MAGICIANS HAVE BEEN PERFORMING THE bullet catch for hundreds of years. Today, its most acclaimed practitioners are the team of Penn & Teller. In their long-running show at the Rio Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas and performances around the world, the pair have caught bullets in their mouths simultaneously, thousands of times. Penn Jillette, the taller, vocal member of the pair, made it clear that the bullet catch is neither an illusion nor a stunt.
“It is,” Penn tells us, “a trick. And we tried to follow Houdini’s rule, and you may not know Houdini’s rule, but it’s fairly important to your book. Houdini wouldn’t do anything more dangerous than sitting in his living room. And we set up a system of checks and balances that I believe makes our version of the bullet catch as safe as standing onstage.
“I mean, a light could fall on you. There could be a crazy domestic terrorist. There are all sorts of ways to die, but none of them related to the trick that we’re doing. And that’s really important. But I’ll tell you something more important, which is, I not only think that show business should be completely safe but also that people should know it. And this is probably the more radical approach. We’ve had many, many people—lay people and producers and showbiz people—tell us, ‘Put a thing in your lobby that talks about how many people have died doing this trick! Talk about how much danger you’re gonna be in!’ And I go, ‘That’s not what art is!’ Art is beautiful. Art is a roller coaster ride where your intellect and your emotions collide head-on as fast as possible. When you get in a roller coaster, your viscera tells you you’re gonna die. And your mind tells you, ‘You know, if they killed everybody on this thing, their insurance rates would be too high.’
“And those two things are colliding at huge speed. What I want during the show is for you to watch the bullet catch and go, ‘Oh my fuckin’ God! This is the most dangerous thing I’ve ever seen.’ And then say, ‘But these guys don’t fuck around. This is completely safe—and beautiful.’
“If we were to advertise our Bullet Catch as we can possibly get hurt, then it is an immoral act to come to our show—because you are supporting someone injuring themselves.
“I have my favorite tricks we’ve done in terms of hipness, in terms of patter, in terms of originality. Obviously the bullet catch isn’t on any of those lists. It’s one of the rare tricks that we did not try to come up with from scratch. Our version certainly added a lot to it, but it’s not original. But for a trick qua trick, for just, I do not know how the fuck they did that, I believe it’s our best trick.
“By the way, doing a bullet catch that isn’t safe is not very skilled. Doing the bullet catch with 99 percent safety is harder than doing it with 73 percent safety, which is harder than doing it with 43 percent safety. In terms of actual skill, we are better magicians if our tricks are safer. That’s what Teller always reminds me: ‘Nothing more dangerous than sitting in your living room.’”
One of the most influential stage magicians of the early twentieth century was Chung Ling Soo. This mysterious man from the Orient staged lavish presentations of mostly Western magic tricks, but with a Chinese touch. The performer who never spoke onstage, and only did interviews through an interpreter, was the highest-paid magician in the business.
Chung Ling Soo used ancient secrets to amaze, and nothing was more amazing than his version of the bullet catch, the trick he called “Defying the Boxers” or “Condemned to Death by the Boxers” (as in China’s Boxer Rebellion). In this very dramatic piece of stagecraft, which he first performed in 1906, six assistants, dressed in armor as the Chinese rebel Boxers, would point guns at him, as if they were a firing squad. Each gun had two barrels, one with a real bullet, the other a blank. Soo would stand in front of them, a few yards away, holding a plate, like a target. The “Boxers” would fire the guns. The magician would “catch” the bullets and drop them into the plate (he actually had the bullets in his palm all along).
On the evening of March 23, 1918, Chung Ling Soo played to a sold-out house of 1,840 at the Wood Green Empire Theatre in north London. Throughout the evening, he astonished the audience with various illusions. At about 10:45 PM, he arrived at his old standby. According to magic historian and Chung Ling Soo biographer Jim Steinmeyer, his assistant Kametaro announced in broken English: “Ladies and gentlemen, if you would . . . Chung Ling Soo now demonstrates how he was condemned by the Boxers during the rebellion and executed by firing squad. How he defied their bullets. And again, tonight, on our stage just as in Peking many years ago.”
Twelve years into performing the bullet catch, Chung Ling Soo was no longer relying on the trick as his pièce de résistance. Now, there were only two “Boxers” onstage. Assistants Dan Crowley and Jack Grossman were handed the rifles. Neither had any knowledge of how the trick worked. (Soo was very protective of his secrets.) Their job was to simply point the guns at Chung Ling Soo and fire. Chung Ling Soo got into place with his plate. He stood defiantly against the firing squad. The shots rang out.
For the first time, Chung Ling Soo dropped the plate. Blood seeped through his silk costume. He uttered, “Oh my God, something’s happened! Lower the curtain.” The audience was shocked, not so much that the star had been shot point-blank in the chest but that he’d spoken English. It was the first time he’d ever spoken English onstage.
And the last. The magician billed as the Marvelous Chinese Conjurer died the following day. He was fifty-six.
