The Jewish 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Jews of All Time (45 page)

Harry Houdini, death-defying “Self-Liberator,” legendary “Maker of Miracles,” “World’s Champion Gaol Breaker and King of Locks,” was the greatest showman in a golden age of showmen, a hugely popular entertainer, a pioneer of mass entertainment and the artful use of self-promotion. Like P.T. Barnum, John L. Sullivan, Enrico Caruso, and Sarah Bernhardt in their fields, Houdini was the undisputed and unique master of his craft, an awe inspiring escape artist, a celebrity and acclaimed hero wherever he journeyed.

A rabbi’s son, Houdini was born in Pest, across the river from Buda in Hungary’s capital. He shared a remarkable birth year with Winston Churchill, Arnold Schoenberg, Chaim Weizmann, Charles Ives, Herbert Hoover, Somerset Maugham, Guglielmo Marconi, Gertrude Stein, and Robert Frost. Houdini’s real name was Erik Weisz, which he changed to Ehrich Weiss after the family emigrated to Wisconsin (his father had answered an advertisement—a small town called Appleton needed a rabbi).

While other boys were playing catch or catching frogs, young Ehrich was escaping from locks or practicing dangerous stunts on his backyard trapeze bar set. He was fascinated with magicians and the wandering circus acts that visited the town. Ehrich studied magic from books and pamphlets and emulated the great nineteenth-century illusionist Robert Houdin, a French master famous as an ambassador, author, and conjuror of eternal secrets and mysteries.

Rabbi Weiss was a harsh, disagreeable man who lost his job in Appleton after alienating his tiny congregation. The family moved to Milwaukee to a desperate poverty. Ehrich ran away from home when he was twelve to seek his fortune as a performer. Rejecting his natural father, he became the son of Houdin, adding an
i
and transforming himself, as if by magic, into Houdini. First with a friend and then later with his brother Theo (dubbed “Dash”), the Brothers Houdini worked at fairs, in dime museums, medicine shows, morality plays, and on boardwalks.

In the 1890s he met his bride, Bess, while appearing in Coney Island. He split with Dash (who prospered, but always in his brother’s shadow, as “Hardeen”) and formed an act with his wife as The Houdinis. From an older performer they purchased a rigged trunk out of which husband and wife would alternatively disappear and reappear, hands free or shackled, in magical “Metamorphosis.”

Wherever they played, Houdini studied with locksmiths, determined to learn every combination and mechanical construction. By giving locks directed blows, hiding picklocks in his body, contorting his body into awful positions, or dislocating his unusually loose joints, Houdini learned how to free himself from every handcuff or straitjacket.

He became a headliner by challenging the authorities in every town on the vaudeville circuit. Houdini promised to pay a large sum to anyone who could lock him up—and hold him captive. At the turn of the century he traveled to Europe, where neither Scotland Yard, the Polizei of Prussia and Bavaria, nor the secret police of Tsar Nicholas could hold the “Handcuff King.” Every time they tried, he escaped. His fame first grew slowly, then sensationally. After being thrown manacled in a crate into the East River, Houdini rose up out of the waters free to perform (to sold-out audiences) at Hammerstein’s Roof Garden.

When his act became too well-known, he developed new, sensational routines to thrill his fans, like the Milk Can and Chinese Water Torture Cell (placed upside down, left to drown, able only through what seemed superhuman exertion to release himself from sure death). He toured throughout Europe, Canada, and the United States, gathering immense public attention, the most famous performer in the world.

The death of his mother in 1913 threw him into a profound depression. Houdini became obsessed with conquering death. He was buried alive, digging his way up out of the smothering earth. Seeking to speak with his deceased mother, Houdini sought the company of eminent spiritualists, one of them Sherlock Holmes’s creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. At the same time Houdini led a crusade against charlatans trafficking in the sorrows of the bereaved with fake séances and bogus raisings of the dead.

After patriotic duty entertaining the troops during the First World War, a brief silent movie career and new acts (such as The Disappearing Elephant) could not rekindle the kind of widespread adulation he had developed earlier. When he died in 1926 from peritonitis caused by a blow to the stomach from a misguided fan, Houdini’s star had already been eclipsed by film stars Charlie Chaplin, Rudolph Valentino, and Douglas Fairbanks, in an era with little patience for the escape artist’s complex and slow-moving acts. Houdini had left Bess and certain friends coded messages he promised to utter to them from the afterlife. No supernatural sightings, however, were ever made of Harry Houdini, ghost.

Apart from a continued importance to magicians and escape artists, Houdini was the first great popular superstar to use the media to gain the broadest possible acceptance. Through his manipulation of the press, giving the public increasingly sensational performances, and wrapping it all up in a pseudo artistry, Houdini created mass entertainment. What he did, the astounding escapes from icy rivers, formidable jails, or locked containers, remains remarkable. How he commanded the public’s attention, locking the masses in his powerful vise, releasing his audiences only at the last possible moment when death seemed ready to pounce, was extraordinary and appeared inhuman. That an immigrant boy, an itinerant rabbi’s son, was able to accomplish by his wits and superlative athletic skills what Harry Houdini did, is both an American success story and a Jewish fairy tale. Houdini symbolized his people’s unnatural ability to survive, even when faced with no way out.

