Ideas - From Dua Lipa to Broadway, Houdini never disappears

Episode Date: June 17, 2026

There may be no one alive who saw Houdini perform magic. Yet we still know his name and his legend. Dua Lipa namechecked the escape artist in a 2023 dance hit and she's not alone. Houdini is still a cultural reference point, despite having died 100 years ago. And that’s pretty much what he would have wanted. IDEAS explores why his name persists in our imaginations and how his magic helped his family escape poverty.Guests in this episode:Adam Begley is a biographer living in London, and author of Houdini: The Elusive American.David Ben is a conjuror, writer, and consultant in Toronto. He’s writing a graphic novel featuring an imagined adventure for Houdini.Katie Bender is a playwright and actor. Her interactive performance about Houdini is called Instructions for a Seance.

I am an actor, fresh out of theater school with big dreams and an even bigger drug habit. But things are pretty good. That is until my best friend is set up on a date with David Lee Roth. Yeah, from Van Halen. If you know, you know. From CBC's personally, this is Discount Dave and the Fix. The true-ish story about how a fake rock star led me to a real trial that held up a mirror to me. And okay, let's just say that not everyone in this story is who you think they are.

Personally, discount Dave and the Fix. Available now on CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. He died a hundred years ago, but Harry Houdini has still not entirely left the stage. If you poll the public today, the name a magician, the odds are Houdini would be still number one. A few years back, Dua Lippa made a hit song out of him. And she's not the go. Tell me all the ways you need me.

I'm not here for long. Catch me or I go. Houdini. I come and I go. Like Sherri Popini, Harry Houdini. I vanish into the thin air as I'm leaving. Ever, ever, cada, cadetabra. Houdini lives on in branding, too.

Want to generate vast landscapes with towering mountains, detailed ecosystems and a densely populated town. Houdini can do it. From visual effects software to weather-resistant hiking gear. When the weather is fair, just hide the Houdini jacket deep in your bag. He's also handy for those reporting on runaway pets. Houdini, the master magician, the daredevil escape artist, sometimes called Harry Handcuff Houdini, died in 1926 and has now possibly been reincarnated as an Australian shepherd in Colorado. This dog made a jailbreak out of this.

Houdini. Those three syllables roll right off the tongue. But the question is, why the idea of Houdini has endured. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. For someone so widely named checked, what Houdini actually represents remains a little elusive. And maybe that's part of what makes the 21st century lean in. That and his contradictions.

The great thing about Houdini was that he really had a special talent. Flexibility, strength, ingenuity, and a tremendously flexible sense of right and wrong. During his own lifetime, Houdini was a self-invention. Now he's a cultural imagining, a juicy metaphor for inexplicable feet. and self-liberation. Everyone has something that they wish to escape from. Your iPhone or the news cycle, the idea of escape is really, really powerful right now.

In this episode, Ideas producer Lisa Godfrey explores the enduring myth and myth-making of Harry Houdini. I've been talking about Houdini off and on since this book came out, and I've never met anyone who doesn't know the word Houdini, which is extraordinary when you think about it.

My name is Adam Begley, and I'm a biographer, and I wrote a book about Houdini called Houdini, the Elusive American. Houdini now is a concept. It's a word that lives in the language that is used every day

by people express something that was there suddenly vanishing or somebody getting out of a corner that was too tight and impossibly constricting. Houdini was a self-mythologizer. You make clear in the book, and that began with the story of his birth in 1874. What did he say about that?

Houdini was born in Budapest, very much a Hungarian, son of a rabbi, and he was four years old before he left home. for the U.S. and ended up in Appleton, Wisconsin as a four-year-old. And in later life, he claimed that that was where he was born in Appleton, Wisconsin. And he changed by a little bit the date of his birth. But in later life, he insisted on this to the point of actually convincing the U.S. Embassy in London to issue him a passport that said he had been born in Appleton. in Wisconsin, whereas his previous passports had truthfully said that he'd been born in Hungary.

Why do you think he wanted that change? Oh, he wanted to be American. He was an immigrant who bought into the American dream at a very early age and pursued it all his life. And yet his family did not exactly land in the American dream when they first immigrated. Why were there early years so hard? His father was a rabbi, as I said, and he managed to get a job in Appleton, Wisconsin, as a rabbi in the local sort of makeshift synagogue. But Mayor Weiss, that was their last name, was Weiss, was never assimilated in America at all. He was elderly, and he spoke German and Hebrew, of course, and Hungarian, but he spoke no English and never learned English.

