The Glorious Deception: The Double Life of William Robinson, aka Chung Ling Soo, The "Marvelous Chinese Conjurer" (review)

If the name Chung Ling Soo sounds at all familiar, it is due to the recent film The Prestige. There, he is depicted as a wizened Chinese man who produces a huge, water-filled crystal globe from thin air. Leaving the shabby theatre where he had been playing, we discover that he merely pretends to be feeble on- and offstage in order to make this illusion more spectacular: a metaphor for a life given over totally to art. While there was an actual magician called Chung Ling Soo whose life was as illusory as his screen doppelganger, he was never famous for conjuring water bowls nor was he performing during the period represented in the film—nor, for that matter, was he Chinese. In reality, he was an American named William Ellsworth Robinson, whose true identity was not publicly known until his death in 1918 when an onstage bullet-catching trick went horribly, horribly wrong.

The startling drama of Robinson's death has often overshadowed the tangled issues raised by his life, and in this laudatory biography, Jim Steinmeyer meticulously tracks the man at the illusion's heart, from his early days as a mediocre dime-museum conjuror, to his shady dabblings as a spiritualist medium during the Columbia Exhibition, to his final appearance on a suburban London stage facing down what appeared to be a firing squad of silk-clad Chinese nationalists. Arguing that "the most glorious deception in a theatre isn't a stage illusion . . . but the theatre itself" (17), Steinmeyer links the conceptual changes in modern populist entertainment to the physical and ideological structures that grew to contain them. In presenting the life of one performer whose racial impersonations fooled a nation for nearly two decades, The Glorious Deception invokes an era when famous magicians were household names and their rivalries the stuff of headlines.

Given its ephemeral and secretive nature, writing about magic tends to be anecdotal. Steinmeyer represents a newer wave of magic historians who are interested in providing cultural context for the tricks as well as engaging in more thorough historiography. What becomes clear in his detailed rendering of Soo's final trick—as well as the tricks of his contemporaries—is a desire to have a contemporary reader understand the structure of such performances, from the architecture of the theatre to the pace and composition of the acts. As a professional illusion designer, the author's familiarity with the mechanics of stage magic enlivens his prose and allows his reader to understand how the changes in popular entertainment affected the development of modern stage magic and vice versa.

Robinson grew up at a time when New York's rowdy concert saloons were transforming into middle-class vaudeville houses. Magicians dressed in respectable evening clothes and using props and tables that would not have looked out of place in a middle-class parlor would headline an evening's entertainment. An indifferent solo performer, Robinson nevertheless attracted attention through his innovative use of new stage technologies that combined carefully placed lights and black drapery to make objects seemingly appear and dematerialize in dramatic fashion. For these tricks he adopted a number of ethnic personae, and was a far more successful performer when he had such roles to play. When a magician from China with the stage name of Ching Ling Foo became one of the most popular and well-paid performers in the United States, Robinson duplicated this act. He secured a series of European engagements in early 1900 where he began to develop his Chung Ling Soo persona. Ironically, his initial bookings in London occurred within weeks of the Boxer Rebellion, an uprising led by Chinese nationalists who murdered a handful of English missionaries and laid siege to the European legations in Peking. Rather than jeopardize his initial popularity by revealing his true identity...