University Place

Houdini and the Cult of Celebrity

– Hi, everybody. Welcome to “Houdini and the Cult of Celebrity” this evening. I’m Patti Sherman-Cisler, the executive director at the Jewish Museum Milwaukee. This program and our other programs, Houdini programs, are in conjunction with the current exhibit, “Life and Legacy of Harry Houdini,” on exhibit through January 5th. I also– I’m going to introduce our speaker tonight, Dr. Richard Popp, who’s an associate professor in the Department of Journalism, Advertising, and Media Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He holds a PhD in mass media and communication from Temple University, and an MBA in marketing from Virginia Tech. Dr. Popp’s research focuses on the cultural history of American media. He’s the author of a 2012 book, The Holiday Makers: Magazines, Advertising, and Mass Tourism in Postwar America, and has many articles that have appeared in the Journal of American History, Technology and Culture, and other leading publications in history and communication.

He’s a native of the Washington, D. C. area. He and his wife Shannon currently live on the East Side of Milwaukee. I also want to make you aware that we have, we’re being filmed by University Place, a program, a series with PBS Wisconsin. It is aired throughout the state, except Milwaukee. But you can find this lecture and hundreds of others on their website. So please join me in welcoming Dr. Popp. [audience applauding]

– Thank you, Patti. Thank you to the Jewish Museum Milwaukee for having me here, and for putting on such a great exhibit. What I thought I would try to do with this talk is to place Harry Houdini in a larger historical context. And more generally, to place the phenomenon of mass celebrity as it developed over the course of the 19th century and the early 20th century into a broader context. And I want to do that by looking at the 19th century show business world, really that Houdini emerged out of. So, Houdini, I think as most folks know was a creature of vaudeville. And vaudeville was, in many ways, a catch basin for nearly all of the major developments in American entertainment over the course of the 19th century. At the same time though, it was also a progenitor of many of the most important developments that would come to shape show business and the media industries of the 20th century. And in particular also, you know very much shape our modern notions of celebrity. That paradox is embodied really nicely in Houdini, who was probably the biggest star to emerge out of vaudeville. And he was at the height of his fame really at exactly the moment when a new type of celebrity, one that owed much less to live performance than to mediated sounds and images.

Musical recordings, moving pictures, broadcast voices, and so on. Which in time would reshape the nature of stardom. When you step back and look at these developments, a few things become clear. The first is that modern celebrity has always been deeply transnational in nature. By this I mean that it as involved the global circulation of people, productions, and genres of entertainment across national borders, oceans, and continents. Cultural globalization is not a new thing in American life; instead has been the very foundation of popular culture since at least the mid 19th century and likely before that. The second point is that you can’t divorce celebrity, or changes in the way that we think about celebrity from the technological landscapes in which women and men become famous. This of course means media technologies, printing presses, photography, moving pictures, radio sets, TV sets, video games, computer programs, social media platforms, and on and on. But just as important and possibly more consequential in Houdini’s day were things like railroads and ocean liners, transportation technologies. As literary scholar Sharon Marcus has argued in her new book on celebrity, “Steamboats didn’t just deliver word “of 19th century celebrities and their exploits, “they delivered the celebrities themselves “as they traveled from one continent to another.

It’s no coincidence that well into the early 20th century, communication as a term generally referred to both media and transportation technologies. One of the most influential media theorists of the late 20th century, James W. Carey, who for a very long time was the dean of the College of Communication down at the University of Illinois, wrote a really brilliant article in the 1970s that made the argument that the telegraph was such a game-changing technology because it really marked the moment when transportation and communication were severed from each other. And what he was arguing was that you know, you no longer have to put that letter, or that newspaper on a ship, or on a train, or on a stagecoach. But rather, you could type out the disembodied message across telegraph wires. There’s a lot of truth to that theory, but I think that it oversells the idea that the physical circulation of people and things cease to play an integral role in how media would take shape after the 1840s. And one of the things that I’d like to argue here is that we can see the development of celebrity over the course of the second half of the 19th century as proof positive that the physical movement of people and things through space still mattered an awful lot in terms of how we could come to think of media and what media would look like. So to start, I want to take things back to one of the earliest scenes of American industrialization. In fact, probably the earliest. The mill towns of New England in the mid-Atlantic in the early decades of the 1800s.

It was here, historian Paul E. Johnson argues, that you can first start to see modern forms of celebrity take shape in a figure like Sam Patch, who was an ordinary mill worker who gained enormous fame, by the standards of the time, by jumping off waterfalls. So, who was Sam Patch, and why did he jump off waterfalls? Patch was born around 1800, and he grew up in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, which you can see there, where he started working in the complex of textile mills built there by Samuel Slater in the 1790s. While nowhere near as large as the mills built along the Merrimack about a generation later, Slater’s factories, which were built along the falls of the Blackstone River, were essentially the first U. S. mills modeled after those in Manchester. And it was by and large staffed by spinners and weavers who had recently immigrated to the U. S. from Lancashire. Patch’s job, like other child laborers in textile mills, was to clear the lint out from underneath the mules, the spinning mules.

