The Life, Times and Fame of Harry Houdini, Part 2

A magician among the spirits.

“You will notice that some of these tricks are very simple. But remember it is not the trick that is to be considered, but the style and manner in which it is presented.” – Harry Houdini

So why are we talking about Harry Houdini? Excellent question. He was a master of …

Spectacle. He turned every show into a headline-worthy event.
Storytelling. Every escape told a narrative of danger, mastery and escape.
Consistency. He reinforced his persona in every appearance, ad and message.
Engagement. His death-defying escapes had audiences on the edge of their seats.
Meaningful Differentiation. Houdini had imitators, but he was always a step or two ahead of them. Yes, we’ve been banging on about distinctiveness for a while now. Differentiation matters, too.
Memorability. His name is still synonymous with the impossible.

That’s what you need to build brand fame.

To set the scene for the last decade or so of his life (and beyond), let’s go back to 1912.

Back then, electric lights were a nearly unfathomable miracle of human ingenuity. The telephone was still a marvel. Radio, used mostly for ship-to-shore communication, was a wonder. With the invention of X-rays, doctors were able to peer into the human body without the need for a scalpel.

These were not simple tricks. Scientists and inventors like Nikola Tesla were harnessing unseen energies, bending them to their will and literally transforming the world around them. It was an age where anything and everything seemed possible.

So it sort of makes sense that spiritualism and seances were all the rage. If it was possible to use invisible energy to talk with someone miles away, maybe it would be possible to communicate with spirits.

Houdini believed it might be possible to speak to those who had passed beyond the veil of our world. In fact, he very much wanted it to be real.

When his mother died in 1913, Houdini was overwhelmed with grief, and he was desperate to talk with her again. So he consulted medium after medium. Each of them would go into a trance. A bell would ring or a trumpet would sound. Maybe the table would levitate. There would be knocking from somewhere in the house.

Medium after medium would give him some version of, “I’m so happy here. You can’t believe how beautiful it is on the other side. I love you and can’t wait to see you, Harry. Live, love, laugh. I hope you dance.” There was nothing meaningful or personal in any of it.

As a magician, he also knew all the tricks of the medium trade, and what he saw were con artists preying on people’s grief. He did everything in his power — hiring his own team of private investigators, writing books and articles, attending seances, revealing their secrets to the press, debunking them on stage, testifying before Congress — to discredit them. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not.

Houdini was tilting at windmills, and he kept on tilting. His wife, Bess, would eventually have the last word. Houdini told Bess that in the event of his death, he would find a way to send a coded message back to her so she would know it was really him.

For their shows, the Houdinis had developed a secret code they used to communicate without the audience knowing what they were up to. According to Hollywood, Houdini and the Seance of 1936, “Their secret seance code word was ‘Rosabelle,’ followed by the phrase: ‘answer – tell – pray – answer – look – tell – answer – answer – tell. In their code, it spelled ‘Believe.’”

Houdini continued to perform, including the public escapes he used to promote his shows. He toured all over the world. He became the president of the Society of American Magicians. He made silent films. He was the first person in Australia to fly an airplane. Houdini was in his early 50s, one of the most famous entertainers in the world and wealthy beyond his wildest childhood dreams.

While performing in Detroit, he collapsed on stage and was rushed to the hospital. His appendix had burst some days before, a condition that was nearly always fatal before the invention of antibiotics. Houdini died a week later on Halloween, 1926.

Every year on the anniversary of his death, Bess and Houdini’s friends would perform a seance attempting to contact Harry from the great beyond. Every year, there was no answer.

On October 31, 1936, Bess performed her final seance on the roof of the Knickerbocker Hotel in Los Angeles. Three hundred guests attended, and the event was broadcast on national radio. The seance moderator, a man named Edward Saint, implored Harry to come through, to give them a sign. But there was no sign, no code, no knock, no spirit writing. There was only silence. It had been ten years with no word from Harry.

After the seance concluded, Bess told the radio audience, “My last hope is gone. I do not believe that Houdini can come back to me or to anyone. It is now my personal and positive belief that spirit communication in any form is impossible. The Houdini shrine has burned for ten years. I now, reverently, turn out the light. It is finished. Good night, Harry.”

Years later, when asked why she stopped performing the seances, she said, perhaps a little cheekily, “Ten years was long enough to wait for any man.”

What does any of this mean for you?

Remember our list at the top of this Dispatch, all the things Houdini did to build fame? All of that is real. What it boils down to is this …

Reach is everything. Attention is everything else. Houdini was a master of both. For marketers, it means getting the best possible creative in front of as many eyeballs as possible in the smartest and most consistent way possible. It’s obviously not a new idea, but it works.

As Harry himself said, “An old trick well done is far better than a new trick with no effect.”

Happy Halloween. We’ll see you next time.

Sources!

Bess Houdini – Wikipedia
Hollywood, Houdini and the Great Halloween Seance of 1936 – Mark Dimunation, Library of Congress Blog
A Magician Among the Spirits, by Houdini – A Project Gutenberg eBook
Houdini and the Witch of Lime Street – Matthew Cheney