American Experience (1988–…): Season 12, Episode 11 - Houdini - full transcript
This is a biography of Harry Houdini that was shown on PBS a decade and a half ago. It's interesting and well worth watching, though I thought occasionally one of the 'experts' was a bit difficult to take. He made some bizarre comparisons that seemed WAY over-stated--such as the public's fascination with Houdini was because when he threw off his chains during his act, it was indicative of a desire by the poor to throw off the chains of oppression. Yeah, right... Additionally, several folks said that Houdini's acting was terrible but I've seen most (if not all) of the surviving silent films made by Houdini and thought he was just fine. Apart from these things, the rest was interesting--how the man continually hurt himself and even risked his life to get magic tricks just right! An odd showman, that's for sure and a reasonably good biography that's narrated by Mandy Patinkin.
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Everyone who ever experienced
seeing Houdini in the flesh
remarked on his smile.
He grinned from ear to ear
and he looked out
over the entire audience.
He swept... everyone met his eye
at one point or another,
up into the balcony even.
He got through.
They would put him
inside of a milk can
full of water, you know...
and put locks
on the outside of the milk can.
He would make it as difficult as
possible for himself, it seemed.
Everybody understands
the fear of water,
the fear of being buried.
You know, he takes
all those metaphors
that are our nightmares
and turns them into something
that he can escape from.
And one way he did that with
the milk can was to say to them,
"At the moment that I put
my head beneath the water,
"I want you all
to take a deep breath
and hold your breath
as long as you possibly can."
To build up suspense
for the milk can,
he had a huge clock
put on the stage.
45 seconds, a minute,
a minute and a half,
when people in the audience
realized
they couldn't hold their breath
for 30 seconds.
Two minutes.
People would panic.
Some of them would even leave
the audience
because they couldn't bear
the suspense.
And then suddenly, dripping,
he would appear
from the cabinet.
And there all the locks
were still intact
and there was no clue
to the method that he used.
That's a good escape, isn't it?
He was our greatest showman.
Throughout his rise from unknown
immigrant to international star,
Harry Houdini radiated
confidence and courage.
In public, he confronted
our greatest fears
and always emerged victorious.
What we didn't know was that
Houdini was plagued by doubts
and haunted
by his own mortality.
To us, he was a superman.
"Harry Houdini" was not
his real name.
He was born Ehrich Weiss
in Budapest in 1874.
When he was four,
he emigrated with his mother
and four brothers
to the small Midwestern town
of Appleton, Wisconsin.
There they joined Ehrich's
father, who had come to lead
a small congregation
of Jewish immigrants.
Rabbi Mayer Weiss was
educated, uncompromising
and deeply devoted
to his wife, Cecelia.
Harry referred to her
as a saint, as an angel.
She was a very good,
caring, nurturing person.
And it's something
that gave Harry, I think,
a goal in his life,
to please Cecelia, his mother.
Houdini grew up in a family
with five boys in it,
and Houdini worked very hard
to try to stand out.
His tremendous competitiveness
partly came
out of trying
to outshine his brothers.
Ehrich stood out
as the most physically agile.
Inspired by traveling circuses,
he performed for friends
as a contortionist
and trapeze artist,
calling himself
"the Prince of the Air."
I'm sure that Harry would say,
"I think I can do that, too."
No matter how incredible it was
or how impossible it seemed,
he knew that if they could
do it, he could do it.
But the idyllic years
in Appleton were short-lived.
Ehrich's father was fired
by his congregation
for being too "Old World."
He struggled
to support his family
and they moved frequently,
finally ending up in the crowded
tenements of New York City.
Ehrich and his father found work
in a garment sweatshop.
What little time he had, he
devoted to building his body.
Just five foot six,
he was muscular
and often ran ten miles a day.
In the wonderful picture of him
at about the age of 16,
he has a chest full of medals,
one of which he won for a
cross-country race in New York.
That's a real medal.
All the other medals
on his chest are fakes.
That's very typical of Houdini.
No matter how wonderful
the things he did,
he had to exaggerate them.
Desperation was
the theme of his life...
That desperate desire
to turn himself
into something almost superhuman
if he possibly could.
"Look at who I am,
look at what I can do"
is very, very much
a desperate kind of thing.
But nothing Ehrich could do
could transform
his father's life.
As Rabbi Weiss lay dying
of cancer at the age of 63,
he made his son promise
that Cecelia would never
want for anything.
It became Ehrich's mission.
I think Houdini was partly
ashamed of his failed father.
It was very important for him
to overcome those beginnings
and to really count
in the world.
Very few people that I know have
wanted to make a mark on life
as much as Houdini did.
It was on the streets
of New York
that Ehrich found a way
to make his mark.
There were entertainment venues
on virtually every block
of the city:
concert saloons,
variety theaters, dime museums.
Dime museums
would indeed advertise
what's inside on the outside
so there would have been
a chance to see
human anomalies demonstrated
or even possibly a magician
on the street.
At age 18, Ehrich joined up
with a friend
to form a simple magic act
performing
sleight-of-hand tricks.
They named themselves
the Brothers Houdini
after the famous French
magician Robert-Houdin.
Ehrich became Harry.
I think when you're a kid
and you do something that's a
little bit out of the ordinary,
whether it be magic or escapes
or something like that
that impresses people,
you get that reaction,
a very genuine reaction
of amazement, of wonder.
It's something you can't replace
with anything else.
The first big job
for the Brothers Houdini
was on the mile-long midway
at the 1893 Columbia Exposition
in Chicago.
The organizers
of the world's fair expected
the fair, the exposition,
to be the great draw.
In reality,
the midway was probably more
successful, more popular.
Why?
Because people were
truly entertained.
American entertainment was still
very much
in its kind of formative stage,
but in the 1890s, it exploded,
and Houdini was coming along
just at that point of explosion.
Harry discovered there was
plenty of work in show business.
He found someone to share it
with the following year
when he met 18-year-old
Beatrice Rahner.
Bess was a German Catholic
immigrant, lively and funny,
part of a song-and-dance act
called the Floral Sisters.
After a three-week courtship,
they married.
Bess was a natural-born
magician's assistant.
She was very petite.
She was only about
five feet tall and very lithe.
Five feet tall,
thin, very gaminlike,
is wonderful for climbing
in and out of boxes.
Appearing as the Houdinis,
they performed
conventional magic tricks
and featured an illusion
called the metamorphosis,
taking only three seconds
to exchange places in a trunk.
The Houdinis started out
in the lowest branches
of show business.
They did circuses.
They did
traveling medicine shows,
where Houdini would sell
Kickapoo Joy Juice
in between the acts.
They started out
in dime museums,
performing next to various
sort of human anomalies.
Houdini really grew to hate it.
He yearned to move up the ladder
to the vaudeville stage.
The money was better
and the pace less grueling.
And compared
to the dime museums,
it was positively refined.
Tony Pastor's in New York
was the really first big date
that the Houdinis had.
It was the place to be.
But what was also important was,
where were you on the bill?
Harry and Bess played
in the worst position...
Opening the second act
while the audience
was still getting seated.
When Harry later pasted
the program into his scrapbook,
he moved the Houdinis
into the headliner's position.
To become a true headliner,
Harry needed a gimmick.
He was inspired
by spiritualist shows
in which the performers
would enter a cabinet
locked in handcuffs.
While the audience believed that
spirits were playing instruments
and making objects fly around,
Houdini knew immediately
it was a trick.
The performers had gotten
out of their handcuffs.
The whole idea
of the spiritualist
was to make the audience believe
that they did not escape.
Houdini saw the potential
in the actual escape.
The first time he used
handcuffs onstage,
he knew he was on to something.
But escape was just
a small part of his act.
Houdini had struggled
for six years
and was still
"Dime Museum Harry."
