Magic’s ultimate local booster collects people and ‘toys’

Gary Darwin’s collection of magic memorabilia fills his eight-room house, surrounding and distracting him as he speaks from the sofa that is just about the last outpost of actual habitation.

I’m there to talk about him, specifically his 50 years of presiding over a weekly magic club. But Darwin’s life is so wrapped up in other magicians — and the books, posters, magazines, props and you-name-it relating to them — the conversation frequently strays to another artifact, and/or the magician who has signed one: “Norm Nielsen, you ever heard of him? He went all around the world doing the floating violin. He’s as crazy as me. He collects posters.”

But Darwin’s ultimate collection may be all the people who stopped in over the years to attend one of his weekly gatherings in countless backrooms or bars around town.

Last Wednesday, Darwin’s Magic Club planned to celebrate its 50th anniversary at Boomers Bar, its home for the past 15 years. The weekly, late-evening gathering is still a place where pros and hobbyists meet on equal ground to share stories and card tricks, or buy and sell props and illusions.

“We meet every week. I don’t care if it’s Christmas. A lot of us are single, and we kind of like to be with each other,” he says.

“The guy has kept a magic camaraderie, if you will, in this town,” says Stan Allen, publisher of Magic magazine. “He kept the amateur scene tied in with the professionals.”

“It’s always been just a social thing where you just hang out. There’s no dues, there’s no rules,” says Lance Burton, who closed his Monte Carlo show four years ago and retired after 28 years on the Strip. “The professionals would come over when they got off work, and the guys who weren’t working would show up. It was just guys hanging out. You never know who you’re going to meet there.”

Burton figures he had only been in the “Folies Bergere” for “two or three days at the most” in 1982 when a stagehand told him he had a call on the backstage pay phone. “Phone call? I don’t know anybody in town.”

It was Darwin inviting him to the club, where he first met Siegfried Fischbacher of Siegfried &Roy, and Jimmy Grippo, the 80-something close-up legend who was still entertaining high rollers at Caesars Palace.

Darwin’s career also blurred the lines between enthusiast and professional. He may be magic’s biggest local booster, but he never gave up his 30-year day job as a Riviera bellhop. “I never trusted show business,” he says. “Smartest thing I ever did, because your chances are one in a thousand that you’re going to hit a plateau where you work steady.”

Beyond that, the bellhop gig offered “eight hours of mental freedom. I could invent (tricks) walking down the hallway and keep my mind on magic.”

He’s almost 80 now. Diabetes claimed one foot a few years ago, leaving him wheelchair-bound. But a photo bears testament to the 1950s, when soybeans helped him sculpt a Charles Atlas physique, intended to make him an escape artist and daredevil with the stage name Dare-O-Win, “the Man With 13 Lives.”

But nobody could pronounce that and he gradually settled on Darwin. Although he worked a lot in town — “I was the first magician to do an afternoon show at the old Thunderbird” — his greater legacy became the club.

The first gathering was for youngsters at the Fabulous Magic Co. on Charleston Boulevard. Darwin eventually split his efforts into an afternoon kids club and an adult gathering at night. “I wanted to mingle with the big boys because you could learn magic from them,” he says.

He holds up a well-thumbed stack of names and numbers, 500 current and past contacts he would spend eight hours calling when someone special was coming in to lecture. (“Gary never switched over when email came along,” Burton says.)

The magic community needed something to celebrate last week, after the recent death of Joanie Spina, David Copperfield’s longtime stage assistant and choreographer, and the hospitalization of Johnny Thompson, Las Vegas’ elder statesman of magic.

Burton and others keep tabs on Darwin. “If it wasn’t for Lance I’d probably be dead,” he says.

And although his collection restricts his living space to the point of no bed in the bedroom, it’s not going anywhere until he does.

“I could cash out but I don’t want to. I’m entertained by all this stuff,” he says.

“I like magicians,” he says, if you haven’t figured that out. “They’ve got great curiosity. And they’re a bunch of skeptics and they’ve got a good sense of humor. …

“Magicians never have to grow up. We have our toys.”

Contact reporter Mike Weatherford at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0288.