Houdini was born Erich Weiss on March 24, 1874. Though he claimed throughout his life that Appleton, Wisconsin was his birthplace, he was really born in Budapest, Hungary. He was four years old when his family moved to America.
Houdini became fascinated with magic after seeing Dr. Lynn, a traveling magician, as a young boy. He did not, as the popular myth says run away with a circus, neither was he an apprentice to a locksmith. In actual fact Houndini turned to magic at age of 17 as an alternative to working in a factory. He teamed up with Jack Hayman, a fellow magic enthusiast, to form the Houdini Brothers.
For the non magicians, the name Houndini comes from a tribute Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin, the most famous magician of that time, and means ‘to be like’.
Although Houndini was quite a magician, billed for quite a while as the King of Cards, he was best known for his escapes and ‘challenges’.
The death of Houdini’s mother focused his attention on the thriving business of spirit mediumship, or the contacting of the dead. Whether Houdini was genuinely outraged at the victimization of the bereaved, or whether he simply saw an opportunity to capitalize on public interest, Houdini spent the last 13 years of his life in a highly publicized battle with the spiritualists. Using his knowledge of illusion, Houdini was able to duplicate the ghostly apparitions, noises and mysterious levitations produced by the working mediums and their spirits. His exposures became so popular with his audiences that they took up more than a third of his regular program. Coached by the famous psychic Anna Eva Fay, Houdini cleverly became, in his way, the most famous spiritualist of all.
The 1953 movie Houdini starring Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh did much to create the commonly-held belief that Houdini died onstage attempting to perform the Water Torture Cell illusion.
The sad truth is that Houdini was in the middle of an American tour in 1926 when he began to experience severe stomach discomfort. A performer to the core, Houdini refused medical treatment, because that would have meant missing some shows. Houdini was suffering from the onset of appendicitis, his own stubborn refusal to see a doctor might have spelled his doom.
Houdini was tired, and unusually accident-prone. In Albany, NY, his ankle broke as he was being lifted into the Water Torture Cell. In pain, he continued to perform. A few days later, in Canada, he allegedly was punched in the stomach by J. Gordon Whitehead, a McGill university student who was testing Houdini’s well-known ability to withstand blows to the body. Its commonly said that it was that punch that caused his death, it may or may not have been the cause of Houdini’s ruptured appendix, but regardless, Houdini collapsed onstage in Detroit, and was admitted to Grace Hospital, suffering from peritonitis.
Bess was also admitted to the hospital to be treated for her stomach ailments. Every day for nearly a week, she was wheeled into Houdini’s room to see him.
On October 31 at 1:26pm, with his brother Hardeen at his side, Houdini passed away. His last words were, “I’m tired of fighting”.
Houdini left an estate of about $500,000 to his wife. To his brother Hardeen, he left his show, his equipment and his magic secrets. Houdini’s instructions were that Hardeen should use the equipment, but that it should be burned at Hardeen’s death. Luckily for magic historians and collectors, Hardeen sold the show and nothing was destroyed.
Though Houdini officially died of peritonitis, Bess was able to collect double indemnity on his insurance policy, claiming the blow was equivalent to “an accident directly causing the premature demise of Harry Houdini”.
One macabre twist in the whole story, in the summer of 1926, a few months before he died, Houdini heard about a magician who had sealed himself inside a box and had been lowered into water, where he allegedly stayed for over an hour, submerged, before coming up out of the water and the box, triumphant. Houdini purchased a bronze coffin and had himself locked into it and submerged in a hotel swimming pool for an hour and a half before the coffin was pulled out of the water and opened to reveal a smiling, healthy Houdini. Houdini took the coffin on tour with him in the fall, displaying it in the lobbies of the theaters he played and planning it feature the illusion on his tour.
He jokingly instructed Bess to use the coffin should anything happen to him while on tour. It was in fact that coffin that Houdini’s body was returned to New York for burial.
For ten years, Bess presided over annual well-publicized s
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