The Secret Life of Houdini (52 page)

As the orchestra played, they worked at a frenzied pace and constructed, brick by brick, a solid impenetrable wall that bisected the two seamless rugs that had been previously placed crosswise on the floor of the stage.

“I would now like to invite any doubting members of the audience to come up and examine the wall to assure themselves that there is no trickery involved,” Houdini said. The spectators who took him up on the offer were allowed to peruse the cloth and even hit the wall with supplied hammers. When they were convinced of the impenetrability of the bricks, Houdini told them to form a semicircle facing the edge of the wall that pointed away from the audience.

Now Houdini, the man who no jail could hold, was going to demonstrate in front of a live audience that walls couldn’t stop him either. The mysteriarch stood solemnly next to the structure. He certainly couldn’t go around the wall; either the audience or the committee onstage would catch that. It was nine feet tall, so he couldn’t scale it without being detected. The seamless carpet prevented him from going under it. So he had only one option: to walk through it.

Two six-foot-tall screens were brought onstage. One was placed around Houdini, the other was set up on the other side of the wall. Houdini held his hands up over the enclosure. “Here I am,” he shouted. His hands dropped. “Now I’m going.” Suddenly, a plank that had been placed on top of the screen on the other side of the wall was knocked to the floor. “Now I’m here!” Houdini said, and he stepped out from behind the screen on the other side of the wall. He had walked through a solid, hand-built brick wall.

“Houdini…gave the most remarkable performance that has ever been witnessed in American vaudeville,” a
Billboard
magazine critic gushed. “He walks through a solid brick wall without disturbing a brick. The audience sat spellbound for fully two minutes after this feat was accomplished. They were too dumbfounded to applaud.” When his turn was over, Houdini received four curtain calls.

With war raging in Europe, Houdini had put his magical bus tour idea on hold and introduced a new effect that bridged his twin identities of escape artist and master magician. The effect was not his own invention. Houdini had licensed the American rights from a British magician named Sidney Josolyne. Whether they were his to sell is still in dispute. Josolyne called his version Walking Through a Steel Plate. Just as the name implied, the magician would miraculously pass through a steel wall and materialize on the other side. Of course, dubious audiences might think that the wall was gimmicked, and the magician, after being shielded from sight on one side of the wall, would simply pass through a secret panel in the structure and get to the other side. Houdini quelled those notions with his brilliant staging.

That Houdini’s feats often completely astonished his audiences to the point of incredulity was evidenced by a disclaimer that Houdini was forced to issue as he continued to tour America with his Water Torture Cell. “There are people who have seen my act…who are inclined to be skeptical. They think the feat is a misrepresentation. They imagine that it is all an optical illusion just performed to deceive the eye,” Houdini wrote. “It is not a sham…. Since my youth I have studied mechanics…. The water torture cell was constructed by myself…. It took two full years. Another year was required to give me sufficient courage to attempt same. And can you blame me? Imagine yourself jammed head foremost in a cell filled with water, with your hands and feet unable to move and your shoulders tightly lodged in this imprisonment…. I believe it is the climax of all my studies and labors. Never will I be able to construct anything that will be more dangerous or difficult for me to do. Having flown a biplane and taught myself to become an expert aviator, I am in a position to state that flying is child’s play in comparison.”

In December 1914, while playing in Washington, D.C., Houdini was summoned to the White House for a private audience with President Woodrow Wilson, and the visit had a profound impact on the magician. “I hold the memory of my visit to President Wilson as an honor that is sacred,” he told reporters. “I have appeared before the rulers of nearly every civilized nation and the potentates of many uncivilized races, but I have never met so gracious a ruler, so human a man, as the President of my native land.” As Houdini was leaving, Wilson, who was then under pressure from all sides with respect to the war, bade him farewell. “Sir, I envy you your ability of escaping out of tight places,” he told Houdini. “Sometimes I wish I were able to do the same.”

