Blaine back to reality

For someone who spent 44 days in a Plexiglas cage above the Thames drinking nothing but water, 30-year-old David Blaine seems remarkably normal.

When he came out on 19 October he had lost four stone. Now he seems perfectly fit and well. He’s tall and olive-skinned. His hair, which was unkempt then, is shaved and sleek. His eyes are hooded. He speaks in an attractive slow drawl. There seems to be no indication that he chose to starve himself for just over six weeks.

In fact, in the time I spend with him, he eats most heartily. Between the two of us we get through a plate of tropical fruit, a platter of chocolate cookies, a bowl of fresh apples and grapes and, as I was leaving, he was perusing the room service menu at the Number One Aldwych hotel.

“It’s such a weird thing, and I think about it a lot, but while I was in the box I didn’t feel hungry,” he says. “I think about food all the time now but then I felt very liberated. I had no wheat or dairy to clog up my system. I felt very pure and refreshed. I got very energised mentally. I really enjoyed it in a way.”

But didn’t he miss eating? Wasn’t there a point at which he got so hungry he thought he’d faint or die? Didn’t he have any cravings?

“I didn’t really,” he says. “I never thought I was going to die. I knew I probably wasn’t. There were times when it was very hard. The days were baking hot and the nights were freezing — it was like being in a greenhouse. Also, my back ached. I didn’t do any exercise in the box because I thought I ought to conserve my energy. Now I think I should’ve exercised. It would’ve been fine.

“I was never tempted by people holding up hamburgers and disgusting stuff like that. If people really wanted to tempt me they should’ve brought down a plate of hot soup. That would’ve been hard to resist.”

When he came out of the cage he was obviously affected by his mission. He virtually fell out. He was shaking, stumbling and crying. He made a quick speech about loving all the things God had made, specifically the sunrise and sunset, and then got whisked off in an ambulance with his friend, the director Harmony Korine, who was filming him, and his model girlfriend, Manon von Gerkan. And that was sort of that.

For most of the summer, David Blaine became London’s obsession. Arguments raged as to how he was doing it. Why was he doing it? Was it a pointless waste of time? Did he have vitamins and electrolytes added to his water supply? How much was he making from it? (The figure being bandied about was £5 million.)

At the time, Blaine couldn’t answer any of this. When he came out of the box he needed intensive medical treatment. But now here he is, 44 days later, looking very fit.

“Don’t you think that’s significant?” he says. “I’ve only just realised that it’s 44 days. I’m obsessed with the number four. My birthday is on the fourth of April and it’s a very significant number for me.”

To give him his due, he really wants to answer all these questions. He has, in the past, proved to be a difficult interviewee, famously saying virtually nothing to Eammon Holmes on GMTV. But today he is relaxed and charming. There are so many things he wants to say.

“I really want people to understand why I did it,” he says. “I didn’t do it to make money. I’m not saying I’m out of pocket but I didn’t come out with very much because it cost so much to do this. I did it because I wanted to rid myself of everything that my life is about. I have two mobile phones. I read the newspapers every day. I’m always moving and rushing and I wanted to cut myself off and think and see what limits I could push my body to.”

He says he chose London firstly because his magic show is popular here, and secondly because he thinks Tower Bridge is amazing.

“I have done all my stunts in New York — the standing on the pole, the being buried in the ice. I wanted to do something here and I love the history of the bridge and the river. It’s what kept me going. I’d look at the tide rise and fall. I’d watch the sun.”

Was he aware of the people down below? “Sometimes I was and sometimes I wasn’t,” he says. “I had no idea Paul McCartney had been there, and there’d been some sort of kerfuffle, until Harmony told me.

“But people did pretty aggressive things every day. I wasn’t surprised by this. Whenever people don’t understand something, they get angry. In a way it took my mind off things. If someone threw an egg I’d look around and see if I could identify who it was. Then I’d think about why they threw it. That would take up four hours!”

The people he liked most were women — “They were all lovely. Especially the women who showed their breasts. I mean, what man would complain about that?”

He also liked people who “got it”. “Some people thought it was a political statement about starvation or something, but it wasn’t. Others used to yell, with megaphones: ‘This is shit. Why don’t you go and do something charitable?’ Well, I do things for charity but I don’t want to publicise that because it’s private.

"What I wanted to say was, ‘Why don’t you stop bringing your negativity down here and go and take a homeless person out for a meal?’ Other people wanted me to perform. I understand that. When I was a kid I’d go to the zoo and will the polar bears to do something. I hate zoos now but I understood why people wanted me to stand up and acknowledge them. I felt bad I couldn’t do that when I became weak.

