I thought I caught him once.
We were standing at the foot of 30th Street Station, watching tiny scraps of a twenty flutter and flirt with the breeze. He had asked for the bill for a magic trick, tore off a corner for me to keep and gave the rest to the wind. When the pieces finally settled like confetti in the Schulkyl, he turned, furrowed his brow and popped the middle joint of his middle finger, like a pacifier, into his mouth. "What are you thinking?" I asked, convinced I had caught him in contemplation, figuring how to pull it off, making magic.
Of course, when I led him into the station, clutching the claim check that mysteriously appeared in my bag, and exchanged it for the parcel--a brown envelope, with my wet, mended corner-less bill sealed inside--it became obvious that he'd staged the entire episode, right down to the pensive expression, hours before.
He is a master of make-you-believe. He's been doing it since the age of five. Which is small consolation when you find yourself in his world, attempting to sort what you believe from what you see: an itinerant poet, teatotaling rebels, an intelligent lout, an eloquent mute, an enduring partnership between men who aren't friends, and at the heart of it all, the man himself, a scholar of Latin called Teller who regurgitates needles for a buck.
Teller, a Center City native, is a professional fraction--one half, to be exact, of Penn & Teller, the self-proclaimed Bad Boys of Magic. When you think of magic, chances are, you think of the other boys, the Boys who are Good. It is the Good Boys who dress in spangley, prissy get-ups with necklines that dive toward their navels and pants specially styled to cup their buns. Good Boys pull pretty white bunnies from silky black hats, hide tiny round balls in little plastic cups. Bad Boy rabbits come to an unfortunate and vibrant end in a wood chipper. Bad Boy cups and balls call for transparent cups. Sleight of hand is accompanied by play-by-play.
Penn & Teller's first brush with national notoriety was Off Broadway in 1985, where a few bookers from the late night circuit caught the act. Within months, they had a certifiable big-break gig: Saturday Night Live, hosted by Madonna, in her trailer-trash teen incarnation, arguably, her peak. They earned cult hero status with their signature Bad Boy take on the Good Boy classic, a card trick--Penn screws up the trick, while Teller, padlocked in a phone booth filled with water, drowns. Weeks before, they made Late Night's hippest-guests list by loosening hundreds of cockroaches on David Letterman's desk . This, back when David Letterman was still cool.
In the decade since, Teller has been run over by an eighteen wheeler in front of Radio City on national television. He has had a washing machine dropped on his head during the Emmy Awards. He has churned heels over head like a mateless sock on tumbledry in a little number the boys like to call "Cement Mixer of Death." Teller, in turn, has stabbed Penn thousands of times through the hand with a Buck knife; another Bad Boy take on the old card trick cliche. They have made their own twisted twist on a movie, Penn & Teller Get Killed. They have just finished a third book, How to Play in Traffic, with the premise of revealing Good Boy secrets, or in magic parlance, tipping the gaff. For the past three years, they've played a semi-permanent gig at Bally's in Las Vegas. Last month, they starred in their own ABC special. And over New Year's, in the midst of a 25-city tour of a show they plan to bring to Broadway come springtime, they are booked at the Merriam, seven shows, December 29 to January 3.
When dealing with a duo, distinctions are obligatory, irrestistable, human nature. "The one who..." is required. "Teller? He's the little one." Or "He's the one who doesn't talk" Neither is entirely correct.
Teller's soft-in-the-middle build is 49-year-old average guy. He stands a full five-feet-nine. But because his partner is a 285-pounder with a cro-magnon forehead and occupies the same approximate space as a brewing tank, Teller is, and will be, eternally, "the little one."
Is he the one who doesn't talk? No. And yes. On stage, Teller is silent, (Decades ago, he discovered, performing on the college party circuit, that working wordlessly held his audience's attention better than heckling frat boys hepped up on jello shots. But when Teller speaks, he articulates precisely, with immaculate grammar, every bit as captivating as Penn, but in a mannered, professorial way.
To instantly grasp the real difference between Teller and Penn is to hear each spin the same story. If Teller is silver-tongued, Penn's speech is scrap-metal corroded. As Teller tells it, when they were first starting out, street performing on New Market, "I brought my own little spotlights and charmed the hot dog wagon people into letting me plug my spotlights in at the hot dog wagon." In Penn's version, Penn is "fucking the hot dog girl."
