I’m looking at a photograph of Harry Houdini. He’s hanging upside down in a straitjacket over a vast crowd in the heart of an American metropolis. It’s just a publicity photo—there were thousands like it taken over the course of Houdini’s career. But I have it framed and hanging in a room in my home that is devoted entirely to Houdini. Books by or about him fill eight feet of shelves. On the walls hang handcuffs designed to encase the entire hand (they look like a device for torturing martyrs) and a man-size black wooden cross (gimmicked with internal knives to allow an instantaneous release). Both items were once owned by Houdini. Two personal letters from Houdini are framed under museum glass. I bought them at auction for twice what my parents paid for the house I was brought up in.
Many magicians were more refined than Houdini. Others were more inventive. So why do I build a shrine to this man? Because Houdini wasn’t just a magician. He mattered. Let me explain.
Magic is an amusing, intellectual art in which what you see collides with what you know, and there’s a sparkling little jolt that makes you gasp or laugh. It’s recreation. Magic is clever and fun. We buy children magic kits in toy stores. When we shop for magic books, we find them shelved among the “games and pastimes.” In Las Vegas production shows, magic occupies the “variety arts” spot as an alternative to trained dogs that dance in tutus—a sorbet to refresh our palates between the important courses of perfect naked bodies. Even Harry Kellar, the “dean” of American stage magicians in the generation that preceded Houdini, declared that a magician should transport his audiences “to fairyland without scaring them with the devil.” This—with one hairstyle or another—has pretty much been the job description ever since.
But there was nothing fairyland about Houdini (the subject of a major exhibition that opened recently at the Jewish Museum, in Manhattan, with a handsome catalogue by Brooke Kamin Rapaport). He was made of flesh—taut, handsome, muscular—and never let us forget it. The buttoned-up world devoured pictures of Houdini’s physique as he leaped handcuffed from the bridges we crossed every day. Houdini gleefully defied authority. He would challenge police to throw him naked into a jail cell (always a great photo op, with manacles discreetly covering his privates); his clothes were locked in an adjoining cell. A little later the officers—smugly congratulating themselves on stumping the Great Self-Liberator—would hear the telephone ring. It was Houdini, calling from across town.
When silent movies became the hot new medium, Houdini formed a film corporation and starred in stunt-filled romantic serials. But the medium didn’t suit him. Cinema was too much like fairyland. Houdini was front-page news. He needed to connect like a prizefighter, fist to jaw with a splatter of blood.
And he came out swinging when spiritualism—the belief that the dead could communicate with the living—spawned racketeers who robbed the bereaved. Houdini’s own mother had recently died. He felt the vulnerability that death brings. So when he saw people exploiting it, he went into a white-hot rage. He toured the country with a team of undercover investigators (sometimes even attending séances in disguise). Then during his stage shows he called out the local spook-crooks by name, listed their crimes, and exposed their methods. The Spiritualist mafia responded with death threats. Houdini answered by lobbying Congress for stronger anti-fraud laws.
As I look at that photograph of Houdini suspended by his feet, I see it all. Men and women, every one in a hat, stand shoulder to shoulder. One woman holds a baby in her arms. All gaze upward. Traffic is stopped. A boy lies on the roof of a car with his head propped on his hand. He stares up with pure love. The boy is not looking at some “fairyland” wizard. He sees a man he wants to be: muscle and mind, unflinching and confident, defiantly American. When Houdini liberated himself, so did we all.
Teller, the quieter, shorter half of Penn & Teller, is the co-author of “<Play Dead,” which opens at the Players Theatre in Manhattan on November 10.
