The Secret Life of Houdini (29 page)

In June, while Houdini was performing at the Gaiety Theatre in Leith, Houdini actually rented a storefront next door to Moss’s Empire Music Hall, where Hilbert was doing his Houdini exposé. He sent his assistant, Franz Kukol, and a man named Vickery, who would later be hired as an assistant, and had them pose as magicians and give a performance every half hour exposing the exposers of the handcuff act.

The broadside advertising an exposure of Houdini’s imitators, demonstrated by two of Houdini’s assistants.
From the collection of Ricky Jay

“I’ll wager that if you throw a stone in the air it will fall down and hit some one who has a handcuff key in his pocket and a ‘Handcuff King’ idea in his head,” Houdini wrote in his
Dramatic Mirror
column in June 1905. It was the debasement of the art form that Houdini had created that was feeding his more and more frequent talk about retiring. Sure, he had conquered England and Europe, smashing all box office records, making a name for himself, earning record salaries, but it was a Pyrrhic victory. Being king of a court of would-be handcuff artists who hounded and disrespected him at every turn wasn’t noble at all.

Houdini also had an acute sense of the illusionary nature and impermanence of fame. The previous December he had been walking the streets of Liverpool when he came upon a pawnshop. A large American eagle perched on top of a medal caught his eye. Inquiring inside, he found that the item had been a once-celebrated medal, worth about $3,500, that had been given to a famous minstrel singer in the 1870s. The medal bore the inscription: “Presented to Sam Hague by a few friends that know him. St. James Hall, Liverpool. May 20, 1875.” While he was alive, Hague would never part with his cherished trophy, but after he had been dead a few years, his widow, in need of money, was forced to hock it. “Seeing this medal in the window brought back to my mind the medals that are pawned in New York with a well-known ‘uncle’ in the Bowery, who displays with pride presentation cups, loving chains and championship prizes of all sorts,” Houdini wrote. “Many a time have I walked to this place and looked at the silent remembrances of past favorites, and never have I forgotten that fact that ‘life is but an empty dream.’”

Houdini’s last night in Leith was on July 8. He planned to sail for America on the 20th, work for six weeks that summer, then return to Europe for a final tour before he would quit show business. His fans had other ideas. On the last night of Houdini’s engagement, the audience called upon him to make a speech. When he had concluded, they all stood and gave him three cheers. And later, when he appeared to make his way to the railroad station to travel to Southampton, where he would catch the
Kronprinz Wilhelm
and steam across the ocean, a waiting crowd hoisted him to their shoulders and carried him to the station on a run, the whole time singing, “And when you go, will you no come back?” In 1902, on his first trip back to the United States from England, when he spied New York Harbor in the distance he broke down and wept, morose that his father wasn’t alive to see his success. Now, three years later, he wept again at this touching send-off from his fans.

From the collection of Dr. Bruce Averbook

M
Y NEXT EXPERIMENT WILL CONCLUSIVELY DEMONSTRATE
that the mind is the force that moves the world,” Houdini said, looking out at the seventy-odd men in the smoking room of the Boston Athletic Association. He reached into his jacket pocket and brought out a handful of sewing needles.

“I will need exactly twenty-seven volunteers for this test,” Houdini said, and the men laughed. That was the last time they would laugh that evening.

“Before I perform the famous Hindoo Needle trick, I want to show you the amazing powers of the human mind. I assume that everyone is in agreement that these needles are sharp. Would anyone care to volunteer to test this truism?”

No arms were raised.

“I guess I’ll have to experiment upon myself,” he shrugged. Then he held one of the needles aloft and sharply thrust it through his cheek. A collective shudder went through the room.

“I would especially like my doctor friends in the audience to take note that the needle has completely pierced my cheek and yet there is no evidence of blood or trauma. It is because I have learned a technique from the Hindoos that conquers pain and allows the mind to control various bodily functions such as bleeding. Now I will need those volunteers.”

A few arms were slowly raised. Houdini motioned them to the front of the room.

“I have twenty-six more needles. You will each get a needle, and you may place it anywhere you wish in my head, except for my eyes. My powers are not that great yet,” Houdini said. He handed a needle to the first volunteer, who took it and punctured his other cheek. One by one, the men slowly shuffled up to the magician, obtained their pin, and thrust it into the soft flesh of Houdini’s face. The cheeks were the first obvious choice but as the line progressed, men thrust their needles into Houdini’s neck, forehead, ears, and lips. The last volunteers actually used Houdini’s nose as a pincushion. And amazingly enough, there was not a trace of blood visible from the multiple puncture wounds.

Finally they were done. Houdini stood in front of the men in silence, his once-handsome face a grotesque mask of small steel quivers. And when he began to speak again, the effect was positively macabre, the needles quivering with each syllable uttered.

