THE SIXTH STRATEGY: REDIRECT YOUR AUDIENCE

Start the fire in the east; attack in the west.

 —Sun Tzu

 Scene: This really happened. 

Tony Slydini, born Quintino Marucci in Italy in 1900, learned the rudiments of magic from his amateur magician father. The boy was never much interested in grand props and great stages, but focused instead on the proscenium within his own mind. Early on, he mastered a sleight of hand technique founded on precise timing and so-called misdirection. In fact, it was direction that Slydini practiced, honed, and perfected, creating a style of close-up magic that was entirely new. 

Traditional effects relied on theatrical conventions, including a certain distance between the magician and the audience. Traditional magicians, accordingly, developed a repertoire of grand, if often stagey, gestures. Not Slydini. His magic invited close inspection. It never sought to evade reality, but to embrace it. Nor did he create about himself a phony aura of wizardly remoteness from his audience. Instead, he welcomed them, inviting them to move in closer and closer. He eschewed rigidly set programs, in which the scale of effects typically rises in a crescendo of you-ain’t-seen-nuthin’-yet showmanship. Instead, he engaged with his audience, apparently following their lead while directing them to inspire the direction of his show. 

All the while, Slydini was very quietly very much in charge. Within the intimate sphere of the reality he shared with his audience, coins appeared and disappeared, paper balls floated over the head of an oblivious spectator. The TV talk show host Dick Cavett, himself an avid amateur magician (just like his friend Johnny Carson), was utterly astounded when Slydini performed on his program. And when Cavett asked the legendary Dai Vernon if any magician out there could still fool him, the sleight-of-hand master reflexively answered: “Slydini.” 

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