Magician Harry Blackstone Jr. Succumbs To Cancer

Harry Blackstone Jr., a magician who made handkerchiefs dance across a Broadway stage and globes of light float above his audience, who made elephants vanish and turned beautiful women into Bengal tigers, who sawed his wife in half 17 times a week during their 23 years of marriage, died Wednesday at a hospital in Loma Linda, Calif. He was 62, and lived in Redlands, Calif.

The cause of death was pancreatic cancer, said Tom Dewhirst, an inspector at the San Bernardino County coroner’s office.

The son of the “Great Blackstone,” one of the century’s master illusionists, Harry Jr. was born in Colon, Mich., on June 30, 1934, inheriting a famous name and a predilection for trickery.

He first appeared in a magic act swaddled in a diaper when he was 6 months old. His nanny had to leave early that day, and his mother was left with no choice but to take Harry Jr. onstage, where she usually posed as the Statue of Liberty and was made to disappear. She substituted a baby bottle for her torch.

Harry Jr. was advised by his father to find a profession that required less sleight of hand. He did so, going into newspaper reporting, radio broadcasting and television production, all the while avoiding inevitable comparisons with a famous father.

But after his father died in 1965, the younger Blackstone decided to pick up the wand.

Onstage, Harry Jr. cut a different figure from his father, with dark hair and a goatee instead of a long white mane, spangled tuxedos instead of black tie and tails.

But both magicians were always firmly in control, selling their mystery with a commanding glance and a single raised eyebrow. An audience could always count on seeing many of the signature Blackstone tricks, the floating light bulbs, the dancing handkerchiefs, the levitating objects, the sawed-up bodies.

Like his father, Harry Jr. had a comic’s timing. He could rescue himself with a laugh line as easily as pull a dove from his pocket. Volunteers were coaxed from the audience. Little boys would be awarded a bunny, then gape in astonishment as their new pet was transmuted into a box of chocolates.

“Both Harry and his father played every city large and small,” said Charles Reynolds, himself an inventor of magic tricks and a historian who was co-author of a book with Harry Jr., “The Blackstone Book of Magic and Illusion.”

“Harry wasn’t lasers and smoke,” Reynolds said. “He was a great classical performer who had the voice and the presence of the classical magicians of the past.”

Blackstone brought his “magnificent, musical, magical show” to the Majestic Theater in 1980. This Broadway extravaganza called for hundreds of rabbits, a camel, a donkey, a tiger, an elephant and 56 humans, including the patient wife who shared the spotlight with a noisy, 36-inch buzz saw.

“What can you say?” said Milt Larsen, founder of the Magic Castle in Hollywood, a private club that also houses the academy.

“It’s the end of an era. There has been a Blackstone on the magic scene for 75 years.”