The Secret Life of Houdini (37 page)

Montraville M. Wood strikes an elegant pose.
University of Iowa

That Houdini’s debut of the Milk Can escape is tied to St. Louis Theater manager Tate’s dismissal of his drawing power is evident from his diary. The next day after he was berated, he began testing his underwater endurance. Upset that he could only hold his breath for two minutes, he began a running regimen to strengthen his lungs. Two days later, he started practicing in the actual can, finding that it took twenty-two pails of water to fill it and seven more pails to refill the water displaced when he entered the container.

Houdini before immersion.
From the collection of Roger Dreyer

Satisfied that the effect looked “very good,” Houdini debuted it on January 25, 1908. Even though he invited the St. Louis press to be present for the new escape, no one bothered to show up. They missed a great display of showmanship. Before beginning the performance, Houdini invited a committee onstage to carefully examine the airtight galvanized-iron can. Once the committee was satisfied that the can was legitimate, Houdini’s assistants began filling it with pails of water, while the magician left the stage to change into a bathing suit. When he returned, he announced that “deprived of life-sustaining air,” a man can only survive a short time underwater. Yet he would first demonstrate his ability to stay underwater for longer durations than most mortals by doing a one-minute test. An assistant brought out “the world’s largest stop watch,” to time the immersion. Houdini invited the audience to test its own ability to hold its breath, beginning the moment that his head disappeared under the water line of the can.

Houdini then stepped into the can feetfirst and slithered his way through the narrow opening into the can. Water splashed over the sides. The audience gasped, as if Houdini had already performed something wonderful. With Houdini’s head still visible, his assistants refilled the tank up to the brim. Houdini waved and then submerged himself. As he disappeared from view, the entire audience began to hold its breath. The auditorium was completely silent. After thirty seconds, most of the crowd was gasping for air. At the end of a minute, one of the assistants would kick the can, a signal for Houdini to reemerge, looking none the worse for wear. The audience gave him an ovation.

Inside the can.
Library of Congress

Now the real work began. He crouched back down into the can and additional water was used to fill it. Then the lid of the can was quickly secured by six padlocks, and the cabinet was put in place. The orchestra broke into a popular song, and many in the audience mouthed the lyrics: “Many brave hearts lie asleep in the deep. Sailor, beware; sailor, take care.”

The giant stopwatch chronicled the passing of the seconds. After it reached ninety, a worried Franz Kukol appeared carrying a fire ax. He briskly walked to the enclosure and put his ear to the cloth. His hand tensed around the ax handle. By two minutes, the tension in the theater was almost unbearable. When the watch had ticked off three minutes, there were cries of concern in the crowd. Kukol raised the ax and was about to throw the curtain open and attack the metal, when suddenly a dripping-wet Houdini threw open the curtain and basked in the sheer adulation of the crowd. In the background, the assistants drained the tank of its contents, showing the audience that the water had indeed remained inside the can.

Houdini’s water can escape was so stunning that it refreshed the debate over his methods. There were even some Spiritualists maintaining that Houdini succeeded through some miraculous psychic power. He seemed willing to blur the line. If an interviewer didn’t broach the subject, Houdini would often gratuitously inject the word “supernatural” for him. Of course he would also invariably deny such powers, but it’s possible that he was using the word to plant the suggestion that this was indeed a possibility. Being the master showman that he was, he understood that if you mention something and then deny it, the denial is often overlooked or forgotten. When one is asked to forget something specific, it’s this very thing that stands out in the mind and therefore the most difficult to forget.

When he allowed his name and image to be used in an advertisement in a Providence newspaper in 1907, the artist created an image of Houdini dematerializing and escaping in a shroud of smoke from a packing case. One might assume he would have objected and refused to let the image be printed but, to the contrary, he kept this image of himself as a supernatural being and used it for years to come in his own advertising. That same year, Boston audiences marveled at his escape from a thin, fragile paper bag. How could he make his way out leaving the bag, the cord, and the knots that sealed the neck of the bag intact? This was fundamentally different than the majority of his other escapes. It was not imprisonment; anyone could escape, but not without destroying the paper bag or envelope. Clearly keys or picks would be no help; he had another secret. In 1914, Houdini used the phrase “a feat which borders on the supernatural” in advertising another of his miraculous escapes. Later, he went so far as to supply various prepackaged stories that papers could run verbatim, using their own byline. More than one proclaims that “he is credited with the power of dematerialization. But he maintains a mysterious silence.” From his earliest days, Houdini knew he would be dogged with questions about how he effected his escapes. In response, he created a brilliant strategy where he would deny that he had supernatural powers but suggest that he had one secret that explained everything he did. The master, of course, didn’t have one secret; he had hundreds. When he claimed one thing could explain all his powers, it made him even more intriguing and mysterious.

