Theodore Mack

Forty-two inches, ninety-eight percent original, its smoker and spitter still inside. This is the Mack figure that would go on to cross an auction block for four times its estimate. Photo: Ventriloquist Central

Theodore Mack never set out to make ventriloquist figures. His trade was architectural carving: cornices, rosettes, ornamental faces for buildings, not for the stage.^[1] Then, sometime around 1900, a broke vaudeville act walked into his Chicago shop needing a favor.^[2] Pull up a chair. This is the story of the bench that favor built.

A wood carver takes on a favor

By the trade's own telling, decades later, Mack was a Chicago wood carver who had never made a ventriloquist figure in his life until a vaudeville ventriloquist calling himself The Great Lester had both of his figures stolen right off a streetcar. Broke and desperate, Lester found a carver's name in the city directory and talked him into it, sometime around 1899 to 1903.^[2] Lester couldn't pay a professional's fee, so by this account he carved the figure himself, in Mack's shop, with Mack's own tools and Mack standing over his shoulder giving instruction. That figure, Frank Byron, Jr., was the first ventriloquist figure to come out of the Mack establishment.^[2] A later chronicler at Ventriloquist Central weighed the same question and came down on the other side: in that reading, Mack is the more likely hand behind Frank Byron, since Lester is not otherwise known to have made a figure in his life.^[3] Either way, once other ventriloquists discovered that the Mack shop had built Lester's figure, they started contacting the woodworking shop themselves, and the requests never really stopped.^[4]

The shop itself ran three generations deep. Mack's father had opened it in 1880 as a furniture and architectural carving business.^[3] Theodore ran it into the new century, his son Charles worked the same bench (Charles also kept a tavern around the corner and carved figures on the side),^[5] and by the early 1900s the shop carried an address on Chicago's near West Side, 720 South Clinton Avenue.^[4] By 1956 the trade had its own nickname for a genuine Mack: a "Rembrandt."^[2]

How to spot one

Mack's figures look the way they do because of where they came from. The shop's real business was architectural carving, faces included: the cornice ornaments and building facades Mack cut for a living. When those same hands turned a relief carving into a full head for the stage, the result came out fuller and rounder than most other makers' work.^[1] Collectors who have handled dozens of his figures point to a checklist: large, flat, saucer-shaped ears with deep carved detail and a raised rim, a notably flat bridge on the nose, hands carved "stylized," flat enough to look almost comical up close, canvas shoes from a single outside supplier distinctive enough to be a near-signature on their own, and arms and legs stuffed with straw or cotton.^[1] Open the body and you'll find a shaped shoulder board with a hole for the head stick, which ran all the way down to the bottom board, the sides and front built from slats and covered over in muslin.^[1]

Most Mack figures kept it simple: a slot jaw and, maybe, a winker.^[6] A figure with more than that, say a rolling-eye winker plus a working smoker and spitter, was the exception, not the rule.^[7] The figure at the top of this page is one of those exceptions: cataloged in 2010 as ninety-eight percent original, forty-two inches tall (near the top of the range for a professional figure), with its mouth movement, smoker, and spitter all intact.^[8] The standard mouth control was a ring on a pull string. A paddle-shaped lever, comfortable under the pad of a thumb, only turns up on later figures, and Mack passed the rosewood he used for it down to Frank Marshall even after Marshall dropped the paddle shape for his own chop-stick style.^[9] One customer even had the mouth rigged to run on air pressure, a bladder and bulb connected by tube, workable from ten feet away.^[10] Collectors credit Mack with pioneering a good part of what a professional figure is commonly built to do: moving eyes, moving eyebrows, a spit, a cry, a fright wig, lips that retract on their own to show the teeth. By that same account he was one of the first, if not the first, to build a figure that walked and swung its own arms.^[1]

The bench that taught the trade

Mack's real legacy walked out of that shop on two legs. In 1914, a fourteen-year-old Chicago kid came through the door and was put to work; he'd go on to spend the rest of his life as a figure maker under the name Frank Marshall, but he learned to hold a chisel at Mack's bench.^[3] Around those same years, another Chicago boy wandered into the back room of the shop, found a man carving what turned out to be a ventriloquist's figure, and was offered a job as a gofer on the spot. That boy was Ken Spencer, and by his own account he learned the whole of what he called "the carving game" at the very knee of Theodore Mack.^[11] One collector who has owned both Mack figures and roughly seventy Marshalls says the inheritance still shows in the carving of the face, if you know what to look for.^[12]

None of which kept Mack's own name from fading. A collector writing for Ventriloquist Central Blog in 2010 called him, flatly, "arguably the best ventriloquial figure carver who ever took up a chisel," and wrote it as background, the kind of sentence you add for readers who might not otherwise know who Theodore Mack was.^[11] That a writer had to introduce him at all, in a hobby built on his own figures, is its own small measure of how far his name had drifted from the work by then.

