The Secret Life of Houdini (5 page)

Christmas is coming,

Turkeys are fat,

Please drop a quarter

In the messenger boy’s hat.

All day long, passersby read the message and laughed and deposited their silver into his hat. Before he got home, he hid the coins up his sleeves, behind his ears, in his shirt collar, everywhere he could find. When he walked in the door, he marched up to his mother.

“Shake me, I’m magic,” he said.

She was dubious, but she complied, and the coins cascaded down from all parts of his body. The more she shook, the more money showered down, and the better her spirits. When the coins were all counted, there was almost enough to pay the rent.

Harry Weiss, prior to becoming Houdini, was a track star and amateur boxer in New York.
Library of Congress

Harry showed the same ingenuity when he temporarily found himself unemployed. Applying for a job at Richter’s necktie company on Broadway, he saw a long line of hopefuls behind a sign that read: “Assistant Necktie Cutter Wanted.” With brash confidence, he walked up and removed the sign.

“Thank you for coming, but I regret to inform you that this position has been filled,” he said in his most officious manner.

After the applicants dispersed, Harry entered the building, sign in hand, and was immediately hired.

In New York, Harry expanded his athletic interests. Besides gymnastics, he began to box, and by the time he was seventeen, he was tough enough to compete for the 115-pound boxing championship of the Amateur Athletic Union, oftentimes a segue to a professional boxing career. Illness intervened and knocked him out of the finals, but he had already defeated the boy who would go on to win the medal. He also took up long-distance running, and when he was eighteen, he set a record for the run around Central Park. Around the same time, he defeated Sidney Thomas, an English champion, in a twenty-mile race. Thomas would later set world records for ten-, fifteen-, and twenty-mile races.

By 1890, thanks to the income from Harry and his brothers, the family was able to move to a larger apartment at 305 East Sixty-ninth Street. Harry continued to maintain an interest in magic in New York, but its practice, beyond card or coin magic, was severely limited by his lack of funds. He learned some coin effects from his brother Theo, who in turn had learned them from his boss, a photographer. In the spring of 1889, Jacob Hyman, a coworker at Richter’s, discovered their shared enthusiasm for magic, and they began to practice together. Harry’s technical knowledge was growing; his friends would be irritated at him when they would attend a magic performance and at the end of every effect, Harry would blurt out, “I know how he does that.” They challenged him to go onstage and do them himself and he did, performing card and coin effects at neighborhood venues like Schillerbund Hall and for the Literary Society of the Young Men’s Hebrew Association, where he billed himself as either “Ehrich Weiss” or “Eric the Great.”

Then he found the book that changed his life and the entire art of magic,
Memoirs of Robert-Houdin, Ambassador, Author and Conjurer, Written by Himself.

He bought the book and that evening, after dinner, sat by his bed and read the life story of the man who had elevated magic to an art form.

Harry read on late into the night, identifying with this picaresque chronicle of a life in magic. Much like Harry would, Robert-Houdin became obsessed with reading about magic, and constantly worked on coin and card manipulations, even during his meals when he’d practice with one hand while eating soup with the other. Then after jumping off a train, delirious from a bout of food poisoning, Robert-Houdin was rescued by an old conjurer named Torrini, who initiated him into the magical arts. Harry soaked in Robert-Houdin’s account of his wonderful exhibitions called the “Soirées Fantastiques” held at his own theater in Paris in 1845. Wine bottles poured any drink the audience would desire and in inexhaustible amounts. Orange trees grew and blossomed before the audience’s eyes. A small, mechanical automaton of a baker would dart inside his store to fetch actual pastries. Robert-Houdin’s son would be blindfolded yet still be able to identify objects in the possession of audience members, then, thanks to his father’s discovery of a new property of ether, a quantity of the anesthetic would be inhaled by him until he was rendered so light-headed that he could actually be suspended horizontally in midair supported by only a cane.

Then there were the accounts of the royal entertainments. Harry was particularly taken with a demonstration before King Louis Philippe and his family at his palace at St. Cloud. Robert-Houdin began by borrowing several handkerchiefs from his audience. He bundled them into a small packet and placed them on the table in front of him. He then asked the royal assemblage to write on a slip of paper a destination where they would desire these handkerchiefs to be magically transported. The king would pick three of these slips at random and then choose the final destination for the bundle. He selected the three. The first locale was under one of the candelabras on the mantelpiece, which he rejected because it was too obvious a hiding place. The second was the dome of the Invalides, which was also rejected because it was much too far away for the entire group to go. The last slip suggested that the handkerchiefs be transported into the planter of the last orange tree on the right of the road leading to the chateau.

The king picked that last option and immediately dispatched guards to secure the spot. But it was too late. Robert-Houdin took the parcel containing the handkerchiefs and placed it under a bell of opaque glass. Then, waving his wand, he implored that the parcel should go directly where the king desired. He then raised the glass bell and the package was gone, replaced by a white turtledove. Louis Philippe then ordered one of his servants to open that last planter and bring back whatever might be there. The man returned shortly with a small rusted iron coffer. The king then mockingly inquired whether the handkerchiefs were in the box. Robert-Houdin replied that not only were they in the box but also had been there for sixty years.

When asked for proof of that wild assertion, Louis-Phillipe was told to open the box using the key, which was on a string affixed to the neck of the turtledove. When the box was opened, the first thing the monarch saw was a yellowed parchment. He read it aloud:

This day, the 6th of June, 1786, this iron box, containing six handkerchiefs, was placed among the roots of an orange tree by me, Balsamo, Count of Cagliostro, to serve in performing an act of magic, which will be executed on the same day sixty years hence before Louis Philippe of Orleans and his family.

