TRAVEL CLUB

Press, Volume LXXVII, Issue 23323, 8 May 1941, Page 2

TRAVEL CLUB

A MAGICIAN ON HIS ARIM:

'Mr Leslie Levante, the famous magician, who fs visiting Christchurch, was' the speaker at the Canterbury Nevy Zealand Travel Club’s morning reception, held at Ballantynes yesterday. Songs were sung by Miss Ursula Irving, a member of Mr Levante’s company, and her accompaniments were played by Mrs Levante. Sir Joseph Ward presided, and Mesdames Gladstone Ward and Horace Cogan were hostesses. Sixty per cent, skill and ability, 20 per cent, dress and deportment, and the rest bluff—these were the proportion of attributes Mr Levante thought necessary for a successful magician, but there was. he emphasised, no royal road to success. It must be achieved by ceaseless practice and hard work. The methods employed by magicians 25 years ago, he said, would not succeed to-day, for audiences were now more enlightened; men had a greater knowledge of mechanics and electricity. Mr Levante gave interesting sidelights on the methods of other celebrated magicians including a pseudo Chinese, who really was an American, born in New York, of Scottish parents. Until his death, caused by faults in the machinery in his bullet-catching trick, he pretended that he was a Chinese, and that)he could not speak a word of English. At the final curtain at his he would stand motionless, smiling a gentle Oriental smile, while his sister explained that he was learning Englisl and hoped soon to be able to address his audience in that language. Mr Levante spoke briefly of other magicians and described some amusing, some startling experiences he himself had had in such widely separated places as London, Mukden, the Philippines, and Melbourne. He had, he said, attended a meeting of magicians in Michigan where no fewer than 1090 magicians were present. • Guests of honour were Mrs Turner (Calcutta), lyiiss Lister (Bradford), Mesdames A. Page, M, W. W. Spiers Chambers (Auckland), E. Stenberg (Wanganui), Miss Campbell (Wairarapa), Mesdames Barnett, and W. Caldwell, and Miss ‘Eva Moore (Wellington), Mesdames Armit, H. Drew, C. C. Robertson, Hubert Staton, and M. J. Andrew (Dunedin), Mrs. Alfret Kilgour (Greymouth), Miss K. O’Rourke (Waipawa).