The Secret Life of Houdini (16 page)

In Buffalo, a few months later, Houdini refined his police station escape by allowing himself to be laced into a straitjacket, and then entwined three times with a long strap that was locked in the middle of his back. His mouth was plastered and bound with a handkerchief. It took the police fifteen minutes to restrain him in this fashion; he was free of everything in half that time, leaving the plaster and the handkerchief in place to show that he hadn’t taken anything from his mouth.

By the end of 1899, Houdini had established himself as one of the new shining stars of vaudeville—at least of the Orpheum circuit. Now he was intent on breaking into the eastern houses, which were controlled by the Keith Brothers and their manager, E. F. Albee. Beck had arrangements with the eastern houses, so Houdini began his assault on the East Coast in early January 1900 in Boston. His first visit was to police headquarters, where Inspector William Watts was waiting. Watts was one of the prime movers in the IACP, the International Association of Chiefs of Police, a devotee of the Bertillon system, and a friend of Andy Rohan. And he certainly didn’t deviate one iota from the script.

“I’m glad to see you, Houdini, but I guess I’ve got you up against the wall this time,” Chief Watts said, holding a one-hundred-year-old pair of handcuffs that were handmade and featured a peculiar screw lock that could only be opened with a very odd-looking key.

“Well, Chief, I feel a little nervous because if I fail on these old cuffs, I am a ruined man in this business,” Houdini said, anxiously looking over the cuffs. Then he turned to the crowd of detectives, officers, and newspapermen.

“I want you to see that I have no key about my person, so I will strip naked.”

Once nude, he was examined by a police surgeon, and his mouth was covered with court plaster so he couldn’t open it.

They began with an easy test, regulation police handcuffs. He was cuffed, his legs were fettered, and then he was led into a giant safe vault and the shackle on his left foot was secured around the bars on the inside of the safe. The safe was then locked. In exactly eleven minutes and twenty seconds, Houdini walked out and handed the irons to Chief Watts.

Then the real test began. He was handcuffed with the antique cuffs. A screw plug was inserted into the lock to prevent it from being picked. Again, he was locked in the vault. Nine minutes later, Houdini emerged. According to the news accounts, his hands were “red, swollen, sore, and bleeding” from the tight cuffs. But he was free. The crowd was “astounded.” Watts congratulated Houdini and had the police brass and the reporters sign an official-looking proclamation on Bureau of Criminal Investigation stationery, attesting to Houdini’s wonderful escape.

The press coverage drove the crowds to Keith’s, and Houdini didn’t disappoint.

“‘The King of Handcuffs’ is well named,”
The Boston Herald
blared. “The man is like nothing or nobody in his line of performers, and one scarcely knows where to place him. What a splendid subject he would make for the old time spiritualistic business! How bells would ring and tambourines jingle and thump with Houdini tied up like a Christmas package in the cabinet!”

After the first week, Houdini’s act had “scored a bigger hit” than Ching Ling Foo, the celebrated Chinese conjurer who was headlining the bill. By the second week, Houdini had been elevated to the star feature. Taking no chances, he began a second round of publicity. Accompanied by a
Boston Herald
reporter, Houdini visited the John Lovell Arms Company and escaped from their handcuffs right in the store, Houdini just turning his back and, “Presto! The handcuffs were unlocked and broken apart as though they were merely ropes of sand.” Then they made a trip to visit with Captain Charles Bean, the venerated inventor of the Bean Giant handcuff that Houdini had defeated a few months earlier.

“I have spread your fame for making handcuffs all over the United States,” Houdini said. “I take my hat off to your Yankee ingenuity.”

Then Houdini slipped on a pair of the Bean Giants and within minutes had liberated himself.

“Well, that beats me how you get out of those handcuffs,” Bean said. “I’ve probably fastened 10,000 prisoners in my time with those handcuffs, but you beat me.”

Onstage, Houdini accepted all handcuff challenges, which led to some unique escapes and, of course, more publicity. On January 20, four officers from the Boston Police Department came onstage and placed leg irons and cuffs on his wrists. Then they conferred quietly with him. Houdini shook his head, as if in doubt.

“I don’t know about that, let me see it,” he said. One of the officers produced a small, nickel-plated object, which resembled a double Yale Lock.

“This is a thumb-cuff,” Houdini told the audience. “I never saw one before in my life, but I will put it on, and see what I can do.”