Of course, when he opened the parcel within, it contained the handkerchiefs.

Cecilia woke up the next morning to a startling sight. Harry was sitting in the same position as the previous night, with his clothes still on, lost in the pages of that book he had brought home. “My interest in conjuring and magic and my enthusiasm for Robert-Houdin came into existence simultaneously. From the moment that I began to study the art, he became my guide and hero,” he wrote later. “I accepted his writings as my text-book and my gospel…. To my unsophisticated mind, his ‘Memoirs’ gave to the profession a dignity worth attaining at the cost of earnest, life-long effort.”

Harry began amassing what eventually would become one of the greatest libraries of magic ever assembled. In that library were Robert-Houdin’s other books, where he presented his theories on the art of magic, theories that would have a great impact on Houdini. Robert-Houdin believed that a magician is not merely a juggler, or someone who does tricks. For him, a magician is an actor playing the part of a man who has supernatural powers. Further, that even though fundamentally what a performer says during his performance is a “tissue of lies,” he has to believe it himself for it to be successful. Is it a coincidence that around this time, Harry began to study acting and debate at the Edwin Forrest Amateur Dramatic Association on Columbia Street?

It was certainly no coincidence how he chose his stage name. His friend and sometime partner in amateur performances, Jacob Hyman, told Harry that adding the letter “i” to a person’s name in the French language means “like” that person. And since “I asked nothing more of life than to become in my profession ‘like Robert-Houdin,’” the transformation was complete. Ehrich Weiss was now Harry Houdini.

On April 3, 1891, he gave notice at Richter’s, but on the advice of his friend and fellow runner Joe Rinn, he got a letter from H. Richter, commending his two-and-a-half-year service, “cheerfully recommend[ing] him as an honest, industrious young man.”

Harry and Jacob Hyman joined forces at first as “The Brothers Houdini.” Their first show was in the fall of 1891, doing inexpensive magic effects (disappearing silks, appearing flowers) as well as card work and a trunk escape. The bookings were scarce. At times, Harry would play solo engagements. In the spring, Harry talked his way into a job at Huber’s Museum on Fourteenth Street. Surrounded by circus sideshow acts, he did some card magic, but more important, he met George Dexter, an Australian magician who was managing Huber’s. Dexter was what was known as an “inside talker,” and his wonderful patter was displayed through his role of master of ceremonies. Just as important for Houdini, he was a master of rope-tie escapes, and he taught Harry the rudiments of the art.

The original Brothers Houdini didn’t last. Harry and Jacob argued, and Hyman decided to dissolve the partnership. Jacob’s brother Joe filled in for the few bookings that had already been contracted. Now Harry brought his brother Theo into the act. Theo had been working for Johnson and Co. and had saved $26 at the Citizen Savings Bank on the Bowery and was only too willing to invest that princely sum into the act.

With bookings few and far between, Harry took any available work. In October of 1892, he was performing at a downtown dime museum doing twenty shows a day. The admission, which included seeing all the other acts on the bill, was five cents. That particular day, he was on the barker’s platform, pulling people into the show, when a little boy came rushing up to him.

“Hey, magician, go on home. Your father’s dying,” he yelled.

Rabbi Weiss had recently undergone an operation for cancer. He had returned home from the hospital, but his prognosis was grim. This was the news that Harry had dreaded to hear.

Dressed in his stage costume, he ran inside the building to the dressing room, threw on a robe, borrowed every penny he could to add to what change he had, and rushed out. He hailed a passing cab. The sound of the horse’s hooves on the pavement paralleled the beating of his heart. It seemed like it took forever to travel the sixty blocks. Now he was running up the five floors to his apartment, three steps to a stride.

He burst through the door and went straight to his parents’ room. His father was lying in bed, head propped up by a pillow, but his eyes were closed. He was emaciated and his skin had the pallor of impending death. Cecilia was sitting next to the bed, rocking and muttering in German. Every few seconds, she would look at her husband and start sobbing. Harry’s brothers Nat, William, Theo, and Leopold were clustered around the bed, along with his little sister, Gladys, but they all looked helpless and lost.

It was clear to Rabbi Weiss that his son Ehrich, while not the eldest, was by far the most responsible, creative, and compassionate of his brood. It was Ehrich who he would charge with the responsibility of providing for the family and becoming the head of household.

Harry went straight to his father’s side.

“Papa, Papa, it’s Ehrich,” he said.

His father slowly opened his eyes. He smiled wanly.

“My Ehrich,” he said, his voice a weak, hoarse rasp.

Ehrich leaned over and kissed him. Underneath his beard, the rabbi’s skin was cold and clammy.

A thousand thoughts cascaded through Harry’s brain. He remembered seeing his father for the first time in the United States, realizing how much he had missed him those two years. And he remembered Appleton and his parents laughing and drinking coffee in the park and watching him and his brothers playing. Then he remembered his father’s sudden dismissal and the toll it took on him. Papa never recovered from that incident, and in the eyes of the world, his father was a man out of time and place, but he knew better. No, Mayer Samuel never attained worldly goods, but he was never interested in them. He was a man of God, and he lived his life in strict accordance with the books that lined his cluttered bookshelves, filled with the sayings of the fathers. Ehrich sat for hours upon hours with his father, listening to him read the tales from the Talmud, and it was there that they both had attained a world of good. They learned about compassion and justice and charity and of the importance of doing the correct thing, even if it meant self-sacrifice. But these thoughts were eclipsed when his father leaned toward him and implored, “You must never forget your promise.”