Citizen Gwynne

When I was a teenager, I found out that my late great uncle was a famous magician. His name was Jack Gwynne. That's a picture of him to the left. My Dad got a box of memorabilia out of the garage and we looked through it. There were old magazines featuring him, ranging from obscure magician's magazines all the way to a feature story in "Life" magazine. There was even an old magic book, written in Sanskrit, personally autographed by Thurston, one of the most famous magicians ever.

Of course these days most people don't know the names Thurston or Gwynne. They do know the name Houdini, though, and one of my Uncle Jack's early jobs was building magic tricks for none other than Houdini. Because of this, and other jobs, he became known as "the magician's magician" -- respected among famous magicians for his ingenuity in the nuts and bolts of producing illusions.

After that, he had his own fair share of fame on the vaudeville circuit, using his entire family, including my grandpa, in his act and becoming known as the "First Family of Magic." After prohibition when floor shows at night clubs became popular, Uncle Jack was the first magician to move his show from the stage to the night club floor. Before this it was considered almost impossible for a magician to perform surrounded by his audience. With the audience able to view from all angles, it stood to reason that it should be more difficult for a magician to hide his tricks, so Uncle Jack's illusions just became that much more amazing.

He appeared in some movies and television shows and toured the world with the USO, bringing a lot of Asian influence back to the states with him to help add mystery and an exotic flair to his show. He wore a dark pointed beard and pencil mustache and slightly resembled popular ideas of what the Devil himself must look like, earning him one of his many nicknames, "The Devilish Deceptionist." This image eventually became kind of a generic magician image, but it started with Uncle Jack.

Uncle Jack died a little over 10 years before I was born, but I remember his influence throughout my childhood. My Dad would occasionally pull out some old magic tricks to entertain at birthday parties or talent shows, sometimes enlisting me as an assistant. Once, we were looking at one of my monster books and the actress Anne Gwynne was listed as the female lead in "House of Frankenstein." My dad speculated that that might be my Great Aunt, Uncle Jack's wife, since the First Family of Magic had some connections with Hollywood. It turned out to be a different Anne Gwynne, but the idea that someone in my family had connections to classic Hollywood fascinated me.

When I was about 15, I had an assignment in school to create a family tree and research my family history. Part of the assignment was to write an in depth essay on one particular ancestor I either identified with or who fascinated me, so of course I chose to write about Uncle Jack. I got most of the information about him from that box in the garage, and was a little disappointed to find that there wasn't much information to be found about him at the library or even on the web, such as it was at the time.

Over the years I've occasionally checked the web to see if more mentions of Uncle Jack have popped up. For years, information was scant, until finally within the last couple years or so I started to find short video clips of his performances. Eventually I found a full Wikipedia article and noticed that information about him on the Internet Movie Database had started to fill out a little bit.

Anyway, my Dad is back east visiting his brother and he gave me a call the other night to tell me he had found out something amazing about Uncle Jack. As soon as he said it, I remembered something amazing I had read, recently, too, and then kind of forgotten about.

"Wait," I said. "I think I already know what you're going to say. But go ahead."

"Jack Gwynne was in CITIZEN KANE!" my Dad said.

Yep, that's exactly what I thought he was going to say. In my lazy research, about a year ago, I had noticed that out of nowhere a credit for CITIZEN KANE had been added to Uncle Jack's IMDB page. He was listed as "Man on Hospital Roof (Uncredited)." It seemed plausible enough -- I mean, back then, none of the extras were ever listed in the credits. And, being involved in magic and vaudeville and all that stuff, it would stand to reason that Jack Gwynne and Orson Welles would cross paths at some point. Still, I had to wonder, how does anyone know that's him? Where's the proof? I made a mental note to re-watch the film and see if I could find him, but then never got around to it.

Anyway, after talking to my Dad, who said my cousin had checked out the factoid and somehow confirmed it, I decided to watch the movie again and see if I could pick out Uncle Jack. The scene in question is the one in which the reporter (William Alland) goes to visit Kane's college buddy, Leland (Joseph Cotten), who has gone to live in a hospital in his old age. He's sunning himself in his wheel chair on the hospital roof when the reporter conducts his interview, and there are two other patients in the far background getting some fresh air as well. As I watched the scene I thought that had to be it, but I checked IMDB just in case to make sure there were "uncredited" credits for two different "man on hospital roof." And, there were. So that had to be it.

Unfortunately, even though Welles and his cinematographer Gregg Toland, pioneered the concept of deep focus in which the foreground, middle ground and background are all equally in focus to create a greater sense of depth and three dimensions in an otherwise two dimensional medium, this shot happens to have the foreground in focus and the background out of focus. So, it's impossible to tell which "man on hospital roof" is Jack Gwynne, or, indeed, if either of them are him at all.

It's not that I think it's far fetched -- I'm just wondering where the info comes from. The two sources I have are Wikipedia and IMDB. Both sources are useful for casual research, but both sources feature user-generated content. That means basically anyone can edit the information on those sites. Wikipedia says the information for their article comes from a 1986 book about Gwynne that's currently out of print and a 1968 magician's magazine.

Here's a picture of the scene in question:

The guy in the foreground on the left of the frame is Joseph Cotten. The guy in the right foreground of the frame is William Alland. I'd guess Uncle Jack is the guy in the background on the right side of the frame. The other one looks a little too big. But, who knows?

Anyway, it's not every day you find out one of your relatives was in the film that many consider to be the greatest movie of all time. As if having Jack Gwynne as a Great Uncle wasn't already cool enough, it just got a little cooler.