Energized by his visit with the chief executive, Houdini began to apply some of his mechanical ingenuity toward inventions that could have practical applications and not merely serve as vehicles of entertainment. By the end of the month, headlines proclaimed “Houdini to Aid U.S. Government.” Couched as a “Christmas gift to the nation,” Houdini revealed that he was at work perfecting a diving suit that could be easily shed to enable disabled deep-sea divers to escape death by drowning. As soon as the invention was perfected, he planned to donate the apparatus to the U.S. government. “For some time I have been wondering how I could devote to the public good some of the ingenuity, which I have utilized in making my own way in the world,” Houdini told the reporter. “All the things by which I have managed to fool the public for many years have been done for the purely selfish motives of building up my own reputation, and I feel that it is only right that what brain and gifts I have should benefit humanity in some other way than merely entertaining the people.”

Houdini had been spurred to develop his improved suit when a friend of his in Melbourne, Australia, drowned while deep-sea diving. Eerily, the two men had had plans to meet for dinner that night. His friend’s death hit Houdini hard and he “formed a strong impression” that the friend had attempted to communicate with him, urging him to invent a safer suit.

This was not just empty rhetoric from a master publicist. A few years later, Houdini took out patents in both the United States and England on an improved diving suit that allowed the user to shed it in forty-five seconds by pulling a lever, which disconnected the top of the suit from the bottom. True to his word, Houdini did donate his invention to the U.S. Navy.

All his touring and inventive tinkering couldn’t get his mind off the death of his mother. As soon as he realized that the war had thwarted his chances to tour with his magical bus through Europe, Houdini had packed up all his belongings and moved out of his Harlem brownstone and moved in with Hardeen and his family in Flatbush. “The Home is a Home no longer for me and must be disposed of,” he wrote his friend and confidant Dr. Waitt. The following spring, Houdini took five months off, except for his usual July dates at Hammerstein’s and in Atlantic City. On July 5, 1915, he wrote friend A. G. Waring, “I have worked hard and faithfully, and never knew what it was to shirk work, until one morning I awoke and found that my Mother had departed—and since then I ‘loaf ’ in my work.”

“I have not recovered from my Mothers Loss, and July 8 was the (1913) last time I saw and [held] Her in my arms kissing Her a genuine Goodbye, and about the 17 of each month the feeling comes back to me, and I get melancoly [sic] moods,” he admitted to his old partner Jacob Hyman. On the second anniversary of her death, Houdini, Theo, and Leopold drove to Asbury Park and stayed in the room “in which My Darling Mother went to Sleep for Evermore.”

“Now I need three more gentlemen on this stage and there is a man here tonight who doesn’t know I am aware of his presence but I would be highly honored if this one man, who is the equal to three, would come up. I refer to Mr. Jess Willard, our champion,” Houdini bellowed from the stage of Los Angeles’s Orpheum Theatre on November 30, 1915.

Momentarily stunned, the audience of more than two thousand responded with tumultuous applause, cheers, and shrieks. Jess Willard was the recently crowned heavyweight champion of the world. Dubbed another “Great White Hope” by racist boxing aficionados who despaired at having the crown reside with Jack Johnson, a flamboyant black man, Willard had knocked Johnson out in twenty-six rounds in over one-hundred-degree heat in Havana the previous April. A six-foot-seven, 265-pound giant, Willard was such a hard hitter that in 1913 a fighter named “Bull” Young died after their bout. His victory over Johnson had made him an instant celebrity, and he capitalized on his newfound status by making personal appearances with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and even doing a vaudeville turn at Hammerstein’s in New York. He was exactly the type of celebrity Houdini would have loved to befriend.

Yet Willard, who was sitting with his trainers, seemed to sink into his seat after Houdini’s request.

“I assure you, Mr. Willard, that everyone here would like to have you as one of the committee and to prove it to you, we will leave it to the audience. Those who are in favor of having Mr. Willard on the stage, please signify by applauding.”

The audience gave him a resounding, lengthy ovation.

“Aw, g’wan wid your act. I paid for my seat here,” Willard groused at Houdini.

“But, Mr. Willard. I—” Houdini seemed at a loss for words.

“Give me the same wages you pay those other fellows and I’ll come down,” Willard said.

The audience fell silent.

“All right,” Houdini said brightly. “I accept your challenge. I’ll pay you what I pay these seven men. Come on down—I pay these men nothing. Don’t crawfish. Kindly step right downstairs and come on stage.”

Another huge cheer. Willard half rose and in his distinctive guttural voice yelled, “Go on wid the show, you faker, you four-flusher. Everyone knows you’re a four-flusher.”

