The Secret Life of Houdini (15 page)

Back in Chicago, Beck sent Houdini a telegram offering him a tryout in his theater in Omaha at the end of March. He’d pay him sixty dollars a week, come see the show, and “probably make you proposition for all next season.” From the beginning, Houdini’s relationship with Beck was contentious. Beck advised Houdini to cut out all his magic effects and to present only handcuff escapes and the Metamorphosis. Houdini compromised by keeping his card work but omitting the silk handkerchief routine and shipping off the birds to a friend in Chicago, who promptly ate them.

When Houdini first set foot into the Creighton-Orpheum Theater in Omaha, he felt like he was entering another world. With its eight-hundred-plus plush seats and lavishly appointed dressing rooms, Harry had finally made the big time. Sharing the block with an equally impressive mansard-roofed mansion of a local mining magnate, Houdini was literally and figuratively in a new neighborhood. No more sharing a dime museum stage with the Marvelous Little Askenas Triplets or The Dog-Faced Boy.

Houdini was ready for prime time. “He gives a performance that rivals in almost every respect the showing made by any of the better known magicians,” one critic wrote, comparing him favorably to Alexander Herrmann and Harry Kellar. One night, responding to Houdini’s challenge, a committee of five local businessmen ambled onstage to challenge Houdini to escape the handcuff they produced, which featured a time lock mechanism that couldn’t be opened in less than sixty minutes. The cuffs were fitted and locked; Houdini retreated to his cabinet and the wait began. After four minutes, there wasn’t a sound to be heard anywhere in the auditorium. Then “thirteen seconds more and the professor stepped quietly from the tent. The handcuffs were dangling from the tip of his right forefinger, while a smile of triumph curled his lips. He was roundly cheered and the committee retired somewhat abashed,” a local paper reported.

He was just as much a sensation in Kansas City, the next stop on the Orpheum tour. One night, he was challenged by a man with a pair of double-lock cuffs. Rather than having them fastened with his hands in front of him, Houdini suggested that they be locked while his arms were behind his back. The committee complied. Houdini stepped back into his cabinet, but for the first time ever, he didn’t draw the curtain, so he was still standing in full view of the audience. For a full minute he stood there motionless and then he suddenly threw the handcuffs disdainfully to the floor. Houdini wrote in his diary: “1st time I took off Hcuffs with curtain open…was the hit of act.”

Houdini’s handcuff act created such a sensation that he began to be billed as “The Wizard of Shackles, A Man of Marvels.” Sometimes it was merely “Man of Shackles,” other times Bess got equal billing as half of “The Houdinis.” By Joplin, Missouri, Houdini had finally decided on a billing commensurate to his ability. From then on, he was “The King of Handcuffs.” The handcuff act became such a phenomenon that local merchants began featuring him in ads.

Not everybody appreciated the newly crowned Handcuff King’s brash and boastful style of self-promotion. One critic, after admitting that his escape work was wonderful, felt that “Houdini wastes a lot of valuable time in telling the audience how good he is.” And the Nebraska Clothing Company hinted at collusion with the police in its ad in
The Kansas City Star
. The ad must have rankled Houdini, because on his next stop through Kansas City, four months later, he visited the clothing store and confronted the employee who wrote the ad.

“I’m Houdini. You’re from Missouri. I’ll show you,” he said, and then he escaped from cuffs, did some card effects, unlocked a door lock using a wooden toothpick, produced a fine cigar out of thin air, pulled a pristine match out of a black inkwell, and lit up. The next ad recounted all this and added, “Give Houdini a few more years and he’ll have cigars to burn and money to burn as well.” By the time they had finished lavishing praise on Houdini, there were barely a few lines left to tout the ties they had on sale that week.

The train was just about to leave the station in Albuquerque to make its run to San Francisco, and Houdini was missing. He had left the car over an hour ago, promising to bring back some ice cream to take the edge off the intense desert heat, and that was the last Bess had seen of him. Then, just as the starting whistle blew and the train’s engine began to wheeze, she looked out the window and there he was, running like a madman with a huge can under his arm. George, the porter, had to literally haul him aboard the train.

