"A curtain would be closed around it for a moment, bang, the curtains would open, Bess would be standing on top of the trunk. "Bess Houdini would be put into a sack, and she would go into the trunk," explained Silverman. Houdini's first important magic trick was called the Metamorphosis.
Playing those dime museums, Houdini met and married singer/dancer Bess Rahner.
"He started off at the bottom rung of show business, which was dime museums: you pay a dime, you go in and see a sword swallower or you see Siamese twins," said Silverman.īy his late teens, he was already calling himself Harry Houdini, the name taken from a famous French magician named Robert Houdin. "His father worked for a while in a necktie cutting factory, and Houdini, I think, for a while also worked there as a child."īut even then, says Silverman, Houdini was seeking fame and fortune as a performer, doing his first performance as a circus acrobat at about age 14. At the age of four, he moved with his mother and brothers to Appleton, to join his father, Rabbi Mayer Samuel Weiss, who was let go by one synagogue after another, in Appleton, then Milwaukee, and finally New York City. He was born Erich Weiss on March 24, 1874.
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