The Reading Chair: “Master of Deception” by John-Ivan Palmer
By: Thomas Burchfield
Tags: John Ivan Palmer Author, Master Of Deception Book, Jack Pyle Magician, Books

Once upon a time, a small boy sat alone in the back seat of a Hudson Hornet, squeezed between a caged rabbit on one side, caged doves on the other. Outside, a South Dakota blizzard raged. It was an early memory and he can’t exactly remember when, but it was likely the early 1950s, a half-century before Smartphones and GPS, when “miles from nowhere” carried an ominous meaning.

The driver, the boy’s father, Jack Pyle, was a magician who was billed as “The Master of Deception.” One of the best stage magicians in the business, he was due to perform in Fort Pierre, a tiny farming community of around eight hundred souls. He could pull rabbits and doves from his capaciously pocketed and specially tailored black tuxedo coat. But now they were stuck in a ditch and digging the car — and their house, a Travelo trailer — out of rising snowdrifts would take a magic not in his bag of tricks.

The magician told the boy, who was running a fever, and his mother, who was filming the action on her 8MM camera, to take shelter inside the trailer while he unhitched the car and pushed on to Fort Pierre. He always timed the trips between gigs to the mile and minute and, like the post office, regardless of rain, snow, heat or gloom of night, he had to make the date. The Pyles had no home to turn around and go home to. In their world, money went out faster than it came in. And they always had to keep moving because the show always had to go on.

And so Jack Pyle pulled another of his vanishing acts, driving off into the blinding storm, leaving his wife and son behind with a promise he would return soon.

This is only one of many crucial, fiercely observed and intensely uncanny moments in Master of Deception: A Son Searches for His Father in the House of Illusion (Rare Bird Press), a colorful, unique and absorbing showbiz memoir by John-Ivan Palmer, the boy in the backseat who grew up to become a stage hypnotist and well-regarded showbiz historian. While in the genre of The Duke of Deception and other family memoirs, it stands apart as an insider’s story of life among outsiders.

Since the dawn of civilization, entertainment was, first and foremost, live, intimate, in the moment — no screens, analog or digital, separating performers and audiences. Since colonial days, roving troupes of entertainers in the thousands were the only entertainment options for Americans, especially in far-flung rural areas.

They were singers and comedians; magicians and mind-readers; sword swallowers and fire-eaters, contortionists and tumblers. Occasionally, major celebrities — Wild Bill Hickock, Buffalo Bill, Oscar Wilde — would headline a show, but most of the rest were “a Sargasso Sea of public unknowns.” A few of the acts were exceptional, some were good, most mediocre and the rest wretched. Their work was ephemeral and most all are forgotten.

To the more refined, live entertainers were sleazy bottom feeders. But to the communities they visited, they were a godsend, their shortcomings forgiven. Even the worst “created enchantment in places where enchantment was hard to come by,” Palmer writes. Whatever refined society thought, live entertainers “no matter how lowly, carried a certain amount of prestige.”

By the time Jack Pyle took the stage as a magician, probably in the late 1930s, the technology that would sweep live acts away hadn’t fully arrived. Movies and radio, though enormously popular, lacked the magical and risky immediacy of live performers. Television was still a buzz on the outskirts of human consciousness and the Internet wasn’t even the dream that would devour everyone’s attention. In the post-World War II boom era, live performers still had the eyes of the world pretty much to themselves in state and county fairs, bars, hotels, restaurants, resorts, corporate conventions and auditoriums all over. Jack Pyle played them all, his wife and son right beside him every mile of the way.

Yet, the enchantment Pyle brought his audiences seemed lost on him. To his son, he remained opaque and remote throughout, a noir figure who, no matter how close you stood, remained a shadow among shadows. Despite his son’s best shovel work, his life before show business is another trick of concealment. “I knew every wave of his hair from behind,” Palmer writes, “the arch of his ears, the stubble of his jaw — but nothing of what was beneath.”

John Paul Pyle was probably born in Rockport, Indiana, in 1909. Though his parents were near-illiterate, his seven siblings were high achievers. Born bowlegged and left-handed, young Jack was the black sheep. His greatest achievement growing up was learning to shoot pool with both hands.

