Nearly seven years ago, LAexcites described watching Tom Frank perform at the Magic Castle as something akin to spending time with an old friend — except this particular friend happened to be an elite magician.
Spend any amount of time talking with Frank today and that impression hasn’t changed much. He remains warm, funny and remarkably forthcoming, as comfortable discussing the mechanics of a magic routine as he is friendship, mortality, marriage or the physical challenges that have complicated a craft dependent on extraordinary control of the hands.
At 61, Frank has been doing this for most of his life. The seed was planted at age five, when a magician performed at a combined birthday party for Frank and his siblings. By seven, he was performing at birthday parties himself, and at 15, he landed his first steady gig at Kings Island amusement park, working six days a week over two summers.
As a teenager, Frank came under the tutelage of magicians Larry Pringle and Paul Swinford, who introduced him to what he calls the “artistry of sleight of hand.” At 18, he dropped out of high school to move to New York City and become a street performer before eventually heading to New Orleans to study with Jim Cellini, whom Frank considers one of the finest street magicians in history.
Frank already had a working repertoire of tricks by then, but Cellini taught him lessons that extended beyond technique.
“He taught me how to get a crowd, how to keep a crowd and how to get the money,” Frank recalls.
The streets also gave him something no amount of solitary rehearsal could replicate: repetition. While performers might talk about completing 20 shows during a week at the Magic Castle, Frank remembers doing as many as 20 in a single day while street performing.
Those thousands upon thousands of performances helped shape the style LAexcites encountered firsthand in 2019, best described as technically sophisticated without feeling clinical, mischievous without becoming smug and intimate enough that the magic often seemed secondary to the connection Frank established with the people watching him.
Among the routines he holds dearest are two classics, the Cups and Balls and Linking Rings. Pringle told him as a young magician that if he didn’t perform both, he wasn’t a “real magician,” and Frank took the challenge seriously.
His five-ring routine grew from an old manuscript describing magician Jack Miller’s routine that Frank encountered as a teenager and painstakingly deciphered. He eventually developed a version performed to poetic patter inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” holding it “very close to my vest for years” before sharing it with the magic community.
Frank has now been manipulating those five solid steel rings for roughly four decades, making movements that required years to master appear almost casual.
“It takes years of practice to get it good,” he emphasizes. “It’s not something you’ll learn overnight.”
Then there is the decidedly less solemn multiplying-banana routine, during which bananas seemingly materialize from nowhere. Frank didn’t invent the effect but has manufactured his own iterations of it with the help of a chemist and fabricator.
“I love that it takes about 30 seconds,” he explains. “It’s not really a magic trick as much as it is a comedy non sequitur.”
After nearly half a century of performing, however, even the most practiced hands encounter new challenges.
Frank has developed an essential tremor that can cause his hands to shake. He also lives with severe tinnitus, which he describes as a siren that never stops and can unpredictably intensify. Neither condition is life-threatening, but both strike particularly close to home for a magician who has long prided himself on technical precision.
“I’m not nervous about [performing any] trick,” he says. “I’m worried because I don’t always know what my hands are going to do.”
Sometimes that means slightly simplifying sophisticated coin manipulation because even a slight tremor can send a coin falling from his fingers. The audience doesn’t know what he originally intended to do, Frank reasons, so they don’t know anything has changed. He does, though, and that distinction still bothers a performer accustomed to exactitude.
Still, Frank continues to practice regularly, even if that sometimes means only 15 or 20 minutes spent running routines, rolling coins over his fingers and doing finger exercises. Adapting, he has come to realize, is simply another part of what he’s done since taking up the art form.
“That’s what being a professional is about,” he observes. “You figure out how to work through things.”
A cigar and cocktail have also become part of Frank’s pre-show ritual, an image that seems to suit a man who remains meticulous about his craft without taking himself quite so seriously.
This summer, Frank has also been appearing in Cleveland’s The Magicians Table, an immersive theatrical magic production that places him in a different performance environment from much of the solo work that has defined his career. His next stop brings him back to considerably more familiar surroundings.
Frank first performed at the Magic Castle at 21 in 1986, beginning a relationship with the legendary Hollywood institution that now spans four decades. From Sept. 14 through 20, he’ll return to the Library Bar, where he’ll perform from 7 to 11 p.m., once again working in a room whose intimacy and flexibility suit him particularly well.
Every time the room fills, Frank can perform another show, drawing from enough material that even a repeat visitor need not see the same performance twice.
“If the same person happens to see me four different times, I can do four different sets without repeating an effect,” Frank states assuredly.
