Anything is Possible Read online

  I could only get so far through it on my own, so Mum sat on my bed with me with the book in front of us, as she had so often before. Only this time she didn’t have to cajole me into persisting. Now it was me trying to race ahead through the description of the steps and her saying, ‘Hang on, let’s go back and look at that sentence again.’ I asked her what unfamiliar words or turns of phrase meant, soaking it all in.

  The trick I set my sights on was one of the first ones in the book, perfect for beginners. It’s called the ‘French Drop’. It’s very basic sleight of hand that relies on one of the keystones of stage or performance magic (as opposed to Harry Potter fantasy magic), which is misdirection. Your audience sees you holding a coin or some other small object in one hand. They see you pass it to the other hand, then you open that hand and it has gone. Of course, it was never in the second hand at all. The ‘passing it over’ was the illusion; the coin is tucked away in the hand that first held it.

  Yes, it’s simple, but so are a lot of the best magic tricks. The feeling of delight you can get seeing something like this isn’t about layers of mystery, it’s much more basic than that. Our human brains tend to operate in a rational and logical manner. I know it might not feel like that when you look around the planet, but stay with me. If you see a train go into a tunnel you automatically expect to see it emerge. If you see water come out of a tap and pour into a glass, you expect to see the glass fill. If you see a ball hit a brick wall you expect to see it bounce off. These are rational expectations, predictable outcomes, they follow logically: 1 + 1 always adds up to 2. Magic turns all that on its head.

  The joyful feeling you get from a magic trick done well springs from unmet expectation. You thought you knew what was going to happen, you anticipated it, your brain knew exactly how the path should run from A to B. But suddenly your eyes are telling you we’ve detoured off the path and jumped from A to P or Q or even Z, and your brain is scrambling to catch up.

  You’re fully engaged and alive in that moment because you’ve been taken by surprise. It’s not the adrenaline surge of a sudden horror movie scare, it’s a cerebral jolt. How on earth did he do that?! And you can enjoy it because nothing’s at stake, it’s purely entertainment. What the magician has made vanish is a coin, not the contents of your bank account. (Even if they have borrowed something of yours, you feel sure you’ll get it back by the end of the act.) All the elements are in place to put you into a state of childlike wonder . . . which is what the magic I do now is all about.

  Wilson Du

  I didn’t understand it enough back then to articulate it in that way to myself, but somewhere deep down I had the first inklings of understanding the power that was just waiting to be unleashed: the power to amaze people, to mystify them, to evoke in them a pure sense of wonder. Mostly, though, I just knew the French Drop looked cool and I wanted to be able to do it. Once I fully understood the instructions I practised the trick in private in my room. I hadn’t done much that required finger dexterity — playing guitar and violin for compulsory school music lessons was about it — but I found it really didn’t take me long to pick up the necessary moves and hone them. Even now I don’t have very large hands and they were much smaller in those days (the bigger a magician’s hands the better, because it’s easier to conceal things). But even so it started to look convincing very quickly. Within a day or two I was ready to try it out.

  I went and found Dad. He was relaxing after work, sitting on the sofa watching TV in our open-plan living room. I said, a little nervously, ‘Dad, I want to show you something.’ He turned to me obligingly, ‘Yep, no worries, what is it?’ I didn’t tell him it was a magic trick, it could have been a piece of homework or a new toy or anything else for all he knew and, looking back, I can see that the element of surprise of me even doing a magic trick, let alone the surprise of the trick itself, all fed into his reaction.

  I executed the trick well and he looked at me in amazement. ‘Wow,’ he said. ‘How did you do that?’ The effect of his amazement made me feel the world had shifted a little on its axis. Most young boys idolise their dads, who seem to know everything. Well, not only could my dad fix things and make impressive-looking creations in the garage, he had his own company that made buildings and bridges. He seemed to me to be the font of all wisdom when it came to how things worked and I was forever asking him to explain how this piece of machinery ran or what that piece of equipment did. And now, I had done something that impressed him. To have him ask me how something worked was an incredible, powerful feeling.