Enchanted by the fancy riverboat gamblers who plied their trade up and down the Ohio River, he fashioned himself into a dandy, concealing his bow-leggedness through clever tailoring. He cruised such nearby towns as Richland, Henderson and Santa Claus, which was a manufacturing hub for Christmas sleighs.

In the 1930s, with one wife and son already behind him, he met Barbara Arsulich an actress-model of Croatian ancestry. How he became a magician isn’t clear, but when he finally took his act on the road, she would join “The Master of Deception” as his “lovely assistant” for, among other gags, switching places with her husband in and out of a locked trunk. While an obstetrician was pulling John “Jacky” Pyle, their only son, into the world in 1945, in Milwaukee, her husband was onstage pulling rabbits from his coat.

Despite the tens of thousands of miles Palmer spent on the road with his parents, he never joined the act. In their nomadic world of uncertainty and grim hardship, a child was an extra piece of luggage where traveling light was essential. Despite the chaotic surface, backstage life was remarkably tight, focused and organized. Among young Jacky’s chores was to put his father’s props away in neat and precise order, keep them under close guard and sweep flies away from the footlights. Otherwise, he was to remain unseen and unheard.

For over thirty years, Jack Pyle zigzagged from coast to coast, from Alaska to Mexico, even venturing to Iceland. To take to the road in the days before the Interstate Highway system spread its tentacles in the late 1950s, was to take risks that seem insane now. With his family quaking at his side, Jack Pyle drove up to fifty hours straight, through rain, wind and snow, to make a show, drowning in sleep deprivation. It was a buyer’s market, the pay so poor, no performer dared to refuse a gig, no matter the location, no matter the distances between. But Jack Pyle never had an accident, never missed a show.

Jack Pyle’s publicity was another sleight-of-hand trick. “ . . . appeared with Frank Sinatra!” declared one of his brochures — true but for a little matter of a four-year time difference. Even so, he did walk the boards with some big entertainers of the postwar era, among them Sophie Tucker. Pyle also appeared with stars from children’s TV, such as Hopalong Cassidy (William Boyd), Gabby Hayes and Clarabell the Clown, names now only remembered by Boomers.

Young Jacky was forbidden from talking to any of them, though he spent plenty of time shadowing their dressing rooms. Even talking to child performers was prohibited, a rule Palmer broke only once as he illustrates with an anguished encounter with a lonely child aerialist whose mother later died in a fall. For years, Palmer was haunted by the thought that he’d caused the accident simply by talking to her daughter.

Not surprisingly, Palmer grew into a profoundly detached, and eccentric, young man. Luckily for readers though, the world of variety acts was tightly knit and Palmer was an excellent spy, observant and furtive. Forget the famous: it’s the un-famous who took center stage in his life alongside his father’s capering shadow. They provide Master of Deceptionwith much of its color and delight.

Teddy Qualls: Too Good for Bob Hope

And what acts! There was the juggler who ate apples while juggling them and chimps riding bicycles; acrobats who hung by their teeth and a tap dancer with a peg leg. There were talking dogs and alcoholic knife throwers, risqué ventriloquists and “assorted burlesque dancers like the Darling Lovadis and the Human Heat Wave.”

Tom Gary could whip a dime off a bald man’s head. Contortionist Hal Plummer could crawl through a tennis racket and would open his act by unfolding himself from a closed suitcase like a neatly packed shirt. Among the best was black tap dancer and comedian Teddy Squalls, a performer so talented and funny that Bob Hope was forced to fire him from his tour for being too good an act to follow.

Papon, Prince of Pantomine

Most of important of all to Palmer, and likely the closest thing he had to a mentor, was Billy Papon, the “Prince of Pantomime.” Papon wasn’t strictly a pantomimist, but he was possessed of a peculiar array of talents. Among them was playing “Peg o’ My Heart” on a giant harmonica, then repeating the melody on progressively smaller harmonicas until he finally closed on a tiny one which he then swallowed like a lozenge. He might ring down the curtain with a pantomime recitation of the aria from The Barber of Seville.