“Other people just wanted me to love them so much. I couldn’t do that either. I liked the people who came down and asked nothing. They just nodded and smiled and walked on.”

He says he didn’t get claustrophobic despite the 7ft by 7ft by 3ft wide dimensions of the box. “I had trained to live in a box and I knew that if I let my mind ramble, if I started to panic, all would be lost. I stayed pretty focused. I wrote everything down in a journal.

"I thought about the people I love and about my mother [she died from ovarian cancer when he was 19]. I tapped into spirituality and God really. I took pleasure in small things.

"But I tell you what I really, really hated. I didn’t clean my teeth or wash for the entire time. My teeth felt horrible. I threw out my lip balm because I heard people saying it had vitamins in it.

“I was told cynics assumed I had electrolytes in the water. At some point I almost believed I did because for weeks my mouth tasted sweet, like pear drops, and then, suddenly, I had this awful sulphurous taste in it. I thought maybe someone was tampering with my water to keep me alive. I became very paranoid about it. I made Harmony taste it and he told me it was all fine.”

Apparently, the reason the taste changed was because his body had by now started to consume his own organs, having gone through the fat and muscle. However, by his own admission, he didn’t look as if he was at death’s door when he was released.

“Maybe it wasn’t such good TV,” he says. “When I came out of the ice [in a previous stunt] I was in a dreadful state. I look back on it now and realise I’d gone mad. But I felt pretty together when I came out of the [glass] cage. I was very moved, though.”

The danger, apparently, came after his release. “It was impossible to tell how damaged my organs were. The doctors were worried about me. I had to be on a drip for five days. I was told I wasn’t to have any solids but one night a friend of mine left an open packet of potato chips in my room at the hospital and I kept looking at them. In the end I ate them. I can’t tell you how painful it was. In fact it was extremely painful to eat for a long time.”

The other danger came from the risk of “too much physical activity”. “Aah, yes,” he says. “Well, I didn’t feel frustrated in the box in terms of sex because I just wasn’t thinking about it. I couldn’t have done anything anyway — it took me a week to get used to urinating in public; I had to close my eyes and pretend I was somewhere private. But when I got out the doctors told me not to have sex for a while.” Did he stick to it? “No,” he says, laughing. Apparently, he had sex while still in hospital.

He must, however, be a difficult partner. His past girlfriends have included model Josie Maran and actress Darryl Hannah. Don’t his girlfriends find it almost impossible being with a man who pushes himself so hard?

“Maybe they do,” he says, “but it’s the people I love who understand me the most. I didn’t think I was going to die in there and neither did anyone who loved me. In a way I found so many truths that I felt wonderful. I’ve forgotten most of them now though. Real life has crept back in.”

Real life means travelling around recording his television show, which involves him doing “streetmagic” all over the States and, sometimes, abroad. “I’ve done magic and endurance since I was four and living in Brooklyn,” he says. “My mother encouraged me. I think people get a great amount of enjoyment from it. You should see people’s faces! It always gives me a kick when I convert a non-believer. Magic is about enjoyment. Illusion and enjoyment.”

Much has been written about how the death of Blaine’s mother, Patrice, from cancer spurs him on to take bigger and more dangerous risks. “All the death-wish stuff ?” he says. “It’s not there. Sure, I feel creative when I’m suffering. But I’ve got over all that ‘I must suffer as my mother suffered’ type thing. I think about her but I grew a lot this summer.”

Neither does he feel a great need to be reconciled with his Vietnam veteran father, who left when he was a baby. “I don’t know him,” he says simply. “Blood ties don’t mean that much when you don’t know someone.”

In essence, though, Blaine doesn’t believe he’s been fundamentally altered. Despite the celebrity life — his friends include Jack Nicholson and Robert De Niro — and the endless crowds that are drawn to him, he’s remarkably down-to-earth.

Yes, he’s a show man. After all, if he wanted peace and quiet and no food, there are 101 other places he could have pursued this away from the public eye. But he’s also pretty honest about what he does.

“Magic is like chess,” he says. “It’s very mathematical, scientific. I look at someone and, mentally, I work out what they will do next. That’s why I’m always one step ahead.”

For his next stunt he thinks he’s going to jump from “as high as is humanely possible” via a helicopter into the river next to Brooklyn Bridge. Why does he want to do that? “It would be amazing,” he says. “But it’s very dangerous. It’s more dangerous than the cage. I don’t know if I’ll survive.”

But, surely, the only risk he runs is one of seeming invincible. The more dangerous the stunt and the more he survives, the less we’ll be impressed by him. Isn’t he doing himself out of a job? He pauses. “I see what you mean,” he says. “You mean I’m getting too good at this?” He reaches for another cookie. “Now that,” he says, “I can’t answer.”