A Celestial Celebration
LEONA LAMAR
“The Girl with 1,000 Eyes”
Women have done quite a bit of fortune-telling, crystal-gazing, and mind-reading, especially during the vaudeville era. With big stars like Anna Eva Fay, Alexander, and the Zancigs leading the way, a host of men and women took up second-sight. Some laid it on pretty thick and convinced earnest audience members that they were truly capable of reading minds and seeing the future. Many were flash-in-the-pan acts, but one who lasted for over fifteen years—often as a headliner—was Leona LaMar, “The Girl with 1,000 Eyes.” She also called herself “The Question Girl: The Mental Marvel of the Century.” Her motto was “Sees All—Knows All—Tells All.” I’ve been enchanted with Leona ever since attending an antique show in Atlanta in 1993, where I discovered a free-standing theatre marquee circa 1920 that promoted her performance. Other similiar pieces have surfaced.
Leona LaMar had a 20-minute Alexander-style question-and-answer act, in which she sat blindfolded on stage and identified objects that her husband borrowed from audience members and held up. But the real heart of her show was providing answers to sealed questions asked by the audience. “Will my business succeed?” “Who will win Friday’s horse race?” “Is my husband faithful?” Reviewers consistently praised the speed of her working, the seeming absence of the usual obvious trickery involved in such acts, and the fact that she took questions from the entire theatre, including the balconies. Magicians praised her. J.P. Ornson reported to The Sphinx that she turned people away at every show in Buffalo and was generating tons of publicity. Dorny called her a “solid hit and a big sensation.” Thomas Chew Worthington described her as a “performer of finished excellence.” Bill Hilliar named hers “one of the best mind-reading acts in vaudeville.”
Like many others in the field, she tried to shroud her origins in theatrical illusion. Leona insisted that her father was Count Alexander Von Vos Dumar of St. Petersburg, and while her father was indeed a Russian immigrant, he was no aristocrat. In fact, according to John Buescher’s book Radio Psychics, he was convicted of larceny in Rochester, New York, after stealing carpet from a furniture store. He died in 1890 when Leona was five. She was born Leontine Dumar in Rochester, New York. While the earliest census records put her year of birth at 1886, her headstone reads “Leontine Dumar Shannon October 26, 1883—April 22, 1941.” She was actually born in 1885. In her prime in 1923, she told journalists she was nineteen years old. According to Buescher, she stayed nineteen for years.
But her age was just one of Leona’s many sleights-of-publicity. For instance, she claimed that her mind-reading ability began at age eight. It may have been pure puffery, but she swore that as a child she could find hidden Christmas presents and could anticipate who the visitors were when the doorbell rang. She told Billboard in 1919 that in school she could predict the next day’s lessons, sometimes even before the teacher had decided what they would be. She claimed to have gotten this gift from her mother, who she said was also psychic. Yet she took her time exploiting this talent on the stage. In the 1905 census, Leona is listed as an actress, and a search of Billboard and Variety shows her performing as a singer, then a contortionist, then a “physical culture girl.”
She began her transition from minor vaudevillian to headlining mind-reader when she met Walter A. Shannon in 1914, and by the end of the year, she had begun practicing the talent that would win her fame. Shannon became her husband, manager, and on-stage partner, though much of his work happened in the audience rather than on stage. With his charismatic help and her obvious skill, “The Girl with a 1,000 Eyes” would soon shoot to the top. Already by January 1917, she took out a half-page ad in the Billboard proclaiming herself “The Box Office Record Smasher.” She touted attendance records at several theaters, including drawing 6,000 people in one day at Poli’s in Scranton, Pennsylvania. She was even held over an extra week at the famed Palace Theatre in New York in 1917. Her rapid success and grueling schedule caused quite a strain, though, and Buescher reveals that in September of 1917, she attempted suicide by turning on the gas in her dressing room in a Salt Lake City theatre. Fortunately, Walter found her, and she recovered in the hospital.
Not surprisingly, her success spawned imitators. So many of them stole her title that Billboard sarcastically suggested that someone should add an extra optic and become the “Girl of a 1,001 Eyes.”
