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There is a century-old magic trick that Jim Steinmeyer finds particularly fascinating. It involves a burglar, a safe, and mind-reading, and it unfolds like this: A group of random audience members file on stage and each place a personal possession inside a sturdy, commercial-model safe, out of view of the magician, Charles Morritt. The safe is locked before anyone looks inside, and after a beat, a burglar appears. The lock-picking bandit looks at the closed safe with a pair of field glasses and disappears. Moments later, a telegram arrives for Morritt. It’s from the master thief. It says, in essence, “I’ve decided not to crack that safe and steal the contents—it’s not worth my time. But here’s a list of everything inside.” When the safe is opened, the list matches up, item for item.
I’m sitting in Steinmeyer’s studio in Burbank, California. By almost any estimation, Steinmeyer is the greatest creator of illusions in the history of magic and theater, but describing Morritt’s idiosyncratic piece of stagecraft still animates and energizes him. He’s not even sure what to call the act. It’s a mind-reading trick, but instead of the magician playing the part of the clairvoyant, it’s the third-party burglar. “Something bigger is happening,” Steinmeyer says. Morritt had come up with a new twist on a familiar routine: Magician presses his fingers to his temples, closes his eyes, and sees the un-seeable.
Steinmeyer uses the mind-reading trick as a launchpad into a disquisition on how magic tricks evolve, which is fascinating, but it temporarily walls me off from a question I’m eager to ask about the trick, or, really, any trick: How does it work? That’s the point of my visit—I’m here to understand what Steinmeyer does and how he does it. I’d approached Steinmeyer with this intent a few weeks earlier. He’d been polite, but wary. Given the nature of his business, he said, he had to be proprietary about sharing the way magic is accomplished. “You know, in terms of explaining how things work,” he told me, “I can’t get into too much of that.” But after some back and forth, he had agreed to let me inside his world under an ill-defined agreement to stick to the basic principles of building magic tricks. Of course, I’m still hoping he’ll decide to lift the lid on his more guarded secrets, and I’m alive to the fact that I’m sitting in the room where much of his classified material is hiding in plain sight.
My eyes flick across Steinmeyer’s studio, his array of artifacts and scale models. The space is shrine to the history and craft of stage magic. Here is a miniature version of the cabinet used in the Disappearing Donkey illusion, a once-lost trick that Steinmeyer—after years of reconstruction via dusty tomes and informed intuition—unveiled to a roomful of confounded performers (“Magicians are actually pretty easy to fool,” he says). There are two walls of reference materials: books about magic, of course, but also books about furniture, graphic design, screenplays, and antique apparatus. Resting along an opposite wall is a pair of tables used in the iconic sawing-the-assistant-in-half illusion, as well as a locked chest for mind-reading tricks, a cylindrical “phantom tube” used for optical illusions, and a foam-core model of the magic table he created for Disney’s latest stage rendition of Mary Poppins. This clever prop allows the British nanny to pull gigantic items from her carpetbag, including a hat rack and full-length mirror.
But what Steinmeyer intends to unpack for me is uncertain. He’s not going to let me flip over his mirrors or rifle through his drawers, and when I give him a straight-line question, he responds with misdirection—labyrinthine tangents and looping alternate pathways. Only when Steinmeyer finishes speaking do I realize we’ve barely moved from my starting point. His story about the burglar and the safe is as much about what he doesn’t say as what he does. My brain fizzes with unsated curiosity.
Secrecy is the coin of the realm here, and Steinmeyer is an open secret himself: Most people who see magic shows assume the performers invent their own tricks, but it’s illusion designers like Steinmeyer who conjure most of the magic offstage. The New York Times, in fact, labeled Steinmeyer theater’s “celebrated invisible man.”
But even given Steinmeyer’s relative anonymity compared with the Cooperfields and Blaines of the world, magic as a whole exists now in the age of YouTube. Type any trick into a search bar and you can view explainers and deconstructions of its mysteries in seconds—endless variations on invisible wires, trap doors, and rigged boxes. You can find books that lay out the mechanics of most illusions in sonorous detail, down to diagrams with measurements. Some of these tell-alls have existed for generations. Some of the more recent ones Steinmeyer wrote himself.
