The Secret Life of Houdini (56 page)

Houdini looked out at his audience. They seemed intimidated by the master magician.

“I think our friend here has a question,” Houdini said, glancing at the soldier that he had tied up so expertly. “But he can’t raise his hand.”

Houdini learned of his old friend Billy Robinson’s death when he received a cable from Joe Hyman, who for a short time had been one of the Brothers Houdini. It read: “Soo Robinson Killed Doing Bullet Trick.” The next day, March 26, 1918, Hyman sent a letter that contained some intriguing details. Hyman was currently sharing a bill with a woman named Annie Rooney, who had been on the bill at the Wood Green Empire the night Robinson died. According to Rooney, Soo had some “trouble” with one of his assistants; the argument escalated into “an open row” that ill-fated night and, between the two shows, Robinson “had it out with his chap.” Early the next morning, Robinson died. “It is known for a fact that the rifle that was used for the trick had been tampered with,” Hyman reported to Houdini. “This was discovered after the bullet had passed clean through poor Rob’s body.” After a short inquest, Robinson’s demise was deemed “death by misadventure.”

Houdini’s response to his good friend’s death was fascinating. On April 5, he wrote his friend and father figure Harry Kellar, the freshly retired master illusionist, now noncritically called “dean” of American magicians, that “it seems as if there were something peculkar [sic] about the whole [Robinson] affair.” Then two weeks later, Houdini announced that he would do the Bullet Catch at a joint benefit for the SAM hospital fund and the Showman’s League of America on April 21, at the Hippodrome. Whether Houdini was merely exploiting the tragedy to get press (which he received) or whether, as was reported in
M-U-M
, the official organ of the SAM, he was “dissuaded by management of Hippodrome from taking up this dangerous feat,” he ultimately didn’t perform the effect that night.

When news filtered out to Kellar in California that Houdini was even considering doing the Bullet Catch, the magician fired off a warning salvo to Houdini on May 1:

Now, my dear boy, this is advice from the heart.
DON’T TRY THE D—N
Bullet Catching trick
no matter how sure you may feel of its success. There is
always
the biggest kind of risk that some dog will “job” you. And we can’t afford to lose Houdini. You have enough good stuff to maintain your position at the head of the profession. And you owe it to your friends and your family to cut out all stuff that entails risk of your life. Please, Harry, listen to your old friend Kellar who loves you as his own son and don’t do it.

Kellar’s view on the risk involved in Houdini doing the Bullet Catch is telling. He isn’t worried about the gun malfunctioning. For him, doing the Bullet Catch would expose Houdini to some “dog” who was out to physically assault, or even murder, him.

When the United States declared war against Germany on his birthday in 1917, Houdini immediately went into action. For most of 1916, while on his vaudeville tour, Houdini, at his own expense, had been recruiting local magic clubs to join the SAM in an effort to revitalize what he felt was a moribund organization. Working with Oscar Teale, an eccentric old ex-magician and Spiritualist exposer, another in a succession of father figures in Houdini’s life, Houdini persuaded groups in Buffalo, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Kansas City to come aboard. Now, a day after war was declared, Houdini introduced a resolution at the Society of American Magicians’ meeting that was unanimously passed that “its members collectively and individually do hereby tender their loyalty to the President of the United States of America and express a desire to render such service to the country as may be within their province.” Teale dispatched the resolution via letter to President Wilson.

Houdini led the war efforts of magicians by example. On June 2, Houdini was nominated for president of the SAM and elected unanimously without opposition. Taking control of the house organ,
M-U-M
, Houdini began filling the pages with news of the SAM members’ contributions to the war cause, and even reproduced an article from
The New York Times
that described how the U.S. government was actively seeking magicians and mystifiers to aid in the wartime effort.

Fellow magicians took up Houdini’s call. Archie Engel, a Washington, D.C., magician, became a secret agent for the Treasury Department during the war. Dr. Maximillian Toch, a chemist and New York City SAM member, was put in charge of the military’s camouflage division and, working with other magicians, he developed the battleship gray formula used by the U.S. Navy. Toch’s chemical expertise was also used in devising ways to transmit secret messages. Eventually, a camouflage section of the Regular U.S. Army Engineers was formed and the SAM members from all over the country enlisted in it and shared their expertise for the war effort. An amateur magician named Dr. Charles Mendelsohn, who was an expert cryptographer, was put in charge of deciphering German codes for the U.S. Military Intelligence Division. Even before we entered the war, the Department of Justice hired a magician named Wilbur Weber to do counterintelligence on German spies who were operating in the Northwest. He used his magic tour as a cover for his spying activities.

Heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey about to deliver a right to Houdini’s jaw as boxer Benny Leonard holds back the escape king, all in the name of entertaining the troops.
From the collection of Roger Dreyer

Houdini seemed energized by the prospect of serving his country. “I register tomorrow for enlisting.
Hurrah
, now I am one of the boys,” he wrote Goldston back in London. “When I see your flag flutter it makes my old heart flutter, but when I see them flutter together, your and our flag, well, there is too much to be said.” Canceling his entire fall vaudeville season, Houdini began to devote his full time to entertaining troops and raising money for the war effort. In June, the National Vaudeville Association staged a benefit featuring the greatest aggregation of stars ever assembled, including Sophie Tucker, Eva Tanguay, Eddie Foy, and Jim Corbett. Houdini made a side wager that he would register the greatest hit of the evening and he won his gamble when he made his entrance into the Hippodrome accompanied by a company of U.S. Marines. The ovation was enormous and then Houdini enlisted some army officers to strap him into a straitjacket. He made his escape in one minute, twenty-three seconds, a new record for him.