Several people hissed the champion. Emboldened, Houdini walked right down to the footlights near Willard and, “white with rage,” threw his best haymaker.

“Look here, you. I don’t care how big you are or who you are. I paid you a compliment when I asked you to be one of the committee. You have the right to refuse, but you have no right to slur my reputation. Now that you have thrown down the gauntlet, I have the right to answer, and let me tell you one thing, and don’t forget this, that
I will still be Harry Houdini and a gentleman when you are no longer the heavyweight champion of the world
.”

The reaction of the crowd was captured vividly by Houdini in a beautifully descriptive letter to his sister. “I have roamed all over the world, I have raised Cain in thousands of theatres, I have tried through many a sleepless night to invent schemes to make an audience appreciate some worthy effort of mine, but nothing like this howling mob of refined ladies and gentlemen ever crossed my vision of success…. My reply to Mr. Jess Willard just set those twenty-three hundred human beings stark, raving mad. Instead of a place of entertainment, it was a seething, roaring furnace. For ten to fifteen minutes I had to stand perfectly still until the audience became exhausted in their tirades against Willard.

“All this time he shook his great fists at me and offered me a thousand dollars to come up to him, as he wished to annihilate me. But he could not make himself heard above the din of the hydra-throated monster he had aroused by insulting their compliments, and there he sat, swearing and blaspheming, until the head usher warned him that if he did not cease he must leave. Willard finally departed, crestfallen and defeated.”

The controversy raged for days, front-page headlines screaming, “Champion Driven from Theater by Hoots and Calls,” “Houdini Makes Monkey out of Jess Willard,” “Sneaks out of Town as Indignant Fans Roast His Conduct.” Willard did, in fact, leave town, failing to make a scheduled appearance as a wrestling referee the next day. Commentators claimed that the entire sport of boxing had been given a black eye by the “Pottawatomie Giant.”

Houdini even used the occasion to publicly declare his patriotism. A month after Willard won his crown, Germany had torpedoed the
Lusitania
, a passenger steamship, killing 128 Americans in the process. Rallying around (some might say wrapping himself in) the flag, Houdini told the
Los Angeles Record
, “I am an American and am more proud of that fact than anything else. That’s why it cut me so to realize that Jess Willard, whom I regarded as OUR champion, would act as he did. I have performed for kings, emperors, czars and princes in Europe, but I value one little audience with Pres. Wilson more than I do all the honors that they heaped upon me. The day that our president sent for me was the one which I shall always treasure in my memory as the happiest in my life, for I love my country and respect its president more than the greatest princes of the earth. So that’s what hurt me when Jess Willard…failed to live up to our ideals in public. An American is always a gentleman, in my opinion.”

The Willard bout was like a tonic to the man who had seemed a shadow of himself after his mother’s death. “[Willard] was not only hissed out of the theatre, but Houdini struck him a blow that knocked him out of the theatre, knocked him down and out of the hearts of hundreds of thousands of his admirers,” the magician wrote his sister. “Honest, Gladys, I have received at least a million dollars’ advertising space from this fray…You will smile to know that I am greeted on the streets as, ‘Hello, Champion.’”

Whether this was a courageous act of defiance or a cunning way of bullying a not-so-bright prizefighter into a David vs. Goliath no-win situation, Houdini seemed to be afraid of only one person in that theater, and she didn’t stand six feet seven inches tall. “Bess was in the wings,” he reported to his sister, “her face flaming red. I felt sure she was going to give me the dickens, and just think of it—there I was hurling defiance at the greatest fighter of the human race, and when I beheld my beloved little helpmate I actually was afraid. But she was with me. In fact in all my fights when she thinks I am right she is alongside, helping me load the machine guns. So when I noted that Bess was not angry with me, I did not give a rap about what Willard thought of me.”

Houdini trumpeted his victory over Willard to all his friends, even sending clippings to his latest confidant and correspondent Quincy Kilby, who was keeping a Houdini scrapbook. His only regret was that his new friend, Jack London, the novelist, wasn’t at the theater that night. “As you will have noticed from the papers I am the Newspaper Champion Heavy of the World????? What a scene you could have written had you been present and witnessed the battle,” he wrote London. He was only half joking—London was an amateur boxer and an avid fan; as a celebrity journalist he covered the Johnson-Jeffries fight in 1910.