The Secret Life of Houdini (32 page)

Houdini repeated his bridge jump on May 4, 1907. In front of about 10,000 people, including his mother (whom he was concerned about since she had not looked well lately, he wrote in his diary) and Bess, he jumped from the Weighlock Bridge in Rochester, New York, without incident—at least to Houdini. Seconds after he leaped, a drunken man, fully clothed, yelled, “Well, goodbye, Harry” and followed him off the bridge into the canal. “He was a good swimmer,” Houdini noted in his diary.

On March 13, before his jump off the Seventh Street Bridge in Pittsburgh, Houdini told a reporter from
The Pittsburgh Leader
that the day before the leap he sent a cable to Hardeen, who was doing a similar act then in Europe, and the charges came to exactly $13. That same day Houdini’s mail consisted of 13 letters. He switched rooms at his hotel and the new room was no. 26, divisible by 13. The letters contained 13 new challenges, the license plate of the auto that drove him to the bridge totaled up to 13, and the cinematographer who was filming the jump had exactly 1,300 feet of film in his camera.

“I feel nervous today,” Houdini said. “There is a goneness in my innards that isn’t pleasant.” He ate an apple to settle himself down, then dove. It was exactly 1:13.

“In a minute and a half from the time I struck the water I had freed myself and was ready to rise to the surface,” Houdini told the press. “Small boats were cruising about looking for me and, as luck would have it, I came rushing up at great speed just underneath one of these crafts. So rapid was my ascent that in rising I hit my head a fearful blow…and sank back into the water again stunned and bleeding. When I struck that boat I thought of the thirteens of the day and concluded that it was up to me to battle for my life. Just when it seemed that all was over with me, I rose to the surface and willing hands dragged me to safety. It isn’t any fun taking your life in your hands. Really, I’m in earnest. If a fellow wasn’t married it would be a different thing, though even a single man oughtn’t to be hankering for chances to risk his life.”

Sequence depicting Houdini bridge leap in Boston.
Library of Congress

Houdini seemed conflicted when facing these challenges. For the most part, he left his destiny in the hands of Fate. “While the manacles and shackles are being adjusted so that my limbs are powerless to move, I look down at the water flowing so far below; then I make up my mind I am going to do it,” he told a reporter. “From the time I let go till the moment I strike the water everything is blank, and my ears are filled with strange songs. If the season be winter with the temperature of the water in the vicinity of freezing, the ordeal is one to be dreaded. The bitter cold of the first plunge seems to cut right into my heart, and I very often bite my lips almost through, so great is the shock.”

On August 27, while preparing for a leap into the San Francisco Bay, he wrote his good friend Dr. Waitt back in Boston. “Tomorrow I will take a leap from the wharf into the Frisco Bay…Perhaps some day my time will come like that, but being a Fatalist, it worries me very little.” After jumping into the deep, dark, and cold Mississippi River from a steamer in New Orleans, he dreaded the experience. “That’s an awful river,” he told a local reporter. “The worst I have ever been in…It’s only a question of time that the man who works trained lions and tigers gets his violent passage to the other world, and it is pretty much the same with me.” The reporter noted a tinge of sadness in Houdini’s voice. “I’ll get in the water some day, my trick will fail, and then good night!”

The stillness in the room was suddenly shattered by a muffled sound that was coming from inside the coffin. A few of the men in the front row ran up, pulled the curtain back, and rushed to the side of the casket.

“I need some more air,” the muffled voice inside urged.

The men conferred, and a janitor was sent for. He had a hand drill and he perforated the coffin, a few times on each side.

“That’s better,” Houdini said, and the men withdrew, drawing the curtain behind them.

Earlier that day, Houdini had returned to his old haunt at the Boston Athletic Association to give the members a special treat. He was going to escape from a coffin with the lid screwed on. Now here he was, reposing in a “regulation, sound casket” that was placed upon three sawhorses so that Houdini could not get any assistance from any hidden confederates who might have rigged a trap-door below.

Still wearing his frock coat, he was handcuffed, shackled around his ankles, and lifted into his wooden enclosure. He struggled to briefly sit up, said, “Goodbye” to his audience, and then the lid was screwed into place, and the curtain was hung around the coffin.

