There are a few movies I watch when I’m having trouble falling asleep. Not because they’re boring, but because they’re comforting. The Portrait of Jennie is one of my favorites. A vaudeville theatre called Hammerstein’s is a key part of the movie and I’d always assumed it was not a real place. But it was. I was just going through my book records and came across the Hammerstein’s flyer below, featuring mystics John T. and Eva Fay and something called thaumaturgy.
Ever since researching Duke University’s Parapsychology Laboratory I’ve developed an interest is parapsychology history. So here I am, 15 years later, looking up John and Eva and thaumaturgy, because I love going down a good rabbit hole.
Why do those rabbit holes so often lead to something sad? Thaumaturgy refers to the ability to produce miracles, to change the physical world in some supernatural way. It has a long history, but I was more curious about John and Eva. The first thing I find is that he shot himself in 1908, when he was around 32. His wife was 25.
According to the New York Times he was a Harvard graduate. But they also said “Mr. Fay was one of the wealthiest men on the American stage, and had a splendid home at Melrose Highlands, near Boston.” His mother, Eva Fay, was a famous medium, who was repeatedly exposed as a fraud, once by Houdini, and I wonder where the money came from, and how he went from Harvard to vaudeville.
But something made him miserable enough to take his life. A few years before he’d tried to stop the production of a play that was going to expose him as a fraud. He took the producer to court and lost, but I didn’t find any evidence that the play was ever performed, or gave him any trouble if it was. He suffered from what was then called nervous dyspepsia, which was not understood in the 19th century, but it can lead to depression, for which there was little effective treatment.
I’ll bet if I started researching former Hammerstein’s acts I’d find a lot of sad stories like this. It’s a sad world, but some worlds within the world are sadder. In addition to a picture of the flyer is a picture of the real Hammerstein’s and John T. Fay’s mother.