Within five minutes, he was free of everything.

The next day, a man walked down the aisle and came onstage with a large parcel under his arm. It was a straitjacket. It took them six minutes to lace it onto Houdini. In less than three minutes, he emerged from his cabinet with the jacket in his hand. The next day
The Boston Transcript
crowed, “Houdini…may now add to his titles that of ‘emperor of straitjackets.’”

In Providence, Rhode Island, Houdini’s next stop, he took no chances. After releasing himself from four pairs of handcuffs and one set of leg irons at the police station on Friday morning, January 28, he accepted a challenge from a Boston dentist on the Keith’s Theatre stage on Wednesday evening, January 31. Dr. Joseph E. Waitt brought a pair of handcuffs whose keyholes had been sealed in the presence of Detective Parker of the Providence police force and Superintendent Thornehill of the Pinkerton Agency in Boston. Onstage, Dr. Waitt sealed another pair of handcuffs that were placed on Houdini’s ankles causing severe pain. Both seals were intact after Houdini made his escape, but what the newspaper reporters and the audience didn’t know was that Houdini had met Dr. Waitt a week earlier when Waitt, who had been an avid magic fan since childhood, had been asked by the assistant theater manager to supervise Houdini’s handcuff act at Keith’s Theatre in Boston. In the intervening time, Houdini had turned a committee member whose job was to catch him in trickery into an accomplice in a sealed handcuff test. Waitt would become an intimate friend and confidant, even helping Houdini design a few of his later spectacular challenges.

“Let me out! Let me out!” Bess’s screams echoed through the New York Theater. If they sounded a little muffled, it was because they were. She was screaming and pounding the sides of the Metamorphosis trunk; she was locked inside it. In fact, she’d been in there for five minutes by now. At first, the audience had laughed, thinking this was part of the act. Then the laughter turned to apprehension.

The effect had been progressing flawlessly, as usual. The transformation had startled the audience. It seemed like only a second after Bess had clapped her hands for the third time that Houdini emerged from the curtained cabinet and was bending down to open the trunk and reveal that his wife was now in the bag inside. Then something went very wrong.

Houdini called an assistant over as he knelt over the trunk, some whispered words were exchanged, and the assistant rushed away. Apparently Houdini had left the key to the trunk in the dressing room, which was five floors above the stage. The wait seemed interminable, but then the assistant returned empty-handed. William McCormack, the theater manager, rushed onstage and conferred with Houdini. Another person was dispatched to find the key. By now Bess had begun to scream and pound at the sides of the trunk.

With Bess’s oxygen supply rapidly dwindling, McCormack ran offstage and returned with a large ax. He had struck the trunk with one blow when the second assistant rushed up to him with the key. He unlocked the trunk and Bess, who had passed out, was lifted from the trunk and carried to the dressing room.

“So this is the way you try to kill me, is it?” she screamed at Houdini. She carried on for two solid hours, hysterical, then was taken to a hotel, where a doctor was consulted who reported that she was in serious condition. This had been some disaster of a homecoming for the Houdinis.

Or had it? If this was a real life-and-death situation, there’s little chance that a world-class lock-pick expert would stand by and watch his wife suffocate. Houdini passively standing by is inconsistent with his nature. It’s the manager who rushes to get an ax to free Bess, and the manager who receives the keys and opens the trunk. A reporter revealed that Houdini had informed him that the trunk was so airtight that Bess could only have survived seven minutes in it. Judging from the account, she was released just under the deadline. The truth is that a person could live for at least half an hour locked in that trunk. It’s clear that Bess was merely emoting in a serio-comic scene written by her husband. Houdini instinctively realized the inherent drama of bringing the danger of death to the stage. Even so, her line, “So this is the way you try to kill me, is it?” is a bit overreaching.

The Houdinis’ “fiasco” was reported in
The New York World
, then picked up and printed in a few other cities. The New York Theater was sold out for the rest of the run.

In some ways, Bess being locked in the trunk, keys forgotten, was an apt metaphor for the changing dynamics with respect to their act over the last year. Until Houdini began doing the vaudeville circuit, they were billed as The Houdinis, but as Harry transformed himself into Houdini, the King of Handcuffs, Bess was called his assistant, and by the time they reached Boston, Bess was completely omitted from the billing. According to Houdini, this was Bess’s idea.