At first, the audience watched the screen with rapt attention, especially after the new airholes had been bored into the casket. Gradually, their attention drifted from the curtain, and cheerfully confident that this test would pose no problem to the famous Houdini, they began to light up fine cigars and discuss sports, world events, and business. The time passed, and the haze of cigar smoke grew thicker, and then finally there was “the sound of a soft pad of feet as of some one landing on the floor.” The curtain was suddenly whisked aside, and there stood Houdini, his frock coat disheveled, his collar and tie vanished, his shirt ripped open, and his bushy hair speckled with wood shavings. He was “panting like a stout man who has caught his car,” one reporter wrote. Yet he was smiling. The cuffs and manacles were later found inside the coffin, which was still sealed. Houdini’s reemergence was greeted with a hale round of “bravos” and applause, and many silk top hats were jiggled in his honor. It had taken him sixty-six and a half minutes to make his escape.

The escape had taken another toll on Houdini, at least that was what he told the reporters. “I was very tired after it was all over and the worry was as bad as the work,” he said. “All the time I was in there I was thinking of death.”

In private, he relished the fact that his promoter Paul Keith had managed to spirit him away from the more inquisitive committee members who wanted to examine him after the escape—to a steam room where a search would be superfluous. “Coffin affair a great big success,” Houdini wrote in his diary. “Created more talk than anything I have ever done in Boston. Paul Keith sneaked me into the Turkish bath after show. That is, a committee desired to search me but we fooled them all and Paul grinned for two days.”

Some of Houdini’s greatest challenges were in front of Boston audiences, and this stint in early 1907 was no exception. He escaped from a giant football, a five-foot regulation hot water boiler, a crazy crib, a rolltop desk, and a glass box—a challenge designed by his confidant Dr. Waitt. On February 4, from Providence, Houdini wrote Waitt, “How is the glass box-lets getting along?” Eleven days later, Waitt and some other challengers (a few who were friends of Houdini) stood onstage with a three-foot-long, two-foot-wide, and two-and-a-half-foot-high glass box that was held together by metal hinges and special bolts. The bolt heads inside the box were specially made to be smooth and not capable of being unscrewed. After having the box outside the theater to be examined by the audience for days, at the last minute, other bolts were substituted that had small imperceptible grooves on the inside. All Houdini had to do to escape was to smuggle in a small crescent shaped tool and unscrew the bolts from the inside. This unique bolt is a modified version of an espionage technique where similarly hollowed-out bolts are used to transmit secret messages.

Houdini took on many varied challenges, including an escape from a “crazy crib.”
From the collection of Roger Dreyer

From 1904 on, Houdini was the only escape artist who accepted such a wide panoply of challenges. Although many of his imitators would do handcuff and rope challenges, only a very few accepted more difficult challenges. Brindamour escaped from challenge paper bags and packing boxes; Mysto did a variation of the box challenge by getting out of a sealed coffin; and Houdini’s brother Hardeen accepted challenges against Houdini’s explicit wishes. Houdini struck back in a fury. He exposed Mysto onstage, called Brindamour a cross-dressing fancy dancer, and shunned his own brother until Bess was forced to make peace.

What set Houdini apart was that he managed each challenge from inception to execution, if he didn’t invent them completely. The vast majority of the hundreds of challengers who confronted Houdini weren’t accomplices. They were legitimate businesses that were, in effect, challenged by Houdini to challenge him. Even so, the challenger didn’t have unlimited scope and control over what they could build. Houdini would happily give the details to the packing clerks and box makers. If needed, he would supply blueprints. The box was delivered to the theater a day or so before the challenge so it could be displayed to drum up business.

Sometime before the box would make its way to the stage, one of Houdini’s assistants would remove a couple of long difficult screws and replace them with shorter ones. Once it was onstage, the challengers would come up, look over their box, be none the wiser, and nail the magician in, making sure to use countless nails and put them in the most difficult patterns. It didn’t matter in the slightest; Houdini wasn’t going out through the nailed-on top anyway.

As early as 1904, Houdini came up with the brilliant idea of “re-challenges.” He would do a challenge packing case and then have the same firm re-challenge him, claiming that they knew that he had somehow tampered with the box. In 1913 in a broadside headlined
HOUDINI EXPOSED!
, the employees of George Scorrer, Ltd., wrote, “Dear Sir, During your last visit to Hull, you escaped from a Packing Case, but in its construction we were restricted regarding the nails and the manner of driving them home.
WE ARE FAR FROM BEING SATISFIED
with the result of that test, and to settle all arguments We defy you to allow us to build
A STRONG PACKING CASE
, of extra heavy lumber, making use of any size common flat-headed French wire nails and no restrictions placed as to the amount or manner.” Sometimes these cases were even built on the stage in front of the audience. Houdini had a different method from the pre-made box challenges, but he escaped nonetheless.