The Great Lester

Lester and Frank Byron, Jr., at the table where the telephone bit lived, signed "Magically and Ventriloquially Yours, Lester." Potter & Potter Auctions, from the Collection of Edwin A. Dawes.

Every family has one relative that all the other stories run back to. In ours, that's the Great Lester. Edgar Bergen learned from him. The man who got Frank Marshall his job at the figure bench learned from him too, in a roundabout way, because Lester is the one who put in the word for him. Call Lester the grandfather of everything this art became and you're not stretching the truth. You're just catching up.^[1] So pull up a chair. This story goes back further than almost anybody else's in the family.

A stolen figure, a broke performer, and a favor for a countryman

He was born Maryan Czajkowski, in Poland, on September 8, 1879, according to the birth certificate that sits in the Vent Haven's own files, the same dates the family's own gravestone carries.^[1][2] He crossed the ocean with his mother in January 1881, just over a year old, his father having gone ahead a few months before. The family settled in Chicago.^[1] He started piano at six, added violin, cello and trumpet, and by fourteen he was doing magic around the city's beer gardens and dime museums. At sixteen his parents shipped him off to a college in Kentucky. He ran off and joined the Hummell & Hamilton Circus instead, driving tent stakes for his keep.^[1] He worked the museum circuit from Chicago to New York as "Kaloofra the Arabian" and "the Hindoo Magician," ate fire, swallowed swords, and handled snakes under the name "Bosco," which is how a man ends up fanged on the hand by a diamond-back rattlesnake and still shows up for the next show.^[1]

His very first figure wasn't bought from anybody. He whittled it himself with a jackknife, and it showed. Booking agents took one look at the rough thing and didn't believe he could do anything with it. A Chicago agent, short on acts, finally shipped him off to a small house in Galesburg, Illinois, with a warning from the manager: they'd send him out first so the crowd would forget how bad he was by the time the show ended. He was the hit of the bill. Inside three months he was headlining a Broadway house.^[3] That's the kind of start this whole family loves, the one where nobody believed in you until the second you opened your mouth.

Once he was established, he bought real figures, a first from a Chicago magic supply house, then a second, a papier-mache boy he converted into a girl so he'd have two acts out of one figure. Both were stolen off a streetcar. He had a booking and nothing to work with, so he opened the city directory, found a wood carver named Theodore Mack, and asked if Mack had any vent figures for sale. Mack told him he'd never made one in his life. Lester talked him into trying anyway, worked the bench alongside him because he had no money to pay for the labor any other way, and that block of wood became Frank Byron, Jr., the first figure the Mack shop ever built.^[1] The post inside him carries the date, by Lester's own account: 1902 or 1903.^[11]

Worth saying plainly, because our family gets this one wrong sometimes: Frank Byron, Jr. was not carved by Frank Marshall. Marshall wasn't even at the shop yet. Theodore Mack & Son made him, with Lester standing over the bench because he was too broke to pay for it any other way. Marshall came along a decade later, and here's the part I love: it was Lester who got him hired. In 1913 he walked a thirteen-year-old Polish immigrant kid named Frank Marzalkiewicz into that same shop and vouched for him, one countryman to another.^[6] Marshall grew up to carve half the famous faces in this family, and years later he made duplicarver copies of Frank Byron, Jr. himself. I own one.^[7] Two of the most important figures American ventriloquism ever produced both trace back to Lester walking into the same little shop, ten years apart.

The vaudeville years

At twenty-two he booked his first tour of Europe. He played every major vaudeville circuit there was, and at his peak he was pulling fifteen hundred to two thousand dollars a week, real money for a man who'd started out driving tent stakes. His last appearance in England came in 1936.^[1] Critic Ashton Stevens wrote up his own billing for him: "What's a Ventriloquist? and why a headliner? SEE THE GREAT LESTER." Performer Howard "the Great Chesterfield" Olson remembered catching him headline the Majestic Theatre on Monroe Street, Chicago, back when the microphone hadn't been invented yet, and called him "a yard stick with which they judged all other ventriloquists."^[8]

The bits he claimed as his own inventions ran nine deep: walking down the theater aisle smoking a cigarette while carrying on a dead-pan conversation with the crowd, drinking a glass of wine while the figure kept right on talking, a three-way telephone conversation worked through an upright phone with a mirror tucked into the mouthpiece so he could watch his own lips, a yodeling dummy, the figure blowing out his match, the busy signal on the phone, calling out the stations at Grand Central Depot.^[9] A few other vaudevillians claimed pieces of that same list. That's what happens when a bit is good enough to fill a house. Everybody wants to say they thought of it first. Nobody argues that Lester's version was the one the whole country believed.

My favorite Lester story, and it's a true one: in 1925 the stagehands and musicians decided to prank him mid-act, swapping straight whiskey for the wine in his drinking bit. Lester drank it dead-pan, not a flicker. Frank Byron, Jr., the wooden figure sitting on his knee, started coughing and shaking like he was the one who'd swallowed it.^[10] That's the whole art, folks, in one sentence. When the moment called for a reaction, Lester didn't take it. He gave it to the dummy.

