The Secret Life of Houdini (34 page)

Accepting the explanation, Leopold allowed Thomas to continue working. When a maid later found the black man’s “cheap seal ring” lying in a dark corner in the lower hall, the very spot where the struggle ensued, Leopold called the police, despite Thomas’s protestations of innocence. Detectives hauled the servant to the station house, Thomas still maintaining that he had nothing to do with the attack. After a grueling cross-examination by acting-captain Maher, the officer “asserted” that Thomas had made a full confession. He was locked up and, after pleading guilty at his trial, received a sentence of ten years and seven months to eleven years and seven months.

The motive was just as flimsy as the evidence. The newspaper reports vary. One suggested that Dr. Weiss had recently received a $1,000 check drawn on a Wall Street bank. When he presented the check, the bank refused to honor it, arguing that he hadn’t identified himself properly. He called a friend and asked him to accompany him to the bank and vouch for him. It was “supposed” that the servant had overheard that conversation and believed that Leopold would have a thousand dollars cash in the house. Ironically enough, by the time the two men reached the bank, it had closed for the day.

The other story was similarly convoluted. This account quoted Leopold as saying that he was in a quandary whether to deposit the check in his account with the Knickerbocker Bank because of their “unsettled” conditions. He called a friend, who advised him to place the money in a safe deposit vault, which he did. He claimed that Thomas overheard his conversation and “doubtless” thought he had the cash in the house. When he saw the intruder in his room, he claimed that he was in the process of “fumbling among my papers.” In a pitch-black room.

Why an employee who had access to the house would try to murder his employer rather than steal something at another more convenient time was not considered. And why a vicious would-be murderer would report for work seven hours after he had inflicted more than one hundred wounds on his employer was similarly never addressed. Judging from the description of the fierce hand-to-hand battle where the razor changed hands, a few minor cuts on one hand doesn’t quite jibe with the report of a severely wounded assailant trailing blood over three backyards. With the confession in place and Thomas’s long sentence, the matter ended. Amazingly, Houdini managed to keep his name out of any of the newspaper accounts of an attempted murder at his home.

Even before he had published his opus on criminality,
The Right Way to Do Wrong
, Houdini had started devoting more and more of his time to literary pursuits. “We have records for five generations that my direct fore-fathers were students and teachers of the Bible and recognized as among the leading bibliographers of their times,” he would boast. Years later, he would begin to write a book that dissected the old myths and stories of the Bible, but for now, he was content to channel his literary ambitions into a new monthly magazine devoted to magic. Houdini-style magic.

Houdini always had an ambition to both organize magicians into a strong fellowship and to propagate (some might say impose) his own vision of the future of magic on his fellow performers. In 1906, he took steps to achieve both of those goals. He became a vice president of the Society of American Magicians, the strongest association of magicians in the United States. And he began to publish a thirty-two-page monthly magic periodical named
Conjurer’s Monthly.

He might not have started
Conjurer’s
if he would have received more attention from
The Sphinx
, the reigning number one magic magazine in the United States. When Houdini returned from Europe in 1905, he implored
The Sphinx
’s editor, Dr. A. M. Wilson, for more coverage. Wilson replied that he would be happy to run Houdini’s picture often, as long as he paid the prevailing advertising rates. This led to a longstanding bitter feud, and the creation of the new magazine.

Conjurer’s Monthly
was unlike any magic magazine ever published. With a staff that included most of his family, and editorial contributions from friends like Joe Hyman and Harry Day, the magazine had the feel of the monthly newsletter of a very dysfunctional family.

The first issue in September 15, 1906 set the tone. It was spotted with tacky ads for detective agencies, in-laws’ restaurants, a Viennese hair and scalp specialist who claimed to have performed wonders for President Roosevelt and Mrs. McKinley, and Theodore Hardeen—“The King of all Handcuff Kings and the Mighty Potentate of all the Monarchs and Jail Breakers (bar Houdini).” Houdini’s opening salutatory claimed that he didn’t wish to “supplant any other paper” and that he had “no axes to grind,” then in the very next paragraph he complained that every other magic magazine was in the hands of businessmen who use them as “‘grafting’ catalogues.”