So as one of history’s greatest conjurers of magic continues to explain and not explain the safe trick, I find myself wondering: If anyone can dig up the secrets behind many of Steinmeyer’s tricks, why is he so intent on hiding them?
He’s a large man, around six feet tall, sturdily built. Though his thinning hair and beard have gone gray, at 61 Steinmeyer retains a striking youthfulness that manifests in an easy grin, a cheerful chattiness, and eyes that seem lit from behind. He wears a khaki vest over a tie and pinstriped Oxford, a look that combined with his affable demeanor conjures him as a boy haunting Chicago-area magic shops in the 1950s, hobnobbing with performers, probing for tips. As we walk through his home, posters of great magicians past stand guard along the walls. One shows an illustrated Harry Kellar, a sensation in the early twentieth century. Kellar’s arms are elevated skyward, a woman floating above his hands. The legend reads: “Levitation—The Greatest Illusion in the World.”
We say hello to Steinmeyer’s wife, television producer Frankie Glass, whose many documentary credits include Ancient Aliens and a series called History vs. Hollywood. Then we cross their yard to his studio followed by Albert, their doddering but ebullient 13-year-old dachshund. Once settled, I make an opening gambit: I ask Steinmeyer about the state of magic today.
He launches into a commentary about how people don’t just receive entertainment anymore—they see it as a challenge.
“That’s what this has become,” he says, lifting Albert into his lap. “It’s become like, let’s talk about magic as a puzzle. Let’s deconstruct it.”
Steinmeyer has given the world more to tease apart than almost anyone on the planet. The god-tier highlight of his career is arguably designing David Copperfield’s televised vanishing of the Statue of Liberty, but over more than three decades, Steinmeyer has engineered an entire pantheon of physics-defying, brain-exploding, how-is-that-even-possible feats. He made a real-seeming flying carpet for the latest turn of Aladdin on Broadway. He transformed the Beast into a prince at the end of the stage version of Beauty and the Beast. He vanished and gradually restored on stage—from veins, to nervous system, to skin—the titular character of The Invisible Man. He erased an elephant from the center ring for Ringling Bros.
In the more traditional world of magic, he brought a painted portrait to life and back again (“The Artist’s Dream,” performed by husband-and-wife team the Pendragons, among others) and designed a whole series of illusions in which the performer walks through a mirror, a wall, and a number of other impenetrable objects. Steinmeyer has invented card tricks and box tricks and levitation tricks and ESP tricks and every other imaginable kind of theatrical deception, then some you couldn’t imagine, and all this for the biggest names in entertainment, including Orson Welles, Siegfried & Roy, Doug Henning, and Ricky Jay.
Aside from its ambition and quality, what stands out is the breadth of Steinmeyer’s work. Most illusion creators stay in a lane: big-stage illusions, escapes, mind reading, theater productions, or “close-up” magic. Steinmeyer does it all.
“Jim is an expert in virtually every area of magic—in fact, he’s singular in that,” says Richard Kaufman, publisher of the industry magazine Genii and the author of scores of books about magic. “Nobody else is working at this level. People like Jim come along once every two or three generations.”
Steinmeyer keeps his secrets out of reach as hours of conversation unfold. He is engaged, insightful, and animated, and he speaks about his life and biography with depth, but he deflects other questions that remind me of the conversational rope-a-dope magicians use, suggesting one thing—See these rings? Solid metal, right?—before doing another.
I ask where his ideas come from. His answer, at first, is that he doesn’t really like the question. “For years and years, I avoided—I just thought it was presumptuous to say, ‘Here’s how you create things,’” he says. “I always hate reading that stuff.”
Only when I press does he finally relent.
“My secret,” he says, “is that I keep a messy notebook. It has to be all three things: That you keep it, that it’s messy, and that it’s a notebook.” A spiral-bound Strathmore Sketch pad sits on the table between us, and he flips through it, pausing just long enough for me to glimpse the pages. There are careful sketches of rotating, hinging mechanisms, drawings of altered cabinets and wardrobes enveloping phantom figures and annotated with measurements and enigmatic notations. Two pages depict a giant industrial fan—clearly an illusion in which the performer passes unharmed through the spinning blades—but many of the others are impenetrable.