At first, foul play was suspected, because Chung Ling Soo had been involved in a very public feud with another magician, Ching Ling Foo. Foo was an acclaimed performer from Peking who was the first East Asian magician to achieve worldwide fame. Foo accused Soo of ripping off his stage persona and his act. The death was ruled “death by misadventure”—accidental—after a firearms expert testified that a buildup of gunpowder in a rifle led to a real bullet being fired into the magician. The expert testified only after Soo’s Chinese widow and assistant, Sue Seen, reluctantly gave away the secrets and mechanics of the trick at the inquest.
That’s when the truth came out. Sue Seen was not Chinese. She was Olive “Dot” Path. She wasn’t really Chung Ling Soo’s wife, because he was still married to someone else. The public was most shocked to learn that Chung Ling Soo was not Chinese either. He was William Ellsworth Campbell Robinson from Westchester County, New York. An American of Scottish descent, he’d performed under such exotic names as Achmed Ben Ali and Nana Sahib, before shaving his facial hair, rubbing on some greasepaint, and wearing his hair in a Chinese-style queue, as Chung Ling Soo.
On November 6, 1982, magician Paul Daniels reenacted Chung Ling Soo’s bullet catch on British television. The bullet was fired by Jack Grossman, one of the assistants who fired the final shots at Chung Ling Soo.
More than sixty years earlier, Harry Houdini had intended to perform his own tribute to the late magician, by attempting the bullet catch himself in 1918. He opted out, however, after his elder colleague Harry Kellar begged him not to do it. “There is always the biggest kind of risk that some dog will ‘job’ you,” Kellar wrote in a letter, “and we can’t afford to lose Houdini. . . . You owe it to your friends and your family to cut out all stuff that entails risk of your life.”
The bullet catch was too dangerous for Houdini! Yet many a less-experienced illusionist has attempted the trick, to tragic results. The misadventures of failed bullet catchers have been chronicled many times in newspapers, on websites, and in books (like Twelve Have Died by Ben Robinson with Larry White).
When it comes to dying onstage, it seems that these magicians are giving themselves an unfair advantage—it’s just too darn easy to check out this way—but in the interest of comprehensiveness and inclusiveness, we list their fatal blunders:
French magician Coulen claimed that black magic allowed him to catch bullets in his bare hand. While attempting the trick in Lorraine in 1597, one of his assistants got angry with him and used the pistol to bash in Coulen’s brain.
Kia Khan Khruse, a member of the Ramo Samee Juggling Troupe from India, was rumored to have been shot to death attempting the bullet catch at the Pall Mall Music Hall in Dublin in 1818. This would have made him the first recorded shooting victim during a bullet catch (as opposed to being beaten to death). Yet, Kia Khan Khruse himself laid the rumor to rest in one of his playbills later that year: “And again (though it has been said that he was killed in performing this Astonishing Trick) he will catch in his hand a marked Bullet, added to the powder-loading of a Pistol which anyone present may fire at him for that purpose.” The magic world is grateful that Khruse did survive, for that year he introduced the needle-swallowing trick.
Madame DeLinsky, wife and assistant of a Polish magician, faced a firing squad of six soldiers—shills who loaded their rifles with blanks. During a performance before a German royal court in 1820, one rifleman loaded a real bullet and shot Madame DeLinsky in the gut. She died two days later. Adding to the tragedy, she was pregnant, her unborn child was lost, and her husband went mad.
Giovanni de Grisy was killed onstage by a spectator in 1826; a real bullet got mixed in with the fake ones during the bullet catch. His father, the magician Edmund de Grisy, was convicted of “homicide through imprudence” and sentenced to six months in prison.
Arnold Buck picked the wrong audience member to load his gun during a bullet catch demonstration in 1840. The volunteer loaded a blank bullet into the barrel. He also dropped in some nails. It was a sharp end to Buck’s career, and life.
In preparation for the bullet catch, Professor Adam Epstein used his magic wand to ram the ammunition into the barrel of a rifle. At one show in 1869, the tip of the wand broke off. When the gun was fired, the tip was launched like a sharp projectile through his forehead.
Raoul Curran was about to show off his bullet catch in 1880 when a member of the audience jumped out of his seat and shot him with his own pistol.
DeLine Jr. was killed attempting the bullet catch in 1890. His magician father shot him.
Michael Hatal attempted to catch a bullet with an American flag at an Odd Fellows benefit in lower Manhattan on October 28, 1899. He handed a gun, powder, and container with twenty-five large-caliber cartridges to audience member Frank Benjo and instructed Benjo to load two marked cartridges of his choosing. Hatal wrapped himself in the flag. Benjo fired the double-barreled rifle at close range. Hatal lived long enough to indemnify his accidental executioner, blaming himself for not switching cartridges.
A German performer named Edvin Lindberg reportedly died attempting the bullet catch in 1905.
Professor Otto Blumenfeld (a.k.a. Blumenfeld “Herr” Bosco) attempted the bullet catch at the Basle Music Hall in Basle (now Basel), Switzerland, on January 24, 1906. He invited a volunteer to come onstage and fire a revolver at him at close range. He, too, forgot to switch the cartridge, and died on the spot.
