The Secret Life of Houdini (39 page)

This same year, Houdini stole blueprints in London. Houdini’s friend Will Goldston, the London-based magic dealer, wrote a series of articles in 1935 for
The Sunday Express
called “Men Who Made Magic.” In his article on Houdini, Goldston recounts an interesting anecdote. In 1908, Goldston had been feuding with John Neville Maskelyne, England’s most famous magician, after Maskelyne had double-crossed the magic dealer by breaking an agreement and testifying for a German who was suing Goldston. When Houdini came to England, Goldston filled him in on the details of Maskelyne’s betrayal. Since Houdini never cared much for the English magician, he sympathized with his friend. While they were in Goldston’s office, a third magician came in and told them of a new illusion named the Levitated Fakir that Maskelyne was working on in complete secrecy.

“How’s it done?” Houdini asked.

“I don’t know,” the third man said. “I’d like to.”

Houdini could even escape from safes.
From the collection of John Cox

“So would I,” Goldston said.

“So you shall,” Houdini smiled enigmatically.

The next morning, Houdini walked into Goldston’s office and threw a large envelope on the dealer’s desk.

“There you are, Will,” he said. “The complete plans of Johnny’s ‘Fakir.’”

Goldston was astonished. He asked Houdini how on Earth he could have obtained the blueprints, especially from someone as security-conscious as Maskelyne, but Houdini just smiled “feebly” and refused to answer.

“To this day I do not know how he came into possession of these prints,” Goldston wrote. “I do know, however, that he never went to bed the previous night! Whatever his methods, they were those of a master-mind.”

On New Year’s Day, 1909, Houdini, now the most famous vaudeville entertainer in Europe, played his three turns at the Paragon Theatre in London and then returned to his boardinghouse. “The poor old deaf landlady had a very bad meal. Went to bed after eating an apple and whatever was fit to eat left from tea,” Houdini wrote in his diary. That the material trappings of success were of no interest to Houdini is obvious, but Houdini’s seemingly complete lack of concern with creature comforts is still noteworthy. Later that year, his friend Roterberg would once again chide him for this. “I am always glad to hear that you are making good although you dont need the money. Because when the time comes, you won’t know what to do with it. You know less about enjoying things than you should know…. But that is an old subject on which you and I will never agree. In occult parlance they would call you a Rajah Yogi because your pleasure lies in making the money and not in the spending of it.”

Roterberg was wrong. Staying at a great hotel or traveling first-class meant nothing to Houdini, but he derived great pleasure in his various collections and when it came to them, Houdini spared no expense. In 1909, he began to direct his collecting zeal in an additional area, art, buying up paintings, etchings, and prints. In a crash course to educate himself, he began to visit museums and galleries daily. Soon he was snatching up Hogarth engravings and bidding one thousand francs for a Van Ostade painting.

Houdini’s newfound passion became a source of friction between him and Bess. After they argued in a taxicab late one night, Houdini responded by leaving the house early the next day, visiting an old magician, bidding on more paintings at an auction, and buying Bess a solid silver case for her handbag to placate her. He wrote the cost of the case in cipher in his diary, which suggests that Bess routinely read his entries.

Meanwhile, he was beginning to be confronted by a new rash of imitators. In Germany, both men and women began to perform Houdini’s handcuffed bridge jumps. Houdini’s response was to train a female German championship diver in both the bridge jumps and the can escape, but it seems that Houdini never had to actually employ her since his original female imitator quickly faded from the scene. By 1909, imitators began replicating his water can. In America, a German woman named Minerva, who dubbed herself “the Original Woman Jailbreaker and Handcuff Queen,” introduced her “newest sensation—the Death-Defying Water Escape from an Airtight Locked Barrel filled to the brim with water.” She even advertised herself as “more wonderful and mystifying than Houdini.” Years before, a female imitator had the gall to call herself “Miss Lincoln Houdini,” with the word Houdini being triple the size of Lincoln.

Houdini was also being imitated by John Clempert, a former wrestler who had achieved some renown for his act, “The Man They Could Not Hang.” Unfortunately, one night, when Clempert’s noose slipped, they could. Clempert dangled from the rope unconscious for a full two minutes before his assistant realized something was amiss. Recuperating in a hospital bed, he dreamed up a new persona—the “Handcuff and Siberian Gaol Breaker.” Clempert began to feature many of Houdini’s escapes and even embellished the water can escape by combining it with the Metamorphosis. In his version, two cans were onstage, one full, and one empty. He went into the full one; his assistant went into the empty one. After a minute and a half, he escaped, but when he opened the filled can, it contained his assistant.

Noting that Clempert was known as “the man they could not hang,” Houdini wrote, “Perhaps this is a pity, for when one man gets work on another’s reputation and has the impudence to rub the fact home by exposing the methods of the originator, words are useless.” Lawyers weren’t. After instituting a suit, Houdini seemed to have settled the case out of court. Clempert “held up a flag of truce,” Houdini wrote Goldston. “He has promised never to use my name in such a malicious manner and I believe he really means it.”

