Houdini: A Life Worth Reading (6 page)

Houdini’s years of constant, physical performances took a strain on his body. In 1911 he suffered his first lasting injury, a broken blood vessel in a kidney sustained when he was tied too tightly in one of his public challenges. The doctor told Houdini that he needed to stop his contortionist activities for good, but Houdini refused. He tore a ligament in his side soon after.

Houdini began to need help lugging around his huge amount of equipment. But he risked exposure of his secrets by employing assistants. He carefully selected helpers, whom he paid well and made take oaths of secrecy about what they learned about his magic. Even still, the assistants were never told the whole story behind any trick, just in case one were to betray him. Likely Dash and Bess were the only two people who knew how Houdini really pulled off his tricks.

In July of 1913 Houdini left for Europe again. He got word of his mother Cecilia’s grave illness soon after arriving and headed straight back to her bedside. Unfortunately, Cecilia passed away before Houdini arrived, and Houdini returned to his European tour with a grieving heart.

In Nuremberg, Germany, he defied a court order that forbid him from performing the Chinese Water Torture Cell under the waters of a lake near Nuremberg; he was prosecuted by the police and won the case. Houdini was the only one who didn’t seem to take pleasure in the ridiculous proceedings; he sat lost in grief in the courtroom. Houdini saw that his black mood was having a negative effect on Bess’s health and resolved to bounce back. He took Bess on a vacation in the French Riviera but indulged in a morbid fascination with a cemetery there.

Houdini tried starting a new show based solely on illusions instead of on escape tricks, including an illusion invented by another magician, the Expanding Cube
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Houdini performed this illusion by telling the audience that his wife was inside a small die, and then “making” the die expand, removing the enlarged item to reveal Bess, sitting on the platform. However, other performers also used this trick, and audiences wanted Houdini to perform his trademark escapes, not other magicians’ illusions.

On a boat trip back to the United States, Houdini performed for an amazed President Theodore Roosevelt. A photograph of the president and eight men from the ship, including Houdini, was taken. Houdini had the other men in the picture airbrushed out and presented the photo of himself and Roosevelt to the public as the original photograph.

Houdini’s next tour abroad was delayed by the breakout of World War I. He turned back to touring in the United States, still struggling with grief over the loss of his mother. He leased the house in Harlem that his mother had lived in for the last years of her life and turned to new tricks: walking through a brick wall, being buried alive, and, most famously, the Suspended Straitjacket Escape. His “walking through a brick wall” trick, in which he literally seemed to do what the trick’s title indicates, made a big sensation but was quickly discarded by Houdini as too easy to replicate and too hard to orchestrate (one had to build a genuine brick wall for each show). In Los Angeles, he agreed to escape a six-foot deep grave, shackled by handcuffs. He reported later that he panicked and nearly died.

Houdini’s crowning escapade of this era was being hung, upside down and straitjacketed, from tall buildings, far from the ground. Houdini first did this trick in Minneapolis from the building of the city newspaper, and he repeated it on skyscrapers in Omaha, San Antonio, New Orleans, New York, and Providence, among others. Huge crowds turned out to see this breathtaking stunt. This trick was as dangerous as it was attention grabbing. Several other performers died trying to replicate the feat; safety hazards lay in tangled ropes, fractures of ankles and necks from the upside-down position and heavy pulleys, and the risk of catching overhead wires or hitting a wall while struggling to get free. While performing in Oakland, Houdini met the famous writer Jack London and his wife Charmian, which produced another photo opportunity for Houdini to pose with a famous person and circulate the picture among friends and family.

In the fall of 1918, Houdini starred in a new variety show at the Hippodrome, called “Everything.” Having shown himself to be very proud of being American at the break-out of the first world war, he continued his patriotic theme by buying an eagle named Young Abe, which he produced out of nowhere in a spectacular opening number. Houdini also performed his upside-down straitjacket escape, suspended high over the Hippodrome stage by wire.

In his later career, Houdini introduced a new kind of magic, illusions. Houdini’s illusion acts differed from his past stunts which showcased his physical prowess and mental skill at beating locks, chains, and all sorts of restraints, with the exception that Houdini had briefly introduced an illusion in which he appeared to walk through a brick wall. Like everything Houdini did, he did illusions in a big way. He procured an elephant named Jenny, who was reportedly the daughter of P.T. Barnum’s circus elephant Jumbo.

Jenny weighed between four thousand and ten thousand pounds. Houdini made her disappear onstage during an eight-minute act in which the elephant appeared onstage, gave Houdini an elephant kiss, and was concealed briefly behind a screen. When the screen was lifted, two seconds later, Jenny had disappeared. Houdini purchased the international rights for this trick from its inventor, a British magician named Charles Morritt. This trick made huge news even though in actuality, only a small section of the audience in the huge Hippodrome theatre was actually positioned such that they could see the elephant and her disappearance. Houdini’s showmanship and reputation, however, was such that the trick still became hugely famous, and Houdini maintained the satisfaction of staying on top of the world of magic. The illusion is still talked about today.

Houdini finally reached Broadway in 1925, while in his early fifties. His show HOUDINI was a three-act, two and a half hour show, featuring a whole hour of new illusions. The show toured at highbrow theaters around the country, and featured young, sexily clad female assistants, as well as Bess, her niece, and her niece’s mother. Even after breaking a bone in his foot, Houdini continued to perform in HOUDINI, although unable to do the Chinese Water Torture Cell, as it involved hanging upside-down from his ankles.

