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James Randi barely made it into this world. Born prematurely in Toronto in 1928, he weighed only 2 lbs. 3 oz. Despite that precarious debut, Randall James Hamilton Zwinge soon took center stage. At nine, he invented a pop-up toaster; by his early teens he had taught himself trigonometry, calculus and hieroglyphics.
Disenchanted with school, Randi often played hooky and one afternoon found himself in Toronto's Royal Alexandra Theater, where Magician Harry Blackstone Sr. was performing. For Randi, it was instant addiction. "What I've since recognized," he says, "is that it is the kids who don't quite fit the social picture who go into magic."
What Randi recognized much earlier was that magic was sometimes misused. Hearing about miraculous happenings in local spiritualist churches, he decided to see for himself. Disaster. Watching the preacher divine the contents of sealed envelopes handed him by his parishioners, Randi, then 15, was outraged. "He was using the old 'one-ahead' method," Randi explains, still indignant. Striding to the pulpit, he fished one of the opened envelopes out of a wastebasket and accused the preacher of cheating. An uproar followed, and Randi was arrested for disturbing a religious meeting. At the police station, he vowed that he would someday fight back against those who defiled his art.
After dropping out of high school at 17, Randi joined a traveling carnival. On tour, he wore a turban and a beard, was billed as Prince Ibis, did a mind- reading act and supervised a "ten-in-one," carny talk for ten attractions under one tent. Among the features, Randi recalls, were Kong Lee, the electric boy, and the 10-ft. indigo snake ("It was only six feet, but who counts?").
He soon graduated to the Canadian nightclub circuit, where as the Great Randall he performed routine acts of legerdemain. One night after his show, a policeman jokingly clapped a pair of cuffs on him and dared him to escape. Piece of cake. "I walked into the open door of a squad car and got out the other side with the cuffs off." Chagrined, the police challenged him to break out of a locked jail cell. He did, easily, and the next day a local newspaper carried a story headlined THE AMAZING RANDI ESCAPES FROM QUEBEC PRISON. "From that moment on," he says, "I was 'the Amazing Randi.' " He has since legally changed his name to James Randi.
Building his reputation as an escape artist, he wiggled out of ropes and straitjackets, as well as handcuffs, sometimes while in a coffin submerged in water. At 27 he was invited to appear on a CBS television show, It's Magic. "They hauled me 110 ft. above Broadway with a crane, hanging me upside down at the end of a cable in a straitjacket -- and I escaped from the jacket. It got me on the front page of the Herald Tribune." It also launched his television career, which has included 32 appearances on the Tonight show alone. Randi's formula was simple. He would walk into the Manhattan office of the Tonight writers an hour or so before airtime, when they were still desperately scrambling for ideas. "I'd say, 'Would you like to freeze me in a block of ice and see me escape?' They'd say 'Great!' and gag it up somehow, freezing me with a halibut on my chest, or whatnot."