If you have seen them, you think you know them. You think you know why they are bad. They are insolent, irreverent, cool. But you have seen what they want you to see, an illusion. That's what Penn & Teller, and Teller do. That's who they are. They are cool, or rather, the act is cool because it is a partnership between a pair of incurable perfectionists. Penn's rants are the life's work of a voracious diarist. Teller, for his part, suckles that knuckle, fretting incessantly over the smallest detail.
The story of Teller, (this story, any story), then, is, literally, the story OF Teller. The one he chooses, because, after all, he is a virtuoso of his craft, telling you, showing you,only that which he wants you to know. The closer you come, the farther you are. In his world, seeing and believing never are one and the same.
It began, as quite a few things are said to, innocently enough, with a mail-order magic kit. One day in the fifties, after the War had come and gone, Joe Teller had served and come home, and the kid had turned five, Irene sent away for it from to the Howdy Doody Show. Her boy would never be the same. "Handkerchiefs were always flying around. It was a damn nuisance," Joe told me with a smile that was sly.
"We're sure walking around what I perceived as the world," Teller said one day last spring, as we skirted the horse of Galacia Pennepacker. "From my bedroom window I could see the Philadelphia Inquirer tower, which strikes Big-Ben style on the quarter hour. I cannot tell you the innumerble times I walked past this statue imagining that as a General in the United States Army, he was dressed like this." I somehow thought he was indeed a Roman warrior. "With the library there, the Frankin Institute and its Hall of Mirrors, the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences that way, this wonderful circle that kids jump around the naked statues in the pond--extremely fine naked statues," he said, pointing past the blooming dogwoods. "Can you imagine a better playground for a child?"
He wore a path from his boyhood home on Summer Street, a three-story row house in the shadow of the Honnaman Hospital, one of the few real neighborhoods that central to Philadelphia, to the library, where he spent countless hours, curled up in the theater and magic section, among what he lovingly refers to as the .791s.
"This was in the days when 'inner city' didn't mean slum. 'Inner city' meant you were very convenient to Wannamakers," Teller later told me. "We had a very large backyard, which is where I developed my fondness for make believe. We had our carnivals there, inventing games. We had a dog named Bowser and Bowser had a rather large house, big enough for two children. I doubled as the swami who told fortunes in the doghouse."
At the carnivals, there were also puppet performances of St. George and the Dragon, young Teller having assembled his 10-year-old playmates into the Philadelphia Junior Puppeteers. Irene, giggling proudly, told me over the phone once, "Even the mothers came and brought chairs."
The Tellers take pleasure in conspiring to propagating the weirder boyhood tales. "Did he tell you the one about the broken bottle?" Joe, smiling, asked me in front of their Cherry Street brownstone on the day that we met.
He was an infant, in his crib. A bottle of formula shattered. The baby stared at a sunlit glass shard swimming in a pool of blood in his palm, giggling and laughing, as his mother attested. Joe and Irene found themselves indulging the boy's passion for things both magical and macabre. Joe drove him to birthday parties, his first professional gigs as a magician, decked out in kimono-like robes. Irene wanted to get the boy something special for his twelfth birthday, so she called a medical supply store and ordered a real human skull. (Even today, not far from their own oil paintings and an original Hirschfeld of their son, a plastic skeleton dangles from the ceiling.)
"My parents are not at all creepy people," Teller once told me. "But they were very very observant of what interested their son." A pair of painters, it also didn’t hurt that they were more than a little bit boehemian in their own right.
Joe was a hobo who wrote sonnets.
During the depths of the depression the lanky teenager left his home in Strawberry Mansion.
He quit high school, kissed his three squabbling sisters, mother and father goodbye.
Then, with some loose change in his pocket and a friend at his side, he caught a street car to the end of Roosevelt Boulevard, where the friend caught cold feet and went home.
For the next three years, Joe hopped freight cars and stowed away atop Greyhounds, writing home and composing poetry every day.
The hobo years were followed by art school in Philadelphia, where Joe met and fell for Irene.
They eloped and shared a studio in a $7-a-month walk up on Spring Garden Street with two canaries they never bothered to cage.