Kids were used for the job for a very, very long time, because they could scamper under and clear out the lint. And then also to tie knots in the broken strands of yarn that float off the machines. Again, they’re thinking small hands meant more nimble knot tying. Over time, Patch learned the art of operating mules, which required a lot of manual technique at the time. And he was among the first generation of American-born boss spinners. So he grew to manhood in the context of this tough, proud, masculine culture that you’d find among artisans and mechanics in the early 1800s. That sense of toughness was reinforced outside of work as well, where he spent a lot of time along the river, where he and other kids would monkey around, go swimming. But one thing that they would do in this town, is they would jump the 50 foot drop from over the Blackstone Falls. And they would also challenge each other to jumping off some of the buildings in town. Making those kinds of jumps was a sort of rite of passage.

Sometime in the 1820s, Patch moved to another nascent site of American industrialization, Patterson, New Jersey, where he worked in the even larger factories built there along the 70 foot drop on the Passaic River. It was in Patterson that his jumps first started to attract attention. In 1827, the town was celebrating the unveiling of a bridge that had been built across the top of the falls. And it was a controversial development, because the builder, a local saw mill owner, had bought an area forest along the north bank that had traditionally been used as a common grounds where the mill workers would picnic, play in the woods, drink beers from a nearby tavern, and that type of thing. And this builder was basically clearing that forest to build a much more kind of genteel restaurant and music venue. So there was a good deal of resentment in the town at the time, and it was probably that sentiment that led Patch to, right at the moment when the bridge was being unfurled, make the jump from the south bank into the cascading waters below. The crowd loved it, and Patch made a similar leap the following summer, this time upstaging the fireworks the city fathers were planning on setting off. And once again, this happened in the context of class conflict within the town. The mill owners had recently imposed a longer working day, or working week. By that point, Patch’s reputation was starting to travel, almost certainly by word of mouth at this point.

And he was recruited later that summer by the owners of a ferry business between Hoboken and Manhattan to jump for a publicity stunt. They didn’t have a waterfall, but they did have a tall ship. And Patch climbed to the top of the 90 foot mast, and leapt into the Hudson River below. That was really his entrance into the world of show business and the beginning of his celebrity, Johnson argues. Because the previous leaps had been made in small cities where he was known. He was jumping basically in front of people who knew him from everyday life. And he was jumping in the context of a, the local conditions of the town. The Hoboken leap was pure entertainment, and he was watched by folks who knew nothing about him beyond his extraordinary ability. It also put him into the orbit of the New York City newspapers, which carried items on the event. Given the system of newspaper exchanges that was in place at the time, if you published a newspaper, you could send a copy of your paper for free, through the postal network.

And you could receive copies of other printers’ newspapers for free. And so you had this very vibrant exchange of newspapers. So in all likelihood, word of these jumps started to travel that way. By the following year, Patch has come to the attention of the early tourism moguls in upstate New York, who brought him there to leap at their publicity extravaganza. Their idea was that he would jump off the top of Niagara Falls, as part of a larger program of events that was also included, it would also include creating a massive rock slide by blowing up the table rock formation there. The whole day ended up something of a wash. Officials from Ontario nixed the explosions. [audience chuckling] And then a replacement event that they had cooked up where they were gonna send an old lake schooner over the top of the falls. It ended getting hung up in some rocks. And Patch didn’t jump that day either, but he did apparently jump the next day, and then again about a week and a half later.

In Buffalo and Rochester where he also started to make appearances, he began to morph into something like a full-on celebrity. In Buffalo, he became attached to a local entertainment impresario, who had opened up an oddities museum and popular playhouse where Patch was a main attraction. He also sold Patch a trained bear that Patch began to take around town with him on a leash. So in general, he was adopting this much flashier persona. He had always worn his traditional spinner’s garb when he jumped, which was a white shirt and pants. But he began to dress that up with things like a big black sash and a monkey jacket, which was the kind of tight-fitting sailor’s coats that were very popular in young men in the early republic. Kind of like the leather jacket of the day. He also started talking a lot with the press in those towns, which covered him much more enthusiastically than the newspapers in New York City. So, this is happening in 1828, 1829. So this is several years, a good probably half decade or so before the advent of the penny press.

And the papers in New York City and elsewhere were still written at the time for the political and merchant elite. But what you were starting to get was the beginnings of a Jacksonian press, where Jackson’s allies in different cities and regions were starting up friendly press organs. And the Jacksonian paper in Buffalo was especially interested in what Patch was doing. Covered him sympathetically and presented what he was doing as a kind of craft, and a very courageous thing, rather than this just kind of crazy publicity stunt. But Patch was not for long. Shortly after the Niagara leaps, he made his way east to Rochester, where he planned to make several jumps at the gorges there, in the Genesee River. He survived the first, and then he died during the second in 1829. Apparently, he had become a very heavy drinker. And the thinking was that he passed out at some point, you know, on the way down, and then didn’t survive that jump. [audience chuckling] So, a very kind of incredible story.

