The Secret Life of Houdini (53 page)

Houdini and Bess had met Jack London and his wife, Charmian, a week earlier in Oakland. London and Houdini struck up a fast friendship and found that they had both been self-educated and had suffered privation before gaining wealth and fame. London was the literary equivalent of Houdini—a courageous, adventurous thrill-seeker who channeled his wide-ranging experiences into best-selling novels like
The Sea Wolf
and
The Call of the Wild
. There were differences too. London had been a longtime socialist and a strong advocate of women’s liberation. He had divorced his first wife after a torrid affair with Charmian Kittredge, who was five years his senior. Charmian shared his love of adventure and the outdoors, and her liberated stance toward their marriage included open sexual experimentation.

The Houdinis meet the Londons. It was love at first sight.
From the collection of Roger Dreyer

Befriending a world-famous author certainly fed into Houdini’s own vision of himself as a literary man. Houdini made fast friends with London. The author and his wife had come to back-to-back shows, and Houdini dined solo with them the first night and with Bess on the second. Then the next day, Thanksgiving, he asked them to a holiday dinner in his hotel room, inviting Hardeen, who was appearing at a rival theater, to witness his new celebrity friendship. Houdini then had to leave for Los Angeles and his date with heavyweight destiny, but the couples made plans to get together again soon.

“Charming Houdini,” Charmian London noted in her diary. “Shall never forget him.”

He had stopped into the Trav Daniel Sporting Goods store to pick up a pair of white Spaulding track shorts. “They’re pretty good for underwear,” he told the awe-stricken young clerk, who, after screwing up his courage, gushed to the magician that he had loved his show the previous night at the nearby Majestic Theater. Never one to shun a compliment, Houdini struck up a conversation. And when the kid told Houdini that his older brother was a trick motorcycle rider, Houdini left the sporting goods store with more than just a pair of shorts—he had the concept for a new stunt that he would pull off the next morning.

The clerk’s brother was Ormer Locklear, a twenty-five-year-old mechanic who had a fascination with cars, motorcycles, and airplanes. Houdini met him and instantly thought that Locklear had the requisite charisma and good looks to win over any crowd. So he proposed that Locklear drag him, hog-tied, behind his motorcycle down Fort Worth’s Main Street. While careening down the street, Houdini would make his escape. At first, Locklear was reluctant to participate in what seemed to be a recipe for disaster, but Houdini assured him that he would minimize all danger. “A good stuntman always knows what his limits are.”

Besides its being the busiest thoroughfare, Houdini chose Main Street because it was the only “paved” street in Fort Worth, the “paving” merely being a series of wooden stumps that had been inserted into the dirt to protect horses’ hooves. The next day, Houdini donned thick, quilted overalls and protected his head with a hood. He asked some volunteers to tie his hands behind his back and then, as he lay down on the street, a rope that was attached to Locklear’s motorcycle was tied around his ankles. With a large crowd lining both sides of the street, one of the locals shot a starting pistol and Locklear revved his cycle and took off, hauling his human cargo. Apprehensive about really gunning his engine, Locklear started off slow and gradually increased his speed. Within seconds, Houdini had freed his hands and untied the rope attached to the cycle.

Houdini had chosen a very interesting time to make his first tour of Texas. On May 15, 1915, President Wilson had directed the Secretary of the Treasury to order the Secret Service to investigate an ongoing operation by German secret agents in the United States aimed at sabotaging the munitions industry, which was selling its armaments to the Allied cause. What they found was shocking. The German government had smuggled more than $150 million in cash (the equivalent of about $13 billion today) into the United States to finance sabotage, propaganda, and a conspiracy to get the United States embroiled in a diversionary war with Mexico by seeding Pancho Villa’s bandit rebellion against the U.S.-backed government of General Carranza. To make sense of all this intrigue, a new form of intelligence gathering and surveillance was needed. To that end, it was decided that the army’s First Aero Squadron, stationed at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, would be deployed in aerial surveillance missions.

Beginning at the end of January 1916, Houdini spent a week in San Antonio, playing the Majestic Theater. Since January 1910, Fort Sam Houston in Texas had been the site of the aero division of the U.S. Army. That sounds grandiose because until April 1911, the army had only one plane and one pilot, Benjamin Foulois. The situation was so bad that a few months before, when the War Department wished to test the efficacy of using airplanes in war by attacking ground troops with dummy bombs, six aviators who were participating in a local aerial tournament in San Antonio were enlisted to fly their machines and bombard the detachment of troops from Fort Sam Houston.

