Prince of Air (13 page)

F
or most of his life, Harry Houdini said that he was born in Appleton, Wisconsin. However, he was really born Ehrich Weisz in Budapest, Hungary. His father, a rabbi, immigrated to the United States when Harry was four. There, he changed the family's last name from Weisz to Weiss. The congregation in Appleton found Harry's father to be too old-fashioned, and he was fired. When Harry was eight, the family moved to Milwaukee. They were quite poor, and all the children had to work when they were young. Harry sold newspapers and worked shining shoes.

Harry's father took him to see a magician who called himself Dr. Lynn. Soon afterward, Harry began performing magic tricks in the backyard. Although he claimed to have performed a trapeze act in which he hung upside down and picked up pins with his eyelids, this is widely thought to be an exaggeration of a simple trick he did hanging from a tree in his family's backyard wearing red socks his mother made for him. Still, he did call himself “Ehrich, Prince of the Air.”

At the age of twelve, Harry ran away from home by hopping on a freight train to Kansas City. He stayed away for a year, during which his family moved to New York City in the hopes of finding work. Harry joined them there, taking jobs as a tie cutter, messenger, and photographer's assistant to help the family survive. He became a prizewinning cross-country runner and swimmer, beginning the discipline of exercise that continued throughout his life.

A friend gave Harry the book
The Memoirs of Robert-Houdin: Ambassador, Author, and Conjuror, Written by Himself
about the famous French magician who had lived in the mid-1800s and was considered the father of modern magic. The book changed Harry's life. A friend told him, erroneously, that in French, adding an
i
to
Houdin
would mean “like Houdin,” the great magician. So Harry added an
i
to his idol's name. He also thought it sounded more mysterious. The name Harry came from a mispronunciation or an Americanization of his Hungarian nickname, Ehrie. At any rate, Harry Houdini was born.

After his father died, seventeen-year-old Harry and his brother Theo, called Dash, became The Brothers Houdini, performing their magic act at dime museums, civic groups, sideshows, and music halls around the city, including the famous amusement park Coney Island. There he met a young singer named Bess Rahner. They fell in love, and soon Bess replaced Dash, becoming Harry's assistant. Bess and Harry got married and traveled with circuses performing his magic act, which included The Metamorphosis.

But Harry wanted to become famous. He began to perfect becoming an escape artist. An expert at escaping from handcuffs, Houdini would arrive in a new town and claim the ability to escape from any handcuffs provided by the local police, offering $100 to anyone who provided handcuffs from which he could not escape. He never had to pay. Soon he was known as “The Handcuff King.”

In London, he successfully broke free after being wrapped around a pillar and handcuffed at Scotland Yard. Word of this escape spread throughout Europe, and soon his act was sold out everywhere he went. Harry performed a stunt in which he was handcuffed and chained while nailed into a packing crate that was then thrown into a river. Realizing that the crowd loved the suspense and the danger, he would remain underwater long after many observers were certain he couldn't survive. Then he would pop up, waving the chains over his head.

The Houdinis returned to the United States in 1905 as international celebrities. Harry's stunts became more sensational and more difficult. Houdini escaped from the prison cell that held the assassin of President James Garfield and freed himself from a straitjacket while hanging upside down. He regularly was shackled and lowered into an oversize milk can filled with water and then hidden by a curtain. Though he could escape in three minutes, Houdini frequently made the audience wait as long as half an hour before reappearing. The possibility of failure and death thrilled his audiences. Eventually, Houdini invited the public to devise contraptions to hold him. These included everything from boilers to mailbags to the belly of a whale that had washed ashore in Boston.

In 1912, Houdini introduced what is considered his most famous act, the Chinese Water Torture Cell. He was suspended upside down in a locked glass-and-steel cabinet full to overflowing with water. The act required that Houdini hold his breath for more than three minutes. By the fall of 1926, Houdini's show included not only the Chinese Water Torture Cell trick, but also escapes from a coffin, straitjacket, and challenges from the audience. The performance took two and a half hours and required him to be onstage almost the entire time.

The tour took a bad turn in Providence, Rhode Island, when Bess contracted a case of food poisoning. Despite the presence of a nurse, Houdini was deeply worried about his wife and stayed awake all night at her side. Exhausted, he insisted on performing, anyway, in Albany, New York. That night, the frame holding his leg in place for the Chinese water torture jerked, and his ankle broke. Against the advice of a doctor, Houdini continued on to his next performance in Montreal.

In his dressing room, a fan who was also an amateur boxer asked if it was true that Houdini could withstand any blow to his body above the waist, excluding his face. Houdini gave the student permission to test him. He began to get up, but before he had time to tighten his abdomen muscles, the student punched him three times in the stomach. Despite excruciating pain, Houdini performed his show that afternoon. The next day, with the chills and sweating of a high fever, Houdini performed two more shows and then continued on to Detroit, Michigan. There, with a temperature of 102, a doctor ordered him to go immediately to the hospital. Instead, Houdini performed that night.

After the show, he finally went to the hospital. But by this time, his appendix had burst and he had peritonitis, an infection caused by the rupture that was often fatal before the development of antibiotics. Knowing he was dying, Houdini told Bess that he would communicate with her from beyond the grave. She would know it was really him if she heard the words “Rosabelle, believe.” “Rosabelle” was the name of a song that Bess had sung at Coney Island when she met Houdini.

Harry Houdini died on Halloween. Every Halloween for as long as she lived, Bess held a séance, trying to communicate with Harry. But she died in 1943 without ever succeeding.

When Felix landed, he hit something hard and hairy, then fell from its great height, hard onto the grass. He looked up the full length of the thing, which was not at all happy to have a twelve-year-old boy drop out of nowhere onto its back. He had seen enough movies to know he was looking at a buffalo. An angry buffalo. The animal snorted and pawed the ground with its hooves. It dipped its head and snorted some more.

Felix rolled out of the way, right into another buffalo. In fact, there were buffalo as far as he could see. Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands.

“Sorry,” he said to the snorting one in front of him.

The buffalo pawed at the grass again, its hooves so close that Felix could see the bits of grass and dirt stuck in them.
If this buffalo charges, the whole herd might follow suit
, he thought. But if Felix ran, would it follow him and start a stampede?

Felix got to his knees, carefully backing away from the buffalo and trying to avoid the other ones. They were standing pretty much shoulder to shoulder, which made it hard to maneuver. Felix couldn't believe that just a couple of hours ago, he'd been happily dancing the chicken dance with Lily Goldberg. Now, here he was in the middle of a buffalo herd, in the middle of who-knows-where, scared that he was about to get gored or crushed. He struggled to his feet. The buffalo nearest to him shifted, trapping Felix between its haunches and the haunches of another one. Their tails swished lazily. They didn't seem like they were about to move again.

Felix placed his hands on the animal's hairy back and tried to push it away. But when it turned its large head toward him—unhappily, Felix thought—Felix stopped. Instead, he wiggled his body until, inch by inch, he worked his way out and smack into something very un-buffalo-like.

He screamed and turned, afraid of what he might see next.

And there was Maisie, turning to look at him over her shoulder.

“Buffalo,” she whispered.

“No kidding,” Felix said.

“We just have to make it over there,” she said, pointing her chin.

“Oh,” he said. “Is that all?” There were about a zillion buffalo between them and “over there.”

“Slow and steady,” she said.

Felix took her hand and did what she suggested. Together they made their slow and steady way through the herd.