There are 24 notebooks, 100 pages each. Counting both sides of a page, that’s 4,800 pages dating back to 1980 or ’81. Steinmeyer shows them to no one. His job is to “think of something completely impossible, then figure out a way to apparently accomplish it”—and that process can be messy. It usually involves revision upon revision, sometimes over several years. “What happens,” he says, “is that an idea branches—you start working on something and you go, ‘Oh, it would really be good if it was like this.’ And you pursue that for a little while and you go, ‘Yeah, that’s not right.’ And then you go back and you pursue this for a little while, and this starts working. Well, those”—he points to a stack of notebooks—“are all that. So when I abandon something because it’s not working, I can go back and find it. There are no dead ends.”
For example, the Mary Poppins illusion originated as an unrelated, sudden jolt of inspiration: a table that employs angled mirrors to conceal items within its folds. “I remember thinking that was a really good idea, but I had no use for it at the time,” Steinmeyer says. Into a notebook it went, and years later he excavated it for the play.
Part of the challenge is that a trick has to tell a story, because magic above all is about storytelling. And the stories involve multiple layers of deception. “There are three scripts in a magic show,” he explains. “There’s the script where you ostensibly say what’s happening, which is often a lie. Then simultaneous with that, there’s the script of what you’re actually doing, so there’s a divergent thing where you’re saying one thing and you’re doing something else. And then there’s the script of how you’re maneuvering the audience through the act.”
The story should be both familiar and impossible. Audiences should recognize the magic about to be performed. “You want that thing where people go, ‘Ohhh, they’re about to divide a person into three pieces,” Steinmeyer says. “You want that thing to be very clear.”
Once magicians manipulate audience members toward certain expectations, those expectations can be subverted, and the audience can be dazzled, and fooled.
Steinmeyer began as an audience member. While attending elementary school in suburban Chicago, he went home every day for lunch, flipped on the TV, and watched Bozo’s Circus, a variety show sometimes featuring touring magicians. Steinmeyer’s older brother, Harry, nine years his senior, had a drawerful of abandoned magic props, and when Jim was about six, he says, “I found that drawer.”
Jim’s bounty: a P&L Change Bag (turn one item into another, or pull something from an empty bag), an Ireland set of cup and balls, and a collection of mystifying instruction books. Harry taught Jim it was about more than props—you had to engage the audience with a story—and between this tutelage and the television and Chicago’s booming local magic scene, a fascination took hold.
Steinmeyer immersed himself in Chicago’s magic-shop subculture, popping in on Saturdays, hanging around, and talking to other magicians. Before long, he developed what was known as a “medicine pitch” act, in which he played an old-timey snake-oil salesman and incorporated tricks into demonstrating his various cures. The act won a few local awards.
When Steinmeyer was 13, his father died, leading to what he describes as “a hell of a year.” As the family wrestled with grief, his mother encouraged him to attend a magic convention in Michigan with his friends, to plug into something that might distract or excite him. Steinmeyer went and saw a performance by George Goebel, a veteran magician with a grand-scale stage act. Rather than perform for a small circle of spectators, the tuxedoed Goebel stretched his act across the entire stage, employing costumed assistants in larger illusions like levitation and sawing someone in half. “That’s when I became interested in stage magic,” Steinmeyer says. “It was that performance with that guy. I was a 13-year-old kid who just lost a father… And it was like another door opening on an interest I already had, and opening in some bigger, grander way.”
In the following years, Steinmeyer dropped his own act; what he really loved, he realized, was conceiving ambitious illusions—the flashbulb of an idea popping inside his head, the mental calisthenics of how it might work, the sketching and spitballing. In college, he started pitching tricks to Doug Henning, arguably the world’s most famous illusionist during the 1970s. Henning eventually bought a piece called “Modern Art,” an illusion in which the magician stands inside a frame and, when the frame is moves, is subsequently split in half—their legs stay in place while their torso and head slide with the frame. Henning liked the way it spun off a trick called “The Zig Zag Girl,” in which the performer divides an assistant into thirds. “It was very much of its time,” Steinmeyer says. “Because Zig Zag was so fresh in the ‘70s, things that felt like that were attractive.”