In April, things began to change. Houdini’s mechanist, Montraville Wood, spent most of April at Fort Sam Houston, flying the army’s Curtiss two-seater, sometimes alone and sometimes with a Lieutenant Beck, experimenting with his gyroscope, which could give the plane added stability in adverse wind conditions. Wood’s mechanical improvements were incorporated in additional planes that the army purchased.

In July 1911, pilot Foulois was transferred to the Signal Corps in Washington and fell under the command of General Allen, who would go on to become the president of Wood’s airplane company. In December 1913, Foulois was assigned to the Signal Corps Aviation School in San Diego, where, the following year, he organized and assumed command of the First Aero Squadron. In the fall of 1915, Foulois’s squadron was moved by rail to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, then flew for the first time as a unit to Fort Sam Houston, where they were based when Houdini came to Texas.

We know that Houdini entertained soldiers from Fort Sam Houston onstage on February 4 when they challenged him to escape from a seven-foot plank. There is anecdotal evidence that suggests that Houdini may have actually even flown during his stay in San Antonio. In a Providence newspaper, Houdini is credited as being “one of the heroes of the Panama-California exposition in 1915, a wizard of the first order and last but not least an aviator of the United States Army.” Around the same time, while he was performing in Boston, Houdini told the noted Boston reporter Ira Mitchell Chappelle, “I’m an American, though first, last, and all the time. I’m an aviator, and in case there’s war, will surely be a member of the aviation corps.”

It was high noon and Pennsylvania Avenue between Thirteenth and Fifteenth Streets was crammed with people taking up every available inch of space on the sidewalk. The more adventurous had shinned up light poles or hung out of the windows from the neighboring buildings. “Human beings don’t like to see other human beings lose their lives, but they do love to be on the spot when it happens,” an astute observer of human nature once said. Well, on April 20, 1916, he was proven correct. The police estimated that 100,000 people had shoved, pushed, elbowed, and wedged their way in front of the Munsey Building in downtown Washington, D.C., then spilled down the street for blocks and blocks. They also said it was the single largest assemblage of people in that city’s history outside of a presidential inauguration.

Captain Peck of the Washington police department stood on the makeshift platform in front of the building as the man was escorted by the police through the frenzied crowd. The rope, a sturdy thick variant, had been tested and retested to make sure that it would hold the man’s weight. Finally, about twenty minutes past noon, the rope was securely affixed to the man by the authorities.

And then the public hanging began.

Houdini, who had just been securely fastened into a straitjacket by two attendants from an area mental hospital, was hoisted by his legs one hundred feet into the air, parallel with the fourth story of the massive office building. For a few seconds he was completely still. Then, as the crowd gasped, he began to jerk frantically from side to side, the veins in his face standing out like great purple cords. It seemed that his arms had some play now; he was able to jerk them from side to side. The crowd cheered. Now he had managed to work his arms slowly and painfully over his head. A huge cheer reverberated through the human canyon. One by one, he opened the straps, managing to unfasten them through the heavy canvas with his extremely strong fingers. With each strap liberated, the crowd roared anew. Now he was completely free of the restraint, and he held it mockingly in the air for a few seconds before he released it and it fluttered in the wind to the street below. The audience yelled as one, and Houdini crossed his arms on his chest and pulled himself halfway up, saluting the crowd with an upside-down bow.

While Houdini is strapped into his straitjacket, more than a few curious onlookers gather.
From the collection of Dr. Bruce Averbook

Houdini’s outdoor upside-down straitjacket escape was one of the greatest publicity stunts ever devised, appealing to both the finest and the basest instincts of his audience simultaneously. It was the pinnacle of his stunts, primarily because it was the only outdoor stunt he ever did where the escape was in full view of the audience. Much of what he did onstage was hidden from view; the bridge or pier jumps used the water to mask the action. The suspended straitjacket was perfect from start to finish, and Houdini dangling in the air above thousands and thousands of astonished spectators became the magician’s iconic image—an image that was inspired by a visit to a young man’s attic in Sheffield, England.

Even dangling upside down in a straitjacket, Houdini knew to pose for the camera.
From the collection of Dr. Bruce Averbook

One of the most spectacular outdoor stunts in history.
From the collection of George and Sandy Daily