And he was old school. And America, of course, is always reinventing itself and moving forward. And Mayor Weiss was not going to move forward. And about eight years into their life in Appleton, he was fired. And as Houdini said, heartache and poverty ensued. I think I got that quote wrong. Anyway, poverty ensued. And the Houdini's move to Milwaukee,

Wisconsin. And from that point on, they were really in dire straits and kept having to move house because they couldn't pay the rent and had to rely on charitable donations. And really, Houdini saw his father fail. And he saw his father fail to adopt, fail to become American, fail to thrive. Eric was Harry Houdini's name of origin. And when he was about 13, he joined his dad who'd relocated to New York to find work. So, you know, that seems like such a pivotal age. And the two of them there together alone, he would have seen that lack of success up close, I guess. Yes. In Milwaukee and in New York, Mayor Weiss tried to get work as a rabbi, always failing to get any work. And eventually had to do what so many immigrants in New York did, which is he went into the rag trade.

He went to work in a sweatshop cutting the linings for neckties. And actually, Eric, his son, Houdini, joined him there. And he spent several years in a sweatshop cutting ties. And that's how they managed to live barely. The idea of entering show business as a way out of poverty seems to us now like a total long shot. But in that time and place, especially weirdly for a rabbi's son in late 19th century, New York, it was a bit more viable.

Can you explain why? Eric had no education. As far as we know, he never graduated from high school. He didn't know anything. He had no particular talents except for physical ones. He thought at first of becoming a boxer or runner and then became a. obsessed with magic and started developing magic tricks and then discovered that one of his co-workers in the sweatshop also was interested in magic and the two of them got together and would

perform for friends and family and did a public show once at an athletic club and that was the beginning of Houdini's career now why did he choose show business well because as the mother of the Marx brothers said famously, how else could young men who know nothing get ahead and make money? And it's true. There are at least a half dozen sons of rabbis who became extraordinarily famous in America at exactly the same time as Poudini. Jack Warner, the head of Warner Brothers Studios, Irving Berlin. You said he had these physical gifts, but what kind of magic was he doing? when he first started out.

He was doing sleight-of-hand stuff, card tricks, and making pieces of fabric disappear and appear and cutting them up, and just your standard parlor magician tricks. Prestadigitation. Prestadigitation. David Ben is a longtime prestidigitator. His expertise is in card magic. but he did try his teenage hand at escapes.

Houdini, I bought the Siberian chain escape, which I still have, some shackles when I was about 15, a standard entry-level piece. Flash four decades later, there's a band named Pat Culleton, an actor who wrote, I think, sort of a definitive series on Houdini. And they had a photographs of Houdini trying to escape from the Siberian chain escape,

and he had much larger chains around his wrist. and he you see photographs, eight photographs, where he's sort of biting the chains off and things like that. And Pat Coulton's description said, this is much more difficult than it appears, for nothing is holding those chains onto his wrist other than sheer showmanship. My name is David Ben, and I'm a conjurer.

But also a bit of a historian of magic, right? Magic has been my life. It's been my passion since I started late in life. I think I was 12. Today, people started magic when they're about six or seven. And I used the magic to finance my education. And after nine months as a lawyer, I decided I don't want to say what if. And I left to pursue my life in magic. And I've been doing magic now some 50 years.

Houdini, who'd named himself after a famous French magician, performed at first with partners. A friend from the garment trade, his younger brother, Dash. Then at 20, the rabbi's son met a nice Catholic girl by the name of Bess Ronner. And then he cut his brother out very quickly and the two of them became a team. They got married. An act back then for them starting out would have been almost like sideshow circus, traveling, part of sort of a 10-and-one show, probably very short duration with the goal being

to get into vaudeville, which was just sort of coming into vogue at the same time that the railroads were sort of expanding across America. With tiny and agile Bess as his assistant, Houdini performed anywhere he could. The Dime Museum would be primarily something like New York City, let's say off of 42nd Street, Times Square area. Admission was probably a dime, and you would go in and you would see acts perform. They wouldn't be the same sort of acts that you'd see on side shows that would travel, but that was a permanent place.