Weeks after Chung Ling Soo’s death, as the Washington Post and other papers reported, H. T. Sartell had “perverted the trick” to commit suicide by bullet catch onstage in Lynn, Massachusetts.
The Post also mentioned that in 1918 a magician known as the Black Wizard of the West “fell at Deadwood, S.D.” As the story goes, the Black Wizard made two serious mistakes before attempting the bullet catch for the first time. He didn’t rehearse, and he allowed his wife to be his assistant. She was angry with him and switched wax bullets for real ones. She shot the Wizard dead in front of the audience, before turning the .45 caliber pistol on herself.
Horace Goldin capped his performance at London’s Wood Green Empire Theatre on August 21, 1939, by imitating Chung Ling Soo’s bullet catch on the very same stage. He survived but died in his sleep at home early the next morning, at sixty-five.
Theodore Annemann, best known as a mentalist and, from 1934 to 1941, publisher of the legendary magician’s magazine the Jinx, performed a theatrical bullet catch outdoors. He’d jerk back, spin around and collapse as if thrown back by the force of the projectile before he’d pull the bullet from his bloody mouth. He was scheduled to perform the routine indoors for the first time in January 1942, but on January 12, two weeks before the performance, he committed suicide. Significantly, Annemann did not shoot himself. According to his biographer, Max Abrams, Annemann’s wife found him “on a couch with a bag over his head and a pipe from the gas stove under the bag. No notes or anything to explain.” Did the bullet catch kill him? Perhaps. Annemann was known to be a victim of severe stage fright.
German magician Ralf Bialla performed more bullet catches than anyone—over three thousand. In his version, the bullet was fired through three panes of glass, through a funnel he made with his hands (covered in steel gloves), and into his mouth, where he hid a set of steel teeth beneath his dentures. Bialla was seriously wounded nine times, and eventually all those bullets in his face led to circulation problems that caused him to black out. He was recovering from an injury in 1975 when he went for a stroll in the mountains, got dizzy, and fell off a cliff.
Doc Tahman Conrad was a magician, fortune-teller, and bullwhip artist. While performing at an outdoor festival in Canada in the summer of 1974, Doc was shot in the stomach while practicing a version of the bullet catch that he called “the Russian Roulette Trick.”
In 1988, Argentinian magician Professor Marvo (Fernande Tejada) was about to perform the bullet catch (with his mouth) for about fifty people in a tavern in Azul. Before his assistant could fire a blank, however, a man named Marco Asprella stood up from the audience, shouted, “Catch this one, professor!” and shot him with a .45 caliber pistol. Asprella went on trial for murder, but got off with a fine and probation after testifying that he truly couldn’t understand why the professor couldn’t catch the bullet.
Nellie Fell would pretend she’d caught a bullet in her mouth after her sharpshooting partner fired a blank. On September 13, 1991, at a circus in Napier, New Zealand, the gun was loaded with a live bullet. Four hundred spectators watched Nellie get shot in the temple. Many of the adults and children applauded before they realized they’d witnessed an execution. The sharpshooter faced firearms charges.
African magician Kofi Brugah, known professionally as Zamba Powers, died during a show in Adukrom, Ghana, on June 14, 2007. For his “final illusion,” he handed a gun to a member of the audience and told the man to fire it at him. Ghana’s largest newspaper, the Daily Graphic, takes it from there: “Boom! Horror of horrors! There lay Brugah in a pool of blood screaming and pleading to be saved.”
Of the versions on that list, Penn Jillette reveals that he and Teller “actually did not like any of the performances of the bullet catch. They all seemed kind of empty,” he says.
“And they all seemed to have nothing other than the danger going. They were, by definition, not safe enough, because people died. And also, I didn’t think they were beautiful, because they were so foursquare, so clumsy. I mean, I have a great deal of respect for brute art that just slams you through the head. I’ve seen the Sex Pistols. I love the Clash. I’m a big fan of the Troggs. I understand all of that. But that is not the only note you can hit. And because the bullet catch has such obvious brutality and horror built into it, it seems like putting an intellectual gloss on it is really beautiful. It seems like it kind of needs that. If you’re gonna have that much sour, you need to have a little bit of sweet, you know?”
That, Penn Jillette says, is why Penn & Teller “don’t ever say we’re gonna catch bullets in our mouth. We say we’re gonna move the bullet from one side of the stage to the other. And we never refer to the guns. We refer to the guns as ‘magic wands.’ And I love the idea of reducing the bullet catch to ‘We’re moving small pieces of signed metal from one side of the stage to the other, using a magic wand’ and letting the audience put all the tension on it. It just gives it the backbeat. That’s the syncopated way to do it. That’s not the foursquare way to do it. That swings.”
One more thing, Penn adds. “I say very sincerely, I certainly hope there’ll be an addendum to the book at some point with me in it. I intend to die in office. Certainly, I’m not going to retire, so since I spend about two, maybe three hours of my day onstage, it seems like I have probably a ten percent chance of dying onstage. So yeah, I’ll probably very likely die doing what I love.”