened as her arms snaked through the air like a flamenco dancer’s—once, twice—and the queens faded into jacks, then tens. The people around her began to cheer. Another whirl and the tens turned into jokers. She is one of the only magicians in the world who can pull off five transformations in a row, and the audience was now crazy for her.

  Toward the back of the lobby, a florid man in a black porkpie hat demoed a shell game—that age-old gypsy swindle with three hollowed-out shells and a pea. In the corner by the entrance, a gaggle of teenagers in red lounge chairs were performing an acrobatic kung fu of card stunts known as Extreme Card Manipulation—a flurry of cuts, spins, and flourishes. In the hands of these kids, the cards became pyramids and snowflakes, whorled mollusk spirals, mandalas of cycling angels. The leader of the group, a chubby alpha nerd in a black skullcap, flaunted a move in which stacks of cards formed intersecting geometric patterns that resembled an M. C. Escher illusion. Then there were the mentalists—mind readers, spoon benders, second-sight acts. Dressed mostly in black, they’d staked out a pair of round tables in the middle of the lounge, and I would have given a kidney to be a fly on one of their beer glasses. Everywhere you looked—in the hallways, at the bar, in the restaurant, by the elevators, even in the bathrooms—men and women were sharing secrets, trading moves. I clutched a worn deck of blue Bicycle cards in my fist and drank in the scene.

  It was almost ten o’clock on a balmy weekend night in early August, but the Stockholm sky was not yet dark, and a gauzy dusk seeped through the skylights, casting a maze of shadows on the carpet of the atrium lobby. In Sweden during the summer months, the sun hardly sets, and the insomnia of endless daylight can throw you into delirium. Not that I planned to sleep. Here I was sharing the same air with the world’s greatest magicians, many of them my heroes.

  We were all in Stockholm for the 2006 World Championships of Magic, otherwise known as the Magic Olympics. Every three years the greatest conjurors from around the globe descend on a chosen city, armed with their most jealously guarded secrets, and duke it out, trick for trick, to see who among them is most powerful. The Twenty-third Olympics in Stockholm were the biggest in history, with nearly 3,000 attendees from 66 countries and 146 competitors vying for medals in 8 events. This year I was one of the challengers.

  Given that the Olympics is by far the toughest magic competition in the world, getting into the games at all was something of a miracle. To be eligible, you must belong to one of the eighty-seven magic societies sanctioned by the Fédération Internationale des Sociétés Magiques, or FISM, the world’s largest and most prestigious magic alliance. The United States has three FISM-approved magic societies: the Academy of Magical Arts, seated at the Magic Castle in Hollywood, the International Brotherhood of Magicians, and the Society of American Magicians, or the SAM (“Magic, Unity, Might!”), of which I am a card-carrying member.

  The entrant must also obtain written authorization from the president of his or her society, and having never competed in an international tournament—or any tournament, for that matter—I had been all but certain that SAM president Richard M. Dooley would reject me outright. I was stunned when he wrote back a week after I sent in my request wishing me luck.

  I would need it.

  I WAS FIVE YEARS OLD when my father, a geneticist and dyed-in-the-wool skeptic who makes his own cologne and brushes his teeth in the car, presented me with an FAO Schwarz magic kit he had bought on a trip to New York for an academic conference. It was a beginner’s set with a wand and a book and a dozen or so simple tricks. There was a small green plastic cup—a miniature goblet—with a ball that vanished, a family of small red foam bunnies that could be made to multiply in your hand, and a small wooden box that turned pennies into nickels. I’ll never forget the look of amazement on my father’s face when I showed him my first trick.

  My debut gig was my own sixth birthday party, and photographs exist somewhere of me gesturing tentatively, in a top hat and red-and-black cape sewn by a neighbor, before a small group of friends. I was woefully unpolished, and they heckled me to tears. But I didn’t quit, thanks in no small measure to my father’s encouragement. Dad was not a religious man. He wasn’t into sports or the great outdoors. We never went to ball games or on camping trips. The Chopin Études I hammered out in our living room—the product of several years and several thousand dollars’ worth of piano lessons—rarely elicited more than an absentminded nod from him. But even the simplest magic trick would light up his face. It was a language we both understood. Saturday trips to JCR Magic in our hometown of San Antonio—a phantasmagoria of trick coins and dove pans and fake vomit—became our ritual; magic shows, our sporting events.

  One of the biggest treats my father ever gave me was a pair of tickets to see David Copperfield at the ritzy, chandeliered Majestic Theater downtown. Watching the show, I quickly recognized that Copperfield was no mortal. He walked through walls, levitated, vanished astride his roaring Harley, only to appear, seconds later, at the very rear of the theater, proud in his snug leather pants. But the most exciting part of all was that I got to meet the illusionist in person after the performance. I’d practiced for weeks what I was going to say to him. I stood in the receiving line in the carpeted lobby of the Majestic for half an hour, worrying over my note cards before coming face-to-face with the unearthly being, he of the feathered hair and flouncy pirate shirt, sitting atop what seemed like a giant throne. When my ten seconds finally came, my vocal cords seized up and the only words that came out were “Can I touch you?”

