The Secret Life of Houdini (14 page)

“He’s got wooden legs,” Detective Cudmore interjected, as he examined the magician’s muscular limbs. For the next forty-five minutes the police officers tried more handcuffs, rope, cords, whatever they could think of to bind Houdini. Every time, he’d retreat to his cabinet and emerge a free man.

None of the detectives could even come up with a theory on how Houdini was liberating himself. They were in total awe of him. Houdini laughed at their amazement and then sat down and showed them some card magic.

It fell to Rohan to give the newspaper reporters the lines that would be quoted in the next day’s accounts.

“I cannot explain how that fellow got out of those handcuffs,” Lieutenant Rohan marveled. “It was simply impossible to either pick the lock or slip them off. I would have banked my life that a prisoner bound as he was could never have regained his freedom. It is miraculous. These cuffs are the best made, and the prisoner they will not hold cannot be kept in custody by the strongest bars or the best locks. No wonder the Lima bank, with its modern and complicated locks, was robbed.”

Just a week before, a seemingly impregnable time lock on a bank in Lima, Ohio, had been compromised and $18, 170 was stolen.

“I’ll go through your time locks on your banks and open your combinations as the Lima robbers did without any trouble,” Houdini bluffed. “It is all trickery.”

Then he collected his cards, signaled to Bess, and said his good-byes to Lieutenant Rohan and the assembled reporters.

Just as Houdini was disappearing through the doorway, Rohan, as if to punctuate the story, shouted after him, “Stay away from here! We don’t want to have you locked up in this station. You’d give these coppers the cold shivers so badly that they couldn’t work.”

Leaving the precinct, Houdini knew the constant work was finally beginning to pay off. By now, he had already mastered almost all of the skills he would rely upon for the rest of his life. Through his knowledge of showmanship, he could make a mountain out of a molehill. He understood a great deal about mental misdirection—how to plant ideas, how to get an audience to think what—not just look where—he wanted. Although he would never rate with the top handful of masters, his sleight of hand was well practiced. He knew the fundamentals of locks, and building upon that base, he would become the master. He understood what it meant to be in the public eye, to tell a good story, and to get the newsmen to write an even better one—and most important, to get them to love him. He not only comprehended the methods of the fraudulent mediums, he knew why they worked, the psychology of what the sitter was there to see. Houdini had learned a great lesson from the Spiritualists—his escape had to be perceived as real. Not in the supernatural sense, but in the sense that he was always capable, at all times, of escaping from anything. Every act he’d ever crossed paths with had rubbed off on him. He did backflips he’d learned from his friend Jim Bard and watched Evatima Tardo so closely, he knew she would only let the snakes bite after her stomach was full of milk and nothing but milk. He’d graduated magna cum laude from the university of deception. He had the tools, and he knew it.

Now the sun, the moon, and the stars came into alignment. For the only time in the history of the United States, a magician ran the Secret Service. This same magician understood that special tasks took special people. The next morning, after his early morning coffee run, Houdini burst into his hotel room, waving the papers. He was holding a copy of
The Chicago Journal
and there, on the front page, under a headline of “Amazes the Detectives” was a large, splendid drawing of Houdini. He woke Bess up.

“Bess! Bess! I’m famous! Look at my picture in the papers!”

Library of Congress

T
HEY’RE PLUGGED! THE SON OF A
bitch plugged these cuffs
.
What am I going to do? There’s no way I can get out unless I saw these off.

Houdini’s mind raced. He couldn’t comprehend how things could have gone so wrong. He had been packing the audiences into the Clark Street Museum in Chicago since his much-heralded escape from Rohan’s handcuffs at the central station. All week long various police officers had come by, handcuffs in tow, to challenge him and to pick up the $50 reward that Houdini offered if he couldn’t free himself from the restraints. Of course, no one left with any cash.

So Houdini didn’t have second thoughts as a Sergeant Waldron slipped his cuffs around the magician’s wrists and clicked them shut, but as soon as he retreated into his curtained-off cabinet, he knew that something was dreadfully wrong.

Maybe I should just go out and denounce him. No, it’s probably better to wait. If I’m lucky, most of the audience will be gone. I just hope there are no reporters around. They’d write that it was my Waterloo.

Outside, Waldron waited patiently. The audience didn’t share his equanimity.

“What’s the matter, Houdini? You forgot your key?” someone shouted. The crowd laughed. After a half hour, the chuckles had turned to jeers. When Houdini finally emerged from his cabinet a full hour later, he had managed to get only one cuff off. It hardly mattered by then; the only people left were Waldron and Bess, who was bitterly weeping.

“So, do you give up, Houdini?” the sergeant asked.

“No,” Houdini spat. “But you rigged these cuffs. They’re impossible to get out of.”

The policeman laughed. “You got me there. You can work on these till kingdom come and you won’t get ’em open. I fixed a slug in it so it won’t unlock.”

Houdini was furious. He was even angrier after he had to saw through the metal to get the cuff off. That whole night, he replayed the humiliation over and over in his mind. And he vowed that never again would he accept a handcuff from a challenger without making them open the lock to prove that they were in working order. Not that it would matter. Not that he had a career left.

