David Copperfield believes he was born to perform magic.
He says this almost with an air of resignation.
"I wish I could sing," he says. "I wish I could sing, but God didn't give me the pipes. I don't know how it works when they pass out the aptitude chips when you're born, but I got the ability to do magic."
Copperfield will turn 50 later this year (Sept. 16), and for at least half his life he has been the world's most famous magician.
He has been performing magic since he was 8 years old. He says that "magic came easy to me," and that at an early age he was doing card tricks, balloon animals and birthday parties. Like a prodigy with an aptitude for singing or playing an instrument, he simply kept at it and never stopped.
When he talks about the performers who have influenced him, the entertainers he most admires, he doesn't speak of expected names like Houdini or Blackstone. Instead, he talks about singers and dancers, choreographers and movie directors — people, he says, who made something out of nothing.
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"The first one I think of is the work of Bob Fosse, both on stage and on screen," Copperfield says. "Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire. Frank Sinatra. Victor Fleming. Those are performers who took their art form in a whole 'nother direction."
On his current tour, he performs a 90-minute show that mixes new illusions with some old favorites, such as making 13 members of the audience disappear.
He says he generally has four or five new illusions in development at all times. Each one takes about two years to go from conception to live performance. To protect their secrets, he develops four or five methods to perform each one.
"I have many ways to accomplish each thing I do on stage," he says. "That way, if someone starts writing about it or posting about it on the Internet and I sense that they're getting too close to revealing how it's being done, I can switch to a different method of doing it, and that way I keep the illusion."
He remains one of the hardest-working performers in the entertainment field, doing more than 500 shows each year. "To do this many shows, I have to enjoy it," he says. "It's very enjoyable to take skeptics and turn them into people who want to come back a second time."