LaMar made various predictions about world events and had her share of hits and misses. Billboard reported in 1919 that she saved her husband $3,000 by predicting the outcome of the famous boxing match between Jess Willard and Jack Dempsey in Toledo—Walter had been planning to bet on Willard. Her war predictions were mixed. According to Variety, at the Majestic in Chicago in June 1918, she predicted that the World War would last one more year (it lasted just five more months) and that the German submarine Deutschland would have safe voyage during the war (it did). But her abilities raised poignant emotional hopes during the War, and The Sphinx reported how that audience in Chicago “kept her busy answering questions relating to soldier boys in France.” Like other crystal gazers of her time, LaMar also gave special “ladies only” matinees so that women could ask “the most private and delicate of questions”—an ingenious marketing strategy to increase the number of female patrons in the afternoons.
Reviewers repeatedly commented on the speed of her performance and the “nearly supernatural” nature of her answers to questions. As a result, she was accused of using plants. So Walter Shannon offered a $1000 reward in 1917 to anyone who could prove that she pre-arranged audience participation. The challenge simply generated more buzz, and she constantly performed before sold-out crowds. When she appeared at Keith’s in Indianapolis in 1919, a magician wrote to The Sphinx, amazed at how gullible some of her audience members were. “It seems strange that intelligent people can believe all the dope handed out by these thought transmitters and crystal gazers,” he wrote.
But believe her they did. There was a hunger for belief in the unexplained. In 1921, Leona LaMar appeared at a convention of persons interested in psychical phenomena, organized by Hereward Carrington at the Hotel Astor in New York City. As Joseph Rinn reports in his book Sixty Years of Psychical Research, over 800 people—most of them women—attended, and LaMar gave a demonstration of mind-reading. She had a talent for relating to audience members, and one reason for her appeal must be the personal way in which she responded to questions. Buescher recounts that she performed on radio for the first time in Boston in 1924, answering questions that had been mailed in by the audience. She would do others during her heyday. A Billboard reviewer catching her act at Loew’s Theater in Minneapolis in 1927 wrote that “she gives members of her audience lots of free advice, which is remarkably accurate. The way she calls the names of her questioners, answers the questions and gives out information is mystifying.”
As the vaudeville historian Joe Laurie put it, Leona “really cleaned up.” Lou Dufour noted in Fabulous Years that she made $2500 per week. She also sold a pitch-book called The Book of Psychology at her performances. LaMar was so hot that a film studio and a publishing house were reportedly interested in her story in 1924. A tour of the UK in 1922 began at the Finsbury Empire in London, where an initially cold British audience soon warmed to LaMar’s act. During the visit she apparently drew favorable comment from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, though he would not have been pleased to read five years later in Variety that she was planning to take up the mantle of the late Houdini and expose fraudulent spiritualists during her performances on the Loew’s circuit.
In 1929 Walter retired, and Leona joined “The Three World’s Wonders” under the direction of Klein and Turner and Sam Wagner, a noted Coney Island side-show operator. The other two “wonders” were a little person named Major Mite and “It,” billed as a “double-sexed” attraction. Billboard announced that the three would come into close contact with theatre patrons through mezzanine appearances at stated hours. The writer further reassured readers in those politically incorrect days that “the offering will not be invested with the side-show atmosphere of others exploiting freaks in seasons past.” The act was short-lived, and LaMar briefly tried teaming up with magician George LaFollette in 1931, but that show opened and closed almost simultaneously.
Tragedy struck on November 28, 1931. Walter died after a brief illness. He was 59 and had been in show business since the age of 14. A protégé of circus giant James A. Bailey, he later managed the struggling Norris & Rowe Circus, which folded in 1910. A few years later, he took the helm of his wife’s career. The couple made a small fortune and lived in a $100,000 home that was described as one of the “show places” in Englewood, New Jersey. Shannon was a generous man, and Variety reported in 1926 that he had donated the property for a home for elderly actors in Englewood. Things went downhill quickly after his death. Walter had promoted his wife tirelessly for fifteen years, and clearly his showmanship was an important key to Leona’s success. So she mostly retired from the stage, and from her Englewood address, she was reduced to giving private forecasts through hand-written letters to those who wrote in with questions. In her fifties, she was still using pictorial stationery from her prime.
In one of her last recorded public performances, Leona appeared at the Grand Opera House in New York City in December 1935 as the closing number, which normally was reserved for acts considered so bad that they would encourage patrons to leave the show to make room for the crowd coming in for the next performance. It was one of the worst spots on the bill. However, the theatre put Leona on last so she could announce her appearance at a booth in the lobby after the show to answer questions privately. Variety reported lines at the booth immediately after the curtain fell, so the manager’s plan worked.