His body was found downriver a couple of months later. But over the next couple years, his fame really grew. His story got picked up, and it was very often featured in the almanacs that were mass-produced at the time, and read by kind of more ordinary, common folks. Someone named a cigar after him. And then, maybe most famously, Andrew Jackson was presented with a horse by the city of Philadelphia. And he named that horse Sam Patch. And apparently it was his prized horse for the rest of his life. So, most important of all, people started to stage plays based on his legend. And this starts happening by the mid 1830s. The best known was produced by a traveling actor named Dan Marble, who got ahold of a script about Patch when he was passing through Buffalo in the mid 1830s.

He presented the play there, but it was further west where he started to develop it into a very successful production, that was in itself a dangerous spectacle. At the climax of it, Marble would jump from the rafters. And they had rigged up the stage so that there was a trap door, and he would go through the trap door, and sawdust would come flying up. And then in the backdrop, there was a very, very lavish, very, very large likeness of Niagara Falls that he was performing in front of. The play toured all throughout the West, and eventually made it to New York City, where it had a long run, and spawned several sequels. And he turned into something of almost like an action hero. By the 1840s, Marble was even able to take this play about Sam Patch to London. Johnson finds Patch compelling, because the story tell us a lot about the cultural dynamics of Jacksonian America. It was through such stories, told in the context of an emerging mass culture, Johnson argues, that Jacksonians were able to knit together the disparate interests, Southern enslavers, Northern artisans, Western farmers and others, that were the base of their mass politics. But Johnson also argues, and this is related, that in figures like Patch, you can see a new kind of famousness taking shape.

Not the classical fame that came with civic prominence, you know, rooted in governmental service, or military heroisms. We think about George Washington or Benjamin Franklin, figures like that. But the modernized form of celebrity that grows around someone who, boasting some awe-inspiring ability, becomes the focus of media attention. And in the process, emerges out of complete obscurity. Quote, “The celebrity of Sam Patch existed first “in newspapers,” Johnson writes. “Then in talk about those stories, “then in the work of actors, poets and so on “who were responding to that talk, “and then the talk that ensues after that. ” Yet, when you look at it, very few of the ingredients we would generally see as necessary to media stardom were around when Patch was living. He pretty much died on the precipice on a whole wave of new media that emerged in the 1830s and 1840s. Photography, the mass urban daily or penny press, the telegraph, and even the lithograph really wasn’t introduced in America at this point. It’s still a few years away.

What was in place was an older print culture. One of merchant and party newspapers at the upper level, and cheap pamphlets, almanacs, and other publications like that on the lower end. And that, in Patch’s case, seemed to be sufficient to make his name known outside of Patterson. But more crucially, there was a show business, however loosely organized, that revolved around oddities, spectacles, and dramatic sights. And it was folks involved in that nascent business of mounting dramatic, live spectacles, that took notice of Patch, and brought him to Hoboken and Niagara. Once the flurry of stories about Patch died down in the 1830s, again it was folks involved in the popular theater, another live spectacle, that revived his legend. That, in turn, produced another flurry of paper, playbills, news stories, reviews and so on, facilitated another round of live events, and so on. This is something that’s kind of key to celebrity in the 19th century, and still in the 20th century and today in other forms. But this kind of reciprocal feeding on each other of print coverage and these kind of dramatic spectacles. It was that combination of print and live performance, especially much-anticipated live performances, that celebrity was built out of for nearly the next 100 years.

Marcus, who I’ve already mentioned, makes the argument that 19th century theater is really the kind of the foundation of modern stardom. And I wouldn’t disagree with that, but Marcus has in mind star performers. She does a very close study of Sarah Bernhardt. And more than the performers, I’m interested in the actual mechanics and logistics of mounting performances. The fact that there was this industry in place I think, regardless of who the actors were, was something that was beginning to produce celebrity. In terms of institutional framework, this was all very shapeless during Patch’s time. But just a decade or so later, it’s starting to look a lot more sophisticated, and play out on a much larger scale. And we’ve already seen that to some degree in the sense that Marble had this very successful play, took all around the Western states and then to New York, but then to London, right. And the traffic of British performers coming east over the Atlantic would have been much greater than, at that point in time, American performers going over to Great Britain and the continent. But it’s happening, right? So a good window into that transatlantic exchange, involves a young African-American dancer named William Henry Lane, or as he was better known at the time, Juba, or Master Juba.

Juba was known to historians of dance, and has been for quite some time, because he’s sometimes seen as the godfather of tap dancing. But he was pretty much unknown to cultural historians, until the scholar Tyler Anbinder, and the historian James Cook started to write about him in books that have come out over the last couple decades. And it’s their work that I’m drawing on here, in talking about Lane. Lane was born in Providence, also Rhode Island, in 1825. And not an awful lot is known about him beyond the fact that by his mid-teens, he was dancing at the P. T. Barnum-owned Vauxhall Gardens in New York City’s Five Points neighborhood in 1840. In 1842, he was performing at the black-owned Almack’s dance hall when Charles Dickens caught him during his visit to the United States. Dickens, as Anbinder points out, liked very little about New York City. But he did like what he saw at Almack’s.

