Merlins’ Mansion : Magic Castle Serves as a Shrine to the Illusionists’ Art
On a hillside overlooking Hollywood, developer Bob Klebs stepped through the doors of the mansion--now a private club--and found himself in an old Victorian room hung with red velvet wallpaper. On a bookshelf stood a brass owl.
Klebs approached and spoke to it: “Open sesame.”
Immediately, the bookcase slid aside, giving way to a secret passageway and other rooms--and laughter--beyond. The 44-year-old Redondo Beach resident quickly moved through the angled corridor and disappeared within the crowded inner chambers of the Magic Castle, a bewitching and otherworldly place where objects leap mysteriously through space, where playing cards take on supernatural properties and where, most of all, the hand is quicker than the eye.
Every night, nearly 300 members and guests flow through the labyrinth of rooms to dine at the 83-year-old mansion, to swap parlor tricks and see modern-day Merlins perform on three stages. But the Magic Castle is more than just another of Los Angeles’ many entertainment clubs; it is a shrine to an art form, a museum of sorcery. Magicians come here from around the world to perform, share secrets and take part in a fraternity that dates back centuries.
Owners Milt and Bill Larsen see great historical importance in magic. After all, the two brothers grew up in what Milt called “a magic family.” Their father, Milt Larsen Sr., was a magician and mentalist who became Harry Houdini’s attorney; and their mother, Geri Jaffe, was a member of the Magic Gals, a team of women magicians in the 1930s.
Jaffe also attended one of the most noted mystical events that ever occurred in Los Angeles: the final seance, in 1936, to try to contact the dead Houdini. Held on Halloween night--the 10th anniversary of Houdini’s death--atop the roof of the old Knickerbocker Hotel in Hollywood, the seance was an apparent failure, although some saw significance in a lightning storm that broke out as the ritual ended.
The younger Larsens enjoyed successful careers in Hollywood, Milt as a gag writer for TV’s “Truth or Consequences” and Bill as an associate producer at CBS. Eventually, however, they fulfilled a lifelong dream by acquiring the timeworn hillside mansion and--presto chango--unveiling their magic club, a 20,000-square-foot showcase of dark wood, brass and stained-glass windows, handcrafted mostly by Milt.
Gargoyles leer from the banisters and no fewer than seven lifeless owls--symbolizing nocturnal wisdom--peer at patrons in the mezzanine bar between the upper and lower floors. Posters fill long hallways--”Now Playing: The Great Nicola”--and, in certain dark corners, one can find places where Milt Larsen has plied his special handiwork: A hidden button near the bar, for example, causes one of the tables to slowly spin.
On this night, Milt Larsen was roaming the busy hallways like a British ghost, a wineglass cradled in his fingers, while the week’s lineup of professional magicians worked the crowds.
In the Close-Up Room, the castle’s tiniest theater, 39-year-old Richard Diamond was pulling off sleights of hand that in another era might have got him burned at the stake. Dramatizing one stunt, Diamond pointed to an overturned card and said with mock bravura, “If this is a five of hearts, it would be a hell of a card trick, wouldn’t it? It would be a damned miracle!”
But, of course, the card was the five of hearts.
Diamond, a former movie stuntman who performed in “The Towering Inferno,” dreams of headlining in Las Vegas like David Copperfield, a world-renowned illusionist who has led a recent resurgence in stage magic. It is said that Copperfield pulls more than $30 million a year from his formidable bag of tricks.
To try to reach that level, Diamond invests tens of thousands of dollars in sophisticated chicanery: At one point, he asked Castle spectators to draw four playing cards from a standard deck. Then, combining magic with stunt work, Diamond switched on a videotape of himself engaged in gun duels and falling off buildings. And at the end of each video skit, his character on the screen somehow was able to name each of the four cards that were picked during the show.
Someday, Diamond said, he wants to combine his two professions on an even more dramatic scale, jumping off a 30-foot wall and vanishing on the way down.
