Secrets of a magician ready to die

Late this year, a man plans to jump off a helicopter hovering over the deep and bitterly cold River Thames at Canary Wharf, chained and handcuffed, naturally, vowing to rise to the surface unshackled within three minutes.

It's a Houdini-like boast few escapologists would dare make, but then this man is David Blaine, sometime Hollywood heart-throb and friend to the stars, and the world's most extraordinary magician.

His London venture, however, is on hold for now because first he must survive the next week and the most daring stunt he has yet performed. On Wednesday Blaine will shin up a 100ft pole girded into position at a central New York location and stay perched there for 34 hours, subject to variables of sun, wind, rain, hunger, fatigue and his own thoughts. He will stand the entire time on a circular platform less than two feet in diameter, will go without food and drink, there will be no safety net and, at the end of his mission, he'll jump to the ground with just a mound of cardboard boxes to break his fall.

He is calling the two-night stunt Vertigo, and says it will be much more dangerous than any of his previous challenges, such as the time he submerged himself under four tons of water in a Plexiglass coffin for seven days, or when he locked himself inside a six-ton ice cube for 62 hours. Primarily, he does these things to promote and provide live-action climaxes for his streetmagic specials. Blaine looks like something of a lost soul - his olive skin, black, sleepy eyes, crumpled black hair, scruffy goatee, slouchy trousers, all add to his mystique. At times he's forcefully self-confident, at others worryingly fragile

He tries to think positively about a stunt he fears could cripple him, but can't find much to say, so he goes back to thinking negatively. "It's too late to back out now," he says. "Each stunt has to top the last, and they get more and more dangerous. If I backed out, I'd be ruined. But never before have I had this feeling. For some reason I'm worried. I don't know what's up." He smiles wanly, adding: "I'm sure I'll survive it, though," with as much conviction as he can muster.

"I have already trained myself to sleep standing up but I will not risk sleeping on top of a pole. For me the excitement is about endurance and challenge. I love to push the boundaries. I have been training in the desert and broke two ribs jumping into the cardboard boxes. That's all there will be between me and death - a bunch of empty cardboard boxes. But I'll live to tell the tale."

In his time, he has levitated off a sidewalk. He has bitten a piece of out of a coin, resurrected a fly and caused a crumpled dollar bill to float in the air. He has shuffled a card into a deck and made the card rise to the deck's top. He has been called a "heart-throb", a "Svengali", "handsomely thuggish", and been told that he has singlehandedly made magic cool again. After he performs a trick, some spectators break down and cry, suffer asthma attacks and call him the devil. In response to these things, he usually fixes his audience with a dead-eye stare and chuckles his knowing chuckle.

Aged 29, he is oddly compelling and has oddly compelled many of today's more prominent celebrities to become his friends, to care for him and to do things for him: Leonardo DiCaprio, Woody Allen, Christopher Walken, Jack Nicholson and Robert De Niro, to name a few. He claims he has slept with Madonna ("Definitely good in bed") and fallen in love with singer Fiona Apple. More recently, he has been seen in the company of actress Gina Gershon and supermodel Naomi Campbell. Now it appears he is dating actress Darryl Hannah. "He has an amazing allure," Apple once said of him. "He has no limits. He's just full of everything.''

Blaine first developed an interest in magic at the age of four, and amazed people with his levitation antics at 11, but he rarely performed for other kids, preferring instead his mother and her friends. This was in Brooklyn. His father had walked out on the family when Blaine was three - "He left me and my mom in the ghetto, begging for money."

His mother took on three jobs to put him through a Montessori school. Four of the buildings they lived in burned to the ground. So it was a raw life. But Blaine liked it that way. "It was pretty pure," he said. "Before we moved to the suburbs and it changed for me, it was me and my mom, and I was always happy, and she was always happy, even when we were on welfare.''

Blaine was 11 when he and his mother moved to Passaic, New Jersey, and she remarried. He didn't like New Jersey, or the white suburban kids living there; they called him "brainy" because he was so smart, and "nigger" and "spook" because his skin was so dark. By the end of most days, he was either crying or fighting.

Then his mother developed cancer, and things got even worse for him. "I watched her suffer for years with it," he said. "When she died, I was right there, in bed with her, and I knew when it happened. I said, 'Mom, if you're in pain and you want to go, it's OK.' At that moment, she released."

This was a devastating experience for Blaine, and it made him decide to change his life. He would not stay in Passaic, wait on tables and go to a community college as the adults around him suggested. Instead, aged 17, he moved to Manhattan, took up residence on a friend's couch, signed on for some acting classes and started performing magic at clubs and private parties.

A few years later, he made a 10-minute demo tape of his magic, compelled a few TV executives to see it and was immediately offered a reported $1 million to make his first special, 1997's David Blaine: Street Magic. During this time he was also becoming a fixture at some of the hottest joints in town: the Bowery Bar, Café Tabac, Spy and Tunnel. Says screenwriter and longtime friend Adam Gibgot: "We'd sneak into these places where I'd walk up to some celebrity like he was my best friend and call David over, and before you knew it the entire room was hovering around him as he performed magic. The celebrity would become his friend for life. He turned them into children again, even the most hard-core personalities - Tony Curtis, Christopher Walken and Robert De Niro."

And, most famously, Leo DiCaprio, who narrated Blaine's first TV special. They were seen everywhere together, drinking to all hours in bars and chasing women incessantly. "He has an astounding ability to draw people in," DiCaprio said at the time, "Sometimes I think of him as not human."

But then Blaine grew weary of the association and cut DiCaprio out of his life. "He was definitely a great friend, and we definitely used to have fun together," said Blaine. "But I didn't love always being referred to as a friend of Leo's. It's as if you don't have your own identity." Indeed, Blaine was no longer the "geeky, nerdy guy" from New Jersey as one acquaintance remembered him. He was now the goatee-wearing "supercool guy with the supermodel girlfriends". And he definitely was trying to do something, though what, precisely, is sometimes not so clear.

"I keep barriers up. I don't let people close to me. Ironically, girls fall for that. Having your mother get sick when you're a kid, and losing her, when she's the only person in your life, it hurt so much, I couldn't let anybody in again."

A few days later, we meet with his friend Gibgot at a basketball match in Los Angeles. They bumped into Jack Nicholson in the VIP smoking lounge. "You looked bad in the ice," Jack said. "You looked froze!"

"I was suffering, man." "You looked like you were suffering." Jack stubbed out his butt. "Well, it's good to see you."

"Jack," Blaine said after Jack was gone. "Heh."

Blaine turned to a couple of girls, showing off with some conjuring for them.

"I don't know how much David has talked about his father," Gibgot then told me. ''He had a father who was a loving man but who had gone to Vietnam and saw a lot of stuff. When David was four, he would take a board and stretch it between two windows 10 stories high and make David crawl across the board. Obviously there was something sick going on there, and his mother took him away when she found out."

Blaine doesn't think you can draw a line from what his father made him do to the things he makes himself do. He won't explore the idea or even entertain the possibility that parallels exist. He finds the suggestion ridiculous. Utterly so.