The Death And Life Of The Great Lafayette Ian Robertson Gordon Rutter by Ian Robertson, Gordon Rutter 9780956870100, 0956870104 instant download after payment.

On 9th May 1911, The Palace Empire Theatre in Edinburgh was packed
with an audience of 3,000 people. They were there to see the spectacular
illusions of the world’s most talented and famed magician, The Great
Lafayette.

A friend of Harry Houdini and a much-copied illusionist, offstage The
Great Lafayette was a private individual who shunned social events and
had little to do with his fellow magicians. Houdini was an exception. In
1899, he had given The Great Lafayette the dog that the magician adored
above everything and everyone else in his life. Her name was Beauty.

Born Sigmund Neuberger in Munich in 1871, The Great Lafayette had
emigrated to the USA with his family, as did Harry Houdini.  Both
Neuberger and Houdini had the fortune to be born into an age when the
fame of great illusionists could spread quickly around the globe, thanks
to emerging technologies as well as great demand from audiences to be
amazed and entertained.

One of America’s most popular magicians in the late 19th
century was the Chinese illusionist Ching Ling Foo, who would provide
inspiration and a challenge for not only Neuberger, but also two other
famed magicians of the era. These were Charles Carter (Carter the Great)
and  Billy Robinson, who as his alter-ego Chung Ling Soo, performed for
many years without some of his friends even realising who he was. He
was fatally injured while in character, on stage, when a shooting act
went badly wrong.

Neuberger’s own career started in fairly typical fashion, learning
the craft of vaudeville out west in the USA‘s mining camps and towns. It
was a tough but lucrative business and probably the baptism of fire
that any performer needed to prepare them for a life on stage.  During
this time, Neuberger developed a shooting act with bow and arrows, and
this he presented in London in the early 1890s.