Escapist

The remnants that live on in TV variety shows--animal acts, jugglers, monologu-ists--are dogged reminders that vaudeville is as dead as the day before yesterday. The old troupers are legend now, larger than life in sentimental memories. But the best of them never needed such exaggeration. Carnival Buff William (Nightmare Alley) Gresham's biography, Houdini, The Man Who Walked Through Walls (Holt; $4.50), serves its subject well, simply by telling the story straight. "As the archetype of the hero who could not be fettered or confined," writes Biographer Gresham, "he became the idol of a million boys, a friend of presidents and the entertainer of monarchs."

He was the greatest escape artist in history, and for Harry Houdini, existence itself was a search for escape. First he had to break away from his family; life on Manhattan's East Side as Ehrich Weiss, son of scholarly Rabbi Mayer Weiss, was not for him. So he studied the memoirs of French Magician Robert Houdin, changed his own name to Houdini, learned a little clumsy sleight of hand, and started to play the dime museums and carnivals that flourished in the late 19th century. He was a flop, and he had to break out of that situation, too. He concentrated on the art of escape itself. Handcuffs, prison cells, the wet-sheet packs of insane asylums, coffins, giant milk cans bolted shut--he beat them all. Said his mother: "From this you should make a living, my son?"

Darbies & Cuffs. On the way to achieving'"this," the dark, sturdy escapist made more than a living. He made himself into an expert swimmer, a master lockpicker, a pioneer aviator, a psychic investigator, and an unfailing expert in the arrogant art of obtaining personal publicity. His greatest illusions and escapes, explains Author Gresham as he gives away the master's secrets, were constructed with the simplicity that is the essence of true genius. They were part fraud and part finely honed athletic skill. Example: When he dived manacled and chained into an icy river, he swam free tense moments later, because the chains were phony and the locks were rigged to open at his touch. But he had also spent months practicing submersion in a bathtub cooled by cakes of ice.

Houdini knew that most of the handcuffs then manufactured could be opened with the same key, and he kept one hidden on his person. Others could be opened by rapping them on a hard surface; so when he challenged an audience to put him in cuffs, there was always a convenient piece of metal strapped to his thigh. When he conned Scotland Yard detectives into trying their "darbies" (handcuffs), they locked Houdini's arms around a stone pillar and left him to suffer. The great escapist simply banged the darbies on the pillar and walked off.

Coffins & Carpets. He traveled to Russia in 1903 and got the attention that nourished him by breaking out of a steel-barred carette, one of the portable, horse-drawn cells used for transporting political prisoners to Siberia. He had been stripped to his drawers and examined by doctors before being locked up. but he produced a small, coiled-spring saw and a can opener to cut through the zinc floor of his cage; they were passed to him, mouth to mouth, when his wife kissed him in tearful "farewell" before the carette was hidden in the corner of the prison yard. Doctors who examined him later did not find the "gaffs." An old carny hand had taught Houdini the trick of retroperistal-sis--swallowing small objects, stopping them halfway down the esophagus and spitting them up at leisure.

Back in the U.S., Houdini bolstered his mounting publicity by breaking out of still more jails. Onstage, he walked through brick walls, even though the walls were set on a carpet and volunteers stood on the carpet's edges to prove that it stayed in place and did not hide a trap door. (There actually was a trap door. When it was opened, the carpet sagged, despite the volunteers, and Houdini inched beneath the wall. This part of the act was hidden from both volunteers and audience by a screen.) He was soldered into a coffin made of galvanized iron and dunked in a swimming pool for an hour and a half. (Skeptics insisted that he had chemicals in the coffin to absorb carbon dioxide. But Houdini simply knew what turn-of-the-century doctors did not: the coffin contained all the air he needed.)

So successful were these illusions and escapes that many of Houdini's vast audience actually believed he could communicate with spirits, that he had supernatural powers. But as the movies began to edge vaudeville into the wings, the master escapist earned most of his headlines by proving that anyone who claimed such magic was a fake. While he tilted with the table rappers and spook producers, he continued to produce new stunts for the stage. He was still at it in the fall of 1926, when he let a college boxer test his vaunted toughness by punching him in the belly. Less than ten days later, Harry Houdini, 52, was dead of a ruptured appendix. His grave, in Brooklyn's Machpelah cemetery, writes Gresham, is marked by a marble bust of the great escapist. "It is an elaborate tribute. He designed it himself."

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