by Hazel Flynn
But I wasn’t too worried since there were lots of other things in the air. I’d had a call from Chris O’Mara, an interesting guy with a great track record. He’d had a very impressive and successful nine-year run as program director and head of production at the Seven Network, then spent five years at a production company he co-founded, having hits with shows including Dancing with the Stars. Earlier in the year he’d left to pursue his own interests. He managed double Gold Logie winner Kate Ritchie and had said that he had plans to expand his management dealings, although he wasn’t going to become a talent manager as such.
One of the packages we had sent out in an attempt to find a manager had made its way to Chris. He told me he enjoyed what he’d seen and invited me to come and meet him in Sydney, which I did. I liked him a lot and respected him being upfront about the fact that while he thought my act was very cool he didn’t quite know what he could do with me just then. He did say he thought the right opening would come along sooner or later.
In the meantime I was making my own opportunities. I decided to mount a tribute show to Houdini on 31 October, the anniversary of his death (yes, as befits a legend, he died on Halloween). Unlike the upcoming centenary of his Queens Bridge stunt, 2009 wasn’t an anniversary of special significance (it marked eighty-three years since he’d done it), but the date was still a good hook and I had enough pieces that were variations on things Houdini had done to easily put together an entire show. I booked the 430-seater Karralyka Centre in Melbourne’s Ringwood, the theatre where I had showcased for the Victorian performing arts centre managers.
Then John, Adam and I went back to Las Vegas. We flew out in a state of great anticipation because we had an in with one of the biggest American agents in the business, whose clients included some of the all-time entertainment greats. I’d been lucky enough to meet him in 2004 when Adam and I went to Vegas after the cruise ship stint. He was encouraging and made a point of saying, ‘Keep me up to date with what you’re doing.’ I’d taken him at his word, sending regular updates with tour ticket sales and other measures of success, and partway through the year he’d contacted me to say, ‘Come on over and let’s talk.’
When a guy like that gives you an invitation like that you don’t think twice. I let him know that as soon as the Hale and Pace tour was done I’d be there. I felt that everything was about to crack wide open. Why else would he want to meet me if not to sign me? It’s not like he needed to have meetings to fill his day. Obviously I was a long way off a headlining spot but a daytime Vegas show would be amazing and I was ready to make the most of it.
I walked into his very impressive office feeling a million bucks. He was pleased to see me, knew what I’d been up to and had lots of positive comments for me. I told him about Anchored and he said it sounded great. I kept waiting for him to bring up the specifics of a management deal but he didn’t. We talked and I waited and waited and waited. What on earth was going on? His air of encouragement and positivity continued right through to the final handshake but the meeting ended with another, ‘Make sure you keep in touch.’ He was so powerful in the business I didn’t feel I could say what was running through my head which was, ‘If you don’t want to sign me what am I doing here???’ So I made myself smile and shake hands and then walked out in a state of shock. It would have been bad enough to have had my expectations dashed if I’d driven from the other side of town but to have come all the way from Australia and brought Adam and John halfway around the world for nothing was crushing.
I was in a daze as I returned to the hotel room the three of us were sharing. Along the way I questioned myself over and over about whether I had misunderstood what this mega-agent had said previously, or misinterpreted his message inviting me to come see him. I recounted everything I could remember of the conversation to my brothers, who were just as confused, disbelieving and deflated as I was. We hashed it over for hours but no matter how we dissected it, it was clear there was not going to be a knock on the door from a messenger with a contract.
‘Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.’ — Albert Einstein
The three of us fell into our usual ways of coping in these situations, with Adam on the gloomy side (‘Oh, man, I can’t believe it! Why did we waste all this time and money coming here?’), me relentlessly trying to convince myself and everyone else things were okay (‘No, no, no, it’s going to be cool, it’s going to be cool. Don’t worry about it, we’ll work something else out’) and John the realist in the middle, already drawing up lists of the builders and other contacts we could see in order to salvage something from the trip.