So Houdini would have done his show perhaps up to eight times a day. And you just repeated and you're just recycling through it. You're going to get better and better and better and better because of doing that. It was a real meat grind of a place, but you certainly learned to your material there and face all sorts of different audiences. A raw but effective training grant. And they would always have a talker outside, trying to entice crowds, attract them into the theater space. Your attention towards the end of this hall.

Here you will find a clever young man. He will mystify you if he can. Look at him. Houdini! And eventually, some people did look at Houdini. He was spotted by someone named Edward Dooley, who also fancied himself as a magician and went under the name Marco the magician. Marco had been unable to conjure enough money to mount and sell his own solo show. To sell a real theater show, sometimes you would have other act with you,

and you pick them to do other things. They do their act with a husband and wife team. Some would do mind reading things, but they also help move things logistically. It becomes a real family operation. So he was looking for help. And so this man, Dooley, set as sights on, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick and asked Houdini and Bess, this was 1896, to join the tour, but it wasn't doing very well.

And duly packed shop early, leaving Bess and Houdini basically sort of stranded there. And Houdini picked up the slack and created his own show under his own name with Bess. And it also meant him trying to extend the time he could perform so he could offer a more complete show. He became famous for doing a straight jacket escape. Houdini had already been performing escapes, notably during an illusion called... Metamorphosis, which is with a steamer trunk, in essence, where he would be bound inside the trunk.

Tied up with a rope, put in a cloth sack, and locked inside. Best, one would stand on top of the trunk, and he'd have fabric around it like a curtain, and they'd raise it one, two, three, when they would draw up, the two people would have changed places. an incredible piece, and even in its staging, and it had its own tie in its own way with spiritualism, at the time, being able to dematerialize from one location

and reappear in another location. Others had performed metamorphosis, but the Houdini's did it in mere seconds. And to whip up further interest in their shows, Houdini started inviting the audience to bring handcuffs for him to escape from instead of rope. As to how exactly he developed the skill to open them, Houdini, as usual, told any number of origin stories.

That as a boy, he'd been driven by hunger to break into his mother's pie cupboard. I opened the locks without any trouble. Or that he'd trained himself at the age of nine out of boredom while recovering from a horse accident. The click of a lock amused me. Or that at one time, he'd actually worked in the trade. My ancestors were locksmiths. But Houdini's tale of how many. how he thought to escape from a straitjacket might well have been true.

St. John New Brunswick was the first place that he saw someone placed in a straitjacket when he was touring a mental health facility on the East Coast and he saw the straight jacket the first time and how that person was put in that restraint who was, you know, at that time the sensational language, a straight jacket for the criminally insane. I mean, that was the tagline. So he first introduced to that in the East Coast of Canada. and he saw the possibilities of putting that into his act. It left so vivid an impression on my mind that I hardly slept that night. And in such moments as I slept, I saw nothing but straight jackets.

In the wakeful parts of the night, I wondered what the effect would be to an audience to have them see a man placed in a straight jacket and watch him force himself free. Within a few years, a big-time theatrical manager for vaudeville named Martin Beck caught a performance. What Beck basically did is, I believe it was in Minneapolis that he saw him. He saw Houdini do a more standard magic act. Involving apparatus and tricks that other magicians used. But escaping every single handcuff, executing the metamorphosis swap in three seconds, that was different.

vaudeville circuit worthy. I think that was the thing that Beck saw that just said, you should do that. He needed a director, really, to say, I could sell that. The other stuff, there's lots of people out there doing that. That was a turning point. And the other turning point was he took the advice. It may have been from T. Nelson Downs,

a great coin manipulator from the Midwest. You couldn't make it in America. Just as some Canadians felt that you have to go to U.S. to make it. Back then, if you were an American, you had to go to England to make it. And it worked. Now a solo act, the self-dubbed King of Handcuffs, drew big audiences. He was a sensation there. They'd not seen anything like it.

And then he also toured France and the other European countries and eventually came back to America. Having tasted success, Houdini was hungry to sustain it. The 20th century had arrived, and he wanted it. to be his. He worked as hard at promotion as he did at his act. If he was creative, it was really in terms of publicity and developing that brand. There's no denying it.

