My friend SB bought me this tasseled blue sequinned leotard at a stoop sale when we were in our twenties. I felt so seen, the “Magicians Assistant” being a major element in my adolescent construction of identity.
The earliest imprint had been Rosanna Arquette in Desperately Seeking Susan, in which a bored suburban wife borrows Madonna’s life, including her gig at a Lower East Side magic club.
Later for me: Houdini’s wife Bess, who would pass to him (via a passionate kiss) the key that would unlock his restraints. A long term crusader against seances monetised by fraudulent spiritualists, Houdini gave Bess a pass code for the afterlife, so she’d know it was really him messaging if he pre-deceased her. He did die first and, being a rationalist, each time a con artist said they had a message from him, she knew it wasn’t true - but she always held out for it anyway because she missed him so much.
The Magician’s female assistant is there to highlight, through her pleasing visual presence, the power of the male magician. Her dazzling costume guides you to keep your eyes focused on her at moments when the magician needs to get away with things. If that isn’t an allegory for how straight women have been taught to chase love, I don’t know what is. My favourite writer - or at least the one I re-read the most - is Eve Babitz who was both the Magician’s Assistant and The Magician. Magician’s Assistant because she saw the power of her lovers Steve Martin and Harrison Ford ahead of them making it in Hollywood, and Magician because she conjured her longings - for brilliant men but also for the orange groves, or the rain fall on the canopy of her neighbourhood restaurant- so impeccably in her memoirs and novels.
To me the ultimate magician’s assistant turned magician coded icon of our day is Chappell Roan, the pop singer-songwriter whose gone from cult lesbian oddity to megastar seemingly overnight (though more on this in a future column). On the cover of her album she looks like the assistant, like this:
But in one of her giddiest songs, she belts with absolute glee:
“I heard you like magic?
I’ve got a wand and a rabbit!
So baby let’s get freaky, get kinky
let’s make this bed get squeaky!”
Marianne Faithfull is maybe the most famous Magician’s Assistant turned magician. She’d been the long time girlfriend/muse of Mick Jagger and the pop puppet of Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham, before she descended into heroin addiction and homelessness. Broken English, the “come back” album where she is in no shape to assist anyone and there was no choice left but to become the magician, is nothing short of an incantation.
When I was a very young journalist I crossed paths in fleeting New York moments with two of the modern great magicians. At a New York party for the fanzine ‘Cheap Date’, the temperature dropped precipitously. David Copperfield, there to catch some cool, but not wanting to freeze, said he would buy my thick down coat from me on the spot and would even return it the next day. “Okay”, I said, “I’ll sell it to you for $500”. He counted the cash out in hundreds and I handed him the coat off my back. He kept his word and next day it was returned to me.
Then - I was sent for Esquire magazine to interview David Blaine. He didn’t want me to go home and I ended up trailing him until night fall. I liked him a lot even though it felt completely possible he might actually be the devil. At one point he called my Dad and did a stomach lurching card trick over the phone from New York to London. At another, he pleaded his case for why he should be allowed to go down on me. That didn’t happen, but I wrote it all down for the article. I’d read a lot of Truman Capote essays - his pieces on Marilyn and Brando particularly hit me - and I thought being a celebrity interviewer should be approached like being a war reporter, that you’re meant to say exactly what had taken place. After publication, I was on my way to interview a rapper and was told, on the bus there, by an extremely panicked editor, that the publicist had just seen my name on the call sheet and I was not to show up or everything was cancelled.
I was blacklisted. And that, as Marianne Faithful showed, is one of the cleanest ways to graduate from assistant to magician- when there are no other options.
There are two great journalistic examples of turning from magician’s assistant to magician: Taffy Brodesser-Akner and Jeanette Walls. Both spent the first half of their careers writing celebrity journalism that, though, in Brodesser-Akner’s case were insightful profiles, did prop up the movie star complex, famous person as focal point of our dreams. Jeanette Walls was kind of a tacky gossip columnist who walked away to write the soaring, seminal memoir ‘The Glass Castle’. Her life was SO much more fascinating than the celebrities she covered and her talent felt boundless. Brodesser-Akner published the hugely lauded novel ‘Fleischman Is In Trouble’, which became an award winning mini-series (and just released the follow up, ’Long Island Compromise’).
This mid life second act applies, very much, as a woman in love. You can make love to someone you think is a genius, assist the genius by getting him off, maybe even more majestically than anyone ever has before! But you’re still the Magician’s Assistant. And you know you have power deep inside you, but maybe you’ve buried it alive from too much fucking? You’re in a relationship or situationship that’s come to feel like Mickey and the brooms in Fantasia: your secret acting out of what it might feel like to be the magician instead of the helper has led to everything feeling catastrophically beyond your control.
The secret is: you just have to not do your magic attempts in secret. You have to accept you can be both. I am Mickey. I am the broom. I am the mess I made and the one who cleaned it up. I’m eternally the apprentice - any searcher is - but I am simultaneously the wizard. I had the power all along. Writing a cohesive, transporting book is to mesmerise yourself and the reader (the term “mesmerising” originating from the alleged snake oil salesman Franz Mesmer). I loved the blue sequinned assistant’s outfit, but I must have donated it to the ether some time around my 40th birthday - offered it up as a spell ingredient that actually worked.
(All photos of me by Ella Webber)
Note: If you seek the shallow in addition to the spiritual, and are curious how I maintained the physique I had in these photos! WELL I was doing barre class twice a week with Marnie Alton, but significantly, I lived in a driving city but couldn’t drive. I walked up and down Lookout Mountain to get to her West Hollywood studio. Marnie has an online aerobics empire now called m/body and what I like about it is it offers the choice of 7 minute workouts - for the periods when you are trying to keep head above water.
I was heart broken during this photo shoot, right when I’d started writing Your Voice In My Head. I ate the same thing every day: two slices of Ezekiel toast with avocado and olive oil and pink salt for breakfast. Two eggs. Two pieces of salmon with kale for lunch. An extra large pinkberry frozen yoghurt for dinner (this again involved walking, this time turning left, down into the valley, deep into Ed Ruscha gas station signpost land). Then I’d take the 218 bus back home at dusk. I was lonely and in my loneliness I had my own strange power, which percolated in isolation, living at the top of a mountain, with a spangly leotard and no-one (bar the occasional female photographer) to admire it.
You made it onto substack! Yay!!! xxx
This is great. And I love the fitness and diet angle. I may try them. You look stunning!