And he wrote glowingly about Lane in his American Notes, which was published later that year. Lane, or Juba, did not need Dickens’ endorsement to win fame in New York City. He had his own phenomenal talents to do that. Breakdown dancing, which combined West African and Irish dance traditions, involved lightning-quick footwork. And nobody, apparently, was faster or more elegant than Lane. Even the virulently anti-black New York Herald conceded that he was by far the most talented dancer in town. What really built his fame though, was the dance-offs that he won against Irish-American favorite John Diamond in 1843 and 1844, which were staged not just in New York City, but they both traveled to Boston, also you know, to perform one of these dance-offs. That led to several engagements with mixed-raced minstrel troupes that toured throughout the Northeast. In contrast, Diamond, the loser, was able to tour nationally, which was not available to Lane. But for Lane, it also led to a spot in a group called Pell Serenaders, which was a kind of early minstrels all-stars, that departed for Great Britain in 1848.

And there, over the next two years, they toured the top British music halls. Played the most prestigious venues. Lane’s reputation had preceded him, and he was billed in ads and show bills as “Boz’s Juba,” Boz being Dickens’ nickname. Indeed, the British press covered the tour closely, and even likened it to similar exchanges, including Swedish opera star Jenny Lind’s visit to the United States, which had been, happened also in 1850, and had been facilitated by P. T. Barnum. At some point in 1850, Lane set out on his own. And over the next two years, he ends up playing the kind of lower rungs of British music halls. And then he disappears from the record in 1852. There’s a lot that can be gleaned from Lane’s story.

For one, it offers a good vantage point on the built-in paradoxes of African-American celebrity, where the opportunity to do what one loves, show one’s talent, and transcend poverty often came with the price tag of performing within stereotype-ridden genres like the minstrel show. But along with that, historian James Cook has argued that you can really see the ligaments of a kind of cultural, global cultural industry taking shape in Lane and Dickens’ travels. Dickens was already famous in the United States, although he was still fairly young when he came in the early 1840s. Because his early works like The Pickwick Papers had circulated widely. The United States did not recognize copyright of foreign works. And so anybody with a printing press could print copies of The Pickwick Papers. You could stick it in your newspaper. And so, it was widely printed, widely known. And this is something that really irritated Dickens apparently, for good reason. And he spoke about it, and his American audiences I guess did not appreciate that.

But his work is circulating, right. It’s circulating throughout the United States. And then through his work, Lane, a black teenager living in what was probably at the time the toughest neighborhood in the world, in the Five Points, is also known on the other side of the ocean to Dickens’ many, many British readers. And then when Pell Serenaders arrive in Great Britain, they then are able to circulate through this British music hall circuit that is much more developed than any, the American entertainment industry of the time. This kind of dynamic of print circulating and people circulating, as Marcus points out, you can really see an abundance with Sarah Bernhardt, traveled widely throughout her life. Performed in many, many countries. And, by all measure, seems to have generated much, much more press coverage than any figure who was living at the time, including very prominent leaders. And then you could also see it in another person that folks have pointed to as one of the prototypes, or the prototype of modern celebrity, which is Buffalo Bill Cody. William F. Cody was a scout, I think as many folks know.

In the West, he’d grown up in the plains, and was this phenomenally talented horseman, an incredibly talented shot. And he just awed the U. S. Army soldiers who were out there fighting the Indian wars. And his legend becomes known. Folks start writing about him, and he ends up becoming, you know, basically the main protagonist of many of the earliest dime novels written by Ned Buntline. And then eventually, gets connected to Nate Salsbury, who was a veteran of the American theater, who then kind of turns him into this show business star. So again, you have this kind of dynamic where you have this figure who has these abilities, and this charisma. But there’s this massive amount of print that’s being generated and circulating about that figure. But then they are also part of a production that travels, and creates these kind of like anticipated events.

The same sea lanes that Dickens, Lind, and Marble had moved through, also brought the modern magic that captured the imagination of a young Erik Weisz to the United States. Although Jean-Eugne Robert-Houdin, and I have no French at all, so I’m probably butchering his name. This is Houdini’s namesake. He never made it to U. S. shores. But contemporaries and imitators of his, such as Carl Herrmann and Alexander Herrmann did. And in fact, it was the British magicians, H. S. Lind’s stop in Milwaukee, and in particular the decapitation trick that he performed that sparked Weisz’s fascination with magic.

And in turn, it was the popularity of these acts that laid the groundwork for a book like Robert-Houdin’s memoir, to be translated into English and then published in the United States. And then went through four editions. So there were enough copies of this book circulating that it could end up in the hands of a poor teenage garment maker in New York City in the 1880s, right, Harry Houdini or Erik Weisz. So at this point, I want to switch gears a little and look at something that’s happening alongside these developments. The rise of the railroad circus in the 1870s and the 1880s, followed by the rise of vaudeville in the 1880s and the 1890s. As Janet Davis has shown in her brilliant history of the circus, the railways fundamentally remade this ancient institution. And those changes had implications far beyond the big top. Circuses began traveling the American countryside in the early 19th century, traveling main thoroughfares such as the National Road built over the Appalachians and the back roads that led to towns, hamlets, and villages of the early republic. Then with the burst of canal building that played out in the 1820s and 1830s, and access that opened up to the Great Lakes, the wagon circuses could then push farther into frontier settlements in the old Northwest. It didn’t take long for some circuses to look to the railroads for transport.

