The Secret Life of Houdini (30 page)

At three
P.M.
on September 20, 1905, a small group of men assembled at Battery Park in downtown Manhattan. On the one hand there was Houdini, attended by his brother Hardeen. In the other corner was someone named “Jacques Boudini,” allegedly Houdini’s “pupil,” a pale, nervous-looking young man whom Houdini had “discovered” doing a handcuff escape act in Brooklyn. He had his “manager” with him, Patrick J. Monahan. Boudini attempted to shake Houdini’s hand, but Harry just stared at it coldly. Then the aggregation, trailed by a bevy of reporters, went to the nearby offices of Nathan Laufer, where each side put up $500 for a winner-take-all contest of who could be the first to escape from cuffs, chains, and leg irons after being dumped off of a tugboat into the Hudson River.

It was no contest. The two men were festooned with irons and then jumped simultaneously into the drink. After a minute and thirty seconds, Houdini’s head bobbed up.

“Is Boudini up yet?” Houdini yelled to the newsmen on the tugboat.

“No,” they shouted back.

Houdini lifted his arms up out of the water, displaying that his hands were free.

“The cuffs are off!” he yelled and threw them onto the tug, and then sank back out of view. A minute later, he bobbed up again.

“Boudini up yet?” he asked again. He laughed when he heard the negative and then kicked a leg in the air to signify that one of his ankles was free. Another few seconds underwater and he sprang up with the leg irons and chains in his hands.

Meanwhile, Boudini “sank and rose and gurgled and sunk again.” When he was finally hauled onboard, he was still completely fettered. “Monahan got my signals mixed up,” he said. “And anyway, when I saw that the other fellow was out of the handcuffs so quick I got discouraged.”

The papers had a field day with their “Hou” and “Bou” comparisons, with Houdini being anointed the winner. “So Houdini proved his right to the title of Champion Mysteriarch of the World. And poor Boudini let the sad sea water trickle from his hair,”
The New York World
reported. It’s possible that Houdini was inspired to orchestrate this challenge after a similar stunt, where his friend Chung Ling Soo sandbagged his rival Ching Ling Foo. In that case, Soo was the imitator, trading on Foo’s reputation. Here Hou seemed to create his competitor, Bou, for shortly after this stunt, Bou faded from the pages of magic history. Interestingly enough, this stunt was the first known example of Houdini releasing himself from shackles while underwater.

With his fall U.S. tour under way, Houdini returned to his tried-and-true formula of jail cell escapes to promote theater shows. And he used every police contact that he had, perhaps because one of the Keith’s bookers had sent him a letter while he was still in Europe, rejecting his salary demands, because “it is absolutely impossible for us to get the co-operation of the police force in tests and experiments in connection with your work and therefore secure the valuable advertising that you are able to do in the west and in Europe.” After cell escapes in Brooklyn, Detroit, Cleveland, Rochester, and Buffalo, Houdini made it to Washington, D.C., where he unleashed the heavy ammunition.

On January 1, 1906, he was handcuffed with what
The Washington Post
called an “invincible bracelet” used by the Secret Service and placed in a cell in the tenth precinct police station. That precinct housed the office of the superintendent of the Washington, D.C., force, Major Richard Sylvester, who also happened to be the current president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the police group with which Houdini had close ties. Sylvester did “his utmost to keep Houdini a prisoner,” even refusing the escape artist a view of the padlock he was to contest. But despite a strip search, Houdini was able to break out of cell no. 3, and then break into an adjoining cell, where his clothes had been stored. He did all this in eighteen minutes.

Immediately, Warden Harris, the chief of the cathedral-like United States Jail, invited Houdini to test the efficacy of his facilities. After building up suspense for several days, Houdini, accompanied by his press agent and promoter, Whitman Osgood, and a slew of reporters, visited the massive stone citadel on January 6. With the headlines already playing before his eyes, Houdini insisted on escaping from the heavily barred cell no. 2 that had once held Charles Guiteau, President Garfield’s assassin, who had been hanged at the jail in 1882. The party was then led to the south wing, where the formidable Murderer’s Row consisted of seventeen cells, all brick structures with their doors sunk into the walls three feet from the outer corridor wall. The cell seemed impenetrable; when the heavily barred door was closed, an L-shaped bar moved out and then angled to the right and slipped over a steel catch, which tripped a spring that fastened the lock. The lock itself contained five tumblers. As was the case in many jails, one key would open all the doors in the corridor.

According to the newspaper accounts, on Houdini’s first visit, he agreed to be immediately locked in to test the cells. He was then stripped, searched, and thrown into Guiteau’s former cell, shocking a black man named Hamilton, who was currently residing there, awaiting hanging for murdering his wife. While Hamilton crouched in a corner in fear, Houdini escaped from the cell in less than two minutes.

He was just warming up. Still nude, and out of sight of the various luminaries who had withdrawn to the warden’s office, Houdini ran to the next cell and opened it. Its occupant, a man named Chase, mistook Houdini for an escaping fellow prisoner. He followed the magician down the corridor to another cell door, which fell in seconds.

“What are you doing here?” Houdini asked Clarence Howlett, the present occupant.

“I’m a housebreaker,” Howlett said.

“You’re a bad one, or you could get out of here,” Houdini replied. “Come along.”

Houdini put Chase into Howlett’s cell and then brought Howlett and locked him into Chase’s cell. He repeated this a few times with other prisoners. Then he broke into the cell that contained his clothes, got dressed, and, precisely twenty-one minutes from being imprisoned, strolled into the warden’s office.

