You may know the St Martin’s Lane hotel. Perhaps you even like it. It’s the
one off Trafalgar Square, designed by Philippe Starck: a modernist “urban
resort” in lime and steel with a green revolving entrance and prim staff
trussed in black Nehru-collared designer uniforms. It’s where one of David
Blaine’s team decided to put up the illusionist and where it had been
decreed that he’d be giving his only British interview.
A table for four had been set in the breakfast area: the controversial
illusionist and I were to be joined by his American personal assistant,
Vivianna, and his British PR Claire, to discuss magic over glasses of
decanted mineral water. Clearly our meeting was not envisaged as an
interview at all, more a David Blaine conference. Something about it was all
wrong.
The first thing that was wrong about it was the fact that the hotel was
creating tension. All those clean angular lines were clashing with Claire’s
attempts to chirrup enthusiastically about her client — “. . . it is
humbling almost . . . my mum gave me a Paul Daniels set when I was small . .
. the power David has over you . . .” — while her client failed to
materialise in a puff of smoke from upstairs.
Every so often Claire cast a wild look about the room which, put into words,
translated as something like, Don’t back out on me, David. I admired her
valiant smile in the face of a potential no-show — a no-show which David
Blaine, with hindsight, could have interpreted as a performance piece.
When he finally appeared, I realised what else was wrong, the chairs. This was
the kind of interview that should have been conducted on a sofa or from the
vantage point of two incredibly comfortable La-Z-Boy armchairs. Instead of
the ambient stuff buzzing from the hotel’s sound system, somebody should
have put on the Doors. This was because, although Blaine gave up drugs long
ago, he was the most stoned-acting non-stoned person I’ve ever met.
Definitely, the most stoned-acting non-stoned high-achiever.
He appeared wearing a coat, impenetrable reflective sunglasses and a cap, his
beard, once piratically neat, patchy and overgrown. He stuck out a hand:
“Technically for me it’s like 5am.” Could we do the interview without the
entourage? “Yeah, sure. You go sit over there,” he said to his assistants,
waving them mellowly towards another table.
He also appeared wearing two gum-guards — one for each set of teeth.
“Are you wearing a gum-guard?”
“In the night-time I grind a lot so I have to wear it.”
“Why don’t you take it off?”
“I don’t know, I like it.”
“How long are you going to leave it on for?”
“I don’t know. I’ll take it off when I eat and when I get bored with it.”
“Why do you like it?”
Blaine imitates what looks as if it might be a hamster by chomping his teeth.]
I ask: “You like the gumguard because it’s got a nice chewy feel to it?”
“Yeah.” [A blissful smile spreads across Blaine’s face.]
You’ll remember the last time Blaine was properly in the public eye in the UK,
the then-still-peppy Paul McCartney called him a stupid c***. In 2003
Blaine, inspired by the Kafka short story The Hunger Artist, fasted for 44
days in a Plexiglas pod by Tower Bridge. The thinner he got, the more
ambivalent his public became.
By about day 30, the British had undergone one of their characteristic changes
of heart about the nature of celebrity and let rip their inner yobs. When he
emerged from his shell, Blaine was four stone lighter but, disappointingly
for his critics, not actually dead. Blaine-hating has a certain currency
even today. When, last month, a minor, Bristol-university educated comedian
referred to Blaine as “the git-wizard” on Room 101, the television audience
obediently guffawed on cue.
For his next two tricks he returned to America — Drowned Alive, a failed
attempt to break the world record and hold his breath for longer than eight
minutes and 59 seconds, and Revolution, in which he successfully escaped
from a giant revolving gyroscope in which he had been shackled for two days.
Is he pleased to be back in Britain?
“I love it. I love everywhere, though. I like it all.”
Are his detractors — mainly male, often university-educated, it has to be
pointed out — pleased that he’s back (as the face of something called the LG
Shine phone)? Advertising a phone is ammunition for his detractors— the
suspicion that he might have sold out, although he says that he’s saving for
a spectacular stage-show: “My next one is also going to be geared towards
science as well. It will push the human envelope of endurance much further
than ever before.”
I make the point about education because Blaine seems so sad about the gaps in
his own schooling. An autodidact who grew up mainly in New York’s Hell’s
Kitchen, he makes up for lost time by reading: Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young
Werther he likes but finds a bit syrupy; Hermann Hesse’s Demian influenced
him on account of the hero’s ability to stare down his adversaries; The
Brothers Karamazov . . . He’s just had a vacation, in which time he’s given
up working out and spent his time reading. “Collected works of Gabriel
García Márquez, Pablo Neruda, I suddenly got into poetry,” he says, vaguely.
“The Iliad.”
He laments his supposed lack of discipline and blames it on never having
satudied for a degree: “If I’d gone to university I would have learned more
about how to structure my time but I didn’t have that opportunity. So I’m
always envious about that.”
