The Secret Life of Houdini (38 page)

Snow tires were almost a match for the escape artist.
Conjuring Arts Research Center

Seeing this as a personal attack on him, Houdini responded with a vicious editorial that compared Wilson with a “dog in a manger.” In the next issue of
The Sphinx
, Wilson struck back. “Houdini is yet a young man with much to learn. I am sorry for him, for money has become his god and self-conceit has caused him to idolize himself.” With the pledge to his father ringing in his ears, Houdini responded: “Houdini may be devoting all his waking hours and laboring far into the night to earn his salary, but this is because he hopes that in his old age he will have enough laid aside to support himself and those dependent upon him, without preying upon his profession and the public by perverting so-called news items into financial gain.”

It only got worse. Wilson told other magicians that Houdini was calling him an “SOB” and saying that the former minister had a “little black book” crammed with the phone numbers of three hundred married women with whom he was “holding criminal relations as an adulterer and fornicator.” Irate, Wilson wrote Houdini on May 20: “I cannot understand why you go about the country saying such disagreeable things about me and mine…. Has success intoxicated you to the extent that you believe you have the sole right to do a handcuff act or publish a paper for magicians?…you know, as well as I, that you could not get out of the commonest county jail, the most ordinary pair of handcuffs, or the flimsiest made dry-goods box if you were divested completely of all the keys, fakes, and other appliances that you use…. you can persist in your infamous attacks on my character and your slurs on
The Sphinx
so long as it pleases you so to do and I will say no more, for you are that type of Jew that has made the noble Hebrew race—God’s chosen people—an execration in every country on the globe.”

Wilson started working behind the scenes to poison Houdini’s plan to have
Conjurer’s Monthly
made the official organ of the Society of American Magicians. Houdini had already polarized some members of the SAM with his attacks on Robert-Houdin, so when Houdini did ask for the status of official organ for his magazine, “not one stood up for me” at the “stormy” meeting, he wrote in his diary. The lack of support hurt him. “You mention that certain people state that I do all my good work for the advertisements I may obtain out of it,” he had written Oscar Teale, an éminence grise in the magic world, in November of 1906. “I know in my
heart of hearts
that whatever good deeds I do is simply to help along people and poor unfortunates that I may meet in my life’s journey. I could tell you of the dozens of performers I have helped and of whom you have never heard a word. I have spent hundreds of dollars sending the poor stranded professional home. In fact, I was looked upon as easy prey, but all that did not stop me from helping my fellowman [sic] along, even when I knew I was getting bested. Do you know that in my hardship days I
never
borrowed a single dollar!!!!!!!!!”

Yet Houdini had a personal charisma that was undeniable and mesmerizing, and after spending some time in his company, his detractors were often charmed into becoming supporters. This happened to A. G. Waring. Thinking Houdini was a “knocker” so that he might better “blow his own horn,” he met him at Teale’s office in June of 1908 and came away feeling “toward him as a brother.” Waring even pledged to fight behind the scenes to make Houdini’s magazine the official SAM organ.

At the same “stormy” meeting of the SAM on June 6, Houdini had been elected vice president of the society. Stung by the failure to stand by his magazine and by not being mentioned by name in the SAM yearbook as the “member” who had bought the neglected cemetery plot of the great Italian conjurer Bosco and deeded it gratis to the SAM, Houdini resigned from the group on July 6. On August 15, three days before he would sail to Europe to fulfill his old contracts, he suspended publication of his own magazine.

Houdini was planning some other changes too. Finally, after years of indecision, he followed through on his threat to give up handcuff challenges. By now handcuff kings were a dime a dozen, and Houdini had raised the bar by performing the truly life-threatening Milk Can escape, his bridge jumps, and his myriad challenges. Those would definitively separate the men from the boys in the escape world.

Houdini showed his disdain for the whole handcuff field by exposing his own methods onstage. On April 27, 1908, on the stage of Boston’s Keith’s Theatre, he took a pair of handcuffs that were alleged to be particularly strong and began rapping them against a chair. In less time than it takes to tell this, the newspaper reporter noted, the cuffs were open. By August, Houdini felt that he might as well be making some money off his imitators, and he decided to put the “Defiance Handcuff Act as Presented by the World-Famous Harry Houdini, King of Handcuffs” on the market. In the September issues of various magic magazines, both in the United States and in England, August Roterberg, Houdini’s close friend, took out a full-page ad guaranteeing that with the “Splendid Instructions and Descriptive Matter” that came with the “outfit,” “any person will be able to free himself in a few seconds from any handcuffs, leg irons, etc, furnished by strangers.”

Houdini also left the country in the capable hands of one of his protégés, The Great Leonard, aka Harry Leonard, aka Leonard Hicks. Hicks had seen Houdini as a kid in Richmond, Virginia, in 1900. Six years later, Hicks was working as a desk clerk at a Chicago hotel when Houdini came in to switch hotels, because Bess hated their current accommodations. Hicks gave Houdini a beautiful room with its own bath, and in return, Houdini invited the young man to his shows. His stay was extended, and when it was finally time to leave, Houdini suggested that Hicks give show business a try. The desk clerk was speechless.

“I think you’d better,” Houdini said. “You’ve watched too much of my work, and you’re the first man not working with me who caught on. You’re too dangerous to have running around loose.”

Hicks moved in with the Houdinis that summer and apprenticed. He even had cards made up that read “Harry Leonard presenting the famous Houdini act by permission of Harry Houdini” and listed Houdini’s Harlem address. He did handcuff escapes, the Metamorphosis, and right after Houdini left the States for Europe in August of 1908, he began doing the water can.