We made the best of things — it was, if nothing else, good to have a holiday together — then we came back home and put on the Houdini tribute show. I played to a full house and the response was great, which served as some kind of antidote to the disappointment of Vegas. I did straitjacket and Water Trap escapes, needle and razor-blade swallowing and, with Adam as my assistant, the famous Metamorphosis illusion where the magician climbs into a trunk which is locked by the assistant, who brings a cloth up to cover both themselves and the trunk. When the cloth drops a moment later it is the magician who is on the stage and the assistant who’s in the trunk. It was a wow in Houdini’s time and it’s every bit as effective today.
In November I turned twenty-seven and celebrated with a solo three-week long trip to the US. I went to Los Angeles and to Vegas to catch up with friends there, then treated myself to a week in New York. I spent time in the famed Tannen’s Magic shop. It’s the city’s oldest, in operation since 1925, and a physical connection to the greats of the twentieth century. I went to see magicians in action, including a really entertaining parlour show by ‘Steve Cohen the Millionaires’ Magician’ and the long-running ensemble show Monday Night Magic. The shows had an edgy, contemporary, very New York feel that was completely different from the glitz of Vegas.
There was just one more big experience left before I headed home: visiting Harry Houdini’s grave at Machpelah Cemetery in the borough of Queens. My hotel doorman found a cab driver who was willing to take me on the 35-minute trip, wait and bring me back again. I had the address but that was all. I’d assumed the place would be open to visitors, the way Australian cemeteries tend to be, but when we arrived the only way in was to jump the fence. The cabbie and I had been chatting on the way up and when I told him what I was going to do he decided to come with me.
I knew what the grave looked like from photographs in books, but I didn’t know where it was. At two hectares the cemetery isn’t huge and it didn’t take much wandering around in the sunshine before we found the grave. It’s part of a plot Houdini bought for his extended family. His parents and siblings are buried alongside him and he even went to the trouble of having his grandmother exhumed from her grave in Hungary and reburied there. Poignantly, the only one missing is his wife, Bess, even though her name (‘beloved wife Wilhelmina Beatrice’) is on his grave marker. In life they overcame religious differences but it divided them in death. Machpelah is a Jewish cemetery and although Houdini had wanted Bess with him, she is in a Catholic cemetery more than fifty kilometres away.
The Weiss plot is suitably impressive, with marker stones for the various family members protected by a curving wall with a built-in bench, a statue of a weeping woman and a handsome marble bust of the ultimate showman, identified by his stage name. There is also the seal of the Society of American Magicians, in recognition of his years as the organisation’s president. I sat for a while and paid my respects. I wasn’t overwhelmed in some corny daytime movie way but there was definitely something very special about having made this pilgrimage as so many magicians, including David Copperfield, had done before me. I felt part of a fellowship of those who love magic stretching back before Houdini and forward into the future.
Cosentino family collection
Back home in Australia I got my first call from the Australia’s Got Talent (AGT) production team. They’d seen me perfor
m the Water Trap escape on Kerri-Anne Kennerley’s show and wanted me to audition for their show. AGT had been on air for three seasons at that point. Red Symons was one of the judges and, to be honest, the whole thing reminded me of the ‘talent show’ segment he used to run on Hey Hey It’s Saturday. It seemed better suited to people used to performing in front of their bathroom mirrors than professional entertainers, but I kept those thoughts to myself as I declined.
There was one more overseas trip before the year’s end: we’d been booked to play in Hong Kong in December. It was another slow-burn result from one of the mail-outs we’d done, this time from an agency called Theatre Arts Export. Ben, who’d toured with us previously, joined Adam and me for the adventure.
The gig was in Cityplaza, a shopping centre, but not the kind we were used to playing. You can buy just about anything there including a grand piano, and go ice-skating year-round if you want to. We were to play three shows a day for the two weeks leading up to Christmas, and the act coming in after us was Cirque du Soleil. The stage was 12 by 10 metres: the size of a theatre stage. The backstage space was double that and included dressing rooms and storage for all our equipment. The audience was also huge: thousands of people came to every show. I focused on high visual impact, keeping the talking to a minimum. It went over brilliantly.