At one point in our conversation, Blaine started comparing himself
unfavourably to Theodore Roosevelt: “There are certain people who I’m so
envious of . . . A guy like that was incredible — he’d read a book, two
books in 24 hours,” before segueing into the claim — the claim of many
high-achievers — that really he’s not achieved anything at all: “I don’t
feel like I’ve really done anything yet. It’s hard, you know. Maybe the only
thing I feel like I’ve done is my travelling to hospitals across the world
and doing magic for kids who are sick and dying and stuff . . .”
In between talking, saying nothing and filling the dead air with card games,
Blaine pops vitamins, about 25 of which he’s poured out on to the table from
a plastic phial. We do an inventory: vitamin E, salmon oil, cod liver oil,
bonemeal, vitamin B, vitamin C. He washes the pills down with water, not
coffee, because he’s also given up caffeine. He eats meat, but prefers fish.
Pretty healthy?
“I try to be. Still overeat. I go up and down in weight really fast.”
Blaine flashed me his belly, which is currently teddy-bear in shape and
consistency although not as hairy. He mutters something about his
metabolism. The belly is tucked back beneath the folds of his coat. I ask
him why he’s wearing a coat.
“That’s a good point,” he says and takes it off. Then puts it on again.
“I have a great aunt who is 103 years old that you would think is 60. She’s
completely intact, walks up and down two flights of stairs a day, cooks for
herself, does everything. This is probably why I’m able to go through what I
do physically and I recover really fast. She’s changed a lot of people’s
lives by making them eat vitamins. But you can’t take multivitamins, she
says, because it doesn’t have the same effect. You have to take each
individually. It’s my great aunt on my mother’s side, I don’t know anybody
on any other side.”
His father, Blaine thinks, disappeared when Blaine was 4 and later died of a
heroin overdose. He doesn’t know so much about that side because his mother
wasn’t keen on talking about it.
While more privileged folk were joining fraternities or drinking their way
through freshers’ weeks, Blaine was turning card tricks in nightclubs.
There’s a picture of him, a lanky 18-year-old, “doing magic to Jack
Nicholson in St Tropez”. It was the year before his mother died — in his
arms. You can read about the effect it probably had on the young Blaine in
the section called Musings on his website: “Those who complain about missing
a meal or being bored, you have never really suffered or witnessed your
loved one face death, smiling in your arms. I hope you are so lucky one day.”
The psychoanalysts among you are doubtless now pricking up your ears. In the
quest to explain what drives Blaine, the theory is that he’s never got over
his mother’s death, assuming that death is something you can necessarily get
over. Wasn’t the underwater stunt a metaphor for the amniotic sac? The
Plexiglas pod, yet another womb? When, as his first public endurance feat,
Blaine decided to bury himself in a coffin, he dedicated the stunt to his
mother. As a reminder he has a tattoo on his left arm, 7 days 7 nights:
“That’s how long I was buried alive for. I did that one myself.” The thought
of Blaine carving a tattoo into his arm with a Biro has confirmed a thousand
theories about his resulting masochism.
Admittedly, mothers come up a lot in conversation: his own mother, how she
instilled a sense of justice in her son; the mother he met in a ward for
terminally ill children. During a riff on love Blaine speculated that: “Love
is like Mother Teresa because she decides to love, it doesn’t matter . . .
Even Jesus, right. He loved everybody. It wasn’t about he loved his mother
more than this person.”
He has said before that he feels his mother is still around. Does he still
believe this? “I think in death people become much stronger . . . the person
who died. Their spirit becomes stronger.” Is it difficult to find a
girlfriend, somebody who lives up to his image of his mother? “That’s tough.
It’s hard when you have such a fortunate situation when you have such a
great mom who was so attentive because it’s hard to repl . . . it’s hard
work. I’m . . . finding . . . because you’re always comparing to something
that never existed because the way that you see it in your brain . . . so
anyway it’s tough.”
Have his girlfriends found that difficult? “Yeah, it’s difficult.” Because you
can never love someone as much as a mother loves her son? “Yeah, I agree.”
So he wanted unconditional love? “Well you need to grow past that. You need to
realise that . . . it’s tough. Yeah, yeah. I think everything is in its due
time, you know. When you’re ready . . . changes. I’m definitely ready, you
know I’d like to find a good woman and have a family and that whole sort of
thing, maybe to experience that.”
Two days later, I turned up to see Blaine do his thing for the launch of the
phone at Cirque, the building that used to be the Hippodrome. He’s single
but one suspects not for long, the way that the girls had dolled themselves
up and the ruthlessness with which they deliberately fell into his path like
seagulls dive-bombing for food.
Were they prepared for the Blaine pillow-talk? I can imagine that a sound
knowledge of the life and works of Primo Levi and at least a fleeting
interest in Harry Lorayne’s Page-A-Minute Memory Book might be useful. And,
once they’d hauled him home, what would their mothers make of a guy who
risks his own life, who worships Houdini (died of a punch to the chest) and
Evel Knievel (contracted hepatitis C from one reconstructive surgery too
many)? He’s stopped saying things like “I’m living in a world of
anti-trust,” but still, the mothers would be wary.
Eventually, one can speculate, he’d win them over with some card tricks,
leaving Blaine with one last challenge, the challenge of his life. Figuring
out what his own mother would have thought of it all.
