The Secret Life of Houdini (49 page)

Library of Congress

M
Y DEAR LITTLE MOTHER. POOR MAMA
,” he sobbed after coming to. The cable that he had neglected earlier contained the message that his mother had died. Moved by his grief, the reporters and dignitaries left the room.

Too weak to even walk, Houdini was helped to the hotel by Bess and his assistants. He seemed to be in a trance, and Bess found him incapable of thought or action. Back in his room, he was helped to bed, where he lay in abject agony. A Danish doctor was called and, after an examination, he told Bess that the shock of Houdini’s mother’s death had precipitated an attack of chronic kidney disease. He ordered immediate hospitalization, but Houdini mustered up enough strength to reject that idea. In lieu of that, the doctor recommended a long rest cure.

Bess and the Danish physician went outside to consult, leaving Houdini alone with Jim Collins, one of his trusted assistants. As soon as they departed, Collins locked the door and walked back over to the bed. He bent over his shattered boss.

“Mr. Houdini, can’t you do anything for your mother?” he asked.

The question seemed to jar Houdini from his stupor.

“What do you mean, Jim?”

“You know what I mean,” Collins said. “Can’t you do anything for her?”

An uneasy silence fell between them.

“Do I understand you, Jim, that you think I really possess some power whereby I could help my mother?” Houdini finally said.

“Yes.”

Houdini sighed.

“No. No, Jim, this is the will of the Almighty, and God’s will be done. There is nothing that can be done.”

Collins slowly sat down next to the bed.

“Maybe I could go back to America for you,” he suggested.

“No,” Houdini said. “We’ll all go back on the next steamer.”

That Houdini’s own assistant believed that he possessed superhuman powers is telling, but it was really only a residue of the myth that Houdini had been creating for almost twenty years. Despite his denials, Spiritualists were convinced that Houdini was able to dematerialize and pass his etheric body through solid substances like packing cases and water cans, rematerializing once free of the constraints. Others posited that Houdini weaved his magic by hypnotizing the entire audience. In any rate, many were in agreement that Houdini possessed some potent powers. “You could have founded a religion on the strength of what you were doing,” one friend wrote him, a religion that presumably would encompass resurrection of the flesh.

Houdini immediately canceled his engagement, even though in Denmark breach of contract was a criminal offense. Herr Beketow took sympathy on his grief-stricken star, and Houdini later repaid him by taking out a large boxed ad in the circus’s program, thanking him for his display of sensitivity. Now arrangements for the return trip had to be made. When it was ascertained that the party would have to wait until the twenty-third for the return trip of the ironically named steamer,
Kronprinzessin Cecilie
, Houdini immediately cabled Hardeen and ordered him to delay the funeral. Houdini’s desire to see his mother one last time took precedence over Jewish law that mandated immediate burial. Apparently the other children of the rabbi acceded to Houdini’s unorthodox request.

Still in obvious distress, Houdini was accompanied by the Danish specialist as far as Germany, where a local doctor took over. In Bremen, the dutiful son remembered his mother’s last wishes and purchased a pair of woolen slippers, size six. The weeklong return trip gave Houdini ample time to imagine the circumstances of his mother’s death over and over again in his mind. Houdini most likely got the true details of her demise when his brother Leopold met him on the revenue cutter. He would have learned that Cecilia had accompanied Hardeen to his Asbury Park engagement on July 14. That day, Hardeen jumped off a fishing pier while manacled and chained. In the evening, he did challenge handcuff releases, and then escaped from a straitjacket and the Milk Can. Later that night, back at the Imperial Hotel, Cecilia suffered a severe stroke. A local doctor pronounced her condition serious. Theo called his sister, Gladys, and she arrived the next morning. By then, Cecilia was on the critical list.

Nonetheless, Hardeen continued his performances. After Wednesday’s show, he went directly to his mother’s bedside. She tried to tell him something about Houdini, but the stroke had impaired her speech. She fell into a fitful sleep. Shortly after midnight, she died.

As soon as Houdini entered his house, he went straight to the parlor where his mother’s corpse had been laid out for burial. “She looked so dainty and restful, only a small spot on Her cheek, and the Face which haunted me with love all my Life is still and quiet, and when She does not answer me I know that God is taking Her to His Bosom and giving Her the peace which she denied herself on this earth,” he wrote in his diary. “And tomorrow Mother will be laid alongside of Her best friend, one for whom she mourned ever since he obeyed the mighty command…. And I know if there is a Meeting Place, Both are Happy in this event, which leaves all us children miserable, unhappy, and mindfull [sic] of sorrow.”

Harry brought a steamer chair from his mother’s room and placed it by her side. He would not move from that chair until the next day. At some point he placed the new slippers inside the coffin.

It was a dismal day, and it perfectly mirrored Houdini’s mood. Once again, he set out for the cemetery. Wearing a black suit, a black bow tie, and a black hat, he strolled distractedly among the rows of graves, noting each marker. Just the week before he admitted to his diary that he was “feeling a bit better,” but quickly he qualified that with, “but July 17 is always in my mind.”

Even here in Monte Carlo, thousands of miles from where Cecilia lay at peace, Houdini could find solace only among the dead. He had tried to reenter the land of the living in September, when he left New York after almost daily visits to the cemetery and traveled to Germany to fulfill his contracts, but it was hard work. On September 16, 1913 Houdini opened in Nuremberg, performing the Needles and the Water Torture Cell. “Act works beautifully,” he wrote in his diary. And then “had a terrible spell after show on account of my darling Mother.” Even before his opening, Houdini had spent days getting his mother’s letters typed up in good German so that he could bind them in book form and carry them with him. It was a poignant exercise. “Many a bitter tear I am shedding. In the entire lot of letters, which I have saved since 1900, each is a love story, a prayer to God to protect her children, a plea that we should be good human beings.”

