The Secret Life of Houdini (28 page)

With the
Mirror
Cuff challenge, Houdini effectively scorched the earth under the feet of his handcuff imitators for all time. He was now literally, and not hyperbolically, the King of Handcuffs. That was precisely his intent. Houdini had designed an earlier prototype of the
Mirror
Cuffs that featured a single Bramah lock on handcuffs shaped like a figure eight. He slyly called them “Hungarian Cuffs” after their inventor. Unsatisfied, he developed the diabolical
Mirror
Cuffs. Thanks to his friend’s newspaper, a challenge was made; he accepted it, there was tremendous publicity, and, on one night infused with drama, he defeated the world’s most devious handcuffs.

Now he had his Excalibur, a sword with which to vanquish his enemies. He immediately issued “a challenge to the world.” Beat this! Hardly anyone even tried. Houdini had even convinced his competitors that the
Mirror
Cuff challenge was real.

Two months later, he had moved on to expand the purview of his challenges. Back in 1902, in Essen, Germany, he had escaped from his own packing case. To drum up publicity, he offered a reward—come to my show, prove that the case was gimmicked, and you’ll collect the prize money. Two years later he introduced an inspired refinement of that idea. In May of 1904, on the night before he was to receive the beautiful solid sterling replica of the
Mirror
Cuffs, Houdini accepted a challenge from a company called Howill & Son. “Having witnessed your show, and if you think you can escape out of any trunk, you are mistaken.” Escaping out of a box that is so cleverly gimmicked that no one in the audience can figure out the deception and win a prize is shrewd. Escaping from a box that someone else builds and brings to the arena is heroic. For the rest of his life, Houdini would challenge the world to bring him their boxes and straitjackets and crazy cribs and mailbags and leather pouches, secure him in them, and watch as he miraculously escaped without leaving a trace. From that point on, Houdini would never be conceived of as merely the king of anything. Now he would be a Superman.

Houdini had just left the room when another guest, a colonel in the military, invited Bess to have a glass of champagne with him. For some reason, she decided to see how her husband would react to her flirting with a strange man.

Houdini had been under a lot of pressure of late. Near the end of his Hippodrome run, he had fallen ill, but somehow managed to complete his last week. He then collapsed from the strain, and on a doctor’s advice, canceled his show in Newcastle. “First time I ever disappointed,” he noted morosely. And now this.

Houdini returned to the party to witness Bess sipping champagne, sitting on the colonel’s knee, and gazing coquettishly in his eyes, his arm around her waist. Houdini’s face registered “incredulous horror,” and “his knees sagged as if he had received a knockout blow.” Bess had to rush to his side and help him to a taxi. He was speechless. Back home, he wept all night and brooded about the disaster for days.

Whether this was Bess’s notion of retaliation for an indiscretion of Houdini’s is unknown, but the whole scene was symptomatic of their day-to-day struggles. Bess’s severe mood swings and regular temper tantrums are duly recorded in Houdini’s diary. “Raised hell because I kidded on the phone to the operator,” one despairing entry reads. He even saw fit to document a rare tenderness. “Bess has been very sweet lately; hope she keeps it up.” Two weeks later, the hopes were dashed. “When I get home, she is sore, and is sore for the night.”

On May 27, Houdini, Bess, and Hardeen sailed for New York, Hardeen sporting a “blue” eye and a scratched face as a result of a fight in a German club. Martin Beck, Houdini’s old manager, was on the trip with them, but Houdini spurned his offer to upgrade the three of them to first class, preferring the informality of second-class cabins. In reality, Houdini would have stuck out like a sore thumb in first class. He had so little regard for his attire off the stage that once a friend who was waiting for him to arrive for a show at the stage door almost mistook him for a janitor. There was a method to his déshabille. The old clothes he wore were often garments that his mother had given to him when the family was too poor to afford a better wardrobe.

Houdini also spurned Beck’s offer of bookings in the United States, since his intention was to get some rest before sailing back to England at the end of August. They arrived in New York on June 2 and Houdini stayed up all night and into the next day catching up with all his brothers. Then, over the next few weeks, he went on a whirlwind buying spree.

He paid $25,000 cash, equivalent to $2.5 million in 2005, for a four-story brownstone at 278 West 113th Street in Harlem, “the finest private house that any magician has ever had the great fortune to possess,” he boasted, conveniently forgetting Robert-Houdin’s manse in St. Gervais. To the Hungarian immigrant, it
was
a mansion, the physical manifestation of the fulfillment of the pledge that he had made to his father when the whole family was crammed into a walk-up tenement. In the town house, he would house his mother, his brother Leo, and his sister, Gladys, and have rooms and rooms left over for the beginnings of his soon-to-be-massive collection of magic and Spiritualism books. “Someday when I’m too old to perform, I’ll spend my time writing about magic. And I won’t have to search for source material. It will be here,” he told his mother. He customized the bathroom with a large eight-foot mirror, before which he would practice hour after hour, and an oversize sunken tub, where he could practice his underwater endurance.

He also purchased a farm in Connecticut to use as a country retreat and spent $450 on a family plot in the Machpelah Cemetery in Cypress Hills on the Queens-Brooklyn border. Two days later, he had his father, his half brother, and his maternal grandmother disinterred and reburied in the new plot. “Saw what was left of poor father and Herman,” Houdini recorded in his diary. “Nothing but skull and bones. Herman’s teeth were in splendid condition.”