“Well, Bess, I’m done for. The whole world will know that I failed to get out of a cuff. We may as well quit,” Houdini said, pacing their rented room. “I’ll take that job your brother-in-law offered to get me at the Yale Lock factory.”

His words had a hollow ring. This turn of events was inconceivable. Just a week earlier, Houdini had worked out a quid pro quo with Rohan. The arrangement had even been spelled out in
The National Detective Police Review
, billed as “American’s Only Detective and Police Newspaper.” Houdini would give the police the “benefit of his skill.” In return, the police were supposed to boost his career, not destroy it.

The next day a glum Houdini went back to the museum to pick up his props.

“Well, two minutes late, are we?” Manager Hedges observed.

“You mean I’m still working here? After I had to be sawed loose from those cuffs?” Houdini said.

“Didn’t you get out of that cuff? That’s the first I knew about it,” Hedges said.

“I couldn’t. They were plugged,” Houdini said.

“Well if they were fixed, what’s the difference?” Hedges said. “Now get up on that platform and go to work.”

Back to work he went. Waldron’s “exposure” of Houdini received virtually no publicity, about a column inch in
The Chicago Journal
. Even then the paper took Houdini’s side, noting that “they were not practicable handcuffs at all, having no lock whatever,” and that “the affair was simply a joke on the part of the officer.”

From this point on, for the next year and a half, Houdini would traverse the country with a set game plan to establish his name. He would arrive in town and immediately arrange a visit to the local precinct. A large number of police officers and brass (and press, of course) would marvel as he escaped from any restraint the police would throw at him. The police chief would then comment, as if reading from a script, that he hoped it would never be his misfortune to have a prisoner like Houdini, and that the magician had helped the police improve their security for the future. Houdini would then get a commendation letter signed by the officers and patrolmen in attendance, and it would go into his burgeoning scrapbook.

The point man for this arrangement was Lieutenant Andy Rohan in Chicago. In return for boosting Houdini, the police received tangible benefits. His expertise in the mechanics of police restraints was second to none. He began to expose cardsharping techniques, writing bylined newspaper articles exposing mechanical devices that literally secreted cards up the sleeves of the crooked card player, and spending hours demonstrating for reporters the secrets behind the three-card monte hustle. After revealing their techniques, Houdini sounded like a public service announcement: “All of which should warn an amateur not to wager money on cards when they are manipulated…A clever man can do everything but make them talk.”

His prowess at card cheating sometimes reaped unwanted dividends, as it had a few years earlier in Coffeeville, Kansas, with the Dr. Hill medicine show. One night after his performance, he had been approached by two gamblers to break into the rear door of a gambling house after it had closed for the night. They didn’t want to steal anything, they just wanted to fix some decks of cards and clean up the next day. They offered Houdini $100 for the job. “Morally, I had no compunctions. It is dog eat dog with gamblers, and the hundred looked good to me,” Houdini wrote. “But so did life—and I knew that if we got caught I’d be strung up for my pains. I declined with thanks.”

The gamblers wouldn’t take no for an answer. Houdini had gone back to his hotel and had fallen asleep, when he was roused to go to the local telegram office to pick up an urgent message from New York. It was just a ruse. On the way to the office, he felt the cold sensation of a gun muzzle right behind his ear. The gamblers marched him to the opera house, where he got his “pickers,” and right to the back door of that gambling joint. As soon as he picked the lock, he jerked the door open, knocking down the two ruffians in the process. He dashed inside, locked the door behind him, and waited for the men to leave. He didn’t figure on one of the gamblers spying him through the grating of the cellar window and firing off a shot. Houdini had raised his hand to shield himself. To the end of his days, Houdini carried that bullet in his hand.

Houdini and Bess had just settled into their hotel in St. Paul, Minnesota, when the magician read the newspaper reports. A handcuffed criminal had escaped from the police, who were now combing the city in an attempt to find him. Then, oddly enough, over the next few days, every time that he left his room, whether it was to go dine or to travel to the Palm Garden, where he was performing, Houdini noticed that the doors to the two rooms that were directly adjacent to his also opened, and each time, the same two men walked into the corridor at precisely the same time he had.

X-ray showing the bullet in Houdini’s hand.
From the collection of Kevin Connolly

One afternoon at about three-thirty, Houdini heard a scuffle in the hallway outside his room. He stepped outside to investigate, and he saw his two mysterious neighbors fighting with a man who was wearing a long opera cloak. The two men finally managed to subdue their lone victim. And then he saw that underneath that long cloak, the man’s hands were handcuffed.

“It’s all right, Houdini,” one of the detectives said. “We knew he’d come to you.” They were so confident, they hadn’t even bothered to inform the magician that he was being used as bait.

An escaped con with a hankering to shed his bracelets wasn’t the only big fish that Houdini reeled in during that engagement in St. Paul. One night a party of theater managers came to see his show. One of them was Martin Beck, the powerful impresario who ran the Orpheum vaudeville circuit, which had a virtual monopoly on all the good theaters in the Midwest and on the West Coast. Beck, who was based in Chicago, had probably read about Houdini’s escape from Rohan’s cuffs. Now he wanted to see the magician do it firsthand. He returned the next night with three sets of cuffs that he’d purchased. Houdini defeated them all.