Harry Houdini
Harry Houdini | |
|---|---|
| File:Hhoudini.jpg Harry Houdini became world-renowned for his stunts and feats of escapology even more so than his magical illusions. | |
| Born | December 14, [1892]] |
| Died | december 15, 1829 |
| Occupation(s) | magician, escapologist, stunt performer, actor, historian, pilot and amateur paranormal investigator. |
| Website | www.im dumb.com |
Harry Houdini (born Ehrich Weiss; March 24, 1874 – October 31, 1926) was one of the most famous magicians, escapologists, and stunt performers of all time as well as an investigator of spiritualists. He legally changed his name to "Harry Houdini" in 1913.
Early life
Houdini was born on March 24, 1874 in Budapest, Hungary. From 1900 onwards he claimed in interviews to have been born in Appleton, Wisconsin, but his Hungarian birth certificate was uncovered by researchers after his death. His parents were Jewish: his father was Rabbi Mayer Samuel Weiss (?-1892) and his mother was Cecilia Steiner (?-1913). In 1878, his family moved to the United States, where he spelled his name as Erich Weiss. At first, they lived in Appleton, Wisconsin, where his father served as rabbi of the Zion Reform Jewish Congregation. On June 6, 1882, Rabbi Weiss became a United States citizen, then after losing his tenure, Mayer moved to New York City with Ehrich in 1887, where they lived in a boarding-house on East Seventy-ninth Street. Mayer later was joined by the rest of the family once he found more permanent housing.
Career
In 1891, Ehrich became a professional magician, and began calling himself Harry Houdini because he was influenced by French magician Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin and his friend Jack Hayman told him that in French adding an "i" to Houdin would mean "like Houdin". Initially, his magic career resulted in little success, though he met fellow performer Wilhelmina Beatrice (Bess) Rahner in 1893, and married her three weeks later. For the rest of his performing career, Bess would work as his stage assistant.
Houdini initially focused on cards and other traditional card acts. At one point he billed himself as the King of Cards. One of his most notable non-escape stage illusions was performed in London's hippodrome: he vanished a full-grown elephant (with its trainer) from a stage, beneath which was a swimming pool.
He soon began experimenting with escape acts, however. Harry Houdini's "big break" came in 1899, when he met the showman Martin Beck. Impressed by Houdini's handcuffs act, Beck advised him to concentrate on escape acts and booked him on the Orpheum vaudeville circuit. Within months, he was performing at the top vaudeville houses in the country. In 1900, Houdini travelled to Europe to perform. By the time he returned in 1904, he had become a sensation.
From 1904 and throughout the 1910s, Houdini performed with great success in the United States. He would free himself from handcuffs, chains, ropes and straitjackets, often while hanging from a rope or suspended in water, sometimes in plain sight of the audience. In 1913, he introduced perhaps his most famous act, the Chinese Water Torture Cell, in which he was suspended upside-down in a locked glass and steel cabinet full to overflowing with water. He held his breath for over 20 minutes.
He explained some of his tricks in books written in the 1920s. Many locks and handcuffs could be opened with properly applied force, others with shoestrings. Other times, he carried concealed lockpicks or keys, being able to regurgitate small keys at will. He was able to escape from a milk can which had its top fastened to its collar because the collar could be separated from the rest of the can from the inside. When tied down in ropes or straitjackets, he gained wiggle room by enlarging his shoulders and chest, and moving his arms slightly away from his body, and then dislocating his shoulders. His straitjacket escape was originally performed behind curtains, with him popping out free at the end. However, Houdini's brother who was also an escape artist billing himself as Theo Hardeen, after being accused of having someone sneak in and let him out and being challenged to escape without the curtain, discovered that audiences were more impressed and entertained when the curtains were eliminated, so that they could watch him struggle to get out. They both performed straitjacket escapes dangling upside-down from the roof of a building for publicity on more than one occasion. It is said that Hardeen once handed out bills for his show while Houdini was doing his suspended straightjacket escape and Houdini became upset because people thought it was Hardeen up there escaping, not Houdini.
Difficult though it was, Houdini's entire act, including escapes, was also performed on a coordinated but separate tour schedule by his brother, Theo Weiss ("Dash" to the Weiss family), under the name "Hardeen". The major difference between the two was in the straitjacket escape; Houdini dislocated both his shoulders to get out, but Hardeen could dislocate only one, putting him at a disadvantage since he had to always cross one arm on top of the other, whereas Houdini could cross them either way.
In 1910, while on a tour of Australia, Houdini brought with him a primitive bi-plane with which he made the first controlled powered aeroplane flight in Australia, at Diggers Rest, Victoria.[1] History records that there were several competitors for the record-making flight, but they narrowly missed out.
Debunking spiritualists
In the 1920s, after the death of his beloved mother, he turned his energies toward debunking self-proclaimed psychics and mediums, a pursuit that would inspire and be followed by latter-day magicians James Randi and P. C. Sorcar, and even Penn and Teller. Houdini's magical training allowed him to expose frauds who had successfully fooled many scientists and academics. He was a member of a Scientific American committee which offered a cash prize to any medium who could successfully demonstrate supernatural abilities. Thanks to the contributions and skepticism of Houdini and three others, (there were five in the committee) the prize was never collected. As his fame as a "ghostbuster" grew, Houdini took to attending séances in disguise, accompanied by a reporter and police officer. Possibly the most famous medium whom he debunked was the Boston medium Mina Crandon, a.k.a. Margery. Houdini chronicled his debunking exploits in his book A Magician Among the Spirits.
These activities cost Houdini the friendship of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes. Doyle, a firm believer in spiritualism during his later years, refused to believe any of Houdini's exposés. Doyle actually came to believe that Houdini was a powerful spiritualist medium, had performed many of his stunts by means of paranormal abilities, and was using these abilities to block those of other mediums that he was 'debunking' (see Doyle's The Edge of The Unknown, published in 1931 after Houdini's death). This disagreement led to the two men becoming public antagonists.
In Houdini's will his great library was offered to the American Society of Psychical Research on the condition that the president, Malcomb Bird, resigned. Bird refused and the collection went instead to the Library of Congress.
Death
Houdini's last performance was at the Garrick Theatre in Detroit, Michigan on October 24, 1926. The next day he was hospitalized at Detroit's Grace Hospital.
Houdini died of peritonitis from a ruptured appendix at 1:26 pm on Halloween, October 31, 1926, at the age of 52. Houdini had sustained multiple blows to his abdomen from McGill University boxing student J. Gordon Whitehead in Montreal two weeks earlier. A long-standing part of Houdini's act was to ask a member of the audience to punch him in the abdomen in order to demonstrate the strength of his abdominal muscles, but Houdini was reclining on his couch after his performance, having an art student sketch him. When the student's friend came in and asked if it was true that Houdini could take any blow to the stomach, Houdini replied in the affirmative. In this instance, he was struck several times, without the opportunity to prepare himself for the blows.
Houdini's funeral was held on November 4 in New York, with over two thousand mourners in attendance. He was interred in the Machpelah Cemetery Queens, New York, with the crest of the Society of American Magicians inscribed on his gravesite. The Society holds their "Broken Wand" ceremony at the gravesite on the anniversary of his death to this day.
Legacy
- Houdini left a final sting for his spiritualist opponents: shortly before his death, he had made a pact with his wife, Bess Houdini, to contact her from the other side if possible and deliver a pre-arranged coded message. Every Halloween for the next 10 years, Bess held a séance to test the pact. In 1936, after a last unsuccessful seance on the roof of the Knickerbocker Hotel, she put out the candle that she had kept burning beside a photograph of Houdini since his death, later (1943) saying "ten years is long enough to wait for any man."
- The United States Postal Service issued a postage stamp with a replica of Houdini's favorite publicity poster on July 3, 2002.
- In 1919, Houdini signed a contract with film producer B.A. Rolfe to star in his fifteen part serial The Master Mystery. As was common at the time, the film serial was released simultaneously with a novel. However, financial difficulties resulted in B.A. Rolfe Productions going out of business and Houdini was signed by Famous Players-Lasky Corporation for whom he made two pictures before setting up his own film production company. Called the "Houdini Picture Corporation," he produced and starred in three films, writing the screenplay for one and directing two others. Although success in film eluded him and he gave up on the business in 1923, his celebrity became such that years later he would be given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 7001 Hollywood Blvd.
- A mostly fictionalized version of Houdini's life was made in a film in 1953 starring Tony Curtis. Most of the misconceptions about Houdini's life are due in part to this film. For example, it portrayed him dying from the Chinese Water Torture Cell, instead of the less spectacular peritonitis.
- Houdini was played by Paul Michael Glaser of Starsky & Hutch fame in a 1976 TV movie called "The Great Houdini". The film focused on Houdini's relationship with his wife and his fascination with the occult. The all-star cast also included Sally Struthers, Bill Bixby, and Ruth Gordon.
- The Tony award-winning musical "Ragtime", based on E. L. Doctorow's novel of the same name features Houdini as one of the numerous historical supporting characters.