Two other Steinmeyer illusions soon made a Henning TV special, and Henning eventually offered him a job helping launch Merlin on Broadway. It was supposed to last six months; Steinmeyer kept the gig seven years before moving on to Disney Imagineering. These positions had their rewards, he says, but he struggled with the compromises that come with corporate productions. He knew that if he wanted to do what he loved—design illusions from a molecule of an idea in his notebook and let it grow into something naturally—he needed to be on his own.
Today, running his own business requires an astonishingly disparate set of skills. Some days Steinmeyer is a mechanical engineer, building scale models with foam core, mirrors, and toothpicks; others, he’s a historian and detective, reconstructing old tricks; still others, he’s a graphic designer drawing up informal blueprints, or a playwright developing scripts to go with his illusions.
Each illusion involves close collaboration with the builder and the performer—Steinmeyer’s client. “Every trick has a flaw,” he says. “If it didn’t, it wouldn’t be a trick, it would be reality.”
For magic to accomplish the impossible—making something disappear—a “flaw” in the magic has to be hidden, like a trick mirror or special compartment. If a magician can’t conceal this secret, the trick is worthless. Steinmeyer relies on both meticulous design and well-suited performers to construct tricks. When he offered to help launch the solo career of Alex Ramon—a former magician for the Ringling Bros Barnum & Bailey Circus—he asked Ramon to write down his favorite tricks, architectural styles, pieces of art, color schemes, and so on to garner a sense of his aesthetic and his way of thinking.
Ramon had never performed original tricks before, but in Steinmeyer’s studio he understood for the first time how they were birthed. “It made me think about magic in a different way,” Ramon says, “I was just a performer. I didn’t have that engineering mind.” Today, he has a trick in which his “blond assistant” materializes in an empty chair covered by a cloth. Though the assistant’s silhouette appears at first to be human, it turns out to be Ramon’s dog. Steinmeyer helped Ramon create what has become a signature part of his act. “I definitely owe a big chunk of my career to Jim,” he says.
During the evening on my second day in Hollywood, Steinmeyer drives me to the Magic Castle. The members-only club for magicians and enthusiasts is both a laboratory for the craft and, by night, a place for guests to take in performances both large-scale and intimate. At the time of my visit, Steinmeyer served as president (though his tenure has since ended), and we arrive about an hour before opening. After I borrow a tie at reception to pair with my sport coat and meet the dress code, the manager greets us. As is customary for first-time guests, I’m given the password that, when spoken aloud, opens the hidden door into the castle. Built in 1909, the building is a shambling maze, a classic chateau-themed manor with narrow passages, branching wings, antique banisters and Tiffany stained glass windows.
Steinmeyer heads to his board meeting and leaves me to roam the castle, still only occupied by staff hustling to prepare for the first dinner seating. In a room tucked behind the main entrance, I test “Irma,” the ghost operating the grand piano, and she nails my softball request (“Hotel California”).
The energy ramps up once the doors open, the dressed-up crowd rolls in, and the performances start. In the Close-Up Gallery, Tom Craven peppers his card, rope, and metal-ring tricks with a stream of old-world patter. Over in the larger Parlor of Prestidigitation, Bill Abbott presents a mashup of puppetry and magic featuring a lustful monkey. In the Magic Castle’s showcase room, the Palace of Mystery, Greg Otto performs a comedy-laden routine (When a heckler pipes up, Otto looks toward the crowd and replies, “I thought I told you to stay in the truck.”) before Kyle and Mistie Knight deliver a classic big-stage performance heavy on audience participation. To take the stage, Kyle passes through a giant fan with spinning blades—the very trick I’d spotted in one of Steinmeyer’s notebooks.
What’s striking, besides the polished performances, is the feeling in the building. The Magic Castle rules call for people to stow their phones, and there are no TVs. It’s a time capsule, everything analog, and the audience arrives with a roiling, tipsy energy. People call out to performers, laugh, slap shoulders, and scream with surprise and wonder. No one is sneaking a look at their phone, and no one resists the timeless astonishment that has come from magic audiences for decades, from Charles Morritt to today.
