THE SECRET LIFE OF HOUDINI: The Making of America’s First Superhero
by William Kalush and Larry Sloman
Simon & Schuster £18.99 pp592 The American escapologist Harry Houdini may not have spawned a premiership eponym such as Boycott or Hoover. But, as confirmed in Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang by Jonathon Green, “pulling” or “doing a Houdini” is acceptable lower-division parlance for getting out of a tight fix. (According to this invaluable reference work, the name also doubles for marijuana, as in an aid to escaping reality.) The reason for Houdini’s linguistic longevity is that he was a worldwide phenomenon — a brilliant magician and publicist who focused on daring feats of escape at a time (around 1900) when the public had dollars and half crowns to spend and were looking for thrills during an entertainment lull between the music hall and the movies.
Born Ehrich Weisz, the son of a rabbi, in Budapest in March 1874, and brought up, from the age of four, in Appleton, Wisconsin, Houdini fulfilled their fantasies, as he perfected an ever more exciting range of releases from chains, boxes, straitjackets, then a combination of the above, dangling from a bridge or submerged in a lake, and finally the Chinese water torture cell, where he was suspended upside down in a steel and glass cabinet full of water.
His formative years were spent on the road. But details of performances in Omaha, Nebraska, tend to read much the same as those in St Paul, Minnesota. Certainly, Houdini’s self-promotional routine becomes familiar as, in each city he visits, he challenges the police chief to truss him up, preferably in the local jail. Everyone feigns surprise when he casts off his shackles. Since the press has been invited, the column inches accumulate, as does the little wizard’s bank balance. By 1904, at the end of a successful European tour, he was able to shell out $2,500, or the equivalent of $2.5m today, to buy a townhouse on New York’s Upper West Side, a farm in Connecticut, and a plot in Brooklyn, where he had most of his family reburied.
This book is enlivened by two promising sub-themes. One, the contention that Houdini worked as a spy, does not work. The authors get excited that he met Superintendent William Melville, who ran Scotland Yard’s Special Branch and later became the first head of MI5. No doubt Houdini’s ability to break locks and enter secret places was of interest to intelligence services. But there is no evidence that, with Melville, he was doing much more than his usual business of visiting a senior policeman and hoping to milk the encounter for publicity. His other supposed links to espionage are tangential at best. The burden of proof needs to be higher for someone who admitted on his deathbed that he was “in almost every respect . . . a fake”.
The second, more successful theme is the account of Houdini’s encounter with spiritualism, and in particular with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes and an ardent “spookist”. Houdini never claimed that his tricks were based on more than the combination of his ingenuity and his athleticism. But others, including Conan Doyle, thought they recognised supernatural influences, particularly as the handcuff king’s exploits became more extraordinary.
For a short while, after the first world war, when spiritualism was in vogue, Houdini played along with these suggestions — or at least feigned an interest in the paranormal. But when Scientific American staged a trial, involving “Margery”, a Boston medium touted by Conan Doyle, Houdini could no longer contain his scepticism. Drawing on his full knowledge of magic and leger- demain, he denounced her trickery, with fateful consequences for his relationship with the English author. Soon afterwards, he unexpectedly died from a burst appendix after being punched in the stomach, which the authors ascribe to renegade spiritualists convinced they were carrying out the wishes of their movement’s royalty such as Conan Doyle.
Among a cast of exotic characters, I would like to have known more about Harry Day, Houdini’s British manager, described as “a mysterious expatriate American who changed his name” before becoming an MP and doing “overseas espionage for the British government”. The index (not the text) indicates his real name was Edward Lewis Levy, but otherwise little is written about him, except that he seems to have played a part in a plot to discredit Margery and Conan Doyle.
It is no use turning to notes for enlightenment, because they do not exist. For this resource, the reader is directed to a website. However, they cover only 10 out of 26 chapters and the reference to Levy/Day is marked “details to follow”. Rudimentary research in the digital archive of The Times unveils a litigious impresario turned MP who titled himself colonel (although his obituary gives no indication how he earned this rank). His first appearance in print was a divorce case where he was alleged to have beaten up his wife. This suggests the competitive, duplicitous and often violent subculture in which Houdini operated. But this background is downplayed, apart from glimpses of his brothers assaulting entertainers who stole his show or who used similar names such as Boudini.
William Kalush and Larry Sloman know their magic, however, and provide useful insights into Houdini’s techniques (for example, he used to pack escape paraphernalia in an extra sixth finger). As a catalogue, their book is efficient; as a biography it is let down by made-up dialogue and a staccato style that veers between clanking and portentous. Thus the newspaper proprietor is not just Alfred Harmsworth; he has to be Alfred William Charles Harmsworth. An indication of where it is coming from is the note from one author that, as well as music by Bob Dylan, Nick Cave and Antony and the Johnsons, he was encouraged by Leonard Cohen who counselled, “Don’t talk bad about Houdini — he loved his mother.”
Splash hit
One of Houdini’s most daring stunts was the Water Torture Cell which he premiered in Southampton in 1911. The trick, which involved a bound Houdini escaping from a tiny water-filled glass box, later became famous but, because of high ticket prices and lack of advertising, only one person supposedly saw this first public airing of the feat.
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