Roy Benson by StarlightPreface
Levent
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When I first began work on this book, magicians rarely mentioned Roy Benson’s name. The few younger magicians who had heard of him associated him mainly with the Benson Bowl Routine, his now-classic variation of the Cups and Balls using a single brass bowl, a wooden wand, and a trio of sponge balls.
But to the older generation of magicians lucky enough to have seen him perform, his name evokes memories of an extremely funny comedy magician and a master billiard-ball manipulator, a true artist whose talents ranged from brilliant new close-up effects to improvements on classics like the Chinese Sticks and the Salt Pour.
While Roy Benson was alive, magicians considered him one of the art’s most insightful and expert performers, an all-around sleight-of-hand entertainer in a class with figures like Dai Vernon and Charlie Miller.
Despite all his achievements and mastery, Roy Benson has rarely been discussed in print and to date few writers have understood Benson’s exact place in the history of magic. After a considerable amount of research, it is now my belief that Roy Benson was in fact one of magic’s unsung masters, one who certainly belongs among the pantheon of great magicians of the twentieth century.
I thus find it incredible that no book has yet been written about him. As providence would have it, I am now tasked with righting what I perceive to be a wrong by stepping up to the plate with this literary effort in Benson’s memory.
Fortunately, this endeavor has been aided by the fact that Roy Benson (who died in 1977 at age 63) was a relatively recent figure who currently has many friends who are still alive and well. They have generously shared their stories about Benson, a man who, I should add, was considered by his almost all his peers and companions to have been a wonderful human being.
When I first told a few friends that I was beginning to work on a Roy Benson book with Todd Karr, they were universally overjoyed to hear that a volume would finally be written about such a fine magician.
Needless to say, the lack of published information about Benson and his magic presented us with more than a few challenges. Nevertheless, we managed to unearth more than sufficient material to write a book. For the biographical opening of our planned work, we found family photos, promotional pieces, details of his career from old magic periodicals and newspaper clippings, and personal anecdotes from his friends, allowing us to create what we hope will be a decent picture of Roy’s life.
Our initial work on the magic portion of the book, however, was a mixed bag. Describing Benson’s main stage act wasn’t difficult, since we found quite a bit of film footage of his performances. It was a fairly simple matter to analyze his act and reverse-engineer his techniques. We also learned about some of Benson’s other stage tricks and close-up effects through interviews with his friends and by unearthing articles in magazines and books, including Benson on Magic, his 1972 lecture notes.
But despite our findings, one of the most important elements was missing. We really didn’t know a lot concerning Benson’s thinking about magic. We certainly could make assumptions based on conjecture, but to really be able to delve into his mind, we realized we needed to hear or read Benson’s own words about his art. For quite a while, we seemed to have hit a dead end.
What made this situation especially sad was a note by Bruce Elliott we found in an issue of The Phoenix, February 27, 1947: “We’ve been giggling ever since we heard the title that Roy Benson wanted to give a book on magic he’s writing. Unfortunately, we don’t think his publisher is going to care for it. He called it The World’s Second Oldest Profession. It sounds so very respectable, don’t you think?”
We later ran across a similar passage in Milbourne Christopher’s Linking Ring column in 1946, which reported that Benson “is writing a book on sleight-of-hand (who isn’t?) which he plans to illustrate with photographs.”
It thus became apparent that Roy Benson was preparing a book that would have certainly explained his thinking about magic, but it seemed that this unfinished or unpublished book was now lost forever.
A properly presented magic trick is full of surprises, and our research had plenty of them, too. In November 2004, I had a few days between cruise-ship engagements and squeezed in a final research trip to New York. The surprise awaiting me there was a gentleman I had known when I was growing up in New York, former vaudeville and nightclub juggler Larry Weeks, who is now in his eighties.
Aside from his stage career, Weeks has been a magic dealer and manufacturer, producer of an annual one-day magic convention, an entertainment agent, a children’s show magician, and an ever-present fixture on the New York magic scene. Since his adolescence, Larry had also collected magic, juggling, and vaudeville props, books, photographs, films, and various show-business artifacts, especially those pertaining to W. C. Fields, Charles Chaplin, and Houdini.
Larry Weeks was a friend of Roy and Connye Benson (in fact, he knew Connye before she met Roy), and after Roy passed away, Larry continued his friendship with Connye and visited her often.