He might turn an opener into a closer, reverse the order of a set or decide that a particular trick deserves more emotional depth. Beneath that spontaneity are decades of honing his craft and an enormous mental inventory of material, but also a sense that performing magic is less about marching through a predetermined sequence than responding to the people directly in front of him.
This Magic Castle engagement also carries personal weight far beyond the stage.
On the final night of his week there, Sept. 20, Frank will emcee a celebration of life for his longtime friend Sylvester the Jester. The two met when they were both 15 at a magic convention in Columbus, Ohio, and decades later became housemates in Los Angeles.
Frank remembers the bond simply: “We were cosmic soul brothers.”
Sylvester developed early-onset Alzheimer’s disease and recently died after a long decline. Frank has been helping organize the memorial, coordinating speakers and assembling photographs and video from his friend’s life.
When fellow magician Kevin James asked him to emcee the gathering, Frank warned that he couldn’t promise he wouldn’t cry.
“I wear my heart on my sleeve,” Frank acknowledges. “As a professional performer, I know how to reel it in when I need to, but I also don’t mind other people seeing me cry.”
There is something revealing in that admission. Frank speaks openly about absorbing other people’s emotions, sometimes to his own detriment, and about the importance of having an emotional release rather than allowing those feelings to remain bottled up.
“If you don’t have some kind of emotional release, everything festers and bottles up inside you,” he declares, “and that’s not healthy.”
Perhaps that helps explain the personable quality of Frank’s magic. The affability never feels pasted onto the performance. Watching him can feel less like witnessing a formal demonstration of technique than spending time with someone you’ve somehow known for years, who just happens to be able to make solid steel rings seemingly pass through one another.
The same affection for people surfaces when Frank talks about Polly, his wife, whom he first met at Cincinnati’s School for Creative and Performing Arts around 1980 and has now known for roughly 46 years.
“She’s been with me through thick and thin,” he reflects, particularly when discussing the difficulties associated with his tinnitus. “I’ve never met a stronger or more compassionate woman.”
They married on Dec. 21, 2012 — the purported end of the Mayan calendar and, in Frank’s telling, their “Armageddon wedding.” The world, of course, did not end, and the marriage proved considerably more durable. Nearly 14 years later, Frank jokes that Polly has already outlasted his two previous marriages combined.
That longevity naturally becomes another punchline. Frank tells his wife that the best way out of their marriage is to kill him.
“Good luck,” he tells her. “I’m immortal.”
Mortality, despite the punchline, has inevitably entered Frank’s thinking. Friends and mentors have passed away, his body occasionally refuses instructions his hands once followed effortlessly and, perhaps most significantly, he has gradually become for younger magicians what Pringle, Swinford and Cellini once were for him.
That transition seems to have caught him somewhat by surprise.
Frank once owned magic shops in Cincinnati and Seattle and has had protégés of his own. In 2017, he traveled to 40 cities in 60 days on a lecture tour, another indication that somewhere along the way the student and working magician had also become a teacher. Yet he still seems slightly reluctant to see himself as one of magic’s older statesmen.
His father once offered some perspective.
“You don’t know how many Cellinis you’ve been to other people.”
The comment has acquired greater meaning as fellow magicians have told Frank they wouldn’t have the careers they have without his help. His humility surfaces in the instinct to deflect the compliment. He may have taught them some fundamentals involving business, psychology or philosophy, he maintains, but they did the heavy lifting themselves.
That response says considerably more about Frank’s idea of legacy than any list of tricks or career credits could.
He doesn’t seem especially concerned with whether history remembers Tom Frank as a great magician. His videos will remain online. People will still be able to watch his Linking Rings work and the Poe-inspired routine. The techniques he has spent decades refining can outlive the hands performing them.
But when Frank considers what he actually wants to leave behind, he speaks less about magic than about people.
“If I could be remembered for anything,” Frank confides, “it would be for helping other people and being of service.”
For a magician who has spent the majority of his life perfecting the art of making things disappear, Tom Frank seems increasingly interested in what remains.
Cover image caption: Tom Frank works his magic with an impressive card trick at the Magic Castle in Hollywood, CA. Photo by Taylor Wong.
Tom Frank performs in the Library Bar at the Magic Castle from Sept. 14 through 20. The Magic Castle is located at 7001 Franklin Ave. in Hollywood and is the private clubhouse of the Academy of Magical Arts. For more information about visiting the Magic Castle and making reservations, visit magiccastle.com. To learn more about Frank or inquire about booking him for an event, visit tomfrankmagic.com.
