STEVE COHEN: MALINI’S METEMPSYCHOSIS

The Magic Circular, July 2022

By Bob Gill

Of times of yore Steve Cohen MIMC cites his inspirations as fourfold. Johann Nepomuk Hofzinser, who performed during the mid-1800s for Viennese high society in the intimate setting of his private salons; Charles Bertram, a favourite of King Edward VII for whom he performed 22 times; and Jean-Eugene Robert-Houdin, resident performer at the Palais-Royal, Paris.

But it was primarily Max Malini who would shape Steve’s approach to his magic. There are too many parallels between these two extraordinarily entrepreneurial talents to ignore; both highly accomplished magicians, risk takers, high achievers, charmers, equally at ease in the company of Kings or tycoons, above all gifted with an eye to the chance and the ability – and chutzpah – to pounce upon every opportunity and turn it to their benefit.

Bob Gill: Between them this quartet of classic entertainers changed the general perception of magic from street performance or sideshow act to that of upscale, elegant society entertainment. But of those four magic colossi’s lives and careers it was Malini’s you chose to document.

Steve Cohen: He fascinated me. Vernon was a devotee, and to my generation Vernon was godlike. He was clearly impressed with not just how Malini performed but the colourful life he led. Vernon was drawn to characters and opportunists, and Max was both. Vernon would often praise Malini in his Genii columns, and of course Harry Stanley put out the Ganson/Vernon book in 1962, Malini and His Magic.

Bob: As a dear friend and mentee of Lewis Ganson I remember Lew saying he regarded their Malini book as the weakest they ever put out.

Steve: Well, I did not know that. How interesting. But it figures; it was a thin book, light on details, a compendium of anecdotes from a fan. The way I heard it was that Stanley brought Vernon over to the UK for a lecture tour and had very little to sell on the back of them. Ganson had accumulated a pile of stories and accounts of tricks intended for his magazine, The Gen, and hastily put them together for a book for the tour. But thin or not, it certainly inspired me when I read it.

Bob: I sometimes wondered whether the Malini legend was just that.

Steve: I know exactly what you mean. I thought everything I’d heard was too good to be true. He became this sort of mythical character. I had to do the research to check how real it was. And it turned out to be true. Fortunately for me, because Malini was so heavily featured in the press around the world, his escapades were extremely well documented. The thing is the people who had seen Malini, and had acquired any insight on his work, wouldn’t share it. Maybe out of respect for the legend, I don’t know. But when they passed the direct generation of links with Malini died with them. So that’s why I determined to write the book. It took 20 years of research, gathering titbits of information, a story here, a reminiscence there. His tricks and techniques were pretty well documented, in fact, but spread throughout the magic literature, and it took some detective work to pull it all together.

Bob: Wow… 20 years in the making!

Steve: Oh yes, a mild obsession. As people in magic got to know what I was up to they’d get in touch with stories. One fellow let me handle the table knife Max used to cling to his pudgy fingertips. I’ve personally handled three of Malini’s Egg Bags; Copperfield has them in his museum. One was used in the White House for President Harding. One was just a plain cloth bag, with no pockets or gimmickry; he’d make the egg appear and disappear through palming or vesting… he was a big user of vesting.

Bob: Did Covid help facilitate you to finish it?

Steve: Yes, when the pandemic took hold I didn’t know what to do with regards to work. I wasn’t interested in the Zoom shows some of my peers were doing, and with live shows being dark, it seemed an opportunity to pull all my years of work together and write it.

Bob: It’s not your first book though is it, so you weren’t starting from scratch?

Steve: It’s not the first book I’ve written, no, so I knew I had it in me. But it was the first on this scale, and I felt a responsibility to do it – and Max – justice. I spoke with friends who were writers and publishers. Bill Kalush said, “Whatever you do, don’t make it a list. Tell us why we should care – and who Malini really was.” So I got on with it, and became immersed in it: at times I could sense Max in the room alongside me while I was writing; it was weird, but not uncomfortable.

Bob: As if Max was approving the project.

Steve: Kind of, yes. And as I got deeper into the writing I began to view things as I believe Max did. He went to such lengths to set up scenarios, so that everything seemed to happen on the spur of the moment, which is why his performances were so astonishing to watch. I relished his resourcefulness; he was always one ahead.

Because he travelled all over the world, working in the smartest of venues, often revisiting them several times, he gradually set up a kind of global card index. So, he’d note that in a particular salon in the Hotel Adlon in Berlin he’d hidden a Two of Clubs behind the painting on the wall; when visiting the Istana Kampong Gelam Palace in Singapore the Five of Diamonds had been secreted behind the clock. Hence he was set to perform miracles when he turned up at these places.

Bob: He wanted to make the greatest impact so it would be remembered.

Steve: Yes. And when you read his press, he did generate that level of impact. They remembered who he was, what he did, how he did it. And I began to realise – if you move at your own pace and choose the moments to strike, you become the instigator of the pace. You feel almost godlike, in control of your environment. The set-ups in the luxury places he’d work – steamships, hotels, luxury trains – were similar, and he became the master of his surroundings, using them within his performances.

Bob: And like you, he’d get gigs from the many contacts he made.

Steve: Oh yes, he was the ultimate networker within a relatively small world, the rich and famous. He created a funnel: the contacts he made whilst travelling became his clients on tour. Malini did it by travelling around the world eight times; I did it by building my own performing environment of which I was firmly in charge, and using that to attract private bookings. It becomes a social proof that you are the best, and worthy of the best.

Bob: You must have been very single-minded in setting out to achieve that positioning.

