Suzy Wandas: The Lady with the Fairy Fingers

March 5 is the birthday of lady magician Suzy Wandas (Jeanne Van Dyke, 1896-1986).

Suzy was a second generation conjurer, born and raised in Belgium to a husband-wife variety team. Her initial role in the act including playing the violin while dancing in the manner of Frank Whitman. She also walked a slackwire. She was billed as Miss White Flower. Inspired by Mary Ford a.k.a. “Talma” of LeRoy, Talma, and Basco, and tutored by none other than T. Nelson Downs, she began doing close-up magic as a teenager. She remained with her family act for decades. When her father died in 1911, he was replaced in the act by her brother, and they were billed as The Three Wandas. When the brother was invalided in the First World War, she and her mother became The Wandas Sisters. She chose the name Suzy from the popular Eddie Cantor song, which had debuted in 1925. Her mother Elizabeth didn’t retire until 1936, when Suzy was 40 years old. At that point Suzy went out as a single, though you can see her perform a solo act a year earlier in the all-star Technicolor short Starlit Days at the Lido. (This is how I first became aware of her). She rapidly ascended to the top of the field throughout the ’40s and ’50s.

Wandas was considered tops in the profession for her manipulation, working with coins, cards, balls, cigarettes, handkerchiefs, linking rings, and so forth. After a life time of performing in Europe, she started coming to the States in the late ’30s. In 1959 she retired and married Dr. Zina Bennett (1891-1965), a real life physician and amateur magician known for working with oversized playing cards, and for an inventing a trick deck called the “Zina B.” deck. Though they married in Brussells, they settled in his native Detroit.

In 2020, a biography was published, Suzy Wandas: The Lady With the Fairy Fingers, by Kobe and Christ Van Herwegen. Learn about it here.

For more on show business history,consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, and please stay tuned for the upcoming Electric Vaudeville: A Century of Radio and TV Variety.