“I let all of your prisoners out,” Houdini announced to the waiting visitors and press. Two guards jumped up and rushed out into the corridor.

“But I locked them all in again,” he added.

That same day Houdini received an impressive letter certifying his escape from Guiteau’s cell and his release of all the other prisoners on the ground floor. “There was positively no chance for any confederacy or collusion,” Warden Harris noted. The same day, Major Sylvester released his statement. “In order that defective means of restraint might be discovered in the holding of prisoners in this jurisdiction, and with a view to remedying any insecurity which might exist, Mr. Houdini, the expert man with locks, was permitted to examine a modern cell lock and attachment and then placed in an entirely different cell from the one he examined. He was searched and in a nude condition placed behind the bars and, as supposed, secured…In twenty-six minutes, he emerged from the cell and corridor fully attired.

“The experiment was a valuable one in that the department has been instructed as to the adoption of further security, which will protect any lock from being opened or interfered with…

“Mr. Houdini impressed his audience as a gentlemen and an artist who does not profess to do the impossible.”

Once again, what was primarily a publicity stunt to sell tickets to Houdini’s shows had been couched as a civic-minded sociological experiment to aid the police departments to improve the efficacy of their confinement abilities. Sylvester was right, Houdini wasn’t professing to do the impossible. To escape from a jail cell, he would need either a key or an implement to defeat the lock. A nude search would seemingly preclude either of those possibilities, but Houdini had other tricks up his metaphorical sleeve. If the jails were using locks that employed a spring latch, they could be temporarily defeated by jamming a small wooden wedge into their socket. With the wedge in place, the lock would appear closed but in actuality would either fail to catch or catch so slightly that a good hard knock could jar it loose.

Houdini had a variety of methods to avoid detection when he brought a key or a pick into a cell. Sometimes he would hide the key in his bushy hair. When his examination commenced, Houdini would suggest to the police officers to check his hair first. Unbeknownst to them, the key, which was treated with a dab of adhesive wax, would be palmed in his hand. As soon as his hair had been examined, Houdini would run his hand through his hair in what seemed like a reflex. What he was really doing was transferring the key to its hiding place and freeing up his hand for inspection. Other times, Houdini would affix the key with adhesive tape under his instep. This was risky, though, especially if the police would ask him to lift his foot for inspection.

Houdini would often visit a jail a day or two in advance and case the place, sometimes bringing Bess along as a distraction while he would snoop. It’s believed that Houdini had the ability to photographically remember the details of a unique key, so that he could make a duplicate. He would also use clay to make an impression when he didn’t want to rely on his memory, a technique that was used years earlier by Wilkie’s Secret Service agents when they had to duplicate keys to make surreptitious entries. Early visits to the cell would give Houdini a chance to plant tools or picks in the cell itself, sometimes in a piece of soap, hanging from an invisible thread in the toilet, or affixed under a bench with gum. If he was escaping from a particularly odious or cold jail, where sanitary conditions were lacking, Houdini might sometimes request that after a thorough search, he be allowed to put his shoes back on. What the officials didn’t know was that the heels were hollowed out and swiveled open after pressing a hidden catch. This invention of Mokana, magic dealer Will Goldston’s brother, was and still is a formidable subterfuge.

Perhaps the most ingenious device Houdini used to smuggle in his necessary tools were his own massive padlocks. He would convince his “captors” that the escape attempt would play better in the press if he was photographed and it was reported that he escaped from many locks and chains. Then Houdini would have affixed his own huge sturdy-looking padlocks in addition to the regulation police handcuffs and chains. What the police didn’t know was that Houdini’s padlocks were gimmicked; they were actually little toolboxes in the shape of large padlocks that held all of Houdini’s necessary hardware. He also owned an egg-shaped container that he could open to store small tools. This could be hidden in the back of his throat and was undetectable by all but the most thorough jailers.

Barring these ploys, Houdini could also employ his hooked keys. He would solder a hook to the necessary key or pick and then station a police officer in front of his cell with his back to Houdini, so he could work without visual inspection. Before placing the officer, Houdini would fraternally slap the officer on the back, in the process affixing the key. Once inside the cell, it was child’s play to reach out and obtain the key without the enabler being aware.

Then there was the last resort, used when he was convinced that the search would be grueling and comprehensive. Always the sportsman, Houdini would enter the cell and then extend his hand through the bars to shake hands with his captors and the press. The last man Houdini would shake hands with would be a friend who was wearing a finger ring with a spring clip that enabled him to palm a key or a pick. During this last emotional handshake, Houdini obtained the necessary tool.

Although the fundamentals of Houdini’s escape methods have been published, the particular details are still shrouded in mystery. Much of what we now understand has come to us from Steranko, a living legend in several varied fields, including that of self-extrication. Steranko has done many of these escapes and is considered a grandmaster in the field. His writings on the subject, published in the 1960s, are still considered the reference standard.

What was notable about these Washington jailbreaks was that the reports suggest that the attempts were made without Houdini’s usual procedure of examining both the locks and the cells beforehand. (There was a good reason for making those courtesy visits. Under the pretext of testing the lock with its key, Houdini was often able to make a wax impression of the key and duplicate it later.) Houdini’s ability to not only escape from Guiteau’s cell but also rearrange all the other prisoners on Murderer’s Row suggests that he had either the master key or a duplicate.

Houdini posing prior to breaking out of the tombs in Boston.
From the collection of Roger Dreyer