Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Dorothy Young, Houdini’s Stage Assistant, Is Dead at 103

Dorothy Young, Houdini's last on-stage assistant, with the magician in 1926 as the “Radio Girl of 1950."
Credit...Courtesy of Dorothy Young's family

From one side of the stage would glide Bess Houdini, wife of the master magician and escape artist, draped in a billowing gown like Marie Antoinette. From the other side would prance Dorothy Young, dressed as a courtly boy page in ruffled silk.

At center stage, they would swirl into a minuet, then draw back the curtain as Houdini — to the triumphal tones of “Pomp and Circumstance” — stepped forward in tails to begin his flash-magic routine of drawn scarves and flapping birds.

That was the standard opening of Houdini’s shows from 1925 through most of 1926, the time that Miss Young shared the stage with the great illusionist.

Harry Houdini died on Halloween in 1926; his wife died in 1943. But Dorothy Young would live for decades, the last surviving stage assistant in those spectacles. She died on Sunday at 103 at a retirement home in Tinton Falls, N.J., her granddaughter Barbara Price said.

For all those years, Miss Young kept her vow to never reveal how Houdini mystified audiences. “I was sworn to secrecy, never to divulge any of Houdini’s secrets,” she said in a 1999 interview for a PBS “American Experience” documentary about Houdini.

She did describe how, after changing costumes, she reappeared on stage as the “Radio Girl of 1950,” a projection of what that medium might be like 25 years in the future.

Atop a table would be a big, boxy ersatz radio that Houdini would fling open — front, back and top — to show that it was empty, apparently.

“Then,” Miss Young recalled, “he would close the radio and say, ‘Now we’ll tune in on KDKA Pittsburgh’ ” — or whatever local station they were near — followed by an announcer saying, “Miss Dorothy Young doing the Charleston!”

“That was my cue for my one foot to pop out of the radio, then the other one,” she said. “I kicked my feet together and jumped up and did a curtsy. And then Houdini would take me by the waist and lift me down, and I would go into a Charleston.”

There were other revealing moments. “She was the slave girl,” said Dick Brookz, curator of the Harry Houdini Museum in Scranton, Pa.. Except for a pole, the stage would be empty. Miss Young would be brought out in a skimpy burlap costume. Saying she had been “naughty,” Houdini would tie her to the pole, from feet to throat.

“Houdini would say, ‘I’m going to put her in the dark,’ ” Mr. Brookz said. A curtain would rise, then fall, “and instantly she came out in a gorgeous butterfly costume with wings that extended from each hand and start doing ballet turns.”

Born on May 3, 1907, in Otisville, N.Y., Dorothy Young was the daughter of a Methodist minister, Robert Young, and Lena Caldwell Young, a church organist. It took some convincing for her parents to allow Dorothy to sign a contract with Houdini after she won an audition in Manhattan in early 1925. She was 17.

Though she was with the Houdini tour for only a little more than a year, Miss Young gained notice. Soon after, her dancing skills were paired with those of Gilbert Kiamie, the son of a silk lingerie magnate. As Dorothy and Gilbert, they toured the country and became known for their own Latin dance, the “rumbalero.” She also danced in several movies, among them the Fred Astaire musical comedy “Flying Down to Rio” (1933).

Miss Young’s first marriage, to Robert Perkins, ended in divorce. She married Mr. Kiamie in 1945; he died in 1992. Besides her granddaughter, she is survived by a son, Robert Jr., two other grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren. Though she took her husbands’ names in marriage, she preferred to be known professionally as Dorothy Young.

In 2003, with a considerable inheritance from Mr. Kiamie, Miss Young was able to donate more than $10 million to the creation of the Dorothy Young Center for the Arts at Drew University in Madison, N.J.

In her later years, Miss Young sometimes attended “séances” organized by magicians and Houdini aficionados to celebrate and, perhaps, hear from the master. In November 2006, at a gathering in Manhattan, she sat in one of the 12 occupied chairs on the stage. The 13th chair remained empty.

Miss Young had talked with Houdini about returning from the dead, she said, while he was alive. He told me, ‘It’s humanly impossible, but I’ll be there in spirit,’ ” she said. “That’s firsthand.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 26 of the New York edition with the headline: Dorothy Young, 103, Assistant Who Kept Houdini’s Secrets. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT