The Secret Life of Houdini (50 page)

Houdini loved children and animals.
Library of Congress

After his mother’s death, Houdini would often wake in the middle of the night and say out loud, “Mama, are you here?” When he didn’t get a response, he would morosely fall back down to bed and sigh with disappointment. On Christmas Day, 1913, Houdini, now in London, sent Hardeen a revelatory letter. “Just a Christmas letter on this day, which finds me with a heavy heart and a soul of pain. But must drop you a letter as I am alone and hope you have had a happy time in the midst of your family and trust the future will brighten up and may the Almighty permit you to bring up your children so that you may be proud of them. I pray that they will respect, honor, and obey their parents. Can’t wish you anything better, for as our Angel Mother used to say, ‘
Kinder machen die altern stolz und Meiner Kinden sind meiner ganzer leben
’ [Children make their parents proud and my children are my whole life.] Tis true God has seen fit not to Bless Bess and myself with children even though Ma prayed for it, but perhaps tis best so after all. I am very unhappy Dash at the present time of my life.” Houdini’s mother’s death had two profound effects on him. It crystallized a deep sense of guilt that he felt in leaving her frequently for such long stretches. That sense was memorialized in a short story he wrote about a strong man who neglects his pledge to his father to care for his mother and leaves her alone when he’s seduced away from her by men who tempt him with a sweet-tasting drink (money and success). Her death also released him from his oath. He had honored it to the letter and now he was beholden only to himself and his legacy.

Houdini may very well have felt that he had gained the world but lost his soul. His mother (and his entire family) had suffered no want, but at what price? Houdini’s rootless, nomadic existence may have been romantic when he and Bess were two young people traversing the globe, trying to make an honest million, but as he neared forty, the death of his mother seemed to have prompted a reassessment of what was really valuable to him.

Houdini opened his show by proving to the audience that he had coins that were so obedient, they would mysteriously travel through the air faster than the eye could discern and arrange themselves inside an empty crystal cash box that was suspended by two ribbons over the stage. First, he opened the box and let the audience see that there were no coins inside. To demonstrate that conclusively, he hooked the box onto the two ribbons and then dramatically swung the box. There was no sound of coins rattling to be heard.

Then the mysteriarch strode across the stage. He turned back toward the box, which was still describing an arc across the stage. He picked up a handful of coins and, one by one, made a tossing motion in the direction of the box. The coins seemed to magically vanish into thin air, and then, one by one, they mysteriously began to rattle inside the swinging box. When they were all released, the magician walked back to the box, stopped its motion, opened the lid, and removed the same coins.

The Crystal Cash Box was an old effect that had been created by the great French magician Robert-Houdin. What was startling about its presentation this night was that the magician who was producing the coins in the small crystal box was much more likely to be escaping out of a giant crystal box. Houdini, the world-famous self-liberator, had transformed himself into Houdini, the self-described Supreme Ruler of Mystery.

It wouldn’t be fair to suggest that his mother’s death had impacted Houdini’s shift in magic aesthetics, as if performing illusions on stage was some form of comfort food for a bereaved soul. Houdini had been planning to mount an all-magic show for a year before her death, and he had been quietly buying up new and old apparatus from magicians and dealers in England and France, including the Palingenesia from the show of Dr. Lynn, the illusion that entranced him as a child in Milwaukee. If anything, his mother’s death had postponed his efforts in that direction. Back in November of 1913, Houdini wrote Goldston, whose wife, Leah Laurie, had sold him an expanding die effect created by the stunningly brilliant French magician Bautier De Kolta. “Re the big show, if I can get my mind on work, it may take place, but I am afraid the material I have on hand is not quite what I would like. Since July 17th I have not had my mind to myself…. Can’t even start in to think of a program and am simply trying to occupy my mind.”

By his birthday the following year, his mind had settled enough to have conceptualized his Grand Magical Revue. He tried it out first in the English provinces in April and later in June, alternating it during a week’s engagement with his usual turn of Needles and the Water Torture Cell escape. The show opened with the Robert-Houdin Crystal Cash Box, a interesting choice considering he had attacked the French magician so unmercifully in his
Unmasking
book. One critic suggested that Houdini buying a replica of a Robert-Houdin illusion was akin to “a primitive hunter gorging on his slain wolf to ingest its power.” Good-Bye Winter and Hello Summer were two effects that Houdini had purchased from the English magician Charles Morritt. In Winter Houdini vanished a “living, breathing human being in mid-air.” During Summer, a beautiful “Fairy Queen Gardener” was produced from a pyramid-shaped box.

A more startling production occurred during the presentation of De Kolta’s Marvelous Cube. A small valise was brought onstage, and Houdini told the audience that it contained a young lady. He reached into the case and pulled out a black die, eight inches square. The die was placed on top of a low table and when Houdini stepped back, it began to mysteriously swell. By the time the motion had ceased, the die had grown to a cubic yard, and when Houdini lifted the now giant cube off the table, a young lady appeared, sitting cross-legged.

Houdini closed the show with his Metamorphosis, putting Bess into service for the first time since Sydney, Australia. “Bess working as though she never retired,” he wrote in his diary. A few weeks later, after another presentation of the Magical Revue, he wrote, “Best show I ever presented. Bess works magnificently.” According to Houdini the critics agreed with his assessment of the revue. “Said by all the great English critics to be the best mystery show ever presented,” he annotated an ad for the show in one of his scrapbooks. Unfortunately, the theater managers (and, presumably, some of the audiences) didn’t agree. They preferred the ex–Handcuff King and present Self-Liberator. Undaunted, Houdini packed up his illusions and put them into storage. “If the English want escapes, they can have them,” he told Goldston. “But I’m determined to give a good magical show before I die.”

