My Interview with Teller

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Several months ago I had the privilege of interviewing Teller, the great magician from the duo of Penn and Teller. This was for an article I wrote for Smithsonian Magazine about Harry Houdini's legacy as an American innovator. Teller was so knowledgeable about Houdini's biography, methods and historical context that it seemed like a shame for me to leave so much of what he said on the cutting room floor. 

This is pretty much the entire text of the interview. Where I use the ellipsis, he was talking too quickly for my hands to keep up typing (this was a phone interview and I type in real time during phone interviews). In places where you see a question mark mid-sentence, there was a single word I couldn't make out. The written questions are only those I had prepared in advance. I talked more than you see in writing here, but I don't usually bother to type out my follow-up questions and comments when transcribing in real time. If Teller seems to lurch unexpectedly from one topic to another, probably he was responding to something I said.

When in your life did you first get interested in Harry Houdini?

I believe the Philadelphia public library was my great friend in magic from the time I was a small child until I went to college. They had many books including some by Walter Gibson. He wrote a number of books on Houdini's behalf. I think that was the first place I encountered him. You are immediately and romantically in love with this guy who has the imagination who is terribly driven and brilliant.

By the time I saw the Tony Curtis movie I was just annoyed by it.

Have you ever had the chance to examine some of the things that Houdini made? Like his Chinese water torture chamber? And without asking you to give any specific secrets away about his or your tricks, have you learned anything from seeing how he built things?

Yes, I have in fact had a very close look at the water torture cell, which is shockingly small. You picture it as this towering thing. But it was a compact, efficient thing. It was destroyed by fire and restored by a guy named John Gaugn [?]. It's a brilliant piece of mechanics. It's a marvelous thing. A lot of the things in the [?] books turnout to be accurate. Penn and I have done, and may some day return to, a version of one of his tricks. …

Houdini's real stage was less the stage than it was the newspapers. He knew how to make a performance happen in people's minds by means of reportage. When you think about him escaping from jail cells and switching the prisoners around and showing up in a distant location, he was a maker of stories in addition to being a performer who was electrifying to see.

I have the first letter he wrote to his brother after the death of his mother. And it contains the phrase, 'Deshi, it's tough and I can't seem to get over it. Sometimes I feel all right when a calm moment happens it's as bad as ever.' So the only time he can get over the death of his mother is when he is working.

Another letter I have is one to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. They became friends because he admired education. Doyle admired Houdini's American manliness, you could say. They became great friends. [Teller mentions a photograph] Houdini was visiting Atlantic City. Houdini was on the beach in Atlantic city, so they are muffled up with all their winter clothing. And while there, a very famous episode happened. Lady Doyle, who was an ardent spiritualist, they were mostly because their son died horribly in ? And she thought she could do automatic writing. And she went into a trance and had a supposed message from Houdini's mother. …he was moved by it and touched by it, but in this letter he had an uneasy feeling about it. Because the letter from his mother didn't have anything evidentiary in it. And it was in English, which she never spoke. …and it commenced with a cross, which was odd because she was the wife of a rabbi. And there were other things in there that Houdini found rational explanations for after he got out of the moment of passion.

After he spoke to the press, he said he thought that lady Doyle was sincere but not in touch with his mother. Lady Doyle was ? Houdini wrote this letter saying that 'I think you are sincere but...' that was Houdini's turn from any possible idea of spiritualism being real.

He collected a lot of stuff. Sid Radner, who was the biggest collector, had an auction in Los Angeles, which was how I got those things. I also got a big black wooden cross. Which I thought wouldn't go for much at auction... I bought the thing thinking this was a good souvenir. After I had bought it, Sid came up and said, 'be careful you don't have kids around this thing.' I said 'why not?' He said, 'you don't want them sticking their fingers in here.' …It has holes where you lash a person to it and they try to escape. What I didn't realize is that it is an elaborate mechanism... which a simple movement of your foot you could sever all of the ropes simultaneously.

One of the things about Houdini that people rarely comment on, Houdini was in an age that is somewhat parallel to our age in this way... in his age people had worked on farms for years and years and now they worked in factories and offices. They were growing soft. There was a movement towards making people who were fit into stars... Houdini seemed to capitalize on the fact that he was extremely fit, he was quite an athletic guy. A lot of the shots that you see in newspapers are just showing off, with a lock that covered his genitals, because he represents this thing that people don't have.

