David Gardner ’69 at one of his early magic
shows.
Above, Gardner in 1990.
David Gardner ’69 and his wife, Lynn
Shostack, at his 25th reunion in 1994.
Photos courtesy Lynn Gardner Moore
|
A magical life
Even after his death, the
passion of David Gardner ’69 enlivens Princeton
By Merrell Noden ’78
Long before he came to Princeton as a member of
the Class of 1969, David Gardner inhabited a secret
world that few Princetonians ever see from the
inside. He was a boy magician, a sleight-of-hand
wizard who on many weekends would perform three or
four shows around his hometown of Cleveland. He was
among the youngest dues-paying members of the
International Brotherhood of Magicians. When it was
young David’s turn to host the monthly meeting of
the Brotherhood’s local chapter, his family would
retreat to the sidelines and watch warily as he
entertained his magical friends.
“These were truly out-of-body experiences,” says
Gardner’s brother, Daniel ’72, who was three years
younger and just a little bit unnerved by the
strange scenes unfolding in his backyard. “Here
you’d have my brother, maybe 11 at the time,
cavorting with 30-, 40-, 60-, and even 70-year-olds
speaking with all varieties of accents, clutching
wands, waving silks and scarves of every color
imaginable, and running around after the occasional
rabbit or pigeon that somehow had gotten out from
under their spell. It was pre-Harry Potter weird.”
Gardner would go on to become a huge success in
the far less whimsical world of venture capital and
commercial real estate, where he stood out not only
for his intelligence and creativity, but also for
his charm and unswerving sense of principle. Despite
the onset of muscular dystrophy, which manifested
itself in the mid-1970s and put him in a wheelchair
by his 15th reunion, Gardner worked just as hard in
his spare time. For years, he served on the boards
of many community and nonprofit groups, including
the Literacy Volunteers of New York; Young
Audiences, Inc., which introduces public school
children to the theater; and the Muscular Dystrophy
Association. He had a deep love of teaching and,
while still a Princeton undergrad, taught chemistry
at the Princeton Day School.
Princeton held a special place in Gardner’s
affections. “His volunteering for Princeton was
legendary,” says classmate Bruce Freeman ’69, who
works in the University’s Office of Annual Giving.
“He was extremely good at it and loved the place
deeply.” Gardner, who always sat in his wheelchair
in the center of class photographs, served as
special gifts co-chairman for the class and was
co-chairman of the New York region during the
University’s 250th Anniversary Campaign.
Through it all, he never lost his love for magic.
“He was a connoisseur of magic,” says Lynn Shostack,
who met Gardner while both were students at Harvard
Business School and became his business partner and
his wife. “We went to magic conventions and had a
big library on magic. He always sought out the best
magicians. He appreciated their skills, which can be
incredibly subtle. And, particularly annoying to me,
he always honored the magicians’ code, which means
we were married 30 years and I can’t tell you how
they do what they do.”
When Gardner died in December of 2001, Shostack
cast about for a suitable way to honor her husband,
to whom Princeton had meant so much. “Whatever it
was going to be,” she says, “it had to reflect what
made David who he was. It had to involve things like
charm and whimsy but also great depth and breadth.”
One morning she woke up with the perfect plan: She
would establish a foundation at Princeton, to be
known as the Gardner Magic Project, which would
award grants for all sorts of projects that involved
magic in the biggest and broadest sense possible. In
the course of promoting “magic,” the Project could
also promote teaching, theater and dance,
linguistics, film, and even the study of the origins
of science. “It’s the perfect metaphor for both
David’s interest in the imagination and for the
effect he had on people,” says class secretary Paul
Sittenfeld ’69.
Gardner got his first taste of magic when he was
8 years old and accompanied his mother to a benefit
she’d organized that featured a magician. “Family
lore has it that David was immediately smitten and
decided then and there to become a professional
magician,” says Dan Gardner.
In Cleveland, there was one clear path to
becoming a magician. It led down an alley, up some
rickety stairs and into Schneider’s Magic Shop, a
dusty, smoke-choked den presided over by Mr.
Schneider, a raspy-voiced old man dedicated to
identifying real magical talent. The shop had two
rooms, an outer room where Mr. Schneider made a
living selling the basic tools of magic and an inner
sanctum into which he ushered only those who had
shown a sufficiently deep interest and an ability to
keep its secrets. Here, Mr. Schneider kept the good
stuff, and David Gardner soon became a prized pupil.
A smart boy, he scheduled his first performances
at nursing homes, figuring that, if a trick
backfired, there was at least a chance that his
audience would never notice. Word of the brilliant
young magician spread around Cleveland, and he soon
found himself shuttling to bar mitzvahs and
anniversary and birthday parties. Performing was
essential, for Gardner needed every penny he earned
to feed what, his brother insists, was something of
an addiction to magical paraphernalia.
When he arrived at Princeton, he was 6'2" and so
skinny that he risked being mistaken for one of his
wands. “I don’t think he ever had to make his bed,”
recalls Jan Gombert ’69, who roomed with Gardner in
their sophomore and junior years. “He would just
slide in and the covers would be almost undisturbed
and he would slide out again.”