  I wanted to go straight back to the book and learn a new trick. Although I didn’t know it, a magic trick had been worked on me: for the first time since I started school I brought positive associations to a book, not the anticipation of misery. I picked it up not thinking about how many pages I had left to slog through, as I normally would, but full of excitement about all the secrets it contained. I wanted to find out everything there was to know about magicians and their tricks. I practised every day and that book became my bible — and also my gateway to reading. (I have to confess that after the first time or two of renewing the loan, it might not have quite made its way back.)

  Cosentino family collection

  The next step in turning a newfound interest into a full-blown obsession impressed my brothers, John and Adam. I learned to make a handkerchief disappear and when they were both in the kitchen I did the trick for them. They were just as amazed and baffled as Dad had been, although their focus was on trying to get me to tell them how it worked. I refused, of course. The book had told me that a magician never revealed their secrets, but even without that I wouldn’t have given up the trick: even then, I knew instinctively that the power lay in the mystery. I was only in Year 7, Adam was in Year 9 and John had done his HSC and left school the year before, but I had a skill they didn’t. It was a feeling I’d never had before.

  1 + 1 always adds up to 2. Magic turns all that on its head.

  Something profound shifted inside me. The door that was unlocked when I’d started dancing now swung fully open, letting the light flood in. My reading abilities improved in leaps and bounds. Between the reading and the magic, one feeding the other, I felt more confident by the day, although I held my new interest close at this point. It felt too important to reveal so I didn’t even talk about it with my friends.

  I didn’t tell them about my dancing either, but Adam was a Michael Jackson fan and so were a couple of his friends, Andrew and Tim. When they saw my moonwalk and spins and pops they were impressed and when they came to visit during the summer holidays we would muck around trying to get various steps from the music videos down for a bit of fun. When we got into the new school year, Year 8 for me, Year 10 for Adam and his friends, he tried to convince me we should perform at one of the regular showcase performances at assemblies where kids would demonstrate karate or play an instrument or anything else they’d been working on. Six months earlier I wouldn’t have entertained the idea and even now my first response was, ‘No way!’ But my building confidence meant that Adam was eventually able to talk me into it.

  We put our names down and were allocated a date. There was no discussion about who would be out in front, it was just assumed that since I could pull off the moves the best I would be, with the others doing back-up. ‘Smooth Criminal’ was the song we decided we’d dance to, adapting the elaborate video choreography as best we could.

  I loved Michael Jackson’s outfit in this clip — a white suit and fedora, very reminiscent of Gene Kelly. We designed some costumes for ourselves. My Nonna Elisa took up a pair of my black trousers so that my socks would show (this was also something MJ had picked up from Mr Kelly). I went to Spotlight and bought some Lurex that I pinned over the socks, and I created a stripe down the side of the trousers with a piece of electrical tape. I got a little cotton glove, covered it with glue and sprinkled glitter over it. We bought matching plastic fedoras. We were ready.

  Only at our final rehearsal, in
a drama department room with mirrors on the walls, did we get to properly see what the whole thing was going to look like. If I saw it now it would probably look fairly hokey, but at the time we thought we were pretty damned good . . . and it turned out the rest of the school agreed. Both students and teachers were literally watching us with their mouths open and at the end the kids cheered wildly. I can still remember the look on the face of my Year 8 homeroom teacher, Miss Sollier, as she was known then. She was a really nice lady but I’d come to her tagged as a struggling child who was terminally withdrawn. She was absolutely gobsmacked at what she’d seen — indeed, when I went back to the school thirteen years later she could still clearly remember the performance and how amazed everyone had been. ‘See,’ said Adam as we left the stage, ‘I told you you were good!’

  For weeks afterwards people were saying how great it had been: those four minutes of dancing changed the way everyone at school thought about me. But more importantly they changed the way I saw myself. In place of the dread I’d previously felt at the idea of drawing attention to myself there was a realisation that I had something to offer that people liked.

  I could amaze and entertain — what a revelation! But I could never have guessed how far it would take me.

