Gloria Dea began performing when she was five years old. Even then, she was sassy and self-assured.
One magic trick that Gloria Dea (1922-2023) did recently, before a small audience of fans gathered in her bedroom, was to apply lipstick (Wet n Wild’s Honolulu Is Calling, to be exact) without using a mirror. She stayed inside the lines, which is hard at any age, but at the time she happened to be ninety-nine years old. Dea had performed more traditional magic—mostly sleight of hand, with a specialty in billiard-ball manipulation—since she was a child. In 1941, when she was a teen-ager, she appeared at the Round-Up Room at the El Rancho Vegas, becoming the first magician known to have performed on the Las Vegas Strip. She was the trifecta of exceptionalism. She introduced this form of entertainment in Las Vegas (which has since become the epicenter of magic); she was notably young to be performing professionally; and she was a female magician, a rarity for sure when she appeared in the Round-Up Room, and, to this day, still an uncommon thing.
Dea, who was an only child, was born in the Bay Area. Her mother, Martha, was a seamstress. Her father, Leo Metzner, owned a paint store, but his passion was magic, and after work he performed at clubs under the name the Great Leo. He began teaching Dea tricks when she was a preschooler, and had her performing onstage when she was five years old. Even then, she was sassy and self-assured. Once, when her father instructed her to do a certain trick, she refused because she thought it was stupid. She later recounted to her caregiver, Elizabeth Bowes, that the Great Leo shoved her onto the stage anyway, so she altered the trick to suit her exacting five-year-old standards. The relationship between father and daughter seems to have been complicated. For a time, they performed together, until one night an audience member commented that the little girl was a better magician than her father. After that, the Great Leo refused to appear onstage with her. Nonetheless, he continued to teach her tricks of the trade. By the time she was eleven, Gloria was one of the youngest members of the Pacific Coast Association of Magicians and was regularly pulling two guinea pigs and a pigeon out of a hat onstage. “They never get stage fright, and neither do I,” she told a reporter from the Oakland Tribune, in 1934.
The elder Metzners had a taste for gambling, so they made frequent trips to Las Vegas with little Gloria. She quit high school and began working as a chorus girl. After her historic appearance at the El Rancho, she began a successful run there. In her shows, she mixed magic with hypnotism and dancing—she specialized in the rumba (sometimes removing her skirt and flourishing it like a cape). “She liked her costumes to be as skimpy as possible,” her friend AnnaRose Einarsen, a hypnotist and magician, told me recently.
After working a few years in Las Vegas, Dea secured a contract with Columbia Pictures, and began a mid-list movie career, appearing in such creations as “Mexicana,” “King of the Congo,” “The Prodigal,” and the worst movie ever made, “Plan 9 From Outer Space,” in which she appeared as a shrieking mourner. She told John Katsilometes of the Las Vegas Review-Journal that she concurred with this popular assessment of the film, adding that the director, Ed Wood, was “the worst,” but noting, “I had fun making it.” She was so busy with film work that when she and her boyfriend, Jack Statham, decided to get married, they did it on the set of “Delightfully Dangerous,” in which she had a role as a clown dancer. (For convenience’s sake, the film’s producer married the couple.) Off the set, she devoted herself to the American Guild of Variety Artists and was installed, along with four men, as a member of the San Fernando Valley Labor Coordinating Council.
Her last film appearance was to be a spoof of the 1963 Elizabeth Taylor epic, “Cleopatra.” At that time, Dea owned a pink 1962 Cadillac, which she had outfitted with a twelve-inch television between the seats. One day, when she was on the set and the car was parked in the studio lot, someone stole the television. She was so disgusted that she quit the film—and the film business—on the spot. She had already been working as a car salesperson between film gigs, so she turned to that profession full time. (“She was extremely entrepreneurial,” Bowes said. “She also had her insurance license and worked at jewelry shows.”) She met her fourth husband, Sam Anzalone, at Community Chevrolet, in Burbank, where they both worked. Her magic took a back seat, although she occasionally did benefits for Hadassah and B’nai B’rith, two Jewish community organizations to which she belonged.
In 1980, she and Sam moved to Las Vegas, but this marked the end of her time as a magician; she never appeared onstage again. Eventually, she sold or gave away most of her props and costumes. (Einarsen forged her friendship with Dea after discovering one of her skirts in a vintage shop and tracking her down.) Dea refused to explain to anyone why her time as a magician came to such a hard stop. She was known as a perfectionist, and Bowes wondered if she had somehow lost confidence in her abilities. She still kept busy: she spent one day a week at the casinos, where she would gamble for at least twelve hours straight, from midafternoon until the following morning. She slowed down her casino-going when she was ninety-eight or so, but she never gave it up completely.
In the past few years, Dea was discovered by a younger generation of magicians, including Einarsen, Lance Rich, Bizzaro, and David Copperfield, who visited her regularly. True to the magician’s credo, she said she wouldn’t explain any of her tricks, but she loved talking magic with them, and would offer an appraisal when Einarsen practiced her routine. “She was spicy,” Einarsen said. “She was really witty. She wasn’t the kindest teacher, but she would give me great critiques.” A week before Dea died, Einarsen asked her if she would consider going back onstage, and Dea said that she would. They discussed what tricks she might perform—the billiard balls, perhaps (her usual trick entailed maneuvering billiard balls so that they seem to multiply and then vanish), and one called Card and Orange, in which she would cause a playing card to disappear and then, miraculously, reappear inside a large, unpeeled orange. She would have certainly cooked up a glamorous costume, something a little risqué, and everyone who knew her was sure that her show would have been a smash. As Bowes said, “She could be successful at anything she touched.” ♦
https://www.newyorker.com/news/afterword/the-first-magician-on-the-vegas-strip