Gardner, a chemistry major, was at first required
to work at Commons as a condition of his
scholarship. He realized that he didn’t want to do
that for long, so he fell back on his first love,
performing not only for kids’ birthday parties all
over Princeton, but also for fellow students. On
major party weekends he’d put on a full-blown magic
show, in top hat and tails, for his Quadrangle Club
clubmates and their dates. “We thought it was so
classy to bring your date to Quadrangle and have her
see a magic show,” says Freeman. “It sounds quaint,
but our dates loved it.”
That was because Gardner was an excellent
magician, who saw magic not as a veil of trickery
but as a way of delighting people. “He had great
‘patter,’” says Shostack. “He was not a silent
magician. He had grace and charm, but he would
intersperse the worst Borscht Belt jokes you ever
heard. I have a pendant he gave me that is solid
gold and about an inch and a half high. It’s a
gorilla, and he gave it to me one birthday because I
was the ‘gorilla his dreams.’”
Gombert says Gardner could make a bowling ball
appear out of thin air. Still, the trick he
remembers best is one that began with Gardner
stretching a sheet of rubber over the mouth of a
drinking glass and placing two coins, a penny and a
quarter, on top of the rubber sheet. He asked you to
pick one, although — in a bit of “heads-I-win,
tails-you-lose” trickery — all along it was going to
be the quarter that he used. He then touched the
quarter and with a theatrical “pop” it would fall to
the bottom of the glass.
“I watched him perform that trick from a foot
away four times, and I still have no idea how he did
it,” says Gombert, adding that Gardner claimed he
had discovered some property of rubber in his
chemistry lab. “I told myself that before he died
I’d persuade him to teach me that trick.
Unfortunately, he never did.”
Gardner never stopped doing magic, largely, says
Shostack, because “David liked people. For him, it
was a way of connecting with them.” He and Lynn had
no children of their own, but every Thanksgiving
they would throw a party for all their friends with
children. Some 50 kids would come to the apartment
on Central Park West with the big picture windows
overlooking the Macy’s Parade. Gardner always hired
a magician for the occasion.
Even near the end, when his condition had
deteriorated to the point where he required a
wheelchair and a ventilator, he could still do
magic. “A weird motor-memory that allowed his hands
and fingers to operate faster than my eyes — and
faster than his fingers and hands could possibly
move with muscular dystrophy — would kick in,”
recalls his brother, Dan. “The tricks he did for us
in his later years remain even more remarkable than
those he did at the age of 11, when he had full
command of his motor control.”
One can only imagine how delighted Gardner would
have been with the Magic Project, which has awarded
10 grants for this, its second year of existence.
They range from $5,000 up to $50,000, and will
support everything from utterly fanciful theater and
dance productions to conferences on some of the most
abstruse corners of Renaissance learning. They will
pay for top acts like the Flying Karamazov Brothers,
juggler/magician Michael Moschen, and Keith Barry,
the Irish mentalist who bills himself as “The
Druidmaster,” to come to McCarter Theatre.
The Project won’t teach students how to pull
rabbits out of hats. “It’s not that at all,” says
Shostack emphatically. “That’s being prohibited,
even though once a year we will be putting on a
magic show for the undergraduate body. That’s just
the cute part, the fun part. The rest of it is
serious education, designed to provide resources to
areas of the University that never could get it
otherwise. Carol Rigolot, executive director of
Princeton’s Council of the Humanities, calls them
‘little bits of DNA’ — those esoteric areas [that]
don’t draw a lot of students and don’t attract major
donors because most major donors want their name
plastered on something that’s permanent. So these
areas are starved for resources. This is a
subterranean kind of idea.”
One grant is going to the University’s Program in
Medieval Studies to renew its graduate seminar in
paleography, the study of ancient writing and
manuscripts; another will help the Italian Studies
program present a conference on “The Magic of The
Late Mattia Pascal,” Pirandello’s novel featuring a
variety of magic. A $50,000 grant is going to the
Program in Theater and Dance to support a variety of
projects, including the creation of two new dance
works and the re-creation of two others, and to
commission an American playwright to write a play
about magic that will have its first performance at
Princeton. A Princeton undergraduate, working as
Shostack’s scout, traveled around the United States
over the summer to identify first-class magicians
and establish a database that future project
administrators will use.
One grant winner – for the second year – is the
Princeton Atelier, which was founded 10 years ago by
Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, who teaches in
Princeton’s creative writing program. The aim of the
Atelier is to “bring to campus professional artists
who are working on an actual project and want to do
it in the company of students,” explains Ellen
Goellner, its associate director. Last spring the
Atelier used a Magic Project grant to bring together
New York painter Nancy Manter and IMAX filmmaker Ben
Shedd for a course on large-scale digital art. The
class created a piece called “Against the Wall: The
Question of Landscape in the 21st Century,” which
explored the potent new magic of unframed cinematic
visual space. It was displayed first in the Frist
Student Center, then at the computer center, and
eventually, Goellner notes with pride, at the Boston
Center for the Arts. This year the Atelier is using
its $25,000 grant to bring to campus three artists —
Ukrainian throat singer and actress Majana Sadovska,
digital videoist Lars Jan, and theater director
Roger Babb — to collaborate on a “choral-theatrical”
piece that will use traditional Ukrainian summer
songs in an “exploration of enchantment” inspired by
Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Whatever inspired lunacy might have prevailed in
Shakespeare’s forest, Shostack stresses the
fundamental seriousness of most of the work the
Project will support and of magic itself. “Magic is
not trickery,” she says. “People think of it as
parlor games, but the subject itself – magic –
permeates everything, all the way back to the Bible
and beyond. It’s a very deep subject, very deep
indeed, like David was.”