If Joe and Irene fueled Teller's passion for theatrics, a man known as Rosey inspired him with their intellectual appeal.
David Rosenbaum was an eccentric thespian who directed the Drama Society at Central High School.
Rosey was a legendary character with a weakness for gold-tipped cigarettes and a fondness for Homburgs.
"Rosey always loved magic, and somewhere along the line, Rosey really started to see where magic fit into theater, an idea he and I pursued for thirty years, usually about putting magic in perspective as the kind of fundamental theater art it is." Teller told me over lunch once, slipping into a lecturer's locution, an effect heightened by his aging-academic’s attire: little wire spectacles--as he would call them, khakies, a tucked-in polo shirt and unkempt curls.
Teller is especially fond of revealing Philadelphia's role in his fledgeling years, after graduation from Amherst, but before he and the big man get their act down pat. It was 197?, and Teller took a job teaching high school Latin in Trenton, moonlighting with magic, just as Rosey had done. (Latin appealed to his life-long love of language, something he traces back to Teacher Anna at Friend’s Select. Teller said, "She actually used thee. But all the while, he was toying with the idea of forming a trio with a couple of guys he hooked up with at school. One, a droll and disgruntled music major with a long frame and a square jaw, Wier Chrisemer, had enticed Teller to perform in a concert series : The Othmar Schoek Memorial Society for the Preservation of Unusual and Disgusting Music, in honor of a Swiss composer nobody knows. The other, Penn Jillette, also was recruited for Othmar. Jillette was a volcanic 19-year-old, a six-foot-six hitchhiker who'd learned to juggle in clown college and met Wier in a stereo store. At one point during the satirical concerts, the frizzy haired gargantuan would unicycle around the stage. Teller, among other things, dressed as a blind man, stood in the lobby and peddled pencils from a cup.
In the spring of '75, 27-year-old Teller sat his parents down and asked their permission to take a leave of absence from school. He wanted to travel, do his magic and perform with the guys. Against it, Irene was outvoted. Joe knew the lure of the road.
The decision was not unlike running away to join the circus. They played street corners, colleges and a renaissance fair.
Standing with Teller one afternoon last spring on one of those corners, the virtually deserted neighborhood that is New Market today, it is difficult to imagine the thriving night spot it was in the seventies, where on summer nights, one could find a motley melange of regulars: performers and patrons, students and gang kids, miscreants, cops. There was a busty brunette hawking hot dogs from a cart, and Big Al, the Spoon Guy, an alcoholic spoon-playing panhandler who, Teller told me, "was not above faking a heart attack to get his way."
It was here, among these characters, perched atop a park bench, that a hippy-haired kid in high boots and black tights perfected an illusion that is arguably the best-ever rendition of a classic of magic, and one of his signatures, still. "I would start the show by setting my needles," he said, standing on the apron of brick along the orphaned open air stall. "I'd set out a little sign that said "When 100 needles are in the apple, magic will begin. And I'd sit there and I'd meticulously and laboriously put my needles in the apple and people would be curious and they'd stop and I'd get my seed crowd out of that." Then, one by one, Teller slid the needles out of the fruit, popped them into his mouth and swallowed. When the apple was empty, he sucked down six feet of thread, like spaghetti. His eyes bugged. His pink, pizza dough cheeks puffed out, and he hurled: 100 needles, strung onto the thread.
Teller made about 100 bucks a show. Penn, as three times that on a good day. The profits paid the rent and financed the Asparagus Valley Cultural Society, a three-man show not unlike "Othmar" that took its name for the farming community in Michigan where the three men had met. They did three runs. It was the first show that ever made money in Theater Five.
"It's like running into something for the first time and you can't put your finger on it and it distrubs you," said long-time theater critic and Teller friend Bill Collins, who was the first to give Asparagus a newspaper review. "Penn juggled. Teller did his illusions. Wier played the synthesizer," Collins told me. "And that doesn't begin to tell you what happened."
Conflicts festered over a three-year run in San Francisco, and in '81, led to the proverbial parting of ways. Not incidentally, Chrisemer is the son of a Lutheran minister, while Teller and Penn are aggressive atheists. The mix made for volatile chemistry that, for the act, probably was instrumental, but for each of them personally, probably was impossible. "I do not have an abiding fondness." Chrisemer told me, clearly struggling for diplomacy. "They are more focused on their art than on others."