Biographer Adam Begley. He started going to police stations and tipping off reporters that he was going there to get himself handcuffed by the police and then break out of those handcuffs or get himself handcuffed and put into a jail. and breaking out of the handcuffs and the jail. Many theories about how he did that, and I'm sure he used all of them. Hiding picks in his hair and skin,

regurgitating keys, smacking locks on hard surfaces, clever, crafty, adaptable. Who was the real, Houdini? What was the truth about him? We asked Milbourne Christopher, the most highly paid magician in America today, who spent a lifetime studying and learning,

and learning from Houdini. A BBC documentary from 1970 called The Truth About Houdini features admiring anecdotes from those in the trade. Now, the most sensational jail escape was in Washington, D.C., in the United States jail. At the time, there were other prisoners in the cell block, which was called Murderer's Row. And Houdini, as usual, in what he called a nude condition, was shackled and put in a cell, and the officials went to another part of the building. And when he finally came into the office where they were seated, he pointed out that he not only had escaped, but he had moved all the other prisoners from one cell to another.

A fantastic exploit. And then he developed material specifically for newspaper reporters, for example. He would go into a newsroom, and he would swallow a number of needles, 25, 30, whatever needles, and thread. And then he would regurgitate the needles threaded. a spectacular piece, but that's something he could do with a committee in a newspaper's office to get publicity because they could take the photo of the needles coming out. Sometimes newspapers allegedly worked with Houdini. There was the famous case of the Mirror Challenge in London where a newspaper, the mirror, had made a pair of handcuffs, which they claimed were unbreakable that he couldn't get out of. and they made a big publicity stunt of challenging Houdini to get out of these handcuffs.

And Houdini got on stage and, as he often did, was behind a screen. And he would, sometimes his head would pop over and he would struggle behind the screen. And when he finally emerged with the cuffs off of him, but still locked, he was drenched in sweat and seemingly exhausted. So there's drama there. It did last a long time and it might have been boring for a current day audience, but it thrilled the audience at the time. Lucratively so.

And the same drama played out weeks and weeks and brought in tons of money for Houdini and for the theater promoters. I don't have the proof of this and I can't. give you evidence, but I'm pretty certain that there was collusion here and that the cuffs were open because of some agreement between the mirror and Houdini. But Houdini also offered publicity stunts that were very much down to his own agility and reflexes. He did these public spectacles, chained again, manacled, placed into a trunk, dropped over from a bridge

into a river. Truly harrowing. Put in a straight jacket and suspended from a flagpole and Times Square or other major cities, and he would draw a mass crowd. I like to describe that as the first sort of flash mob performance in the world, really, because he'd get literally tens of thousands of people to come and see him do this. A publicity hand, for sure, but also a performer of true skill. The great thing about Houdini was that he really had a special talent,

and that talent involved flexibility and strength and ingenuity and a tremendously flexible sense of right and wrong. Getting himself out of a straitjacket was one of the ones that really was only as simply a matter of thrashing in the right direction and with the right tempo and the right torque, as it were, to get out of the bindings. But the handcuffs was sometimes a question of dexterity and sometimes hiding a key in the right place or colluding with whoever had put the handcuffs on him or put him in the jail cell.

David Ben sees Houdini's toughness. I have a photograph in my collection of Houdini. Why I treasure that photograph because it's one of the few, the only photograph I've seen where you see his hands close up when they haven't been retouched, and they're unbelievably scarred, like just calloused and scarred. So no, you're not doing, you know, fine, super slight of hand with hands like that.

You just can't, you don't have that touch. But it illustrates to me the endurance that he could weather, particularly another big thing of his shows, was you bring your restraints to the show and I'll escape from them. And people will come up with the craziest things, like being sewn inside of a whale. that had been washed up on the shore. And so just the fumes, I mean, the craziest, you know, challenges.

He was willing to embrace change. I think it's because he also came from, like, nothing, really. He had that hunger and that drive. El Doctro saw that drive that need to escape from the past into freedom when he wrote about Houdini in his classic novel, Racktime. His audiences were poor. people, peddlers, policemen, children. He escaped from bank vaults, nailed up barrels, sewn mailbags. He escaped from a zinc-line piano case, a giant football, a galvanized iron

boiler, a roll-top desk, a sausage skin. The screen was pulled away and there he stood, disheveled but triumphant, beside the inviolate container that was supposed to have contained him. He waved to the crowd. This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. Since the dawn of time, humanity has been at war. It has shaped the world around us. And if it somehow feels like we've been here before, it's because we have. I'm David Boris.

