The Secret Life of Houdini (3 page)

A young Erik Weisz poses with baby brother Dezso in Hungary before the family migrated to the United States.
From the collection of Roger Dreyer

They arrived in New York on July 3 and were processed at the Castle Garden immigration building, where each of them received a new name. Since Cecilia didn’t speak English, her responses to the officials were in German. So their names became English variants of German names. Armin became Herman, eight-year-old Natan just had an “h” added, six-year-old Gottfried Vilmos was dubbed William, Erik turned into Ehrich, and Ferencz Dezso was officially named Theo—later to be nicknamed Dash—and the family name became Weiss. Cecilia was reunited in New York with her mother and two sisters, who had emigrated earlier, but by September, the entire Weiss family was together again in Appleton, Wisconsin.

Appleton was a stark contrast to the cramped tenement buildings of New York. Only in existence for twenty-five years, it still had the feel in some ways of a frontier outpost. For the first three years of the Weisses’ residence there, livestock were allowed to run free in the streets of the city. It took an additional year for a sewer system to be built and another year to get municipal water flowing (although the system was too primitive to be used above the ground floor of buildings). On the other hand, with a long established college, Lawrence University, a soon-to-open Opera House, and as a regular stop on the lecture circuit, there was a sense of culture that set Appleton apart from its sleepy farm-based small Midwestern town counterparts.

And for Mayer Samuel Weiss, it had one advantage. He was a friend of one of the town’s most prominent businessmen. David Hammel was a clear example of the assimilationist spirit of many Eastern European Jews. He ran several businesses, including a lumberyard, a mill, and a wheat farm. But most of all, he was connected in local politics. Mayer Samuel Weiss came to Appleton with no knowledge of English but with a craving for respectability. Back home he had been a soap maker, but by the time they left the country he had taken law courses and was a practicing solicitor. But this was a different world, and when his friend Hammel told him that the town needed a rabbi, he didn’t hesitate.

“Okay, that’s me,” said Mayer Samuel.

So he donned his robes and began conducting services in a makeshift temple, earning $750 a year. At first “the Hebrews of this city,” as a local newspaper called them, seemed pleased with the services of their “able” rabbi and hoped that he would “remain permanently among us.” His particular forte seemed to be wise words of counsel at milestone events like weddings and funerals. Even though he conducted all his ceremonies and homilies in German, his addresses commanded “the most profound respect.”

Morality lessons weren’t just reserved for the pulpit. When Ehrich was only five years old, his father noticed his son playing with some large iron spikes. Further inquiries disclosed that Ehrich had taken them from a local construction site where a bridge was being built.

“This is theft!” the rabbi thundered. “Theft cannot be tolerated, especially in this household, especially by the son of a rabbi.”

Ehrich’s schoolhouse in Appleton.
From the collection of Dr. Bruce Averbook

Ehrich was ushered back to the scene of the crime, where he was forced to replace the spikes and confess his guilt to the foreman. He was a decent child, ready to learn from his mistakes and to accept the wisdom of his elders. And he certainly had a winning personality. When Ehrich was about seven, he happened upon his teacher on the streets of Appleton. She smiled and wished him “good morning,” but the boy just mumbled in embarrassment. The teacher looked him square in his steel-blue eyes. “When a gentleman meets a lady, Ehrich, he should take off his hat and bow.” With that he took off, sprinted around the block, timing it so he would meet her at the next corner, where, to her astonishment, he doffed his cap and bowed reverentially.

With its open spaces, parks, and woods, Appleton was the ideal playground for a young child, and it was here that Ehrich began to display an athletic prowess that would blossom later in his life. It started when he was barely seven and went to see a traveling street circus that was passing through Appleton. He tolerated the clowns and the acrobats, but he was positively enthralled by a man in tights who climbed twenty feet up into the air to a small platform, where he was about to walk across a taut wire that had been stretched between two poles. Keeping his center of gravity low by using a long curved pole, Jean Weitzman, Ehrich’s instant hero, began to slowly walk across that wire. Ehrich held his breath as he realized that just one small misstep would send Weitzman to an almost certain death. The fact that a performer was risking his life right in front of him was both inconceivable and thrilling. Step by step, Weitzman navigated that wire, and when he made it to the far pole, the whole crowd cheered. But Ehrich was even more amazed when he saw Weitzman perform a routine where he suspended himself from the high wire by his teeth.

That afternoon Ehrich rushed home, scrounged up some rope, and tied it between two trees an appropriate distance apart. The first time he tried to balance on the rope, he fell to the ground so violently that he could barely get up again. But he persevered and soon was adept at walking the tightrope. His replication of hanging by the teeth was not quite as successful. He hadn’t realized that Weitzman used a mouthpiece for that feat. “Out came a couple of front teeth,” Houdini remembered, “but luckily they grew back again.”

These early years in Appleton were, in retrospect, idyllic years for the Weisses. There were two new additions to the family, a boy Leopold, and finally, a girl named Gladys. In June of 1882, Mayer Samuel and his children embraced their new country by becoming citizens of the United States. Then disaster struck. Rabbi Weiss’s congregation revolted, with a faction believing that he was too old and too antiquated in his ways for their tastes.

“One morning my father awoke to find himself thrown upon the world, his long locks of hair having silvered in service, with seven children to feed, without a position, and without any visible means of support,” Houdini said. “We thereon moved to Milwaukee, Wis., where such hardships and hunger became our lot that the less said on the subject the better.”

Settling in Milwaukee in December of 1882, the Weisses became almost nomadic; at least four addresses in four years suggested that they were keeping one step ahead of the rent collector. The boys were all put to work; Ehrich sold newspapers in front of the Plankington House and shined shoes. Some days his younger brother Theo would assist him. One day, the two boys accumulated more than $2, which Theo deposited in the pocket of his overcoat. They caught a ride home on a sled and on arrival discovered that Theo had lost the change. Cecilia was near tears, but Ehrich quickly conceived a plan to remedy the damage. He grabbed Theo and with his last nickel in hand, they went to a nearby florist shop. He bought a flower, went outside, and quickly sold it for a dime. They marched back to the florist shop and bought two flowers and this time both boys sold theirs for a dime. A few hours later they were back home with a fresh $2 in change, the fruits of the nine-year-old’s resourcefulness.

Ehrich Weiss hadn’t even made a dent in the heavy handcuffs when the hacksaw blade snapped in two—for the sixth time—which did not amuse the unusually large, repellently ugly man who had the misfortune of currently being fettered by those resilient manacles.

“You’re lucky that blade didn’t cut me up,” the man snarled ominously.

Ehrich swallowed hard. He didn’t want to show that he was scared, never wanted to do that, but he was. He didn’t even know if it was possible to saw through the cuffs and he certainly didn’t want to disappoint his boss, Mr. Hanauer. Ehrich had been a fixture at Hanauer’s shop on Appleton Street since he was a little kid living around the corner. It wasn’t the guns that Hanauer sold; those didn’t really interest him. Ehrich was fascinated by the locks. He had always been intrigued by all types of locks and fasteners and hardware, practicing at home by opening the drawers, closets, and pantries of his house at will, using a small buttonhook. He had become notorious in Appleton as the boy who had unlocked all the doors to the shops on College Avenue one night. Now that he had turned eleven, and since things were so hard in Milwaukee, his parents had decided to send Ehrich back to Appleton to start a formal apprenticeship with Hanauer.

But this was baptism by fire. The sheriff had come into the shop one day, with a behemoth of a prisoner in tow. He was the scariest and ugliest person Ehrich had ever seen—sporting a bristly beard punctuated by a long, ominous-looking blue-white scar.

“John, for some unknown reason, the justice found this here feller innocent as charged, but my damn key broke off in the lock,” the sheriff explained. “Think you can saw through this?”

Just as Hanauer started examining the cuffs, he realized it was lunch time. He called Ehrich aside.

“Ehrie, get a hacksaw and cut that handcuff off. I’m going out for a drink with the sheriff.”