Papon was also a passionate rock collector and stargazer and Palmer, who stuck close to him them during their frequent encounters on the road, developed lifelong interests in both subjects. When Jacky Pyle took to the stage years later as John-Ivan Palmer, first as a magician, he modeled his appearance on Papon’s.

Papon was one of Jacky’s more reliable tutors. His education was otherwise alarmingly ad hoc, another strange and miraculous trick. His father would simply drop him off at the local school, where he would walk in and asked to be enrolled. Almost no one refused him and child services never fully caught on.

Not surprisingly, Jacky was a rather poor student and a uniquely skilled troublemaker. His father’s professional trickery inspired his own. Even so, thanks to one of the dozens of harried teachers he met during these peripatetic years, he became a passionate literary autodidact.

The Pyles parked their trailer mostly in one of the 12,000 trailer parks that dotted the country. They also camped on county fairgrounds or, when permitted, on farms. They seldom stayed more than two weeks. While Jack was doing a show in Mexico, Jacky’s romper room was the local garbage dump. Not surprisingly, the boy was drawn to other young loners. The encounters were brief, sometimes no more than an hour and must have thoroughly baffled the other children, confronted with the pint-sized stranger in town who would pop up like rabbit out of a hat then vanish like a movie gunslinger, like one of his father’s tricks.

When 1960 came and Jacky was fifteen, his parents committed a shocking act — they moved into a house, one that Jack built with his own hands outside Minneapolis, Minnesota. It was Jacky’s first experience with indoor plumbing. Up to then, he’d lived in a tiny space on wheels where everything he needed was within arm’s length. Now he had to adapt to a space which, in the early years, lacked even interior walls: “Every footstep, every handling of an object, every word reminded me I was living in a big empty place that never moved.”

The Pyle marriage was never really on firm ground either, especially after that South Dakota snowstorm. By the 1960s, the marriage had ended. Jack Pyle pushed on, crisscrossing the country, his son riding alongside, wondering at the mystery of his father.

Over the years, Palmer learned to become almost ruthlessly independent, a perfect spy and close observer of people in their element. This makes his memoir a rich and fabulous read, a peek into a forgotten world and way of life.

But while Master of Deception has a superb sense of “where,” its “when” is harder to grasp. The Pyles traveled through an ever-shifting parallel universe during the 1950s, similar to two other great road-trippers of the time, Jack Kerouac and Vladimir Nabokov. Unlike those two literary adventurers though, the Pyles were focused on survival. They rarely, if ever, interacted with their times. Jack Pyle’s declining years are dealt with too soon and few dates are given overall. It’s not until Palmer and his father part ways during the mid-1960s, with Palmer facing the twin shadows of the Vietnam War and the draft, that we get a better sense of time.

John-Ivan Palmer never unveils the mystery behind his father but he makes his life of illusion acutely real. Master of Deception is true-life noir, written with eloquence and energy, a strange, incredible story painted in precise vivid colors, boisterous humor and sharp wit. Its portrayal of an often grim and gamy world may ruffle more sensitive readers. But unlike so many similar memoirs, there’s hardly a trace of disillusion or bitterness, not an ounce of self-pity. With no one’s life to compare with his own, John-Ivan Palmer’s life seemed perfectly normal to him.

Though his father and his world are long gone, Palmer tells us, Jack Pyle still strolls into his dreams: “As in real life, I am elated to see him return, his ghostly form carrying a wardrobe bag.”

Thomas Burchfield’s short story “Lucky Day” is in the anthology Berkeley Noir (Akashic Press, May 2020), now available in bookstores everywhere. Another story “What Now, Masked Man?” is in issue #1 of Hello Goodbye Apocalypse. He’s also the author of Butchertown, a ripping, 1920s gangster thriller and the award-winning contemporary vampire novel Dragon’s Ark. His original screenplays Whackers, The Uglies, Now Speaks the Devil and Dracula: Endless Night are available in e-book editions only). Published by Ambler House Publishing, all are available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Powell’s Books, and other retailers. His reviews and essays have appeared in Swing Time Magazine, Posthoc.com, Bright Lights Film Journal, The Strand Magazine, and Filmfax. He also posts essays on Medium and his own webpage, A Curious Man. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.