Stage frights

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This article was published 22/06/2019 (2353 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As last words go, they were eerily prophetic.

“If I can open it up, then it will be magic,” Indian magician Chanchal Lahiri told a crowd of onlookers last Sunday, “but if I can’t, it will be tragic.”

And tragic is the best word to describe what happened moments later after Lahiri — better known by his stage name “Jadugar Mandrake” (“Wizard Mandrake”) — was lowered by winch into the Hooghly River in Kolkata, India.

The 40-year-old magician/escape artist, his legs and arms tightly bound with ropes and chains, was reportedly trying to replicate a 1912 stunt in which the legendary Harry Houdini escaped from a crate lowered into the East River in New York.

He was expected to free himself within seconds and swim to the surface as he had done many times before, but authorities, spectators and his family launched a frantic search when he failed to reappear.

Syed Waquar Raza, deputy commissioner at the Port Division of the Kolkata police, told CNN they had found the magician’s body on Monday evening around two kilometres from the site of the incident.

Prior to the stunt, Lahiri boasted he had pulled off a similar escape at the same location 21 years earlier. “I was inside a bulletproof glass box tied with chain and locks and dropped down from Howrah Bridge,” he said. “Then I came out within 29 seconds.”

Sadly, it’s far from the first time a daredevil trick has gone horribly wrong, as we see from today’s spine-tingling list of Five Famous Magicians Who Died Performing Deadly Illusions:

5) The mangled magician: “Amazing Joe” Burrus

The deadly illusion: The Buried Alive Escape

The last act: It was the lifelong dream of American magician Joseph W. Burrus to be even greater than his idol, the legendary illusionist and escape artist Harry Houdini. It ended up costing him his life. On Halloween night, 1990, the 64th anniversary of Houdini’s death, the 32-year-old magician attempted to top his idol by having himself buried inside a plastic-and-glass coffin.

“I consider myself a master of illusion and escape artist,” Burrus told reporters before the stunt. “I believe I’m the next Houdini and greater.” Houdini’s first attempt at the buried-alive stunt in 1915 almost proved lethal — he dug himself out of a six-foot pit and, when his hand broke the surface, fell unconscious and had to be pulled from the grave.

In 1990, no one was overly worried, as Burrus had successfully performed the escape-from-a-buried-casket stunt the previous year in Oregon. At that time, however, he had been buried only under dirt. On Halloween 1990, at Blackbeard’s Family Fun Center in Fresno, Calif., he added cement to the mix and apparently didn’t factor in the extra weight — about the same as an African male elephant. On this night, wearing a white tuxedo, Burrus was handcuffed, wrapped in chains, locked inside a see-through coffin and then lowered into a seven-foot-deep hole with horrified trick-or-treaters looking on.

A recovering drug addict, he was staging the stunt to benefit the Third Floor drug recovery clinic. After one false start — the chain around his neck was too tight — the magician made a second attempt. “The crews put another three feet of dirt into the hole and then began covering that with three feet of cement,” the Los Angeles Times reported. “As soon as we finished and the truck pulled away, the whole thing dropped,” witness Sean Henderson said. “The… cement busted the coffin. It buried him alive.” The coffin collapsed under an estimated nine tons of cement and dirt. Like his hero, he died on Halloween night.

 

4) The mangled magician: Genesta

The deadly illusion: The Milk Can Escape

The last act: Like Lahiri and Burrus, Royden Joseph Gilbert Raison de la Genesta, professionally known simply as Genesta, lost his life trying to emulate the great Houdini.

In 1908, Houdini unveiled his Milk Can Escape, in which he was stuffed into an oversized container full of water, locked in and given only moments to escape before drowning. As part of the effect, he invited members of the audience to hold their breath along with him while he was inside the can.

The oft-imitated act became one of his signature escapes, and was advertised with dramatic posters proclaiming: “Failure Means A Drowning Death.” In tribute to Houdini, Genesta had executed the escape successfully many times before, but a performance in 1930 would prove to be his last. “The outside of his milk can had six locks and a large metal cover, but a secret hatch automatically opened the whole apparatus when you pushed on it from the inside.

Unbeknownst to anyone, the hatch had been dented earlier that day when the milk can was being unloaded, preventing the apparatus from working properly,” according to the website howstuffworks.com. “Genesta didn’t notice the dent before his performance, so he climbed into the can, and his assistants filled it up with water, as usual. They locked him in and gave the six keys to six different audience members.

Distributing the keys this way unfortunately meant that when his assistants realized that something was actually wrong, chaos broke out in the audience. Genesta was banging frantically on the side of the can, and everyone was scrambling to help — including Genesta’s wife, who was in the audience.” Genesta was unconscious when he was finally pulled from the can by assistants and rushed to hospital. He died in hospital that same evening, but only after telling the doctor that, in more than 10 years of performing the trick, he had never failed before.

 

3) The mangled magician: Chung Ling Soo

The deadly illusion: The Bullet Catch

The last act: Born in New York, in 1861, his real name was William Ellsworth Campbell Robinson, but that moniker apparently lacked the necessary hocus-pocus for a life as a stage magician. Which is why this turn-of-the-century vaudeville veteran adopted an assortment of stage names, most famously Chung Ling Soo, which was an alias inspired by his rival, the famous Chinese conjurer Ching Ling Foo.