Adam, Ben and I had a great time together with plenty of time off to explore the city and for me to continue my Anchored training in a local public pool. We wrapped up on 23 December. Adam flew home for Christmas while Ben and I went on to nearby Macau. It was a famed casino city, often spoken of in the same breath as Vegas, and I wanted to scope out the possibilities. It turned out to be nothing like Vegas in terms of entertainment. I believe Macau has changed since, but at the time it struck me as a series of interchangeable casinos where there was nothing else to do but gamble or spend money in the cookie-cutter designer boutiques.
Pierre Baroni
My take on the place was definitely not helped by the fact that less than forty-eight hours after arriving I was struck down by what I initially thought was food poisoning but later suspected might have been a gastro bug picked up in the Hong Kong pool. I went from being the fittest I’d ever been to five days of vomiting broken up only by bouts of shivering in bed and showers where I was too weak to stand up. I lost five kilograms in less than a week and flew back to Australia feeling like death warmed up. Mum’s look when she saw me said it all, but with a week or so of her loving care I was well on my way back to health. I needed to be: the Anchored escape was only six weeks away.
New York Public Library Digital Collections Image ID: 3989682
MY INSPIRATIONS
MICHAEL JACKSON
If ever there were a case for separating the artist from the art it’s Michael Jackson, who died in 2009. For much of his life he was a troubled person, but he was so remarkable as an entertainer that his legacy stands separate to his own sad ending.
I’ve described in detail the electrifying effect it had on me when I discovered I could pull off some of his dance moves well enough to get the whole school applauding. It was an amazing experience that had a huge impact on my life: MJ’s sense of theatricality and showmanship is where my theatricality stems from. So I was already as big a fan as I could be the first time I saw him perform live, at the MCG in 1996 on his ‘History’ tour, but I got a whole new appreciation of him that night. Even though my seat cost $80 it was still far distant from the stage, but it didn’t matter; he had a presence that was like nothing I’d ever experienced before.
Maybe the best way to explain it is to contrast him with his brothers and sisters. They’re all singers and dancers who perform at a really high level, but even coming from the same gene pool MJ was something else again. He was ultra-gifted — touched by something like a divine spark if you want to put it that way. Yes, he put years into developing his stage-craft and yes he worked so hard on his dancing and his choreography that every move seemed like second nature. But it was something else that made him so mesmerising. There’s no other way to put it: he seemed like he was from another world. I think that’s why he broke barriers between black and white and crossed over all sorts of other different groups. He was not like anyone else. He had an absolutely unique watchability about him, an aura that seemed to come from somewhere the rest of us had never been.
Many years ago Adam got me a flag with MJ’s image and name on it and we hang it backstage every show we do — every one, no matter how big or small. It’s one of the few pre-show superstitions or rituals I have.
There are so many performers who owe him so much in terms of his influence — Beyoncé, Justin Timberlake, Bruno Mars, you name them, they all pay homage to Michael Jackson and say they wouldn’t have the careers they have if it wasn’t for him. The same goes for me. I loved the fact that he wasn’t ‘normal’ and wasn’t like all the other performers. It inspired me to think to myself: You know what, it’s okay be different and to do your own thing. It’s okay to be unique.
I was about to face my greatest challenge so far. Anchored wasn’t a trick or an illusion, IT WAS AN EXTREME ESCAPE. A YEAR OF PREPARATION WOULD FEED INTO THOSE FEW DEATH-DEFYING MINUTES. WAS I GOOD ENOUGH TO SUCCEED? WE’D KNOW SOON ENOUGH.
The last few weeks of preparation went by in a blur. With the help of a publicist we’d lined up all kinds of things, including live coverage on the Seven Network Sunrise breakfast show. We needed the escape to go faultlessly but, worryingly, the only full rehearsal I was going to get would be a quick run-through on the day itself. Usually by the time I performed a stunt in front of an audience I’d done it hundreds of times, finessing it down to the last detail. That repetition was vital for building up muscle memory and honing my technique in order to reduce the risk of something going horribly wrong. This time the best I could do was to practise the various elements separately.