He began plotting that show almost immediately. With no more responsibilities to his mother, Houdini felt free to mount a world tour. He would return to the United States for his Hammerstein engagements that summer, but by January 1915 he planned to travel back to the continent, perform across Europe, return to Russia, and then take the Trans-Siberian Railroad into Japan. There his party would tour the interior of Japan and China using a specially designed huge car that could be opened to six times its own length and seat five hundred people around its stage. The idea of barnstorming around the countryside in a special van that could be opened at will to accommodate a large audience was not new. In fact, Houdini first learned of the idea back in New York as a boy when he read
The Memoirs of Robert-Houdin
.

When Houdini had added the amazing galvanized milk can to his show in 1908, he brought the real risk of death to the stage. It worked as high drama, even if it was his prop, his invention. By 1911, he turned his own can into a challenge vessel by inviting local dairies and breweries to fill the can with their liquid.

In early 1914, after he had been performing his Water Torture Cell, another death-defying effect of his own invention, Houdini took the challenge concept to a new and unprecedented level when he escaped from a barrel that had been built by a man in Bradford, England. Houdini had escaped from empty barrels before, but this one was different. It was filled with water. He had two minutes to figure his way out or die a drowning death.

What the audience didn’t know was that the challenge had been pre-arranged on a cold January evening when Houdini paid a visit to the home of a fellow escape artist named Carleete. Needing something special to pack the house, he was shown a barrel that Carleete had been using as a prop in his own show. Without even trying it out, Houdini negotiated a sum for its use and had Carleete come to the theater and challenge him under his real name, Howes. The escape went over wonderfully, and Houdini returned the barrel the next day, but a new challenge had been born. Over the next few years, Houdini repeated this barrel or cask escape, sometimes letting local brewers fill it with their beer.

Houdini kept pushing the envelope with his challenges. In 1917, he challenged the Atlantic City police department to chain and cuff him before he jumped off a pier into the Atlantic Ocean. When Houdini and his brother did most of their manacled leaps into bodies of water, they used special handcuffs called “bridge jumpers.” Hardeen later quipped that keeping the cuffs on until he hit the water was the hardest part of the bridge jumps. Unless Houdini had friends in the Atlantic City police department who used gaffed cuffs, his 1917 jump was singularly risky.

The next year, he took the death-defying challenge one step further. On April 18, 1918, Houdini was challenged by the expert packers of the American Chicle Co. Claiming that they didn’t “trust” the box that Houdini was using to do his underwater packing case escape at the Hippodrome, they challenged him to allow them to pack him into a “special extra-heavy export case” that had been drilled full of holes, secure it with screws, nails and iron bands, and then throw him into the huge pool at the theater. Needless to say, Houdini lived.

All of these years of challenges created the cumulative effect that became the myth of the superman. Houdini could get out of anything, he could defeat any defi thrown at him. He was more than a man, he was a superman. Every member of his audience both rooted for him and basked in his reflected glory. He was greater than us but, in the end, he was one of us.

By 1914, Houdini was as famous as any man on the planet. That June, when he played the Nottingham Empire, after his second show, he could have dined with any local celebrity, aristocrat, or business mogul of his choice. Instead, he hired a car and traveled forty grueling miles to Sheffield. He was going to see a teenager who still lived with his mother.

After they dined, Randolph Douglas led his mother and Houdini to the attic of the small house. Once there, Randolph asked Houdini to strap him into a straitjacket. Thinking he was going to see the young man emulate his hero, Houdini played along. What Douglas did next would change the course of magic’s history. He had his mother tie his feet with a long rope and had her thread it through a block and tackle hung from the wall of the A-frame. With Houdini’s assistance, the two of them pulled and pulled until Randolph had been hoisted off the attic floor and was suspended from the roof. And then, hanging upside side, Douglas escaped from the straitjacket in front of his audience of two.

Houdini went forty miles out of his way that night because the world of magic is a strict meritocracy. Money, prestige, titles, pretensions count for nothing in the face of raw talent. Unlike the Masons, a secret handshake doesn’t open doors in this world, but the perfect mastery of a difficult sleight commands immediate respect. The world of magic is made up of all strata of society: doctors, lawyers, professors, firemen, garbagemen, accountants, janitors, prison guards, intelligence officers, and the lowest-level government employees. Once gathered behind closed doors, the job descriptions, net worths, and titles disappear. Nothing can be faked in a world where a premium is placed on the execution of perfect deception.

The evening’s concert entertainment, a joint benefit for the German Sailors Home and the Magicians Club of London, had begun with some Puccini. As the passengers settled back into the comfortable, plush chairs in the Grand Salon of the S.S.
Imperator
, the Ritz Carlton Orchestra played some selections from
La Bohème
and then Madame A. Cortesao joined them and sang a magnificent aria from
Madame Butterfly
. Now it was time for Houdini.

He began his presentation with some simple close-up magic, producing and then changing the colors of silk handkerchiefs, even turning water into wine. While he was doing some card flourishes, he noticed that the walrus-mustachioed bespectacled man who was sitting next to Victor Herbert, the famous composer, was watching him like a hawk. Houdini was convinced that the man had seen through all his misdirection, and it would be extremely difficult to baffle him. Until the slates.

“La-dies and gen-tle-men. I am sure that many among you have had experiences with mediums who have been able to facilitate the answering of your personal questions by departed spirits, these answers being mysteriously produced on slates. As we all know, mediums do their work in the darkened séance room, but tonight, for the first time anywhere, I propose to conduct a spiritualistic slate test in the full glare of the light.”