I'm a military historian. And on my new podcast, hostile history, I take us inside history's most defining wars and rebellions. From Genghis Khan to the war in Iran, find out how the past can explain the present. Search for and follow hostile history on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts. Appearance and reality, fact and fiction. Those are themes in Houdini's magic and life,

and help explain why he's inspired so much creative work in turn across genre and geography. Listen down there, listen. Nothing that man ever made can keep Houdini a prisoner. Now watch me. Some trace Houdini's posthumous come back to a mid-century movie, a Technicolor biopic from 1953, starring Tony Curtis and Janet Lee as Harry and Bess. No, it wasn't love at first sight when beautiful Bess met the fabulous Houdini, who made love to her the way he lived, with headlong daring, but spent his wedding night like this. Harry!

Great effect, isn't it? Yes, it's wonderful, but... We have to do something like this every night. It takes major liberties with established facts, but that's all in the spirit of its subject. Plenty of books also favor this mashup of history and imagination, from kids lit to literary novels. I really didn't come across Houdini until I read Cavalier and Clay,

and then I remember reading Ragtime, and he's also in Ragtime. Two historical depictions in fiction before I actually discovered. Yeah, Houdini. That's playwright and performer Katie Bender. She spoke to ideas producer Lisa Godfrey about the cross-century pole of Houdini. The first things that really caught me were the images of his public escapes, hanging from buildings, from a great height in a straight jacket, upside down. and there would be crowds and crowds of people who would kind of fill the streets, stop traffic.

I mean, thousands and thousands of people. My name is Katie Bender. I am a writer and a performer based in Austin, Texas. And I have created a DIY seance to contact Houdini called Instructions for a Seance. We'll get to that eventually. I was at graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin, and my professor said that I should check out the Harry Houdini archives at the Harry Ransom Center connected to the University of Texas,

and they have the largest collection of Houdini's letters and memorabilia anywhere. And my plays often dealt in magical real. So he thought I would appreciate the kind of deep dive into magician's life. I was pretty quickly, I mean, almost immediately, pretty obsessed. Strange to think that you could go into an archive, look at someone from a previous century who was a different gender than you and did a different kind of performance than you. And yet he was almost speaking to you through those images and words. Why do you think he connected with you?

At the time when I was in graduate school, I was raising a child. My daughter at the time was six, and graduate school was really hard. I was the only person in my class who had a child and had a semi-functioning marriage. And I was really struggling. I was struggling to be present in my family and struggling to do the writing and the graduate school work that was expected of me. and I just personally was really longing for an escape. And so I think those first images of Houdini, when I looked at them, yes, I was seeing a performer and knowing what it feels like to be in front of an audience, but I think I was really actually connecting with the audience and what it means to watch somebody do something that seems impossible

and yet get themselves out of it. You're seeing him in a straight jacket upside down, but you know that the implication is that he gets out. And if that's the implication for Houdini upside down in a straight jacket, then perhaps any of us in the audience watching it with enough grit and determination can figure out how to get ourselves out of whatever it feels like is holding us in an impossible way at that time. Do you think he thought about failure?

My sense of him is a real desperation, both in terms of getting himself and his family out of poverty, but also his father died. And whether this is true or not, the story that he has put in his archive is that he heard his mother say to his father, Meyer, how could you leave me with these children? that is the thing that he chose to keep in his papers about the death of his father, which just makes me think that he felt a really, really intense responsibility to take care of his family and keep the family together, which he really exhibited throughout his life. And, you know, these kinds of physical stunts were a real way of getting out of

factory work, which would only ever pay so much. So I think the drivers for why, desperation, and then on top of that, an enjoyment and a great capacity for physical activity, I think he was hurt quite a bit all the time in ways that we don't see because there wasn't the kind of epic failure that ended in death. But I think there were several instances when hanging from a building, the wind was up and he was thrown into a building, dislocated a shoulder, there was not that spectacular failure, and yet he was kind of living through a lot of physical endurance and physical pain amidst those tricks. A lot of magic and magician's tricks, once you know how they work, you're sort of like, oh, duh, obviously. What I love about Houdini is that,

Yes, there was all the Oda, yeah, obviously tricks going on, but then also he really did learn how to hold his breath underwater. He really did learn how to manipulate his body into smaller and smaller spaces, you know, so both are true. Houdini's body was his instrument, and he wanted to be witnessed in public, by the public, doing physically awesome things. biographer Adam Begley sees him as a mix of self-regard and self-consciousness. Houdini was a very beautiful man. He had a striking face, straight nose, big brow, cleft chin, piercing eyes. And he had a beautiful physique, very, very well-defined muscles, very beautifully proportioned. He was also tiny.