Hanauer was known to throw back a few beers at lunch, a daily ritual that usually took him fifty-five minutes, but with ten minutes left Ehrich still hadn’t gotten the bracelets off.

The hacksaw was out of the question. He couldn’t smash the cuffs off. In fact, he wasn’t too comfortable about being in a store alone with this guy and a case full of handguns and derringers, even if he was handcuffed. Then, suddenly, he remembered his buttonhook. Ehrich had customized it over the years, and it had proved infallible in opening the occasional door or desk drawer. Why not use it on a handcuff lock? They were more sophisticated but maybe, just maybe…

But no, it was too big. Unperturbed, he fashioned another one out of piano wire. The giant man eyed him with suspicion.

He slowly inserted the pick into one of the cuff locks.

“Can you just look away for a second?” Ehrich asked politely. The last thing he wanted was for this guy to see how he was going to open the cuffs.

“Like hell I can,” the giant said. And he almost stared a hole in the cuffs.

Ehrich had no choice. Fumbling from nerves, he awkwardly stuck his pick in the mechanism of the cuff. And, to both his and the prisoner’s amazement, after about a minute, the cuff clicked open. It took him half the time to get the other cuff open.

To Ehrich’s great relief, the sheriff and Hanauer entered the shop just then.

“Well, you’re free to go. But if I was you, I’d put a little distance between myself and the great municipality of Appleton,” the sheriff said.

The giant was too stunned to move. He picked up the cuffs and examined them. It was then that the other men realized that Ehrich hadn’t sawed through them. He had figured out a way to defeat them.

Hanauer took the cuffs from the prisoner and gave them the once-over. He turned to his apprentice.

“That is good work, Ehrich,” he said. “That is damned good work.”

This trivial incident would change the whole course of Ehrich’s life. “The very manner in which I then picked the lock of the handcuff contained the basic principle which I employed in opening handcuffs all over the world.
Not with a duplicate key
, which seems to have been the only way others had of duplicating my performance.” But in doing so, Houdini gave his secret away to the prisoner. “He is the only person in the world beside my wife who knows how I open locks, and I have never heard from him since,” he remembered.

Working in a locksmith’s shop wasn’t really in Ehrich’s blood. He still idolized Weitzman, the high-wire wizard. So when Jack Hoeffler, an Appleton friend who was a few years older than him, decided to put on a five-cent circus, Ehrich convinced his mother to darn him long red woolen stockings to simulate the proper tights that professional acrobats wore. He was billed as “Ehrich, the Prince of the Air,” and his act probably consisted of swinging from ropes and doing contortionist feats and acrobatic tumbling on an old field in the Sixth Ward that Hoeffler had located.

Houdini always marked the October 28, 1883 Jack Hoeffler 5-Cent Circus performance as his legitimate entrance into show business. He earned thirty-five cents. But more important, he was continuing to develop the skill sets that would serve him well in the future. By 1919, Houdini could look back on this sandlot performance as another turning point. “My training as a contortionist was, of course, the first step toward my present occupation of escaping from strait-jackets and chains, for it is chiefly through my ability to twist my body and dislocate my joints, together with abnormal expansion and contraction powers, which renders me independent of the tightest bonds. Thus, to any young man who has in mind a career similar to mine, I would say: ‘First try bending over backward and picking up a pin with your teeth from the floor.’…That was
my
first stunt.”

With the show business bug running through his veins, Ehrich “made a bolt for the door” and returned to his family in Milwaukee. It wasn’t a far stretch for his interests to widen from gymnastics and acrobatics to magic. Young Ehrich was a voracious reader, thanks largely to the influence of his father, who had a most impressive library of theology books. He began by devouring the biblical tales and the Talmudic legends in the rabbi’s collection, but the first book that he purchased himself was a tencent pamphlet, “pilfered from the pages of a magician named Hoffma[n],” that he found in a small bookshop in Appleton. Now back in Milwaukee, he began to frequent the public library, reading books at random, exploring the boundaries of his inquisitive mind.