Hardeen, the “Official European Correspondent,” wrote about a fistfight he had with card sharpers onboard a steamship. Houdini printed personal letters from friends like Harry Day and even an angry letter from a stranger who wrote, “I have seen you perform once, but what good are you to society?” Alongside this bizarre content was a terrific article by Houdini called “Handcuff Secrets Exposed.” Besides tipping legitimate escape techniques like employing a false finger or using a split key (Houdini’s own invention), the article detailed some very clever and helpful showmanship techniques. “In addressing your audience do not become bombastic or overbearing in demeanor but speak as you would to critical friends, thereby gaining their confidence and sympathy and no matter what may worry or trouble you, never let your audience detect any irritability or ill temper, but always display a bright and pleasing manner.”

Conjurer’s
truly reflected Houdini’s personality. Houdini began a feature, “Answers to Various Questions,” that contained gems like “Knocker. To H––l with you. And all others like you. We shall do whatever we feel like, and no amount of advertising will make us change our plans.” His book reviews displayed a similar truculence. Reviewing a book called
Mediumship
(in the monthly feature “Reading and Rubbish”), written by “A medium under control,” Houdini noted that the more he read of the book, the more he was convinced the author “was under the control of the warden of an asylum” and that if the book were to be sold through the U.S. mail, “we feel sure that the Government’s sleuths will be sent out after the publisher.”

Old scores were settled with enemies (he called an English magic dealer who sold his handcuff secrets an “errand boy clerk”), veiled attacks were made on fellow performers (“The American Illusionist, who…appeared before King Edward and Queen Alexandra, cuts but a sorry figure. Like the mercenary, flat-headed, pride-inflated individual that he is, he imagined that his future standing would be rated by the present he received from his royal patron.”), but Houdini’s greatest wrath was reserved for his escape act imitators. Houdini relished printing police accounts of his competitors’ failures to escape from jail cells and he even encouraged his readers to send in local reports of their defeats. Houdini’s diatribes against his opposition were picked up by other columnists, including Leonard Hicks, a handcuff expert and mechanist who would later be mentored by Houdini. Hicks skewered a “near handcuff king” named Miller and then offered that if “Miller does not believe it in print, let him call at the hotel, and I’ll tell it to him personally, where he will find me near the big chair in the lobby. He will be able to recognize me by the club and gun on my knee.”

On May 24, 1921, Houdini was visiting at the offices of his lawyer, Bernard Ernst. It was six
P.M.
and Houdini needed a contract drawn up, but Ernst was hungry for dinner, so they agreed to go have a bite to eat and return to the office to do the legal work. Forgetting the time, Ernst led Houdini out the Liberty Street entrance of the building, which was routinely closed at six. He turned and began to walk toward the other entrance, but Houdini didn’t follow. Ernst turned around and saw him huddled over the lock.

“Come on,” he said a few seconds later. “It’s open.”

When Houdini asked Ernst what he thought of his feat, Ernst made the mistake of telling him that he would expect Houdini would be able to open a lock like that, and that he had assumed the magician was familiar with it in advance.

For the next few hours, Houdini fumed. Finally, after the contract was drawn up, Houdini couldn’t restrain himself.

“You didn’t seem to think very much of my opening those swinging doors. Now I want to show you that I am Houdini. Let me see your office safe,” he requested.

Ernst took him to a room that contained a six-foot-high, four-foot-wide Herring-Hall-Marvin safe.

“Make sure that it’s locked and leave me alone with it for sixty seconds,” Houdini said.

Ernst complied. After a minute, Houdini called him in, turned the combination to the correct numbers, and opened the safe. Ernst was truly amazed. He knew that Houdini had never seen this safe before. Now he showered praise on his friend.

