I’ve had books about Houdini since I was a kid (and I fumbled around with a few magic tricks too). Now I have Google Earth, so it was only a matter of time before I got around to tracking his greatest escapes around the world via satellite.

That tour is now online here, and this website, “Houdini Reappears”, pretty much follows its wanderings. It’s wonderful to see the places where these things happened a century ago, but there’s so much more to his story that not even Google Earth can gets its arms around it.

Not that this website can tell the whole story, either. In fact this site is far from comprehensive. There is much more to Houdini’s story, so many incredible things that really did happen, that a proper biographical movie still waits to be made about him — although I have no idea how everything could be fit into two hours.

The purists of stage magic tend to grumble about Houdini. Even if they allow that he was the greatest escape artist in history, they’re fond of belittling his skills as a conjuror. Even in his day the general public didn’t regard him as a magician so much as a “man of mystery”, a showman who specialised in stunts, according to Walter Gibson, who collaborated with him on books.

“Some of his magic was comparatively mediocre,” Gibson wrote, adding, “Today the fame of Houdini is more exaggerated than ever. From this it may be concluded that the alchemy of time can transmute gross publicity into golden legend.”

Houdini’s critics are right. His sleight-of-hand wasn’t all that sleight. There was little finesse to his stagecraft. “It was awful stuff,” Orson Welles moaned. Better illusionists abound in the story of magic, their fame living on despite the curmudgeonly Houdini doing his best to denigrate his rivals and exaggerate his own prowess.

But for all the truth in the charges against Harry, I think Welles and Gibson and the rest are shortchanging the legend.

Harry won’t go away. There’s so much more to this man’s tale that other biographies of great show-business personalities pale in comparison. It’s not the bright glow of Houdini’s well-stoked celebrity that continues to attract interest so much as the resonant revelations that can be found in his history. Everyone can find something in it that’s meaningful to them personally — meaningful and often moving.

As I searched on Google Earth for the locations where Houdini hung from skyscrapers, leapt off piers, slipped free of leg irons and chased the spooks who haunted him, it soon became clear that most of the structures where his magic took place are now gone. The theatres long ago turned into cinemas and were then torn down so that something slicker could be built for a modernising world. Even the hospital where he died has vanished like a million-pound elephant.

I have four Houdini books now. One is Walter Gibson’s collection of Harry’s writings about magic, with a lot of the tricks explained, but in a couched, manneristic language that I’ve never found helpful or very interesting. I don’t think Harry’s intention was to reveal his secrets at all.

The other books are biographies: Harry Kellock’s “His Life Story” from 1928, written with the help of Houdini’s widow Bess two years after he died’ Ruth Brandon’s 1993 “The Life and Many Deaths of Harry Houdini”; and William Kalush and Larry Sloman’s “The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America’s First Superhero” from 2006.

Brandon took Kellock’s book, sometimes almost word for word, and wrapped it in amateur psychology. With forays into Nabokov, Yukio Mishima and the Greek gods, she ran the facts through a mythology scanner, trying to answer the questions I’ve posed in the introduction at the top of this page.

She is very good at placing Harry’s Jewish faith in context regarding his approaches to both life and the stage, and wonderfully describes the paradox of a man who had so much personal vitality and yet was obsessed with dying. “It was as if he sucked life from the jaws of death,” she writes.

And Brandon is no doubt right when she suggests that Houdini reached moments of transcendence and catharsis in the lead-up to and execution of his most daring stunts. I think she gets carried away with speculation on shamanism, about Harry’s possible sexual thrill in bondage, and with statements like, “His life was tolerable only if he could reassure himself, time after time, that he could defeat [death].”

The results of all of her Freudian analysis are intriguing … but ultimately heartless. Ruth Brandon is no Joseph Campbell.

There isn’t much heart to the 2006 biography either, but many more details and some controversial theories.

I am neither Joseph Campbell nor a dedicated researcher, but on this always-expanding website I’m sifting through the facts, considering the places and weighing up whatever it was that was poking at Houdini. I believe a more recognisable human being comes through from beyond. I think the answers to the questions lie in the muscle and sinew as much as the mind and the soul.