He was thinking
of getting out of magic,
but he went to fulfill
a contract that
he had in Minneapolis.
While he was performing in
some kind of beer garden there,
a very famous agent
named Martin Beck...
One of the leading
vaudeville managers...
Walked in and happened to see
one of Houdini's
handcuff escapes.
He didn't think the escape act
could maintain a continuity
that an audience would
come to see just that.
But Beck saw through that.
Beck saw that an escape act
could be an act in itself.
Martin Beck wired Houdini,
saying he could open in Omaha
and get paid $60 a week.
"This wire changed my whole
life's journey," he later wrote.
The act was no longer
Bess and Harry.
It was simply Houdini,
the king of handcuffs.
After 14 months
on Beck's vaudeville circuit,
he was earning $400 a week
and was famous.
In 1900, Beck sent Harry and
Bess on a brief tour of England.
At the time,
at the turn of the century,
it was important that people
in America came to England,
because that's where it
mattered most to be successful.
That's where... everyone
from America came to England.
In London,
Houdini astonished audiences
and was hailed as "the most
wonderful entertainer
the world had ever seen."
Harry and Bess decided
to stay abroad
and began performing
all over Europe.
I think Houdini appealed
to the working class.
They considered themselves
in chains...
Chained to the drudgery
of their work
for low pay
and poor conditions...
And to see Houdini
actually escape,
seemingly
from impossible things,
they thought that maybe
it gave them a glimmer of hope
that maybe
they could do the same.
Houdini publicized
his appearances
by visiting the local jail,
where he convinced the police
to lock him up
and let him try to escape.
Houdini came to town, and
you knew Houdini was in town.
He had placards mounted
onto handles,
and he would employ
perhaps 20 people
to carry these
through the streets:
"Houdini escaped from
your jail today at 10:30."
It was one just great big hype.
The jail escapes were
especially newsworthy
because he performed them nude.
In that day,
that was exceedingly daring.
But it also proved
that he didn't go in
with special tools concealed
in his shirt and his trousers
and his shoes and whatnot.
Though he would be
searched assiduously,
he had ways
around those searches.
As you can imagine,
there were so many ways
by sleight of hand and such
that he could actually
be in that cell
with sufficient tools that,
after he'd studied the lock,
he knew how to manipulate it.
The real trick of it all was...
I mean, the right key
at the right time,
but keeping it away from anyone
that might see him having it.
That's it, really, sums it up.
That's all escapology is anyway.
Harry worked the press
just as skillfully
as he worked his locks.
In 1904, he staged an event
with London's biggest newspaper,
the Daily Mirror.
For days, the Mirror fed
the public every detail
about a set of handcuffs
that were guaranteed
impossible to pick.
In front of 4,000 spectators,
Houdini appeared to be worried.
"I do not know whether
I will get out or not," he said.
He then withdrew into a cabinet
he called a ghost house
and the audience waited.
One of the times that Houdini
came out of the ghost house,
he asked to have
his dress coat taken off.
He was sweating profusely.
The manager of the escape
said no.
He was afraid that
that would show Houdini
really how the cuffs
could be opened.
Houdini then pulled
a pure Houdini stunt.
He struggled to get into
a side pocket of his coat...
Terrifically difficult...
Removed a pen knife,
opened this with his teeth.
And he hacked the coat
away from his body
and threw it on the floor,
and everyone cheered.
And he held the handcuffs
triumphantly in the air
and went back into
the cabinet to try again.
For more than an hour,
the audience sat riveted,
waiting for Houdini to appear.
And when he finally emerged
from those cuffs,
they literally picked him up
on their shoulders
and walked around with him.
They were so excited.
The audience just went berserk.
There's only one way
he could have gotten out of it.
He was able to get a newspaper
to collaborate on a charade
to get themselves publicity,
which is quite
an interesting achievement.
It's really amazing marketing.
"Nothing on the walls
but Houdini," Harry boasted.
But after five years,
the constant touring
had taken a toll.
Harry felt guilty leaving
his mother for so long
and, as he wrote to a friend,
"Bess wishes to stop working
and rest long enough
to raise one of them things
we call children."
In 1905,
the Houdinis headed home.
Harry was now
an international star.
Almost 30 years earlier,
Ehrich Weiss had sailed
into New York Harbor
as a young immigrant
from Hungary.
Now he was Harry Houdini
and carried a passport
which listed Appleton,
Wisconsin, as his birthplace.
After you evolve
in a foreign country
and you're welcomed back
into your adopted America,
you know, that's...
can be nothing better
than conquering something that
was unconquerable for yourself.
Houdini now commanded
$2,000 a week.
He bought an elegant brownstone
in a fashionable part of Harlem
and moved in his sister,
one of his brothers
and, of course, his mother.
Houdini was really
twice married.
I mean, he was married to Bess
and then, in a way,
also married to his mother.
He always called them
"my two girls."
He was, in effect, what we would
call today a "mama's boy."
He loved his mother
to the point of obsession.
But he also loved Bess
and, I think, loved her
passionately, romantically.
He left her little notes
underneath the tablecloth
and tucked behind a picture
that she would eventually find.
Harry addressed Bess adoringly
as "sweetie wifey mine,"
saying he had a ""Bessyful'
of love" awaiting her.
His whole relation to her
is so sort of kidding.
There's something
very unserious about it.
It was the kind of relation
Houdini had
with other people, too.
This was someone
very wrapped up in himself.
He was an absolutely
immense egoist... none larger.
He had the most
elaborate stationery
that had "Houdini" all over it.
His pajamas said "H.H.",
his wallet said "H.H.",
the tiles, the floor tiles
in his bathroom said "H.H."
Houdini was especially
preoccupied with his health.
He swam
and had massages regularly,
didn't drink or smoke and was
evangelical about his diet.
He tried to tell people
that he could build them up
if they had lots of milk
and oranges and eggs
and goodness knows what.
And he gave them little recipes,
jotted things down for them,
to help them
build their physique.
He was a very personable guy...
A guy that you'd
like to be around.
But the other side of him was,
one particular lady,
who was his secretary, told me
that he didn't like people.
He didn't like people at all.
So he didn't just do an act
onstage; he did it off as well.
He was an implacable foe.
He had people that he disliked,
if not hated, all of his life
simply because
they had slighted him.
The people Houdini
hated the most
were the imitators
who had plagued him
since the beginning
of his career.
Harry often spied on them and
then humiliated them in public.
"Do others," he once said,
"or they will do you."
In 1908,
he dropped handcuff escapes
and began performing a new act,
the "open challenge."
He offered a thousand dollars
to anyone with a device
that could hold him.
It was a wonderful gimmick.
It brought him a lot
of local good will.
I mean, he'd come into Milwaukee
and some packing case firm
or some piano maker would say,
"We'll lock you in our piano
and nail the lid shut
and you get out."
It would be great
publicity for them
and great publicity for Houdini.
There were people in factories
who I've spoken to
who said, "Oh, it was wonderful
"when we got together
and we said,
'Let's make up a challenge
for Houdini to escape from. ""
They joined in.
He brought the public
really onto the stage.
He made them feel
important, I think.
Houdini escaped
from a roll-top desk, a huge
envelope, a giant football,
even a creature from the deep.
If he were working today,
there would be
a level of cynicism
that just didn't exist then.
There was this kind
of innocence of that time
before television, before big,
high-tech, $100 million movies
that made his act
a kind of a super-act.
He created a frenzy to see
his shows in Europe and America,
and streets were often blocked
with hundreds unable to get in.
Most vaudevillians developed
12 minutes of material
across a lifetime,
and it was always the same.
But Houdini's act had suspense
and no one knew exactly
what was going to happen,
including himself.
It was unbelievable.
They would tie every piece of
his body with ropes and chains
so it would be absolutely
impossible to get out of it.
But he seemed
to wiggle out of it.
