“A woman wizard? Preposterous! You’ll never make a go of it!”

No, that’s not what someone said to me when I told them I wanted to write about weird stuff for a living (though I’m sure more than one person thought that). That quote comes from a May 1942 Good Housekeeping article about the magician Dell O’Dell, the self-proclaimed “Queen of Magic” who — along with being a consummate cook — was one of the most popular and hardest-working magicians of her time.

O’Dell worked at night clubs, army camps, theaters, private homes, hospitals, and hotels. And in the 1950s, when television was in its early days, she had her own TV show, which in itself reflected the medium’s early, avant-garde years.

By the early 1950s, when she was also in her early 50s, O’Dell — who has been described as a wrestle-them-to-the-floor performer and a force of nature onstage — moved to Santa Monica with her husband, the juggler Charlie Carrer.

O’Dell’s move occurred when TV was still experimental but on the cusp of becoming a fixture in every American household (for a more contemporary example, think of the internet circa 1995). O’Dell, deft at changing with the trends (she would have killed on TikTok), soon had a TV show of her own. TV, magic, and O’Dell went well together.

“There's this kind of groovy thing that happens with new media, where sometimes some of the most interesting material is playing with the conventions of the medium and drawing attention to its artifice in strange and weird ways,” Michael Kackman, Associate Teaching Professor of Television at the University of Notre Dame, told me. “And so the idea of a magician doing a TV show seems really interesting, because a lot of what they're doing can't really be experienced through TV — it's only experienced vicariously through imagining what it's like to be there.”

O’Dell’s first show was descriptively called The Dell O’Dell Show. It premiered in 1951 on KECA-TV (an affiliate of ABC) and was marketed as an “audience-participation program” for children. Sponsored by a local Chrysler-Plymouth dealership, it aired beyond the local Los Angeles area, including across the country in New York City. After about seven months at KECA, O’Dell moved to KTLA with another aptly titled show called It’s Magic With Dell O’Dell.

KTLA, under the leadership of Klaus Landsberg, was the first commercial station west of the Mississippi. The station was especially experimental, with programming that included a live broadcast of the U.S. detonating an atomic bomb during testing in Yucca Flats.

Landsberg was also a stickler for ensuring his programming was family-friendly entertainment. That’s likely why O’Dell geared her shows toward children and performed in a faux living room setting where she bantered with audience members — children and adults alike. Show notes reveal she transformed a fake rabbit into a real one, sent coins bursting out of the tip of a magic wand, made silk handkerchiefs vanish and then reappear, and even sawed a woman in half.

I tried to find footage of O’Dell performing on television. No footage of O’Dell’s TV shows appears to exist — a sadly common occurrence given most TV at this time aired live. But she was also a guest on other programs, including The Ina Ray Hutton Show, The Spade Cooley Show, and The Morey Amsterdam Show, among others. 

And so I went on a hunt. I narrowed down an appearance of hers on The Morey Amsterdam Show to sometime in June 1949. I did some more digging, and found out that UCLA’s Film & Television Archive had reels from that month! They would digitize one for me to view on their campus, but there was no guarantee it would be the right one.

Alas, it was not. But there’s something special about watching a show that no one had seen for over 75 years. The program felt slapdash and silly; a medium that Amsterdam and his guests were still figuring out and having fun while doing so.

The episode I saw was from June 23, 1949, and featured Dorothy Morey and Harry Eaton (aka Morey and Eaton). They were big vaudeville performers from the ‘20s and ‘30s and were close to the end of their career in 1949. The duo, however, seemed to be having a good time performing their song and dance numbers on live TV. This digitized episode, housed at UCLA, might be one of the few clips of them performing, which is magical in its own right.

O’Dell was on air for a little over two years, with her last episode airing in late fall 1953. That stint earned her a regional Emmy nomination for Outstanding Feminine Personality Award. She was up against Zsa Zsa Gabor and Betty White, with White walking away with the statue for her work on Life With Elizabeth at the February 1953 award ceremony.

We don’t know for sure why O’Dell’s television stint ended, but Michael Claxton, a Professor of English at Harding University who wrote Don't Fool Yourself: The Magical Life of Dell O'Dell, a biography of the performer, has a guess of at least one factor that caused her show to end. “She needed the live work,” he theorized. “I mean, $1,000 a week at a nightclub is just going to do better than even TV.”

Cancer finally slowed Dell O’Dell down. In February 1962 at age 64 (or 59, based on her doctored birth certificate), she died from cervical carcinoma. “Dell O’Dell had many, many titles heaped upon her during her spectacular career but we doubt if any are more appropriate than ‘champion,’” read her obituary in the March 192 issue of Genii magazine. 

O’Dell was indeed a champion of magic, a performer who worked tirelessly to promote the art and her place in it when female magicians were far from common. She worked hard and earned the praise she received. As the Los Angeles Times concluded in a 1956 review of one of her theater shows, “She takes second place to no man in the legerdemain league.”

There was only one Dell O’Dell, and she performed every show as if thousands were watching. And when she was on television, they were.

Parts of this post originally appeared in my article for smithsonianmag.com, published on October 24, 2023.

Thanks for reading! And thank you to Michael Claxton for sharing his amazing behind-the-scenes photos from Dell’s TV show.

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