The Secret Life of Houdini (33 page)

In an age of virtually no mass communication, when people relied on local newspapers for their news of the world, very few theatergoers knew that this “special” challenge was something Houdini had done routinely all along his itinerary. When Houdini visited, it was imperative to go to the theater, because who knew if this would be the one night that the invincible escape artist would fail.

Houdini took all sorts of seemingly unique and unrelated challenges. He escaped from a sea monster, lit cannons, a giant football, wheels that were rotating, milk churns, diving suits, and iron boilers. Many of these he did only once and they were absolutely sensational. These one-of-a-kind challenges seemed unique, but Houdini realized that the sea monster and football escapes were more or less the same as escaping from large leather pouches or sailcloth sacks. Escaping after being chained to a lit cannon is still just a chain escape.

In some instances he refused challenges of unique escapes that didn’t fall into his normal classifications. An old sea captain wanted to lock him in a diving suit with leaden boots and then throw him into thirty fathoms of water and have him escape without getting wet. The employees of an electric company proposed to blow a giant lightbulb around him and have him escape without breaking the glass. A plumber wanted to place him between two bathtubs and then spike them together. A German committee proposed handcuffing him to four horses and then have them race off in opposite directions. In San Francisco, a builder offered to build a house onstage and brick him in it. Although Houdini never accepted these challenges, they set his mind working, and he did invent a method to get out of a challenge house built around him, but he never used it.

Not content with his Boston area shows, Houdini even gave a private performance at the home of a prominent Bostonian named J. S. Fay. The magician’s appearance was conceived in a discussion Fay had with Herbert Leeds, a well-to-do Bostonian who was a perennial contender for the America’s Cup yacht race. Fay maintained that, as a nautical man, he could tie Houdini so securely that Houdini couldn’t escape. Leeds was willing to wager that Fay couldn’t. The bet was for $1,000. Leeds offered to split his winnings with Houdini and the contest was on.

On January 26, 1907, before the principals and ten close friends from their Somerset private club (who also made considerable side bets), Houdini allowed himself to be tied in Fay’s living room, where a makeshift roped area, not unlike a boxing ring, had been constructed. Fay instructed Houdini to take off his coat, vest, trousers, collar, and necktie. He did not allow Houdini to remove his shoes, since he had heard of the escape artist’s facility with his toes. Using stout cord, heavy silk fish line, and some twine, Fay got to work. He wound the cord so tightly around Houdini’s neck that his tongue came out of his mouth from the pressure. Two of the men, both doctors, protested that Fay was choking Houdini.

“He’s expanding the muscles of his neck,” Fay explained. “I have to pull the rope tight enough to overcome that.”

“I cannot breathe,” Houdini said.

Fay shrugged and told him that the rope would expand. One of the doctors was so adamant that Houdini was being choked that Fay finally relented and loosened the cord a bit.

Then he bound his wrists so tightly that the cord was invisible from the swelled flesh. He then spent over an hour trussing Houdini. Finally, he was satisfied. Houdini then spent the next seventy-three minutes getting free, all with Fay watching him from six inches away, making sure that no hidden knife was used. Fay was a good sport, though, and he cheerfully paid off the bets. In all, a total of more than $10,000 was wagered.

“It was the hardest experience I ever had,” Houdini told a Boston reporter. “He tied me so tightly that I shall have these welts on my wrists for weeks. I thought one time he was going to choke me, and I guess he would if the doctors present had not made him desist…Though I am physically sore, I had a good time, and I am glad if I gave a company of very entertaining gentlemen a pleasant morning.”

Houdini spent most of the rest of 1907 confronting newer and stranger challenges. “Am in my usual rush. Three strange challenges. Gee but its hard to keep a[t] it all the time,” he wrote Waitt. And after spending eighty minutes escaping from another boiler challenge in Toledo, he made a note to himself in his diary, “Must invent some new means of enlightening my labors. This challenge is the limit.” Sometimes, Houdini would confront an astounding nine challenges a week.