  JEAN-EUGÈNE ROBERT-HOUDIN

  You can’t talk about the history of my craft without talking about this maestro, the father of modern magic. He was amazingly influential, but too few people know about him today.

  Born in 1805 with the surname Robert, he loved magic but dutifully went into the family clock-making business and added his wife’s surname to his own; the final version is pronounced Rob-air Hoo-dan. He spent many years going out at night to see magic acts including ones using the first ‘automata’ — wind-up mechanical devices often made to look like human figures. He was so fascinated by automata he started making his own: intricate miniature scenes in which a beautiful lady sitting at her dressing table opened a music box, or a patissier emerged from his shop with a tray of treats.

  In the 1840s he opened a small theatre to showcase his creations and soon developed a full magic act. But while other magicians of the day wore wizard’s robes and pointy hats, Robert-Houdin took to the stage in gentleman’s evening attire: a tail coat, white waistcoat and bow tie. He showed that magic wasn’t a children’s novelty but serious stage-craft; he gave it credibility, which is one of the reasons I admire him so much. Young magician Erich Weiss was so in awe of the master he took the stage name ‘Houdini’ in tribute. (Unfortunately he later turned on his idol, writing the bizarre 1908 book The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin.)

  When I’m dreaming up new illusions I like to think of myself as a mad scientist tinkering away. It links me to Robert-Houdin, who used electromagnetism and clever mechanical designs for tricks that are still amazing people one hundred and fifty years later. One of his most beautiful and famous illusions was a mechanical miniature orange tree which, on his command, produced several real oranges to be passed around the audience and another which revealed a ring he had taken earlier from someone in the crowd. (You can see one like it in the film The Illusionist.)

  Another famous piece was ‘Broom Suspension’, a levitation in which he would hypnotise his assistant then place a broomstick under each arm, brush side up. Removing one broomstick and leaving the other in position, he would swing the assistant’s stiff body up by the feet, leaving them at an impossible 45-degree angle suspended on the tip of the brush. I perform the Broom Suspension to this day and when the audience gasps, as they always do, I think of the great Robert-Houdin.

  State Library of Victoria P.95/NO.377 (top left); State Library of Victoria P.95/NO.379 (bottom left); Internet Archive (right); Internet Archive (background)

  HARRY HOUDINI

  Houdini is widely considered the greatest magician of all time. Do I believe he was? Well, yes and no. But I’m in no doubt about the fact that no-one influenced magic more than he did. He had many talents and none greater than his gift for self-promotion. He knew what would thrill the public and was genius at turning himself into legend.

  Born Erik Weisz in Hungary in 1874, he migrated with his family to America at an early age. He loved his adopted country so much he insisted he was born there and spelled his name Erich Weiss. In his youth he came upon the Memoirs of Robert-Houdin and decided to become a magician himself, taking the name Houdini. He first tried to make a living conjuring in carnivals and travelling shows and billed himself as ‘the King of Cards’, but sleight of hand was never his strong point.

  Discovering his flair for escapology made Houdini’s lack of dexterity irrelevant. The piece that first brought him fame was an updated, speedier version of a decades old trunk escape — he dubbed it ‘Metamorphosis’. He was locked in a trunk as his brother Theo (known as Dash) stood next to it. A curtain would be drawn and mere seconds later pulled back to reveal Houdini standing beside the trunk which now had Theo locked inside.

  At age nineteen Houdini met singer–dancer Wilhelmina Beatrice Rahner — ‘Bess’. Smitten, they married three weeks later and she became his assistant. He added escapes featuring handcuffs, chains and padlocks and by 1899 was a big vaudeville star. He spent five years performing daring feats throughout Europe, building a huge international following. In America he performed sensational new stunts including his ‘Milk Can’ (see Chapter 8) and ‘Straitjacket’ (see Chapter 4) escapes. I hope it doesn’t disappoint you too much if I tell you that many of his pieces were illusions rather than true escapes. But some of them were real and Houdini was without doubt capable of great feats of strength and endurance.

