What a CardBy Susan Ladd, Staff Writer
"Could I borrow your ring?" Whit Haydn asks innocently. The woman hesitates, then gives him the big diamond. He admires it, turns it over in his hand. It isn't there anymore. "Where's my ring?" the woman asks, giggling nervously.
"Well, there's something in my wallet," Haydn says, pulling the leather case out of his jacket. Inside a zippered compartment is a sealed envelope. Inside the envelope is not the ring, but the woman's watch, which she hadn't even missed. The patrons are in an uproar. The question remains: Where is the ring?
"It's in the glove compartment of my car, " Haydn says. "I'll go right out in the parking lot and get it for you."
He pulls out his key ring...and the diamond ring dangles from one of the hooks.
Amid laughter and applause, Haydn shakes his head. "You know what this means? My car key is locked in the glove compartment of my car."
Meet Whit Haydn: con man, pickpocket, comic and amateur psychologist.
In a word, magician.
"The kind of person who becomes a magician has a need to pull people's legs," Haydn says. "He wants to make them think, challenge perceptions, pose questions. He's the same kind of person that would be a swindler, except he doesn't have the heart to keep the wallet. And maybe, not the nerve."
Haydn, 37, is a self-taught magician who has practiced his craft on street corners from New York to Israel, on cruise ships, and at the prestigious Magic Castle in Hollywood. In 1980, he was named Stage Magician of the Year by the Academy of Magical Arts and Sciences, beating out Harry Anderson of the television comedy "Night Court." He's written two books on magic: "Fast and Loose" and "Whit Haydn's Four Ring Routine."
Now a High Point resident, he works at Wellington's restaurant Sunday through Thursday nights and at national trade shows throughout the country.
A Greenville native, Haydn began practicing magic at age 10.
"I wasted the first nine years of my life just drifting," he says.
He tried his hand at writing and activism. But magic kept calling him back. After two years and East Carolina University, Haydn moved to New York City and practiced magic on street corners to support himself-more or less to see if he could.
It turned out to be the best field training he could have hoped for as a performer.
"The streets are a very liberating performing experience because the audience isn't trapped," he says. "They only stay as long as it's interesting, they leave when they get bored, and they only pay what they think the show is worth. You touch their lives for a moment and vanish like a snowflake."
Haydn returned to academia and completed a degree in philosophy at Lynchburg College in Virginia in 1972. Then he enrolled at Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, to become an Episcopal priest. But he spent as much time studying sleight-of-hand as he did theology.
"I decided what I really wanted was to get into performing." Haydn says. "So I took off to Europe and the middle East, working street corners doing magic and just bumming around."
Back in the states, he joined the Road Company, a Washington, D.C., improvisational group. When the Road Company moved to Johnson City, Tenn., Haydn began opening shows for country music stars like Conway Twitty in amusement parks. It was here he met his wife, Debra.
"She was a singer, and I asked her out to dinner," Haydn says. "When we got ready to leave, I left a silver dollar in an empty wine bottle for the waiter. I think that's what hooked her."
The couple moved to Los Angeles in 1976, where Haydn became a regular at the Magic Castle, a private club for magicians whose members include David Copperfield and Doug Henning.
"Whit is a superb magician," says Jean Cantor, assistant to Magic Castle president Bill Larsen. "He can hold his own with the best-known magicians, though his magic is very different from, say, Copperfield. He was one of our good ones, and we were sorry to see him go."
While at the Magic Castle, Haydn performed for celebrities including Mohammed Ali, Luciano Pavarotti, Sally Struthers and Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley. And he played his Tribble trick on the one man for whom it is most relevant-actor William Shatner. A Tribble was a furry, round creature that reproduced at an alarming rate on one of the most famous "Star Trek" episodes.
"Ever seen a Tribble? Haydn asks a late-night bar patron at Wellington's. "I have one of the few Tribbles in captivity." From his pocket comes a red spongy ball. "Go ahead, pet it. They like it when you do that."
Haydn tears the Tribble down the middle, making two. One goes into his hand, one into the patron's hand. "OK, now squeeze it real tight and sprinkle some pixie dust on your fist." He reaches in his pocket for the imaginary pixie dust and the patron follows suit. "Feel silly doing this? You ought to try doing it for a living..."
Haydn opens his hand, the Tribble is gone. The patron opens hers, two Tribbles appear. The second time, the patron again begins with one Tribble. "I can feel it growing!" she says. She opens her hand, eight Tribbles jump out over the table.
"You should see my living room," Haydn says, reaching for the ceiling. "It's up to here in Tribbles."
Most people have one of two images of magicians, Haydn says. They either picture a guy with a goatee in a tuxedo with a well-trained theatrical voice cutting women in half, or some obnoxious guy wearing a rabbit button and a squirting flower.
Neither image for Haydn. At Wellingtons, he doesn't wear a tuxedo. Clad in a plaid wool jacket and armed with what seems to be a dozen decks of cards, he does the impossible-often with his sleeves pushed up to the elbow:
"Gives me an aura of integrity, doesn't it?" Haydn asks a customer.
Lulled by his easy-going manner, his ingenuousness, people find themselves swept away by one illusion after another. Waitresses at Wellington's, who have seen him do the same tricks many times, still stop and watch.
Some magicians think magic relies on the suspension of disbelief, but Haydn dares audiences to disbelieve.
"I don't believe in real magic, yet there's something about it I can't explain," he says.
Haydn returned to North Carolina to settle in High Point two years ago. He wanted his daughter, Jessamine, 7, to grow up like he did, in a place where she could ride her bike and tramp around in the woods.
Though he won't disclose specific fees, Haydn says he makes a good living as a full-time magician.
Haydn has done almost every kind of magic, including big stage shows with levitation and cutting people in half. He's worked with rabbits and doves. What he prefers is loosely gathered, impromptu situations like the table-to-table shows at Wellington's.
"I like to work almost one-on-one with people doing close-up magic," he says.
To do that, he has to be so good that people can't figure out the trick. Haydn practices eight hours a day and carries a deck of cards constantly to perfect the mechanics involved in slight-of-hand. But he's also a student of human nature.
"I study the principles of observation," he says. "Did you know that it's harder to look up and down than it is to see side to side? If I combine those motions, it's hard to follow what my hands are doing.
"You take advantage of people's socialization. If I ask you a question, it's impolite not to look up at me when you answer. While you're looking at my eyes, my hands are doing something else."
The easiest people to fool, he says, are the intelligent, scientific types. They think logically, and magic is not logical. The essence of magic is that what logically should happen never does.
The reward is the applause, the expressions of surprise, the squeals of delight. It's a happy profession. Haydn has this lurking fear that someday someone is going to make him get "a real job."
"When I'm performing, I'm lost to the word," he says. "Nothing else engages me with such intensity. The Great Wallenda, the tightrope walker, used to say that he spent most of his life waiting to go back up on the wire. That's what draws me back like a magnet every time I try to do something other than magic. It's totally absorbing."