Even his downtime wasn’t relaxing. He was taking summers off and trying to spend time on his farm. In 1904, when he was ill and ordered to rest by his physician, he bought his farm and then spent three weeks cutting down twenty huge trees by himself. Desirous of a road leading up to the house, he single-handedly cleared a series of boulders from the path, some weighing more than three hundred pounds.

Houdini opened his fall 1907 season with a new secret weapon against his competitors—his brother. Hardeen had been enjoying success in Europe, especially with Houdini in America for the last few years. Now the competition was heating up here, and old rivals like Cunning and new upstarts like Grose, a young Canadian, were still a threat to Harry’s hegemony. Houdini realized that the same strategy that he had used in Europe would work here. At that time, Houdini was performing for the Orpheum circuit out west and Keith’s in the east. The major opposition to those companies was the newly formed Klaw & Erlanger circuit. Unbeknownst to his own promoters, Houdini engaged in secret negotiations and booked Hardeen with the rival group, effectively blocking his authentic opposition from the best competing houses in the cities Houdini would play.

Houdini milked the “rivalry” for all it was worth. He brought reporters along when he boarded Hardeen’s incoming ship to meet him “and learn his intentions.” It was reported that the brothers had a long consultation on the dock and made peace. “I was very much alarmed, to learn that my brother was coming,” Houdini told the press. “He says that he will not antagonize me, however, and will not attempt to discredit my name of ‘Houdini,’ though he is under contract to work in this country. We have always loved each other, and I felt very badly when I heard that he was going to fight me, but I guess the country is big enough for both of us.”

Genuine bad feelings were generated when Hardeen went a little overboard in his publicity drumming. When asked by reporters about his attitude toward Houdini, he magnanimously told them that he had great admiration for him—so much so that he was willing to engage him as his assistant for a grand a week. “This got into print and it got Harry on my neck,” Hardeen later recounted. “It was all right, he said, to bill myself as greater than Houdini—but this was going too far! I promised never to do that particular thing again—and good feeling was restored.”

Houdini had created and stage-managed his biggest rival. He had had a hand in producing the very challenges that he would claim credit for defeating. And every night, there was the possibility of someone bringing a tampered lock to defeat him and ruin his reputation (just as he would send his brothers to his rivals’ shows with similar equipment). It was no surprise that by March of 1908, Houdini would tell a reporter that he was laying up treasures “against the day when the public gets on to me.”

Since 1900 Houdini had added an additional layer to this already convoluted landscape. Working as an agent for U.S. government agencies, international police associations, and special branch at Scotland Yard meant compartmentalizing a whole side of his experience that was shared on a strictly “need to know” basis. Houdini, a keeper of secrets by trade, now had a whole other secret life to protect. By 1906, there seemed to be some slippage in keeping these identities distinct and separate.

In April of that year, Houdini self-published his ninety-six-page book called
The Right Way to Do Wrong
. Billed as an “exposé of successful criminals,” the book was for the most part a recounting of the successful ways con artists, bunko men, and pickpockets bilk the public, but it goes much further than simple three-card monte exposés. “It has been my good fortune to meet personally and converse with the chiefs of police and the most famous detectives in all the great cities of the world,” Houdini writes in the introduction. “To these gentlemen I am indebted for many amusing and instructive incidents hitherto unknown to the world.”

His idea was to sell this book at his shows, and correspondingly, a portion of the book is a pitch book of sorts, a whole chapter recounting highlights in Houdini’s career. In a chapter on “Humbugs,” he even gives his physician brother Leopold a plug, noting that, “Dr. L. D. Weiss, of New York, discovered that he could detect a fake mummy from an original by placing it under his X-Ray machine.”

