Showman (1937)

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SHOWMAN dark young fellow with claw-like hands and sweeping, wavy black hair and languorous dark eyes and a low, insinuating voice was just exactly what the audience thought a hypnotist ought to look like. Our audiences were always running over with hard guys from Missouri who had to be shown, so you had to give them their money's worth. It was easy to get droopy and stiff -jointed at the word of command under the boss's magic eye, grunt like a pig, lie down and roll over, swagger round with my head swinging like a grizzly bear's. I'd never seen a grizzly but Satanella said that was the way they acted. He spared me the chair stunt although many a fake has done it with a forked board strapped up his back and down the backs of his legs. But he did put me through the business of having needles run through my cheeks and lighted cigars ground into my flesh. For the needle stunt he gave me local anesthetics and used a kind of heat-insulation lotion to protect me from the cigars. Still it was always a little chancy and, when he started talking about using me as subject for his famous stunt of burying a hypnotized man six feet underground and digging him up good as new at the end of a week, I experienced sizable misgivings. He explained there would be a pipe leading from the coffin to the surface so I wouldn't smother: "But suppose it rains?" says I. "We'll put a little tin umbrella over it," says he. "I have no faith in little tin umbrellas," says I. "And 50