  By the time I was in high school, I’d gotten good enough to start doing paid shows—birthdays, weddings, bar mitzvahs. Mostly I did these shows so I could afford to buy new tricks, the way a junkie deals to support his habit.

  In my mind, magic was also a disarming social tool, a universal language that transcended age and gender and culture. Magic would be a way out of my nerdiness. That’s right, I thought magic would actually make me less nerdy. Or at the very lea
st it would allow me to become a different, more interesting nerd. Through magic, I would be able to navigate awkward social situations, escape the boundaries of culture and class, connect with people from all walks of life, and seduce beautiful women. In reality, I wound up spending most of my free time with pasty male virgins.

  My interest in magic has only grown since childhood. As I entered the workforce—as a fact checker and later an editor at Discover magazine—magic became an escape from the fluorescent anomie of cubicle and commute. Later on, when I started taking upper-level physics classes at Columbia University, with an eye toward applying to graduate school, magic provided a welcome respite from a world bound by logic and empiricism, a relief from my father’s metaphysics. There’s something deeply liberating about letting go of the reins that couple cause and effect, the X and Y axes. Not even wrestling a grungy quantum mechanics problem to the ground could give me quite the same pleasure as mastering a new baffler, and I took an almost perverse joy in stupefying Columbia’s illustrious faculty.

  That said, I also began to notice a number of connections between magic and science—especially psychology, neuroscience, mathematics, and physics. Magic, at its core, is about toying with the limits of perception. And as any neuroscientist will tell you, one can learn a lot about the brain by studying those bizarre moments wherein it succumbs to illusion. Magic lives in these moments. At its best, magic is a kind of psychological cage match. What distinguishes a good magician is his or her ability to divert an audience’s attention and manipulate their expectations. Expert conjurors possess an instinct for how people see things, a marksman-like ability to get a good bead on a person’s perception.

  As a practitioner of magic, you become more attuned to the limits of other people’s perceptions as well as your own. As a result, you become better at distinguishing reality from illusion, at reading the angles and decoding the fine print. You gain an intuition for how people behave. You even learn ways to influence their behavior. This makes you less susceptible to all manner of deception. It is this heightened state of awareness, this sixth sense, that has kept me interested in magic well into my supposedly adult life.

  To truly understand the art of magic and its timeless appeal, you wind up asking questions not just about how the mind works—and why sometimes it doesn’t—but also about some of the most fundamental aspects of human nature. Why do people take pleasure in deceiving others? How does the brain perceive the world and parse everyday experience? What are the psychological consequences of secrecy? What is reality, and how much of it do we consciously take in? How much faith can we have in our memories? Why are humans programmed to believe in the supernatural? These are the kinds of questions that philosophers and scientists have puzzled over for centuries. Which is to say that, strange as it may sound, studying magic ultimately leads you to ponder some of life’s deepest mysteries. Perhaps this is why, as I came to learn, the world of magic is filled with scientists and the world of science is filled with magicians. Both fields appeal to the same breed of intellectual thrill seekers that Victorian stage magician John Nevil Maskelyne referred to as “people who take an interest in mysteries.”

  Eventually my fascination with the mysteries of magic, and my quest for new material, led me to immerse myself in a world of meetings, lectures, and workshops—an underground community of like-minded obsessives for whom magic is more than just a hobby: it’s a way of life. In any given week in New York City, where I now lived, there were a dozen private gatherings—in the backs of diners, at split-level veterans’ lodges, in spare rooms at medical centers and universities, and in various other undisclosed locations. I quickly learned that the juiciest secrets were seldom printed in books or packaged in magic kits. The most valuable knowledge—the real work—was passed along in secret sessions and backroom conclaves. Deception, I came to realize, was one of the few remaining oral traditions.

  In November 2005, I sought to improve my skills alongside the experts at the Society of American Magicians, the world’s oldest magic fraternity. To join the SAM, you must enlist the sponsorship of three members, pass a test, and swear an oath of secrecy—all of which I managed to do. Founded a century ago in New York City—Harry Houdini was president from 1917 until his death in 1926—the SAM boasts 30,000 members (or “illustrious compeers”) in 250 assemblies nationwide, a monthly magazine, a secret handshake (known as The Palm), a national contest and convention, millions in assets, its own liability insurance policy that it issues to members, its own credit card, and an Occult Investigation Committee that sniffs out paranormal claims à la Mulder and Scully. In 2009 the SAM held a meeting aboard the International Space Station. Levitations made easy.