“Harry, I’ve never known an act billed as ‘Mr. and Mrs.’ to succeed. Suppose you bill yourself just as Houdini and leave me out of it,” she told him one day.

“Won’t you be jealous?” Harry asked.

“Why should I? Certainly not.”

Bess might have been disingenuous, because there are later reports that she would bitterly listen to Harry’s patter backstage and decry the frequency with which Houdini would use the word “I.” Now, even though the petite soubrette was no longer singing and dancing, she was still performing the Metamorphosis. She threw the rest of her energies into collecting dolls and designing and sewing her costume.

A “little man with a thin, pale face” walked into detective headquarters in central station in Chicago just before six
P.M.
on Thursday, April 5, 1900.

“I would like to be locked up, please,” he said.

Sergeant Kuebler, Detective Quinn, and Lieutenant Rohan looked up and “greeted the little man as an old friend.”

“Aha, come back to fool us again, have you?” Kuebler, the lockup keeper, said. “Well, we’ll fix you this time. No handcuffs, we’ll just slip you in a cell, and if you get out without my permission, you’re a beauty.”

The little man was Houdini. Of course they would greet him as an old friend; Houdini had been back to the central station a dozen times since he escaped from Rohan’s cuffs the first time.

This time Houdini bet Rohan a cigar that he could escape from a jail cell. It seemed like a daunting task. Each cell door had two locks. One was a standard lock, opened with a giant key, but over that keyhole there was a wide band of iron that looped over a staple placed a foot away from the door. That band was fastened by a padlock.

Rohan and Kuebler escorted Houdini to the cell and locked him in. They walked back around the corridor to the squad room. In three minutes, Houdini bounded out and asked Rohan for his cigar.

Houdini had certainly earned his smoke. Just hours before visiting Rohan that evening, Houdini had performed at a benefit for the Columbia Theatre employees, where he “created the sensation of the day” by freeing himself from handcuffs and manacles that were placed on him by an accredited member of the Secret Service.

The escape from a jail cell, a new twist, was repeated the next week in Kansas City. The jailer at the station, a man named Shavely, joked that they should lock him in a cell and see if he could get out.

“Getting out of a cell isn’t in my contract and I don’t guarantee it, but if you won’t laugh too much if I fail, I’ll try it,” Houdini said.

“Better not try it,” Chief Hayes warned. “We’ve got a new guaranteed lock on the cells down there that you can’t always open even with the keys.”

Houdini and the officers walked down the stairs to the cells. The jailer pointed out a cell door that was locked with one of those impenetrable locks. Houdini took the lock into his hand and bent over it, with his back to the others, studying it closely. Thirty seconds later, he turned and faced them and held out the unlocked lock.

“We can use this one if you want,” he said.

Sixteen months after that first Chicago police station escape that landed Houdini’s picture on the front pages of the papers, he had become famous. His name was being used to sell clothing and meat, his exploits were being written up daily, and he was being compared to and even said to surpass the greatest magicians of his day. When they went to Toronto in February of 1900,
The Toronto World
heralded him as “one of the greatest living masters of mystery, the famous Houdini,” but the recognition (and his increasing salary, which by now had escalated to $400 a week, an amount comparable to $45,000 today) hadn’t really changed Houdini. He was still as hardworking and enthusiastic about his craft. H. J. Dillenback, a publicist with Keith’s in Providence, wrote an unsolicited letter to a theater manager who had just booked Houdini. “You will find [him] to be the most appreciate [sic] man in the business, and more ready to cooperate in every way with you than any performer I have ever met. He is as square as a die, a thoroughly good fellow in every way, and one of the kind whom it is a decided pleasure to help along…I have found him such an exceptional man in every way that I feel desirous of doing anything in my humble power to ‘boost’ him.”

Houdini didn’t forget his humble origins either. He had maintained his membership in the tie cutters union and by the middle of 1900, he was regularly sending money to an old coworker at Richter’s named L. Gorlitzer. Gorlitzer had worked at the tie factory for twenty-three years and had been promised a job for as long as he lived by old man Richter. Apparently the sons thought otherwise and Gorlitzer was “sent away” without even his $5-a-week pension. On hearing the news, Houdini was “thunderstruck” and started regularly sending Gorlitzer money, helping him to stave off eviction.