On a bright winter morning in the Atwater Village neighborhood of Los Angeles, illusion designer John Gaughan and Jeff Chang, one of his technicians, stand together in Gaughan’s workshop. The two men lean over a table, on opposite sides of something I’ve agreed not to describe in detail. Gaughan squints, tracing a line of woodwork with his fingertips. There is a long silence. Then he says, “That’s perfect.”
Gaughan, who is 84, is tall and solidly built, with a thatch of white hair and a workshop uniform of worn jeans and plaid shirts. For decades, he’s been a nerve center of the magic world, the builder of extraordinary illusions for famous magicians like David Copperfield, Ricky Jay, and Siegfried and Roy. Gaughan has also worked with musicians like Cher, Alice Cooper, and Barbra Streisand, fashioning elements for their elaborate stage shows. He’s a recipient of the Academy of Magical Arts’ highest honor, the Masters Fellowship, and is included on Magic magazine’s list of the 20th century’s 100 most influential people in magic. He’s also a master woodworker, and many of the things he builds have a distinctive, beautiful mid-century modern look.
This article appears in Issue 28 of Alta Journal.
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The workshop holds its own surprise as well: in a red-walled, sumptuously carpeted back room, Gaughan has built a museum of magic history. Besides celebrated tricks, it houses an array of automata, early robotic figures that became an entertainment craze during the Victorian era. A tiny acrobat performs on a trapeze, a little magician figure hides and reveals a ball beneath a cup, and a life-size Harry Houdini slowly signs his name on a piece of paper. Most of the visitors to the museum are magicians; a few times a year, civilian tour groups come through for a rare glimpse into the red room.
Gaughan began collecting automata in 1977; people who knew of his mechanical knack had been bringing him things to repair for decades. At one point, someone showed up with a figurine on a small trapeze to restore. Gaughan gently took it apart to see the builder’s name: Houdin, or Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, the French father of modern magic. Overcome, Gaughan had to walk away from his workbench for a moment.
“I walked around it, thinking, ‘Oh my god, what should I do?’ It was so important,” he says.
Fittingly, given his appreciation for magic history, Gaughan has also specialized in astonishing reproductions of magic tricks from the 19th century that had not been seen for a hundred years or more. They include the Marvelous Orange Tree, invented by Robert-Houdin, whose name Houdini took on as an homage. A tree onstage blooms with live oranges; in the finale, a top orange splits open, and two butterflies rise out of it, holding a handkerchief taken earlier from someone in the audience. Another illusion, Hooker’s Rising Cards, in which cards levitate out of a deck into midair, had not been done since 1934 until Gaughan, working with other illusion designers, resurrected and performed it at a magic conference in 2007.
The people who witnessed Gaughan’s spectacle tend to speak of that moment with reverence. “The Rising Cards was incredible,” says Bill Goodwin, the librarian at the Magic Castle, the private club of the Academy of Magical Arts, in Hollywood. “I haven’t a clue as to its workings.”
While Gaughan is almost comically modest—“I was at the right place at the right time,” he says of his 70-year career—he doesn’t pretend that what he does is easy. “Our stuff has to work twice a night in Vegas and not break down.” Throughout our conversation, Gaughan keeps performing a sort of magic trick himself, retreating behind the amazing illusions he’s created.
“You want the audience to leave saying, ‘My gosh, where did that girl come from?’ ” he explains. “ ‘How did he do that?’ You don’t want them to say, ‘Wasn’t it amazing that that box produced that girl?’ You don’t want the star of the show to be the box.”
Gaughan shows very few signs of slowing down. Nor does he outsource his own work to his small staff of three technicians. “Look at his hands,” Chang says, gesturing at his boss’s calloused palms. “He was on the saw this morning.”
At his age, though, Gaughan is thinking about his legacy—and what will become of both the workshop and the museum when he’s no longer around. Donating the museum to another institution isn’t really an option; that would likely require an endowment to pay for its care and would mean the items might rarely be displayed. “It ends up being in a warehouse in Landover, Maryland, that everyone forgot about,” he says.
He’s well aware that after he’s gone, his museum, too, will cease to exist, its items snapped up by collectors and dispersed in all directions, to new museums that will form from scraps of his, and other collections like it, all similarly broken apart and constantly re-forming in new patterns.
“That’s kind of sad,” Gaughan says mildly. “This all can’t stay together.”
“That’s not a happy thing to contemplate when you’re standing in the middle of that and admiring it,” echoes Jim Steinmeyer. He’s an illusion designer, inventor, author, and magic historian who’s worked with Gaughan on projects for the past 40 years and become a close friend along the way.
A MAGICIAN AMONG THE SPIRITS
Gaughan fell in love with magic the first time he saw it performed as a child, out of the back of a bread truck in a Dallas supermarket parking lot. (He even remembers the trick, and chased down a version of it, which he keeps in his office. It’s called Hippity Hoppity Rabbits; in it, two wooden rabbit forms change into “outrageous colors,” he explains.)
Gaughan’s father was a civil engineer, and according to him, Gaughan says, “I did everything wrong. He wanted me to make blueprints and learn how to use a slide rule.”
Instead, Gaughan was more of a tactile learner, disassembling items like alarm clocks and phonographs and even his sister’s bicycle to see how they worked. “I took apart a lot of things,” he says, chuckling. “But I didn’t put them back together.”
In his young teens, Gaughan started spending as much time as he could at Douglas Magicland, a legendary Dallas magic shop that was open for some nine decades. “A lot of professional magicians would come in and out of there,” he says. At Magicland, Gaughan met Mark Wilson, a famed magician who’s widely credited with bringing magic performances to television. Gaughan began working for Wilson and in the 1960s followed him to California, where Gaughan also taught furniture design at Cal State Northridge, a trade he’d learned by simply looking at furniture, more or less. (“ ‘You see it and you build it’ type of thing,” he says, another comic degree of understatement.)
While working for Wilson, Gaughan realized that his fate was behind the scenes, not onstage. He went into business for himself in 1971. “I loved magic, and I enjoyed performing it, but I only did birthday parties around the neighborhood starting out back in Dallas,” he says. “Out here, I realized I didn’t have any stage presence in a professional sense.”
It wasn’t a disappointment, he adds. “Not at all. I got so much enjoyment out of building the thing and seeing it used. So in a way, I’m onstage a little bit up there.”
Steinmeyer says that Gaughan excels at finding the right illusion for the magician he’s working with, “the equivalent of writing a song in their key. And not only in their key, but one that allows them to show off and complements their voice, in effect.”
In the workshop, an array of majestic clocks tick constantly, a reminder of time passing. Gaughan happily takes out a few “head choppers”—automata that simulate beheadings, obviously—and a lovely, enormous walnut-and-oak box, made for dividing someone in half. He’s surrounded by layers of magic, shelves of artifacts, finished and half-finished projects. For a moment, it seems as if he’s about to bask in the wonder—and, yes, the magic—of what he’s created. But soon, his attention is drawn back to the object on the table that he’s been working on with Chang.
Gaughan gently closes the workshop door behind him, and the magician’s secret disappears behind the curtain.•
Anna Merlan is a Los Angeles–based investigative journalist and Magic Castle enthusiast. She’s the author of Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power.