But those tended to be much smaller than the big wagon shows, because the logistics and the expenses of moving a major production were simply too prohibitive. That changed in the late 1860s, right around the time the transcontinental lines were completed. As Janet Davis points out, within a few months of the driving of the golden spike, Dan Castello Circus and Menagerie were whizzing their way by Promontory Point. The big switch came a couple of years later though, when the combined Barnum, Coup, and Castello Circus, or the great traveling World’s Fair, began building their operations around the train. Buying their own train cars and having them modified, for instance, sleepers with extra bunks to accommodate the very large crews, flatbeds that were large enough to accommodate their very large poles. Palace cars that were designed to compartmentalize the animals, and so on. Together, they extended to more than 1,200 feet, or the length of four football fields. This is the early 1870s. Over the next quarter century, the trains grew longer and longer, tripling in size by century’s end. In 1910, both the Barnum and Bailey and the Ringling Brothers circuses were using 84 train cars apiece, and the crews they ferried around the country numbered nearly 1,000.

As a physical production, the logistics themselves were part of the attraction, as crowds gathered to watch the trains unload, and to watch the work crews busily set about pitching the tents, driving the stakes, and just more generally setting up the grounds. The productions these enormous crews continuously assembled and disassembled had grown in size as well. Expanding from the one ring tents that might run about 85 feet in diameter in the pre-Civil War years, to the sprawling two and three ring monsters that could be up to 450 feet in length. The railroads did more than make the circus big, however. They made it into the sort of operation, Davis argues, that absolutely could not exist without close and highly systematized management. In other words, without an awful lot of bureaucracy. Indeed, the Barnum and Bailey crew was so large, and probably transient as well, that in place of name tags, they wore badges that bore numbers instead. Nowhere was this bureaucratic ethos more evident than the behind the scenes planning that each touring season, or that, you know, was necessary to plan out every touring season. Route planners pored over data, crop reports, financial news, population counts and so on, to determine which towns merited a stop that year and which did not. And then to get finer grain data, they could work their contacts at local newspapers, post offices, and banks.

Meanwhile, another group of clerks sent letters back and forth with their counterparts at the suburban and regional rail lines to arrange the excursion trains and discounted fares that would bring the farm families and small towners in outlying communities, some as far as 50 miles out, into the local population hub for the big show. The circus, for all its gaiety, was built on paperwork, and it provided a model for others who set out to produce entertainment on a continental scale. No one, it seems, paid closer attention than the impresarios who systematized the theaters and music halls, that people like Master Juba and Dan Marble thrived in a half century earlier. As it so happened, the two individuals who would come to lord over vaudeville at the turn of the 20th century, Benjamin Franklin Keith, or B. F. Keith as he was always referred to, and Edward F. Albee. Both spent their early adult years working for Barnum Circus. In 1883, Keith opened a dime museum in Boston. And while innovative in Patch’s day, when he and his bear were living it up in Buffalo, dime museums made up the bottom ranks of the show business circuit by the time Keith opened his doors in the 1880s.

Later, he was joined by Albee. And this was a floundering business, pretty much. But what saved it was a highly successful run of music halls that they– of musicals that they borrowed from Gilbert and Sullivan. This is still before there’s a protection of foreign copyright. And also a novel framework for presenting those acts, which was the continuous program, which meant that, you know, something was always showing on the stage from
10:00 a. m. in the morning until 10:00 p. m. at night. By 1886, Keith and Albee were faring well enough to leave the dime museum behind and open a proper theater.

1888, Southam expands south into Providence. A year later, they open shop in Philadelphia. In 1894, they established their first New York City theater. New York was the birthplace of vaudeville. In the 1860s, the veteran circus clown and songwriter Tony Pastor had pioneered the form at his theater in the Bowery. The idea was a whole night’s worth of entertainment: singing, dancing, acrobats, trained animals, dramatic sketches, and so on, all presented as short acts with one following the next. The performances, like the neighborhood that hosted them, had an edge to them. Putting the racialized humor, sexual innuendo, and working class bravado of bar room banter to music. Gradually though, Pastor reshaped his shows with an eye toward the middle class. During the 1870s and 1880s, he banned alcohol from his shows, he toned down the language, and he moved uptown to Union Square.

