The Dangerous Book of Heroes (47 page)

Ralegh and Drake were opposite sides of the same Elizabethan coin. Ralegh was the gentleman, the diplomat, the dreamer and elegant courtier. The way he was treated by his queen and then his king makes his story one of the great romantic tales of the era. Drake was the rambunctious seaman and privateer. Both were vital to the flowering of Elizabethan England.

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I
n the 1870s, Rabbi Mayer Samuel Weiss traveled from Hungary to America like so many thousands of other immigrants, looking for a better life. It took him two years to earn enough to bring his wife and four sons over as well. One of those sons, Ehrich Weiss, would become the most famous escapologist who ever lived. While Samuel earned two dollars a day as a rabbi in Appleton, Wisconsin, his nine-year-old son renamed himself “Eric the Prince of the Air” and gave acrobatic displays at a traveling circus.

Around that time, an English magician, Dr. Lynn, was on tour in nearby Milwaukee. Rabbi Weiss took Ehrich to the show. The boy was spellbound, but it was not the blinding flash that gave him his life's purpose—that came later.

Neither Rabbi Weiss nor his wife, Cecilia, spoke English, and when the rabbi lost his job, he moved to Milwaukee. He was a scholarly academic but had no talent for earning a living. During the years that followed, the Weiss family knew grinding poverty.

Aged just twelve, Ehrich ran away from home, making one less mouth to feed. With no food or spare clothes, he jumped on a freight train heading to Missouri. His story could well have ended there, but he knocked at a door offering to work for food and was taken in by a Mrs. Hannah Flitcroft. Ehrich stayed all winter in that house, and for the rest of his life he sent gifts to the woman who had shown him such kindness when he was lost and alone.

Ehrich heard that his father had gone to New York for work and followed him east, taking a job as a messenger boy while his father worked as a Hebrew teacher. Together they earned enough to bring the family to them once again.

At his adult height of five feet four inches, Ehrich was a compact,
muscular boy when he joined the New York Pastime Athletic Club. Fast and doggedly determined, he won medals for sprints, but he had not yet found his path in life. That came at a bookstall, when he picked up the autobiography of a French magician, Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin.

“From the moment I began to study the art, he became my guide and hero,” he said later. While still in his teens, Ehrich Weiss chose the name of Houdini to honor him, believing that it meant “one like Houdin.” In his family he was known as Ehrie, so “Harry” fit easily enough. For his new life, he began to reinvent himself completely, even to the point of increasing his height on promotional posters.

Houdini was fascinated by magic from the beginning and spent every last cent on a collection of books and pamphlets that is still unequaled. He was never taught magic but instead practiced sleight of hand for hours every night while working as a necktie cutter during the day.

With Jacob Hyman, another man from the factory, he put a formal magic act together for the first time. They called themselves the Brothers Houdini, and Harry left his job to make the act work. It didn't. After a short run and small change, Hyman left the act and Houdini brought in his brother Theodore, known as Dash, to be his assistant. They needed tricks and Houdini persuaded Dash to give him his life savings—sixteen dollars. With that, he bought the stock-in-trade of a retiring magician. Among the props was an old and battered trunk with an escape hatch, and Harry and Dash worked it into the act. Escapology had already captured Harry's interest, and he spent his evenings studying every pair of handcuffs and restraints he could lay his hands on, looking for weaknesses.

Copyright © 2009 by Matt Haley

In the act, Dash would bind Houdini with ropes, put him inside a bag and then the trunk, and lock it securely. Dash then closed curtains around it and stepped behind it to count to three. On three, Houdini would throw back the curtain and Dash would be revealed inside the trunk, bound as his brother had been.

The act was not a success at first. Houdini thought it might be the fact that he spoke bad English, with a strong New York accent. He began to work on polishing his grammar and diction as well, moving further away from the Jewish immigrant from Hungary that he had been.

When Harry was eighteen, his father died. Harry knew he had to support his mother and worked even harder to perfect the act. The trunk trick was going over well, and he began to concentrate on escapology and drop some of the usual rabbit-in-hats, card, and coin tricks. He could do all that, but no one could work knots, chains, and handcuffs the way he could.

In 1894, when working the cabaret circuit on a low billing, Houdini met the eighteen-year-old Wilhemina Beatrice Rahner, “Bess.” He was just twenty, she eighteen. They married after only three weeks, and he adored her until his death. Her mother was appalled at Bess marrying a Jew and sprinkled holy water around her house whenever he came to visit.

Houdini made Bess his assistant, and Dash struck out on his own. He too had a successful career as a magician, but it is amazing to think that of all of his contemporaries, the name Houdini was the one that everyone came to know. It wasn't the magic that made him, but the physical prowess and incredible showmanship.

Houdini and Bess worked every night, taking any booking they could get, no matter what the billing. A turning point was a week's booking at the Tony Pastor Fourteenth Street theater. Houdini had to borrow a tuxedo for the first night. He called himself “the King of Handcuffs,” and the crowd loved the act, but it was a hard business and every break seemed to be followed by the return of poverty. Desperate for work, the Houdinis joined a traveling circus. Harry even made himself up as “Wild Man” for a time, growling at the audience
through cage bars—anything to earn a buck and keep body and soul together.

It was around this time that the entire troupe was locked up for performing on a Sunday—forbidden by the laws of the time. When the sheriff had gone, Houdini borrowed a pin from his wife and opened the cell door, letting them all out. It gave him the idea for stunts that would irritate police in a number of countries for years afterward. He also visited an insane asylum and became interested in the possibilities of working with a straitjacket. It suited him perfectly, as escaping from one involved no trick, just strength, dexterity, and practice.