When Connye died in 1996, her brother requested Larry to help dispose of the estate. After most of Roy’s props were sold to collectors, Connye’s brother told Larry to do whatever he wanted with the rest of the items left in the Bensons’ apartment. Larry put it all in storage, where it sat undisturbed for eight years.
When I initially contacted Larry Weeks and asked him what items he might own concerning Roy Benson, he replied, “Everything.”
That was certainly the case. As Larry and I looked through the many boxes he had stored, we found Benson’s corre-spondence, legal papers, tax returns, canceled checks, family photos, newspaper clippings, and publicity shots.
Then we came across the audiocassettes, a pile of tapes containing an odd variety of recordings including telephone conversations, the music from Connye’s contortionist act, and the soundtrack to Benson’s legendary Siamese Act.
We found a two-hour recording of a 1972 lecture that Roy Benson had given in New York. This tape was crucial to the book Todd and I were planning, for now we had Benson’s actual patter for his close-up tricks, including items we had known only from scant published explanations, including the Benson Bowl, his Copper and Silver transposition, the Glass Trick, and his Banished coin vanish. In addition, since this was a recording of Roy Benson teaching these tricks more than twenty years after they had first been published in magic magazines and books, we were treated to Benson’s previously unknown advances in technique and thinking.
Then Larry and I discovered gold: a stack of audiocassettes with four hours of Roy Benson discussing his theories of magic, showmanship, routining, costuming, and handling audiences. These tapes of Benson also shed light on his early magic career and recounted fascinating details about the personalities and performances of magicians he knew and admired like Nate Leipzig, Cardini, Paul Rosini, and José Frakson.
From comments on the recordings, it appeared that Benson was planning to release the tapes as a cassette series on the presentation of magic. Benson progressed no further than recording and roughly splicing together his words, and the tapes remained unreleased, buried in Larry’s collection. As part of Roy Benson by Starlight, we have transcribed his words and include them here for your enlightenment.
Copying this material at Larry Weeks’ home took several days of intense work. I set up a computer scanner on his kitchen table and copied everything I could. I also plugged in a small digital audio recorder and dubbed all of Roy Benson’s audiotapes so I could later remaster them.
As I archived all this material, my sprightly host stood by me the entire time. I passed the hours of scanning by peppering Larry with questions about vaudeville acts I had only read about. With boundless energy, Larry not only talked about these performers but also acted out their routines for me. He made the past come back to life, and over a period of a few days I was treated to a flash of what vaudeville must have been like.
This was the oral history of a performance art that had rarely been recorded on film and that doesn’t translate well into print. I considered myself blessed to be spending those few days with Larry Weeks, and I came to regard this elderly vaudevillian as somewhat of a living treasure.
As the three-ring circus of audio dubbing, photo scanning, and vaudeville-history discussion progressed in Larry’s kitchen, my heart skipped a beat as I came across a box full of loose papers: Roy Benson’s notes on magic. Some were typed, but almost everything else was handwritten. There were a few sketches by Roy and some nice drawings by Connye.
In my hurry to scan all of this in my limited time, I could only briefly glance at each paper, but I sensed that this was indeed a terrific find. Then I got to a sheet with just four words in large hand-lettered type: The Second Oldest Profession. And the next piece of paper continued: "A Study in Magic by Roy Benson."
At this point, you could have knocked me over with a feather, because I knew from the contents that I was now holding the unfinished manuscript of Roy Benson’s magic book, the same one Bruce Elliott and Milbourne Christopher had written about almost sixty years ago.
It was obvious that the manuscript was unfinished, but what I could see was pure gold. Benson had even typed up a table of contents for his book, giving us a clear picture of what he intended to cover.
Combined with Larry’s audio recordings, Todd and I now had a far clearer picture of Roy Benson’s thinking than we could have ever imagined.
Early in the spring of 2004, I spoke to Alan Wakeling on the telephone. He was gravely ill at the time and I was grateful for his kindness in consenting to talk with me about his idol, Roy Benson. One piece of wisdom that Alan imparted to me was that I should bear in mind that there were some questions about Roy Benson that I would never be able to answer and at some point I would have to “shut up and write the book.”
I have finally shut up and written the book. I can assure you that Todd and I have done our best to create a clear and accurate magic textbook. No doubt we have committed some errors along the way. I pray that these mistakes are small and that the portrait we have painted of the magician known as Roy Benson is a grand one worthy of its subject.
— From Levent's preface to Roy Benson by Starlight (2006)