The Life and Many Deaths of Harry Houdini

For many performers, stage life and real life are separate identities. For master illusionist Harry Houdini, the two were inextricably linked. In this widely acclaimed biography, Ruth Brandon shows how Houdini’s obsession with his own mortality drove him to create death-defying stunts that not only captivated the public but also subdued his own raging psychological demons.


As Brandon relates Houdini’s methods of escape, she asks: What was he trying to escape from? Her exploration of the psychic landscape of one of the most enduringly famous performers of the twentieth century makes for utterly fascinating reading. Brandon reveals much that is new: how Houdini invented a phantom son; why he wrote long daily letters to his wife, Bess, who lived one floor below him; his combative relations with mediums and spiritualists, including Arthur Conan Doyle; and the first full description of his fabled death. This definitive biography allows readers to peer into Houdini’s psyche and understand him more deeply than ever before.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

YA?As Houdini mesmerized his audiences, Brandon skillfully unfolds the mystery and drama behind the Handcuff King's obsession with the illusions and tricks of death. Besides being very readable, this biography is accessible to students because of its numerous photographs, added notes, selected bibliography, and index.?Beth Gourley, Handley Regional Library, Winchester, VA
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Brandon, who has written on Sarah Bernhardt (Being Divine) and the Singer sewing machine family, approaches this master of illusion with skepticism and sympathy. Houdini was born sometime in 1874 (virtually nothing about him was easy for his biographer to establish). She considers what psychological needs drove a man to jump handcuffed into an icy river to prove he could free himself, or to hang upside down in a straitjacket from the top of a skyscraper for the same reason; and she portrays "this conspicuously brave man" as also a "conspicuously frightened man." Houdini's every performance carried the threat of death and, more important, the threat of failure. The dramatic escapes of this meticulous craftsman were in essence faked but nonetheless often highly dangerous. Obsessively devoted to his mother and to his wife, Bess, Houdini numbered among his friends both Edmund Wilson and Conan Doyle. He died in 1926 at the age of 52-from appropriately mysterious causes. Brandon draws the reader inexorably into the magical, slightly crazed world of the Great Houdini, born Erich Weiss in Budapest, or was it Appleton, Wisconsin? Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Houdini's fame is so great that he is more a metaphor for magical escape than a man, but Brandon's (The New Women and the Old Men, 1990) biography readably explores both his act's archetypal appeal and his obsessive personality. Born Ehrich Weiss in Hungary and raised in Wisconsin, Houdini mythologized his impoverished childhood and early career in countless interviews and publicity notices. Brandon penetrates his family's isolation in poverty, his father's failure as a rabbi in America, and his mother's Freudian bond with her favorite son. Married early, Houdini and his assistant-wife began with an unremarkable magic act, which they toured in circuses, vaudeville, and even a freak show. At the turn of the century his theatrical breakthrough came with concentrating and expanding on his original escape act--from handcuffs--and his promotional talents and showmanship brought him worldwide fame, with phenomenal success in autocratic Germany and Russia. He added constantly to his ingenious repertoire--escaping from straitjackets, immersed in water, suspended in midair, or buried alive--with an instinctual sense of the public appetite, while also writing books and dabbling in early movies and aviation. Preoccupied with spiritualism, he campaigned against fraudulent mediums and arranged experiments to make contact with his wife after his death. Invoking Freud and Jung, Brandon reveals Houdini's fixations on his mother (including impotence, in her guess), suicide, death, and the hereafter, and his act's fascination for his audience (though she ignores his influence on modern magicians like Penn and Teller). If her Houdini is shackled in Freudian complexes, though, his act was equally bound up in his obsessions. More trickily, Brandon adroitly deconstructs his secrets (available for years) but keeps the suspense and wonder intact. Apart from occasional slips into a corny carny-huckster style and insertions of irrelevant anecdotes of her own experiences, Brandon has written an entertaining biography of a legendary figure. (24 pages of b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

A writer of detective stories as well as biographies of such seminal figures as Sarah Bernhardt, Brandon has now created a psychologically intrepid portrait of the great and enigmatic escape artist Harry Houdini. She not only reveals Houdini's impressive technical secrets but also identifies the sources of his unabashed melodramatics and puzzling innocence. Houdini, who was the son of Hungarian Jewish immigrants named Weiss, took his name from the great French magician Robert-Houdin, had very little education, an unhealthy attachment to his mother, and a fierce sense of integrity and unrelenting competitiveness. He was also a born performer, a perfectionist, and an adept mythologizer and self-promoter. Fascinated by locks and bondage, Houdini invented a thrilling repertoire of increasingly complex and daring feats, from extricating himself from handcuffs and straitjackets to escaping from jail cells, coffins, tanks of water, and padlocked trunks submerged in water. He was manacled from head to toe, and then suspended from skyscrapers or hurled into rivers and seas. As Brandon describes these galvanizing performances with the aid of newspaper accounts, she analyzes Houdini's classic "little man" complex, speculates about his impotency, and ponders his obsession with death. Houdini was one of the most compelling "idols of popular culture" in the early years of this mass-appeal century, and he still works his magic through the medium of Brandon's bold and magnetic interpretation. Donna Seaman