Begley writes-accusing the long-dead magician of many sins of which Houdini himself was guilty, including “supreme egotism and utter disregard for the truth,” pilfering his magic tricks from others, being a mediocre performer of magic and, most boldly, having used a ghostwriter, as he was doing in that very book.Cover of the May–June–July 1924 edition of Weird Tales, featuring Imprisoned with the Pharaohs Soon he began to perform as Houdini, the name a tribute to this man he called his “guide and hero.” But later in life, in best Oedipal fashion, Houdini published a book called “The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin” (1908)-a “brutal diatribe,” Mr. Ehrich read the Frenchman’s memoirs and knew what he wanted to do with his life. Young Ehrich had recovered with comparative ease from his father’s death, in part because he fixed his attention on another father figure, Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin (1805-71), known as the father of modern magic. Begley writes, and was never quite the same again. Reminding her of the commitment he had made to his father, he asked that she hold out her apron and, as Adam Begley adroitly puts it in his “Houdini: The Elusive American,” “poured the coins, a tinkling golden cascade, into his mother’s lap.” When she died a year later, Houdini “mourned extravagantly,” Mr. Nearly a quarter-century after his father’s death, having become famous as the Great Houdini, the performer demanded that one employer pay him in gold coins, and then took a sack of them to Cecilia.
Born Erik Weisz in Budapest in 1874, he was “a mama’s boy all his life,” Joe Posnanski writes in “The Life and Afterlife of Harry Houdini.” Years later, long after the Weisz (now Weiss) family had moved to America, his dying father, an out-of-work rabbi in Manhattan, reminded Erik (now Ehrich) of an earlier promise to take care of his mother, Cecilia. If ever a life called for a brief reversion to Freudian psychobiography, it is that of the escape artist Harry Houdini.
0 kommentar(er)
