The Secret Life of Houdini (24 page)

After that night, Houdini had become quite friendly with the Grand Duke Sergius and his wife, the duchess. They often summoned Houdini to their Palace Kleinmichel, where he never failed to astound them and their guests. On May 23, Houdini and Bess performed their Second Sight mind reading act at the palace. Dating back to the fifteenth century and newly popularized by Robert-Houdin, the Second Sight routine had been their staple. It worked on a very simple principle. Houdini had taught Bess a code that could be transmitted both by nonverbal and verbal cues. By moving his facial muscles, wiggling his ears, even changing the position of his feet, Houdini could cue information to Bess. For example, if he wanted to convey the number one, he might stand with his left foot forward of his right, for number six, he might stand with his left foot in back of his right, with his left heel raised—and other previously agreed on positions.

It was even more amazing when Bess could glean information when she was blindfolded. They did that by using a code where seemingly casual words would convey specific information, in this case a number.

By combining the words, repeating some, Houdini could transmit either numbers or specific letters of the alphabet to Bess, and when she would then repeat the correct answers, it would seem like a miracle. The duchess was so intrigued by Bess’s ability to identify objects while blindfolded that she took Houdini aside and asked him if it would be possible to transmit this knowledge to her. Houdini took the duchess to another room and gave her a quick lesson in the Second Sight code. When they returned to the guests, the duchess announced that Houdini had imparted to her the power to receive transmitted thoughts. The other royals were amazed as Houdini roamed the room and the blindfolded duchess was able to correctly identify objects that Houdini pointed to.

On another occasion, in June, the grand duke ordered the governor of Moscow’s prison to bring his most difficult handcuffs to try to defeat Houdini. Houdini was surprised when he saw that the irons were wrapped in soft leather to avoid chafing the wrists.

“Do you find Russian handcuffs very cruel, Mr. Houdini?” the duchess asked.

“In fact, I have never seen one less cruel or one more comfortable,” Houdini replied.

The duchess smiled sadly. “Won’t you tell this to the world, so they won’t think Russians so cruel.”

In some way, the duchess was most responsible for the fascination by the royal family and Czar Nicholas toward Houdini. She had taken a liking to Houdini at their first meeting and had imparted a very valuable piece of information to him. Before the end of his first performance before the royals, the duchess informed him that anyone who accepted money for their performance before the royal family was immediately relegated to a menial position. Since Houdini was more interested in prestige and maintaining an air of mystification, he took her advice and indignantly refused the grand duke’s offer of a fee. On the defensive, the grand duke implored Houdini to accept gifts as a token of their esteem. Houdini deigned to accept an antique ladle that was used by Count Kleinmichel to dispense champagne, some rings, and allowed Bess to receive a fluffy white Pomeranian that they named Charlie.

In Russia, as in Germany, many people thought that Houdini effected his escapes and rapid trunk substitutions through an innate ability to dematerialize. One Moscow newspaper went further. When Houdini gave a performance in front of a special committee at the Restaurant Yar on May 1, the reporter marveled at his supernatural abilities. “Mr. Houdini, in front of the serious committee, was able to turn into a woman, then turn into a baby, then come back to his regular appearance.” Possessing ability like that marked Houdini as a “wolshebnik” or miracle man. And there was no person in all of Russia more convinced that Houdini was a wolshebnik than Czar Nicholas himself.

For some years before Houdini’s visit, Czar Nicholas had been disproportionately influenced by the occult and by strange religious beliefs. He believed that God spoke through the mouths of idiots, and consequently, he had collected scores of these blessed “simpletons” and installed them about the palace. One of these soothsayers was a thirty-year-old woman named Matronushka Bosoposhka (Matrona, the barefooted one). She was an itinerant mentally challenged woman who always walked around Petrograd barefoot. When the czar heard that she had the power to foretell the future, he brought her to the court, where he and the czarina would spend hours listening to her prattle on about nothing, all the while ecstatic to receive her blessings. When Matronushka lost her luster, the czar replaced her with Vastil Tkatchenko, a seventy-five-year-old soothsayer. Oftentimes, the czar’s foreign policy was dictated by these outcasts.

By 1900, there was a significant faction of the royal family that had had enough of Nicholas’s foolishness. This clique, led by the czar’s uncle, the Grand Duke Vladimir, and his wife, the Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna, was bitterly opposed to what they viewed as the czar’s liberal tendencies and reforms. When Nicholas convened a disarmament conference in Hague in 1899, cosponsored by Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, the reactionary element had had enough. Maria Pavlovna had seen an exhibition of hypnotism conducted by a man named M. Philipp. Enlisting him in their cause and paying him dearly, they introduced Philipp to the czar, who was entranced by his mystic powers and personality. Their reactionary agenda was promoted by Philipp in a series of hypnotic sessions, and the resultant actions of Nicholas in harshly suppressing a student movement and violently putting down peasant revolts were attributed to Philipp’s own brand of brainwashing.

Eventually the czarina became suspicious of Philipp’s sway over her husband and Okhrana agents stationed in various parts of Europe began a full-fledged investigation into Philipp, revealing that he was a Turkish ex-convict charlatan. At first the czar dismissed these allegations, but when his own personal physician ridiculed Philipp’s production of the spirits of the czar’s two predecessors, Philipp was exiled to Paris. This is exactly when Houdini arrived in Russia.