In July he embarked on a series of fund-raising benefits for the Red Cross, and then dashed from camp to camp entertaining the troops. And when Secretary of the Treasury William McAdoo began to finance the U.S. war effort by issuing “Liberty Bonds,” Houdini became one of his most determined fund-raisers, in one case by literally selling the shirt off his back. During a Hippodrome appearance, a man in the audience offered to buy $1,000 in bonds if the magician could get out of his shirt in thirty seconds. By the time the audience counted six, Houdini was waving his torn shirt above his head. “I’ll buy another $1,000 bond if you will give me that shirt,” the audience member screamed, and went home with his prize. Within a year, Houdini had sold a million dollars’ worth of bonds. By some accounts, by war’s end the total reached two million dollars’ worth.

When Houdini performed at military camps, he made sure to include his “Money for Nothing” routine, where he seemingly materialized a succession of $5 gold pieces out of thin air. Each coin produced was presented to a boy heading overseas. In this manner, over time, Houdini personally gave away more than $7,000 (which today would be about $250,000). This same year, he also contributed money to build a hospital ward that he dedicated to his mother.

The closest Houdini got to waging war was on the propaganda front. He gave numerous interviews recounting how he had forced the kaiser into a public apology when he was touring Germany. He even used the German manacles that he escaped from before the German court in his lectures to U.S. soldiers. In another article, he wrote that he had been an “advocate of war” with Germany dating back to his first European tour. In his official bios, he excised all mention of his early flights in Germany, attributing them instead to Australia. In private, he fretted that the German soldiers he had taught to fly might kill American boys, so he destroyed all the photographic evidence of those lessons that he could. To underscore his fervent patriotism, Houdini went out of his way to tell people that he was born in Appleton, Wisconsin, even often gratuitously adding that “fact,” along with his invented birth date, to his signature.

Houdini’s desire to help the war cause and his long-standing commitment to honoring his elders in the world of magic coalesced on November 11, when Houdini orchestrated a Carnival of Magic extravaganza to benefit the families of the Americans who had been killed when the
Antilles
, a transport ship that was on its way back to the United States after bringing soldiers to France, had been torpedoed by a German sub. Organizing “the biggest magical feat recorded in the history of magic,” he persuaded Dean Harry Kellar to come out of retirement one last time and perform.

After Kellar finished his routine, he informed the audience that since he would never again appear onstage, he wished to present Houdini with all of the apparatus he had used that night. But then Houdini one-upped Kellar. Refusing to allow the dean to walk off the stage in his final exit, he signaled for four magicians, who carried out a large, decorated chair. Kellar was forced to sit in the sedan chair as twenty-four magicians escorted by twenty-four “fair women” walked on the stage with military procession, accompanied by a like number of stage assistants, each carrying a large basket of flowers. As they bombarded Kellar with the flowers, the 125-piece Hippodrome band broke into a stirring version of “Auld Lang Syne,” as the sold-out audience stood up and serenaded the magician. Kellar, “weeping like a child,” was finally carried off the stage by his magician honor guard, bathed in another shower of flowers.

Houdini with the great past master and dean of magicians Harry Kellar.
Library of Congress

With the new year, Houdini transformed his war work from entertaining to educating. In February, he wrote Secretary of War Newton Baker and offered to conduct classes in extrication from ropes, handcuffs, and even shipwrecks. He began his classes during intermissions of
Cheer Up
, a patriotic show that Houdini joined at the Hippodrome. A room was set up and officers could telephone in and make appointments to bring their regiments in for the instructions. According to
Billboard
magazine, the theater was “daily besieged by hosts of boys in khaki.”

By June of 1918, a mere fourteen months after war was declared, Houdini had sacrificed more than $50,000 between lost salary and his own out-of-pocket expenditures in his ongoing war efforts. In a letter to R. H. Burnside, the manager of the Hippodrome, he recounted his efforts that helped “buy ambulances” and raised funds for the Liberty Bond campaign. “My heart is in this work, for it is not a question of ‘Will we win’ or ‘Will we lose.’
We must win
, and that is all there is to it.”

“La-dies and gen-tle-men. Perhaps you have al-rea-dy heard of the fame and ac-comp-lish-ments of my very spesh-ul guest,” Houdini intoned. “Allow me to in-tro-duce Jen-nie, the daughter of Barnum’s Jumbo, who is the world’s first known vanishing el-e-phant!”

The first inkling that something special was about to happen came when a dozen or so Hippodrome stagehands, dressed in circus livery, wheeled a huge cabinet that had been painted to resemble a circus cage out onto the enormous stage. They placed the cabinet about fifteen feet from the rear backdrop and nearly forty feet from the apron of the stage. One end of the trailer had a circular window, covered by curtains. On a command from Houdini, the men pulled the curtains back, revealing a series of bars running across the window from top to bottom, adding to the cagelike effect of the enclosure. At the other end of the box was a set of double doors, each with a half-circled curtained window. The men opened the doors and pulled a ramp into place at the opening.