When I started all this, I had no idea where it would go. But I suppose I always hoped that, at some point, it would lead to walking through a cemetery in the rain.
The only trouble is that I have no idea whatsoever what we are looking for. My guide, John Cox, will not tell me. He promises only that it will be worth it.
“It’s a surprise,” he says every now and again and looks around to place himself. His sneakers squish through the mud. There is unmistakable glee on his face.
John Cox is an impossibly friendly middle-aged man with looks and mannerisms that make him blend into the scenery. You can imagine him standing at a bar and finding himself unable to get the bartender’s attention. John was once a Hollywood screenwriter—his big credit is as cowriter for a Mila Kunis film called Boot Camp—but it wasn’t the life he expected, so he quit writing and took on a more manageable and stable job at SGI Cinema Quality Control Services. He and his team review digital movies (mostly versions sent from the United States to other countries) and make sure that everything lines up and they are ready for release. He routinely watches the same movie (or, more technically, Digital Cinema Package) ten or twenty times. His record is Zootopia, which he watched seventy-four times, if you include spot checks.
He took that steadier job, in large part, so he could spend his time doing the only thing he has ever really wanted to do: study Harry Houdini.
“There is a tree, I know there’s a tree,” John says as we wander the cemetery somewhat aimlessly. There are, in fact, many trees at the Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Los Angeles. This is one of the most famous burial grounds in America. Samuel Goldwyn used to say that his studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, had more stars than there are in heaven. Forest Lawn now has more stars. Spencer Tracy is here, Errol Flynn, Sammy Davis Jr., Clark Gable, Carole Lombard, W. C. Fields, Nat “King” Cole, and Jean Harlow. The “It Girl,” silent movie star Clara Bow, is here, as are two of the Marx Brothers, Elizabeth Taylor, and the baseball manager Casey Stengel. Walt Disney’s grave is here as is Humphrey Bogart’s. The beloved comedy team George Burns and Gracie Allen rest under one gravestone that says, “Together Again.” L. Frank Baum, who wrote The Wizard of Oz, has a huge tombstone here. And Samuel Goldwyn himself is buried in among stars.
Many of the graves are hidden away in private gardens, away from the prying eyes of the public, but Mary Pickford’s headstone is enormous enough to be seen over the fencing. She was, perhaps, the biggest star of Harry Houdini’s time. They called her “The Girl with the Curls,” and the “Queen of the Movies.” She won the second ever Academy Award. Now her gravesite, massive as it is, goes mostly unnoticed.
I offer John this thought as he leads us around the cemetery: Mary Pickford is all but forgotten, and Harry Houdini is as famous as ever. This sort of thought would normally get him talking at length, but he’s so distracted by the mission that I’m not sure he actually hears me.
“This is definitely the wrong tree,” he says, and he heads back to the car to look again at the map he had made the first time he came.
When John was twelve, he handcuffed himself and jumped into the family pool. He obviously did this because of Harry Houdini, but—and this may seem like a subtle point—not because he wanted to become an escape artist like Houdini. He did it so he could try to understand what it feels like to be Houdini.
You might ask: Well, what’s the difference? And you should know the difference is everything to John Cox. He doesn’t want to be Houdini and never did, but he wants to understand Houdini as no one has ever understood him. Few people have ever gotten that. Family, friends, classmates, everyone always assumed that John would someday become a magician. When he was eleven and got good grades in school, he asked his parents for a straitjacket. He used it to perform an escape on the short-lived Toni Tennille Show. But he didn’t perform on TV for attention (well, okay, he might have liked the attention) or to build his career as a magician. He performed because, well, how could he know Houdini if he didn’t know what it was like to escape from a straitjacket in front of a live audience?
“There was never really a great ambition to become a magician,” he says. “That never felt right. I was always just wanting to do it because Houdini had done it and kind of experience it in that way. I should show you some of the articles.”
There are indeed newspaper articles about the young John Cox’s love of Houdini. After all, nothing mattered more to Houdini than to get his name in the newspaper, so nothing mattered more to John. The most compelling of the John Cox stories is one in the Los Angeles Times headlined “Hobby Turns Teen into Houdini Disciple.”
“People say we are put here for a reason,” the sixteen-year-old John Cox said. “And if someone said I was put here for Houdini, I’d believe it.”
“Funny,” John says. “I remember that was the one where I was announcing that I had retired from performing and wanted to spend my life researching and studying Houdini. I was calling myself a Houdini disciple. My hook was ‘I’m in a line of Houdini disciples who worked to promote Houdini’s name.’ ”
John pauses for a moment and smiles.
“I had this whole crazy philosophy, he says, “but the craziest part is that I think I was right.”
