HOUDINI'S IRON STOMACH

This picture of Harry Houdini sparring with two champions - heavyweight Jack Dempsey and lightweight Benny Leonard - always makes us think of the fatal punch to the gut that ended Harry’s life.

Houdini was, by all accounts, a first-rate boxer. Martial artists in the audience will note that he actually has Dempsey in position for a leg sweep, with a simultaneous turning elbow strike to his left that will also disable Leonard! 

According to news accounts, Houdini actually beat the future bantamweight champion of the world in an unsanctioned bout on a barge in the East River. Ken Silverman writes that Harry believed he would have won that championship himself if he hadn’t been sidelined by illness. We’ve blogged about his virtual defeat of heavyweight champ Jess Willard, here seen losing his title to Dempsey.

Boxing is in the Houdini blogosphere lately, which has been periodically humming with smart and skeptical questions about Harry’s unusual death in October 1926.

The consensus is that Harry was resting in his dressing room after a performance in Montreal when he was sucker-punched by a strong, lanky McGill University student who may or may not have been an amateur boxer. 

One of the three eyewitnesses in the room drew a sketch of the death scene that was reproduced on John Cox’s blog:

The punch itself is depicted in the lower right corner.

The subsequent internal damage caused Harry’s death from peritonitis a few days later. His killer (or was he an assassin?), J. Gordon Whitehead, became a recluse and was buried in an unmarked grave in 1954.

The picture and scant info available about Whitehead appear in a book by Canadian journalist Don Bell called The Man Who Killed Houdini. It travels through (as they used to say) “fire, water, copper pipes and all the roulette halls of Monte Carlo,” but it never answers the vital question raised by various Houdiniphiles on the blog Wild About Harry.

Whitehead allegedly asked Houdini if it was true that he could be punched in the stomach without harm, then unloaded a barrage of blows on the magician's midsection. Why did he ask that particular question? 

From the learned Dean Carnegie, the Magic Detective:

My one question is, when did Houdini ever use punching him as a bragging point? 'Ladies & Gentleman, not only am I the greatest escape artist in the world, but you can punch me and I will feel nothing!' Really??? I don't think so.

An anonymous comment on John Cox’s blog:

I always thought the original story rang untrue since I never read that Houdini went around telling his audience that he could withstand anyone's body blows.

Dick Brookz & Dorothy Dietrich, proprietors of the Houdini Museum in Scranton, PA, insist:

It's false that Houdini went around asking people to punch him in the stomach. There's no record of this in all Houdini History. We asked the best biographer on Houdini, Ken Silverman, and he agreed. It's a story made up by others. Mostly Sidney Radner. When we approached on this he said, "Houdini would have loved it! As long as we spelled his name right." Houdini was a very smart man and would not go around the world telling people to punch him. There is extensive research to bear this out.

Top Houdini expert Pat Culliton is skeptical of the above, but still tentative: 

 Silverman apparently told Dick and Dorothy that Houdini had no history of letting people punch him in the stomach. Well, that tells me that Ken never spoke with Ozzie Malini, who saw Houdini's final performance in Montreal. Houdini's statement to Ozzie and Max Malini: "I let a college kid punch me in the stomach and he caught me wrong and it's killing me," tells me it was something Houdini might do.

Well, we're here today to settle this point once and for all. We have found the evidence, and it comes from our highly reliable and greatly missed friend Al Hirschfeld, who must surely be reckoned as the premier historian of the American stage in the 20th century. 

As we wrote last week, Al knew Houdini well. He says:

He could swell his stomach and shrink it, and withstand blows. He would say, "Hit me. Hit me as hard as you can." And I’d say, "Well, I don’t want to." He said, "No, do it." And I would hit him with a -- I would hurt my hand, I mean, before I’d hurt him.

As we have discovered before, some of the best information about Houdini comes from outside the insular world of magic history. 

Al Hirschfeld was a great lover of magic and he did several portraits of Harry and other fine magicians. We'll show them all in future posts.





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HOUDINI &  HIRSCHFELD

HOUDINI TO THE RESCUE



(Images via Google unless otherwise credited. Hirschfeld image reproduced by arrangement with Hirschfeld's exclusive representative, Margo Feiden Galleries, Ltd., New York. Hirschfeld quote from PBS 'Houdini.")