  He was, by all accounts, remarkably charismatic and he got every last bit of juice out of each appearance. But I think one reason he struck such a chord was that he served as a metaphor. Between 1870 and 1900 twelve million people emigrated to America, mostly from Europe. They came to avoid famine and pogroms and, like Houdini’s rabbi father, to seek a better life for their children. They were millions of poor no-ones drawn by the belief that in America anyone could become someone. Houdini was living proof they were right.

  But he was too complicated to be a straight-out hero. He was a great feuder and grudge-carrier. He was also extraordinarily close to his mother and when she died in 1913 he was devastated. It’s often said that he started visiting mediums in an effort to contact her from beyond the grave but he was already known as a sceptic about supposed psychic powers and in 1924 he published his paranormal-busting exposé A Magician among the Spirits. A signed copy of this book is one of my most treasured possessions.

  He died at age fifty-two on Halloween, 1926. More than a week earlier he had invited a young admirer to punch him in the stomach. It was something he often did to demonstrate his strength, but Houdini didn’t know he was already suffering the early stages of appendicitis, which the blows aggravated. He refused to cancel his shows for the next two days and by the time the appendix was finally removed on 25 October it was too late to stop the infection. He died six days later and, following his wishes, was buried with his head resting on letters from his mother.

  Family is everything to me and it always has been. When I think back to myself at THIRTEEN OR FOURTEEN YEARS OLD, JUST STARTING OUT IN MAGIC, I PICTURE MY NONNA ELISA, MY MOTHER AND ME SITTING AROUND A TABLE, CREATING COSTUMES FOR MY PERFORMANCES. MAGICIANS’ COSTUMES ARE TRICKY, SO THE SEWING WOULD GO ON FOR HOURS, DAYS, WEEKS, AS SLOWLY BUT SURELY THE FIRST ‘COSENTINO LOOK’ WAS CREATED. BACK THEN, IT WAS A REAL FAMILY AFFAIR AND ALL THESE YEARS LATER, IT STILL IS. THEY NEVER LAUGHED AT MY BIG DREAMS. EVEN AS A KID PERFORMING FOR MY FAMILY, I DIDN’T JUST THROW A CLOTH OVER A SIDE TABLE. IT NEVER OCCURRED TO ME TO DO IT THAT WAY. IT WAS GOING TO BE AS MUCH OF A ‘REAL’ SHOW AS I COULD MAKE IT.

  For my first show for our extended family I wanted a banner, but Texta on scrap paper just wasn’t going to do it for me. I set about creating something much more elaborate, with the name of the show, ‘The Magic of Paul’, in tin foil letters mounted on crepe paper and
John’s lovely girlfriend Jilda helped me finish and mount it. I draped material elegantly over the pool table so I could use it for the card tricks and the levitation illusion (see below) I had learned. I gathered chairs from around the house and Adam helped me set them up in rows. We did our best with the lights we had at home to create a spotlight effect. I was so excited to show everyone what I’d learned.

  My extended family must have been surprised to turn up for an Easter lunch and be told they were getting a show from thirteen-year-old me, but everyone just went with it, willing me to do well. I did my coin disappearance, card tricks and, because I’d never come across the idea of leaving your audience wanting more, everything else I had. I finished by taking off the cap I was wearing and putting it upside down on the table, busker-style, with a flourish. Despite not expecting to be hit up for money when they came over for a meal, my audience was just as generous with their donations as they had been with their applause, and I was flushed with success, excited and inspired.

  I already knew one of my cousins, Mark, was into magic. But after that Easter show another cousin, my uncle’s son Vincent, came up and told me he was learning it too. That was the three of us just in one family. I wondered how many of the kids at school were also drawn to it but, like me, didn’t talk about it in public. Years later I realised that for a lot of adolescent boys magic is a coping mechanism. If you’re not a kid who’s a hero on the footy team or getting standout grades at school, being able to do magic gives you validation. It makes you more confident and puts you in control. It gives you a positive feeling of power that you might not be getting elsewhere: ‘I can do something you can’t do, and what’s more you can’t even figure out how I’m doing it.’