Inspired by Houdini, magician David Blaine subjects himself to punishing, even life-threatening feats of endurance. "He practiced staying underwater, and he would lie in the bathtub and see how long he could stay underwater, with his wife timing him." "His escapes were very demanding physically," said Silverman.
Possibly his most sensational stunt was breaking out the Chinese water torture cell. His exploits became more and more difficult, more and more dangerous. In the 1920s, he produced and starred in silent films. In 1910, he was the first man to fly a plane in Australia. "And by seeing Houdini's own transformation, it was really a great story of liberation from your past."Īs he became world famous, Houdini had to up the ante. "In this period there was anti-immigrant sentiment, anti-Semitic sentiment, and people wanted to become Americans and really slough off their historic past and their roots," said Rapaport. The millions of poor immigrants who arrived with similar trunks, seeking metamorphoses of their own. "What interested me about the Metamorphosis trunk," said Rapaport, "is how poignant a symbol it would have been to the immigrant community in this time." And inside the trunk, the locked trunk, would be Houdini! They would change places, this metamorphosis."
"A curtain would be closed around it for a moment, bang, the curtains would open, Bess would be standing on top of the trunk. "Bess Houdini would be put into a sack, and she would go into the trunk," explained Silverman. Houdini's first important magic trick was called the Metamorphosis. Playing those dime museums, Houdini met and married singer/dancer Bess Rahner.
"He started off at the bottom rung of show business, which was dime museums: you pay a dime, you go in and see a sword swallower or you see Siamese twins," said Silverman.īy his late teens, he was already calling himself Harry Houdini, the name taken from a famous French magician named Robert Houdin. "His father worked for a while in a necktie cutting factory, and Houdini, I think, for a while also worked there as a child."īut even then, says Silverman, Houdini was seeking fame and fortune as a performer, doing his first performance as a circus acrobat at about age 14. At the age of four, he moved with his mother and brothers to Appleton, to join his father, Rabbi Mayer Samuel Weiss, who was let go by one synagogue after another, in Appleton, then Milwaukee, and finally New York City. He was born Erich Weiss on March 24, 1874.
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