Leona LaMar died of a heart attack at her home on April 22, 1941, and was buried in the Mount Carmel Cemetery in Englewood. She kept up the old illusions until the end, and her age was reported as forty-eight in Billboard, though she was fifty-five. Her funeral was attended by a delegation from the Old Actors’ Home that her husband had helped establish fifteen years earlier. It was a place she visited often. She left behind a son Walter and a daughter Leona, as well as a legacy as one of the fastest, smoothest, and most successful second-sight performers in magic history.
This article first appeared in the May 2007 issue of The Linking Ring and is used here by permission. I am thankful to Geraldine Duclow, Head of the Theatre Collection at the Free Library of Philadelphia for information on Leona LaMar, as well as to William Rauscher for the use of photographs from his collection. I also used Ask Alexander, Ancestry.com, and the Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive. In updating the piece in 2023 for Magicana, I drew from John Buesher’s book Radio Psychics (2021).
Stargazing
Other female mind-readers with the letter “L” include Millie LaMar (ca. 1863-1905—no relation that I’m aware of—she was an albino clairvoyant in the 1890s), La Celeste (Agnes Josolyne, 1911-1992), Le Moyne, Lorenza, and two Luciles (Robertson, d. 1967, and Roberts, 1909-1977). In 2023, I acquired a 1904 postcard of the Great Lora, who had a most unusual mind-reading act. As her partner held up objects for her to identify, she answered from a perch on the stage, blindfolded, and dressed in a parrot costume. There have also been several female escapists: Madame LaShee, Madame Lasko, Margarette LeClaire, Esme Levante (1922-1989), Miss Lincoln, and Effie Lorraine.
Here are more “L” list notables: Lucille LaFarge (1903-1982) was the wife and chief assistant to the British illusionist Cecil Lyle. The actress Veronica Lake (1919-1973) learned magic for her role as a nightclub magicienne in This Gun for Hire in 1942. Krystyn Lambert has made quite a success as a young magician during the past two decades. Diane Lane (1957-2008) was an active magician in San Diego. The German Peggy Lauder performed blindfolded manipulations in the 1930s. Joan Lawton (1939-2020) was the longtime hostess at the Magic Castle. Cathy Laveau, one of the few African-American female magicians working today, is based in Las Vegas. Madame Lazerne lost her props in a 1908 shipwreck. Jenni Lea (1906-1996) flourished in Oklahoma City in the ‘40s. Agnes Leamon (1911-1978) also performed during the same decade and was from St. Louis. Paula Lee was English, as is Stacey Lee, who lobbied to get women admitted into the Magic Circle.
Evelyn Leedy (b. 1930) did magic in Cleveland as a teenager in the late Forties. Melanie Leichtmann was a pro in Germany from 1895 to the 1930s. June Leith is a magician from Scotland. Lenore (Eleanor Walton) and Hilda LeRoy are names from the ‘30s and ‘40s, while Tina Lenert is one of the most creative and well-loved acts in the business. The Levards were three women who carried on the show of Philip Levard while he served in WWI. Shari Lewis (1934-1998) learned magic from her father Abe Hurwitz and later became the famous partner of Lamb Chop. Based in Boston, Felice Ling is a street magician, but also a social scientist and UX researcher. Laura London is currently one of the leading female magicians in the UK, and an expert on the life and career of Mercedes Talma. Another English stage illusionist is Josephine Lee. There is also Gabriella Lester a young escape artist and magician based out of Vancouver, Canada.
And! There are more: Florrie Lingard, Lucy Lingerman (1870-1926), Julie Llusion, Layne Loughland (1967-2016, partner of Stuart Loughland as “Safire”), Sherry Lukas (who starred in “Spellbound” at Harrah’s in the 1990s), Sunny Lupton (b. 1939), Zobeide Luti (who performed in Barnum’s show in the 1870s), Sheila Lyon (who researches women in magic and recreates the act of Anna Eva Fay), and the Canadian magic illustrator Pat Lyons (1933-2016). Finally, I salute perhaps the most important dynasty of women in magic: the Larsen family, with Geraldine (1906-1998), Erika, Heidi, and Liberty, and the late, much beloved Princess Irene (1936-2016).