agitation in Europe at the time, but he
came to represent Max Nordau's ideal
of Mushljudentum, 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 oflocks
while employed at a locksmith shop.As
a child, he had played at conjuring and
had dreamed ofbecoming a trapeu art-
ist. When he was in his late teens, he
acquired a used copy of the memoirs of
Jean-Eugene Robcrt-Houdin, the Freru:h
watchmake.r who became the great ma-
gician of the nineteenth century. Ehri.ch
was so excited about Houdin that he
changed his name to Houdini. He
thought, Begley says, that the .final "i"
signified that he was "Howlin-like."
In the eighteen-nineties, 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 arriwl. of a travelling cir-
cus, with its animals, its high-wire 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
shuffied can:ls, did sleight-of-hand 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 1.894, Dash was replaced in the
trunk by Wilhelmina Beatrice Rabner,
or Bess, a pretty, diminutive eighteen-
ycar-old from Brooklyn. Within three
~ of meeting, Harry and she had
married, over the objections ofher 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 billets-doux, but he wrote
Cecilia passionate letters; he also sent
his mother a part of his earnings from
Europe, indulged her whims and Un.-
tasi.es, and eventually bun.died 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 ofNew En-
gland with Bess, in l.895. 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 twenty-five feet off the
Belle Isle Bridge, for instance, into the
freezing Detroit River. In 1915 and afu:r,
thousands of onlookers saw him strait-
jacketed and hanging upside down :6:om
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. Fromthe beginning, the excitement about
magic shows and outlandish feats was
amplified by newspapers that, in this
matter, barely observed the distinction
between reporting and press-agent copy.
In the novel "Ragtime" (1974), in which
Houdini appears as a character, E. L.
Doctorow re-created the lurid public
llfe of the period just before the F'll'litWorld 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 full-time, full-circuit
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 ghostwrita;
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 nineteen-tens and twen-
ties, although he was a terrible actor.
In "Houdini," a large-scale Hollywood
version of his life from 1953, the an-
gel-faced Tony Curtis-who was al.so
of Hungarian Jewish parentage--gave
him a quick-moving grace and an in-
genuous charm. But the movie is square,
dishonest, and distinctly unmagical For
all his self-promotion, Houdini man-
aged to dude the projections of others.
In 1920, he became mends 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 seances, with his
son Kingsley, who was wounded in the
Great War and died in the influenza
epidemic of 191.8. 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
untilJune of1922, 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 fur nine
years. (Hearing of the death while in
Europe, Houdini had fainted.) She
wrote out fifu:en pages of messages in1l£ NEY )OMfR, MAl\01 30 , 1020 69