Doug Henning, the hippie who revived magic, dies

NEW YORK -- Doug Henning, the mustachioed hippie magician who helped repopularize the craft in the 1970s with TV specials and Broadway shows, has died at 52.

Henning, who had suffered from liver cancer for five months, died Monday in Los Angeles.

Henning's showmanship and boyish enthusiasm helped revive a genre that had lagged in popularity for decades. He offered audiences an entertaining mix of music, comedy and spectacles like a vanishing elephant.

"You could see that there was a great deal of joy in what he did," said The Amazing Kreskin, a friend and fellow performer. "He tended to float through his work."

Born near Winnipeg, Manitoba, Henning said he first became fascinated with magic as a child, when he saw a performer levitate a woman on "The Ed Sullivan Show."

Henning's shaggy hair, bushy mustache and tie-dyed shirts -- replaced later by more flamboyant shimmery costumes -- became well-known in the United States in the 1970s and '80s. His rock musical "The Magic Show" ran on Broadway for more than four years in the 1970s.

"When Doug opened that show on Broadway, that was the starting point of a huge boom in magic that has continued to this day," said Lance Burton, a Las Vegas-based magician. "Every magician that's out there working today owes Doug Henning a great debt."

The attention Henning won on Broadway helped Henning land an NBC special called "The World of Magic."

He re-created Harry Houdini's "Water Torture Escape" before a live audience, and ratings were so good that NBC made the show an annual event. The shows won an Emmy award and seven Emmy nominations and made Henning one of the world's best-known magicians.

He toured the country several times and returned to Broadway in the 1980s with "Merlin" -- nominated for five Tony awards -- and "Doug Henning's World of Magic."

Henning said he wanted to help his audiences recapture a childlike sense of the world.

"Wonder is very necessary in life," he once said. "When we're little kids, we're filled with wonder for the world -- it's fascinating and miraculous."

"A lot of people lose that. They become cynical and jaded, especially in modern day society. Magic renews that wonder."

Fascinated for years by transcendental meditation, he said his life changed when he met the movement's leader, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, in 1975. Henning stopped performing in the mid-1980s to devote himself to the meditation movement full-time.

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