BOOK REVIEW
Art of the deal, tale of discovery
The Magician and the Cardsharp The Search for America's Greatest
Sleight-of-Hand Artist Karl Johnson Henry Holt: 352 pp., $26
By Crispin Sartwell
Special to The Times
December 12, 2005
YOU won't realize this until you start trying, but manipulating a
simple deck of cards is as hard as mastering an oboe. Among the many virtues of
Karl Johnson's "The Magician and the Cardsharp," with its prodigious
research and compelling settings and characters, is that it conveys the allure
of playing cards and the singular focus required to learn to manipulate them.
At its heart, it is a tale of art and obsession.
The story Johnson tells is one of the foundation myths of modern
card work: the meeting of the great sleight-of-hand magician Dai Vernon and
Allen "Bill" Kennedy, a gambler who had crafted the perfect center
deal. In the course of a money game, Kennedy could cull the cards he wanted to
the top or bottom of the deck, then hand the deck left to be cut. Then he could
deal his cards from the middle of the deck, undetected.
Vernon was the 20th century's most influential performer of magic,
responsible in large measure for its conversion from huge stage simulations of
the supernatural to table-top demonstrations of sleight of hand. He emphasized
naturalness achieved by prodigious skill, the result of thousands of hours of
practice. Johnson rightly places Vernon's achievement in the context of art
history, particularly that of Impressionist painting and jazz music.
From the start, card conjuring was dependent on sleights developed
by gamblers, such as bottom dealing, palming and the pass. And card conjurers
have always admired and perhaps romanticized gamblers because they could use
these devices under fire, in situations where their lives and fortunes might
depend on the success of their maneuvers.
Vernon tracked down several great card cheats during his long
life, but the coup he brought off by pursuing Kennedy through the Kansas City
gambling dens of the 1930s to his home in Pleasant Hill, Mo., became the stuff
of legend.
Many have doubted that it actually took place, thinking it part of
Vernon's self-created myth. But Johnson demonstrates that Vernon's accounts of
the meeting were accurate. For example, the jailed Mexican gambler reputed to
have put Vernon on the scent is named and pictured here for the first time.
Magicians seek publicity, while gambling cheats seek anonymity.
While Vernon's story has been fully, indeed obsessively, documented, Kennedy's
remained in the shadows until now. Relying on peripheral sources for Kennedy's
early life, Johnson gets great mileage from small-town newspaper archives.
"Constable Mose Mahaffey continues to work his dragnet in Pleasant
Hill," reported a small-town Damon Runyon in the Cass County Leader in
April 1921. "On Friday afternoon of last week Mose suspicioned several of
the Pleasant Hill inhabitants of flirting with the fickle Goddess of
Chance."
Johnson's narrative oscillates from New York magic circles where
Vernon rubbed shoulders with legends such as Max Malini, Nate Leipzig and Harry
Houdini to the world of vice in Pleasant Hill and Kansas City. There, jazz was
exploding along with gambling, and Count Basie and Bill Kennedy honed their
chops simultaneously. When these worlds collide, Vernon and his protégé Charlie
Miller almost get killed walking into the wrong rooms and asking after the card
mechanic with the impossible move.
The story climaxes when Vernon tracks Kennedy to his home and
learns the center deal. Vernon and Kennedy never meet again, and as Kennedy
declines into alcoholism, Vernon becomes the personification of conjuring for
generations of magicians, holding forth into his and the 20th century's 90s at
the Magic Castle in Los Angeles.
In one sense the discovery of the perfect center deal turned out
to be of dubious importance: Even Vernon, after perfecting it, had a hard time
figuring out how to use it in performance. And the secrecy surrounding it,
which Vernon eventually broke, publishing the deal in the 1950s, is
fundamentally unnecessary: Even if you know how to do it, you're going to have
to abandon all other tasks and devote the next five years to mastering it. Few
gamblers other than Kennedy have used the center deal to "get the
money."
That Vernon cared so much about something so essentially useless
is his illumination of art and of the human condition, of our inspiring or sad
ability or need to make something unnecessary into the meaning of a life.
Crispin Sartwell teaches political science at Dickinson College
and wrote "Six Names of Beauty."
