From Dua Lipa to Broadway, Houdini never disappears

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This is a CBC podcast. He died a hundred years ago, but Harry Houdini has still not entirely left the stage. If you poll the public today the name of magician, the odds are Houdini would be still number one.

A few years back, Dua Lipa made a hit song out of him. And she's not the first. Houdini lives on in branding too. systems and a densely populated town, Houdini can do it.

From visual effects software to weather resistant hiking gear. When the weather is fair, just hide the Houdini jacket deep in your bag or clip it for... He's also handy for those reporting on runaway pets. Houdini, the master magician, the daredevil escape artist, sometimes called Harry Hancock

Houdini died in 1926 and has now possibly been reincarnated as an Australian shepherd in Colorado. This dog made a jailbreak out of this. Houdini. Those three syllables roll right off the tongue.

But the question is why the idea of Houdini has endured. two ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. For someone so widely name-checked, what Houdini actually represents remains a little elusive. And maybe that's part of what makes the 21st century lean in. That and his contradictions. The great thing about Houdini was that he really had a special talent,

flexibility, strength, ingenuity, and a tremendously flexible sense of right and wrong. During his own lifetime, Houdini was a self-invention. Now, he's a cultural imagining, a juicy metaphor for inexplicable feats and self-liberation. Everyone has something that they wish to escape from.

iPhone or the news cycle. The idea of escape is really, really powerful right now. In this episode, ideas producer Lisa Godfrey explores the enduring myth and myth-making of Harry Houdini. I've been talking about Houdini off and on since this book came out, and I've never

met anyone who doesn't know the word Houdini, which is extraordinary when you think about it. My name is Adam Begley, and I'm a biographer, and I wrote a book about Houdini called Houdini, The Illusive American.

Houdini now is a concept. It's a word that lives in the language that is used every day by people expressing something that was there suddenly vanishing or somebody getting out of a corner that was too tight and possibly constricting.

Houdini was a self-methologizer, you make clear in the book, and that began with the story of his birth in 1874. What did he say about that? Houdini was born in Budapest, very much a Hungarian, son of a rabbi, and he was four

years old before he left Hungary for the US and ended up in Appleton, Wisconsin as a four-year-old. And in later life, he claimed that that was where he was born in Appleton, Wisconsin, and he changed by a little bit the date of his birth. But in later life, he insisted on this to the point of actually convincing the US

embassy in London to issue him a passport that said he had been born in Appleton, Wisconsin, whereas his previous passport had truthfully said that he'd been born in Hungary. Why do you think he wanted that change? Oh, he wanted to be American.

He was an immigrant who bought into the American dream at a very early age and pursued it all his life. And yet his family did not exactly land in the American dream when they first immigrated And why were there early years so hard?

His father was a rabbi, as I said, and he managed to get a job in Appleton, Wisconsin as a rabbi in the local sort of makeshift synagogue. But Mayor Weiss, that was their last name was Weiss, was never assimilated in America at all.

elderly and he spoke German and Hebrew of course and Hungarian, but he spoke no English and never learned English. And he was old school and America of course is always reinventing itself and moving forward and Mayor Weiss was not going to move forward. And about eight years into their life in Appleton, he was fired.

And as Houdini said, heartache and poverty ensued. I think I got that quote wrong. Anyway, poverty ensued and the Houdinis moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And from that point on, they were really in dire straits and kept having to move house

because they couldn't pay the rent and had to rely on charitable donations. And really Houdini saw his father fail. And he saw his father fail to adopt, fail to become American, fail to thrive. Eric was Harry Houdini's name of origin.

And when he was about 13, he joined his dad who'd relocated to New York to find work. So that seems like such a pivotal age. And the two of them there together alone, he would have seen that lack of success up up close, I guess.

Yes. In Milwaukee and in New York, Mayor Weiss tried to get work as a rabbi, always failing to get any work and eventually had to do what so many immigrants in New York did, which is he went into the rag trade.

He went to work in a sweatshop cutting the linings for neckties. And actually, Eric, his son, Houdini, joined him there and he spent several years in in a sweatshop cutting ties and that's how they managed to live barely. The idea of entering show business as a way out of poverty seems to us now like a total

long shot but in that time and place, especially weirdly for a rabbi's son in late 19th century New York, it was a bit more viable. Can you explain why? Eric had no education.

As far as we know, he never graduated from high school. He didn't know anything. He had no particular talents except for physical ones. He thought at first of becoming a boxer or a runner and then became obsessed with magic

and started developing magic tricks and then discovered that one of his coworkers in the sweatshop also was interested in magic.