There, nestled amid the department stores, historian Robert Steiner writes– and throughout this section, I’m really drawing on Steiner’s work. “Pastor was no longer a showman from the precincts “of the Bowery; he was at the crossroads that cradled “the emerging world of mass entertainment “and shopping,” end quote. Reaching a cross-class audience, Pastor’s theater had a centrality to it. Both physically, the showman advertised the fact that his theater was situated along streetcar, trolley, and elevated train lines, but culturally as well. The same newspapers that advertised Pastor’s shows also provided grist for his topical songs and comedy sketches. Watching that sociological cross section of humanity file in and out of Pastor’s theater each night, the songwriters and publishers setting up shop in nearby Tin Pan Alley came to see the theater as a kind of transmission point. Get a song into Pastor’s show, and you likely had a hit on your hands. At Keith and Albee’s growing chain of theaters, nicknamed the Sunday School Circuit by the performers forced to walk the line there, the class boundaries dividing the legitimate theater, as the three act playhouses were called, and the manic variety of the vaudeville house were eroded even further. Along with a healthy chunk of the middle class audience, Keith and Albee took something else from the legitimate theater: Its tight control over the booking of acts. In the mid 1890s, a small consortium of New York theater owners, emulating their peers in the oil industry, tobacco industry, steel industry, and dozens of other fields, banded together to buy up hundreds of the most desirable theatrical venues nationwide.

By one count, The Syndicate, as it was ominously called, controlled more than 500 theaters. And in some markets, they had almost complete saturation; they had nearly all of them. Controlling the theaters meant controlling the stages and who got to appear on them. It was a defacto way of regimenting the labor pool, and the lesson was not lost on Keith and Albee. In 1906, they established the United Booking Office to handle hiring and scheduling, not only at their own formidable chain of theaters, but also at the larger network of affiliated venues to hope to feature Keith and Albee performers. Incorporated in Maine, but headquartered on the sixth floor of the Palace Theater building in midtown Manhattan, the UBO office was the only way into Keith and Albee’s network, which encompassed the entire eastern half of the United States. As Steiner points out, aspiring comics, magicians, tumblers, and anyone else who hoped to make it big time had to first contact the UBO, which may or may not arrange for a tryout. If they did offer a tryout, that generally meant several weeks of shows under a fake name in Podunk venues. If that trial period went well, the performer’s agent was then invited to the UBO offices to work out contracts for shows on the Keith and Albee circuit. That circuit was broken down into 20 geographic zones, each of which was represented by a desk and a booking agent at that desk, who was responsible for piecing together the programs at the theaters in his district.

For instance, somebody might have all of New England, or all of Ohio. To compose these programs, the bookers relied on the conventions, formulas, and hunches that constituted industry wisdom. What works in Philadelphia, but won’t work in Tennessee? What kind of magic act builds the right amount of momentum at a certain point of the show? Those sorts of things. If the performer looked like a good fit, the booker and agent then set about negotiating a contract for each and every one of the theaters along the circuit. All of those contracts had to include a non-negotiable 5% cut that went to the UBO. And then another 5% cut that went to an entity called the Vaudeville Collection Agency, which was also owned by Keith and Albee. The VCA was tasked with collecting and processing payment from the individual theaters. And for that service, they kept half of that 5%, and then sent the rest on to the performer’s agent. Once the bookers had their bills set up, the UBO could then turn its attention to working out the endless logistics of getting dozens upon dozens of troupes from one engagement to the next, ensuring that an actress in Fort Wayne today has a hotel room in South Bend tomorrow. Making sure that the wardrobe and prop cases in Shreveport made their way onto the morning train to get down to Baton Rouge for the show that night, and so on.

The UBO was in a certain regard, the entertainment industry as travel agency. It was out of this mountain of paperwork the celebrity was built at the turn of the 20th century, including Houdini’s. For nearly the entirety of the 1890s, Harry and Bess Houdini had toiled away in obscurity, playing the dime museums, midways, and medicine shows that comprised the catch-as-catch-can circuit of the plebeian performer. Close to fed up with it all in 1899, Houdini’s act at a beer garden in St. Paul just happened to be seen by a man named Martin Beck, who, along with B. F. Keith and Edward Albee, was probably the most significant person you could have in an audience at the time. Beck ran the Orpheum circuit that was to the Western United States what Keith and Albee’s was to the East: A booking circuit that set the bill for nearly all of the top Vaudeville venues from Chicago to the Pacific. Beck was impressed, especially with Houdini’s handcuff tricks, and he and Bess had also performed their metamorphosis act where she begins in a box and then magically, they switch places. It had been part of their routine for several years.

Beck’s thinking is that, okay, you can focus on basically escape tricks. That’s essentially what he developed on the Orpheum circuit. So extends a tryout and then obviously, the rest, as the clich goes, is history. Houdini clearly had that combination of ability and charisma that left audiences enthralled as well as a genius for publicity. But talent and magnetism aside, it’s probably safe to say that if not for that encounter with Beck, a person uniquely positioned to open the gates to Orpheum’s bureaucratic kingdom, we wouldn’t be here today talking about him. We just, you know, probably would not have even known of him. In a brilliant essay on Houdini, and a larger book about changing conceptions of manhood at the turn of the century, the cultural historian John Kasson argues that to truly understand Houdini’s appeal, you have to place him in the context of a newly urbanized way of life that posed distinct challenges to traditional conceptions of masculine independence and personal agency. “At a time when new technologies seemed imbued with magic,” Kasson writes, “Houdini affirmed the presence “of magic within the body, “and the spirit of the individual man. “In an age of bewildering obstacles “and intimidating authorities, “he dramatized the ability of a lone figure “to triumph over the most formidable restraints, “and the most implacable foes, “and against the most impossible odds,” end quote. It mattered greatly that when Houdini was suspended in midair, upside down and handcuffed, that he was dangling from skyscrapers, or the cranes that built skyscrapers.