Houdini always said that, if it were possible, he’d stay in touch after he died. He’s certainly keeping his word.

Since early 2007 I’ve had Google email me news alerts on “houdini”, and there are several items every single day. Most by far are mundane uses of his name in the sense of someone pulling off an unforeseen escape, often a sports team evading relegation or a particular athlete cutting through a line of defence to score. Sometimes it’s a politician avoiding doom, or failing to, such as Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, of whom a rival said colourfully, “We are watching Houdini finally drowning in his chains.”

The two paintings accompanying this post are by Whitney Bedford, exhibited at the Cherry and Martin gallery in Los Angeles in the autumn of 2007. The concept is extraordinary: art as magic. Bedford used oil paint and unstable inks on unprimed paper, so that the works will eventually disappear, that is to say, escape.

The portraits, says the gallery’s website, “complement the ‘adventure of death’ found in Bedford’s previous shipwreck series. Here, however, the possibility of death is condensed into this enigmatic persona who enraptured audiences with dangerous feats and uncompromising artistry during a tumultuous time in our country’s history.

“Bedford’s timely investigation into Houdini reflects the existence of a new audience for fatalistic showmanship and self-made celebrity, especially as a metaphor for an artist’s career within the art world.”

Occasionally the news items funnelled my way from Google are “about” Harry himself, as when a burglar was caught after breaking into the Houdini Museum in Scranton, Pennsylvania. But of the big news I’d expected long ago — a court ruling on whether his body will be exhumed for the autopsy that wasn’t performed when he died — I’m still waiting. One wonders if this is what it feels like to attend those Houdini seances every Halloween.

News is expected and does not arrive … but that’s not to say it will never come. There is always the possibility.

Paul Dorsey
Bangkok, Thailand
October 2007

History’s most celebrated magician was born Erik Weisz on March 24, 1874, in Budapest, Hungary. He was four years old when his family set sail for America aboard the steamship Frisia, arriving in New York on July 3, 1878. Eric’s father, Mayer Samuel Weiss, was already there. His mother Cecilia, nee Steiner, answered the immigration officer in German, so her appointed surname became Weiss and the whole family was given a raft of new “German” names: Herman for Armin, Nathan for Natan, William for Gottfried Vilmos, Theo for Ferencz Dezso and, for Erik, the altogether more cumbersome Ehrich.

Cecilia had two months to spend with her mother and sisters in New York, and then in September she and her family moved on to join Mayer in Appleton, Wisconsin. There this story begins, with a poor, diminutive Jewish boy immigrating to WASP America with his swelling family, whose father could barely speak English and whose mother never did learn how. He was already off to a rough start, and would soon learn that he couldn’t be backward about coming forward.

The Houdini boys after Harry hit the big time: From left, brothers Leopold, Theodore (who became the magician Hardeen), Ehrich, William and Nathan.

Appleton was a young town practically on the wild frontier, and a quirky one at that. It had a college and an opera house, but it didn’t have sewers or running water. Apart from its odd character, it’s never had a lot going for it. Senator Joe McCarthy came from Appleton too, and he’s nothing to be proud about. Willem Dafoe is another local, but he didn’t even bother revisiting until many years after becoming a movie star. In Google Earth imagery, as of mid-2007, the town remained a low-resolution blur, and in circumstances like that, imagination comes in handy, as it did for McCarthy, Dafoe, Ehrich Weiss and for the fourth famous Appletonian, Edna Ferber.

The future author of “Show Boat” and “Cimarron” and the book that became my favourite James Dean picture, “Giant”, was also of Hungarian Jewish origins, and she reckoned the way to become a successful writer was to start out as a newspaper reporter. (It’s a theory I’ve been testing for three decades.)