He would display each challenge
in front of the theater
before the show
to attract an audience.
It was a strategy Harry
had picked up at the circus.
It also gave him a chance
to plan his escape.
But no matter how much he
prepared, there was always risk.
Houdini broke, injured,
sprained almost everything.
One of the worst injuries was
he was performing in Pittsburgh,
and he was doing a rope tie.
And he had some longshoremen
come up on the stage
and tie him tightly.
They pulled very hard
on his body,
so hard that
they ruptured his kidney.
And for about the next week,
he was urinating blood.
All of Houdini's escapes
involved a lot of pain
and certainly, part of
the interest in it has to do
with some kind
of masochistic pleasure.
Houdini was fascinated
by mutilation.
He had a gruesome collection
of photographs,
some of them of prisoners
somewhere in Asia
who were beheaded,
and the heads are sort of lying
around the field like cabbages.
Harry was fascinated by madness
and even visited
mental institutions.
One day, he was struck
by the sight
of an inmate struggling
to get out of a straitjacket.
It's part of his genius
that he saw in that
a presentation piece,
because you appear
to be totally helpless.
But Houdini's strongest
obsession was death.
After a schoolhouse burned down,
he traveled out of his way
to view the charred remains
of the young victims.
Houdini had a lifelong
fascination with death.
There are many, many pictures
of him visiting graves,
usually the graves
of other magicians.
He's tempting death himself
all of his life.
When Harry introduced
the milk can escape,
he played on
his audience's deepest fears.
I was fascinated to see
just how crazy this man
could get, you know,
and get himself out of it
because he put himself
in peril... he really did...
Many, many times.
Houdini almost died
when he was challenged
by the Tetley brewery in England
to escape from a milk can
filled with beer.
He had a small air space
at the top of the can.
The lid was slightly domed.
Now, when Houdini, who many
times had done this trick,
went into the can
and come up to the top,
he then found that little space
that literally saved his life
many, many times...
That was full of CO2
from the beer.
As soon as he took a gulp
of that air, it wasn't air.
It was poison.
I don't know exactly
how he contacted the outside.
They knew it was going wrong
and they hacked him
out of the thing,
ripped the thing apart
and took him out.
There's a story
that when he was young,
he was swimming in the river...
He was seven years old or so...
And almost drowned.
That story always fascinates me
because so many
of Houdini's greatest stunts
are really underwater escapes.
Perhaps that experience
so much scared him
that he spent a lot
of the rest of his life
trying to be sure he could
overcome it and survive it.
Harry started preparing
for hazardous water escapes.
He would submerge himself
in an icy bathtub,
holding his breath
as long as possible.
Bess timed him as he stayed
under for up to three minutes.
He was so insanely devoted
to what he was doing
and so disciplined
that the ultimate insanity of
his life never occurred to him.
At age 33,
Houdini began performing
dangerous water escapes outdoors
to promote his vaudeville shows
around the country.
In New York, he created
one of the biggest spectacles
the city had ever seen
when he was handcuffed,
secured in a packing box
and lowered into the East River.
The crowds were
absolutely immense...
I mean, up to 100,000 people.
You couldn't get anywhere
near the East River.
People were standing
on the seawall.
The police were afraid
people were going to topple in.
I think actually
a few people did.
He was enacting over and
over again the same impulse
that brought people
from foreign countries here
in the first place:
to escape from social hierarchy,
to escape from poverty,
to escape from injustice.
That kind of self-assertion
appealed to people.
But in his head,
I think Houdini was always
performing for his mother.
That was his real audience.
What always amazes me is
that when he was doing some
of his most dangerous stunts,
he would have his mother come
and see him jump off a bridge,
locked in handcuffs,
and at the end
of his performance
he would write in his diary,
"Ma saw me jump."
It was as if he never grew up.
He was the ultimate
aspiring teenager or child
who never could quite get
the recognition
he thought he deserved.
Harry had long wanted to be seen
as a scholar, like his father.
Since his father was a rabbi,
a learned person,
Houdini tried to become
a learned person,
in spite of the fact that he had
very little basic education.
Most of that was gained
in the streets and on the road.
Houdini tried to turn himself
into an intellectual.
He collected one of the largest
theater libraries in the world,
wrote books on magic
and pursued friendships
with famous writers
such as Jack London
and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Look how he started...
In the carnivals,
in the circus, the sideshow,
this kind of... the periphery
of respected entertainment.
And you really... eventually,
after you get success,
you really want people
that you respect to respect you.
There was always this feeling
that not only would he want to
escape from the freezing river
or the coffin or the milk can,
but that he had to escape
from the stage as well
and be seen in the real world
as a historical figure
and not just
a stage illusionist.
In 1910, Harry bought a plane
and took it to Australia,
where he made a daring
three-minute flight.
He was one man
who hardly had to worry
about being forgotten,
but he was never
quite confident of that.
"Even if history forgets Houdini
the handcuff king," he said,
"it will write down my name
as the first man to fly here."
Who remembers today that Harry
Houdini was the first person
to fly a plane in Australia?
Not many.
Harry was disappointed
he and Bess were unable
to have children.
Without a family of her own,
Bess focused her maternal
instincts on Harry.
His wife Bess was always after
him to put on a clean shirt.
And she'd take a brush on
occasion and scrub his knuckles
because he was not too careful
about his personal appearance.
He's a sort of slob.
I mean, he looks like
he hasn't changed for weeks.
I think his sloppiness in dress
was just a function
of his total preoccupation
with what he was doing.
By 1912, the milk can escape
was being copied
and sold to imitators for $35.
Houdini was furious,
but prepared.
He had spent five years
in his basement workshop
secretly developing
a new escape.
"The climax of all my labors,"
he said,
"is the Chinese
water torture cell."
Well, here we had sort
of a man-sized aquarium.
There were a couple of tons
of water in there.
The lid had a couple of notches
cut out of it
into which his ankles would be
placed, padlocked on the end.
He would be lifted up upside
down, hanging from the lid.
To be hung upside down by
your ankles submerged in water
takes a lot out of you.
Your chest feels
like it's exploding.
It's scary.
The last you saw of Houdini
was him hanging upside down
looking at the audience
through the glass.
It instilled terror.
His hair sort of swirling
around, his cheeks puffed out,
turning sort of red in the face.
And you wondered, how is this
guy going to get out of there?
And then you saw
the curtain drop over it
and the tension was unbearable.
There was a representative
or two from the audience
standing there to make sure that
no one approached it from behind
to release him in any way.
And for a couple of minutes,
that's the way it sat
while they played
"Asleep in the Deep."
He would get out
of the water torture cell,
but concealed from the audience.
And they wouldn't be aware of
the fact that he was now out.
And he would stall
for a while, of course,
to build the suspense.
And then suddenly at a signal,
the music stopped
and there he was, all
out of breath and dripping wet,
walking forward
to take his bows.
What a wonderful moment.
Even though Harry insisted
it was only a trick,
many believed he must have
escaped by supernatural means.
Once you know the secret,
the whole beauty of it is gone.
The secret is actually
not the best part of it;
it's the presentation.
Houdini was headed
for a big European trip.
He was going to take in
the Scandinavian countries.
He got aboard the ship, but...
and the thing was
just about to pull out,
but he insisted on running
back down the gangplank
and giving his mother
another kiss and a big hug.
There's a very poignant picture
that exists
of the moment that Houdini
last saw his mother.
He took that picture perhaps
from the stern of the ship
as the ship sailed away from New
York Harbor, bound for Europe.
And you see his mother
just a small figure
in a huge crowd of people,
waving good-bye to the boat.
The worst day
in Houdini's life certainly
was the day
that his mother died.
By one account,
when he got the news...
He was performing in Copenhagen,
I think... he fainted dead away.
"I feel like a child
who has been taken
to the railroad station
by Mother," he wrote.
