Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man by John F. Kasson

Author:John F. Kasson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2011-04-28T16:00:00+00:00

MASCULINE VERSUS FEMININE MAGIC

Houdini attempted several more metamorphoses in his career. Though he remained a man of extraordinary physical energy and endurance, the strain of escapes on a now middle-aged body took its toll. As early as April 1911, his wife, Bess, anxiously observed in a letter, “Harry is worked to death, he looks so old.” He absorbed numerous punishments over the years. His first lasting injury occurred seven months after that letter, in November 1911, when, freeing himself from a bag tied by longshoremen in Detroit, he ruptured a blood vessel in one of his kidneys.116 On a number of occasions during this period, publicly and privately, he had wondered how long he could go on performing his strenuous feats.

Also, in July 1913 while on tour in Copenhagen, he suffered the greatest emotional blow of his life, from which he never entirely recovered. There he received news of his mother’s fatal stroke. She was seventy-two; Houdini, thirty-nine. Just as Houdini’s father’s death had defined his entrance to adulthood, his mother’s death marked his passage to middle age. She had been unquestionably the greatest love of his life. As he wrote to his brother Theo: “[M]y Heart will ALWAYS ACHE FOR OUR DARLING MOTHER … . [M]y very Existence seems to have expired with her.” Then he added, “Must try and cheer up and be a man.”117 Against the finality of death, he desperately craved some sort of reunion with her. Ultimately, the struggle between this longing for authentic communion and the bitterness of sham contact, the desire for maternal comfort and the fear of being deceived by a rival’s illusions led to his passionate battle against spiritualist frauds in the 1920s. But even before this point, in 1916, expressing his desire to move in new directions, he told a Washington Times reporter, “As an escapist extraordinary I feel that I’m about through.” “For the last thirty years, or thereabouts,” he explained, “I’ve been getting out of all sorts of things human ingenuity has devised to confine a human being. Hereafter, I intend to work entirely with my brain.”118

Houdini never abandoned escape art, but the spectacular innovations he had made famous for two decades were at an end. Other developments besides physical and emotional demands contributed to this shift. Even though he was at the height of his career in vaudeville and variety, he felt the looming shadow of the movies, which by then usually closed his vaudeville bills and ultimately, in tandem with radio, eclipsed vaudeville as an institution. In addition, the war had suspended his practice of alternating tours between America and Europe. Seeking new and less taxing outlets, he determined to become both a movie star and an industry mogul. Beginning in 1916, he poured a great deal of time, energy, and money into the Film Development Corporation, a company working to improve processing methods. He went on to make seven films between 1918 and 1923, including The Master Mystery, in which he battles a robotic villain, and Terror Island, in which (as in a Tarzan film) he foils a tribe of spearwaving black cannibals.

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