And just as significant was the fact that he made his escapes not only from traditional symbols of confinement, a coffin, or a prison cell, but also from things like mailbags, envelopes, snow tire chains, and even a massive sausage casing. [audience laughing] “Whatever their guise,” Kasson writes, “all were converted into the menacing, phantasmagoric “materials of a nightmare of modern life,” end quote. I have to admit that Kasson’s book, which is an incredible read, it’s one of three chapters, the other two are about the strongman Eugen Sandow, and then Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs, that this book completely shaped my thinking about Houdini. But I think there’s something that we can add to his argument, which is that even in a highly rationalized world, Houdini, after his big breakthrough in 1899, lived an especially bureaucratized existence. Working in the tightly organized confines of vaudeville, it’s easy to forget that the prison escapes, the bridge jumps, the skyscraper dangles that he’s probably most known for today, were done in the service of drumming up publicity for his vaudeville act later that day. He spent his day dealing with the press. And between engagements, spent a lot of time wiling away his time on trains, waiting in railway stations, and so on. That was the fate of someone who spent their life on the road. And celebrities, by necessity, lived in transit. From this perspective, the whole world could start to look something like a railway time table.

So it wasn’t just the print culture of publicity, you know, one thing I’m kind of hoping to argue here, that shaped modern celebrity. It was also the more mundane print culture of paperwork that shaped its contours, and the meanings of celebrity as well. So moving ahead, at the same time that Houdini is enjoying his incredible fame and popularity, you’re also getting the emergence of other stars, whose fame is much more rooted in media artifacts. And so just very quickly, I want to touch on two. One would be Enrico Caruso. Caruso was the first kind of you know, very legit musical figure to agree to make recordings. At the time, he was not as famous as he would become. He was kind of seen as sort of like the top up-and-coming opera singer. And then he emerged obviously as this you know, enormous figure. But, throughout the early 20th century, one of the things that Victor Red Seal, which is the label he was assigned to, which did just an enormous amount of advertising during this era.

Victor was one of the largest advertisers for the first couple decades of the 20th century. One of the things they do a lot, the historian David Suisman points out in his book about the early recording industry, is they try to convince people that the record and the recorded voice, and the figure of Caruso, the actual flesh and blood figure of Caruso, are the same thing. That there’s really no difference. And of course, part of that is obviously self-interest. They’re trying to get across the idea that it’s just as good to have this record as it is to see Caruso in performance. But there’s also some truth to it in the sense that this is an era where you didn’t have electrical microphones. The grooves that were cut into that master recording were created through the force of Caruso’s lungs. So there’s a remnant in this sense of Caruso in that record. Excuse me. And so, the recording in the sense, is a piece of Caruso.

Obviously, something else that’s happening during this period is the emergence of film and the film industry. There is huge amounts of overlap and is very complex between vaudeville, the theater, and film early on. But one thing that begins to happen around 1910, 1911, and then play out very quickly, is that you begin to see some of the studios identify who the players are in their films. I think it’s fairly well-known that up until about that point, there were no credits. And it was very hard to know who any of the actresses and actors were. One of the first person, both of the actresses that tend to get pointed to as the kind of first true movie stars were named Florence, Florence Lawrence and then there was Florence Turner. Turner in 1910, started to appear at events, she was known as the Vitagraph girl, the Vitagraph girl. And began appearing at events to promote a song called “The Vitagraph Girl” that was about her. Also around this time, some of the studios begin doing things like producing posters and placards that sort of bear the images of the entire group of players, identify them by name. People are beginning to create postcards and things that folks can collect and have the players’ names on them.

Folks will sometimes, especially film historians, will sometimes point to somebody like Florence Turner as really among the first movie stars because she was somebody who became famous only because of being in films. Some of the folks who were– it didn’t have anything to do with her renown from some other field that then was kind of imported into film. She became known based off of fans’ enthusiasm about other films that they had seen her in. And then could begin to identify her by name. But then it all plays out very quickly where there’s many stars that are attracting a lot of attention. And again, you still have this dynamic of print being created, the fan magazines, the gossip columns, sheet music. But you don’t have that live performance variety anymore. It’s not necessary for Turner to travel around and to live this sort of life on the road in the same way that it was for performers and celebrities for nearly 100 years by that point. Thank you.

– Audience Member: Question. So I wanted to ask you about, Houdini’s, you know, implementing all this culture, the celebrity and stuff, and how he would go to the newspapers and the local media, to try and drum up business. But a lot of other people were doing that as well too. What is it about Houdini that we’re still talking about him? If you do a Google alert of him, it’ll probably pop up half a dozen times. A dog escaping, so they call it a Houdini, or somebody getting out of something, they call it a Houdini. I’m just curious as to what you think, why, what made him stand apart of everybody else, and why are we still talking about him?