"Train rushes in,
Mother manages to get aboard,
"and before my very eyes,
"away goes the train
and Mother onboard.
Here I am left alone
at the station."
Harry canceled his tour,
and for weeks
only left the house
to visit Cecelia's gravesite.
He bound her letters in a book
so he could read them
late into the night.
He told his brother
he had lost all ambition.
And yet, he was still driven
to perform.
When you're passionate,
you don't have very much peace.
You have to keep going.
You have to really be passionate
about continuing to move forward
like the shark going
through the water.
And Houdini had a passionate
yearning to stay out there.
On a cold winter day
in New York City,
Houdini, now over 40,
performed his most physically
demanding publicity stunt.
He would hang himself
across Times Square
and get out of a straitjacket.
And, of course, all traffic
at Times Square was tied up.
Thousands of people
would stand outside
and watch this phenomenon.
He struck me
as just one big muscle...
with a controlled center
somewhere.
He seemed to have control
over every muscle in his body.
There was a connection
to the audience's
sense of the modern, too...
These tall new buildings
ten stories high,
new miracles of architecture
and cranes on the street.
It was a kind of
very modern feat.
By 1918, Houdini was
a cultural icon.
There was even
a new word, "Houdinize,"
meaning "to get out
of a tight spot."
But Harry still felt restless.
He had an affair with
Jack London's widow, Charmian.
Both suffering from
the loss of a loved one,
they had a relationship
that was passionate but brief.
He was really a straight arrow
and he seems to have felt
very guilty about it.
That he should have had
an affair is sort of inevitable.
That he had only one
and that it seems to have been
not very happy
is probably more revealing.
In major cities
all over the country,
Houdini performed
his upside-down
straitjacket escape...
His most popular
publicity stunt.
It was also the last
he ever created.
Harry was physically exhausted.
"Hereafter I intend to work
entirely with my brain,"
he wrote in his diary.
It's generally not appreciated
that Houdini,
almost from the beginning,
really wanted to get out
of the escape business.
He writes in his diaries
over and over again,
"This is too tough.
Must find some other way
of doing this."
In the teens
moving into the '20s,
film was gaining rapidly
as a major threat to vaudeville.
Houdini probably knew
that his career
as a stage performer
might be limited,
and therefore it seemed
very important for him
to succeed on the screen.
I n 1918,
Houdini's first attempt
to break into the movies
was a 15-part serial
called "Master Mystery."
And his idea was
he would have himself filmed
doing his escapes
and not
have to do them anymore...
People could watch him on film.
For a time,
life in Hollywood was good.
Harry and Bess enjoyed
staying in one place
after years on the road.
On the evening of
their 25th wedding anniversary,
he left her a note:
"We have starved
and starred together.
"I love you,
and I know you love me.
"Yours till the end of the world
and ever after,
Ehrich."
But in the movie business,
Harry had met his match.
He was a terrible actor.
I mean, he has about
three expressions.
He can frown, he can look wooden
and he can look quizzical.
That's about it.
It's just so ridiculous.
It's as if it were a comedy.
But he didn't mean these
as comedies.
He wanted to be taken
very seriously.
He was a great failure
in the films.
Harry and Bess retreated
to their home in New York.
He buried himself
in what he called
his "world-famous
theater library."
With the death of millions
during World War I,
a religious movement called
Spiritualism was flourishing.
One of its greatest disciples
was Houdini's friend
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
the creator of Sherlock Holmes.
Doyle had lost a son
in the First World War,
and various mediums had
brought Doyle's son back to him
to kiss him on the forehead
and to speak to him.
Oh, my darling, thank God,
thank God.
Conan Doyle's wife offered
to hold a séance for Houdini.
She claims she could receive
a message from his mother.
I want to talk to my boy,
my own beloved boy...
Harry was extremely skeptical,
but he agreed.
The message was in English,
and Houdini said his mother
knew almost no English.
She spoke a kind of mixture of
German, Hungarian and Yiddish,
so he was sure that
the message was a fraud.
Enraged by the exploitation
of his grief,
Houdini began a crusade
against spiritualists.
He went to séances in disguise,
confident that he was uniquely
suited to expose their trickery.
"It takes a flimflammer to catch
a flimflammer," he said.
Harry was back in the headlines.
He told me that he thought
they were wicked.
They preyed on poor people.
They'd spend their last dollar
to hear the voice
of a loved one.
Houdini's exposés proved
incredibly popular.
They became his new act.
He read the name and address
of every single spiritualist
in every city,
and of course a lot of people
sued him and all like that,
but they didn't get anywhere
because the information
we had was authentic.
Houdini even testified
against spiritualism
at Congressional hearings.
At last he was receiving
the respect for his intellect
that he had always craved.
He had become very well known
in the pages of
Scientific American magazine.
He'd become something much more
than just
a vaudeville entertainer.
Even though he had
promised Bess he would retire,
Harry could not step
out of the limelight.
He was competing with
all kinds of entertainment...
Eddie Cantor, Al Jolson,
W.C. Fields.
This is the great period
of the Ziegfeld Follies.
This is the great period
of the Broadway stage.
In 1925, Houdini launched
a one-man show on Broadway.
Doing your own show on Broadway
was an enormous leap.
There is a kind
of class associated
with appearing on Broadway,
especially then,
and Houdini had reached it.
Houdini's show featured
magic tricks, escapes
and exposés of spiritualists.
He would call on volunteers
from the audience
to participate in a mock séance.
Really, it was weird.
It was so real,
the way it was performed.
Then after he did the séance,
he showed the audience,
step by step, how it was done.
The participants
could not understand
how the bell
under the table rang
without the help of spirits,
but the audience could see
Houdini slipping out of his shoe
and ringing the bell
with his toes.
We used to go backstage
after his performance
and sit in his dressing room
and I got to know him
rather well.
I was fascinated by him.
He could swell his stomach and
shrink it and withstand blows.
Why, he would say, "Hit me,
hit me as hard as you can."
And I'd say,
"Well, I don't want to."
He said, "No, do it."
And I would hit him with a...
I don't know, I'd hurt my hand,
I mean, before I'd hurt him.
But Houdini would not stay
invulnerable much longer.
He fractured his ankle
performing the water torture
cell escape in Albany.
He continued on to Montreal,
and before his show that night,
gave a lecture
at McGill University.
The psychology department
invited him
to give a talk on
the psychology of mediumship...
Just the kind of thing
Houdini loved to do.
Some students came back to see
him after one of the lectures.
One of them was going
to sketch him.
While he was being sketched,
Harry lay on a couch in his
dressing room reading his mail.
He was worn out
and in great pain.
As the student observed,
Houdini looked "in need
of a long, carefree vacation."
Another student entered
the dressing room.
The student asked him
whether or not he could take
a blow to the stomach.
Houdini nodded that he could,
and as he put down
the letters to stand up,
getting ready to be prepared,
the student struck him
in the stomach.
Harry could only mumble,
"That will do."
He went on that evening
and gave the show,
and the next day
he left for Detroit by train.
And on the train
he developed a very high fever.
They got a doctor
to meet them
when the train came to Detroit,
who urged him, you know,
"Don't do the show."
Of course he did
perform that night
and when he finished the show,
he collapsed and was taken
to the hospital.
Houdini was operated on,
but his appendix had burst
and the infection had spread.
It is likely he had been
suffering from appendicitis
for several days
before the punch.
They ministered to him,
but they pretty well knew
that he was doomed.
After 52 years
of breaking his bones
and getting ahead of everyone
and insisting
on being at the top,
he said to his brother,
presumably his last words,
"I can't fight anymore."
Houdini died in Detroit
on Halloween, 1926.
He was laid in a bronze coffin
he'd had made
for a "buried alive" stunt.