He is right. John is the creator, proprietor, editor, designer, and writer of a website called Wild About Harry, the most comprehensive Houdini site in the world. Becoming the most comprehensive Houdini site might sound like a fairly easy thing to do, but it is a much more competitive field than you might think. Other contenders would include The Houdini File, and The Magic Detective, and Houdini Circumstantial Evidence, and Houdini & Hardeen, and Interval Magic, and dozens of others. These are not just history sites rehashing old tales or recounting Houdini’s great escapes. They are surprisingly fresh and alive; they break ground, find new information, tell new stories. To people who run these sites all over the world, Houdini is not a figure of the past. He is a living, breathing, and modern phenomenon.
John goes several fathoms deeper than anyone else. He has averaged more than one story per day for the first ten years of Wild About Harry, and he’s only growing more engaged. In any given week, he will write a dozen original stories about Houdini. His site has received more than five million pageviews. Some posts are rabbit hole investigations into Houdini curiosities. When did Houdini first perform his Prison Cell and Barrel Mystery illusion? What is the true story of a Houdini photo that just sold at auction? Some are explorations of Houdini’s personal life where John will dig in to learn more about, say, the magician’s relationship with Bess or try to grasp Houdini’s sense of humor. John goes on adventures; he was granted a tour of Houdini’s New York house. He reviews Houdini books, fact-checks Houdini television shows and movies, introduces exciting discoveries about the man’s life. He also spends extraordinary effort creating the most extensive timeline of every single year Houdini lived.
He alerts his readers about Houdini events all over the world, and it’s stunning how many are happening. Someone puts on a one-person Houdini play in Chicago. A magician reenacts a Houdini escape in Pittsburgh. A Houdini museum in Budapest has a ribbon cutting. A group in Cleveland puts on a Houdini séance. I came upon John’s site when he advertised a Dining with Harry Houdini cooking class in Austin, Texas, which I attended. Chef Louis Ortiz taught everyone how to make chicken paprikash, Hungarian goulash, and custard bread pudding, three of Houdini’s favorite dishes. A magician brought a set of handcuffs and did a quick escape act. Several Houdini stories were told and refuted.
I don’t know for sure. But I think going to the class is what convinced John to let me into Houdini World.
“There are other Houdini disciples,” John says. “Patrick Culliton is now the great Houdini disciple. Patrick is the king. But I sort of feel like maybe I’ve become what I said I was going to be.”
It was a movie that changed John Cox’s life, the 1953 Technicolor movie Houdini starring Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh as Houdini and Bess. In fact, it changed many lives. It crashed through America’s sensibilities. “There was nothing else like it,” the director Barry Levinson says. “Nobody made movies like that; it was revolutionary.”
My own fixation on Houdini began with that movie as well. There’s a scene in it that I have probably thought about at least once or twice every month: Houdini and his wife, Bess, are at a dinner for magicians. It is a critical juncture in the movie when Houdini has reluctantly given up magic for Bess. After dinner, the president of the magicians’ organization announces a prize for anyone who can escape from a straitjacket (all of this is Hollywood invention).
“These are regulation straitjackets which have been loaned to us for this occasion by Bellevue Hospital,” the man says. “No inmate has ever escaped from one of these . . . As you can see, ladies and gentlemen, one has to be a little crazy just to put on one of these.”
Tony Curtis pleads with his on- and off-screen wife Janet Leigh to let him enter the contest. Bess repeatedly refuses. He begs. The rest of the crowd joins in. Finally, in exasperation, Bess lets Houdini go on the stage, and the contest begins. The other magicians roll around on the ground frantically and futilely; they make no progress actually getting out of their straitjackets. One of them fights the jacket so hard, he flies off the stage and crashes into the audience.
And this is the part that stays with me: Houdini just stands there. He stands motionless, staring at a spinning crystal ball attached to the chandelier, as if hypnotizing himself. Beads of sweat pour off his forehead. Finally, his right hand pushes through the bottom of the jacket. He reaches around and unhooks the latch in the back of the suit. And he is free. The audience of magicians goes wild with delight. Janet Leigh’s Bess rushes over to give him a big kiss.
“You know, Mr. Houdini,” the magic club president says, “no one has ever escaped from a straitjacket before. I’ve been a magician for over forty years, been to quite a few places, seen quite a few things in my time. But there was always some explanation, some trick. Tonight, there was none. There couldn’t have been. Yet you got out.”
The scene is not only made up, it’s deeply flawed. Houdini did not escape from straitjackets by standing motionless. Quite the opposite; he was always sure to helplessly flop around much more than necessary, making it look like getting out was the hardest thing the mind can imagine. But the authenticity of the scene never mattered to me; it has burned in my memory. I tell this to John.
“Yes,” he says as if he understands perfectly. “It’s a powerful scene.”
