THERE’S NO ESCAPING IT... HOUDINI WAS HORRIBLE
What a bore Harry Houdini must have been. And what a narcissist. Ninety-three years on from his death in 1926, Houdini reads like a thoroughly modern celebrity. Shameless in his desire for fame and relentless in his pursuit of it, he gave himself a year to make it big in the world of magic or else, he declared to his wife, ‘I will give it up and get some sort of steady work’.
There was no risk of that – his contemporary Dai Vernon said that ‘if he had been a butcher, a cobbler, an architect, or a lawyer, he would have been known all over the world. He was obsessed with one thing: to make his name a household word’.
How he would have thrived today. By 1899, aged 25, he was earning $400 a week, more than $2m a year by today’s standards. By 1922, four years before he died, Houdini was famous beyond his wildest dreams. Yet how unpleasant he seems, too.
Posnanski paints Houdini – real name Ehrich Weisz – as a divisive and complicated figure obsessed with his own legend; a habitual liar who squared up to everyone who challenged him. Why? I wish I could tell you. In this erratic, undercooked book, Posnanski, an American sports journalist and New York Times best-selling author, attempts to examine Houdini’s legacy by combining biography with travelogue and interviews with magicians today. There is more sensationalism than substance in this account. By the end, the real Houdini remains elusive, hidden behind the smoke and mirrors that the great escapologist created for himself.