Dai Vernon

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Dai Vernon

Dai Vernon (born David Frederick Wingfield Verner 11th June 1894 in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada - died 1992 in Hollywood, California) was a Canadian magician. Though a popular misconception is that he began to use the first name "Dai" after a newspaper mistyped "David", the paper actually was using the Welsh nickname for David (he was happy for it to be pronounced Day or Die). When Verner first moved to the United States, the male member of a popular ice-skating pair had the surname Vernon; Americans continually mistook Verner's last name to be the same as the popular ice skater, and eventually the magician became fed up with correcting people and simply adopted "Vernon" as well.

Due to his extraordinary skill at sleight of hand, Dai Vernon is affectionately called The Professor. Harry Houdini (who in his early years billed himself as "The King of Kards") often boasted that if he saw a card trick performed three times in a row he would be able to figure it out. Vernon then showed Houdini a trick, where he removed the top card of the deck and placed it second down, and then turned over the top card to again reveal the original card. Houdini watched Vernon do the trick seven times, each time insisting that Vernon "do it again". Finally Houdini's wife, and Vernon's friends said, "Face it Houdini, you're fooled." For years afterward, Vernon used the title "The Man Who Fooled Houdini" in his advertisements.

Vernon first fell in love with magic when he was eight years old after his father took him to see a magic show. The first real magic book he ever owned was an early edition of perhaps the most famous card book of them all, "Expert at the Card Table", by S. W. Erdnase. By the time he was 13 he had completely memorised the contents of the book. He also had a famous encounter with another up-and-coming young magician from his town who asked Vernon, "What kind of magic do you do?" Vernon responded by asking the boy to name a card. Upon pulling a pack of cards from his pocket, Vernon turned over the top card of the deck to reveal the named card and replied to the speechless boy, "That's the kind of magic I do. What kind of magic do you do?"

Vernon made his home in the magic circle in New York, which was basically the back of an old magic shop, and had perhaps the best and most famous card magicians in the world at the time as its residents. It was here that the extremely famous incident involving Walter Scott occurred. In 1930, Walter Scott, then an unknown card hustler, was brought in to do a demonstration. After Scott was blindfolded, one of the men watching shuffled and cut a pack of cards and handed it to Scott. The blindfolded man proceeded to deal out six hands of five-card draw poker, and in his hand were four aces and a king. None of the magicians present saw how it had been done, earning Scott the nickname "The Phantom of the Card table", and many believed that his skills rivaled that of Dai Vernon. However the only magician not present that night was Dai Vernon. More information on this and other magicians can be found in The Phantoms of the Card Table by David Britland.

1989 portrait of Dai Vernon (right), by Sylvester the Jester

Dai Vernon spent most of his life traveling all over the United States of America looking for card cheats and anyone who might know anything about sleight of hand with cards. He was famously under-credited for much of the work published in Jean Hugard and Frederick Braue's Expert Card Technique, though a later edition included an extra chapter which acknowledges Dai Vernon's contributions. In fact, a huge portion of the sleight of hand had been discovered by Vernon over years of searching.

Vernon was perhaps the most skillful sleight of hand artist that ever lived and, with Ed Marlo, possibly the most influential card magician of the 20th century. Among magicians, he is credited with inventing or improving many standard close-up effects with cards, coins, and other small items. The "standard" Cups and balls routine is his, and his 6-ring "Symphony of the Rings" remains one of the most popular Chinese linking rings routines in use to this day.

Vernon spent the last thirty years of his life as Magician-in-Residence at the world-famous Magic Castle in Los Angeles, California. There he mentored numerous well-known magicians including Ricky Jay, Persi Diaconis, Doug Henning, Bruce Cervon, Larry Jennings, and John Carney.

In November of 2005, Karl Johnson wrote The Magician And The Cardsharp about Vernon's early days of tracking down card cheats to learn new tricks.

In June of 2006, the first in-depth biography of Vernon was released by Squash Publishing entitled Dai Vernon: A Biography, *Artist * Magician * Muse 1894-1941 (first of planned two volumes) written by Canadian magician David Ben.

[edit] Trivia

The character of "The Professor" (played by Hal Holbrook) from the movie Shade was based on Dai Vernon, and the character Vernon (Stuart Townsend) was named for him.