Indeed, the religion department has been awarded
a grant that will pay a graduate student to help
Peter Schaefer, the Ronald O. Perelman Professor of
Judaic Studies, translate the fourth and final
volume taken from the Cairo Genizah. Written over
roughly 1,000 years from the ninth to the 19th
centuries, and discovered in a secret room in a
synagogue in old Cairo, the trove of documents
includes everything from scholarly treatises and
commentaries to laundry lists and recipes. It may
well be as important as the Dead Sea Scrolls in
giving us a more complete picture of Judaism, and
especially of the way it mixes mysticism and
rationalism. Jews were assumed to have special
magical powers, notes Schaefer, and this particular
volume from the Genizah amounts virtually to a
handbook of contemporary magic, from amulets to
potions and love charms. “You’d write a love charm
down, and put it under the door of your beloved,”
says Schaefer.
The Renaissance saw a flowering of interest in
magic across Europe, as magical texts from the
ancient world were reconsidered in the light of the
“hard” science just beginning to emerge. “Magic had
always been practiced,” notes history professor
Anthony Grafton, one of whose specialties is
Renaissance magic. “It was always a big part of
church and university life. In the Renaissance, it
was given a new classical basis, thanks to
rediscovered Greek texts about magic and an interest
in technology. And it becomes a huge force of its
own in theology and philosophy.”
Grafton points to both Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus
and Shakespeare’s The Tempest as evidence of the
ongoing interest in what was called “natural” magic,
which dealt with the magi’s supposed power to turn
the special properties of the earth and stars to
their advantage. “This kind of magic had an impact
on the growth of modern science,” says Grafton.
“Francis Bacon, for example, was fascinated by the
this idea of power and knowledge, and though his own
idea of knowledge and power was quite different from
the magical one, he certainly was influenced by it.
By the middle and late 17th century, there’s no
question that the new science was defining itself
against magic.”
Or, as Don Skemer, curator of manuscripts, puts
it, “the boundary lines between religion and magic
and science are very porous.” Skemer himself is
working on several grant-supported projects,
including a workshop on magical books and the
purchase of magical texts, the first of which is a
work by the 13th-century Islamic thinker, Al-Buni.
The best role in the Magic Project, however, may
belong to Andy Hoover ’07. Hoover spent the summer
working as Shostack’s intern, attending magical
conventions and scouting top magicians in an effort
to build a database of the very best magicians,
since many of them are not professionals but
dedicated amateurs like Gardner. Hoover himself is
not a magician – at least not yet. An actor who
played in a number of on-campus productions and in
McCarter Theatre’s acclaimed staging of Charles
Mee’s Big Love, Hoover got the job by writing an
essay about his high school pal Mike. Mike, it
seems, was a good magician but a little weak on the
patter. Hoover’s job was to provide Mike’s schtick.
In an attempt to find “magicians’ magicians,” he
went to the International Brotherhood of Magicians
convention in Cleveland at the end of June and then
to the Society of American Magicians convention in
St. Louis in July. “Magicians, in my experience, are
a great group of people, very friendly, very warm,”
he says. “I was afraid going in that it would be a
cultish thing and I’d be excluded, but it wound up
being an advantage. Despite the magicians’ code
about not revealing tricks, when they do encounter
an outsider who seems to have a genuine interest in
magic, there’s nothing they like better than showing
him how to do tricks and what their world is all
about.”
Hoover reckons that by mid-July he’d seen some 50
magicians and was busily typing up notes to present
to Shostack. Among the more amazing people he
encountered were 22-year-old Jason Latimer, who drew
a standing ovation from other magicians for making
balls materialize in a crystal glass, and Chase
Curtis, who performed a similar trick by making
larger and larger batteries appear out of nowhere,
working his way up to car batteries.
“It’s amazing how many tricks are based on sheer
audacity,” says Hoover over lunch, waving a nacho
around as if he’s about to make it disappear, which
he does, but by rather ordinary means. “Once you’re
at the convention everyone assumes you are one of
them. So I had a rare opportunity to learn how many
of these tricks were done without first knowing the
basic principles of magic. I’m not bound by any
official oath [of secrecy].”
But don’t get your hopes up. For all the
excitement Hoover clearly feels about his magical
summer, he has no intention of giving away any
secrets. What he will do is help Shostack spread
magic around the Princeton campus. If the Project
produces anything close to the wonder that animates
Hoover, it will be a fitting tribute to Gardner
indeed.
Merrell Noden ’78 is a freelance writer and
frequent PAW contributor. |
