Imagine standing on a stage while rifles are pointed directly at you. Not prop guns or toys. Rifles. The audience is watching. The soldiers are ready. Somewhere among the ammunition are marked bullets that members of the audience have been allowed to inspect. Then comes the command.
Fire.
For most people, this would represent an exceptionally poor career choice, but for Adelaide Herrmann, it was magic.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the bullet catch had already acquired a fearsome reputation. The premise was beautifully simple and utterly horrifying: a bullet was apparently fired directly at the magician, who somehow caught or intercepted it without being killed. There were safer ways to earn applause but Adelaide Herrmann did it anyway. And if her name is less familiar today than Houdini, Robert-Houdin or even her own husband, Alexander Herrmann, that says considerably more about the way the history of magic has been remembered than it does about Adelaide. Because Adelaide Herrmann wasn’t simply a magician’s assistant. She became one of the great magicians of her age.
She was born Adelaide Scarcez in London in 1853, and entered showbusiness long before becoming associated with magic. She was athletic, theatrical and apparently quite fearless, performing as a dancer, aerialist and trick cyclist. Then she met Alexander Herrmann. Herrmann was already a major name in magic. With his dark hair, pointed beard, evening clothes and dramatic appearance, he helped create an image of the magician that remains instantly recognisable. He was Herrmann the Great. Adelaide joined both his life and his act.
It would be very easy at this point to describe her simply as his assistant but contemporary evidence makes that rather difficult. A surviving American theatre programme from 1892 advertised “Herrmann the Great” as the supreme monarch of conjurors, but specifically billed him as being aided by ‘Mme. Herrmann’ in an entertainment of ‘Magic, Mirth and Mystery’. Adelaide wasn’t hiding backstage passing him rabbits. She was part of the attraction. She danced, performed illusions, handled animals, changed costumes at extraordinary speed and developed a distinctive stage presence of her own. She understood the mechanics of the performances and the theatrical business surrounding them. For roughly two decades she worked alongside one of the world’s most successful magicians. Then, in December 1896, Alexander Herrmann died suddenly.
He was travelling by train when he suffered a heart attack. For Adelaide, the loss was personal and also professional. The star around whom the entire Herrmann organisation had been built was gone. There were performers, equipment, bookings and an established theatrical name, but no Herrmann the Great. The obvious solution would have been to close the show. Adelaide chose another.
The Herrmann company continued, initially with Alexander’s nephew Leon Herrmann performing alongside her. Surviving posters show Leon and Adelaide heading the company and promising audiences new sensations and illusions. But Adelaide was not going to spend the remainder of her career preserving somebody else’s act. She decided to go out on her own, and the magician’s assistant became the magician.
Her ambition was not subtle. Writing in 1899, Adelaide made her position perfectly clear. She wanted to be recognised as a leader in her profession regardless of her sex. She didn’t want to be seen as a good female magician. She wanted to be seen as a good magician. Adelaide’s performances were not small demonstrations designed to prove that a woman could shuffle cards rather nicely. They were enormous theatrical productions.
One of her most celebrated illusions was The Phantom Bride, in which a bridal figure apparently rose into the air before vanishing. Another performance transformed Adelaide herself. Appearing as an old witch, she entered a fiery spectacle and emerged transformed. Then there was Noah’s Ark, and this one was magic on the scale of glorious lunacy. The act involved an ark and the production of a menagerie that, according to accounts preserved by magic historians, included animals as extraordinary as lions, leopards, tigers, zebras and elephants. At some point somebody surely had had to ask the practical question:
Where exactly are we putting the elephant?
But that was the scale on which Adelaide worked. She understood something that the great stage magicians had understood before her. The secret of spectacular magic wasn’t simply making something disappear. It was making the audience remember watching it disappear. Costumes, lighting, movement, music mattered and suspense all mattered. And Adelaide brought all of them together.
Then there was the bullet catch.