E
dward L. Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud (the founder of psychoanalysis), is generally recognized as the father of public relations. Eager to differentiate his field from press agentry, Bernays had friend H. L. Mencken define “public relations” in a book on American language as “a vocation applied by a social scientist who advises a client or employer on the social attitudes and actions to take to win the support of the public upon whom the viability of the client or employer depends.” With pioneers such as Ivy Lee, Carl Byoir, and John Hill, Bernays helped mold contemporary opinion in the twentieth century, exercising a greater influence on culture than many of the politicians and corporations he represented.

Throughout his extraordinarily long career, Bernays sought to gain for the field of public relations the same professional attitude and ethical standards commonly assumed of attorneys or architects. Bernays wished to be known as a “counsel on public relations.” Such counsel was a professional adviser who out of a profound understanding of people’s motivations guided public opinion.

Edward Bernays was public relations counselor for, among many others, the Ballet Russe of Sergei Diaghilev, the Metropolitan Opera, Enrico Caruso, Procter and Gamble, President Calvin Coolidge (loosening up his image by inviting vaudeville stars to the White House), Henry Ford, Conde Nast Publications, David Sarnoff of NBC, William Paley of CBS, Mack Trucks (influencing the construction of the first interstate highways that united the country economically), United Fruit (bananas), America Tobacco, United Brewers Association (bringing beer out of the taverns into supermarkets and the home), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and Columbia University. Bernays’s activities for these organizations and individuals revolutionized the American way of life and mass communications. Bernays also lived to see (and outlived) totalitarian regimes such as Dr. Joseph Goebbels’ Nazi propaganda machine steal many of his techniques of social persuasion for sinister purposes.

Bernays’s family tree was as impressive as the people he guided during his many years. His mother was Sigmund Freud’s sister, Anna (Freud) Bernays, his first cousin, Sigmund’s daughter, the great child psychologist Anna Freud, and his daughter Anne Bernays, a marvelous novelist and wife of Justin Kaplan, Pulitzer Prize-winning author (of most notably a unique biography of Walt Whitman).

Born in the Vienna of his uncle Sigmund, Edward was raised in New York City from the age of one. His father .was a prosperous grain merchant. Edward attended public school and Cornell University’s College of Agriculture (perhaps to please his father).

He realized early that what he did best was to influence people. Of all the people in this book about influence, Bernays was the only one to earn a living from his ability to make people react. He was of course not the most influential Jew of all time, but he was perhaps the most successful Jewish person in modern times whose profession was engineered and intended to influence others.

His first try at public relations was assisting an actor produce a play about sexually transmitted disease, surely then prohibited subject matter. Bernays was able to make the play a sell-out by promising participating civic leaders that their attendance and sponsorship (which drew crowds) would support needed sex education.

During the First World War, Bernays publicized theatrical events (mostly ballet and opera). Volunteering to aid the American war effort, he joined President Wilson’s Office of War Information. During the Paris peace conference that followed the Armistice, Bernays composed propaganda extolling the virtues of America’s role in “the war to end all wars.”

With his wife-to-be, Doris Fleischman, Bernays founded his own office of what he first called “publicity direction” and then later “public relations counsel.” Always basing his advice on sound, detailed research, Bernays’s practice flourished. His most famous early campaigns were on behalf of a hairnet manufacturer, Venida, and P&G’s Ivory soap. Bernays used public opinions of, for example, safety (working women in factories with long hair constrained in hairnets were less likely to get hurt than others who exposed their bobbed haircuts to machinery) or education (a national competition for kids sculpting figures out of Ivory soap established the product as an American staple).

Bernays became a national figure in 1929 when he orchestrated the fiftieth anniversary of Thomas Edison’s inventing electric light. Sponsored by Henry Ford in Dearborn, Michigan, in attendance were the elderly genius inventor himself as well as President Hoover, Madame Marie Curie, and John D. Rockefeller.

Bernays’s book
Crystalizing Public Opinion,
published in 1923, was the first and most influential book in the history of public relations. In the same year Bernays became the first person to teach a course in his field, lecturing at New York University.

F
or many Jews with talent in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, pursuing a life in music was the only way to escape the ghetto. Leopold Auer, the great violinist and greater teacher of the violin, was a beacon of hope and pride for little Jewish boys with the last names of Elman, Zimbalist, Heifetz, and Milstein and for many others desiring to escape a life of persecution. Auer established the line of violinists who have dominated string playing for over one hundred years. More than any other instrumentalist in history, Auer set standards of interpretation and technique which continue today to dominate music making and pedagogy.

Auer also represents the incredible ascendancy of Jewish instrumentalists from Felix Mendelssohn, Joseph Joachim, and Anton Rubinstein during the nineteenth century through Josef Hofmann, Joseph Lhevinne, Leopold Godowsky, Wanda Landowska, and Artur Schnabel in the early part of the twentieth, into more recent times with Artur Rubinstein, Joseph Szigeti, Rudolf Serkin, Vladimir Horowitz, Benny Goodman, Emanuel Feuermann, David Oistrakh, Yehudi Menuhin, Isaac Stern, Mstislav Rostropovich, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Itzhak Perlman, and Murray Perahia.

Auer was born in Hungary, the son of a housepainter. He showed an early aptitude for music, but did not receive formal training on the violin at the Budapest Conservatory until he was eight. Studies followed in Vienna and then with Joseph Joachim in Hanover. Joachim, a Jew and childhood friend of the great German composer Johannes Brahms, was in many ways a precursor of Auer. Like Auer, he collaborated with and inspired well-known composers to create important orchestral and chamber works. He also taught prominent musicians who passed on to further generations his pure, classical interpretive approach.