His life at that point was one of traveling around the country to shabby clubs and bars—anywhere that would take his act for a night. At times, he and his wife starved, and at the lowest point, Houdini offered to sell his secrets to a newspaper for twenty dollars—only to be turned down. He began a conjurer's school for a while but earned little from it. Next came a fifteen-week booking with a medicine show in Kansas, and it was there that he met a group of traveling acrobats. Part of their act was throwing their one-year-old son around the stage. Away from the crowds, Houdini caught the toddler when he fell down some stairs.

“That's some buster your kid took,” he told the parents. They kept the nickname, and Buster Keaton went on to become a famous silent-film star and director of knockabout comedies.

When the show went bust, Houdini, in desperation, turned to a new act. Spiritualism had become popular all over the country, and as a professional magician, he knew the tricks that mediums would use to fool an audience into thinking they could speak to the dead. Houdini booked a show and visited a local cemetery to take notes from the gravestones. He reduced some of the audience to tears with the extraordinary “accuracy” of his knowledge. He kept the act going for a time but despised himself for making money from the true grief of his audiences. In the end he stopped the performances completely. For the rest of his life, he made it a personal mission to expose the charlatans in the world of Spiritualism, destroying the
careers of a number of the more famous ones, who used all his tricks and had none of his scruples.

His career to that point had been hit-and-miss, with nothing to raise him above the hundreds of similar acts traveling the boards in America as the nineteenth century came to an end. In 1898 he realized that publicity was everything. Newspaper headlines would fill the largest halls with audiences. First he tried walking into newspaper offices and challenging them to tie him up or chain him, but the cynical journalists assumed his handcuffs were props and threw him out. Remembering the experience of getting a circus out of jail, he challenged the Chicago police instead, saying that they could use their own cuffs and lock him in a cell. To his delight they agreed, and Chicago newspapers sent reporters to cover the event.

It was barely minutes before Houdini walked out of the cell, but the first attempt was met with indifference. The reporters heard he had visited the cell the day before and assumed he'd made a key from a wax impression. Indignantly, Houdini offered to do it again—this time naked and with his mouth checked and sealed with wax. His clothing was placed in another locked cell. For a second time, he strolled out in just minutes, fully dressed and grinning.

By the time the newspapers were on the stands the following morning, he was famous. Most important, he now had all the ingredients that would make him the best-known escapologist of his generation.

Modern magicians assume he used keys, though he always denied it, or wire to pick the locks if he hadn't. He did apprentice to a locksmith for a time and studied handcuffs until he knew them as well as any man alive. Even so, there were times when it all went wrong. Once during each performance, he would challenge the audience to produce some restraint to test him. In Chicago, a burly policeman produced a set of standard handcuffs. When Houdini went behind a curtain, he found that he could not spring the lock. He came out again and the man triumphantly explained that he had jammed the locks with lead. The great Houdini would have to be sawn out of them. Houdini's defeat made the papers, with gleeful headlines. He was mortified and never again allowed cuffs to go on without examining the workings first.

Once more, the Houdinis were saved from a low point, this time by Martin Beck, a theater manager who saw potential in the act and became a mentor for a time. He offered Houdini regular bookings and the princely sum of sixty dollars a week. That is the equivalent of almost fifteen hundred dollars a week today and shows the extent of Beck's faith in Harry Houdini. It was the first taste of the big time, and Houdini grasped it with both hands. On Beck's advice, he dropped the last of the card tricks and focused his act on three main events. He would swallow needles and thread, then pull the thread back out of his mouth with the needles threaded in a neat line. The trunk trick remained, and he continued with miraculous escapes from chains and ropes. With Bess, he traveled to San Francisco and once again challenged the police.

The San Francisco police were intrigued by a man who thought he could get out of their best cuffs. They strip-searched him before putting on ten pairs of handcuffs and manacles around his ankles. He dropped them all at his feet in just moments. The newspapers reported his triumph, and the chief of police said publicly: “Should Houdini turn out to be a criminal, I would consider him a very dangerous man, and I suggest that the various officers throughout the United States remember his appearance in case of future emergency.” You just can't buy that sort of publicity. The Houdinis went on to Los Angeles, where they did it all over again.

Martin Beck advised that Houdini should travel to Europe and make a name for himself there. His advice was farsighted, and the Houdinis went by passenger ship to London on a tour that would make him world-famous. In the American embassy in London, Houdini had to fill out a passport application. He put his birthplace down as Appleton, Wisconsin, and rubbed away another piece of his past.

The tour didn't start well. The manager of the London Alhambra Theatre was skeptical about the grand claims Houdini made and refused to honor the booking. Houdini was furious, and eventually the man agreed that Houdini could go ahead if he could beat the policemen of Scotland Yard. Houdini insisted on going straight to that ancient police station.

The English policemen were amused at the brash American escapologist. They agreed to his challenge and handcuffed him to a pillar with a few pairs of their handcuffs. With a smile, a senior policeman pointed out that they weren't “stage handcuffs.”

“Here's how we fasten Yankee criminals who come over here and get into trouble,” he said, adding with a chuckle that he'd come back and set Houdini free in “an hour or two.”

As the policeman turned to go, Houdini said, “Wait, I'll go with you.” The handcuffs fell to the floor with a clang, and Houdini walked out. Magicians still argue about how he managed that. The story quickly became famous, and Houdini packed London theaters for six months.

Riding a wave of success, Houdini and Bess traveled to Germany, where in 1900 he moved on to the signature escapes that would become his trademark. The first was in Dresden. In front of a large crowd, he was manacled and bound. He was about to be thrown into the river when the local police stopped what was clearly a murder in progress. Houdini was forced to move onto a boat midriver to complete the stunt.

He sank below the surface, and many in the audience held their breaths with him. One minute went by, then another. The audience began to pale, realizing they had witnessed a terrible death.