Nobody is particularly impressed by a magician safely catching a handkerchief. But a bullet? A bullet is different. The audience understands exactly what ought to happen if the trick goes wrong. That knowledge does half the magician’s work. Adelaide’s performance of the bullet catch became one of the feats for which she was remembered. The Magic Circle still identifies it among the routines that helped make her a major vaudeville star.
There is an additional reason it belongs in our story. This week we will meet another magician associated forever with the same trick. Chung Ling Soo’s bullet catch would end very differently.
For Adelaide, however, danger was only one element of the performance. She had another speciality.
Ghosts.
The Victorian and Edwardian appetite for supernatural entertainment had produced a wonderful overlap between Spiritualism and stage magic. Mediums claimed that spirits could move objects, manifest in darkened rooms and communicate with the living. Magicians knew perfectly well that human beings could create remarkably similar effects without assistance from the dead and Adelaide’s ghostly illusions played directly with that fascination. Things appeared. Things vanished. Figures materialised where no figure should have been. The audience could enjoy all the delicious unease of a séance without necessarily being asked to believe that Aunt Martha had genuinely returned from beyond the grave. And Adelaide kept doing it year after year. The career that might reasonably have been expected to end with Alexander’s death instead continued for decades.
There is something particularly satisfying about surviving publicity from the period. The title attached to Adelaide wasn’t bestowed upon her by a modern historian attempting to recover an overlooked woman. She was billed as:
‘The Queen of Magic.’
She had earned it while she was still performing. By the 1920s Adelaide was an elderly woman by the standards of theatrical life, but she was still working. Then, in 1925, disaster struck. A warehouse in New York containing her equipment caught fire.
The loss was devastating. Illusions and apparatus accumulated across a lifetime in magic were destroyed. Memorabilia disappeared. Worse still, many of the animals associated with her Noah’s Ark production were killed. For a performer whose stage career had already survived widowhood, changing theatrical fashions and advancing age, it might finally have been enough. Adelaide was in her seventies. She could have stopped but instead, with assistance from fellow magicians, she assembled another show and returned to the stage.
Eventually age accomplished what everything else had failed to do. Adelaide retired towards the end of the 1920s. She died in 1932.
But Adelaide had been working on one final act.
During her later years she produced a substantial memoir of her extraordinary career with Alexander and afterwards. It wasn’t published because the manuscript disappeared from public view and for decades magic historians knew of it without knowing exactly what had become of it.
Then it resurfaced. A 295-page typescript had survived within Adelaide’s extended family and in 2012, eighty years after her death, her account finally formed the heart of a published collection of her memoirs, writings and surviving material. There is something almost irritatingly appropriate about that, isn’t there?. Adelaide Herrmann spent her professional life making things disappear. Then history did it to her. Not completely, of course. Magic historians remembered her. Posters survived. Programmes survived. Photographs survived. The Magic Circle preserved her place in the profession’s history. But outside magic circles – in the other sense – the Queen of Magic became considerably less famous than many of the men who occupied the same stages. Even Alexander’s familiar image survived more readily than Adelaide’s name.
Yet look at her career. She spent approximately twenty years working at the heart of one of the great magic shows of the nineteenth century. When its star suddenly died, she kept the company alive. Then she became a headline magician herself. She performed dangerous illusions, produced ghosts and commanded enormous theatrical spectacles. She toured for decades then survived the destruction of her show in a warehouse fire while in her seventies and still returned to the stage. And finally, she left behind her own account of what she had done.
Perhaps the most revealing thing Adelaide ever said was simply that she wanted recognition as a leader in her profession without the question of sex entering into it. More than a century later, we can finally grant her the courtesy of taking her at her word. Adelaide Herrmann wasn’t remarkable because she was a woman who performed magic. She was remarkable because she was extremely good at it. For years she had made women disappear.
After Alexander died, Adelaide Herrmann stepped into the empty space herself.
And refused to vanish.