I mention this to Steinmeyer on the drive back—he’d been in his meeting for the duration—and he nods. “I know it’s weird to say, but somehow magic is immune from technology,” he says. When he watches performances, he tunes in not just to the magic but the way people respond to it. “The thing about the Magic Castle and places like it, when you’re there in the right size theater, the intimacy is just completely amazing. People always say afterwards, ‘I had no idea the performances were going to be so strong.’”
My last day hanging around with him, I ask Steinmeyer straight up: How does the sawing-in-half trick work? In the studio with us are two of the trick tables. I decide this is where I’m going to make my stand and try to extract a secret. The illusion has been around for more than a century, and Steinmeyer has mentioned its timelessness and layers of innovation. It still coaxes grasps from a crowd.
So what’s the trick? True to form, Steinmeyer first gives a non-answer. He begins a mesmerizing filibuster about the illusion’s evolution, citing his friend and mentor Alan Wakeling, who in the 1970s came up with an “incredibly elegant” design for the trick in which two audience members shackle the hands and feet of the woman, and instead of sawing the box in two, the magician stabs four blades through the sides. Coincidentally, I’d seen that exact trick at the Magic Castle the night before.
Steinmeyer allows that historically, the trick is that the woman pulls her knees up to her chest when the sawing happens. But with Wakeling’s box, you can still see her feet sticking out the bottom, and beyond that, the box looks too narrow for a knee lift. So I press: “But there’s no room for her to—.”
“Right,” Steinmeyer says. “Yeah.”
He smiles and shrugs as if to say, What more do you expect? “I mean it’s all—as soon as people believe you’re doing one thing, you can subvert it by doing something else.”
This time, though, I don’t let it drop.
In Hiding the Elephant, his narrative history of magic, Steinmeyer points out what most of us already suspect or know: The secrets of magic are not true secrets—the answers are often right in front of us. A magician friend often told Steinmeyer, “If you want to keep something a secret, publish it.”
So why don’t more of us know how magic works? I realize Steinmeyer has been trying to lead me to this point all along. Magic is not about knowing how we’ve been deceived. “Magic,” he says, “is an opportunity to experience a deception without actually being threatened.”
In a world of deepfakes and identity theft and warfare by invisible computer viruses, real-life deception has consequences. You need to know the mechanisms of these tricks to avoid being taken in. That’s why we press for answers.
Steinmeyer sees I’m not going to let the sawing-in-half trick go, and maybe against his better judgment, he relents. The feet are fake, he explains. The box incorporates design elements that make it appear narrower to the audience than it actually is. In fact, there’s just enough room for the woman to drop her knees to one side and avoid the blades.
I nod. Huh. It’s cool enough, but somehow learning the answer isn’t as exciting as I’d expected.
I remember something I’d read in one of Steinmeyer’s books: Magicians don’t protect their secrets from the audience, they protect the audience from their secrets. The truth of how magic works is that most of us don’t know because we don’t want to know. What we want, instead, is to sign what Steinmeyer calls “a mysterious pact between a performer and the audience.” We want to be in the midst of that credulous, shrieking crowd at the Magic Castle.
“There’s no substitute for that,” Steinmeyer says. “That’s really what this is. When you gasp or scream in response to a card trick, it’s a hotwire to that emotion, to that sense of being incredibly pleased and feeling a sense, not only of surprise, but of wonder.”
The secret of magic is not knowledge, it’s feeling. Steinmeyer and I eventually wile away almost an hour analyzing the early-1900s illusion with the thief and the safe. He reveled in the intricacies of it—the different historical accounts, Charles Morritt’s possible motives, all the potential explanations. Steinmeyer holds that feeling himself. He admires a trick well done. He treasures the wonder that comes with being fooled in an artful way.
Steinmeyer doesn’t know how the safe illusion works. He never has, it’s possible he never will, and this doesn’t bother him in the least.
Excerpted from https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/a33336282/magic-tricks-explained-steinmeyer/