These past few months have been tough for me, aside from medical problems. I refer to the fact that I’m losing longtime friends, here in the USA and abroad. The latest of these is Charles Raymond Reynolds, my dear, dear, friend who died November 4th at age 78 of liver cancer. He left behind his dedicated wife, Regina. Charlie was a versatile creator of magical effects, a valued consultant to famous magicians, a very skilled photographer, a producer and director of spectacular magical illusions – both on TV, film, and on the theater stage – and a very close friend of the one-and-only Doug Henning and of both the Harry Blackstones – father and son. He was a confidante of seriously important illusionists who listened when he spoke, changed direction when he so advised them, and incorporated tiny nuances into their featured routines that he devised with uncanny insight and care. Countless optical, mechanical, electronic, and audio cues and twists that Charlie originated are integral parts of marvelous dramas that will never reveal his name but bear his stamp…
Charlie was also a very accomplished sleight-of-hand performer, and could bring an audience of professional and amateur magicians to their feet with cheers as he carried off a routine such as the Cups and Balls, in which a set of metal cups inverted over a simple ball would confound the spectators’ expectations of just where that mystically furtive object could be found at any given time, only to end up in Charlie’s pocket while lemons or baseballs dropped out of the just-emptied cups… It was a classic, a wonder, a stunner, an illusion, a beautiful prestidigitation from the hands of a master.
I must tell you a behind-the-scenes episode that will illustrate just how exciting and challenging – as well as humorous – Charlie’s life was. For one of the live Doug Henning NBC-TV specials that Charlie designed for him, Doug insisted on the network hiring only TMers as assistants and workers. This resulted in a major set of problems for Charlie, tedious interruptions of rehearsals caused by sporadic private Transcendental Meditation sessions with Doug and the staff sitting cross-legged with closed eyes, and other very inconvenient and expensive pauses that drove the network producers and directors to distraction. One of the show’s illusions known in the trade as The Million-Dollar Mystery, was the stunning closing magical “production” trick that resulted in a very large number of startled white doves and giddy female assistants surging out of a previously-apparently-empty box and flitting happily about the studio – the birds, that is. That whole production almost came to the Total Disaster stage. You see, another routine planned for earlier in the show involved two tigers in the cast of performers, and the night before that show was broadcast, in the backstage area where the doves were caged, an unfortunate event took place. You should know that tigers like to just lie about and snooze, when they’re not hungry. That’s not the showbiz attitude, so animal handlers design the tigers’ feeding schedule so that they’re just hungry enough that they’ll pay attention and look alert and fierce while on camera. Late the night before the show, the cats apparently got the scent of something potentially good to eat, and broke free to rip up the huge dove cage and snack on the inhabitants. When the staff showed up the next morning, they found some very satisfied jungle cats snoring away amid a gory scene of feathers and lots of dove blood. This was against the carefully-laid plans of the livestock handlers, because now these fully satiated cats were quite sleepy. Even more critically, the planned finale was in shambles, with no birds to fill the air…
The staff – and particularly Charlie – were understandably panicked at the unexpected vanishment of the doves. Searches for enough replacement doves in local markets proved unsuccessful, and even I volunteered to call every magician in my phonebook to enlist local magi to contribute, but met with little success. So the TMers had to rustle up anything and everything that walked, crawled, or flew, to emerge from that magical box. The resultant spectacle on TV was a barnyard of pigeons, cats, chickens, ducks, poodles, and other wildlife that poured from the box along with the comely ladies, not quite the planned spiritually-inspiring flock of doves that had fed the tigers.
Yes, Charlie Reynolds lived a long, productive, and exciting life. One cannot really expect more, I guess. He was not only very talented, he was a fine human being. He was my friend for some half-century or more, a valued buddy. I will miss him greatly, and every time I see a performance of the Cups and Balls routine, I will compare it with his…
I will try to be kind.
You can read the New York Times story from last week about Charlie's death here.