Houdini pulled out a letter from a large safe company that thanked him for calling attention to a defect in the locks that they used in their safes. Ernst was duly impressed. Then, in an uncharacteristic moment, Houdini pulled out a small object that he carried in a leather bag that was enclosed in a metal case dangling from his trousers on a key ring chain. Although Ernst refused to give details of this “gimmick,” we now know that Houdini was showing Ernst a safe-opening micrometer. In the September 1907 issue of
Conjurer’s Monthly
, Houdini revealed the existence of a version of that safe-opening micrometer, a device made from a common watch, which, when customized even “in the hands of the average person,” can open any combination safe lock.

Because of the nature of deception, magic devices and espionage tools have certain elements in common, such as hiding and transmitting information and working with codes. Like Dr. Waitt’s special bolts that had dual use, magicians and spies alike have used hollowed-out coins, small hollow containers that could hide tools or documents and then be secreted in various body cavities, and shoes like those invented by Mokana that have a hollow heel. Before he left the United States, never to live there again, Billy Robinson wrote a book called
Spirit Slate Writing and Kindred Phenomena
. In it, Zanzic’s old running partner described a number of the devices that would seem as equally suited for espionage as for pretending to contact the dead. He detailed thirty-seven different methods for secret writing. These various methods, some using heat, some chemicals, and others light, were in great demand and interest and in fact would play an important part in spy communication during World War I. He also detailed how to read other people’s letters without opening the envelopes by using alcohol to render them temporarily transparent. Another clever method for the same result involved using an embryologist’s egg glass to look within opaque envelopes. Especially subtle methods to share information while being closely scrutinized were given in several variations and in detail; two were for special ways to use secret writing devices attached to hands that couldn’t be seen. He even taught how to use a piece of thread to send secret Morse code directly to a medium’s (or another operative’s) head. A new secret at the time, which is now called black art, allowed for agents or magicians to move about without being seen, wearing a specialized form of black clothing. Robinson also described a primitive way to gimmick a fountain pen so it could shoot a cap. Years later, an acquaintance of Houdini’s named Clayton Hutton, one of the major creative forces to create escape material and methods for the military, would make a deadlier version to help captured British airmen and troops escape from the Nazis during World War II.

By the March 1908 issue of
Conjurer’s
, Houdini began a comprehensive series of articles on cryptography. In the stated context of promoting a secret code so “magicians can secretly correspond with one another and exchange tricks and secrets without fear of the messages being intercepted by others,” Houdini published a series of techniques and a history of the art of cryptography, an art that he claimed “often…has been the means of giving me a friendly warning or clever hint to look out for myself.”

He began by teaching the method of using what he mistakenly called a “windowed cipher” to communicate secret messages. In Germany Houdini purchased sets of pasteboards, properly known as a Cardan grille. In the example that Houdini uses, the original message would be the following: “Would like to prepare to leave my son at your house Saturday and if you wish for him to bring the late copy of the London
Times
do let me know, as I shall not refuse.” When read through the pasteboard filter that covers over certain letters, the message reads, “prepare to leave your house Saturday for London do not refuse.”

The next magazine installment included instructions for producing invisible ink and another cipher that employed the grouping of letters or sentences to produce a new message. In the June 1908 issue, Houdini’s call for magicians to communicate via coded ciphers was echoed in a letter from an amateur magician named “Raymeen” Stone. He suggested that Houdini devote a page in each issue of the magazine that would be designated for a correspondence club of amateur magicians who could communicate to one another using one of Houdini’s cipher methods.

Houdini’s literary ambitions were being channeled into areas other than magazine publishing too. On October 5, 1907, while he was performing in Los Angeles, Houdini went to a local synagogue where he recited the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, on the fifteenth anniversary of his father’s death. It might have been on his next train trip, from Los Angeles to Kansas City, when Houdini pulled out a piece of paper and modified a popular poem by Elizabeth Akers Allen called “Rock Me to Sleep.” Where Allen envisioned a backward flight of time so that her now dead mother could comfort her, Houdini had turned the poem into an ode to his dead father.