I Won’t Tell, Promise

A Magician’s Daughter Exposes her Father’s Stage Secrets. And Why not?

By Katy Grabel

In fourth grade, I asked my father to teach me his best card trick for Show and Tell.  When the day came, I performed it for my class. That night when my father asked how it went, I told him the awful truth.  After I showed the trick to my classmates, I then revealed to them how it was done.  His eyes widened. I had never seen him so surprised. “You told them?” he said, looking at me, and then looking away, over and over, like I wasn’t who he thought I was.  All night he repeated. “You told them.” He didn’t know if he should laugh or yell. I had fooled him and he knew it. When he taught me the card trick, I had intentionally mislead him into thinking I would not expose the trick.  And it worked. 

I could not be trusted.  

Years later this is still true. In my memoir about traveling in my father’s magic show, I exposed many of his tricks and illusions. Nothing was sacred: not a silk on a wire, the eyelids on a metallic ball, or every cool trap floor I laid my cheek on.  My sister and mother, who had also been his stage assistants, never would have committed this misdeed. But my allegiance had never been pure. 

According to a 2022 study by researchers from Columbia University and Arizona State University, in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 26 percent of people reveal secrets told to them about other’s behavior they find immoral. Certainly, there was nothing shameful in my father’s stage secrets. In reality, when taken out of context, they are boring – a shaved card, split hoop or metal gooseneck. 

A magician’s secrets are a little different. They are closer to trade secrets which are intellectual properties with an economic value that a business or corporation has. In that case my father should have had my fourteen-year-old self sign a confidentially agreement during our first rehearsal when I saw the mechanical device that made his floating piano rise.   

There is something inherently intimate about the stage secrets of magicians. I witnessed the long hours my father spent in his workshop constructing contraptions around my mother’s dimensions in a fetal curl. And the beautiful sunny days on the golf course he forfeited to sit at our dining room table soldering aluminum sheets into shiny clocks, one nested inside the other. And his before his mirror watching the angles as a fount of silver coins shimmered from his fingertips. I believe this kind of time and labor, gives a magician an organic and visceral ownership of their magic, and exposure feels like a threat not only to their financial livelihood, but the passion they have so diligently and lovingly shared with the world. 

When I traveled in my father’s big illusion show, an unshrouded prop was blasphemy.  Items were hidden away in little pouches, cookie tins, wooden cigar boxes and cosmetic bags. Things stuffed down, tucked under and wrapped up. Even the big equipment, once out of their crates, were draped until the moment they rolled on stage. And then draped again after their use. 

My mother, sister and I were sworn to secrecy as to how tricks worked. “Never tell you sisters,” my father told my mother. “Never tell your friends,” he told my sister and me. Even my father’s curious mother never got a chance. And when he constructed his illusions in his workshop, he partially lowered the garage door so neighbors could not see inside. Even in the summer he kept the door low and worked in the stuffy heat, for fear the mail man might see inside.  

It’s what all stage magicians do. If someone asks magician Lance Burton a secret to a trick he will say, “Sure I can tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.” World-traveled magician, The Great Raymond, hung this sign on every stage door — “Keep Out” in seven different languages. In the past, the enemy has been competing magicians. Dante the Magician prohibited his staff from talking to other magicians for fear they’d be pumped for information. In Howard Thurston’s workshop, he assigned each worker separate tasks so that no one knew what illusions they were building, and therefore never suspectable to bribes. 

I wonder why magicians do it at all.  Why all this frantic practicing, performing and protecting? Most folks are indifferent to the efforts it takes to be a good magician. And callously curious regarding its secrets. The popular Breaking the Magician’s Code series on Fox Network drew millions of viewers. Still, so many male and female magicians are learning and mastering the craft. And the reason is this: A really good magician wants to bring wonder and awe to others and not appease a bloated ego. That’s what great stage magic does. It returns its audience back to a time when the world felt filled wonder before it became dull and ordinary. That’s why magicians do it.  

And isn’t that a noble motive? A motive I dishonored. 

In all fairness, my memoir is not just about exposing tricks. It’s about what it was like to be a dreamy fourteen-year-old girl walking into her father’s big illusion show for the first time. And the juxtaposition between magic and fake women’s feet, between magic and a silk on a string,    which propels my young self to ask “What is real magic?”  

Don’t I have a right to my story? 

Despite this defense, I’m not so guilty.  Professional magic is going through a crisis of exposure on the internet. My father would say “The secrets of magic is a safe without a lock.” He meant any determined person can discover how a magic trick works. It used to be a library book but now it’s the monster tendrils of the internet.  Meanwhile, the popular young magicians today have stayed clear of the standard tricks of magic to create their own amazing original effects, therefore ensuring their secrets will be protected with only themselves as the guardians. 

Writing my book took a long time because I didn’t want my father to read it because of his tricks I exposed. Consequently, I shelved it for years, and it was published after he died. And now that my treachery is up for public opinion, I have to come learn that I like being the provocateur, the teller of secrets. Professional magic is a cloistered world and I’m a little window into that. I like the attention.  I felt it in the fourth grade when I exposed my father’s card trick. I could see it in the smiles on my classmates’ faces. I was a hit. It was irresistible, exhilarating, fantastic – it was magic.  

—

Katy Grabel is the author of The Magician’s Daughter – A Memoir.  She lives in New Mexico and San Miguel De Allende in Mexico. You can follow her on facebook.com/KatyGMagic and Instagram.com/KatyGMagic and Katygrabel.substack.com

THE MAGICIAN’S DAUGHTER

Never before has the daughter of a great magician written with such candor and beauty about magic’s backstage—and onstage—world, where even the most outlandish dreams are possible.

The Magician’s Daughter-A Memoir is a coming-of-age story set within the motion and light of a traveling magic show. Fourteen-year-old Katy is the daughter of Lee Grabel, a former professional magician stuck behind a desk in the suburbs who yearns to rekindle the past fame of his old magic show. When he decides to hit the road again in a grand bid to be a Las Vegas headliner, Katy has her chance for the spotlight she yearns for as his stage assistant. With a truck full of wonderments, the Grabel family and their crew go on tour across the western states, where trouble quickly ensues along with the increasing unhappiness of her mother -The Beautiful Helene-who is disenchanted with the magic show even as she runs it with military precision from her table stage right. Setting up, performing, and packing out of town after town, tensions mount, and betrayal is in the air.

Through error and misstep, Katy struggles to free herself from the show’s intoxicating spotlight. Meanwhile, the Grabels and their crew are getting closer to their booking at the Las Vegas Convention Center, where the show’s ultimate fate will be determined.

Readers of Cherry and Small Fry will be captivated by this page-turner-a story of a daughter’s complicated love for her magnificent, stage-dazzled father. It’s a tale that delves into the complexities of family dynamics and the enduring power of love, set against the backdrop of a mesmerizing magic show.

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Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing