The New Yorker - USA (2020-03-30)

THENEWYORKER,MARCH30, 2020 69

agitation in Europe at the time, but he
came to represent Max Nordau’s ideal
of Muskeljudentum, or muscular Juda­
ism, with its rejection of male bodies en­
feebled by endless study. He spent little
time in school and worked at odd jobs;
he may have learned the secrets of locks
while employed at a locksmith shop. As
a child, he had played at conjuring and
had dreamed of becoming a trapeze art­
ist. When he was in his late teens, he
acquired a used copy of the memoirs of
Jean­Eugène Robert­Houdin, the French
watchmaker who became the great ma­
gician of the nineteenth century. Ehrich
was so excited about Houdin that he
changed his name to Houdini. He
thought, Begley says, that the final “i”
signified that he was “Houdin­like.”
In the eighteen­nineties, small cities
and towns had little in the way of live
entertainment (burlesque and vaude­
ville were mostly confined to the big
cities), so the arrival of a travelling cir­
cus, with its animals, its high­wire acts,
its “attractions,” was a major event. By
1893, Houdini and his brother Dash, two
years younger, were touring as the Broth­
ers Houdini, performing with “freaks,”
snake charmers, and belly dancers; they
shuffled cards, did sleight­of­hand tricks,
read the minds of people in the audi­
ence. That year, at the World’s Colum­
bian Exposition, in Chicago, they first
performed an act known as “Metamor­
phosis.” Harry was trussed and tied in
a sack, then locked in a trunk, which
Dash bound with rope. A curtain con­
cealed them briefly; when it was with­
drawn, Dash was the one tied up in the
trunk, and Harry was at liberty. The
speed of the transfer—mere seconds—
was what people marvelled at.
In 1894, Dash was replaced in the
trunk by Wilhelmina Beatrice Rahner,
or Bess, a pretty, diminutive eighteen­
year­old from Brooklyn. Within three
weeks of meeting, Harry and she had
married, over the objections of her Ger­
man Catholic mother. The two worked
together onstage, on and off, for three
decades. Their romantic life, however,
remains a mystery: they never had chil­
dren, and Houdini, in truth, seemed
more devoted to his mother. He wrote
Bess cloying billets­doux, but he wrote
Cecilia passionate letters; he also sent
his mother a part of his earnings from
Europe, indulged her whims and fan­

tasies, and eventually bundled her, along

with Bess, into a Harlem town house

just north of Central Park. It’s as if he

wanted to be a better husband to his

mother than his father had been. As

Kenneth Silverman detailed, in his 1996

biography, Houdini did have one se­

cret affair, with Jack London’s widow,

Charmian, but he appears to have run

away from it. He was a driven, restless

man in his career but not in his roman­

tic life. Indeed, it’s not clear whether

he was sexual at all—his imprisonments

and escapes, his purposeful exhibition­

ism, may have been all he needed, the

ultimate act of sublimation.

During a burlesque tour of New En­

gland with Bess, in 1895, he wore hand­

cuffs under the eyes of the police for

the first time. For thirty years, he was

cuffed and chained in shows, in police

stations, in penitentiaries. The police

evidently pulled out their strongest

equipment for him; locksmiths designed

special restraints with multiple locks.

By 1906, he was throwing himself,

chained, into inhospitable bodies of

water, dropping twenty­five feet off the

Belle Isle Bridge, for instance, into the

freezing Detroit River. In 1915 and after,

thousands of onlookers saw him strait­

jacketed and hanging upside down from

a scaffold above the streets of Kansas

City, Minneapolis, and many other cit­

ies. He’d pull himself up, wriggle free,

drop the straitjacket, and spread his

arms. The reference to Jesus did not

go unnoticed.

The aerial escapades were often

staged near a newspaper office. From

the beginning, the excitement about

magic shows and outlandish feats was

amplified by newspapers that, in this

matter, barely observed the distinction

between reporting and press­agent copy.

In the novel “Ragtime” (1974), in which

Houdini appears as a character, E. L.

Doctorow re­created the lurid public

life of the period just before the First

World War. For Doctorow, Houdini

was a key player in the history of sen­

sation. Sex scandals, advertising, radio,

moving pictures, flying machines, con­

vulsive newspapers, exploding toys—

America was going electric, approach­

ing the goal of full­time, full­circuit

excitement. Mass culture defined the

aspirations of democratic man. The pub­

lic was avid; Houdini was avid. As Beg­

ley says, he was more interested in ac­

claim than in money.

He taught himself to speak in ad­

vanced elocutionary English, and to

write in the ornate tones of period bal­

lyhoo; sometimes he used a ghostwriter,

but he also composed or dictated sto­

ries about himself, proclaiming his

greatness in leaflets, flyers, books, and

pamphlets. He appeared in a few silent

movies in the nineteen­tens and twen­

ties, although he was a terrible actor.

In “Houdini,” a large­scale Hollywood

version of his life from 1953, the an­

gel­faced Tony Curtis—who was also

of Hungarian Jewish parentage—gave

him a quick­moving grace and an in­

genuous charm. But the movie is square,

dishonest, and distinctly unmagical. For

all his self­promotion, Houdini man­

aged to elude the projections of others.

In 1920, he became friends with Sir

Arthur Conan Doyle. The creator of

the most logical man in popular liter­

ature was, paradoxically, devoted to Spir­

itualism. Doyle was convinced that he

had communicated, in séances, with his

son Kingsley, who was wounded in the

Great War and died in the influenza

epidemic of 1918. In between writing

stories about Sherlock Holmes, Doyle

wrote books announcing that human­

ity had entered into “new relations with

the Unseen”; he believed that Harry

Houdini, for one, possessed supernat­

ural powers. Houdini was flattered but

disavowed any special help. The friend­

ship proceeded in an amiable manner

until June of 1922, when Doyle and Lady

Doyle, who was a practicing medium,

invited Houdini to their suite at the

Ambassador Hotel in Atlantic City.

Lady Doyle seated the party around a

table, rapped three times, and began

communicating with Houdini’s adored

mother, who had been dead for nine

years. (Hearing of the death while in

Europe, Houdini had fainted.) She

wrote out fifteen pages of messages in