Mr. and Mrs. Houdini in Monte Carlo.
From the collection of Dr. Bruce Averbook

Two days later, the German authorities tried to maintain that Houdini was not a good human being and hauled him into court for presenting a professional performance without obtaining police permission when he jumped manacled into the Dutzend Lake twice in one day. He was fined fifty marks for bathing in the water, fifty marks for not obtaining prior allowance for the performance, and an additional twenty marks for walking on the grass. Houdini naturally appealed the case, and the local police became laughingstocks in the press when it was revealed that they had attempted to prevent the jump into the lake on the day
after
it had occurred. It was also wryly noted that while city authorities had warned Houdini against carrying out his publicity stunt, the city’s municipal streetcar administration had placed additional cars in service to transport the thousands of citizens who flocked to see a performance that was verboten.

His troubles in Germany didn’t even rate a mention in a letter to Hardeen. Writing on black-bordered mourning stationery, he confessed, “I am working in a sort of a mechanical way and feel so lonely that I dont know what to do properly, but am hoping that eventually I will have my burning tears run dry, but know my Heart will
ALWAYS ACHE FOR OUR DARLING MOTHER
. Dash, I knew that I loved Mother, but that my very Existence seems to have expired with HER, is simply writing my innermost thoughts. I trust that The Almighty will allow Our Darling Mothers Prayers to sheild [sic] us, and that She from Heaven will look cown [sic] on us and guide our footsteps on the Rightous [sic] path. With all my efforts, I try and still my longing as I Know positively that Mother would not like the way she Passing Away has effected [sic] me, but what can I do, All
HER LIFE
was spent in making Motherly Sainted Love to us, and I am simply weeping at our Loss. My brain works naturally, and I try and scheme ahead as in the Past but I seem to have lost all ambition…. Must try to cheer up and be a man…. Bess seems to be sick to me, but perhaps she is anxious about my welfare, for I must worry her.”

By November he was still miserable. Now playing in Paris, although Houdini did great business thrilling audiences with the Needles effect and the Upside Down, he was “very melancholy” and only met one challenge the whole month. Still obsessed with Cecilia’s death, he wrote to Hardeen near the end of the month. “Dash its [sic]
TOUGH
, and I can’t seem to get
over it
…. Time heals all Wounds, but a long time will have to pass before it will heal the terrible blow which
MOTHER
tried to save me from knowing.” This cryptic reference remains a mystery to this day.

Houdini canceled his December Paris dates and took Bess to Monte Carlo to divert himself with the casinos. He won two thousand francs but soon got bored with the gaming tables. What seemed to pique his interest was the special graveyard that contained the bodies of people who had committed suicide after losing their life’s fortunes. Houdini made several visits to this bleak landscape. It’s unlikely that he himself was contemplating such a grisly fate but if he was, the visits seemed to disabuse him of that notion. “A terrible feeling pervades the first time one sees the graves, and thinks of the human beings who finish their lives in this manner.” More sociologist than potential suicide, Houdini made some acute observations about the phenomenon in his diary. He noted that there were more suicides in winter than in summer; that the casino workers would stuff money into the bare pockets of recently discovered suicides to suggest other motives than financial; and that the casino now offered to pay for shipping bodies back to their hometowns to “keep things quiet.” A grave of a man and woman who committed suicide together particularly fascinated him.

My mother has been the
one great love and adoration of my life
. I have loved others, but it has seemed to me always that beneath and above any other affection was my love for my beautiful mother.

Houdini scholars have always emphasized Houdini’s seemingly over-the-top devotion to his mother. In the context of his time, Houdini’s sentiments don’t seem excessive. Houdini didn’t pen the mother tribute above; Clyde Fitch, the most popular playwright in America in the early 1900s, wrote it. “A mother is a mother still/ The holiest thing alive,” the poet Coleridge observed, and Houdini quoted that in a letter to Bess seeking to differentiate his love for her and Cecilia. “My Dear Girl, whereas I say you are mine, my mother claims me as her son. So the two loves do not conflict…. Indeed I love you as I shall never again love any woman, but the love for a mother is a love that only a true mother ought to possess, for she loved me before I was born, loved me as I was born and naturally will love me until one or the other passes away into the great Beyond, not passing away but simply let us say ‘gone on ahead.’”

Though he didn’t follow the Jewish religion to the letter, as witnessed by his postponement of his mother’s interment, Houdini did believe in an after-life—one where the deceased might even be able to intercede with God on behalf of those still living. In 1916, Houdini was interviewed by a Cincinnati journalist who came across a picture of an austere-looking, gray-haired, bearded man in his dressing room. “That’s my father,” Houdini told him. “I think [he] has given me my success. When he died he asked me to pray for him every night. He would watch over me and assure my success…. I have followed his request.”

Cecilia had urged Houdini to visit the cemetery before departing on his journeys to get his father’s blessing. Whether the dead could actually communicate with the living was an issue that always fascinated Houdini. Throughout his life, he had made pacts with many of his friends, creating a unique, secret code for each one. Whoever pierced the veil of death first would then attempt to relay the code from beyond the grave. Years later, Bess suggested that Houdini and his mother had made such a code before her death and that the operative word was “Forgive.” According to Bess, Houdini’s youngest and oldest brothers had been estranged. Although Leopold, the youngest, had been Houdini’s favorite sibling, the magician sided with his older brother. Bess claimed that the family tragedy was enough to have contributed to Cecilia’s death. “In his heart he wanted to forgive his brother, but pity kept him silent,” she said. “Only that word, ‘Forgive,’ from his dead mother, could have brought about the reconciliation for which he longed.”