For years, Chung Ling Soo couldn’t speak English. Then somebody shot him, which was unfortunate for several reasons, not least because Chung Ling Soo could speak English perfectly well. He was William Ellsworth Robinson from New York. And if ever there was a magician that understood that the greatest illusion need not be the trick, it was Robinson.
Born in New York in 1861, Robinson had been around show business and magic for years before Chung Ling Soo appeared. He performed under other names, worked behind the scenes and developed a considerable knowledge of stage illusion. Wat he didn’t have was the thing that every performer desperately needs.
A really good act.
And this is the bit where things become uncomfortable as well as fascinating.
Ching Ling Foo was actually Chinese. Born Zhu Liankui, he became an internationally successful magician with a spectacular act involving productions, transformations and enormous quantities of theatrical flair. One of his famous feats involved apparently producing a bowl full of water from nowhere. Western audiences loved him.
And William Robinson was taking notes.
Around 1900, Robinson transformed himself into Chung Ling Soo, complete with costume, make-up, carefully manufactured biography and a convenient inability to speak English. It was yellowface, although the term would come later: a white American performer constructing an exoticized Chinese identity because Western audiences found it mysterious, exciting and, most importantly, marketable. He didn’t just borrow the atmosphere of Ching Ling Foo either. Even the name was uncomfortably close.
And it worked. Chung Ling Soo became a star. Robinson maintained the character with with enormous commitment. Onstage he remained silent. When communication was required, an interpreter could do it for him. Publicity presented him as an authentic Chinese conjuror and wonderfully elaborate stories developed around his supposed background. One newspaper account even managed to turn him into a magician honoured by the Chinese Empress Dowager and elevated to the rank of Mandarin. That would have been some achievement for a man fro New York.
Behind the make-up, people within theatrical circles knew who he was. The wider audience, however, was buying Chung Ling Soo, and Robinson had no intention of spoiling the trick. Until in 1904 the genuine Chin Ling Foo arrived in Britain.
In January 1905, London had Ching Ling Foo performing at the Empire and Chung Ling Soo at the Hippodrome. One of these men was a famous Chinese magician. The other was an American pretending to be a famous Chinese magician whose stage name sounded suspiciously like the name of the famous Chinese magician. There was only one thing to do. Have a magical duel. Because of course you would.
Ching Ling Foo issued a public challenge, offering £1000 if Soo could reproduce a selection of his tricks, or if Foo himself failed to reproduce one of Soo’s.
A meeting was arranged at the offices of the ‘Weekly Dispatch’, and Robinson turned up, in character, dressed as Chung Ling Soo, accompanied by his entourage and reportedly travelling in a large red motor car. Foo did not appear, and the reason why Foo didn’t rock up to the Weekly Dispatch’s offices makes the story even better.
Foo’s representatives subsequently said that before any competition took place, Chung Ling Soo should prove to members of the Chinese Legation that he was actually Chinese. Which was a bit awkward. The newspapers had a wonderful time with it. Soo effectively claimed victory when Foo failed to appear, while Foo had managed to point at the enormous elephant standing in the middle of the theatre and ask why nobody else seemed to be bothered by it. Robinson wasn’t Chinese. The press knew it. People in the profession knew it. Ching Ling Foo definitely knew it. And Chung Ling Soo carried of regardless. Because the audiences apparently weren’t buying William Robinson’s birth certificate. They were buying the illusion.
Over the following years, Chung Ling Soo continued to be a hugely successful performer. His shows were colourful, elaborate and filled with the kind of spectacular magic that looked magnificent under theatre lights. Among his most famous feats was one with a particularly ominous title.
Defying the Bullets.
The bullet catch was already notorious. Versions had been performed by other magicians, including performers Robinson had encountered during his career. The basic proposition was irresistible – guns were loaded, fired directly at the magician and somehow he survived. Obviously nobody with any sense intended to catch an actual speeding bullet. The danger was making absolutely sure that an actual speeding bullet never entered the equation.
On Saturday 23 March 1918, Chung Ling Soo appeared at the Wood Green Empire in London. He had already performed the bullet trick successfully during an earlier show that day. At the later performance, Defying the Bullets came at the end of his act. The guns were prepared. They were fired. And this time the illusion stopped. A bullet went through him.
For years, Robinson’s silence had helped preserve Chung Ling Soo. The magician who supposedly couldn’t speak English did not need to explain himself to his audience. But now, badly wounded on the stage, that silence was reportedly broken. Later accounts give his words as:
“Something’s happened – lower the curtain.”
It is a magnificent piece of theatrical history. it is also one we should handle very carefully. The line has been repeated so often that it has become part of the Chung Ling Soo legend, and versions of it appear in later histories. What we can say with certainty is considerably less theatrical. William Robinson was shot. He was taken to hospital where he died the following day.
The inquest gives us something much more valuable than the legend because it tells us what actually happened to the apparatus.
The guns used in the illusion had been specially prepared. Bullets could apparently be placed into them while the mechanism prevented the charge from propelling those bullets towards Robinson. That was the trick. Except one of the components intended to keep everything safely separated had worn loose. When the gun fired that night, the bullet wasn’t pretending. the inquest heard expert evidence about the faulty mechanism and returned a verdict of death by misadventure.
The way that William Robinson died is somehow horribly appropriate. Not that he deserved to die, because he didn’t. And not because of some supposed curse from Chung Ling Foo, tempting as that piece of theatrical folklore inevitably became. It’s appropriate because Robinson had spent nearly twenty years building layers between himself and reality. William Robinson became Chung Ling Soo. His birthplace of New York became China. English became silence. Makeup became identity. Publicity became biography. A mechanical trick became apparent invulnerability.
And night after night, audiences happily accepted it all because that’s exactly what they had paid to do. Then, for a fraction of a second at the Wood Green Empire, one tiny piece of machinery moved where it shouldn’t and the illusion collapsed. And beneath the robes, the make-up, the invented history and eighteen years of Chung Ling Soo, there was William Robinson. A magician who had spent so much of his career making the impossible look real.
In the end, all it took was one real thing to destroy him.