“I think it’s time for dessert,” he said, and he slowly began to pluck the needles out of his face, one by one, and dramatically chewed them. The audience could hear the grinding of the metal before he swallowed them. Then he swallowed a long section of thread. When he was finished, he took a drink from a glass of water that was on the lectern.

“Can I impose upon one of my doctor friends to come up and assure you that I have swallowed my metallic repast?”

An elderly medical man walked to the front and peered into Houdini’s open mouth.

“I can detect no trace of the needles,” he said.

“Gentlemen, a needle must be threaded. Please draw the thread,” he said to the doctor.

“Where is it?” the doctor wondered.

“In my mouth,” Houdini said, and he opened his mouth. The doctor peered into his mouth again and found the thread. He slowly began to draw it out of Houdini’s mouth, and to everyone’s utter astonishment, after every twelve inches there was one of the needles that had been stuck into Houdini’s face, perfectly threaded. By the time he finished pulling the thread and the needles out of the magician’s mouth, the thread was twenty-seven feet long.

Houdini bowed, but the audience was too shocked to even applaud. They had just witnessed something that they would never forget.

When Houdini returned to America in 1905, it was almost as if he had to start all over. It had been five years since he had performed in the country, and though he had gained good name recognition in places like Boston and Chicago, he was still a relatively unknown commodity in his hometown. And what’s worse, he found that America, just like Europe, was teeming with his parasitic imitators.

Houdini and his brother Doctor Leopold Weiss.
From the collection of Dr. Bruce Averbook

While still in England he had opened up a second front of his war against his rivals. In 1903, he dispatched “Doc,” his brother Leopold Weiss, to Massachusetts to confront his old partner Jacob Hyman, who was then performing in Boston under the name of Houdini. Weiss brought along one of his brother’s “defeater” handcuffs and an attorney named Louis Spiegel to dissuade Hyman from continuing to use the Houdini name. Their feud was short-lived, and they went on to reestablish their friendship.

One of Houdini’s rivals was a man named Cunning. In May of 1905, Houdini sent another brother, William Weiss, to Hurtig & Seamon’s Music Hall on 125th Street in Manhattan to confront Cunning. When members of the audience were asked to come up onstage with their challenge handcuffs, William was one of seven to respond. After all seven handcuffs were affixed to Cunning, he retreated into a steel cage, over which a curtain was lowered. He remained in the cage for an inordinately long amount of time, and the audience began to get restless.

“He’s not under there. Drag him out!” the audience yelled.

Cunning finally emerged. Only one arm was free.

“I want my handcuffs back,” screamed William, but Cunning ignored him and began to walk offstage. The big curtain was lowered and Houdini’s brother tried to jump under it, but a stagehand blocked his way. Then he ran around the end of the curtain and got on stage, but he was thrown off the stage and deposited in the lobby by some stagehands. A portion of the audience came to his defense and began hitting the stagehands with their umbrellas, but Weiss was ultimately arrested and charged with disorderly conduct, a charge later dismissed, although he did have to spend the night in jail.

Houdini’s fall 1905 season unofficially opened on September 11, when he and Hardeen sat down in their seats at the Hyde & Behman’s Theater in Brooklyn and waited for Cunning to take the stage.

As soon as the ersatz handcuff king asked for volunteers from the audience with regulation cuffs, Hardeen bounded up onstage, along with five other men. Cunning allowed the other five to place their cuffs on him, but he looked at Hardeen and his “regulation” cuffs and waved him back to his seat. That was Hardeen’s opening. He rushed to center stage.

“Here is a pair of handcuffs that came from the Adams Street police station that Mr. Cunning refuses to put on,” Hardeen screamed, waving the cuffs in his hand. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a bill. “I have here a fifty-pound note on the Bank of England, which I will wager that he cannot remove these handcuffs if he puts them on.”

The confrontation escalated with insults being hurled from the Cunning camp toward Hardeen and toward Cunning from Houdini, who sprang up in his seat to defend his brother. The theater manager got involved and was ready to stake Cunning in the bet, but Hardeen’s stipulations got so involved and convoluted that the clock reached midnight and the theater curtain crashed down around the still-arguing participants. Hardeen was roundly jeered by the audience, and then a committee member rushed up to him and cold-cocked him with a right, sending him sprawling over a row of seats. A full-fledged riot broke out and local policemen shrewdly plucked Hardeen from the audience and dragged him out through the stage door. He was booked under the name “Theodore Frank” on charges of disorderly conduct and immediately bailed out by his brother. The next day Houdini was able to convince the judge that the entire fracas was a publicity stunt, and the charges were dropped.

Even though the local newspaper accounts differed, that month’s issue of
Mahatma
, the Brooklyn-based magic magazine that had employed Houdini as its European correspondent, ran a story that claimed that Cunning had refused Hardeen’s challenge and was roundly jeered by the audience. Houdini’s ploy had worked.