– Yeah, that’s a great question. And I think a lot of it has to do with just the feats that he pulled off. And how, one, how death-defying they were. And one of the, and I didn’t sort of make the connection there I guess, explicit in the talk. But Sam Patch came to mind, because he’s doing something very similar. It’s the body at extreme risk.

And he doesn’t survive many of those, but Houdini did. So there’s something about that. And then, you know, he clearly did, like you said, he had a genius for working the press, for attracting attention. And in a way, where it’s almost hard to imagine that whatever he was promoting could have possibly been better than the promotional event. He’s getting nailed into a crate and then dropped into a river to promote a stage show. And so how could the stage, so. I think It also has something to do with that, right? With what he was willing to do, you know, at these promotional events. And then I think Kasson’s point, I mean Kasson is, I guess really trying to explain why he had so much resonance at the time, and doesn’t really delve a whole lot into why we’re still so interested in him. Yeah, you know. I don’t know if I can really say more than that.

But I do think it has to do with just the, kind of head-spinning nature of the things that he was doing.

– Audience Member: What was his spirituality as such, in terms of religion? Do we know anything about that?

– So, his father was a rabbi. And

– Oh really?

– Yeah. And, had come to Appleton, you know, because– to preside, but then lost that job apparently. Then you know, his life was never really the same after that. He tried to become a rabbi in Milwaukee. That didn’t really come together, and then they ended up going to New York. As far as I know, Erik Weisz, he was not necessarily a. . .

I don’t know what the right term would be. Actively involved in, his own sort of religious life. But he never sort of tried to distance himself. Other than the fact that he took on the stage name Harry Houdini, which is a much more ambiguous sort of name. But he never. . . I think he always considered himself Jewish, you know, throughout his life. And you can see where. .

. I guess this kind of gets at the other part of your question, where he had this very public feud with a prominent spiritualist kind of towards the end of his life. There was a woman named Margery who was this kind of Beacon Hill, Boston figure, who was the kind of most celebrated spiritualist of the 1920s, and attracted a lot of attention. And Houdini and several other folks kind of really set out to try to expose her as a fraud. And they would make anti-Semitic remarks about him. And it was kind of a very ugly episode. But I think, you know your question, it makes me think. And I think another thing that kind of keeps our interest is the very strange events of his death. He’s somewhat randomly sucker punched by this college kid in Toronto, or in Montreal, and dies from that. This incredible specimen of a human being, just all muscle, is punched a couple times in the stomach and causes the appendicitis that kills him.

I mean, the events surrounding his death are strange. And then also, he did have this kind of interest in the afterlife, where he had this very close relationship with his mother. And when she passed he, you know, I think repeatedly attempted to contact her through mediums. And then kind of had this sort of, almost about-face where then he kind of launched this crusade to sort of really show a lot of these mediums as frauds. And I think part of what, a big part of what upset him about this was that many of these folks seemed to be capitalizing on the grief surrounding the death of soldiers in World War I.

– Audience Member: I was just gonna ask, and this kind of goes to your question too. One of the things we talk about in the exhibit in terms of Houdini really being considered the first major superstar. And one of the things we talk about is he’s someone who really started out in those lower echelons of entertainment, as they would be considered, in the dime museums, the medicine shows, circus, vaudeville, even though that certainly led to huge entertainers. But, that he was someone who, you know, if you will, broke that glass ceiling of becoming not just of great interest to the middle class, but to the upper class, as well. And gained this incredible notoriety and became friends with politicians and celebrities.

So he did all of that while also maintaining this resonance and connection for immigrant masses who really saw themselves in him. In his literal escapes, and also metaphorically as a symbol for someone who broke the shackles of the restrictions, the challenges of being an immigrant and all that encompasses. I’m just wondering if there are other celebrities. Is he kind of unique in terms of his trajectory from starting out so low and rising to the heights that he did?

– Yeah, that’s a great question. Somebody who had that kind of cross-class appeal, but doesn’t necessarily have the you know, rags-to-riches sort of story. I mean, Caruso kind of comes to mind because he was loved by sort of upper class lovers of classical, continental music. But then at the same time, was beloved by many working class immigrants, because this is the music of Italy, it’s the music of their homeland. There’s a few other folks who really kind of transcend those class boundaries. But I don’t know if they also have that combination of the biography, the personal story of quite possibly having never been discovered. Or never had that big break.

There’s a really good book about the sociology of celebrity that came out in the 1990s by a sociologist named Joshua Gamson. And he points to basically a couple of master narratives of celebrity, and one of them is that, you know, story of the big break, right. Of, and he kind of contrasts that with the story of destiny. It just sort of had to happen, because this person’s charisma was so great, their talent was so great that how could they not be discovered? But then you also have this very similar story that’s, okay you have this person who’s got all this incredible ability. It still took that one lucky break to break through. Then of course, that there is many people that are like that that never had that one little instance. But it’s a story that we like to tell about celebrity, because it kind of, is a way about talking about fate. It’s a way of talking about why some folks succeed and others don’t, even though they have what it would seem to take to succeed. [audience applauding]