The Secret Life of Houdini (54 page)

Houdini did it first in September of 1915 in Kansas City, where five thousand people watched as he was hoisted twenty feet in the air and then shed his restraint. By the middle of 1916 the crowds had swelled ten or twenty fold and the height had increased to as high as two hundred feet. For the most part, Houdini retained his early formula for a successful publicity stunt—he did the escape hanging from the building that housed the local newspaper, guaranteeing front-page coverage, and he performed it exactly at noon, ensuring himself a street filled with lunchtime spectators.

Of course, he would have to come to the site a day earlier to “inspect” the building and the harness and speak with the local authorities who would do the strapping of the jacket, spurring a newspaper article that would promote the actual event the next day. In San Antonio, he met the two police officials who were charged with securing his straitjacket and hoisting him up.

“String me up just as high as you can. If I drop I want to be sure it’s going to be the finish. I’d rather have a lilly [sic] in my hand than go through life crippled and a burden to others,” Houdini told them, within earshot of the eager reporter who scribbled down each word. After all, human beings don’t like to see other human beings die, but…

As dangerous as it looked, the upside-down straitjacket escape was somewhat safer than his manacled bridge leaps or escapes from submerged crates, even when he started affixing an additional safety rope after a stray wind blew him into the side of a building and cut him badly. But when you’re dangling one hundred feet in the air by your feet, twisting and jerking to free yourself, anything can happen. In Oakland, California,
after
he had freed himself and thrown the jacket to the adoring crowd, when he gave the signal to be lowered, he didn’t budge. During his gyrations, he had entangled the ropes. He was forced to hang upside down for a full eight minutes until a ladder, held secure by six men, was extended off the roof and a window cleaner shinned down it and untangled the ropes.

By April 19, 1916, the day before his massive outdoor stunt in the nation’s capital, Houdini’s weariness seemed to be catching up with him. “I’ve about reached the limit, it seems to me,” he told the
Washington Times
reporter. “For the last thirty years…I’ve been getting out of all sorts of things human ingenuity has devised to confine a human being. Up to date there hasn’t been anything made that confined my activities to any alarming extent. But some day some chap is going to make one. And I’m going to quit with a clean record before he comes along. I’ve about made up my mind that this is the last stunt I’ll perform. Hereafter I intend to work entirely with my brain. See these gray hairs? They mean something. I’m not as young as I was. I’ve had to work hard to keep ahead of the procession. I’ll still be entertaining the public for many years to come. But I intend to do it along lines not quite so spectacular. As an escapist extraordinary I feel that I’m about through.”

Two days after Houdini’s huge stunt, President Wilson, who was continuing to try to steer the United States on a course of neutrality despite Germany’s ever-more-blatant submarine attacks on unarmed American merchant ships, snuck away from the White House with his new bride to see Houdini escape from his Water Torture Cell. The next afternoon, Houdini paid a visit to the Senate visitors’ gallery. While presiding over the session, Vice President Thomas Marshall spotted Houdini and waved to him. Other senators stopped their business and followed suit.

A page was dispatched to Houdini and delivered a note, inviting him to the vice president’s chamber. When Houdini complied, the senators called a recess and crowded into the vice president’s chambers. “It was the proudest day of my life,” Houdini would later say.

Buoyed by the honor accorded him by the president and the Senate, Houdini went back home and came face-to-face with his own mortality. He had spent part of his forty-second birthday at the grave of his parents. Now, three weeks later, he ran into old Mrs. Leffler, his landlady when he and his father first moved to New York. “I nearly cried, as she was a pal of my Dad and Mrs. L is the only one left of the Old Guard,” he wrote in his diary. Two weeks later, on Mother’s Day, he sent flowers to all the “Mothers graves” he knew, and then visited Mrs. Leffler and hand-delivered her a bouquet. The following week, after seeing his dentist, he took a sentimental trip to the East Sixty-ninth Street apartment where his dad died. He stood there in silent meditation for half an hour, replaying his father’s final exit from the building. “It grieves me more now than it did then,” he wrote in his diary. He remembered comforting his mother that day, asking her not to weep. “If you had 28 years of heaven, you’d weep too,” she responded. As a tribute to his parents, Houdini commissioned his friend Oscar Teale to design an extravagant exedra that used many tons of Vermont granite. After years of restoring the graves of magicians he had never known, it was time to honor his parents’ final resting place.

Wearied by the constant touring and the years of abusive challenge escapes, Houdini came up with a get-rich-quick scheme, “which if it only materializes half way decent, will bring in lots of money to my celler [sic],” he wrote a friend. With the film business beginning to make major inroads into competing entertainment forms, Houdini was approached to bankroll a German aniline dye expert named Gustav Dietz who invented a new process for developing film stock that was allegedly cheaper and better than the methods that were currently in use. Houdini seeded the company to the tune of $4,900 in September and then approached friends and raised $100,000 in capital. August Roterberg, one candid friend who didn’t invest, was wary of Houdini’s business acumen. “You are old enough to know that there is a vast difference between inventing a successful developer and developing the developer, or in other words handle it along commercial lines and make it pay. I hope that you won’t fall down on the latter part.”

Houdini’s relentless publicity seeking and his innate understanding of what was believable combined to push his name into the language. As early as 1899 the word
Houdini
began to be used synonymously with escape. Newspapers referred to escaped criminals as Houdinis or as “doing a Houdini.” By 1917, the guardians of the language noticed that cartoonists, lexicographers, preachers, the
Literary Digest,
and even a U.S. congressman were using Houdini’s name as a comparison for other people’s activities in elusion. Houdini didn’t completely understand the power of his own name then, and he petitioned a popular publisher to have “houdinize” added to their dictionary. He was successful, but ironically, he didn’t understand that as a verb, “houdinize” was meaningless, since the word
Houdini
had already become a noun and adjective.