John then says there wasn’t any one scene that grabbed him; it was the whole movie, everything about it. He remembers the date he first saw it—November 16, 1975. He was at his mother’s boyfriend’s house. Everyone else wanted to go to dinner, but a young John insisted that they stay until the movie was over. He remembers the place and the time and the moment so vividly that he can go back to it any time he likes. And so he does.
John is self-aware enough to note that while he remembers everything about seeing Tony Curtis as Houdini, he cannot recall the day or month or even the universal emotions he felt when his parents divorced.
“I know it was around the same time,” he says, and he stops as if something has occurred to him for the very first time.
“I wonder,” he says, “if that was part of the thunderclap.”
At that instant, Houdini overtook his life.
“I sometimes wonder,” he says, “well, we weren’t religious at all. I never knew the existence of Jesus or anything like that. Houdini was the first I heard of a miraculous human being. I don’t know, the idea that he could be put into anything and escape, wow, that really stuck with me.”
The day after John saw the movie, he begged for someone to take him to the bookstore at the mall, where he bought two books about Houdini. A month or so later, the most famous magician of the time, Doug Henning, memorialized Houdini by escaping from the Chinese Water Torture Cell on a television special. Then came 1976, which happened to be the golden anniversary of Houdini’s death, and there was a Houdini television movie (Patrick Culliton played in it).
And by then John Cox was possessed. He thought about Houdini more or less every minute of every day. When John’s father asked what he wanted to do on their weekend visits together—with everything on the table, ballgames, beach visits, trips to the mall, anything he wanted—John insisted they travel the dusty bookstores along Hollywood Boulevard in search of a book or pamphlet or poster that connected him even more closely to Harry Houdini.
“Looking through those bookstores to find a Houdini treasure,” he says, “are some of the happiest moments of my life.”
It is ironic that a movie as blatantly fabricated and stylized as Tony Curtis’s Houdini is the one that set off John on this path. He spends much of his life now exploding Houdini myths. His most-read blog post was an epic takedown of History Channel’s lamentable Houdini miniseries; John was so devastated and furious about the many myths it perpetuated that he had to break up his scathing review into two parts.
“After one night,” he wrote at the end of part one, “HISTORY’s Houdini miniseries starring Adrien Brody is on track to be the least accurate Houdini biopic ever made, and that’s saying something.”
And yet, the History Channel’s Houdini was practically gospel compared to Tony Curtis’s Houdini, which got almost nothing at all right. In fact, Houdini created the most powerful myth of all by showing Houdini die while trying to escape the Pagoda Water Torture Cell, the movie version of Houdini’s Chinese Water Torture Cell.
Spoiler alert: This is not how it happened.
And yet, even now, John still loves Tony Curtis’s Houdini.
“I jokingly call it the biblical version of Houdini’s life,” he says. “It’s not true in any of the details, but it is true, if you know what I mean. If you look at the superstructure of it, it’s all true. He was a struggling magician for many years, met Bess, went to Europe, became a star, did jail escapes, straitjackets, became involved in spiritualism, and died suddenly at the height of his fame. He travels into a place of more intensity and fame than anyone who has ever gone before him, and in the end, he annihilates himself horrifically in front of people, in front of this wonderful woman, because he went too far. That is the story of Houdini. The story is true even if the details are not.
“You know what I love about it? He’s so likable I think that’s the part people miss about Houdini. He was not always an easy guy to deal with, but he was just so likable that people were drawn to him. It is in Technicolor. It’s fun, and it’s dark, and it’s wonderful. It is, in many ways beyond the obvious details, the closest anyone has gotten to what I think Houdini was really like.”
Back in the cemetery, John finally finds the grave marker. He shouts out something that sounds like “Eureka!” and gleefully calls me over. I look down at the ground, and there is a small marker, mostly covered in mud and grass. I get on my knees to wipe away some of the dirt so I can read it:
Dr. Jacob Hyman
1871–1942
UNTIL THE DAY BREAK
AND THE SHADOWS FLEE AWAY
Yep, this is the place. And the strangest part of all is I know exactly why he has brought me here.
Jacob Hyman is the man who (probably) came up with the name Houdini.
Let’s talk about the name for a minute. Houdini! Would Ehrich Weiss be as remembered if he had lived exactly the same life but was named something else, something more or less grand, something like “The Great Ehrich” or “Weiss the All Powerful?” Maybe not. Howard Thurston faded away. The Harrys—Kellar and Blackstone—are mostly forgotten. Nevil Maskelyne and Eugene Laurant and Max Malini are known only to magic nerds. They were all famed magicians around Houdini’s time; many magicians today would say that some or all of them were greater than Houdini.
