Magic Surrounds Couple at Work, Home

When magician Mike Caveney and his wife, mime Tina Lenert, set up housekeeping in a Pasadena home built in 1906, they ended up with surroundings straight out of a storybook:

A secret room. A golden harp. Even a gray-tailed female peacock strolling the grounds.

Caveney and Lenert, who met 12 years ago while performing at the Magic Castle in Hollywood, bought their own magic castle in 1984.

The house, on a tree-lined street on a hill near the Rose Bowl, is a 2 1/2-story Craftsman-style blend of wood, stone and brick. Outdoors, its whimsy comes from porch balconies and a painted gingerbread motif under the eaves of its deep-pitched roof.

Inside, wood is everywhere--in paneling, beamed ceilings, a balustraded stairway and hardwood floors, even in the kitchen. The living room, with its clinker-brick fireplace and beveled-glass windows installed by Caveney and Lenert, is a perfect setting for the golden harp Lenert plays “for hours every day,” according to her husband. “It makes this house feel like heaven.”

Nooks and crannies are everywhere. Down a few steps from the living room, there’s a secret room that appears when Caveney touches a magic poster that hangs on a foyer wall.

Wandering around the yard are the proud peacock, who adopted the premises as its home a couple of years ago, and a pet chicken, a professional bird that performs with Caveney in his magic act.

The couple have no children--”The time hasn’t been right yet,” Lenert says--so they named their pet cat Dink, for “double income, no kids.”

Lenert, who grew up in Caracas, Venezuela, said she was 11 when she got her first glimpse of the art of mime at a performance by Marcel Marceau.

Then, when she was a teen-ager, her family moved to Hollywood and lived in a house a stone’s throw from the Magic Castle. Her interest in a performing career was piqued.

“Whenever I passed by, I had to stop and look at it,” she said. “I love old houses, and its whimsical architecture fascinated me. I grew determined that some day, whatever it might take, I’d perform there.”

For a while, she studied classical guitar at Cal State Northridge but decided against a career in music in favor of taking to the streets as a “white-face” mime.

“I just held out my hat and my card, and the calls mushroomed,” she said.

Caveney, who grew up in Arcadia, dates his interest in magic from the time he received a magic set for Christmas when he was 9 years old. He launched his career shortly after, performing at friends’ birthday parties. He made $7.50 a performance, he says, “and my mom had to drive me.”

Caveney eventually became a professional stand-up comic magician. Now he and his wife appear one week a year at the Magic Castle, on the same bill but in separate acts.

Lenert, who incorporates some magic into her act as well, also performs on foreign television and in March, 1988, appeared before the royal family of Monaco at the Princess Grace Theater in Monte Carlo.

Caveney, with help from Lenert, writes and publishes books on magic for other magicians. They call their venture “Magical Publications.”

The couple’s home is full of antique magic posters they have collected all over the world. The posters cover the walls with colorful visions of beautiful women suspended in midair and top-hatted men doing sleight of hand. They showcase such venerable names in magic as Herrmann the Great, Dante and Cardini. Places of honor go to a 1897 depiction of Harry Kellar and a 1907 Howard Thurston.

Caveney, 39, tall, with a kind face and smiling eyes, explained that at the turn of the century Kellar was the first great American name in magic. Thurston took over his act.

The posters, some of which are 9 feet high and 20 feet wide, are rapidly outgrowing their upstairs “poster room.” Caveney and Lenert hope to hang some of them in a planned addition to their home, which also would have a theatrical stage.

Caveney and Lenert also collect antique furniture, especially pieces with connections to the world of magic and magicians. They are proud owners of a hand-wrought wooden chair, with organic curves and a velvet seat, that once belonged to Thurston. The great magician used it in his act as a “disappearing chair” from which his lady assistant vanished, Caveney said.

“The chair is circa 1915, and I exhibited it at a magic conference in early November,” he said. “Magicians from all over the world had known about it.”

And the couple’s “saw-the-lady-in-half” box is Dante’s original, they say.

Lenert, 41, petite, with serene dark eyes, clowns around and climbs into the box from time to time.

But she says the routine has no place in modern-day magic shows. “No man should be allowed to do that to a woman,” she says, “even in an act.”