In July 1904 she was working for the Appleton Crescent when the famous Harry Houdini came home for a visit. He’d been back once before, in the spring of 1897, with a touring troupe called the Rogers Orpheum Stars. They put on a show at the local opera house, and Houdini escaped from three pairs of handcuffs in five minutes. Seven years later he was one of the world’s most celebrated entertainers.

Edna found him in a drugstore at the corner of College Avenue and Morrison Street and interviewed him on the spot. The article she wrote is online, though she doesn’t say what he was doing in the drugstore — maybe just chilling at the soda fountain.

“I am earning, now, from $900 to $2,000 a week,” he told her, “but my first performance brought me slightly less than that. It took place in an old field across the track in the Sixth Ward and I did a contortionist act, giving three performances, for which [my manager] paid me exactly 35 cents.”

She was impressed by his sinewy physique, the result of being a track star in his youth (biographer Kenneth Silverman claimed that all but one of those medals on his chest in the photo were fakes) and sampling a bit of trapeze work. But Ferber was even more amazed at his dexterity: he ended their conversation by offering her a gumball from the drugstore’s vending machine, which he’d idly unlocked while they were gabbing.

Today in the same part of town is Houdini Plaza, inaugurated in 1985 at the former site of the Weiss home, which was above a downtown store. There’s a towering sculpture by Richard Wolter called “Metamorphosis”, around which magicians often put on shows, including famous ones like Doug Henning, David Copperfield and Penn & Teller.

There’s also a bar called Houdini’s Lounge, and many bronze plaques memorialising young Harry.

Further along the road at 330 East College Avenue is the History Museum at the Castle, usually referred to as the Outagamie Museum because it’s run by the Outagamie County Historical Society. It has a Houdini Historical Center featuring ongoing exhibits, and it looks pretty good from its website.

William Kalush and Larry Sloman made ample use of its apparently vast archives for their 2006 biography “The Secret Life of Houdini”. The photo here shows museum staff in the 1970s unpacking the famous Milk Can from which Houdini escaped a thousand times. Also among the treasures is Harry’s first book of press clippings, which would be a real mess after all these years had the pages not been lovingly “deacidified” here and encased in a chemically inert polyester sleeve.

Another website I’ve seen relates that the town used to host magicians from all over the country at its annual Houdini Days festival. It wasn’t made clear why they abandoned the event, but they might want to consider reviving it. Houdini never stops making news.

Father Weiss used to make soap in Hungary and then begun practising law, but when he linked up with his friend in Appleton and was told the local Jews needed a rabbi, and he readily took the position. Things were fine for a while, and two more children came along, Leopold and Gladys, but eventually Mayer’s adult flock wanted someone with a little more pizzazz, and they got someone.

By several accounts, Papa Weiss — pictured here — was sacked for refusing to conduct services in English.

By then, though, he had in 1884 consecrated Temple Zion at 320 North Durkee Street in downtown Appleton, which according to a January 2009 article in the local newspaper, the Post-Crescent, had in 1999 become the workshop of organ builder Ron Wahl, “saving it from further deterioration and, eventually, possible demolition”.

“A ghostly outline on the wall is all that’s left of the tabernacle,” columnist Rob Kaiser wrote, noting that Edna Ferber had been a member of the temple choir, singing from the loft where Wahl established his office. Temple Zion is now on the National Register of Historic Places. The photo here comes from the website of Wahl Organbuilders.

The Weiss family moved to Milwaukee in late 1882 and stayed there for four years, residing at several addresses while Ehrich sold newspapers and shined shoes. Mayer left the family behind and went looking for work elsewhere, mostly teaching the good book. At one point Ehrich, who at least learned from his old man how to “put on a show”, tried the same thing — hitting the road, that is.

~ ~   H    H   ~ ~

When he died Houdini was making plans to establish a University of Magic in New York and even had a course list drawn up. Maybe someday someone will actually follow through on the idea. For now, the kids in Appleton can start small — at Houdini Elementary School. (No, they don’t teach them tricks. Not knowingly, anyway.)

The school’s name was apparently chosen by its first pupils, and its official colours are the red and black of a stereotypical magician’s cape!