Houdini: Recalling A Legend

By Henri Marchand

Harry Houdini died on Halloween, one-hundred years ago at the age of 52.  In those short fifty-two years he took the world’s imagination by storm and in so doing became an astonishing American legend.  Although he is best known as a magician and escape artist, he was also an author, aviator, actor, film producer and debunker of psychic frauds.  He was, above all else, a master showman who rose to the top of his field by accepting seemingly deadly risks and routinely doing the impossible.  He did so with supreme self-confidence, meticulous preparation and shrewd, relentless self-promotion.

Always in search of bigger headlines, he piloted a plane on the first sustained flight on the Australian continent and appeared in a string of melodramatic silent films showcasing his daring and skills.  But it was his spectacular escapes, on stage and on the street, that made him a star.  While other magicians put their assistants at risk, sawing them in half or running them through with swords, Houdini placed himself in harm’s way, always emerging victorious, always receiving wild applause and always with the press present.

Born Ehrich Weiss in 1874, Houdini was the quintessential self-made man.  He had no formal education but was a voracious reader who amassed a huge library.  He began performing professionally at age seventeen, playing music halls, dime museums, and carnivals.  Though physically short in stature, Houdini developed a Herculean physique and combined an eye for the dramatic with bold ambitions and an outsized ego to become larger than life.  By the late 1890s he and his wife Bess were performing “Metamorphosis,” a trick whereby they would switch places in a locked trunk.  Ever the showman, he developed the challenge act, offering a $100 reward to anyone who could restrain him in handcuffs.  No one ever collected.

Houdini’s breakthrough came in 1899 when vaudeville impresario Martin Beck saw his act, convinced Houdini to concentrate on escapes and booked him on the western circuit of the Orpheum theater chain.  By 1900 the former “King of Cards” was billed as “The King of Handcuffs” and for or the next 26 years he would dominate American entertainment.  Still, he dreamed of greater fame and sailed to England with little but his dream and audacity.  Upon arriving in London, he challenged Scotland Yard to restrain him.  He promptly escaped and there followed extended runs, more well-planned challenges and sold-out engagements throughout Europe.  He returned to the United States five years later an established celebrity and continued the publicity stunts that would fill theaters and solidify his legend—an escape from the jail cell that held President Garfield’s assassin and death-defying escapes from straightjackets as he hung upside down above busy downtown streets and from packing crates tossed into New York Harbor.  These stunts guaranteed front page news and sold-out performances.

It was Houdini that first got many interested in magic including myself.  After watching the 1953 movie Houdini starring Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh on TV, my brother and I began experimenting with escapes from ropes, handcuffs and padlocked chains.  We had no real clue what we were doing but we faked it enough so that our friends and family were mildly impressed.  Fortunately, we were smart enough, or scared enough, to not attempt Houdini’s underwater escapes by jumping into the Merrimack River or Lowell’s canals in manacles.  Had we done so, it would have been the end of our “careers” as escapologists.

Houdini was at the height of his career in the fall of 1926, when he began a run on Broadway in a one-man, two-and-a-half-hour show titled simply, HOUDINI.  In October the show went on the road with performances in Providence, Albany, and Montreal.  Beginning in Providence, Houdini suffered a series of setbacks.  Bess contracted food poisoning and Houdini got little sleep as he stayed by her side.  In Albany he broke an ankle during his famous “Chinese Water Torture” escape.  Stubbornly refusing medical care, he finished the show and moved on to Montreal.  Weakened by pain and lack of sleep, Houdini, who claimed to be able to withstand body blows, allowed a McGill University student to strike him.  Unprepared, the punch staggered him.  Though in pain, he went on to perform three more shows and on October 24 the troupe moved on to Detroit where he finally saw a doctor but, against advice and with a temperature of 104, performed again that night, collapsing at intermission and at the end of the show.  He finally entered Grace Hospital and was operated on for a ruptured appendix but it was too late.  After nearly a week struggling to escape death one more time, he succumbed to peritonitis in the early afternoon of Halloween.

In the end, he was beaten by shackles of his own making—pride, bravura, and the showman’s mantra that the show must go on.  For someone who meticulously planned to reduce risk of failure and rehearsed for absolute success, Houdini failed to recognize real risk when it arrived.

A century after his death, Houdini’s legend lives on.  On Halloween, at twenty-six minutes past one, the exact time of Houdini’s death, magicians again conduct solemn broken wand ceremonies, traditional memorials by fellow conjurers symbolizing the deceased’s broken powers.  Halloween séances will be held by fans and followers in yet another attempt to make contact with Houdini.  It’s unlikely they’ll succeed, for, after ten decades, the man who in life never failed to escape all devices made to confine him remains captive to the grave.  But these annual events will succeed in recalling the remarkable story of Houdini the man and in generating more press clippings for Houdini the legend.

After the trick-or-treating is done this Halloween, I will stream Houdini and recall a bit of the magic that an 11-year-old felt watching the black-and-white, small screen adventures of Harry and Bess.