The face with two feelings, and the phone that watched itself

Frank Byron, Jr.'s face was painted on purpose to hold two moods at once, one side set to smile, the other to look like it might cry, a deliberate psychological effect Lester said very few figure painters could pull off.^[11] The famous telephone bit had its own secret sitting in plain sight: a small round mirror set right into the mouthpiece, so Lester could check his own lips while three voices, his figure's, the caller's, and his own, argued down the line at once. The Vent Haven still holds that actual telephone, several duplicates of it, and Lester's own wall mirror, in a room the museum's own volunteers once called the Great Lester Room, its door draped in black after he died.^[12] He'd mastered the hard consonants without moving his lips or jaw by the age of thirteen. "The alphabet was mastered by me in 1892," he wrote near the end, and by his own account there wasn't a word in English his students couldn't say "with a still lip and jaw, and dead pan."^[13]

The teacher

He kept up a standing column in the Oracle for years, "Lester Reporting From Hollywood," and the magazine itself called him the Dean of Ventriloquists.^[14] His own business card told you everything about his priorities in three words: "Vocal Arts. Ventriloquism. Magic." Voice came first, ventriloquism second, magic dead last. The man Bergen himself called the greatest of all ventriloquists sold himself, first and foremost, as a voice teacher.^[4] His 1953 teaching advertisement carried a headline that still hangs over this whole family: "The Man Who Taught Edgar Bergen."^[15] Bergen had come to him fresh out of high school in 1922, and Lester spent his final years teaching one pupil at a time out of a small apartment above a hardware store on Hollywood Boulevard, its walls covered floor to ceiling in photographs of the entertainers who'd sat in that chair before them.^[16]

The trade, in one frame

Bobby King with "Tiny," the Great Lester at rear, and Frank Marshall holding the model he's credited with using for Charlie McCarthy, all photographed together at a 1930s magicians' convention.

The Davenport Democrat and Leader, via Ventriloquist Central Blog

The book

David Erskine's 2013 biography, foreword by Jeff Dunham, drawn partly from Lester's own recorded teaching tapes.

Ventriloquist Central Blog

The tapes

Erskine's cassette transfer of Lester's own reel-to-reel teaching recordings, "A Collector's Dream," five of the original forty tapes still surviving.

Invaluable auction listing

Opens Studios

His own teaching advertisement, Hollywood, the 1950s. Moderate prices. Children a specialty.

Ventriloquist Central

He would not sell a mail-order course, not at any price. "Personal Instructions Only. Moderate Prices... Satisfactory Results Guaranteed or Money Refunded," his own advertisement promised, while the facing pages of the very same trade directory were selling correspondence courses by the dozen.^[5] His doctrine, quoted by a teacher sixty years later: "Buy all the books you can... imagine if someone wanted to become a doctor or a lawyer by just reading a few free books." Whatever you paid for real instruction, he said, "it is worth the price you pay for it."^[17]

His pupils, by his own count in his very last column, ran more than forty names deep, from Bergen on down to men most of us have never heard of.^[18] One of them was a Chicago theater usher named Lester R. Marshall, taught to make a figure talk in 1914 at the Majestic Theatre. The kid liked the lesson enough to take "Les Lester" as his own stage name, a tribute to the teacher. Later, wanting a fuller identity, he built one out of two men entirely: Lester, for the Great Lester, and Marshall, for Frank Marshall. He became Lester Marshall Sr., and his own son worked the family act behind him.^[19] That's not a coincidence, folks. That's a student who knew exactly who taught him and said so with his own name for the rest of his life.

Lee Dean was fourteen, sitting in W.S. Berger's hotel room at the 1955 Pittsburgh convention, six months before Lester died, when Lester showed him the whole method in a single gesture, two fingers pressed to the jaw hinges. "Freeze your jaw to freeze your lips," he said, dead-pan, in a perfectly normal voice, without moving his lips or his jaw at all.^[20] And yes, by that same pupil's account, Lester privately thought his most famous student never quite locked his own jaw right. Even the master grumbled about his best-known pupil. That's just family too.

The circle

The last curtain

He died poor, and the trade would not let him be buried that way. He'd had an appendix operation that March, then was stricken at his studio on July 9, 1956, and taken to Memorial Hospital in Los Angeles for a gall bladder operation. The Comedy Club, of which he was a member, donated four and a half pints of blood. He did not rally, and passed away on July 14, 1956. He was buried with Masonic honors at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, the eulogy delivered by George Boston under the title "This Was Your Life, Harry Lester."^[21] His own column, "Lester Reporting from Hollywood," ran its final installment in the very same issue of the Oracle that carried his death notice, his own pupil list printed as an obituary he never got to read.^[13]

His estate wasn't enough to cover a funeral, let alone a headstone, so the International Brotherhood of Ventriloquists opened the Great Lester Memorial Fund. Ventriloquists from around the world sent in what they could, a dollar here, five dollars there, and raised three hundred ninety-eight dollars and twenty-five cents. A hundred seventy-five dollars and thirty-six cents of it bought the bronze grave tablet. The rest went against his funeral bill. The ledger closed in 1957, balanced to the penny.^[22] When the marker itself went up, it read simply: "Harry E. Lester (Great Lester), I.B.V. Member No. 19, 1879 to 1956," the stage name and the brotherhood number, not the birth name.^[23]

Frank Byron, Jr. lives today at the Vent Haven Museum in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky, alongside Lester's own private letters to and from the museum's founder, W.S. Berger. The museum's sponsorship program found him a new adoptive keeper in 2017.^[24]

He didn't leave money. He left Bergen. He left the shop that built Charlie McCarthy and, through Marshall, practically every famous face that came after. He left a method that pupils were still passing hand to hand a half-century later, and a stone that the whole trade chipped in to buy him because they weren't about to let the man who taught them go into the ground unmarked. That's a rich man's estate, folks. It just doesn't look like one on paper.

Whittled with a jackknife, booked to be forgotten first, hit of the bill by curtain. Somewhere a hundred glossier figures are still waiting for their agent to call back.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy