Now and again, he does shine through in throwaway anecdotes, such as when he asks his entire salary for high-profile performances in New York in gold coins so he can shower his beloved mother in gold.ĭescriptions of his persistent stage fright also help humanize him. Kalush and Sloman tell us plenty enough about Harry Houdini the escapologist superman, but rather less about Ehrich Weiss the common man. We care about superheroes, like Superman or Spider-Man, only because we know the failings and foibles of their ordinary alter egos, Clark Kent and Peter Parker. Largely lost is the man behind the legend: an audacious Jewish immigrant of short stature, earthy good looks and magnetic personality who defied his lowly origins and conquered the world of vaudeville through grit and hard work.
Meanwhile, it emerges only bit by bit (from some of Houdini's diary entries quoted seemingly at random) that the plucky daredevil was a henpecked husband tormented by the violent mood swings of his diminutive wife. Houdini's amazing stunts are minutely detailed, but if hundreds of pages' worth of vignettes listing them (often relayed in chronological disarray, making for a disjointed, episodic read) add up to a true expose, this reviewer must have missed it. Thus, "The Secret Life," though comprehensive, fails to live up to its own billing: if the master magician did have a secret life, little of it emerges from the book. Yet the theory suffers from a sorry dearth of detail about Houdini's alleged spying career. Espionage then was still a gentlemen's game, and under the cover of accepting escape challenges Houdini could easily case German munitions factories.
They speculate that Houdini was a secret agent working for the fledgling U.S. Then Kalush and Sloman go one better and argue that in his life too there was far more to the Master Illusionist than met the eye. No, they posit, Houdini didn't die (on October 31, 1926) from appendicitis (much less on stage during a failed escape, as an urban legend has it) he was murdered.
Their magnum opus (592 tightly written pages without references, which are available separately on a website) is the result, they say, of two years spent scouring archive after archive, including all 17,000 pages of Houdini's scrapbooks and thousands of his letters.
In their biography, Kalush, a professional magician, and Sloman, a writer, attempt to reveal Houdini's unknown persona. His biographies, biopics and internet tribute sites abound, yet do we know who he really was? Not according to William Kalush and Larry Sloman. Erik Weisz, the Hungarian-born son of a rabbi and soap maker, would turn himself into the world's most famous illusionist
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