For several decades we've seen people getting very soft. People who look like Brad Pitt in his prime, their fitness makes them stars.

Is there any object that Houdini left behind where you look at it and just cannot figure out what this thing was for or how it worked?

I have not encountered such a thing... Certainly he was obsessed with being at the cutting edge of everything. Aviation which was kind of an odd choice, because it was the new thing. He was super aware of what trends are happening and tried to stay on top of them. Silverman calls him an icon of modernity. When he escapes from a straight jacket, it's in front of a skyscraper.

No, in terms of inventions, some of the things that, he was also obviously, he knew that the cinema was the next thing and tried to become a movie star. And he kind of did. …there's a great deal of charm. He's acting quite naturalistically and I was surprised by that. …obviously what he was outstanding at was ?

As I look at some of what Houdini said and wrote, I keep finding some things that are sort of off. Like he claimed to have invented a working robot that was used in his first major movie, but looking at that with modern eyes we can see that this is definitely a guy in a suit. How reliable is Houdini as a historical source?

Not terribly. His job, although he had hopes of becoming an author and historian, his job was to be a show man and that's what he was. He was very interested in the history of magic. And one of the things he did consistently was search out the graves of magicians and when they were people he admired he would restore those graves. He collected a lot of information but I wouldn't look to him as a historian because historians have standards.

What you and Penn do seems to sort of refer to Houdini's legacy at times without trying to imitate it. How, if at all, does Houdini's work inform what you have done in your own career?

Houdini was the outstanding exponent of the idea that magicians are uniquely qualified to detect fraud. And uniquely qualified to be skeptics. We're not the first ones to do this. The Amazing Randi is someone of considerable powers who focused on the skeptical angle. When you are a professional magician you want to see your art respected for what it is, not misused to mislead people about the universe. Houdini really brought, in his style, he disposed of the point that booga-booga thing that magicians had carried for a long time. He wasn't the first to take it out of the black arts thing. Robert-Houdin was. But particularly the escape stuff, it comes out of a history, a spiritualist history. In seances, mediums were typically restrained in some way. Even locked up in boxes... at least tied and sometimes chained or handcuffed. He would escape to do their manifestations and get locked up again. Houdini said, 'there are no spirits, I'm just a clever guy getting out of stuff.' It was a major transformation. There's a great quote from him in Congress where they ask, 'nothing is done by supernatural means?' He said, 'I do tricks that nobody can find out.' I love that, there's such balls in this.

He did go through a period earlier where he did a fake mind reading act. ...he was fundamentally honest with the audience. Doyle drove Houdini crazy by saying things like, 'all you did was de-materialize yourself on the inside and re-materialize yourself on the outside!' It drove Houdini crazy.

...is the fact that he always left the thing that he got out of exactly as he left it. …if you left me in a trunk or safe, when I got out it would be wide open. But Houdini would leave the thing still intact.

As an innovator, he's the guy who kind of figured out how to use the press. When you think back, he's the first prominent person that you see doing co-promotions with corporations. If he's coming to your town and you are centered around the beer industry, he would talk to the brewery and arrange to escape from a giant beer keg or something …he is really the guy who made a whole thing out of co-promoting with a major corporation.

I know that there are some people who are trying to keep the idea of an escape artist alive, but why do you think that this stopped being something that most Americans care about? Why don't we have mainstream escape artists anymore?

I think there's the big picture psychological reason which is that everybody was an immigrant and everyone was fleeing from the chains of oppression in another country. The idea was you could be a tough little immigrant and no matter how hard the big guys came down on you, like the police or the big company in your town, he would take the symbol of authority and defy it in the act of self-liberation. … and the idea of self liberation has more appeal to people than mere escape.

Is there anything that Houdini did that has stuck with you, where you could never figure out how he did that?

I've read a lot. There are still some things that are unknown, although people have strong suspicions. In a lot of cases Houdini would do whatever was necessary to make something happen. And what was necessary included some of the uglier things in magic. Like collusion or bribery. None of those were very heroic, but he would resort to those. Nothing in my head comes to mind...