The book received good reviews, although one magic journal complained that there wasn’t a chapter exposing Houdini’s handcuff act, supposing that it was “The Wrong Time to Do Write.” Apparently the book wasn’t as favorably received by Houdini’s friends in the world of law enforcement. According to
The Sphinx
, the book was banned by the police in England and Germany, and an article on rare books published in
The Providence Sunday Journal
in 1937 noted that
The Right Way to Do Wrong
was rare because “so well did it answer its title that the Government asked Houdini to withdraw it and he complied.”

He didn’t completely gag himself. Talking to the press was as much a part of the creation of the Houdini persona as actually appearing onstage. On March 11, 1906, a few weeks before Houdini published
The Right Way to Do Wrong
, he did a long interview with a reporter for
The Boston Sunday Herald
, where he revealed that his extensive contacts with criminals always make him a target for requests from criminals to teach them escape techniques. “But he is always on the side of law and order, and has contributed much valuable information to the secret service department of the government.”

In the first decade of the twentieth century, Harlem was a fairly safe place to live. Houdini’s brick town house, which had been built in 1895 and purchased by him in 1904 for $25,000, was part of a “genteel enclave” according to
The New York Times,
close to both Central Park and Morningside Park. So it was definitely an aberration when on July 24, 1906, Houdini wrote in his diary that his brother Leopold “thought he heard a burglar in my apartments. He must be mistaken. Have discovered no losses so far…”

It was a different story a year later. On October 25, 1907, he had returned to the town house a little after midnight. Exhausted from his rigorous schedule, he fell directly asleep but was awakened by a noise in his second-floor bedroom. Allowing a few seconds for his eyes to get acclimated to the dark, he thought he spotted a man crouching in a corner of the room.

The last thing that the intruder expected was for his prey to jump off the bed and attack
him
. He immediately drew a razor and slashed wildly. The two men wrestled out into the hall and tumbled down a flight of stairs, locked in a deadly embrace. The noise woke Houdini’s mother up, who ran into the hallway and started screaming. The two men continued their struggle in the hall, with the intruder, who had lost his razor to his victim, now getting the raw end of the blade. He had enough, and he opened a door and attempted to escape down the stairs to the basement. He wasn’t quite fast enough. His coat was just a touch too long, giving his opponent a chance to grab it, and the two men tumbled down another flight of stairs.

Mrs. Weiss’s screams alerted a neighbor, Dr. Reuss, and a passing policeman, Patrolman McCarty. They rushed into the house, and Mrs. Weiss led them to the basement, where she saw her son lying on the floor in a pool of blood, critically wounded. She wailed. The two men, spying an open door that led to the backyard, ran out. They saw blood on the steps and they followed the trail over a series of several fences and into a vacant lot, where they discovered the razor. The intruder had escaped.

From the collection of Roger Dreyer

O
N OCTOBER
26,
THE DAY OF
the attack in his town house, Houdini was playing an engagement at the Orpheum Theatre in Los Angeles. As great as he was, he couldn’t be in two places at once. It was his brother Leopold, who closely resembled him, who was set on by the razor-wielding intruder. The police began to look for a “negro” perpetrator. In the dark, Leopold hadn’t actually seen his assailant but guessed his race from his contact with the intruder’s hair.

The morning after the attack, Dr. Weiss’s servant, Frank Thomas, a black man who worked all day at the town house and left to sleep at his own domicile, reported for work at eight
A.M.
By then, the police had already cast a net of suspicion upon him, since there had been no signs of forced entry, and he was the only “negro” employed on the premises. Leopold allowed him to resume his duties, but he kept a wary eye on him all morning. His suspicions were aroused when he noticed that Thomas was keeping one hand shut, his fingers closed down over the palm. Using the pretext of handing him an object, Dr. Weiss grabbed the man’s hand and peeled back his fingers. An examination revealed several strips of court plaster on his palm. Thomas was perfectly calm when he explained to his employer that he had tripped on a curbstone the previous evening on his way home and had cut his hand when he fell to the pavement.