Although by the mid-1920s Houdini had begun branching away from his more physically strenuous tricks, he returned to the arena when a young magician named Rahman Bey began performing a much-acclaimed show involving animal hypnotism and piercing himself with steel pins, tricks that Houdini had already revealed the methods of in his books (see Chapter VIII). Houdini resented the competition from Bey and that Bey claimed to go into a “cataleptic trance” that allowed him to perform these tricks. Another strike against Bey was that Houdini’s enemy from his battle against fraudulent Spiritualist mediums, a man named Carrington (see Chapter XI), was the announcer of Bey’s show.

But worst of all was Bey’s claim to be able to remain in a casket underwater, without air, for long periods of time. Houdini publically announced that he could beat any record that Bey set for staying in a casket underwater. Although Bey had failed to stay underwater for more than twenty minutes during an attempt in which he was lowered into the Hudson River in a casket, Bey soon managed to remain in his underwater box for an hour in a pool in New York City. Houdini immediately began training to beat this record, obtaining a casket from the same company that made Bey’s. After three weeks of training, Houdini beat Bey’s record by staying submerged in his casket at New York’s Sheldon Hotel’s pool for an hour and a half, despite the temperature in the casket rising to heights not anticipated during Houdini’s test runs. Houdini insisted that he did not use any special equipment or go into any trance to perform this feat, but rather that he had merely trained himself to breathe slowly.

After reading this chapter, you will know more about

• Houdini’s ego:
  The magician’s need to be on top often brought him trouble.
  

• The marriage:
  Houdini and Bess were private about their relationship, but most agree they had a loving, supportive marriage despite a likely affair.
  

• The fulfilled promise:
  The deathbed promise Houdini made to his father to care for Cecilia was one that Houdini took pleasure in fulfilling.
  

• The Catholic mother-in-law:
  Bess was reunited with her estranged mother after an illness.
  

Houdini’s obsession with self-promotion seemed to have started a young age. Pictures of him as a child and teenager show him posing for the camera, showing off his medals (some real, some fake) and his messenger uniform. He billed himself as “Eric, Prince of Air” at the young age of seven. By the time he died, Ehrich had turned himself into the all-powerful persona Houdini, attempting to leave behind even the first name “Harry” because he thought “Houdini” sounded more regal than “Harry Houdini.” Even when not in the public eye, this character seemed important to him; his wife and family called him Houdini, and he had his initials HH embroidered on his pajamas and other personal items. His diary entries as well as his public statements reflect a strong propensity to twist the truth to flatter his ego and sense of importance.

Biographers attribute Houdini’s desire to transform himself into an all-powerful, world-known figure as stemming from a need to escape his childhood of deprivation and insecurity. Other psychoanalysts have gone further to explain Houdini’s obsession with escaping restraints and defying death as a reaction to an extreme Oedipal complex. Some also point out to the novelty of Houdini’s nude jail cell escapes and speculate that Houdini’s willingness to bare his body might point to an element of eroticism in Houdini’s appeal.

Whatever the case, Houdini’s personal writings reflect his anxiety to stay forever famous, his fears that his success would just be fleeting, and his desperation to stay on top. Despite his huge ego, he clearly always felt like he was about to become irrelevant, that he must crush all who threatened or opposed him before he himself got crushed, and that he might become poor again. Although rich, he carefully saved money in case of future poverty and scrimped money wherever he could, except for his extravagant spending on his collections and other passions. Although famous, he went out of his way to crush imitators and to sue any who tried to use his name. Although renowned throughout the world at a relatively early age, he continued seeking more dangerous and breathtaking stunts, often performing when injured and in pain.

Even though many could and did criticize Houdini’s self-obsession, no one could attack his work ethic. Houdini trained for hours each day and stayed up into the night reading and researching to improve his performances and collections. It is rumored that he was an insomniac who used his long waking hours to further his professional goals. Even when Houdini took time off, he juggled several projects and was constantly on the go. He didn’t seem to know any other pace besides flat out.

Ethnically Jewish, Houdini was proud of his educated rabbi father and raised money for Jewish organizations. He did not approve of indulging in alcohol or drugs, and also looked with contempt on men going to lewd shows and otherwise womanizing. He seemed apathetic towards politics and issues of social justice, although he did approve of steps towards racial equality that he witnessed in England. Having first come into fame in England, he considered himself as having more in common with the British and other European nations than with Americans. He proudly presented his shows in Germany and Russia in what he knew of those countries’ languages. However, he made himself into an American citizen by falsifying his place of birth on his passport, changing it from Budapest, Hungary to Appleton, Wisconsin. He also claimed his birthdate was slightly different than the real date (April 6, 1874 instead of March 24, 1874). Further, when war broke out, he dove into patriotic efforts to raise money for the United States effort and to contribute his skills to raising the morale of the troops and the public.

Clearly an intelligent man, Houdini was keenly aware that his lack of formal education put him at a disadvantage. Coming from a house filled with his father’s books and love of learning, he yearned to be considered worthy of joining the ranks of academia and to be regarded as more than just a magician. This desire likely fed his passions for collecting books and for writing, as well as for making connections with famous authors such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Jack London, as well as other academics such as Robert Gould Shaw. Despite his drive to be considered equal to those in the academic, elite world, Houdini reportedly cared very little about his appearance when off-stage, frequently appearing in rumpled and dirty clothes. He also maintained friendships with the usually lower-class circus and beer hall performers that he had worked with in his early career, and went out of his way to send flowers and gifts to the working-class people that had helped him and his family while he was growing up.

In his forties Houdini became known as a generous charity figure. He called his works of charity “Good Works” and received no payment for them. He had a particular reputation for handing out money to older people who were down on their luck, perhaps because they reminded him of his impoverished father. He performed shows at charity hospitals, orphanages, and prisons. Most famously, he put on a three-hour show at Sing Sing prison, much longer than his or any other magicians’ of the times shows. Houdini interestingly commented that he thought that given a different set of circumstances, he himself might have found himself leading a criminal life.