Blaine: Houdini or hoaxer?

The proposition is brutally simple. Tomorrow, David Blaine, an illusionist and performer of flamboyant stunts, will be suspended in a clear, coffinlike box above the Thames.

He proposes to stay there, being filmed by two TV channels, for 44 days sustained only by water delivered through a tube. He is calling the event 'the one true test', muttering quasi-mystically that he feels 'commanded to do it'.

Blaine promises it will be more spectacular than his two previous headline-making stunts - being entombed in a block of ice in New York's Times Square for two-anda-half days and balancing on an 80ft pillar for 35 hours.

At the official launch of his latest venture at the Savoy Hotel earlier this week, he responded to a request for a 'trick' by seeming to cut off his ear with a Swiss Army knife while screaming, cursing and producing copious fake blood .

The revolting stunt - similar to a TV chat show appearance last year when he pretended to cut his still-beating heart out of his body - was typical Blaine: part illusion, part stomach-turning PR exercise.

So who is David Blaine - 21stcentury charlatan or illusory genius? And what is the truth about his suspension above the Thames, which is set to earn him in excess of £5million in worldwide television rights?

By his own account, he is simply a man interested in pushing the boundaries of human experience.

'We are all capable of infinitely more than we believe,' he says. 'The only restrictions on our capacity to astonish ourselves are imposed by our minds. My performance will demonstrate these ideas through the most extreme exercise in isolation and physical deprivation ever attempted.'

But is it really? And can we trust Blaine - who as, we shall see, is at the very least economical with the truth - not to cheat? After all, with no independent monitors, what could be easier than to introduce glucose or electrolytes into his water drip to sustain him?

Blaine's ambitions are clear. He has set out to be the 'world's greatest showman', with the lifestyle of a Hollywood icon to match.

Profiles of him note his success with women - he has dated Madonna ('Definitely good in bed,' he says) and actress Daryl Hannah, plus various top models and female rock singers. His sexual appetite includes, by his own admission, spanking and threesomes.

Inevitably, given the fast New York set with which he mixes, there have been drugs. He has had a heroin habit and admits to other narcotic experiments, although he says he is clean these days.

When he first achieved fame in the Nineties, Blaine was part of Leonardo Di Caprio's notorious 'pussy posse' - young, rich men about town who trawled clubs and bars in Hollywood and New York in search of beautiful girls to sleep with.

More recently he has cultivated his image as the Mysterious Stranger, the title of his autobiography. Indeed, what sets Blaine apart from other illusionists is his persona, built around the sinister stare he has perfected. For the most part, he favours a monosyllabic monotone except when delivering such profundities as: 'Jesus was a magician, and so am I.'

He lives in a Gothic-style manor house in the Hollywood Hills - once the home of escapologist Houdini - and is worth at least £30million, a fact, no doubt, which explains his success with women. So far, showbiz.

However an investigation into Blaine's background reveals that nothing is quite what it seems. Fittingly, for an illusionist, there is more than a suspicion of sleight of hand in his personal history.

His mother, described in some of his publicity as a gipsy, is elsewhere referred to by him as a Russian Jew. She brought him up alone after being abandoned by his father who fought in Vietnam.

The story Blaine likes to tell is that his father made him, aged four, crawl across a plank laid between the roofs of two ten-storey buildings - giving him a lifelong obsession with danger. At other times, he says his father left when he was three.

It is impossible to verify either story as Blaine refuses to give his real surname and the date he gives as his birthday - he claims to be 30 - appears to be false too.

Other tales from his childhood include a Tarot-obsessed grandmother who inspired him to take up magic. More usually, though, he says that his mother bought him a cheap magic trick when he was a child which got him started.

He claims that he beat adults at chess at the age of three and was doing card tricks at four. As a teenager, he says he convinced a doctor he needed bricks in his pockets to stop him floating away as he performed a levitation.