According to his request,
a black bag
of his mother's letters
was placed beneath his head
as a pillow.
Bess collapsed.
"The world will never know
what I have lost," she cried.
After a life spent
in pursuit of fame,
Harry Houdini would now assume
his place in history.
I've had people actually ask me
whether Houdini
was a real person
or whether he was like Sherlock
Holmes, a fictional creation.
To get to a point
where people don't know
whether you were real or not,
that's fame beyond fame.
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Everyone who ever experienced
seeing Houdini in the flesh
remarked on his smile.
He grinned from ear to ear
and he looked out
over the entire audience.
He swept... everyone met his eye
at one point or another,
up into the balcony even.
He got through.
They would put him
inside of a milk can
full of water, you know...
and put locks
on the outside of the milk can.
He would make it as difficult as
possible for himself, it seemed.
Everybody understands
the fear of water,
the fear of being buried.
You know, he takes
all those metaphors
that are our nightmares
and turns them into something
that he can escape from.
And one way he did that with
the milk can was to say to them,
"At the moment that I put
my head beneath the water,
"I want you all
to take a deep breath
and hold your breath
as long as you possibly can."
To build up suspense
for the milk can,
he had a huge clock
put on the stage.
45 seconds, a minute,
a minute and a half,
when people in the audience
realized
they couldn't hold their breath
for 30 seconds.
Two minutes.
People would panic.
Some of them would even leave
the audience
because they couldn't bear
the suspense.
And then suddenly, dripping,
he would appear
from the cabinet.
And there all the locks
were still intact
and there was no clue
to the method that he used.
That's a good escape, isn't it?
He was our greatest showman.
Throughout his rise from unknown
immigrant to international star,
Harry Houdini radiated
confidence and courage.
In public, he confronted
our greatest fears
and always emerged victorious.
What we didn't know was that
Houdini was plagued by doubts
and haunted
by his own mortality.
To us, he was a superman.
"Harry Houdini" was not
his real name.
He was born Ehrich Weiss
in Budapest in 1874.
When he was four,
he emigrated with his mother
and four brothers
to the small Midwestern town
of Appleton, Wisconsin.
There they joined Ehrich's
father, who had come to lead
a small congregation
of Jewish immigrants.
Rabbi Mayer Weiss was
educated, uncompromising
and deeply devoted
to his wife, Cecelia.
Harry referred to her
as a saint, as an angel.
She was a very good,
caring, nurturing person.
And it's something
that gave Harry, I think,
a goal in his life,
to please Cecelia, his mother.
Houdini grew up in a family
with five boys in it,
and Houdini worked very hard
to try to stand out.
His tremendous competitiveness
partly came
out of trying
to outshine his brothers.
Ehrich stood out
as the most physically agile.
Inspired by traveling circuses,
he performed for friends
as a contortionist
and trapeze artist,
calling himself
"the Prince of the Air."
I'm sure that Harry would say,
"I think I can do that, too."
No matter how incredible it was
or how impossible it seemed,
he knew that if they could
do it, he could do it.
But the idyllic years
in Appleton were short-lived.
Ehrich's father was fired
by his congregation
for being too "Old World."
He struggled
to support his family
and they moved frequently,
finally ending up in the crowded
tenements of New York City.
Ehrich and his father found work
in a garment sweatshop.
What little time he had, he
devoted to building his body.
Just five foot six,
he was muscular
and often ran ten miles a day.
In the wonderful picture of him
at about the age of 16,
he has a chest full of medals,
one of which he won for a
cross-country race in New York.
That's a real medal.
All the other medals
on his chest are fakes.
That's very typical of Houdini.
No matter how wonderful
the things he did,
he had to exaggerate them.
Desperation was
the theme of his life...
That desperate desire
to turn himself
into something almost superhuman
if he possibly could.
"Look at who I am,
look at what I can do"
is very, very much
a desperate kind of thing.
But nothing Ehrich could do
could transform
his father's life.
As Rabbi Weiss lay dying
of cancer at the age of 63,
he made his son promise
that Cecelia would never
want for anything.
It became Ehrich's mission.
I think Houdini was partly
ashamed of his failed father.
It was very important for him
to overcome those beginnings
and to really count
in the world.
Very few people that I know have
wanted to make a mark on life
as much as Houdini did.
It was on the streets
of New York
that Ehrich found a way
to make his mark.
There were entertainment venues
on virtually every block
of the city:
concert saloons,
variety theaters, dime museums.
Dime museums
would indeed advertise
what's inside on the outside
so there would have been
a chance to see
human anomalies demonstrated
or even possibly a magician
on the street.
At age 18, Ehrich joined up
with a friend
to form a simple magic act
performing
sleight-of-hand tricks.
They named themselves
the Brothers Houdini
after the famous French
magician Robert-Houdin.
Ehrich became Harry.
I think when you're a kid
and you do something that's a
little bit out of the ordinary,
whether it be magic or escapes
or something like that
that impresses people,
you get that reaction,
a very genuine reaction
of amazement, of wonder.
It's something you can't replace
with anything else.
The first big job
for the Brothers Houdini
was on the mile-long midway
at the 1893 Columbia Exposition
in Chicago.
The organizers
of the world's fair expected
the fair, the exposition,
to be the great draw.
In reality,
the midway was probably more
successful, more popular.
Why?
Because people were
truly entertained.
American entertainment was still
very much
in its kind of formative stage,
but in the 1890s, it exploded,
and Houdini was coming along
just at that point of explosion.
Harry discovered there was
plenty of work in show business.
He found someone to share it
with the following year
when he met 18-year-old
Beatrice Rahner.
Bess was a German Catholic
immigrant, lively and funny,
part of a song-and-dance act
called the Floral Sisters.
After a three-week courtship,
they married.
Bess was a natural-born
magician's assistant.
She was very petite.
She was only about
five feet tall and very lithe.
Five feet tall,
thin, very gaminlike,
is wonderful for climbing
in and out of boxes.
Appearing as the Houdinis,
they performed
conventional magic tricks
and featured an illusion
called the metamorphosis,
taking only three seconds
to exchange places in a trunk.
The Houdinis started out
in the lowest branches
of show business.
They did circuses.
They did
traveling medicine shows,
where Houdini would sell
Kickapoo Joy Juice
in between the acts.
They started out
in dime museums,
performing next to various
sort of human anomalies.
Houdini really grew to hate it.
He yearned to move up the ladder
to the vaudeville stage.
The money was better
and the pace less grueling.
And compared
to the dime museums,
it was positively refined.
Tony Pastor's in New York
was the really first big date
that the Houdinis had.
It was the place to be.
But what was also important was,
where were you on the bill?
Harry and Bess played
in the worst position...
Opening the second act
while the audience
was still getting seated.
When Harry later pasted
the program into his scrapbook,
he moved the Houdinis
into the headliner's position.
To become a true headliner,
Harry needed a gimmick.
He was inspired
by spiritualist shows
in which the performers
would enter a cabinet
locked in handcuffs.
While the audience believed that
spirits were playing instruments
and making objects fly around,
Houdini knew immediately
it was a trick.
The performers had gotten
out of their handcuffs.
The whole idea
of the spiritualist
was to make the audience believe
that they did not escape.
Houdini saw the potential
in the actual escape.
The first time he used
handcuffs onstage,
he knew he was on to something.
But escape was just
a small part of his act.
Houdini had struggled
for six years
and was still
"Dime Museum Harry."
He was thinking
of getting out of magic,
but he went to fulfill
a contract that
he had in Minneapolis.
While he was performing in
some kind of beer garden there,
a very famous agent
named Martin Beck...
One of the leading
vaudeville managers...
Walked in and happened to see
one of Houdini's
handcuff escapes.
He didn't think the escape act
could maintain a continuity
that an audience would
come to see just that.
But Beck saw through that.
Beck saw that an escape act
could be an act in itself.