He was baby five, six. if he was lucky on his second passport, the one that confirmed him as an American citizen born in Appleton, Wisconsin. He also added two inches to his height. He was a beautiful man and he was also a thoroughgoing narcissist. Who would have loved playing with Instagram? David Ben says Houdini doctored photos of himself. He knew how to manipulate and promote himself. So he found himself on an ocean liner coming back from the UK

and Teddy Roosevelt's on board. And there's a group photo of Roosevelt and Houdini with some others. And when he reproduced the photo, he had them cut out. And made it look as if he was taller than the U.S. president. I don't think Roosevelt was particularly tall. I'm not sure, but Houdini certainly was shorter. In the early decades of the 20th century, Houdini shaped his public image further through theater advertising.

His posters are beautiful. Probably his most famous poster in many ways is sort of nicknamed the president's poster. And it's a three-sheet, large-scale poster. And it was done in the shape of almost the image like Houdini was running for president of the United States. It was just him in a business suit with his arms crossed with the name Houdini on it. Nothing about death-fifying escapes. There's nothing about where he's touring or performing or where he's perform, it's just his image and just the name Houdini.

Even more striking to the modern eye, maybe the publicity photos of Houdini, muscled up and stripped down. He needed to be seen and he needed to be seen as often as possible naked. And he advertised himself as being stripped naked all the time, especially when he was going into police cells. And the idea there was, of course, that if he was naked, he couldn't conceal on his body any keys or devices to open locks. But the number of times he was photographed naked or announced himself as naked

makes it clear that at some level that this was important to him. But something sits just below the skin with Houdini, something darker, the threat of mortal danger, drowning, suffocation, being buried alive, he was occupying the audience's primal nightmares. Or was it all an illusion? Absolutely real. Houdini, every time he jumped off of a bridge with his hands handcuffed and his legs in irons, he was courting death.

People died jumping off a bridge even without their hands manacled all the time. You know, the hanging upside down in a straitjacket isn't good for you. and he had several medical issues as a result of his contortions, and he was always breaking his wrists or breaking his leg. It was very dangerous what he did. And as he said and acknowledged explicitly, if you want to get a big crowd together, just announce that at a certain time,

a famous person is going to be risking death. And I said, Houdini must have been crazy to do this. A famous magician of the 1970s, Doug Henning, tried Houdini's water torture cell on live TV and found out. It was live. I could do it perfectly in rehearsal. Had my feet chained up in stocks, handcuffs. I was lowered inside, upside down, this tank of water, and then the stocks were locked in the tank.

Well, I'll never forget they started to lower me in. And it was 60 million people watching. And I suddenly took breasts and hyperventilate like I always did, and I suddenly realized I didn't have any air. And I thought, what should I do? Should I cancel it? It was live. People pay for risky things, but if you're good at reducing the risk without telling people you've reduced the risk, then you have an opportunity to really develop something both memorable and, you know, financially rewarding.

And there's no question Houdini excelled on both fronts. Yes, he did some very risky things for the average person in the street, but he wasn't crazy. Yet madness was part of the iconography of his act, as was torture and death. He was attracted to all of that in some way. And then there was his extreme personality, obsessive, relentless. There is a sense that he didn't know when to quit. And he pushed himself and pushed himself. And after a while, you think, well, this isn't normal.

Because he attained a degree of fame when he was about 45 that most people would be happy with. and yet he continued to throw himself off of bridges or dangle upside down in a straight jacket. And that's not something you want to do when you're in your 40s and you've been abusing your body with these kind of torturous tricks for years. And so you wonder why, why did he do these things? and some people have posited that what he wanted was not to be liberated but to be actually in chains and that he wanted to be in chains and naked, for example, because it's the ultimate humiliation. I don't see that. I see a showman, a showman who is driven by the desired to succeed and the desire to be applauded.

I mean, if you are driven to harm yourself to achieve plaudits and love and celebrity, then maybe that's a kind of disease. But I don't think that he was a masochist. And in fact, could be a little sadistic. He had a hero whose name was Robert Hudin. Teenage Eric Weiss had admired this 19th century French magician, who wrote an influential book. In fact, Eric named himself Houdini in tribute to him, but...

He later wrote a book called The Unmasking of Robert Houdin, in which he absolutely tore Houdin apart and called him a pilfer and a fraud and a bad magician and a liar and actually accused him of everything that people have since accused Houdini of. It was the most unself-aware and unkind, ungenerous attack that you can imagine. And it caused him a lot of harm, actually, because the rest of the magic community saw through this attack. And it caused him some damage to his reputation, more damage than Houdini did. to Houdana's reputation.

Houdana is still considered the father of modern magic. Freud might say that Houdini was killing off his figurative father. Absolutely. It was broad daylight parricide. And combined with, of course, his adulation for his mother, it can be presented as a classic case of the antipus complex. For me, that's a little reductive. There are some letters to his mother that he signed your little father. worshipful of Cecilia, his mother and alleged angel on earth.

Houdini's greatest ambition, he frequently said, was not to be the world's finest escapologist, but to be worthy of his sainted mother. On a slightly lower pedestal. His relationship with his wife, Bess, I mean, so many of the love letters are so sweet and so romantic. But also, there is a letter in which he very clearly states that if he were to before her, she could not marry again in such a way that that second husband would have access to any of his funds. So, yeah, quite controlling, quite paternalistic, both to his mother and to his wife. And on the other hand, he really did single-handedly lift his family out of poverty

and give them a whole different life than they could have ever imagined and dreamed of. Houdini's major professional success erased the failure that had marked his immigrant family when they first came to the United States from Hungary. The unemployability of his rabbi father who died so early and left his wife alone with five young sons. But Houdini did not forget his father.

There was a very poignant moment when his father was in his worst days. He had to sell some of his books, especially a collection of very valuable books of Jewish theological writings. And Houdini managed to track those down and buy them back and kept them in his collection. He revered his father, even though his father failed. But Houdini's life can be seen as a monument to doing what his father was unable to do, which is to assimilate perfectly and make a success of himself in this new country. Houdini worked hard to maintain that success right to the end of his life. At 53, he set out on what would be his final tour.

His body was no longer capable of a full escapology performance, so he combined it with a new crowd-pleaser. So Houdini was 1926 on a tour, primarily North America in Montreal, and he was doing part magic and part as an expose of spiritualism, which was on the rise. Specifically against fraudulent mediums,

spiritual seances, where he thought corrupt shams, and he devoted the last five years of his life or so to exposing seances as frauds. There was a moral energy behind it, but there were other things, too. And spiritualism was all the rage in the years after the First World War when so many people had lost so many loved ones

and they were desperate to get in touch with their sons, their brothers, their husbands. And Houdini knew that whenever spiritualism was in the news, it was going to attract a great deal of attention. So he was in Montreal and doing some of his promotion and he was in what is now the McGorred Stewart building in Montreal, the museum, doing a talk related to spiritual. A couple students from McGill talked to him afterwards, and one asks, could he paint his portrait or do his sketch of him? And he later invited the person to come backstage at the Princess Theater to do that.

But another McGill University student showed up uninvited. Well, Houdini was purportedly sort of reading some mail. He was asked the question by Jocelyn Gordon Whitehead, whether it's true that he could withstand taking a blow to his abdomen because he was a prime physical specialist. And Houdini said yes, and before Houdini could sort of brace himself and contract the muscles. This person's strong guy just released a flurry of punches to his abdomen, winded Houdini. And legend has that it sort of burst his appendix at that time. I believe that's false. Houdini died of a burst appendix and peritonitis, but it was not caused by the blow to the abdomen.