“Come, folks, ice-cream for all,” Houdini shouted gleefully as he walked down the aisle of the train. Bess sighed with relief.

“George, you’re also in on this party, and here’s a small present for your kindness,” Houdini said, dropping five shiny new silver dollars into the porter’s hand.

Bess was aghast. They had been down to their last five dollars, an amount that had to last them until they got paid in San Francisco. They had even shared a single cup of coffee each morning to economize. As soon as Houdini sat down, she interrogated him.

“Where did you get that money? Did you kill someone?”

“No, sweetheart,” he laughed. “Let’s eat the ice-cream first.”

George produced dishes for all their fellow passengers, and everyone enjoyed the delicious treat. Everyone but Bess, who was too nervous to eat, especially after she caught a glimpse of her husband’s pockets, which were near bursting from the weight of seventy-five silver dollars.

Later, Houdini explained that he had run into a crap game in town. He had secreted three of their five dollars in an inner pocket and tried his luck with the remaining two bucks. He described the game in detail, a description that was incomprehensible to Bess but left George the porter delirious with joy at Houdini’s good luck. The $2 wager had been parlayed to eighty-five dollars. It was a fortuitous rest stop indeed.

This trip to the West Coast may also have been Houdini’s first mission for the U. S. Secret Service. The counterfeiting of silver dollars in the Western portion of the country was a major problem for Wilkie in the spring of 1899. On the same day that Houdini was stepping off that train to San Francisco, his pockets bulging with silver dollars, there was an article in
The Los Angeles Times
warning that both California and the entire West Coast were being flooded with dangerous counterfeit coins manufactured using the hot-die process. Since the counterfeits were being generated from a mold of a legitimate silver dollar, the design and the weight of the fake coins were indistinguishable from the legitimate ones. “Secret Service officials are laboring earnestly to apprehend the offenders,” Wilkie promised.

Houdini had been receiving orientation on counterfeiting techniques around the same time from police officers in Kansas City. On April 10, 1899 he paid a visit to police headquarters where he conferred with Chief Hayes, Inspector Halpin, Captain Branham, and the detective squad. After Houdini demonstrated his ability to escape from their cuffs and shackles, Chief Hayes took him to a back room and showed him a machine that had been employed to make counterfeit $20 pieces. According to the newspaper account, “Houdini was much pleased with the machine, and when shown how simple it was laughed heartily.”

Houdini’s first visit to California coincided perfectly with the anticounterfeiting operation launched by Wilkie. From June 2 to July 29, Houdini shuttled back and forth between San Francisco and Los Angeles, the two California cities where major counterfeiting rings had just been uncovered. Chief Wilkie also made a trip to California at exactly the same time, a trip “believed to have been connected with the attempt now being made to break up gangs of counterfeiters operating on the Pacific Coast,”
The Washington Post
reported.

Houdini being shackled in front of San Francisco policemen.
Conjuring Arts Research Center

In San Francisco, Houdini insisted on renting a hotel room for six dollars a week, which included running water and a gas stove, luxuries they usually eschewed. It also came with a flea infestation that kept Bess awake and scratching into the wee hours, while Houdini slept peacefully. He also slept through a minor earthquake that rolled both him and Bess out of bed and onto the floor. The next day, he was at the central police station. With the consent of Chief Lee, Houdini demonstrated his prowess in escaping restraints in front of four hundred officers, using a table set up in the center of the assembly room as a makeshift stage. At one point, he simultaneously escaped from four pairs of handcuffs and an Oregon Boot, a fifty-five-pound weight that encircled one leg and was secured by a combination lock. The ensuing publicity helped pack the Orpheum for his two-week run.

