The Secret Life of Houdini (31 page)

The path of Houdini’s escape from Boston’s tombs.
Conjuring Arts Research Center

In Boston in March, Houdini made a similar splash. This time it took him only sixteen minutes to break out of the dreaded tombs. Houdini made his way back to his theater and then placed a call to William H. Pierce, the astonished superintendent of prisons, who asked him to return to the jail so that the photographers could shoot him reenacting his leap over the jail fence.

“You’re a great fellow,” the superintendent said, and grasped Houdini’s hand. “I expected that you would come here if you got out. The next time I’ll take your clothes out here with me, and then you’ll have to come into the office.”

The acme of these staged, precisely choreographed Houdini–police chief encounters came the next time Houdini visited his old haunts in Chicago in November of 1906. “Under the personal direction, as they say in the show business, of Andy Rohan, lieutenant of detectives, Houdini, who makes a living getting out of handcuffs and locked rooms, mystified more than twenty detectives at detective headquarters last night,”
The Chicago Examiner
began its story. “Houdini, who has been doing this sort of thing for six years, was secured for one performance only at detective headquarters by Lieutenant Rohan…. Just what good it would do a detective to learn how to break out of jail Impresario Andy did not explain.”

“‘You coppers and the press,’” said Andy, the manager, “‘will have to stand back and give the professor room enough to swallow a paper of pins.’”

Houdini did the Needles to the delight of the crowd. Rohan wasn’t through playing MC.

“‘The next trick will be the big one,’” said Lieutenant Rohan, handing Houdini a cup of water.

“Louis, hand me the cuffs.”

Detective Louis Bock materialized with two pairs of handcuffs and some leg irons. Houdini stripped and was shackled.

“Look at the cell carefully and attentively and also closely,” Rohan said, “and see the professor has nothing concealed in the cell. Now he gets into the cell. Now I slam the door, so. Now I lock the door, so, and now I lock this padlock. Are you all right, professor?”

Houdini nodded. Rohan corralled the reporters, and they all moved back to the main room. As time passed, “Manager Rohan grew a bit restive.”

“The professor will come out all right,” he kept assuring himself.

The professor did it in due time, “to the visible relief of Mr. Rohan.”

“Do a few more tricks for the lads,” said Rohan, and Houdini obeyed to the extent of picking the locks of two other cells, taking the prisoner from one cell and placing him in another and “‘vicey versey’ as one of the detectives explained.

“The entertainment closed with the passing round of cigars and the showering of congratulations upon Houdini and his accomplished impresario. Anybody that could smoke one of the cigars all the way through could do a harder trick than any Houdini did yesterday,” the reporter concluded.

Houdini’s close relationship with Andy Rohan continued. Later correspondence revealed that Houdini would send Rohan spare parts of leg restraints, and Rohan would collect newspapers and forward them to Houdini.

Even though Houdini maintained contact with police officials and wardens, by the spring of 1912, six years later, Houdini did his last jailbreak. By then the risk to his reputation was too substantial for him to chance a mishap.

Houdini’s first film sequence depicted him escaping from a jail cell.
From the collection of Dr. Bruce Averbook

Boston’s love affair with Houdini remained unabated. In 1906, he played there for almost two months and continually filled the newspapers with stories recounting his exploits. Early in March he was challenged to escape from an iron-ringed wicker basket. The challengers insinuated that Houdini might have been able to pry some nails loose when he escaped from a packing crate the week before, so a wicker basket large enough to contain him was found. Before a packed house and three hundred committee members on the stage, Houdini climbed into the basket and three pairs of handcuffs were placed on his wrists. Then the cover was placed on the basket and affixed by means of several padlocks, the keyholes of which were sealed with the private seal of one of the challengers. Padlocks secured three strong iron bands. Then a network of half-inch rope and heavy chains was added. Houdini’s cabinet was pulled up around the hamper and the curtain closed.

It took Houdini sixty-two minutes, but finally he threw the curtain open. He was panting, his bare arms were streaked with perspiration, and his clothes and his hair were disheveled. The audience cheered him for several minutes, and then he retired backstage, where it took him several minutes to muster up the strength to talk to
The Boston Globe
reporter. This had been the hardest of all of his tests, he assured the reporter. He couldn’t wait to call his wife, who was back at the hotel because it was too much of a strain on her to witness these special, grueling tests.

Backstage, the challengers heaped praise on him. “I surrender to you,” the head of the committee told him. “For years I have been planning this test for you, and I admit my defeat. I am satisfied that, unaided, except by your own strength and ingenuity, you have succeeded in accomplishing that which myself and my associates believed absolutely impossible.” The reporter printed each of the challenger’s words. He even printed his name, Dr. Waitt. What he didn’t know was that Waitt was one of Houdini’s oldest confidants.

Near the end of March, Houdini performed at a special show for 1,600 members of the Boston Athletic Association. He did card effects, the Needles and he escaped from a straitjacket in four minutes, a record for him. Earlier that afternoon, Dr. J. E. Rourke, an anatomical expert at Massachusetts General Hospital, had examined Houdini. “Houdini is the most remarkable man I ever examined.