According to an article in
The Chicago Herald
shortly after Houdini’s death, Chicago Probate Judge Henry Horner, who went on to become governor of Illinois in 1933, revealed that Houdini had informed him that he was asked to become an advisor to Czar Nicholas’s court on three separate occasions. The first time was during Houdini’s stay in Russia in 1903. Houdini’s introduction to the royal family was made by the Okhrana through the Grand Duke Sergius, whose official title was Military Governor of Moscow. Under the patronage of Sergius, who must have known that Houdini was merely a conjurer and not a holy man, Houdini’s powers so amazed the czar and his family that he was asked to replace Philipp as the czar’s close confidant. Houdini rejected his entreaty, claiming that he wanted to show his art to the entire world. Two years after Houdini left Russia, his friend the grand duke was literally decapitated by two bomb-wielding left-wing revolutionaries.

Around the same time, the czarina came under the sway of an itinerant peasant faith healer named Grigori Rasputin. Rasputin’s ability to heal young Prince Alexi, who suffered from hemophilia, gave him sway over the royal family and his influence in the court was considerable. Rasputin’s dissolute lifestyle was chronicled in almost daily secret reports by the Okhrana, but even the secret police’s chief had to marvel at Rasputin’s hypnotic powers. “His influence is so great that even the old secret agents of my department fall under his sway in a few days.”

Rasputin made many enemies, foremost among them Nicholas’s prime minister Peter Stolypin. Stolypin presented many of these secret police reports to Nicholas, but the czar was loath to remove the man who his wife held responsible for the life of the sickly prince. In September of 1911, Stolypin was assassinated by a radical who feared that Stolypin’s reforms would forestall the revolution. The opposition to Rasputin’s power grew and in 1912, Houdini was contacted by the czar’s court officials to come to Russia and depose the faker. Houdini considered making the trip, but never did.

Rasputin met a grisly fate on December 30, 1916 when he drank several glasses of poisoned wine and ate pastries laced with potassium cyanide, courtesy of a faction of the royal family. When the poison was not enough to kill him, he was shot by Prince Felix Yusupov, stabbed repeatedly, and finally drowned in the icy Neva River. Shortly after, Houdini was again contacted by the czar and asked to replace Rasputin. Houdini had had enough of the man who he deemed “as helpless as an infant.” He was pessimistic about the ability of the royal family to enact desperately needed reforms in Russia. “Any radical change would mean that too many grand dukes would lose their jobs,” Houdini quipped to the press in 1905. He was prescient. On March 15, 1917 Nicholas was forced to abdicate and on July 17, 1918 he and his family were shot by a Bolshevik firing squad and then dragged to the basement of the house they had been confined in and stabbed with bayonets.

From the collection of Dr. Bruce Averbook

The Challenge of the
Mirror

H
OUDINI CLOSELY EXAMINED THE MANACLES. HE
didn’t like what he saw.

“Ladies and gentlemen, my challenge stipulated that I could escape from regulation restraints, but I am afraid to say that these cuffs have been tampered with. The iron has been wrapped with twine, the locks have been altered, and various other expedients have been adopted to render my escape that much more difficult,” Houdini said.

Most of the audience cheered sympathetically for Houdini. A few people registered their disappointment.

“Mr. Houdini, if you would care to read your own notices, you would see that I stipulated that I would bring and use my own irons. This is precisely what I’ve done,” William Hope Hodgson, the proprietor of the Blackburn School of Physical Culture, announced dramatically. There was a smattering of cheers for the local son.

Houdini pondered the situation.

“Although Mr. Hodgson is going beyond the challenge, I am quite willing to go on with this contest provided you allow me a little extra time in which to deal with these unusual difficulties.”

Houdini was roundly cheered by the 2,500 people who had packed Blackburn, England’s new, beautiful Palace Theatre on October 24, 1902. He had performed two shows already that night, at seven and nine. Now it was a little after ten, and the audience was primed for the showdown. Hodgson, a twenty-four-year-old town resident who had studied judo and bodybuilding while serving in the merchant marines, had taken up Houdini’s standard offer of
£
25 to any challenger who could cause him to fail to escape from regulation handcuffs used by the police of Europe and America.

Hodgson and his assistant, a giant hulk of a bodybuilder, began the torturous process of fettering the escape artist. First they affixed a pair of irons over one of Houdini’s upper arms. They passed the chain behind his back and pulled it painfully tight and then pinioned his elbows closely to his sides. They repeated this procedure with another pair of cuffs on his other arm and padlocked both of them behind him, which had the effect of pulling Houdini’s arms stiffly toward his back. Then they fastened a pair of chained cuffs to his wrists and tightened them to the point where Houdini’s arms were simultaneously being pulled both backward and forward. The zeal with which the strongman assistant tackled this job led to a protest from Houdini.

“There is no stipulation in the challenge that my arms should be broken,” Houdini said, to the delight of the crowd.

“His challenge clearly says that he would iron you himself,” an audience member shouted out. “Where’s the fair play?”

A murmur of assent rose from the audience and Hodgson was compelled to dismiss his assistant. A second pair of handcuffs was fastened to Houdini’s wrists, both pairs being padlocked securely. Still the entrepreneur wasn’t finished. He helped Houdini kneel down and then he passed the chain of a pair of heavy leg irons through the chains that held Houdini’s arms together at the back. The leg irons were fastened to his ankles and then a second pair was added and they were both locked together. Houdini “looked for all the world as a trussed fowl” one newspaperman wrote. Hodgson and the committeemen, who had been drawn from the audience, then assisted Houdini to his cabinet. The curtains were drawn, the orchestra began to play “up-to-date musical selections,” and the battle commenced.