The most famous face in the shop

Here is where the record gets careful, on purpose. Charlie McCarthy, Edgar Bergen's partner and, in one curator's own words, "perhaps the most famous vent figure of all time," came out of the Mack shop.^[15] Exactly whose hands cut that particular block of wood is where the paper trail runs thin, and it deserves to be told straight rather than settled by force.

Bergen himself named the maker more than once, across four decades, and every time he named a Mack. In 1937, in a newspaper column, the young star put it plainly: "A wood carver, Theodore Mack, now dead, down on Van Buren St., made the head up for me," for thirty-six dollars, while Bergen was still in his second year of high school in Chicago.^[13] In 1940, replying to a fan's letter, Bergen wrote, "I am still using the original figure made by Mr. Mack."^[14] And in the late 1970s, in a letter to a museum curator, Bergen went further, attesting that the original Charlie was created by "Theo" Mack himself, a claim the curator backed up with his own inspection of the wood-carved original, now in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.^[15]

But the shop was a family bench, not a one-man operation, and the record holds a second thread. Charles Mack, Theodore's son, carved figures there too, as a side line to the tavern he kept around the corner.^[5] Ken Spencer, who apprenticed there as a boy, was told by his own account that it was "Charlie Mack" who carved Charlie McCarthy, and he was adamant about it.^[5] A 1945 description of a figure in a private collection calls the maker of Bergen's famous partner "Ted Mack, the creator of Charlie McCarthy," a short form that period sources used loosely for either man.^[16] And Theodore's own last years narrow the window further: he was placed in a nursing home in January 1922, more than a year before he died, in declining health.^[5] Whatever Mack-shop work happened after that date belongs to Charles, not to Theodore.

So here is the honest version. Charlie McCarthy came out of the Mack shop: Theodore's shop, with his son Charles on the same bench. Bergen, the one man who actually owned and performed with the figure for decades, always credited a Mack by name and never once, in anything this record holds, credited a Marshall for the original. Whether the specific hands were Theodore's or Charles's is a question the surviving paper doesn't settle past all doubt, and anyone who tells you otherwise is rounding up.

Bergen's own letter

"I am still using the original figure made by Mr. Mack." Bergen wrote this to a fan in 1940, unprompted, while still performing with the figure the Mack shop had built him years earlier.

Photo: Ventriloquist Central Blog

Shorty Jones & Augustus Rapp

A Mack figure at work in vaudeville: Shorty Jones, made for Rapp, who later listed a young Frank Marshall as the figure's godfather on its own mock "birth certificate."^[17]

Photo: Ventriloquist Central

What the market remembers

The earliest price on this record is from 1911: eleven dollars, paid by a father for a red-wigged figure named "Reddy" that his one-year-old son would keep as a lifelong companion for the next fifty years.^[19] A century later the same shop's name commands very different money, and not always for the reason you'd guess. When the Willinger Collection went to auction in 2015, a Mack figure in excellent original condition, estimated at $2,500 to $3,000, sold for $12,000, four times its high estimate and the single biggest surprise of the sale.^[18] The nine other Mack lots that same day, several restored by named craftsmen, several with clean provenance behind them, brought $1,500 to $2,000 apiece.^[18] Condition, not rarity, not mechanism, not a documented owner, was the variable that moved the price. The figure pictured at the top of this page, ninety-eight percent original with its smoker and spitter still inside when it entered a collection in 2010, is a strong candidate for being that very auction figure.^[8] Attach a legend to a Mack-shop object and the number changes again: one "Charlie" alleged to have been used by Bergen sold for more than $100,000 to the magician David Copperfield, on an attribution the curator selling it would only call "alleged."^[15]

The shop's reach even extends past its own name on a price tag. The figure that greets visitors at the entrance to the first building of the Vent Haven Museum is, itself, a Theo Mack and Son figure.^[20]

The circle

A shop doesn't teach a trade alone. Here is Mack's Chicago bench, and who came through it.

The end of the shop

The Mack shop lost its people fast, at the end. Louis Mack, another Mack in the business, died in 1921.^[4] The next year, in declining health, Theodore was placed in a nursing home.^[5] He died April 25, 1923, at seventy-three.^[21] Charles Mack died the following year, in June 1924, and the business passed out of the family for good: Frank Marshall, the boy who'd started there a decade earlier, bought the shop from Charles's widow along with a fellow employee named Alex Cameron.^[4] The tools that had turned out Frank Byron, Jr., and very likely Charlie McCarthy, and every working figure in between for a couple of decades of vaudeville acts, went on to a second life in Marshall's hands.

Ask around and most people will guess Bergen carved Charlie himself, or name Frank Marshall, since Marshall's name outlasted everyone else's in this trade. The paper says otherwise. It says a wood carver who never set out to be in this business took on a favor for a broke vaudeville act, built a shop his own son worked beside him in, and somewhere on that bench, Theodore's hands or Charles's, the most famous face in ventriloquism got its first coat of paint. That's worth remembering, even though his own name is the one that faded.

A stolen figure on a streetcar starts a whole dynasty of splinters, and nobody thinks to bolt down the merchandise. Some lessons never carve themselves into vaudeville's thick skull.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy