The book was called ‘Houdini: the Man who Walked Thru Walls’ and mum left it out for me to find on my return from school. Mum was away on her weekly trip to her Harley Street doctor in London. She visited a psychiatrist for my entire childhood and teenage years with no noticeable improvement to her condition, which was referred to in those days as manic depression. It wasn’t until after his death that she seemed to improve at all. Coincidence? I will be charitable and say maybe. She always tried to leave a little surprise or gift for me when she took the bus to his afternoon appointments at the busy Middlesex hospital in London. This time she had really picked a winner in Lindsey Gresham’s biography of this fascinating man. In fact to a young man already infatuated by the art of magic it was like pouring gasoline on a lit match! As soon as I found the book on the kitchen table I made a triple-decker peanut butter sandwich and began to devour them both. My mum’s paranoid nature began to assert itself however and she phoned me several times to making me promise not to experiment with any walking thru walls myself. This she assured me could be dangerous. After the forth or fifth call she began to believe me when I promised her I had no such plans!Houdini was certainly an amazing man and like so many other young magicians I fell under his spell and decided that this was the life for me. As synchronicity would have it within that very week the BBC television network played the classic
“Houdini” movie starring Tony Curtis. This brought the book to life for me in a very special manner. I was right up there in the screen with the tall, dark, handsome and debonair movie version of the great man. I was to later discover that as usual Hollywood got it all wrong and if you had to compare Houdini with anyone in a movie it wouldn’t be the loveable Tony Curtis, it would be closer to Joe Pesci in ‘Goodfellas’. Houdini was a short, rough, tough little fella’ with equal parts paranoia, delusions of grandeur and sheer guts! I was later to discover that Tony Curtis also wasn’t the godlike figure he seemed in the movies when I performed a private show for him and his guests at the Magic Castle. What started as a dreamlike experience sitting with the movie star and performing an hours worth of my very best close-up magic wound up as a major disillusionment when he stiffed me for my very modest fee! I discovered years later that he had a serious drug problem at the time which should have allowed me to forgive him, but hasn’t. The theory in Hollywood though is if you’re going to be stiffed it is better to be stiffed by a movie star than an average Joe!My identification with Houdini was the final thing that sealed my fate as a professional magician. Houdini had been born in Budapest, was short, in great physical condition and dead. I on the other hand was a tall, overweight Londoner who was very much alive. You need lots of imagination to make it in magic though and the very fact that I identified with him at all was probably a large part of what I needed to follow in his deep footprints.
The one piece of the Houdini myth that I didn’t understand was his fascination with the spirit world. It seemed strange and an unnecessary addition to his legend his continuing battles with spiritualist and spirit mediums but I forgave him this eccentricity. As for his weird insistence on continually rewriting and reinventing himself I certainly didn’t mind that, in fact I rather liked it. In future years my two major heroes shared this same character trait. I have even come to think that people who are consistent or tell too much of the truth about themselves are at the very best lazy. It seems to me that what we believe or create about our past is every bit as accurate as what actually happened. It is often more revealing and honest to the ‘I’ we currently are. If you can’t change your past then you don’t have much chance of shaping your future. Truth and time is like salt water taffy, it can be pulled and stretched into any shape without affecting it’s substance.