An alternative explanation for Houdini’s escape.
From the collection of George and Sandy Daily

Houdini was thrilled with the reception of his new escape. “The new Can trick is the best that I have ever invented…. It’s a fine-looking trick, and almost defies detection,” he told Waitt. Both in the United States and later in Europe, audiences were mystified by his escape, but for as long as he performed it, Houdini could never come up with a catchy name for the effect. By May, Houdini was so desperate he advertised a reward of $25 to anyone who could suggest a proper name for “this mystery.” With entries like “The Genii of the Can” and “The Ali Baba Can of Mystery,” the reward money went unclaimed.

Climbing past the first story was fairly easy. The bricks were large, and he could get a good grip on the mortar between each stone. Once Houdini was twenty feet in the air, his task got a little more difficult. The balcony railing helped. He hoisted himself up to it and took a break. On the street below him, some bewildered passersby paused to peer at him, but others didn’t even break their stride. While climbing up the sides of buildings using only hands and feet wasn’t an everyday occurrence, there were enough “human flies” around that the average jaded New Yorker might not even notice one. That is until they fell off the building and splattered on the ground, which was the fate of Harry F. Young, “The Human Fly,” who fell twenty stories from the edifice of the Hotel Martinique to his death in 1925. Then again, Houdini wasn’t one to dwell on the danger. What was occupying his mind was the task at hand.

When he was about four feet from the third story, Bess stuck her head out of the window and, when she saw him, screamed. She was a bundle of nerves for the next few seconds until he had safely climbed through the window and presented her with the red roses he had carried in his teeth, roses that marked their fourteenth wedding anniversary.

It’s a telling story, an exquisitely accurate representation of their relationship. Houdini the adventurous, romantic, swashbuckling daredevil. Bess the anxious, fragile worrywart. By June of 1908, they had spent fourteen years together and there was still a spark between them that could inspire such extravagant gestures. Or perhaps it speaks more to Houdini’s inability to relinquish center stage. At any rate, it had not been a good year for Bess. She had been spending less time on the road with Houdini, due to a variety of illnesses, which usually got diagnosed as nervous exhaustion. Touring had taken its toll on her, and with the introduction of the water can escape, the Metamorphosis had faded from the act. Now her time was spent in making sure that Harry remembered to change his underwear.

In March, Bess was still sick. “Mrs. Has not been well of late, and she needs a rest,” Houdini wrote Waitt. By the middle of April, a friend inquired whether Bess had recovered enough to be back on the road with Harry. Life on the road was never easy with Bess. She had long-standing superstitions that were abnormal even by eccentric performers’ standards. If she learned that someone had whistled in a dressing room, no matter how many years had elapsed since that event, she would never enter that room, convinced that it was still under an evil spell. You could never find her wearing anything yellow. After Houdini had a hard time with an escape in Burnley, England, in 1902, Bess stormed into her dressing room and pulled off a pair of new yellow tights that she had worn for the first time. Enraged, she ripped the tights to shreds, convinced that they had hoodooed her husband.

Although Houdini seemed almost browbeaten by Bess’s wild mood swings in some of his surviving notes to her, his personality certainly exacerbated some of her difficulties. At the end of 1909, Houdini’s close friend Roterberg candidly wrote, “You refer to the fact that Bess is in much better health. You can always do her health good by bothering her as little as possible. Don’t come in like a whirlwind and tear off a lot of talk, but take it easy when you speak to her. She is a bundle of nerves and not strong at that. Anytime that anything gets on her nerves, she does herslef [sic] a certain lot of harm. In other words be as restful as pssible [sic] while with her and you will do her a world of good. If after that you fell [sic] like going out and tearing around in your usual fashion[,] all well and good as long as she is not implicated. Seee [sic] my point?”

For the rest of the spring 1908 season, Houdini toured the United States doing his water can and straitjacket escapes and throwing in a local challenge or two to help drum up business. One of the challenges he accepted was from the Weed Tire Company, which was anxious to promote its new snow chains for auto tires. On a New York stage in April, Houdini allowed the Weed representatives to enmesh him in a series of Weed chains, looping the chains around his head, legs, and arms and then locking them together. He was then bound and chained into two steel-rimmed auto tires. Several minutes into his escape, Houdini cried for help. When Kukol drew back the curtain of Houdini’s cabinet, he found that Houdini had turned blue from the tight chain that was cutting into his throat. The chains were moved down and Houdini finally released himself, but he was so drained that he couldn’t deliver his customary victory speech, and he “reeled” off the stage assisted by Franz.

Houdini laid off that summer (and even induced Bess to venture into the ocean for a swim for the first time since 1894), but he certainly kept busy. He was still publishing his monthly magazine and preparing his Robert-Houdin book for publication, but he was also butting heads with the editor of the largest magic magazine and making preparations to seize the leadership of the most important magical society in the world. Houdini’s vicious feud with Dr. A. M. Wilson, the former magician-turned-minister-turned-MD, began when Wilson ran a small item by Midwestern magician Harry Helms that claimed that the Western Vaudeville Association had recently changed their policy and was now relegating all handcuff acts to their dime houses.