Are you watching closely?

What’s a white man to do in turn o’ the 20th century America, when the magician and vaudeville circuits are brimmed up with talent? Change his name, snip on a ponytail, and become Chinese. It’s happening all over again right now in SF’s Richmond District, or so I’m told.

As one learns in Jim Steinmeyer’s The Glorious Deception, William Robinson was a well known designer of magical apparati. He was a first rate engineer. He was tuned in with Hermann and Kellar and their top flight troupes, designing props and working as an assistant for both. A bit shy and less than eager to pick up the bit, he was no showman. Happening upon a Chinaman’s silent show, Robinson witnessed the magic of one Ching Ling Foo. Foo tore up America with top tricks, and critics and public raved. Robinson’s bright idea took him to England, where he became Chung Ling Soo, garbed up, and had his pint sized wife do the same.

Robinson/Soo was a secret to all but magicians in the know, and he made a killing. He hired on real Chinese to act out other parts of the stage show, and to “translate” for him when nosy white reporters came calling for interviews. Robinson/Soo responded in his best fake coolie, and the ruse held up until the fateful night Robinson/Soo tried the old bullet catch bit, and some punter mixed up the sleight, and poor Robinson/Soo was dead before they got him to a hospital.

Steinmeyer does a yeoman’s job here, but the book is a bit thick and ponderous, and it feels at times like an ironed magazine piece. That magicians kept journals and correspondence is wonderful, but Robinson/Soo, for all his creativity and philandering, while interesting, doesn’t seem to hold the imagination like a Hermann, or like the Great Lafayette, who Steinmeyer unwittingly describes as the world’s first homosexual entertainer (Lafayette’s ashes are interned alongside his taxidermied dog). Hiding the Elephant is the better Steinmeyer, but he’s got a new one out on Charles Fort that should be good, given what I know of that cad.