Minerva and Clempert weren’t exceptional cases. A French performer named Steens imitated everything Houdini did, down to his advertising. Houdini’s escalation of his escapes from simply defeating handcuffs (or even jail-breaking) to cuffed bridge jumps and the water can escape had served to slightly winnow down the population of imitators. And with good reason. A man named Alburtus had attempted a straitjacket escape in the ocean at Atlantic City on a freezing day in January. The ocean was too violent so he went to the bay, dove in, and struggled to free himself. After going down twice, he finally surfaced free of his restraint. Unfortunately, he was unconscious by then and had to be saved by lifeguards moments before he would have drowned. A would-be escapologist named Menkis was fished out of the water unconscious after he dove in manacled. And in April 1909, a handcuff king named Ricardo jumped off the Luitpold Bridge in Landshut, Bavaria. He couldn’t escape from his restraints and he drowned.

“I was honestly sorry to hear of Ricardos [sic] death,” Houdini told
The London Umpire
on July 25, 1909. “People who attempt these feats ought to know before exactly what they are doing. I don’t mind entering into competition with any man, for competition is healthy, but I do kick when they steal my act, do it badly, and then make a great shout. The fact that they are bad stealers is inclined to have an injurious effect on my show, because the people are prone to put all acts of a particular kind in the same basket.”

In a fascinating footnote to the story, years later, an escape artist named Rex Palmer Gordon claimed to have been hired by Houdini to fail in his jump off the Luitpold Bridge—as Ricardo. “Joined Harry Houdini and as Rex Ricardo, jumped off the Leopold [sic] Bridge Barvia [sic]. This was done on a Friday. I was fished out unconscious. The Wife finished the week…HH came in on the Monday, did the job on Tuesday, with the usual success.” Houdini’s creativity in framing challenges, and in creating and then defeating his own competition, was brilliant.

Houdini was never rash and reckless when it came to stunts in which he faced the possibility of death, always maintaining that the only successful wizards were safety-first wizards. Still, he was performing escapes both on and off the stage that
did
carry the possibility of death, even if he
had
taken sufficient precautions to work the odds heavily in his favor. On June 17, 1908, Houdini, heavily manacled, dove off Young’s Pier at Atlantic City, New Jersey, before a crowd of more than twenty thousand. He usually jumped feetfirst into waters that he was unfamiliar with, but on this day, he decided to dive, despite being warned against that by the lifeguards. He knifed through the water perfectly but then struck his head on the bottom of the ocean floor. Dazed and bleeding, he somehow managed to remove his handcuffs.

During his run at the Euston Palace of Varieties in London, he accepted a challenge from a local dairy to escape from one of their milk churns. Although it was a huge churn, Houdini was cramped inside it, and the airholes that had been drilled were insufficient. “I realized that in my efforts to escape I was exhausting the available oxygen,” Houdini remembered. “It was useless to shout for help, as my cries would not be heard…. I rocked the churn back and forth, but could not escape…. Suddenly, in my thrashing, I overturned the churn, and it fell on the stage.

“The cover was held down by clamps, and as luck would have it, the churn fell so that one of the clamps struck the floor, and the blow dislodged it. The cover came loose, and I pushed it off. The air rushed in.”

In 1909 alone Houdini had serious difficulties escaping from a wet sheet challenge, injured his wrists severely when he was hung from chains, and “all but choked to death” from the pressure of a leather collar when his bed slipped from position during a challenge to escape from a “crazy crib” restraint used on lunatics. And at the end of the year, Houdini had to undergo an operation to lance an infected boil on his derriere that had been worsened by the constant pressure from one of the straps on his straitjacket.

Besides the risks, Houdini was now running into resistance from local authorities, who were loath to allow him to perform some of his outdoor stunts. Early in November 1908, Houdini was set to leap from Westminster Bridge in London while both handcuffed and straitjacketed, but the chief commissioner of police refused to give permission for the attempt, fearing that the huge crowd would block traffic. Houdini was threatened with imprisonment if he went ahead without official sanction.

Clempert the Siberian copycat.
New York Pubic Library

Steens replicates another Houdini poster.
From the collection of George and Sandy Daily

The following April, Houdini did just that in Paris. The newspaper report was wonderful and read:

The many idlers who were basking in the sunshine close to the river noticed an automobile pull up at the Morgue. A man clad in the briefest of bathing costumes descended, to the wonderment of the spectators. Two fellow-passengers gripped the scantily-clad man, secured his wrists with handcuffs and bound his arms tightly. The crowd, believing it had to do with a band of lunatics, shouted for police assistance.

Four policemen, who had been dozing on duty at the side of Notre Dame, suddenly woke up and ran towards the wildly gesticulating crowd. In the meantime the principal lunatic, by the aid of a ladder, had climbed to the roof of the Morgue. He stood there for a moment with his enchained hands held above his head, while the four policemen below looked helplessly on: Come down, said one policeman, coaxingly. The man’s reply was to plunge headlong into the river. He is gone without a doubt, was the general comment of the spectators of the incident.