[This weekend marks Harry Houdini’s 150th birthday! So this week on the blog I’ve performed some AmericanStudying magic of my own, leading up to this special post on that legendary prestidigitator.]
On three
lesser-known layers to perhaps our most famous magician.
1)
An Immigrant Family: Born Erik Weisz in Budapest
in 1874, Houdini was literally part of such a family, as he, his parents, and
his six siblings immigrated to the United States in 1878 (part of that era’s
sizeable wave of immigration from Eastern Europe among other places). But that
family was also an influential part of Houdini’s development as a performer,
including his debut as a 9 year old trapeze artist “Ehrich,
the Prince of the Air” in entertainer Jack
Hoeffler’s traveling circus; and his first true performances in the early
1890s, working alongside his brother Theodore (known as “Dash”) in an act
called “The
Brothers Houdini.” As I wrote about in one of my
early posts, the late 19th century was the heyday of the concept
of the “self-made man,” but it takes a village to produce any successful
figure, and Harry Houdini was no more self-made than anyone else in that
category.
2)
An Inspiring Partnership: There are likely various
reasons why Houdini and Dash stopped performing together, including Houdini’s
own developing turn of the 20th century fame as an individual artist
(especially when he began transitioning from card magic to
escapes), but one factor was a bit less of a fraternal bond: Dash had a
romantic interest in a fellow performer, Wilhelmina
Beatrice “Bess” Rahner; but Houdini was likewise interested, won her hand
in marriage
in 1894, and made her his stage assistant in a new act known as “The
Houdinis.” Although that’s obviously a complicated story and one on which Dash
would undoubtedly have a different perspective, it did lead to a lifelong
partnership for Houdini on multiple levels, as Bess would remain both his wife
and his performing partner for the rest of his life.
3)
An Irritable Author: Those performances would
of course define the remaining three decades of Houdini’s career, from that
1894 marriage through his tragically early death in 1926 (officially from
appendicitis, but apocryphally
from a punch to the stomach). But another through-line in his career was
Houdini’s use of writing not only to market himself but also and especially to
express his grievances with fellow performers and the profession. When he
founded a periodical, the Conjurers’ Monthly Magazine,
in 1906, it only featured two editions before the preponderance of what magic
historian Jim Steinmeyer calls Houdini’s “own crusades” led to its failure.
Undeterred by that failure, in 1908 Houdini published a book, The Unmasking
of Robert-Houdin, which attacked the French magician from whom Houdini
had drawn his stage name as a fraud (due at least in part to Houdini feeling
slighted by Robert-Houdin’s family during a European tour). Houdini could escape
most anything, but clearly not the fraught chambers of his own psyche, no more
than any of us can.
Next
series starts Monday,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Magicians or magic histories or contexts you’d highlight?
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