Houdini opened with the Circus Busch in Berlin on August 31, and the audience was littered with would-be handcuff kings who were aching for a dollop of free advertising by challenging Houdini. They went home disappointed, cuffs in tow, when Houdini debuted the water can in Europe and escaped from a straitjacket. By now, Houdini was really selling his straitjacket escape. “His contortions, while rolling about the stage, were wonderful to look upon, and this worked the spectators up to a pitch of excitement bordering on hysteria,” one reporter noted.

With his new difficult escapes, Houdini may have succeeded in warding off competitors, but the day-in and day-out extreme exertion took its toll. “The act I am now doing—first the straitjacket, then the can—is the hardest on my body that I have ever attempted,” he wrote that September. And that was just onstage. When he wasn’t performing, he spent his time doing outdoor bridge jumps, escaping from jails, trolling for new books to add to his collection, and meeting with old magicians. As well as doing some intelligence gathering for Melville again.

The entire valley was filled with galloping horses, as far as the eye could see. And on each steed, a rider wearing a breastplate and a steel helmet, chanting in unison as his upright lance refracted the last rays of the sun. Suddenly, the galloping horses came to a halt. And from a clearing due south, a small contingent, led by a sword-waving dashing figure wearing a silver helmet that was the perch for an equally silver eagle, came to greet them. The large group, Cavalry Division A, had just completed a fifty-mile march, the longest of these military maneuvers. They were being personally greeted by German Kaiser Wilhelm II, who rode a magnificent white steed. The cavalry commander and the kaiser’s retinue exchanged formal greetings, but soon the formalities had been dropped and even the kaiser could be seen eating a sandwich and drinking a good German beer, still in the saddle.

Every year in September, the kaiser convened these four-day mock war games and invited military leaders from the world over to view the splendor of the mighty German army, the world’s largest, which numbered 605,000 men. The United States was represented by both Colonel John P. Wisser, who was the military attaché stationed in Berlin, and by Major General Leonard S. Wood, who came from America as the kaiser’s guest. This year the “kaiser’s manoeuvres” were taking place in the strategically important Alsace-Lorraine area, so there were no official French or English guests. Perhaps that was also the reason why every modern warfare appliance was on display, except for dirigible balloons. The German high command had determined that they were still in too incomplete a state of development to allow them to be seen by the eyes of the world in mock warfare.

By September 2, the kaiser was back in Berlin for the glittery annual military spectacle of the review of the guards at Tempelhof Field. In all likelihood, Houdini was in the crowd, watching the procession before working at Circus Busch that night. And back in England, William Melville, who had “retired” from Scotland Yard in November of 1903, was covertly working as a “Mr. Morgan” for a new branch of British intelligence called MO-5 (which would eventually become MI-5). More than ever convinced that Germany would be England’s next great foe, he reached out to Houdini again. On September 15, he noted in his diary,
No word yet from HH.

There was a lot for Houdini to report on. One area of particular interest was heavier-than-air flying machines. Houdini took sharp notice of German progress in this area, writing back to his inventor friend Montraville M. Wood that the country was going crazy on flying machines. In addition to that, Houdini was making contact at the highest levels of the German royal family. In early October, he visited the hunting lodge of Prince Friedrich Leopold von Preussen. Leopold was a first cousin to the kaiser and the richest prince in Germany. On October 9, Houdini gave a private performance for Leopold and his invited guests in the castle of Klein-Glienecke. According to Houdini’s diary, he did card tricks, the needles, and finished with the water [milk] can effect. “They had a pair of their handcuffs at the palace, and I beat them easily.” He also mesmerized the young princes when he took their silk handkerchiefs and did some magic with them. For his efforts, he received a pin and a nice letter of commendation from his old nemesis Count von Schwerin, who was by then a high-ranking military official. In November, Houdini was back in England for yet another tour.

It was pitch black, that rare type of purple darkness that induced sudden panic because there was absolutely no difference whether one’s eyes were open or closed. The cramped space was too short for a person to stand erect and too narrow to sit comfortably. Inside the enclosure, the air was thin, hot, and stagnant with the odors of sweat and fear. It was frightening to imagine the vast depth this darkness could contain, but reaching out just an inch and touching a wall would instantly prompt a spine-tingling chill. Even a coffin would have been more comfortable.

Somewhere in the distance, an orchestra was playing, the music punctuated by cries and shouts of desperation, but the eight-inch-thick steel walls were lulling the outside world and its harsh noise into an amorphous amalgam—a muffled hymn. What was distinct was the rhythmic melody of short, desperate gasps of breath. Perhaps last breaths.

His hands were impervious to the darkness. As if by second nature, they skimmed the cool metal walls and zeroed in on the bulky mechanism. First the scraping sound of metal on metal, then the first welcome
click
. He listened for the specific order of sounds—a second
click
, more scraping,
click
,
click
, and then
whump
. The deep thunderous tone was like a prison door closing, but to Houdini, it was precisely the opposite.

In December of 1908, Houdini appeared at the Euston Palace of Varieties Theatre in London, a beautiful building that lived up to its name. On Friday night, December 4, he accepted a challenge from J. R. Paul, a locksmith and safe expert, who defied Houdini to escape from a safe that he would bring to the theater. Houdini accepted the challenge with the proviso that the safe be brought to the Euston earlier that day.

On the night of the challenge, Houdini was locked into the safe and then a screen was placed in front of the vault to obscure the audience’s view. According to Houdini’s own account, he escaped from the safe in “fourteen minutes.” However, he didn’t throw down the screen and triumphantly appear in front of the audience for another half an hour. One explanation is that such challenges gave Houdini both the opportunity and an alibi to conduct a mission while he was performing. We know that Melville used other magicians as operatives to do similar jobs.