The Secret Life of Houdini (2 page)

When we looked back at why Houdini suddenly succeeded in Chicago after having done substantially the same act for years in anonymity, we found some stunning connections. The particular Chicago detective who boosted Houdini’s career at a most critical point was a member of an exclusive private club. Another club member was the chief of the U.S. Secret Service. We dug and dug and discovered that the chief was also a magician, and he admitted to using magicians as operatives. Perhaps this was the opportunity Houdini had needed.

Then we found some startling new evidence about Houdini’s first visit to Scotland Yard. It turned out that the inspector who he had met with was actually England’s leading foreign intelligence officer, a spymaster who would go on to start England’s famed MI-5.

We gathered more and more documents and found ourselves overwhelmed with data. Then we made a breakthrough in the form of Alexander, our fully text-searchable database, designed by computer genius Mike Friedman. We fed Alexander our photocopies and original books, then, in agreement with the Conjuring Arts Research Center, we scanned and digitized enormous swaths of magic history—whole runs of magazines, some of which were in circulation for more than one hundred years, and thousands of books. Alexander now contains more than 700,000 pages of magic material, with tens of thousands of references to Houdini.

Once Alexander was operational, we started to break down Houdini’s life day by day, creating a timeline of every moment we could account for. Then we discovered Andrew Cook, one of the world’s leading espionage experts. Cook filled in our knowledge about MI-5 and then dropped a bombshell: He had in his possession a diary of Houdini’s spymaster friend from Scotland Yard. What’s more, Houdini was mentioned in the diary entries.

There was, however, a fly in the ointment. Early spy records are notoriously incomplete. Spy agencies were miniscule by today’s standards and relied on co-opting all sorts of amateurs to ferret out information in foreign countries. These special agents were very often only given oral directions and filed oral reports. Anything that had been recorded on paper was often destroyed.

A year into our research, we were spun in a whole new direction. Through a chance meeting at an annual Houdini séance, we met a lovely young lady who happened to be the great-granddaughter of Margery, the famous Boston medium, and Houdini’s nemesis. When we asked if she happened to have any of her relative’s papers lying around, we were stunned that she invited us to her home and opened up a closet filled from top to bottom with scrapbooks, letters, and photographs documenting Margery’s life as a medium. For more than eighty years, this material had gone unseen by any researcher. We pored over the thousands of documents and discovered the most amazing story of what really happened when Houdini took on the fraudulent Spiritualists. As a by-product, we learned a great deal about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Suffice it to say that he’s not the genial old duffer of popular portrayals.

Now we intensified our research. We electronically searched through as many as two hundred million articles in all of the major newspapers and many minor ones. We searched through millions of census and government records that a few years ago would have required years to digest. We like to think that this is the first Houdini biography of the new digital age.

What you’ll read in this text is what we surmise the story to be after reading tens of thousands of documents, chasing down thousands of leads, and making all sorts of connections. To make certain stories come alive for the reader, we’ve dramatized scenes using composite material, but although we occasionally shift what people said in time, we’ve always remained faithful to what the players said and thought. When we give you Houdini’s thoughts, they are based on interviews or letters in which he’s revealed them. We’ve made nothing up; in some cases, we’ve just turned the facts into dialogue.
¹

Finally, we’ve spent countless hours discussing with each other and the world’s experts what it all means. We are happy to finally present you with the results of all our research, study, and pondering on not only what Houdini did but also who he was. We realized that the trajectory of Houdini’s life was influenced by forces that lay well below the surface. All of our lives are. Did these motivations include pride? Greed? Machismo? Lust? Vanity? Love? Whatever he was seeking, did he ultimately find it?

We leave this for you to discover in the pages of
The Secret Life of Houdini
.

The Secret Life of
Houdini

T
HE FIRST SHOVEL-LOAD MISSED HIS TORSO
and struck his neck, sending soil flying up his nostrils and into his mouth. He started choking and coughing.

“Sorry, boss,” Collins said, looking down into the hole. “I guess the wind took it.”

Stay calm. Conserve energy. Keep the heart rate down.

Collins and Vickery continued to fill the cavity with moist Santa Ana soil. They had been at this since a little past dawn and their arms were beginning to ache with fatigue. They could only imagine how he must feel. Subconsciously, they moved into a rhythm, one scraping his shovel into the mounds of dirt piled high around them, the other sending his payload straight down into the dank hole. Vickery thought of how his friends would react when he told them of Harry’s latest stunt. Of course, that would have to wait until after it was performed. He’d never forget that oath of secrecy that he’d sworn and how seriously Harry seemed to take it.

Am I pushing myself too hard? I’m forty-one but I look fifty. I’m so gray.

Vickery began to admit to himself his concern. He had expected his boss to have no problem with the one-and even the two-foot “plantings,” as he called them, and he didn’t. But the four-and five-foot escapes seemed to really have taken something out of him. What if he hurt himself now, like the time he did in Buffalo? Ever since Harry had burst that blood vessel getting out of those chains, he was in such intense chronic pain he’d had to sleep with a pillow under his left kidney. Vickery never forgave himself for allowing those bastards to pull the chains so tight.

It’s so much hotter down here. How can a few feet make such a difference? I’m starting to feel faint. Stay calm.

By now the dirt had almost completely covered Houdini’s body. The shackles that held his ankles together were completely buried, and the content of two or three more shovelfuls would obscure the last traces of the handcuffs. He knew that his head would be covered next so he braced for the assault of the heavy soil, so as not to eat some again.