But that name, Houdini, has rung through the years. Why? For one thing, there’s something about three syllable names: Skywalker, Da Vinci, Kennedy, Unitas, Beyoncé, Dumbledore, Houdini.
The first of those three syllables, the eternal question: Who?
The second and third syllables: dini. Italian. Exotic.
Put them together: It’s fun to say. Filled with mystery. Enchantment. But there’s something more. Think of a game show or family trivia game and a question is asked, and you know the answer, you know it, you can see the person in your mind, but the name is just out of reach, just beyond your grasp (“I know it starts with an E!”).
That could never happen to Harry Houdini.
The name is unforgettable.
Jacob Hyman and Ehrich Weiss did not plan any of this. They were poor kids who only hoped to quit their jobs at Richter’s Sons’ neckwear factory. They liked magic. They admired Robert-Houdin. They added the i to the end of his name and called themselves the Brothers Houdini. Ehrich Weiss (or Ehrie, as friends called him) became Harry Houdini. Jacob Hyman became the less lyrical J. H. Houdini.
They came up with the name together. But if you look closely at how things played out, it seems pretty clear that Jacob Hyman was the one who actually thought of it. Ehrich and Jacob only performed as the Brothers Houdini for a short while. Then they broke up, but each continued to do a magic act, each still calling himself Houdini. While Harry performed in sideshows and dime museums in the mid-1890s, Hyman went into the army. But once he returned home, Hyman began to perform again, and naturally insisted on calling himself J. H. Houdini.
This drove Harry blind with rage. He had worked relentlessly to make a small name for himself as Houdini. There had been more failure than success along the way, and Harry saw Hyman’s return just as he was beginning to have some success as a betrayal of the worst kind. In 1899, Harry and Bess took out a savage ad in the New York Clipper.
OPEN LETTER TO THE UNSCRUPULOUS FAKIR
Stealing our hard and well-earned Name and Reputation. We Warn You to Stop stealing our name or we will REACH you in a MANNER that will cause you to back out of the business with your FAKE ACT with Greater Rapidity than you entered it.
HARRY AND BESSIE HOUDINI
P.S.—And You Know We Can do so.
No, Harry Houdini did not play; if he thought someone was trying to steal from him (and he often thought someone was trying to steal from him), he lashed out with a fury that, looking back, seems just a little bit excessive. Here, Houdini seemed so racked with rage that he just began randomly capitalizing words.
But Jacob Hyman he did not scare easily. He read the Mafia-like threat and promptly wrote a counter-letter to the New York Dramatic Mirror:
The name “Houdini” originated with an act known as the Brothers Houdini, of which I am one of the original members. I have never received any financial remuneration or ever agreed not to use the title “Houdini,” and in view of the foregoing you will certainly admit that I have as much right to the use of it as anyone under those circumstances.
To this, Houdini responded: “Perhaps he has. But he has no honor.”
Houdini’s bitter but quick concession strongly suggests that Hyman was the one who thought of the name. Houdini made very few concessions for anything or anyone. In the end, Harry Houdini ended the magic career of J. H. Houdini in what would become a trademark move: He sent his brother Leo to publicly challenge Hyman to escape from a particular type of handcuff. Hyman accepted the challenge, failed to get free, and suffered such embarrassment that he soon left magic and studied to become a doctor. In time, he moved to the Beverly Hills and married a once-famous silent film star named Lyda Wilcox.
In their later years, Hyman and Houdini reconnected and became close friends again. That story repeats itself again and again through Houdini’s life. His friends became rivals. His rivals became friends.
Jacob Hyman was hardly the last magician to use some of the magic of the name. Dozens of Houdini imitators through the years did not just shamelessly copy the act, they also stole parts of the name: Oudini and Howdini and Hardini and so many others. But even more, magicians whose acts were nothing at all like Houdini’s have tried to channel some of the brand’s power. There have been great sleight-of-hand magicians like Cardini and Slydini. Numerous modern magicians have come up with their own twist like Haydini and Mahdi Moudini and the Great Tomsoni.
In Norfolk, Nebraska, in 1937, a twelve-year-old boy named Johnny Carson read a magic catalog and was instantly smitten. He dedicated his life to magic. He called himself the Great Carsoni.
And it still continues today. In Washington Heights, a Marine named Tomas B. De la Cruz decided to try and use his sleight-of-hand talents and become a full-fledged magician. He called himself Smoothini, the Ghetto Houdini, and performed in bars. Later, after gaining some fame on the television show America’s Got Talent, he slightly changed the name and began performing as Smoothini, the Hip-Hop Houdini.
And to think it all began here, with this man, Jacob Hyman. John and I stare at this tiny grave marker for a while. “You would never expect to find such a big piece of magic history right here,” John says. We jog back to his car to get out of the rain.