But is any of this true? His own comments cast doubt on any of his statements. 'You should never be accurate (about your background), you should be entertaining,' he once said in a candid moment. 'Houdini, Chaplin; they always told conflicting stories.' David's stepgrandmother told the Mail this week that he became interested in magic only when he was 16 - and added that no one in the family even knows who his real father was.

What can be verified about Blaine's background is that he was raised by his mother Patrice, a schoolteacher, in Brooklyn. However, she was not, as Blaine likes to claim, left 'begging in the gutter' and struggling to raise him after being abandoned by his father.

Patrice remarried and the man Blaine calls 'Dad' is personnel manager John Bukalo, who still lives in the pretty New Jersey suburb of Little Falls with an outdoor heated pool and manicured gardens where Blaine was brought up.

His childhood, according to his step-grandmother Klementyna Bukalo, 80, was distinctly middleclass and comfortable. David attended the local school and was considered bright - although his lack of interest in sport marked him out as something of a nerd. 'He is very intelligent,' she said proudly, 'a very good boy. I never remember him being in trouble.'

In his high school yearbook, Blaine makes no mention of magic. Instead, he records that his ambition is to be a TV actor. Pictures show a rather strait-laced teenager with bouffant hair.

This comfortable world was shattered when David was 17 and his mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She died two years later, in her son's arms.

Blaine left home, enrolled in an acting school, and hired an agent who later persuaded TV broadcast giant ABC to view a ten-minute tape of his client's 'Street Magic' - tricks performed in New York's parks and cafes and filmed closeup. He was an immediate success.

None of Blaine's team will talk about his latest stunt, other than to confirm that he will enter the box tomorrow and, all being well, emerge on Sunday, October 19.

Sky and Channel 4 are paying to carry live coverage of the entire 44 days on their websites for a fee that is 'nudging the £1million mark'.

But is the stunt really dangerous? How great a feat is it for a fit 30-year-old man to exist only on water for 44 days? In interviews, Blaine displays breathtaking ignorance about what he is trying to do.

'There are rumours that people have gone without food for longer,' he told an interviewer last week. 'Bobby Sands (the IRA prisoner who went on hunger strike) supposedly did 66 days. But I don't know if he slipped into a coma on like, day 17, or what.'

In fact, it is well documented that Sands was conscious throughout his 66-day hunger strike. At the end, he was blind and emaciated but conscious. The average survival period of the 1981 Irish hunger strikers was 55 days and one of them, Laurence McKeown, lasted 70 days before falling into a coma and being nursed back to health.

But these facts are extremely inconvenient for the entertainer who is determined to present his 44-day target as a superhuman feat.

Jeremy Ward, professor of respiratory cell physiology at Kings College, London, said: 'In my opinion, he should be able to do this. He would be very unlucky to die. You have to be fit to do it for six weeks and anyone with any underlying disease would not last. But if he is going to have water, then he could certainly do it.'

'That is not to say it will be pleasant, but it is do-able.'

In interviews, Blaine has naturally played up the drama of what will physically happen to him during this 'one true test'.

He has said: 'You will see my skin have open wounds and lesions. When you have nothing but water in your body, your skin begins to rip open and scab. You are surviving by digesting your own muscles and organs. You will see it first-hand.'

Dramatic stuff. Professor Ward, however, is unimpressed. It is possible that he will get pressure sores - where he has been sitting or lying in the box - and certainly his muscles will start to waste as they are broken down to provide glucose for the body, once fat stores have been used. But the idea of viewers being able to see him "digest" his own organs is dismissed as fanciful.

Professor Ward said of the venture: 'I think he is a complete idiot. There are enough starving people in the world. For someone to starve themself as a publicity stunt - I don't think morally it is something which you should do for glamour or glory or money.'

But David Blaine - the nerd from New Jersey - knows that people will pay a fortune to watch a man 'starve to death' and he's more than happy to give them the opportunity. Who cares that it's not what it seems - illusions are what he does best.