In his Chung Ling Soo persona, Robinson performed in yellow face, and traded on racist notions of Oriental mysticism. He scrupulously maintained his image as a Chinese man who never spoke onstage, claiming he spoke no English and relied on interpreters when interviewed by journalists. One of the highest-paid performers of the day, he became famous for his bullet-catching trick, which he called “Condemned To Death By The Boxers,” a nod to China’s Boxer Rebellion.

In that trick, two assistants fired guns at him, and he caught the bullets. The guns had two barrels — one took the real bullet, which the magician displayed for the audience, while the other held a blank. It’s an extremely hazardous illusion, with at least a dozen magicians perishing onstage since its introduction in the late 1500s. On March 23, 1918, Chung Ling Soo performed the illusion one last time in London. Tragically, the magician did not routinely clean the weapons, which allowed accumulated gunpowder to explode in one gun’s chamber, accidentally firing a real bullet in the second chamber into his chest.

On the fateful night, when the bullet pierced his lung, he collapsed and, for the first time in his Chinese persona, spoke English onstage, calling out: “Oh my God! Something’s happened! Lower the curtain!” Notes mentalfloss.com: “He died the next day. At first, foul play was suspected, as there had been a feud between Chung and Ching, the magician from whom he stole his name. But after Chung’s widow explained the mechanics of the trick at an inquest, the death was ruled accidental.”

 

2) The mangled magician: Karr the Mysterious

The deadly illusion: The Speeding Car Escape

The last act: As any magician worth his wand will tell you, it’s all about the timing, especially when it involves a split-second daredevil escape. Professionally known as “Karr the Mysterious” or “Karr the Magician,” Charles Rowan became famous as a South African escape artist and magician. A lot of his tricks involved escaping from straitjackets and jumping into piles of broken glass. Say what you will, this performer understood the importance of melodrama.

In 1930, according to listverse.com, Rowan (sometimes spelled Rowen) was performing his signature stunt before a large family-style crowd in Springfontein, Orange Free State, South Africa. It was a daredevil escape he had done successfully many times before — allowing himself to be secured in a straitjacket while an assistant in a speeding car barrelled towards him. He would typically escape at the last second to the crowd’s amazement.

“The car approached from (180 metres) away, accelerating to a speed of 72 kilometres per hour. If you do the math, that would give Karr about 10-15 seconds (depending on how long it would take the driver to get up to that speed) to get out of the straitjacket and get out of the way of the car,” listverse.com noted.

On this day, as he routinely did, Rowan wrote a letter of exoneration for his assistant in case of accidental death. This time, the assistant needed it, because the magician’s timing was off, a mistake that proved instantly deadly. He is largely forgotten by magic history, but a Reuters report of his death stated: “A ghastly death befell a travelling magician named Karr here this afternoon, when his oft-repeated stunt of allowing himself to be strapped in a straitjacket and charged by a motorcar failed… a large crowd, including numerous small children… saw a car dash into Karr and kill him… he was struck by the right wheel, which almost severed one of his legs.”

 

1) The mangled magician: The Great Lafayette

The deadly illusion: The Lion’s Bride

The last act: Born in 1871 in Munich, Sigmund Neuberger led a bizarre life and his death was equally odd. His family emigrated to America, where he toured the vaudeville circuit as a marksman, before switching to magic. He emerged in 1900s London, reincarnated as The Great Lafayette, one of the highest-paid performers of the day. The love of his life was a cross-bred terrier pup named “Beauty,” given to him as a gift by the great Houdini.

“The dog slept on velvet cushions, dined at the table with Lafayette, had a collar of pure gold studded with diamonds. The radiator ornament on Lafayette’s limousine was a metal statuette of the dog,” according to the Scotsman newspaper. On May 1, 1911, the magician began a two-week stint in Edinburgh at the Empire Theatre. Four days later, Beauty died of a stroke. Inconsolable, Lafayette got permission for the dog to be buried in a local cemetery, provided he agreed to be buried in the same place. He got his wish.

On May 9, according to the Scotsman, 3,000 spectators packed the theatre for an evening performance, the finale of which was Lafayette’s signature illusion, The Lion’s Bride. “An African lion paced restlessly in a cage while fire-eaters, jugglers and contortionists performed. A young woman in Oriental dress walked slowly onstage and entered the cage. When she was inside, the lion roared and reared up ready to pounce. The animal skin was then suddenly ripped away to reveal The Great Lafayette who had mysteriously changed places with the lion,” the paper noted. On this night, as Lafayette took his bow, a lamp fell among the scenery, which instantly caught fire. “The audience, now accustomed to unusual effects, were slow to recognize the danger. Only when the fire curtain was rapidly lowered did they hurry to the exits. By this time the stage was an inferno.

It took three hours to bring the fire under control, and 11 people died,” the Scotsman reported. Lafayette was last seen onstage trying to rescue his black stallion, Arizona. Three days later, his remains were found in the rubble. A crowd estimated at 250,000 watched his ashes trooped through the streets before being laid to rest at Piershill Cemetery beside his beloved pet.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca