Orson Welles - 1-25-09

By sixteen, I put off college permanently. I could not conceive of where the satisfaction lay in any of the so-called professions. Obviously jobs that, as they say, help people, like medicine, have an intrinsic satisfaction, but a little voice inside me said they were not for me. It was lucky that someone invented magic because I loved it, and I didn't fit in anywhere else.

Besides, I felt satisfaction bringing surprise and laughter to others. And I particularly liked the idea of lying to people in a socially acceptable manner... in the world of a magician, lying isn't a sin, it's an art form.

In 1970 I was the youngest member of a magician's club called "Shit," the name was an acronym for Sleight of Hand Intimate Tableworkers. The club's founder, magician / comedy writer Lou Derman, was a well-connected Hollywood guy, at the time best known for his work on "Mr. ED," a television show about a talking horse.

When contacted by Nate, a fellow teenage magician and Lou's nephew, about an emergency "Shit" meeting, I already had something planned for that night. My plans changed when I heard Orson Welles would be there and the purpose of the meeting was to screen a recently completed film called "Get To Know Your Rabbit."

The film, directed by an unknown named Brian De Palma, featured Welles as a magician and Tommy Smothers, familiar from television as half of the comedy team "The Smothers Brothers," as his student.

I was very excited, as was Nate, when we carpooled over to his Uncle Lou's. Welles was the only participant in the film to attend the screening. I have no idea where Lou got a print of the film, but it wasn't from Welles, who made a point of telling everyone he hadn't seen it.

After viewing "Get To Know Your Rabbit," which was projected on a window-shade-type pull-down screen in Lou's den, all of us had the same reaction: the film was not as good as we had hoped it would be. Others must have felt the same, since it wasn't released for years, and then only briefly in a single theater.

The evening still turned out to be one of the most memorable of all my memorable evenings. Welles told us wonderfully personal stories about his exploits as a filmmaker and his experience as the star of his own big magic show during the war years.

It was wonderful and terrible. Wonderful that all of us had fallen deeply in love with the utterly irresistible Welles. But terrible that an evening that went so smashingly could turn sour in the flush of a toilet. I was a more than credible eye-witness who would swear that the awful smell emanating from the powder room, which was located less than ten feet from where all the members were gathered, was not present before Oscar Award-winning filmmaker, Orson Welles, had gone into it.

Nate and I traded glances and grimaced, with a what- the- hell-is-that? expression on our faces. Welles came blithely out of the powder room and smilingly rejoined the crowd. No one seemed to smell what Nate and I were smelling, or if they did they were acting as though they didn't, which, with a bunch of magicians, was possible. The stench of the lethal fumes poured into the den, making it a gas chamber. No one person could have created such a pungent bomb.

Suddenly everyone was saying their good-byes at the door. Uncle Lou made Nate and I stay to help find the source of the offensive odor. We considered that it might be a broken pipe under the powder room. The next morning, foul-smell experts Ð a plumber, along with someone from the health department, diagnosed the problem.

A stray cat had, weeks or months earlier, squeezed itself through a small opening under the house and had not been able to find its way out. A Santa Ana wind kicked up and blew through Los Angeles. A particularly strong gust had wooshed through the crawl space under the house, wafting the aroma of the putrefying cat up through the basement and into the house.

The next "Shit" newsletter explained that a gas-masked city worker, wearing heavy work gloves and carrying a very long pole with tongs at the end, removed the poor animal, and fumigated the area. Lou finished by writing, "I hope you didn't, as I did, falsely accuse Orson Welles for fouling our lovely atmosphere. The man has been completely exonerated."

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