It is easiest to say what happened to their bodies.
Sandow died first, in October 1925. After funeral services at a Baptist church in Holland Park, his body was buried in a cemetery at Putney Vale, near London. Yet surprisingly, given his immense fame and prosperity, no stone ever marked his grave. Wrapping herself in a tight silence, his widow appears to have forbidden any memorial.1
Houdini made sure he would not suffer a similar fate. That any great magician, let alone himself, might not have a suitable grave site deeply disturbed him, and over the course of his career he spent considerable effort and expense refurbishing the graves of other conjurers, including John Henry Anderson, Bartolomeo Bosco, William Davenport, Robert Heller, and “the Great Lafayette” (Sigmund Neuberger). He lavished still greater care over the arrangements for his own family. As early as 1904 he had exhumed the bodies of his father and half brother to rebury them in a family plot he had purchased at Machpelah Cemetery in Queens, New York. Always fascinated with the macabre, he wrote in his diary, “Saw what was left of poor father and Hermann. Nothing but skull and bones. Hermann’s teeth were in splendid condition.”2 After the death in 1913 of his mother, with whom his identity was so intensely bound, he began to plan his own
grave site in earnest. With an ostentatious display of graven images that is startling in a Jewish cemetery, he erected a massive granite monument, ornamented with figures carved from Italian marble. To cap the structure, he arranged for a commanding bronze bust of himself. Ever the headliner, he had written in large letters above the Weiss name HOUDINI. Among his meticulous instructions for his own burial, he specified that all his mother’s letters be interred with him as a pillow for his head.
Houdini’s widow, Bess, and his brother Theo at his grave, c. 1928. Library of Congress
Tarzan, of course, never died. As for Burroughs, he was the only one of the three to live to “damn[ed] old age.”3 His heart ailed for years and finally gave out on March 19, 1950, when he was seventy-four. After his death, in obedience to his instructions, his body was cremated and his ashes buried next to his mother’s remains under a black walnut tree outside the offices of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., in the Los Angeles suburb that bears the name of his most famous creation, Tarzana, California.
The larger cultural legacies of Sandow, Houdini, and Burroughs
are much more difficult to specify. Even in their lifetimes, their presentations of the triumphant white male body evolved significantly, and each figure showed notable agility in adapting his message to changing circumstances.
Undoubtedly, the greatest change, to which all three responded, was the coming of the Great War. Sandow, now retired from performing and living in England, faced it first. Even when the war lay several years in the future, he contributed time, prizes, and his immense prestige to training eleven thousand recruits to guard the English home front. Once again, reporters marveled at the bodily metamorphosis he achieved by his training and competitions. The Times of London reported, “Each of the 104 prize-winners added no less than 12 inches to their combined neck, chest, and leg measurements, while the winner of the first prize of £500 obtained in all an improvement of 27½ inches, 5¾ inches being added to his chest girth.” Throughout the war, Sandow urged the importance of physical training and gloried in his status as “the greatest ‘recruiting sergeant’ the Army has ever had.”4
When the United States entered the war in April 1917, Houdini immediately registered for military service, exulting, “HURRAH, now I am one of the boys.” Despite his many performances in Germany, he declared, “WE MUST WIN, and that is all there is to it.” Although he was too old to serve directly, he contributed both his talents as entertainer and some of his stratagems as escape artist to support the cause.
A year younger than Houdini, Burroughs also found himself too old for active duty. Instead, he joined the Illinois reserve militia and rose to the rank of captain. With his pen, he was still more bellicose. Targeting German Americans in the drive to sell Liberty bonds, for example, he declared, “Each and every one of us pines to go over the top and spear a Hun … . Next to sticking a bayonet through a Hun’s gizzard, you can inflict the greatest pain upon him by jabbing him in the pocket-book.” Workers who thought this a “rich man’s war” equally aroused his ire. He contemptuously described one who declined to join the militia because of its history of brutally repressing workers as a “narrow chested, pimple-faced, chinless, anthropoid creature.” Indeed, even at the conclusion of the war, he itched to purge subversive elements at home: “We have thrashed the trouble
makers of Europe and it is within the range of possibilities that we may have to deal with similar cattle here.”5
Tarzan fully shared Burroughs’s rabid anti-German sentiments. At the outset of Tarzan the Untamed, the major Tarzan novel written during the war, a sadistic German officer apparently kills Tarzan’s Jane (in response to pleas from his editor and his wife, Burroughs ultimately revived her). This brutal assault sets the spring for a plot in which Tarzan pursues an insatiable appetite for revenge, sadistically reveling in each German death and hungering for the next: “[N]ever could she be entirely avenged. Life was too short and there were too many Germans.” A few years later, as Burroughs contemplated losing German royalties with the translation of his wartime Tarzan tales, he wrote to his editor, “How would it be to make the Germans Austrians, or will these volumes circulate also in Austria … ?”6
The war offered scant opportunity for the kinds of individual heroism, freedom, and prowess that Sandow, Houdini, and Burroughs had celebrated. On the contrary, it represented the powers of modern depersonalization and mechanization at their most ghastly. Overall, approximately 10 million died in the conflict, including more than 112,000 Americans. In the war’s aftermath a new generation of writers, preeminently Ernest Hemingway, attempted to put manly courage back together again. To do so, they endeavored to purge its emphasis on romantic patriotism and heroic transcendence in favor of private tests and qualified triumphs.
Nonetheless, key elements in the work of Sandow, Houdini, and Burroughs endure. Sandow offered a compelling if controversial new standard of masculine strength, muscular development, and beauty to face the challenges of modern life, and Houdini had an aura of courage, miraculous powers, and invincibility. To these Burroughs added a narrative of the unclad white male body filled with wildness, engaged in violent combat, and inviting romance. Together, these three figures helped to shape conceptions of manliness and the white male body that proved immensely popular in their own day and have shown remarkable resilience.
History never repeats itself, but it is an avid recycler. With the end of the Vietnam War and the advent of an information-based, global economy in the 1970s, as well as new waves of immigration, the emergence of modern feminism, and other developments, came a new
“crisis” of masculinity. Responses to that crisis have taken many forms, but no cultural observer could miss the reemergence of bodybuilding, stage magic, and adventure stories and films. Often with a high degree of self-consciousness, new popular heroes assumed the places of the old: Arnold Schwarzenegger as the great heir to Sandow; David Copperfield and Doug Henning among the many rivals for Houdini’s legacy; Miles O’Keeffe and Christopher Lambert as new Tarzan hopefuls. The cultural needs at the turn of the twentieth century remain very much with us as we enter a new millennium.
The value of this legacy remains highly controversial, though. The bodily spectacles offered by Sandow, Houdini, and Burroughs always existed in dialogue with audiences who brought their own imaginative concerns and experiences to the entertainments, so that the meanings of their work are necessarily fluid. They appealed to immense and diverse publics, across class, across nation, across gender. Clearly, they spoke powerfully to individual aspirations for palpable challenge and heroic achievement. They offered compelling dramas of bodily risk as a means of self-realization. Yet their work easily fortified images of white male superiority that were used to dominate women, people of color, and less technologically advanced societies. To some degree, all spoke to the longing for a restitution of manly authority and power that appeared threatened by the coming of a more impersonal modern order. By stressing the centrality of the unclad white male body, each in effect reasserted that gender and racial divisions were fundamentally based on innate and natural differences. At the same time, each appealed to the dream of masculine metamorphosis, the possibilities for bodily transformation and, by implication, for a transformation of self and of social standing. The challenge that remains is to conceive of transformations in which freedom, wholeness, and heroism are available to all.