On most nights, seven professional acts perform at the Castle. One of this night’s stars was Terry Evanswoode, a promising illusionist from Chicago who was celebrating his 21st birthday as the youngest performer in the club’s history. He vanished from the stage and reappeared, almost instantaneously, in the back of the room.
Martin Cottet, 25, of Switzerland had been invited here after winning the prestigious international Magic Hands competition in Germany. His act was an amalgam of sorcery and what he called “electric boogie,” a slick-as-silk dance style that seemed to have been borrowed from Michael Jackson.
Two of America’s few full-time female magicians also were on the card: Becky Joyce Blaney and Joycee Beck, close friends who joked about the similarity of their names. At the Magic Castle, even identities seem done with mirrors.
Like most professional conjurers, the two women had paid substantial dues in time and travel to earn a place in the spotlight. Blaney, 34, the daughter of Houston magician Walter Zaney Blaney, started at 16 as her father’s assistant, crisscrossing the country to corporate banquets and trade shows. Though her father once appeared on “The Tonight Show,” he just as often played to “the Corn Growers Assn. of Tulsa, or whatever,” Blaney recalled.
Embarking on her own, Blaney performed comedy and magic in every state but Alaska, a string of cities and towns from New York to Beaumont, Tex. Until a few months ago, she said, “I was on the road nonstop for five years with no apartment, no car. It’s hard.”
Beck, 35, was a protege of the Castle’s oldest member, 97-year-old Dai Vernon, a legendary magician whose bust sits outside the Parlor of Prestidigitation.
While growing up in Riverside, Beck became fascinated with card tricks and puppet tricks and eventually found herself making almost nightly ventures to Hollywood as a “Magic Castle junkie,” she said. Vernon would encourage her. “He’d say, ‘I want to see you in the Close-Up Room,’ ” she said. And before long, she played not only that room but others, and soon expanded into private parties, restaurants and wedding showers.
In 1988, Beck quit a $35,000-a-year job as a teacher to make more money as a full-time magician.
During her show in the 65-seat Parlor, Beck professed to let the audience in on one of her secrets as she ripped up--or appeared to rip up--a newspaper. “I’m not really tearing the paper,” she confided, making another shred. Then, with a flourish, she suddenly was holding a whole, untorn newspaper.
“That was really one of the better ones I’ve seen tonight,” said first-time visitor Alan Trecartin, 69, as he left the Parlor moments later. “That was amazing.”
Barbara Tracey, another guest visiting from Grand Canyon Village, was equally amazed when a card she had written on ended up inside a sealed envelope. She kept the card as a souvenir but didn’t know how in the heck it happened.
“We have to go 90 miles (in Arizona) to get a decent head of lettuce,” she said. “I don’t want to sound too small-town, but this is fun. This is really something.”
While the shows continued through the night, Milt Larsen gave a short tour of the basement library, where hundreds of volumes detail secrets of magic developed over centuries. A magician who borrowed a single trick from each of these books, he said, pointing from volume to volume, would suddenly possesses a commanding repertoire.
Later, in a small private alcove upstairs, one of the Castle’s more somber sessions began. Scott Lazar, 28, of West Los Angeles and 11 friends and relatives had just finished dinner in the Houdini Room, where the walls display a straitjacket, assorted manacles and other artifacts once belonging to the great escape artist.
As the huge round table was cleared, the lights were dimmed and spiritual medium Leo Kostka prepared to resume a very old quest. Kostka started with some mind tricks, asking three people at the table to think of a number; inexplicably, those numbers matched a hotel key that he had laid on the table--the key to “a haunted room.”
Before long, the guests were touching fingertips and Kostka was deep into the candlelight seance, imploring the spirits about him to lift the veil between worlds. In the darkness, a hazy green image took shape, then the table lifted and a faint voice was heard.
Voila! Houdini had returned.