In Los Angeles, Houdini repeated his performance in Chief Glass’s office at the central police station, much to the delight of an old policeman named Commodore Hill. Hill, an avowed Spiritualist who had previously been the laughingstock of the department, saw Houdini’s escapes as confirmation of his religion. “I tell you, boys, it’s the spirits,” Hill said. “I have seen the same thing dozens of times at Spiritualist meetings, and there can’t nobody do these things but spirits, I tell you.” Comfortable with blurring the line, Houdini refused to confirm or deny Hill’s assertion and told the policemen they should figure his method out for themselves. He did take umbrage with Hill’s declaration that he could tie up Houdini with rope to the point where he couldn’t escape. Houdini made a second trip to police headquarters and escaped Hill’s ties with ease.

By now, Houdini was mastering the art of publicity. He became expert at bantering with reporters, giving them succinct, quotable answers to their queries. He began generating articles as well, big two-page spreads like “How I Effect My Rope Ties” that featured him posing for a seven-shot series of photos demonstrating his escape. “Any one can do the escape act if they only know how,” he wrote. “This being aided by spirits in a dark cabinet is all bosh. Of course one must do the act out of sight of the audience, just as I do the escape from handcuffs at the Orpheum, or after people had seen how simple it is, they would not pay to see it again.” Houdini’s rope tie exposé article was the beginning of a cunning strategy to expose an act after he had stopped performing it, thereby making it much more difficult for his imitators to follow him. This salting the earth strategy would be implemented throughout his career.

With a full media blitz saturating the newspapers in San Francisco and Los Angeles, it seemed oddly timed that the first exposé of Houdini’s act should be printed in San Francisco on the last day of Houdini’s western engagement in Los Angeles, but there it was—a full-page story by “Professor Benzon,” an English card conjurer who had just moved to San Francisco, complete with photos of the magician unlocking handcuffs by means of a key in his mouth.
The Los Angeles Call
picked up the story the next day and prompted a curt response from Houdini. “Why I can do the trick stripped stark naked,” he told the reporter. And that’s exactly what he did, making an unscheduled return to the San Francisco police station, where he shed his clothes, was examined by a police surgeon, and proceeded to escape from ten pairs of police handcuffs that crisscrossed his arms and connected to leg shackles. Then, for good measure, he made an escape from a leather belt used to restrain the violently ill. At the conclusion of the demonstration, Houdini revealed that the Orpheum management had retained his services for the coming week, and that he had challenged Benzon to escape from his cuffs. If Benzon succeeded, Houdini would pay him $100. If he failed, all the magician wanted was “the privilege of cutting off his whiskers on the Orpheum stage.”

Whether Benzon’s exposé was a setup isn’t known. If it wasn’t, it showed Houdini’s shrewd ability to turn a setback into a victory by going one step further than his opponent. The nude escape was conceptually brilliant—how could he be using keys or picks if he would consent to do the escape nude? In one fell swoop, Houdini had eclipsed all his rivals, whose acts consisted of buying keys, hiding them in a pocket, and using them to open the cuffs in the cabinet. The notion that Benzon was part of a choreographed feud must be considered, though. In Boston a few months later, the exact same article “exposing” Houdini was printed with the byline of “Professor Pooley” and timed to coincide with Houdini’s first large engagement there. And years later, when Professor Benzon applied to the Society of American Magicians for membership, he was sponsored by then president and legendary grudge-holder Harry Houdini.

Taking his act from the dime museums to the considerably more prestigious Orpheum vaudeville circuit seemed to set Houdini’s creative juices flowing. In September of 1899, while in St. Louis, he told a reporter that he would jump from the Eads Bridge into the river with handcuffs on his wrists and shackles on his ankles and come up unfettered. “I know I can do it, and I will…There is absolutely no question in my mind of my ability to free myself of the irons while I am underwater. That is an old trick of mine.” Then he proposed another test—one in which he would be shackled, placed in a bag, then in a basket, which would then be closed and thrown into a deep tank. After a minute, the basket would be drawn up and found to contain only the bag and locks, while Houdini would be swimming freely around the tank. Both of these daring escapes would become major publicity stunts for him in the years to come.