The end of 1916 was marked with family tragedies in the Houdini household. His brother Nat was in the process of an ugly divorce with his wife, Sadie, which might have prompted Houdini to remind Bess of his feelings toward her. “Your Love bestowed upon me is Duly Appreciated though at times I may be apparently thoughtless, my mind is compelled to carry so many things, but my heart only one on earth and that is you,” he wrote. Contrast that with his feeling toward his relatives that he expressed in a letter to Kilby, thanking him for a thoughtful Christmas present. “Your gift is far and away more welcome than you have an idea. You see I send out dozens of checks to folks in need, and all I ever get from my relatives, those that are left write saying ‘You have everything you want I dont know what to buy you.’ Mrs. H makes something for me to put on the dresser, but [as] it is made by ‘herself ’ that counts a good deal. My Sainted Mother, would send cookies and a few pair of silk socks to all parts of the world, and honestly since
MOTHER
has passed away Christmas (and I am the son of a Rabbi) seems somewhat empty.”

After a bittersweet Christmas, Houdini spent a forlorn New Year’s Eve alone in Philadelphia as Bess stayed home to deal with an unknown family tragedy. His New Year Day’s letter was revelatory: “Keep up your courage, sweetheart, and bear your loss like the brave little soldier that you are, for we are all more or less an army fighting our way to our own graves, but let us do so stout of heart, smile and cheer our less fortunate brethren who are also in the trenches of life and who are not as well equipped with mates as you and I are, nor with the world’s goods.”

The new year found Houdini’s name in papers across the globe for a compassionate gesture toward one of the world’s greatest actresses. Sarah Bernhardt, who was on a tour of the American stage, had been honored the previous December by a group of American actors who presented her with a bronze statuette depicting her in one of her most famous roles. Unfortunately, she was also presented with a bill for the cost of the sculpture by the artist’s wife. Indignant, Bernhardt returned the figurine along with the bill.

Houdini had long been a fan of the French actress, often writing up her exploits in his
Dramatic Mirror
columns, and he had been especially moved by her strident advocacy for the human rights of Jews in Russia. Anxious to avoid an embarrassing scene for American actors abroad, Houdini immediately dispatched a $350 check to the sculptor’s wife, took possession of the statuette, and offered to personally present the gift anew to Madame Bernhardt. The resulting publicity kept Houdini’s clipping service working overtime—more than 3,500 articles were generated. Ironically enough, Bernhardt relished the publicity but left Houdini in possession of the statuette. The two-foot-tall sculpture eventually found a home in the living room of Houdini’s friend Quincy Kilby, who was pleased when Houdini then sent him both his telegram to Bernhardt and the canceled check for the purchase of the piece. “[This] completes the story,” Kilby crowed. “It shall be preserved in the archives.”

Houdini, Bess, his assistants, and his parrot pose in front of the Christmas tree. Houdini’s parrot was trained to squawk, “Hip, hip, hoorah, Houdini’s home!”
From the collection of Dr. Bruce Averbook

In February, both Bernhardt and Houdini found themselves playing Boston at the same time. She invited him to visit her at her hotel, where Houdini entranced her with more than a half hour of close-up magic. The next day, she rode in a car with the magician and watched him free himself from a straitjacket while being suspended sixty feet in the air. The previous year had been rough for the French actress; ten years after a serious injury, her right leg was finally amputated and she was continuing her stage career with the assistance of a wooden leg.

The Houdinis meet the Grand Dame Sarah Bernhardt.
From the collection of Dr. Bruce Averbook

On the way back to the hotel, the Divine Sarah suddenly embraced Houdini.

“Houdini, you are a wonderful human being,” she purred. “You must possess some extraordinary power to perform such marvels. Won’t you use it to restore my limb for me?”

Houdini was shocked when he realized that she was dead serious.

“Good heavens, Madame, certainly not,” Houdini sputtered. “You know my powers are limited and you are actually asking me to do the impossible.”

“Yes,” she said, leaning closer to him. “But you
do
the impossible.”

“Are you jesting?”

“Mais non, Houdini, j’ai jamais été plus sérieux dans ma vie.”

Houdini’s eyes welled with tears.

“Madame, you exaggerate my ability,” he said.

Houdini would often brag that without the aid of any memory devices, he was able to recount the exact date of the birth of the Roman Emperor Caracalla. He could even tell you the day of the month in 1593 when dissenting clergymen were hanged in Scotland. He most likely also knew the exact day that Napoleon abdicated; the day Robert Peary reached the North Pole; and maybe even the day that Stilicho stymied the Visigoths in the Battle of Pollentia.

Of course, the correct answer to all of these is April 6, Houdini’s adopted birth date (except for Caracalla, who unbeknownst to Houdini was actually born on April 4). On April 6, 1917, Houdini celebrated his forty-third birthday and had a new milestone to add to his list. The day before, his brother Leopold had scandalized the family by marrying Sadie Weiss, who until March 26 had been legally married to his brother Nat. Reeling from a family secret that had finally gone public, Houdini woke up to a birthday present from his friend the commander in chief. On that day, President Wilson declared war on Germany. In one fell swoop, Houdini’s midlife crisis had been solved. Escapologist, illusionist, collector, businessman, author, philanthropist—all his myriad identities suddenly paled in comparison with his new vision of himself: Houdini the Patriot.