Steve: I was fascinated by Max’s appeal to the wealthy and famous. And I realised early on that if you only surround yourself with such people, and conduct yourself as if you were one of them in the way you look and act, you will grow to become the society entertainer.

Bob: Yet despite the many parallels between you, Max Malini was so unlike Steve Cohen in personality.

Steve: Yes, of course. Max was this offbeat, amusing, larger-than-life character who spoke in a language all his own: a mixture of Yiddish and heavily accented English known as Yinglish. I’m very different in my chosen persona; I strive for elegance, the upper-class New Yorker who speaks, dresses and behaves like the people I aimed to perform for. I will not use a standard magic prop, but get it made in an antique form.

I admired his choice of magic, he tended to perform simple, uncluttered, classic plots that stood out in the spectators’ minds. Complicate the effect and it will not form a clear memory for the individual experiencing it. That was a good lesson for me too.

Bob: I’m guessing your favourite of his effects was the surprise production from beneath the hat? You devote a lot of pages in the book to it.

Steve: It was his trademark effect, the one everyone talked about because the surprise of the appearance was so visceral following what was a simple plot of a coin toss under a hat. Usually a real house brick would appear but on special occasions the block of ice. I perform it in my show and it always produces a gasp of surprise.

As to the block of ice, I admired his enormous patience. He’d wait – and wait – and wait for the right moment to unleash the effect he’d set up perhaps hours before. Famously he’d sit there with a huge block of ice under his jacket, soaking his shirt and pants and leaving a puddle under the chair, waiting for the perfect moment to unleash the production on them. Or he’d palm a card in his pudgy little hand and wait for the time came to perform using it. That way he was always one step ahead. Vernon loved that about him.

Bob: One thing you didn’t try to emulate was the way Malini would speak to the highest in the land.

Steve: [Laughs]. Yes! He had a quirky way of speaking. It was a combination of his heavy Eastern European accent and his memorable use of language. The cadence of spoken Yinglish has a singsong, slightly whining quality to it; it became a staple of Jewish comedians such as Sid Caesar and Groucho Marx. I’m not entirely sure whether he exaggerated a natural trait for effect, or whether it was entirely manufactured, but it was comical, and endearing. He also got away with being quite impudent with his illustrious spectators.

Bob: There are plentiful examples of his patois in your book. They’re so entertaining.

Steve: [Laughs again at the memory]. At the turn of the twentieth century on the occasion of Malini’s first appearance before the crowned head of England he was being given instruction on how to address King Edward VII at Sandringham Palace: “Don’t forget to fall on your knees as soon as the King enters. Address him always as ‘Your Exalted and Benignant Majesty.’ Always walk backwards. Wear riding breeches and black silk stockings, and an Inverness cape. Use a touch of patchouli. And try to speak in a refined voice.”

After Max returned from his royal errand his guide asked him how it had gone. Max replied…

Ah, you tink me von big fool, eh! Valk backyards…patchouli! Exalted and benizzant! Bah! I spit at you! Me, Max Malini. I know ver well how to speak wit kings. He jus’ com’ to me after I have perform and say: ‘Ver goot, Meestaire Malini; ver goot indeet,’ an’ I answer: ‘Much opliged to you, Royal Mister!’ “Then the King he laff an’ say: ‘Haf a schmoke,’ an’ I take a cigar an’ say: ‘You bet—I keep zis wit my others keengs’ cigars vot I haf gollect,’ an’ he laff again and say: ‘Vell, here’s anudder, an’ don’t keep zat! Schmoke it!’”

Newspapers would gleefully report his sayings: “Ah! Chust der very feller I vanted to bump into! I show you a few dricks vit a pack of gards. Come as closer as you likes. I vas just tinking of you. If that ain’t mental palotapy [telepathy], vat in the devil is it?”

Malini’s son Oziar once recommended that he improve his command of English, to integrate more naturally with his elegant audiences. Malini offered a caustic rebuttal: “If I talk good, you don’t eat.”

Bob: That was him told. Were you aware that Paul Daniels did a Malini show?

Steve: Oh, yes, we spoke about it at some length. Paul took the show to Edinburgh for the Festival there. I was impressed at the sheer number of tricks he packed into the hour.

But I was a little disappointed that he didn’t get more into Malini’s history. Paul Daniels relied on surface-level historical details, and took artistic license with the methods, to perform Malini-flavored effects.

Bob: You were going to tell me what happened when Max visited London?

Steve: Oh yes. Max attended a stream of press interviews, in places like The Savoy. One of the reporters had a most distinctive tie pin. Max borrows it and vanishes it. But he doesn’t reproduce it: he goes to move off. “What about my pin?” asks the reporter, a little frantically. “Ver vill you be goin’ next?” – “Back to the office.” – Max points to a taxi: “…take that one.” The reporter opens the taxi door and there, impaled on the back seat cushion, is his pin.

Now I ask you: what kind of mind dreams that up? And who was even the stooge in that case? The taxi driver? The hotel concierge? A waiter who smuggled it out of their room several floors up? All of them? Amazing.

Bob: And how has the book been received?

Steve: Extremely favourably. We’re planning a second edition, as the first 2000 have sold out.

I’ve a couple of photographs to add that have come to light. There are a few small things in there I want to correct, and people have sent me fresh anecdotes and clippings about Max. I’m also planning a website, since so many of the hundreds of photos I have are too low- resolution for a quality book.

My book has been received better than I could have dreamt. It is so touching when a subject dear to your heart affects others too. And I think there is much we can all learn from Max’s approach to his magic.