Houdini was born Erik Weisz in Budapest in 1874, the son of a rabbi. The burst appendix poisoned his system, and on October 31 he died. Doctors operated on him, but to no avail. He fell ill on the train to Detroit, and, after performing one last time, was hospitalized. The magician hadn’t had time to prepare, and the blows ruptured his appendix. Suddenly, one of the students punched Houdini twice in the stomach. Twelve days before, Houdini had been talking to a group of students after a lecture in Montreal when he commented on the strength of his stomach muscles and their ability to withstand hard blows. All Rights Reserved.Harry Houdini, the most celebrated magician and escape artist of the 20th century, dies of peritonitis in a Detroit hospital.

Begley writes, and was never quite the same again.Ĭopyright ©2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. 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.

Harry houdini water tank