On Harry Houdini

Of all the many ways Houdini may have conceivably died, one way we know he didn’t die is upside down in his own water-torture chamber, no matter what we've been told by way of Tony Curtis in 1953’s Houdini. So what was it? Was it the blow to the stomach he took from some kid on a visit to McGill University, result of a childish challenge gone bad? Was it the appendicitis he’d carried with him for much of his life untreated? Was it poisoning from the angry spiritualists that Houdini had so effectively and publicly ridiculed?

Master showman, daredevil extraordinaire, step right up and see Harry Houdini dislocate his own shoulders to slip free from a straitjacket, hanging upside down from the Empire State Building. If you and Evel Knievel could put your heads together and come up with a million ways to embarrass yourselves and die before a paid audience, then Harry Houdini would be sure to come up with a million and one. It’s hard to know which required more cunning and ingenuity: the execution of the stunt or its original design. One time, he even deigned to escape from the belly of a whale. Granted, the whale was beached, but still: the belly of a fucking whale. Talk about mythical grandiosity. Fortunately he never dared un-hang himself from a holy cross.

Houdini once had to sue a cop for claiming he'd been given the cuffs’ keys prior to an escape. Obligingly, he offered to crack the cop’s safe, but when Houdini succeeded in doing so, the cop went and said that Houdini’d been given the combination. Some people, you just can’t entertain ‘em no matter what. Houdini did keep himself hidden during many of his escapes, but supposedly that was just so the master magician wouldn’t leave his secrets exposed on stage. Who knows? There are so many rumors of handy helpers, stunt doubles, and artificial “sixth finger”s hiding a lock pick, you have to believe that one or two of them just might be true.

Houdini himself was a doubter in his way, a cold skeptic who brought his skepticism to bear on the spiritualists, the psychic oddsmakers and communicators with the dead who were effectively, and expensively, duping some of the world’s smartest people at this time, up to and including Arthur Conan Doyle, who apparently was not nearly as savvy as his most famous creation. Houdini’s strident and aggressive attacks on spiritualism resulted in the bitter end of his friendship with Doyle, and may have resulted in death by poisoning at the hands of angry mystics. It might be astonishing, but it’s not farfetched. It’s a hell of a ticket if you can buy it, even if the skepticism it inspires is the kind of trap anyone could escape, but that only a Houdini would ever try to.