There is no evidence of the thing called trauma-induced. appendicitis. It's an infection, not an injury. And Houdini just weathered on, because he was used to a very high pain threshold, obviously, completed those shows, took the train to Detroit to do more shows. And I sort of say, not with malice, but Houdini's cause of death was really a vanity. Houdini died of stubbornness. He was very ill. He saw a doctor who told him he needed to go to the hospital, he declined to follow that advice. He then saw another doctor who said he had to have surgery immediately. He declined to follow that advice and instead waited to call his own doctor in New York. And when he finally was operated on, they saw that the appendix was

burst. And there was nothing to do about it in those days because this is before antibiotics. So he lingered six days. He was brave as usual. during all of this. They couldn't save him and that's what he ultimately died from on Halloween, 1926. He hoped that there was an afterlife, but he was very skeptical

of specific claims of spiritualists. That side of Houdini's career will come up in a future episode, including the seances that occurred for decades after his death, in his name and with his consent. It is the spirit of Houdini we wish to contact. Houdini, are you here?

Are you here, Houdini? All this to say that Katie Bender is not desecrating Houdini's memory with her interactive theater show, one that she's been mounting across America for the last decade. A DIY seance to contact Houdini called Instructions for a Seance. Houdini's escapes symbolized something to his audience 100 years ago, bucking authority, breaking free of intractable problems, wars, economic issues, class issues. What's that expression?

The more things change. We're living in a time when the idea of escape is so potent. everyone has something that they wish to escape from, especially now, you know, whether it's your iPhone or the news cycle or climate change or late stage capitalism. I think the idea of escape is really, really powerful right now. And so this is a particular moment in which Houdini, as a a metaphor really lives in our psyche. Yeah, and you hear that from your audience, right? Because they're invited to tell you what they want to escape from anonymously.

What are some of the things that you hear? Right. There's a, in the beginning of the seance, as an invocation, I ask the audience members, everybody to write down one thing that they wish to escape from on a piece of paper that's under their chair or on the table in front of them. and by the end of the show, we are sort of able to communally have a moment of referencing what they want to escape from. And people want to escape from physical pain and people want to escape from their government. And I actually save all of the papers that I collect.

And so I have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people's wishes for a single thing. that I've been holding on to. What does it feel like to hold on to all those wishes? I feel like it's a real honor. You know, I think theater is one of the few spaces where we can collectively imagine new worlds together and commune publicly about change together. And I think of,

theaters as sacred spaces that are so important in our current era especially. And so holding on to these invocations of people's hopes for what they escape in their own life feel, it feels like a real honor and something that we share in real time together in a way that feels really powerful. Then, as now, whether it's theater or a magic act, what stirring is being together in the same room at the same moment witnessing something unexpected. When you see film clips, for example, of his stunt, there's one famous one of him jumping off of a bridge in Pennsylvania with his arms and his legs shackled. they're interesting, but they're not stirring. And that's because you have to be there. That sense of wonder and awe is important because today,

I think there's a fixation on how did he or she do that? I'm going to say that doesn't help magic. Wonder is the key. And you only get one crack at wonder as a performer. And I think one of the things that made Houdini so great was that audiences were seeing these things for the first time. Gentlemen.

There's probably just one recording left of Houdini's voice. It was made on Edison wax cylinders in 1914. I take great treasure in introducing my latest invention of Wadipaterprician.

Houdini was a 20th century performer, a purveyor of magic and wonder. But he carries on. He's given people something to think about to see themselves in ever since. He was enacting in some way

the liberation of the self, whether it was from the society or from self-imposed drama. There's something tremendous about the idea that you can get away. And Houdini captured that and made it into a dramatic form that anybody could understand. You just heard the first of two ideas episodes about Harry Houdini,

with biographer Adam Begley, magician and writer David Ben, and Katie Bender, playwright and performer. Readings were by Brian Danbrook. This episode was produced by Lisa Godfrey. A tip of the idea's top hat to the many colorful books and documentaries that informed this episode, and to the blog Wild About Harry, the consummate Houdini blog by John Cox. Lisa Ayuso is our web producer.

Technical production, Danielle Duval and Emily Kiervezio. Our senior producer is Nicola Luxchich. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas, and I'm Nala Ayad. And from 1970, this is The Amazing Randy. Four minutes when. by in the audience by this time was absolutely screaming, save him, let him out. The assistant to rush on stage would say, get the axes, where are the axes, here are the axes,

Houdini is drowning, take the curtain up. People would stand in the audience at this point in hysterics. Suddenly a hand would come out through the slot in the curtain, and Houdini would fall off the top of that milk can just as the curtain was being hauled away, come to his feet, begin to take a bow and go into a collapse. He would collapse to the stage at the very second that the curtain did so, and everything was a blue. from that moment on. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca.ca slash podcasts.