To test the bridge we built it in our workshop at home and I used it to do dry runs, literally. Visualising water beneath me, I would walk across the bridge, sit and strap my feet into the concrete then, holding my breath, pretend I was being lowered down and go through the escape.
The next step was borrowing the pool belonging to Ben, the friend who had toured with us. Again we built the bridge and I got to do my first real submersion, wearing the boots and chains and being lowered by the winch. Being a normal backyard pool it was less than two metres at its deepest, so the winch journey was a short one: with the added height from the concrete boots my hair was floating on the surface. But my face was under, so I could genuinely do the breath-hold while escaping.
Four weeks before the big day I started regular sessions in the Aquarium with head diver Brett Rapp, who’d been involved since the initial meetings. John and I arrived before 6 a.m., hours before the place would be opened to the public. We were fitted out with full-body wetsuits, masks and scuba tanks and allowed into the Oceanarium. It was stunning. I wish everyone could experience it at least once. I know this sounds a bit crazy when we’re talking about a plastic-lined concrete tank, but I felt much closer to nature in there. A lot of effort has been put into making it as much like the real thing as possible and it certainly feels that way from the inside. The colours of the fish are so beautiful and having sharks swimming right over the top of you produces genuine awe — you know you’re completely insignificant in their environment.
Of course saltwater made us very buoyant but with weights on we were able to walk along the bottom, which meant close encounters with the next biggest creatures after the sharks, the stingrays. For some reason these guys have a tendency to come and want to perch on top of you. Brett had warned us about this before we went in and shown us the technique for pushing them off. We couldn’t help but think of Steve Irwin being fatally stung by a ray, but Brett assured us that, tragic as that had been, experts regarded it as a freak occurrence. Even so my heart was thumping the first time a ray came and leaned its weight on me. They’re pretty creatures but they are huge close-up, an
d heavy. I went for a very gentle lift at first but it had absolutely no effect; only by putting a bit of muscle into it could I persuade my rubbery new friend to move on. I got a bit more trouble from another inhabitant, a very large turtle with a very big, very powerful beak, who seemed intent on nipping my heels. In the end Brett had to move it to another tank to keep me uninjured.
We went back every week for more of these sessions and each time I stripped down further. It wasn’t practical to wear a full wetsuit for the escape — it would make me too buoyant and hinder my movements and it wouldn’t look anywhere near as good on TV. I tried it with just the leggings on but the water was far too cold; I was shivering and going through oxygen at too high a rate. I needed a dive vest to be able to get through it.
I had to do a breath-hold test for the Aquarium executives. While I went to the bottom they gathered at the huge viewing window where the TV crew and a live audience would be on the day. I took a final breath then removed my regulator and they started a stopwatch. From inside the tank you can’t see very clearly but I could make out their shapes. We’d planned on the escape taking two minutes and forty seconds. I hit that mark easily and, satisfied, the execs all left. I kept going, staying down there for three and a half minutes. I was ready.
Cosentino family collection
Robert Piccoli
But a week before the scheduled date something very scary happened. Early on in the Aquarium visits I’d asked Brett about the sharks. I had always assumed that they were specially reared so that they’d be used to humans. That’s the way I had done it with my doves over the years, making sure mine were the first hands the babies saw and felt after they hatched, then hand-feeding and spending time with them to build up familiarity and trust. One day I made a casual reference along these lines to Brett. ‘No,’ he said, ‘we don’t raise them, we catch them off the back beaches of Port Phillip Bay.’ Well hang on a minute, if they’re not specially bred and raised how could he be sure they wouldn’t attack people who came into the tank? Simple, Brett said, ‘We keep them well-fed.’ That was all there was to it: the theory was that if they weren’t hungry and weren’t provoked they wouldn’t attack.