Martin Beck wired Houdini,
saying he could open in Omaha
and get paid $60 a week.
"This wire changed my whole
life's journey," he later wrote.
The act was no longer
Bess and Harry.
It was simply Houdini,
the king of handcuffs.
After 14 months
on Beck's vaudeville circuit,
he was earning $400 a week
and was famous.
In 1900, Beck sent Harry and
Bess on a brief tour of England.
At the time,
at the turn of the century,
it was important that people
in America came to England,
because that's where it
mattered most to be successful.
That's where... everyone
from America came to England.
In London,
Houdini astonished audiences
and was hailed as "the most
wonderful entertainer
the world had ever seen."
Harry and Bess decided
to stay abroad
and began performing
all over Europe.
I think Houdini appealed
to the working class.
They considered themselves
in chains...
Chained to the drudgery
of their work
for low pay
and poor conditions...
And to see Houdini
actually escape,
seemingly
from impossible things,
they thought that maybe
it gave them a glimmer of hope
that maybe
they could do the same.
Houdini publicized
his appearances
by visiting the local jail,
where he convinced the police
to lock him up
and let him try to escape.
Houdini came to town, and
you knew Houdini was in town.
He had placards mounted
onto handles,
and he would employ
perhaps 20 people
to carry these
through the streets:
"Houdini escaped from
your jail today at 10:30."
It was one just great big hype.
The jail escapes were
especially newsworthy
because he performed them nude.
In that day,
that was exceedingly daring.
But it also proved
that he didn't go in
with special tools concealed
in his shirt and his trousers
and his shoes and whatnot.
Though he would be
searched assiduously,
he had ways
around those searches.
As you can imagine,
there were so many ways
by sleight of hand and such
that he could actually
be in that cell
with sufficient tools that,
after he'd studied the lock,
he knew how to manipulate it.
The real trick of it all was...
I mean, the right key
at the right time,
but keeping it away from anyone
that might see him having it.
That's it, really, sums it up.
That's all escapology is anyway.
Harry worked the press
just as skillfully
as he worked his locks.
In 1904, he staged an event
with London's biggest newspaper,
the Daily Mirror.
For days, the Mirror fed
the public every detail
about a set of handcuffs
that were guaranteed
impossible to pick.
In front of 4,000 spectators,
Houdini appeared to be worried.
"I do not know whether
I will get out or not," he said.
He then withdrew into a cabinet
he called a ghost house
and the audience waited.
One of the times that Houdini
came out of the ghost house,
he asked to have
his dress coat taken off.
He was sweating profusely.
The manager of the escape
said no.
He was afraid that
that would show Houdini
really how the cuffs
could be opened.
Houdini then pulled
a pure Houdini stunt.
He struggled to get into
a side pocket of his coat...
Terrifically difficult...
Removed a pen knife,
opened this with his teeth.
And he hacked the coat
away from his body
and threw it on the floor,
and everyone cheered.
And he held the handcuffs
triumphantly in the air
and went back into
the cabinet to try again.
For more than an hour,
the audience sat riveted,
waiting for Houdini to appear.
And when he finally emerged
from those cuffs,
they literally picked him up
on their shoulders
and walked around with him.
They were so excited.
The audience just went berserk.
There's only one way
he could have gotten out of it.
He was able to get a newspaper
to collaborate on a charade
to get themselves publicity,
which is quite
an interesting achievement.
It's really amazing marketing.
"Nothing on the walls
but Houdini," Harry boasted.
But after five years,
the constant touring
had taken a toll.
Harry felt guilty leaving
his mother for so long
and, as he wrote to a friend,
"Bess wishes to stop working
and rest long enough
to raise one of them things
we call children."
In 1905,
the Houdinis headed home.
Harry was now
an international star.
Almost 30 years earlier,
Ehrich Weiss had sailed
into New York Harbor
as a young immigrant
from Hungary.
Now he was Harry Houdini
and carried a passport
which listed Appleton,
Wisconsin, as his birthplace.
After you evolve
in a foreign country
and you're welcomed back
into your adopted America,
you know, that's...
can be nothing better
than conquering something that
was unconquerable for yourself.
Houdini now commanded
$2,000 a week.
He bought an elegant brownstone
in a fashionable part of Harlem
and moved in his sister,
one of his brothers
and, of course, his mother.
Houdini was really
twice married.
I mean, he was married to Bess
and then, in a way,
also married to his mother.
He always called them
"my two girls."
He was, in effect, what we would
call today a "mama's boy."
He loved his mother
to the point of obsession.
But he also loved Bess
and, I think, loved her
passionately, romantically.
He left her little notes
underneath the tablecloth
and tucked behind a picture
that she would eventually find.
Harry addressed Bess adoringly
as "sweetie wifey mine,"
saying he had a ""Bessyful'
of love" awaiting her.
His whole relation to her
is so sort of kidding.
There's something
very unserious about it.
It was the kind of relation
Houdini had
with other people, too.
This was someone
very wrapped up in himself.
He was an absolutely
immense egoist... none larger.
He had the most
elaborate stationery
that had "Houdini" all over it.
His pajamas said "H.H.",
his wallet said "H.H.",
the tiles, the floor tiles
in his bathroom said "H.H."
Houdini was especially
preoccupied with his health.
He swam
and had massages regularly,
didn't drink or smoke and was
evangelical about his diet.
He tried to tell people
that he could build them up
if they had lots of milk
and oranges and eggs
and goodness knows what.
And he gave them little recipes,
jotted things down for them,
to help them
build their physique.
He was a very personable guy...
A guy that you'd
like to be around.
But the other side of him was,
one particular lady,
who was his secretary, told me
that he didn't like people.
He didn't like people at all.
So he didn't just do an act
onstage; he did it off as well.
He was an implacable foe.
He had people that he disliked,
if not hated, all of his life
simply because
they had slighted him.
The people Houdini
hated the most
were the imitators
who had plagued him
since the beginning
of his career.
Harry often spied on them and
then humiliated them in public.
"Do others," he once said,
"or they will do you."
In 1908,
he dropped handcuff escapes
and began performing a new act,
the "open challenge."
He offered a thousand dollars
to anyone with a device
that could hold him.
It was a wonderful gimmick.
It brought him a lot
of local good will.
I mean, he'd come into Milwaukee
and some packing case firm
or some piano maker would say,
"We'll lock you in our piano
and nail the lid shut
and you get out."
It would be great
publicity for them
and great publicity for Houdini.
There were people in factories
who I've spoken to
who said, "Oh, it was wonderful
"when we got together
and we said,
'Let's make up a challenge
for Houdini to escape from. ""
They joined in.
He brought the public
really onto the stage.
He made them feel
important, I think.
Houdini escaped
from a roll-top desk, a huge
envelope, a giant football,
even a creature from the deep.
If he were working today,
there would be
a level of cynicism
that just didn't exist then.
There was this kind
of innocence of that time
before television, before big,
high-tech, $100 million movies
that made his act
a kind of a super-act.
He created a frenzy to see
his shows in Europe and America,
and streets were often blocked
with hundreds unable to get in.
Most vaudevillians developed
12 minutes of material
across a lifetime,
and it was always the same.
But Houdini's act had suspense
and no one knew exactly
what was going to happen,
including himself.
It was unbelievable.
They would tie every piece of
his body with ropes and chains
so it would be absolutely
impossible to get out of it.
But he seemed
to wiggle out of it.
He would display each challenge
in front of the theater
before the show
to attract an audience.
It was a strategy Harry
had picked up at the circus.
It also gave him a chance
to plan his escape.
But no matter how much he
prepared, there was always risk.
Houdini broke, injured,
sprained almost everything.
One of the worst injuries was
he was performing in Pittsburgh,
and he was doing a rope tie.
And he had some longshoremen
come up on the stage
and tie him tightly.
They pulled very hard
on his body,
so hard that
they ruptured his kidney.
And for about the next week,
he was urinating blood.
All of Houdini's escapes
involved a lot of pain
and certainly, part of
the interest in it has to do
with some kind
of masochistic pleasure.
Houdini was fascinated
by mutilation.
He had a gruesome collection
of photographs,
some of them of prisoners
somewhere in Asia
who were beheaded,
and the heads are sort of lying
around the field like cabbages.
Harry was fascinated by madness
and even visited
mental institutions.
One day, he was struck
by the sight
of an inmate struggling
to get out of a straitjacket.
It's part of his genius
that he saw in that
a presentation piece,
because you appear
to be totally helpless.
But Houdini's strongest
obsession was death.
After a schoolhouse burned down,
he traveled out of his way
to view the charred remains
of the young victims.
Houdini had a lifelong
fascination with death.
There are many, many pictures
of him visiting graves,
usually the graves
of other magicians.
He's tempting death himself
all of his life.
When Harry introduced
the milk can escape,
he played on
his audience's deepest fears.
I was fascinated to see
just how crazy this man
could get, you know,
and get himself out of it
because he put himself
in peril... he really did...
Many, many times.
Houdini almost died
when he was challenged
by the Tetley brewery in England
to escape from a milk can
filled with beer.
He had a small air space
at the top of the can.
The lid was slightly domed.
Now, when Houdini, who many
times had done this trick,
went into the can
and come up to the top,
he then found that little space
that literally saved his life
many, many times...
That was full of CO2
from the beer.
As soon as he took a gulp
of that air, it wasn't air.
It was poison.
I don't know exactly
how he contacted the outside.
They knew it was going wrong
and they hacked him
out of the thing,
ripped the thing apart
and took him out.
There's a story
that when he was young,
he was swimming in the river...
He was seven years old or so...
And almost drowned.
That story always fascinates me
because so many
of Houdini's greatest stunts
are really underwater escapes.
Perhaps that experience
so much scared him
that he spent a lot
of the rest of his life
trying to be sure he could
overcome it and survive it.
Harry started preparing
for hazardous water escapes.
He would submerge himself
in an icy bathtub,
holding his breath
as long as possible.
Bess timed him as he stayed
under for up to three minutes.
He was so insanely devoted
to what he was doing
and so disciplined
that the ultimate insanity of
his life never occurred to him.
At age 33,
Houdini began performing
dangerous water escapes outdoors
to promote his vaudeville shows
around the country.
In New York, he created
one of the biggest spectacles
the city had ever seen
when he was handcuffed,
secured in a packing box
and lowered into the East River.
The crowds were
absolutely immense...
I mean, up to 100,000 people.
You couldn't get anywhere
near the East River.
People were standing
on the seawall.
The police were afraid
people were going to topple in.
I think actually
a few people did.
He was enacting over and
over again the same impulse
that brought people
from foreign countries here
in the first place:
to escape from social hierarchy,
to escape from poverty,
to escape from injustice.
That kind of self-assertion
appealed to people.
But in his head,
I think Houdini was always
performing for his mother.
That was his real audience.
What always amazes me is
that when he was doing some
of his most dangerous stunts,
he would have his mother come
and see him jump off a bridge,
locked in handcuffs,
and at the end
of his performance
he would write in his diary,
"Ma saw me jump."
It was as if he never grew up.
He was the ultimate
aspiring teenager or child
who never could quite get
the recognition
he thought he deserved.
Harry had long wanted to be seen
as a scholar, like his father.
Since his father was a rabbi,
a learned person,
Houdini tried to become
a learned person,
in spite of the fact that he had
very little basic education.
Most of that was gained
in the streets and on the road.
Houdini tried to turn himself
into an intellectual.
He collected one of the largest
theater libraries in the world,
wrote books on magic
and pursued friendships
with famous writers
such as Jack London
and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Look how he started...
In the carnivals,
in the circus, the sideshow,
this kind of... the periphery
of respected entertainment.
And you really... eventually,
after you get success,
you really want people
that you respect to respect you.
There was always this feeling
that not only would he want to
escape from the freezing river
or the coffin or the milk can,
but that he had to escape
from the stage as well
and be seen in the real world
as a historical figure
and not just
a stage illusionist.
In 1910, Harry bought a plane
and took it to Australia,
where he made a daring
three-minute flight.
He was one man
who hardly had to worry
about being forgotten,
but he was never
quite confident of that.
"Even if history forgets Houdini
the handcuff king," he said,
"it will write down my name
as the first man to fly here."
Who remembers today that Harry
Houdini was the first person
to fly a plane in Australia?
Not many.
Harry was disappointed
he and Bess were unable
to have children.
Without a family of her own,
Bess focused her maternal
instincts on Harry.
His wife Bess was always after
him to put on a clean shirt.
And she'd take a brush on
occasion and scrub his knuckles
because he was not too careful
about his personal appearance.
He's a sort of slob.
I mean, he looks like
he hasn't changed for weeks.
I think his sloppiness in dress
was just a function
of his total preoccupation
with what he was doing.
By 1912, the milk can escape
was being copied
and sold to imitators for $35.
Houdini was furious,
but prepared.
He had spent five years
in his basement workshop
secretly developing
a new escape.
"The climax of all my labors,"
he said,
"is the Chinese
water torture cell."
Well, here we had sort
of a man-sized aquarium.
There were a couple of tons
of water in there.
The lid had a couple of notches
cut out of it
into which his ankles would be
placed, padlocked on the end.
He would be lifted up upside
down, hanging from the lid.
To be hung upside down by
your ankles submerged in water
takes a lot out of you.
Your chest feels
like it's exploding.
It's scary.
The last you saw of Houdini
was him hanging upside down
looking at the audience
through the glass.
It instilled terror.
His hair sort of swirling
around, his cheeks puffed out,
turning sort of red in the face.
And you wondered, how is this
guy going to get out of there?
And then you saw
the curtain drop over it
and the tension was unbearable.
There was a representative
or two from the audience
standing there to make sure that
no one approached it from behind
to release him in any way.
And for a couple of minutes,
that's the way it sat
while they played
"Asleep in the Deep."
He would get out
of the water torture cell,
but concealed from the audience.
And they wouldn't be aware of
the fact that he was now out.
And he would stall
for a while, of course,
to build the suspense.
And then suddenly at a signal,
the music stopped
and there he was, all
out of breath and dripping wet,
walking forward
to take his bows.
What a wonderful moment.
Even though Harry insisted
it was only a trick,
many believed he must have
escaped by supernatural means.
Once you know the secret,
the whole beauty of it is gone.
The secret is actually
not the best part of it;
it's the presentation.
Houdini was headed
for a big European trip.
He was going to take in
the Scandinavian countries.
He got aboard the ship, but...
and the thing was
just about to pull out,
but he insisted on running
back down the gangplank
and giving his mother
another kiss and a big hug.
There's a very poignant picture
that exists
of the moment that Houdini
last saw his mother.
He took that picture perhaps
from the stern of the ship
as the ship sailed away from New
York Harbor, bound for Europe.
And you see his mother
just a small figure
in a huge crowd of people,
waving good-bye to the boat.
The worst day
in Houdini's life certainly
was the day
that his mother died.
By one account,
when he got the news...
He was performing in Copenhagen,
I think... he fainted dead away.
"I feel like a child
who has been taken
to the railroad station
by Mother," he wrote.
"Train rushes in,
Mother manages to get aboard,
"and before my very eyes,
"away goes the train
and Mother onboard.
Here I am left alone
at the station."
Harry canceled his tour,
and for weeks
only left the house
to visit Cecelia's gravesite.
He bound her letters in a book
so he could read them
late into the night.
He told his brother
he had lost all ambition.
And yet, he was still driven
to perform.