“I have examined Sandow and most all of the physical wonders of the country. But Houdini is in a class by himself.” Apparently the examination also gave Houdini a scare. “He said that my arms were too hard to be of healthy tissue,” Houdini confided to a reporter. “He said that I was threatened with being muscle-bound. My success…lies in my agility as well as my strength. To be muscle-bound would greatly lessen my agility.”

A few days later, Dr. Waitt organized a special matinee at Keith’s for an invited audience of local-area doctors. Houdini astounded the doctors with both his Needles effect and by his offer to have his lips sewn up by a doctor before he escaped from handcuffs to nullify the possibility that he had hidden a key in his mouth. The offer was, of course, refused. Days later, the mystified doctors flooded Houdini with letters offering bizarre methods for the escape. “The urethra could easily be used to hide one or more small keys,” one doctor suggested.

After his smashing success in Boston at Keith’s, Houdini thought he could earn more if he promoted his own show and took it out on the road. Working with his friend Whitman Osgood, a newspaperman, Houdini signed up the Kita-Muras—Imperial Japanese juggling troupe, the Zancigs, who did a telepathy act, and Carver & Pollard, a comedy act. Houdini, billing himself as “The Mysteriarch, The Greatest Sensation of England and America,” did a prison cell and barrel transposition and then closed the show with challenge escapes from handcuffs and leg irons. Trying to buck the established vaudeville circuits, Houdini found that his business instincts were not quite as powerful as his forearms, and after folding the show in May for the summer, he was back on the vaudeville circuit doing his own turn by the fall.

On November 26, Houdini opened a run at the Temple Theatre in Detroit. During the show, a policeman named Mark Baker challenged him to escape from a pair of handcuffs. Houdini struggled for forty-five minutes and then stormed out of his cabinet.

“These handcuffs have been tampered with,” he screamed. Then he glared up at Harrison Davies, a local amateur handcuff king, who was sitting in an upper box.

“Is this your work?” Houdini said.

Davies shook his head.

“I’ll get them unlocked,” Houdini said grimly and retreated to his cabinet.

For the next hour, Houdini worked on the tampered cuffs, the audience breathlessly awaiting the outcome. The tension was too much for Bess, who, fearing that he had been defeated, “retired to her dressing room in tears and went into hysterics,”
The Detroit Journal
reporter wrote.

Finally, Houdini emerged, the handcuffs open. The audience cheered, but Houdini was not in the mood to bask in congratulations.

“These cuffs have been tampered with. Whoever did this was certain that they would never be opened,” he shouted. Then he addressed Officer Baker.

“Are these your handcuffs?”

Baker fidgeted.

“No, they were given to me by a Detroit man to put on you. Further than that, I do not care to say anything.”

Houdini immediately suspected another handcuff worker, a man named Grose, who was playing opposite him at the Crystal Theatre.

All in all, it was an embarrassing, inauspicious opening. Houdini went to his hotel and brooded all night.

Standing on the Belle Isle Bridge, he gazed at the current of the river twenty-five feet below him. He had stripped down to his trousers and with the raw wind factored in, the temperature was around twenty-five degrees Fahrenheit, but even though he was shivering, he seemed impervious to it. His mind was elsewhere, focusing on the water, going over what it would feel like when he sliced into the current from that height. Right before he approached the railing, he hastily scribbled a makeshift will on an envelope. He wrote: “I leave all to Bess.” Then, suddenly, he was ready.
It’s now or never
, he thought. He tensed his muscles. “Goodbye,” he impulsively shouted and jumped off the bridge.

The manacled bridge jumps were the first of Houdini’s spectacular outdoor escapes.
From the collection of Dr. Bruce Averbook

And the thousands of people standing on the bridge held their breath as one.

Houdini had conceived of doing a handcuffed bridge leap as far back as 1899. In July of 1901, he had been beaten to the punch when an English society illusionist named Maurice Garland dove manacled off the Wellington pier into the sea at Yarmouth. Both Houdini and Garland might have been inspired to do their spectacular leap by the example of a New York City bookie named Steve Brodie, who garnered worldwide fame in 1886 when he allegedly jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge and survived in order to win a $200 bet. His name entered the vernacular, and “pulling a Brodie” became synonymous with doing something spectacular and dangerous.

Houdini’s unfortunate incident on opening night in Detroit finally prompted him to attempt his own bridge leap. “Having met with difficulty in freeing himself from a pair of handcuffs that he suspected had been tampered with while performing his stunt at the Temple Theatre Monday night, Houdini was determined to show the public that his marvelous powers of extrication have not been overrated,”
The Detroit Free Press
reporter noted in his coverage of the leap. So Houdini, with entourage and newsmen in tow, had stopped off at police headquarters to borrow two new pairs of their strongest cuffs. Then they went to a police barn, where they secured 150 feet of rope. They all boarded a streetcar and made it to the bridge, which was “black with humanity.”

At a few strokes past noon, Houdini jumped, the rope, which was tied to the bridge, trailing along behind him as he made his descent. He hit the water and disappeared. Two experienced oarsmen were waiting in a nearby boat in case of trouble. For a second, Houdini’s head bobbed above the water, and then it disappeared. Then one hand shot up from the surface of the water. It was unencumbered. Shortly after, his head and his other hand became visible. Houdini was free and he was alive. He climbed out of the water half frozen. His left hand had cramped up and was useless. The audience cheered heartily. They had seen something new in the world of entertainment—a life-and-death public spectacle.