  Soon after I joined, bimonthly meetings of the Society became a big part of my social life—if you can call it that—and on a typical Friday night I was less likely to be found at the latest hotspot than in the poorly ventilated upstairs room of the Soldiers’, Sailors’, Marines’, Coast Guard and Airmen’s Club on Lexington near Thirty-seventh Street, the SAM’s guildhall, trading moves with geriatrics and ungainly teenagers. I never left home without a deck of cards in my back pocket and a trio of Kennedy half dollars. Saturdays found me at Tannen’s, New York’s oldest magic store, founded in 1925 by a scrappy red-haired Brooklyn magician named Louis Tannen, who toured with the USO and the Red Cross during World War II.

  There’s a heart-wrenching scene in Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer, the old stop-motion Christmas TV special, that has always resonated with me. After his run-in with the Abominable Snowman, Rudolph and his buddies seek asylum on the Island of Misfit Toys, a haven for crappy, deformed, and unwanted toys presumably built by an elf with substance abuse issues. There’s the choo-choo train with square wheels, the water pistol that shoots jelly, the cowboy riding an ostrich, the white elephant with pink polka dots, the infelicitously named Charlie-in-the-Box. “Hey we’re all misfits, too!” Rudolph squeals to his newfound friends, and everyone breaks into song. I cry every time I see it.

  Throughout most of my life, I’ve felt a bit like that square-wheeled caboose. I was the only child of older parents, and when I went out with my dad people would say things like “How nice of you to take your grandpa for a walk.” Up until junior high, I hung out mostly with adults. In elementary school, I was nerdy and unsocialized, a dweeb who wanted to talk about biology and play with his chemistry set while the other kids were playing foursquare. In middle school, I was a band geek. In high school, a debate dork.

  For me, discovering the world of magic was like finding my own island of misfit friends, a place where everyone was special in the wrong way. Magic, let’s face it, is a pastime for misfits, an outlet for outcasts with low self-esteem. It offers a structured medium through which you can be social without really dealing with people on a personal level, a way to get back at the alphas through trickery, a secret skill you can lord over your social betters. With magic tricks, you can seem extroverted and outgoing while still maintaining a safe social distance. Magicians hide in the spotlight, much in the way that photographers often mediate their social experiences from behind a lens and comedians hide behind jokes. Like physics, magic is all about nerds playing god with the universe.

  Once you enter this world, you find that there are people everywhere who are just like you. They start to come out of the woodwork. You begin to make what are known as “friends in magic.” A restaurant owner in Barcelona takes you into his wine cellar to show you the Shapeshifter change and a soft double lift. In return you teach him the faro. The meal, of course, is free. A neuroscientist at a major university e-mails you about a new mind-reading technique he’s discovered. You become fast friends. His dream is to retire so he can focus on magic. You meet a salesman who credits magic with adding millions to his bottom line. You arrive in strange cities to find yourself in instant communion with a band of strangers. You travel the world never in want of a place to stay.

  The deeper you immerse yourself in this world, the more it s
eems like the only one that matters. The real world of clock watchers and brown baggers with their 401(k)s and tidy job hair seems lethally boring by comparison. None of them can do what you can do. Increasingly, you see the world as split between two classes of people. Only two. There are magicians and there are laypeople. If you’re not on the inside, you’re on the outside.

  This is how magicians act.

  This is how magicians think.

  Everyone else is a layperson. The NASA rocket scientist, the CEO, the fashion model, the celebrity—they may be smarter or richer or better looking or more famous, but you’ve fooled them all.

  So now who’s the misfit?

  But while most hobbyists are content to fool laypeople, competitive magicians live to fool other magicians. These are folks who move from tournament to tournament, for whom honor is more important than money or fame, and the ultimate prize is to fry your opponents with a brilliantly crafted trick or routine. The social order of this rapidly growing subculture is based largely on who fools whom. Atop the hierarchy sits a small number of eccentric geniuses all but unknown to the outside world, but revered as royalty within their sect.

  The thrill of victory. A shot at the title. This was what had brought me to Stockholm. I, too, wanted to be a magician fooler, a misfit king.

  MAGIC OLYMPIC VILLAGE, WHERE THE official events would all take place, turned out to be a titanic fuselage-gray complex of low-slung metallic buildings on the edge of town, just off the highway. I checked in on Monday morning and received an ID badge, a program, that day’s edition of the FISM Daily, and a swag-filled World Championships of Magic tote bag.

  Events at the Magic Olympics fall into two main categories: stage magic and close-up magic, reflecting a long-standing division within the art. A Grand Prix medal is awarded at the conclusion of the weeklong games to the top performer in each category, upon whom is bestowed the title “World Champion of Magic,” along with membership in the elite World Champions Club and career-making contracts at such venues as the Greek Isles Hotel in Las Vegas, the Palladium in London, and the Crazy Horse in Paris.