Although I had hoped to produce this issue without disturbing him, I finally had to contact Eddie Fields in regard to a photo permission. The conversation turned into a mini-inteview, the contents of which I am most pleased to pass on to you.

I asked Eddie if he could elaborate on The Unholy Five, an inner-circle cabal consisting of Eddie, Audley Walsh, John Scarne, Walter Gibson, and Orson Welles.

He related the very funny story that appears in his biography. The group used to meet at Holden's Magic Shop in New York, after which they would cross the street and convene at the Dixie Hotel. One day they decided to drive over to Audley Walsh's home, in New Jersey, which required crossing the George Washington Bridge. Walsh had with him a bag of rubber production goods he bought at Holden's, among which was a lifelike rubber hand. Orson Welles stuck a half-dollar between two of the fingers, and pushed the thing up his sleeve. When they approached the toll booth, he held out his arm for the girl to take the coin. As she grasped it, Welles let out a scream and retracted his arm, leaving the girl holding both the coin and the hand. As the book puts it, "the Unholy Five observed a gratifying halt of traffic in the lane behind them" as they sped away.

I explained to Eddie that I had been discussing his code with Danny Orleans.

We did so many things, Eddie said. George would be blindfolded, and he would read cards, telegrams, describe rings, etc. He'd recite someone's social security number and then say, "Give it back to Henry."

Re added layers of deceptiveness, Eddie once noticed a spectator holding a quarter. He walked past the fellow and across the room to another spectator who was holding, say, a comb. George would say, "It's a comb. Brand name ACE." And Eddie would say, "Over there," pointing back across the room to the man with the quarter. "It's a coin," George would say. "A 25-cent piece. Tell him to look at it." Eddie would instruct the man to look at it. "The date is 1934." Although Eddie had glimpsed the date in passing, it now seemed that there was no possible way for Eddie or George to know that information.

We got around to the subject of troublemakers, and contingencies.

We had an answer for everything, so many ways to do everything. Sometimes a spectator would hold an object in his closed fist. "What does this man hold in his hand?" Eddie would say. "More than he holds in his head!" George would respond. Sometimes in this situation Eddie would touch the man's hand with a joy buzzer. This was usually sufficient to cause the hand to open and allow Eddie to glimpse the object. Later Eddie heard about cattle prods and designed a small one he could conceal in his hand. This unfailingly caused the hand to open.

I'd like to see Danny Orleans use a cattle prod at a corporate affair! As I tried to wrap up the conversation, we touched briefly on card tricks.

Eddie's favorite trick is the Invisible Deck. He worked out a handling where he spread cards all over a pool table. Someone was allowed to break three balls, and wherever a selected ball, say the three-ball, would land, that would indicate the selected card. Meanwhile an Invisible Deck had been left on a rail of the pool table. The deck could now be spread and the prediction revealed. [This item is demonstrated on Eddie's video.]

Once Eddie was on a cruise ship, and he held up a deck, after a card had been selected and returned, between two fingers. "Come with me," he said, and he led the entire party up to the main deck, from where he hurled the cards overboard. There floating on the water were 51 face-down cards and one face-up card, the selection. Eddie said the effect isn't his, so I can't reveal the method (astute magicians can work it out). "Do you know Murphy Brown [Candice Bergen]? She did it on Letterman, in a swimming pool!"

And for the record: did you get more than five people ahead in the dime store code?

Oh, yes. We did seven. We were very good.