In July, Houdini and Hardeen took a sentimental visit to Milwaukee and Appleton. They visited old neighbors and caught up with Herman’s widow. In Chicago, they visited with their friend Gus Roterberg and saw their brother Nat, who was working in Chicago at that time. A note sent to Bess from Chicago suggests that Bess’s absence on the trip might have been due to more tension between the two. The week apart seemed to have smoothed things over. “We will arrive Tuesday morning at 42nd Street Station & if you want to meet me, why I Think I would Kiss you in front of the audience, so as to show you that alls well.” Bess took him up on the offer and met him at the station. “She looks a treat in her pale blue dress. Am certainly pleased to see her. I missed her on my trip,” he confided to his diary.

With posters like these, it’s no wonder Houdini went after his imitator Hilbert.
New York Public Library

Frank Hilbert’s turn at the Cardiff Empire Theater, called “The Bubble Burst,” had just begun when the first cries came from the audience. Hilbert had shown how a Handcuff King could conceal instruments in various parts of his clothing and open his cuffs, when a gray-haired bespectacled old man with a beard began waving his cane in the pit.

“You’re a fraud, you’re a damned fraud,” the man screamed with surprising vigor for someone his age.

Simultaneously, two women sitting near the rear jumped up in their seats. One of them was waving a pair of handcuffs she held aloft.

“This man does not use police regulation handcuffs. He has cuffs of his own. But I have some regulation handcuffs here and I challenge him to open them,” she yelled.

The old man continued yelling, and he was soon surrounded by the theater manager and two constables. He began to swing his walking stick wildly, and it took another constable to subdue him. As they started to drag him to the side exit door, his beard fell off. It was Houdini. In the rear of the theater, the two women, who were Bess and Houdini’s sister, Gladys, rushed up to the fracas.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, see how they are treating me,” he began screaming. “It is not right.”

“Shame, shame,” some people in the audience yelled.

“Give him fair play,” another suggested.

Fair play was the last thing on the manager’s mind. They had been alerted by Mr. Oswald Stoll, the theater owner, that Houdini might try to disrupt Hilbert’s exposé, but Houdini’s disguise, which had been professionally administered by a hairdresser who Houdini hired and included a waxed modified nose, completely fooled the theater management. When they realized the old man was Houdini, they followed Stoll’s orders, which were to eject him immediately.

“What shall I do, Mr. Lea?” one of the constables asked the manager.

“Throw him out,” Lea said. Then Lea grabbed Houdini by the throat and tore at his collar.

“We’ve been waiting for you,” he said, and threw Houdini into one of the constables. Houdini fell to the ground, and his knee struck one of the seats, numbing it. Then the constable kneed him in the ribs and slapped his hands over Houdini’s mouth so he couldn’t cry out.

Just then, Hardeen, who was also in the audience, although not in disguise, ran up and attempted to throttle Lea, but was held back by a constable.

Houdini was carried out the side door and thrown four feet down into a muddy alleyway. He screamed in pain and claimed that his leg was broken. Hardeen arrived on the scene, and his brother asked him to flag down a cab. Two of the constables pulled Houdini to his feet, and just as he began to walk away, Lea kicked him in his leg. Houdini almost fell again.

“Don’t you do that again,” he glared at the manager.

“Oh, that was an accident,” the manager smiled.

A cab came and Hardeen and Houdini fled the scene.

Later that night, the two brothers entered the King’s Theater and rushed onto the stage. Houdini’s hair was disheveled and his collar still unbuttoned. He spoke in a hoarse voice.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, I must apologize for appearing like this, but I have been thrown out of the other theater,” he said.

“Shame, shame,” the crowd cried out.

“They have nearly broken my leg,” Houdini said, and to thunderous applause, he limped off the stage.

That night Houdini opened his diary. “Went to Empire and raised a rumpus against Hilbert,” he wrote. “Went disguised, was carried out. Raised hell in the streets. This helped with my business.”

It was hard to fathom that he needed help in that area. Since his return to England seven months earlier, he had been smashing his own records all over the provinces. In September in Glasgow, he featured an escape from a packing case that was built onstage by a local company to ensure that the crate was not gimmicked. Thousands of people who couldn’t get into the theater milled in the streets outside, stopping traffic, until they heard that Houdini had escaped in fifteen minutes.

In December, Houdini sat in a box at the Empire Theatre in London, watching his friend Chung Ling Soo perform. During the entire show, the crowd kept yelling, “Houdini!” Back in Glasgow in January of 1905, an escape from a hamper built by a local firm generated so much interest that an overflow crowd actually broke into the theater to witness the challenge. On February 18, in Rochester, playing a house on a percentage basis, Houdini netted his largest weekly salary yet—$2,150 at the then prevailing exchange rates (today, a whopping $215,000). Business like that spawned ever more imitators and even a new Handcuff King who dubbed himself “Hardini.”

Houdini about to be nailed into a packing case.
From the collection of Dr. Bruce Averbook

Going after Hilbert was personal, though. When Houdini had first returned to England in September, Harry Day had negotiated new contracts for him at much higher pay. Houdini was immediately sued by the Moss chain of theaters which claimed that they had an irrevocable option for his services. When Houdini won the lawsuit on November 1, 1904, the owners of the Moss dynasty hired Hilbert, his old nemesis, to follow him around England, playing their theaters and doing an act exposing his escapes. By April, Houdini had had enough and he bum-rushed Hilbert’s show. Houdini wasn’t through with Hilbert just yet. Two months later, he received a letter from his old pal Billy Robinson. Robinson was in Manchester, where Hilbert had just closed. “I found out that the stage carpenter had made a packing case for Hilbert during his engagement. So I got quite chummy with him. A few beers and the job was done.” Robinson had enclosed a detailed sketch of the packing box and just how it was gimmicked.