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| Gary Gilmore and his grandmother, "Baby Fay" |
The story unfolded and came to a climax just like one of David Roth’s beautiful, elegant coin routines.
The story began for both of us in 1976. Roth was becoming a hit as one of the world’s finest magicians. I was also doing magic, but my main gig was writing and producing news broadcasts for CBS.
That year I wrote one of my best headlines ever: “The Utah Supreme Court has ruled that if Gary Gilmore wants to be shot by a firing squad, they won’t stand in his way.”
Gilmore, you may recall, was a convicted murderer who was the first American to be executed in a decade. He received the very death penalty he had demanded - a firing squad.
Now, exactly 40 years later, David Roth is considered the greatest coin magician who ever lived. And I am fully absorbed with Houdini, in the forthcoming historical novel The Secret Notebooks of Harry Houdini, and on this blog.
So you could have knocked me over with a paper flower when Roth tells me that Gary Gilmore appears to be Harry Houdini’s illegitimate grandson!
Roth heard it from people in a position to know. Gilmore’s grandmother had been a vaudeville psychic known as Baby Fay La Foe. All her life, she told her family that her son Frank Gilmore’s REAL father had been a famous magician whose real name was Weiss. The family legend says it happened in 1893, when young Houdini was playing the World’s Fair in Chicago. He was not yet married to Bess.
According to Baby Fay, Houdini sent her checks every month to pay for Frank’s upkeep. After Frank’s son Gary was born, the family used to argue about how small those checks had been, coming from a man who ultimately became so wealthy.
This odd bit of Houdiniana got picked up by Norman Mailer, who wrote a book about Gilmore called The Executioner’s Song. It won the Pulitzer Prize.
Norman Mailer actually played Houdini in a film based on Gilmore’s life, made by the artist Matthew Barney. Start at 1:06:37 to watch two minutes of a scene between Houdini and Baby Fay:
Matthew Barney spoke of Gary Gilmore and Houdini as having an artistic temperament in common. Firing squad or buried alive, they both chose to look at death up close:
“…[T]his idea of Houdini having himself chained and locked and blindfolded and thrown in a box …. [T]his is the procedure to make a … creative gesture. There’s a brutality in there that appeals to me in the same way. There’s a brutality and a physicality… that combination of accuracy and speed and violence.”
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ReplyDeleteWait a minute--Baby Fay was Gilmore's grandmother--not mother as captioned in the above photo.
ReplyDeleteThank you, vigilant sir! Corrected.
DeleteYou're welcome my friend. I wouldn't mind looking at photos of Frank Gilmore to see if there are any features that match Harry.
DeleteI have a clipping about this from an old National Enquirer. On this one, I'm willing to believe Wikipedia (Gary Gilmore page):
ReplyDelete"The theme of illegitimacy, real or imagined, was common in the Gilmore family. Frank's mother Fay Gilmore once told Bessie that Frank's father was a famous magician who had passed through Sacramento, where she was living. Bessie researched this at the library and concluded that Frank was the illegitimate son of Harry Houdini. In fact Houdini was only sixteen years old in 1890, the year of Frank Gilmore's birth, and did not begin his career as a magician until the following year. Mikal Gilmore, Gary's youngest brother, believes the story to be false, but has stated that both his father and mother believed it."
David Roth did not testify to its truth, though he said he heard it from those in a position to know. What struck us both was that Norman Mailer, a fine investigative journalist and an expert on Gilmore, devoted a chapter to it in his book and played the Houdini role in the Matthew Barney film.
DeleteWe should note for clarity that the "Bessie" referred to above is Gilmore's mother, not Houdini's wife.
DeleteYes, good clarification.
DeleteWhy not take DNA samples to know for sure if Frank Gilmore is the Bioligical son of Harry Houdini ?
ReplyDelete