How Do You Open for a Mind-Reading Horse?
By DICK CAVETT
Dick Cavett on his career in show business, and more.Tags:
Let me make it easier. Maybe you remember him by the way he billed himself: “The Mysterious Mr. X and His Mind-Reading Horse.”
I guess not.
It was one of those nice times of day on the prairies of Nebraska (Lincoln, in this case) when evening is setting in and the mourning doves begin their soft, three-note coo (“hoo, hoo, ho-woo-oo”) that, wherever I hear it now, puts me right back on the glider on our front porch on 23rd St. (Are there still gliders?)
The phone rang. A sort of rough, rustic voice barked, “This is Ed Steib. Is this the young magician Dick Cavett I hear so much about?”
Since I was the only 14- year-old magician in Lincoln that I knew of with that name, I affirmed it.
“I want you to do a show with me and I’ll pay you a hundred dollars.”
As the old joke goes: I fainted and they brought me to. Then they brought me two more.
Now I was to be in those converging spotlights, cavorting like Uncle Miltie to an adoring sea of spectators.
One hundred smackers. And not to play Fairbury, or Broken Bow, or Beaver Crossing (yes) Nebraska, but Omaha! Omaha was to Lincoln, in my world, as New York is to Chicago. And a bright, impertinent young collegiate-type comic named Johnny Carson had a radio show from there.
When I told my dad, he wryly observed that one hundred dollars for one day’s work was “not much. That’s only one-eighth of what I made teaching school during the depression—in a year!”
The show was to be in a big stadium and I could remember having marveled at Milton Berle there, playing to a sell-out crowd a year earlier. Now I was to be in those converging spotlights, cavorting like Uncle Miltie to an adoring sea of spectators.
Ed Steib said he had heard that I was good, adding that he had also heard that I was “a nice-looking kid.” Could this have had anything to do with my dad’s decision to accompany me on this gig? Also, there were no (legal) 14-year-old drivers in Nebraska.
I decided to feature my most stunning “effect” (magicians don’t say “trick”) — my rabbit vanish. A rabbit is placed in an ornate break-away box, which is then dismantled, showing each piece on both sides. No rabbit.
The hand-made Egyptian two-fold screen the box sat on is then placed aside. But a bit of white fur is visible. Feigning embarrassment I stand in front of it and try to go on despite raucous jeers and cried of “Turn it around!” When this reaches fever pitch, I do, revealing only the phrase, “HA HA!”
My dad and I drove to Omaha the night before because there were two shows, the first an early matinee. This added to the excitement the need to spend a night in a hotel, back then still a glamorous adventure. I think it was the Hotel Rome. It brought to mind a hotel gag I used in my act: that they do change the sheets every day — from one room to another.
The momentous day dawned. Behind the stadium we were greeted by the affable Mr. X in person. You might cast him as a Nebraska farmer, probably of peasant German stock. Nearby grazed The Wonder Horse, looking decidedly untheatrical and a bit tired; probably, I figured, from the rigors of “the old two-a-day.”
Outside the stadium were striking posters in black and red of Ed and his four-legged co-star, with pictures apparently taken, in both cases, some years earlier.
I was steeped in the great language-gifted radio comedian Fred Allen back then and could turn him on in my head. (A harbinger perhaps of becoming a comedy writer?) I heard Fred saying, “Tell me, Mr. Steib, how long have you been wowing the populace with this spavined equine clairvoyant?”
The stage was a platform across from the grandstand.
I began setting up an hour before showtime to be sure to be ready when the crowd began to arrive. It was windy, and my dad got some tire chains out of our ’38 DeSoto to anchor my aluminum magic table with its obligatory black felt top and gold fringe. Nearing showtime, the adrenaline started as I pictured the throngs pouring through the turnstiles and scrambling for seats.
And by showtime it was clear. Something had gone wrong.
For blank, unparalleled vacuity, nothing holds a candle to a yawning, empty stadium sleeping in the sun on a lazy summer afternoon in Nebraska.
To put it at its breathtaking simplest, nobody showed up.
The clock ticked past showtime by a minute. Then two, three, four. And more. There was a dearth of customers, to the tune of none.
The vast interior seating area lacked a single living individual.
There was something awe-inducing about the sight of that stadium. For sheer, unadulterated emptiness I have never seen anything to match it.
I’ve seen empty rooms, empty closets, empty houses, empty theaters and empty wheat fields. But for blank, unparalleled vacuity, nothing holds a candle to a yawning, empty stadium sleeping in the sun on a lazy summer afternoon in Nebraska. Pompeii when the ashes cooled was more populous than that grinning expanse of geometrically segmented concrete void.
I haven’t been fully honest in this. There is something emptier: An empty stadium into which three people enter. A trio of would-be spectators were glimpsed for a moment, wandering in way up top, sitting down, looking around, and exiting.
Ed had a wonderful resilience. He shrugged the whole thing off as the result of poor placement of his “paper” (posters) and reminded me to be equally ready for the evening show. I’d forgotten about it.
The horse too appeared unfazed, but being psychic, had probably foreseen the whole thing.
My dad and I drove around Omaha, had lunch, and he tried to elevate my spirits by saying (A. B. Cavett being a humorist) that I was getting good experience at least in packing and unpacking my act. I was woeful and crestfallen but did my best not to let my father see it.
That night we packed them in.
By 8:00 the place was jammed with eager and noisy spectators.
I should mention that the majority may not have been Steib-and-Horse fans. For the night show, we were the intermission act to a stock car race. Obviously the addition of the race was just what the public needed to remind them of their eagerness to see Ed and me and the nag.
The only hitch was that the management, fearing running overtime, decided to dispense with the kid and his conjuring trumpery.
A bitter blow. God, how I wanted to play to that huge crowd.
Gloom abated considerably when Ed suddenly recalled that he needed an announcer; someone to read over the sound system the narration of his and his hairy partner’s wonder show.
It seemed glamorous sitting up in the booth with the track announcer, reading from the faded, much-handled pages Ed gave me. I thrilled at hearing my voice boom out over the loudspeakers, making sure everyone saw that the blindfolded horse was stomping out the number of fingers held up by his master.
The only other show-stopper I recall from the horse’s repertoire was walking, blindfolded, up a see-saw or teeter-totter, tipping it, and proceeding down the other side, while in dramatic tones I pointed out that this would be difficult even for an un-blindfolded horse. (I couldn’t tell if it occurred to the crowd as it did to me that even a horse wouldn’t be dumb enough to try it un-blindfolded.)
Afterwards, I was filled with the heady glow of having given a performance, if not exactly the one intended. There’s nothing like a cheering crowd, I loved the “chills and spills” of the stock car race, and I was getting $100 to boot. Could Broadway be far off?
Halfway back to Lincoln it began to sink in that I hadn’t done what I’d yearned to do: my act, cheered like Milton Berle had been by a huge crowd. No rabbit vanish.
Moreover, Ed hadn’t so much paid me my $100 as told me he would, carefully noting down my address. And I had no reason to doubt his word. He had never not paid me before.
We were almost back to Lincoln when my father managed to include me in his vast amusement over the whole thing and we got to laughing so hard tears obscured the road. He advised me not to spend the money in one place, which set us off again.
But I wasn’t yet suspicious or cynical enough to think my check might never appear.
“Aw, hell,” my father said. “We had a thousand dollars’ worth of fun out of it.”
This was more than half a century ago. Have I become cynical, jaded, ungenerous and hardened in the intervening years? I think not. Because when the money does come, I plan to give it to charity.
