“Seven-year-old Gloria Metzner, 3607 Park Boulevard, is the youngest working magician in the world,” The Oakland Tribune of California declared in a November 1929 article about her. An accompanying photograph showed Gloria holding three balls between the fingers of her right hand, a moment from a trick in which she would make the balls appear and disappear like, well, magic.
“Anything with sleight-of-hand and billiard balls I liked,” she said almost a century later, in a 2022 interview with KVVU-TV of Las Vegas on the occasion of her 100th birthday. “That was my favorite trick.”
In between those two splashes of publicity, Gloria Metzner adopted the stage name Gloria Dea, made history in Las Vegas, had a few tabloid-ish moments in a brief film career, faded into obscurity for a half-century or so, and then, in her final years, was rediscovered and celebrated by her fellow magicians. Ms. Dea died on March 18 at an assisted living center in Las Vegas, her caregivers told local news outlets. She was 100.
Ms. Dea (pronounced day) might well have died in obscurity if not for a serendipitous confluence of recent events. One catalyst was Lance Rich, a magician and magic historian, who, while doing research for “Neon Dreams: Vegas Greats, Dates and Firsts,” a talk he gave at the Magic Collectors Expo in August 2021, determined that Ms. Dea held a singular distinction: She was, he believes, the first magician ever to perform in a Las Vegas casino.
Other magicians had performed at various venues — an opera house built in 1908, for instance, or in vaudeville halls — but when Ms. Dea did her magic routine in May 1941 in the Round-Up Room of El Rancho Vegas, a recently opened casino and resort, she started the line that led directly to the flashy Las Vegas shows of magicians like David Copperfield and Siegfried & Roy.
Mr. Rich, in a telephone interview, said he was well into his research on Ms. Dea’s life and career when he learned that she was still alive and living in Las Vegas. By happenstance, at almost exactly the same time, AnnaRose Einarsen, a hypnotist and magician, was browsing at a vintage clothing store in Las Vegas when she came across one of Ms. Dea’s old outfits and assorted mementos that were being sold on consignment.
Like Mr. Rich, she found her way to the alive-and-well Ms. Dea, and word began to spread in the magicians’ community about that history-making centenarian. By the time her 100th birthday arrived last August, Mr. Copperfield had proclaimed a Gloria Dea Day, a Clark County commissioner had given her a “Key to the Las Vegas Strip,” and magicians of all stripes turned up for her birthday party.
“Magic should be about taking audiences on journeys,” Mr. Copperfield told The Las Vegas Review-Journal last year. “This whole journey of discovering Gloria, this hidden treasure, has been wondrous, thrilling and very gratifying.”
Mr. Rich detailed her life in a December 2021 article in MUM, the magazine of the Society of American Magicians: Gloria Metzner was born on Aug. 25, 1922, in Oakland, Calif. Her mother, Martha (Heyman) Metzner, was a seamstress, and her father, Leo, was a paint salesman who had a side job as Leo the Magician. Gloria began performing alongside her father and soon was proficient enough to take the spotlight herself.
Interviewed by The Oakland Tribune when she was 11, she said she had an arsenal of 50 tricks and was adding more.
“I can usually see through other people’s tricks, because I’m used to it, you see,” she said. “But to learn to do them takes days of work before the mirror.”
She developed dancing, modeling and other skills as well; in 1940 she was a bit player in an extravaganza called Aquacade at the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco.
Mr. Rich said her versatility helped her land the historic booking at El Rancho. Her magic act was just one element of a revue in which, alongside other performers, she probably also appeared in dance numbers and other bits. But, perhaps owing to her stage presence and attention-getting costumes, she seemed to garner the most attention.
“Her concluding trick, wherein a card jumps from a handkerchief into the core of an orange, was the hit of the show,” The Las Vegas Review-Journal said.
Ms. Dea later took a stab at Hollywood, getting small parts in a dozen or so films. Her personal life drew more publicity than her performances, though. In September 1944, she was working on the musical “Delightfully Dangerous” when the producer paused production long enough for her to marry Jack Statham, the orchestra leader.
“Judge Ida May Adams united the couple in marriage in a brief interval between shooting of scenes in which the bride dances in a clown number,” The Los Angeles Evening Citizen News reported.
The marriage lasted only months.
“Gloria Dea, 22-year-old film actress, today got a divorce from John F. Statham because he always found an excuse not to kiss her,” the United Press agency reported in March 1945. “‘Either he was smoking a cigarette or his pants were just pressed,’ she complained.”
Marriages to Hal Borne and Jack Shulem also didn’t last; the one that did, in 1975, was to Sam Anzalone, who died last year. Ms. Dea leaves no immediate survivors.
One of Ms. Dea’s last movie credits was in Ed Wood’s notoriously bad “Plan 9 From Outer Space” in 1957. She later sold insurance and then cars before settling back in Las Vegas.
Mr. Rich said Ms. Dea was flattered by the late-life rediscovery of her role in Las Vegas history.
“She said, ‘I don’t deserve the attention, but I’ll take it,’” he said.
“She loved being surrounded by new magicians, young magicians,” he added. “She enjoyed seeing magic too.”
At her 100th birthday party, he recalled, “she said, ‘Don’t bring gifts, but if any magicians want to bring magic, that would be great.’”