Chrisemer lives in Trenton and works for the phone company, and hasn’t seen or spoken to Teller or Penn in more than ten years. Bitter over the break-up, Chrisemer exterminated his show business bug. He has one remaining connection to entertainment. He selects the hymns for his local church.
Without Wier, Penn and Teller began work on Penn & Teller. The first ten years were tumultuous, at best.
Clearly, the relationship isn't based on friendship, and it has lasted because they don’t try to force it to be. A favorite analogy is an arranged marriage. Both have deep respect for what the other one brings, knowing that Penn & Teller together is far greater than the sum of its parts.
"Teller’s point of view is let's work all the time on everything. My big contribution to the partnership is knowing which things we shouldn't work on anymore. If you need me I have a date and I think that would be good for the career. Why don't you, go out and oh, I don't know, design all the ads, and paste them up and get the light plot done and decide where all the props are, and the show’s at eight and I'll be there at 7:30 and you can talk me through the blocking. When we went on Broadway, Teller was there, from six in the morning until midnight. I showed up for the first preview having the idea that maybe when the lights were on in a certain area I would go over there and just talk. And Teller made it all very easy for me to just talk."
Three years ago, Penn and Teller (and Penn & Teller) packed up and moved to Vegas. At Bally's Casino, several months a year, Penn & Teller perform in a showroom next door to Jubilee!, a gloriously garish nightly gala in which the Titanic is sunk, Sampson is shorn, and a twitchy married guy in the audience averts his eyes from the battalion of nipples that parades past his nose.
In practical moments Teller has admitted that Las Vegas is a more financially feasible place to run a business. In more poetic moments he has said, "I’ve been the toast of Broadway, hobnobbed with Madonna and Warhol. I’ve scuba-dived the Great Barrier Reef and flown over the Australian bush in a billionaire’s helicopter. Arthur Penn and Steven Spielberg have directed me. I have tasted the best tamales in the world in downtown Detroit. Life is my theme park. So why not live in one?"
He is almost finished with his dream house, his own Never-Never Land that clings to a hillside in the desert, just beyond the glow of neon seeping from the Strip. It’s quintessential Teller: there’s a library with a mezzanine, just like a favorite room at the Philadelphia Public Library, but with a secret revolving door disguised as a stack of books. He asked his architect to concoct a design that would feel like a cross between Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean and Hoover Dam.
(Penn’s idea of a dream house, for comparative purposes, is called The Slammer. It’s got a wall in the entry way painted to look like a police line-up room, a portrait called "Porn Jesus" and a jacuzzi specially designed to induce female orgasm, thanks to a mechanism whose name rhymes with "slit bet.")
A few minutes closer to the casinos is Penn & Teller headquarters. There’s an office with office things like a water cooler and coffee pot; show biz things, like a black and white blow-up of the Stooges; and magic things like boxes of eyeballs, jugs of fake blood and a tiny little platoon of rubber Teller thumbs in formation on a shelf. Adjacent to the office is a 5,000-square-foot warehouse, so there's plenty of room for building things to drown Teller in, and to string him up from, over a bed of spikes, like a side of beef, by his feet.
When he isn’t touring or in Vegas, Teller finds his way back to Philadelphia, so Irene can cook them all chicken and Joe can teach him to paint. It feels as much like home as anywhere else he has found.
"Vegas has no history. That’s the appeal of it and that’s the drawback to it," he said, shuffling around Logan Circle on a recent visit. "San Francisco people are well dressed and they look content with where they are. Philadelphia, to me is the working mother. People are not as well-groomed, but they look like people I’d rather spend time with."
"Playing a Broadway theater or a Las Vegas showroom or a television special, my feelings are no different from when we were playing the Walnut Theater Five. And this is not because I think so little of the television shows or the Broadway shows, it’s because the first perfomances we did at the Walnut, I thought what we were doing was the most important thing in the world. There’s really no difference between a person coming up to you on the street and saying, 'Wow you did a really good job on Leno,' and somebody saying, 'You did a really good job on Second and Pine.' There’s no difference. It’s one person telling you you did okay.
By the way, I know his first name. He wouldn't want me to tell.
© Copyright 1997