When you're passionate,
you don't have very much peace.
You have to keep going.
You have to really be passionate
about continuing to move forward
like the shark going
through the water.
And Houdini had a passionate
yearning to stay out there.
On a cold winter day
in New York City,
Houdini, now over 40,
performed his most physically
demanding publicity stunt.
He would hang himself
across Times Square
and get out of a straitjacket.
And, of course, all traffic
at Times Square was tied up.
Thousands of people
would stand outside
and watch this phenomenon.
He struck me
as just one big muscle...
with a controlled center
somewhere.
He seemed to have control
over every muscle in his body.
There was a connection
to the audience's
sense of the modern, too...
These tall new buildings
ten stories high,
new miracles of architecture
and cranes on the street.
It was a kind of
very modern feat.
By 1918, Houdini was
a cultural icon.
There was even
a new word, "Houdinize,"
meaning "to get out
of a tight spot."
But Harry still felt restless.
He had an affair with
Jack London's widow, Charmian.
Both suffering from
the loss of a loved one,
they had a relationship
that was passionate but brief.
He was really a straight arrow
and he seems to have felt
very guilty about it.
That he should have had
an affair is sort of inevitable.
That he had only one
and that it seems to have been
not very happy
is probably more revealing.
In major cities
all over the country,
Houdini performed
his upside-down
straitjacket escape...
His most popular
publicity stunt.
It was also the last
he ever created.
Harry was physically exhausted.
"Hereafter I intend to work
entirely with my brain,"
he wrote in his diary.
It's generally not appreciated
that Houdini,
almost from the beginning,
really wanted to get out
of the escape business.
He writes in his diaries
over and over again,
"This is too tough.
Must find some other way
of doing this."
In the teens
moving into the '20s,
film was gaining rapidly
as a major threat to vaudeville.
Houdini probably knew
that his career
as a stage performer
might be limited,
and therefore it seemed
very important for him
to succeed on the screen.
I n 1918,
Houdini's first attempt
to break into the movies
was a 15-part serial
called "Master Mystery."
And his idea was
he would have himself filmed
doing his escapes
and not
have to do them anymore...
People could watch him on film.
For a time,
life in Hollywood was good.
Harry and Bess enjoyed
staying in one place
after years on the road.
On the evening of
their 25th wedding anniversary,
he left her a note:
"We have starved
and starred together.
"I love you,
and I know you love me.
"Yours till the end of the world
and ever after,
Ehrich."
But in the movie business,
Harry had met his match.
He was a terrible actor.
I mean, he has about
three expressions.
He can frown, he can look wooden
and he can look quizzical.
That's about it.
It's just so ridiculous.
It's as if it were a comedy.
But he didn't mean these
as comedies.
He wanted to be taken
very seriously.
He was a great failure
in the films.
Harry and Bess retreated
to their home in New York.
He buried himself
in what he called
his "world-famous
theater library."
With the death of millions
during World War I,
a religious movement called
Spiritualism was flourishing.
One of its greatest disciples
was Houdini's friend
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
the creator of Sherlock Holmes.
Doyle had lost a son
in the First World War,
and various mediums had
brought Doyle's son back to him
to kiss him on the forehead
and to speak to him.
Oh, my darling, thank God,
thank God.
Conan Doyle's wife offered
to hold a séance for Houdini.
She claims she could receive
a message from his mother.
I want to talk to my boy,
my own beloved boy...
Harry was extremely skeptical,
but he agreed.
The message was in English,
and Houdini said his mother
knew almost no English.
She spoke a kind of mixture of
German, Hungarian and Yiddish,
so he was sure that
the message was a fraud.
Enraged by the exploitation
of his grief,
Houdini began a crusade
against spiritualists.
He went to séances in disguise,
confident that he was uniquely
suited to expose their trickery.
"It takes a flimflammer to catch
a flimflammer," he said.
Harry was back in the headlines.
He told me that he thought
they were wicked.
They preyed on poor people.
They'd spend their last dollar
to hear the voice
of a loved one.
Houdini's exposés proved
incredibly popular.
They became his new act.
He read the name and address
of every single spiritualist
in every city,
and of course a lot of people
sued him and all like that,
but they didn't get anywhere
because the information
we had was authentic.
Houdini even testified
against spiritualism
at Congressional hearings.
At last he was receiving
the respect for his intellect
that he had always craved.
He had become very well known
in the pages of
Scientific American magazine.
He'd become something much more
than just
a vaudeville entertainer.
Even though he had
promised Bess he would retire,
Harry could not step
out of the limelight.
He was competing with
all kinds of entertainment...
Eddie Cantor, Al Jolson,
W.C. Fields.
This is the great period
of the Ziegfeld Follies.
This is the great period
of the Broadway stage.
In 1925, Houdini launched
a one-man show on Broadway.
Doing your own show on Broadway
was an enormous leap.
There is a kind
of class associated
with appearing on Broadway,
especially then,
and Houdini had reached it.
Houdini's show featured
magic tricks, escapes
and exposés of spiritualists.
He would call on volunteers
from the audience
to participate in a mock séance.
Really, it was weird.
It was so real,
the way it was performed.
Then after he did the séance,
he showed the audience,
step by step, how it was done.
The participants
could not understand
how the bell
under the table rang
without the help of spirits,
but the audience could see
Houdini slipping out of his shoe
and ringing the bell
with his toes.
We used to go backstage
after his performance
and sit in his dressing room
and I got to know him
rather well.
I was fascinated by him.
He could swell his stomach and
shrink it and withstand blows.
Why, he would say, "Hit me,
hit me as hard as you can."
And I'd say,
"Well, I don't want to."
He said, "No, do it."
And I would hit him with a...
I don't know, I'd hurt my hand,
I mean, before I'd hurt him.
But Houdini would not stay
invulnerable much longer.
He fractured his ankle
performing the water torture
cell escape in Albany.
He continued on to Montreal,
and before his show that night,
gave a lecture
at McGill University.
The psychology department
invited him
to give a talk on
the psychology of mediumship...
Just the kind of thing
Houdini loved to do.
Some students came back to see
him after one of the lectures.
One of them was going
to sketch him.
While he was being sketched,
Harry lay on a couch in his
dressing room reading his mail.
He was worn out
and in great pain.
As the student observed,
Houdini looked "in need
of a long, carefree vacation."
Another student entered
the dressing room.
The student asked him
whether or not he could take
a blow to the stomach.
Houdini nodded that he could,
and as he put down
the letters to stand up,
getting ready to be prepared,
the student struck him
in the stomach.
Harry could only mumble,
"That will do."
He went on that evening
and gave the show,
and the next day
he left for Detroit by train.
And on the train
he developed a very high fever.
They got a doctor
to meet them
when the train came to Detroit,
who urged him, you know,
"Don't do the show."
Of course he did
perform that night
and when he finished the show,
he collapsed and was taken
to the hospital.
Houdini was operated on,
but his appendix had burst
and the infection had spread.
It is likely he had been
suffering from appendicitis
for several days
before the punch.
They ministered to him,
but they pretty well knew
that he was doomed.
After 52 years
of breaking his bones
and getting ahead of everyone
and insisting
on being at the top,
he said to his brother,
presumably his last words,
"I can't fight anymore."
Houdini died in Detroit
on Halloween, 1926.
He was laid in a bronze coffin
he'd had made
for a "buried alive" stunt.
According to his request,
a black bag
of his mother's letters
was placed beneath his head
as a pillow.
Bess collapsed.
"The world will never know
what I have lost," she cried.
After a life spent
in pursuit of fame,
Harry Houdini would now assume
his place in history.
I've had people actually ask me
whether Houdini
was a real person
or whether he was like Sherlock
Holmes, a fictional creation.
To get to a point
where people don't know
whether you were real or not,
that's fame beyond fame.
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