This would be so much easier if I did it in a coffin. We could gimmick a plank. I’d be able to disperse so much more soil using that instead of my bare hands. I’d be out in half the time.

As soon as he was completely covered by the soil, he began to go to work. Even though his assistants were still filling in the last of the grave, he swiftly slipped out of the cuffs, crouched into a fetal position, and began working on the leg irons. Within seconds, he was free of them too. Now all he had to do was work his way up against the loose earth, slowly, methodically, timing it so that he would be just below the ground when they had finished filling in the hole. Then he’d claw through the loose topsoil and literally escape the grave. But he didn’t figure on panicking.

It wasn’t the eerie darkness or the complete silence down there that horrified him; he had grown accustomed to that. It was the sudden realization that he was six feet underground—the legal requirement for corpses—that sent a chill up his spine.

What if I die here? What a field day they’d have in the papers. Houdini Digs His Own Grave. I’d be a laughingstock.

He gasped involuntarily. Now he began to claw and knee the soil without any concern that he’d get out before they had finished filling in the hole. But that momentary scare—the irretrievable mistake of all daredevils—had wasted a fraction of his breath, when every last fraction was needed to get out of the hole. Up above, Collins and Vickery and the others in the party had no idea of the drama that was unfolding four feet below them.

No! This can’t be! Out! Get out!
GET OUT
!

All of a sudden the weight of the earth above him felt like a thousand tons. His body stiffened and for one quick second he smelled the acrid odor of death. And then, for the first time in his life, he screamed for help. But that just made it worse. There was no way they could hear him, and now he was squandering what little air and energy he had left. He started pawing at the dirt above him like a wild animal, scratching his hands and arms on the coarse soil. He had long abandoned his slow, steady rhythmic breathing and now he was operating on pure instinct, swallowing and inhaling as much soil as air in one last desperate attempt to escape.

On the ground, Collins put down his shovel and took out his watch. When it passed the ten-minute mark, he looked at Vickery with concern.

“If he’s not up in thirty seconds, we better go get him,” he said. Vickery nodded grimly. The clock slowly ticked off the requisite seconds, and then, just as Collins and Vickery grabbed their shovels and started to frantically dig, the earth suddenly burst open and expelled a bloody, battered, and filthy Houdini, grateful for that measure of fresh, cool, California air.

“Come, come. Push, push. It’s almost over.”

Anne Fleischmann was urging Cecilia Weisz on, alternately wiping her brow and giving her some ice chips to suck on. On March 24, 1874, the small room at Rákosárok utca 1. sz. had been emptied, the three young boys sent out to play. Only a few neighbors were there as Anne expertly cradled the baby’s head and turned it slightly to allow the shoulders to emerge. She gently grabbed the baby’s chest as the rest of the bloody body was expelled from the womb.

“Another boy!” Anne said, expertly clipping the umbilical cord and swathing the child in a clean sheet. Then she presented little Erik to his mother, who immediately nestled him to her bosom, where her heartbeat seemed to have a soothing effect on the newborn. It was a sanctuary to which he would often return, that steady heartbeat and her warm caress, a place where the woes of the world could be forgotten.

Of course, a newborn meant another mouth to feed, and another warm body to share this typically small “room-and-kitchen” flat in the predominately Jewish section of Pest, part of the newly consolidated town of Budapest, Hungary. That made four sons now for Mayer Samuel Weisz, who had recently graduated law school. One could only assume that Mayer Samuel would make a very eloquent solicitor if the story of the courtship of his future wife was any indication.

Weisz had been a recent widower, his first wife having died during or shortly after giving birth to their son Armin. Perhaps to escape the memories, he moved from the Hungarian countryside to Budapest, a thriving, tolerant, cosmopolitan city destined to become one of the great showpieces of Europe. In Pest a friend of his, in obvious homage to his charisma, asked him to intervene for him in an affair of the heart. His friend was in love with a pretty young maiden, Cecilia Steiner, but he was too shy to make his intentions known to her. Mayer Samuel, who knew Cecilia’s mother and her three daughters well, took on this assignment and called upon Cecilia at the small apartment that she shared with her family. Somewhere in the middle of his loquacious address, he realized that he was no proxy; he was expressing his own heartfelt sentiments. And Cecilia, moved, reciprocated. This verbal expression was followed with a formal written marriage proposal, a letter in which, according to family legend, Mayer Samuel documented his whole life history, “telling Her everything, so no one could ever come to Her and relate things.”

Rabbi Mayer Samuel Weisz, Houdini’s father.
From the collection of Tom Boldt

They married in 1863 and by 1876 Mayer Samuel Weisz had set off for a new life in America. With Weisz already overseas, Cecilia and the five children sailed from Hamburg for New York on June 19, 1878. They traveled on the
Frisia
, a six-year-old 364-foot, three-and-a-half-thousand-ton steamship that was powered by a single screw propeller with its one smokestack supplemented by two masts. One could only imagine what memories the young boys had of this fateful trip to America. Armin, fifteen by now, was charged to help Cecilia mind the other boys for she had her hands full with little four-year-old Erik and the two-year-old Dezso. The family traveled in steerage. Cecilia’s ticket cost $30 and that afforded her and her sons the privilege of being packed like cattle below the deck in a fetid, poorly lit and ventilated dormitory that held 620 people. Luckily, on this particular voyage the ship was less than half full, which allowed Cecilia to spread out over several cots instead of just one.