HOUDINI’S PRACTICE ROUTINE

This sketch was drawn by Harry Houdini himself. We found it tipped into a book in his vast collection at the Library of Congress (now closed because a few anarchist Congressmen can’t handle the fact that they lost fair and square via the democratic process, but don’t get us started….).

It’s a picture of the human spine, with careful breakdown of the spinal sections - the kind of thing a contortionist, or escape artist, or any aspirant to the "supernormal," needs to know. It raises one of our biggest questions about our friend Harry: what was his daily practice routine?

Being magicians ourselves, as well as avid practitioners of other difficult arts like kung fu, we have a pretty good idea of how Harry must have trained on a daily basis. Here’s the way we depict it in our historical novel Houdini Unbound:

Two days later, the springtime sun had not yet risen when Harry awoke at four o'clock in the morning. With a longing look at Bess, still sleeping, he gently undraped her leg from over his thigh, rolled out of bed, stretched like a cat, walked silently to the windows of their suite and threw them open. Venturing stark naked onto their balcony at the Metropol, he looked down four stories into the Bolshoi Theater plaza. Silent and empty, its log-and-cobble pavement glowed dark blue in the false dawn. 

 Savoring the serene atmosphere, Harry turned his attention inward. He felt completely alive and awake, though he had slept only four hours. His mind was perfectly clear. He sensed his blood circulating, and detected a steady vibration running throughout his body. He slowly inhaled the fresh morning air, feeling its energy entering through his heels and pores, circulating up his spine, over the top of his head and, exhaling, through his tongue, heart, lungs, solar plexus, down the front of his body and back down to his feet. He focused on this for a few minutes, then went back inside and drank a glass of mineral water. 

Closing the bedroom door, he padded silently into the grand parlor, cartwheeled onto the large blue-and-yellow carpet and walked on his hands back and forth across the room. He'd walked on his hands daily since he was nine years old, when he billed himself "Harry, Prince of the Air," and had played local carnivals as an acrobatic contortionist whose specialty was bending backward and picking up needles with his eyelids.   

After an hour of gymnastics, he again stood still. Letting his sweat dry, he cooled down by quietly imitating the breathing patterns of the heron, the deer and the turtle. Then he went into the bathroom, filled the alabaster bathtub with cold water and drowned himself. Drawing mind and energy inward, intentionally slowing his internal functions, he held his breath, submerged, for five-and-a-half minutes.  

Drying off with a towel, he returned to the rug and practiced ju-jitsu for an hour, feeling each movement coiling through his bare feet, spiraling up through his joints and emerging in the hands. He devoted the next forty-five minutes to hands and fingers exclusively -- rolling silver dollars clockwise and counterclockwise over his knuckles, palming and producing poker-sized playing cards with both sides of both hands. 

Sitting in the large armchair for fifteen minutes, he tied and untied knots with his toes, without looking, while mentally counting backwards from three hundred by threes.  

He spent the next fifteen minutes exercising his internal organs. As he had learned from early apprenticeship with Thardo the Poison Eater, he threaded a small potato onto a string and gently swallowed it. When it had settled in his empty stomach, he walked around the room, on his feet this time, and then sat down and performed ambidextrous tears and switches with folded pieces of paper, while looking straight ahead and quietly reciting "Kubla Khan," "Casey at the Bat," and "The Song of Hiawatha." After he had both moved and spoken normally for a quarter of an hour, he carefully began to work his peristaltic muscles and gently refluxed the potato back up his gullet and into his hand. 

It was not yet eight o'clock when he finished, feeling supercharged, and as though he had already lived an entire day while the rest of the world was asleep. 

Reproduced by arrangement with Hirschfeld's exclusive representative, Margo Feiden Galleries, Ltd., New York

Harry himself disclosed very little about how he practiced. But we do know something about it from his friend (and, we are proud to say, ours) Al Hirschfeld, the pre-eminent artist who chronicled the stars of Broadway and Hollywood from the 1920s through his death in 2003. Hirschfeld reports that Houdini practiced constantly, during every waking moment.

“He was always practicing, even when we were just sitting there talking,” Hirschfeld reminisced to his longtime friend and art dealer, Margo Feiden. She often asked Hirschfeld about Houdini, thanks to her own longtime interest in magic: Feiden was, for many years, the producer of Kuda Bux's "Sightless Vision" shows, a story which we'll detail in a future post. It was Feiden who commissioned Hirschfeld's drawing of Houdini wrapped in chains and replete with locks.

Margo Feiden

“During luncheon, Houdini always practiced his palming," Hirschfeld said. "He would lay a dime on the table. Then, as we were eating, he would pick it up dozens of times using a completely flat palm. And all the while he would never stop eating, talking, and looking straight at me! He would make coins vanish and reappear, roll them on his knuckles, push salt shakers through the table - always practicing."

Reproduced by arrangement with Hirschfeld's exclusive representative, Margo Feiden Galleries, Ltd., New York

“He had control of every single muscle in his body," Hirschfeld continued. "Even this little ring of muscles right in the center of his palms. He had really inordinate control of the muscles of his body. I mean, he would show me how he could swell his wrists, you know, before they put handcuffs on them. I’m sure there was more to it than that, but he did have complete control. He used to take his hand and show me little muscles in the center of his hand that he could pop up. He could put his hand down flat and pick up a dime or a quarter. I used to try to practice that, but I could never see any muscles in the center of my hand. It was really remarkable.”




RELATED:

HOUDINI'S IRON STOMACH

HOUDINI & HIRSCHFELD






(Hirschfeld images reproduced by arrangement with Hirschfeld's exclusive representative, Margo Feiden Galleries, Ltd., New York. Sketch: LOC. Quotes via Margo Feiden & PBS.)