The Secret Life of Houdini (42 page)

Digger’s Rest, the site of Houdini’s first flight in Australia.
From the collection of Dr. Bruce Averbook

There were so many people crammed onto the south side of the Queen’s Bridge in Melbourne on February 17 that it looked like the structure could tip over. Thousands and thousands more lined the river wharfs on both sides of the Yanna, a good hour before the scheduled event. By one-thirty
P.M.
, the crowd was estimated at more than twenty thousand people. With military precision, the car arrived at the appointed time. Accompanied by the manager of the opera house and Franz Kukol, Houdini, who was clad in a bright blue bathing suit, wasted no time and pushed right to the parapet of the bridge and held out his wrists for the manacling. Kukol passed a heavy chain around his neck and then over his arms, locking the ends. Placing Houdini’s hands behind his back, Kukol then snapped regulation police cuffs on the magician’s wrists. A committee of local men tugged a while at the irons and seemed satisfied. And then Houdini jumped.

Houdini behind the wheel of his Voisin.
From the collection of Sid Fleischman

To a chorus of cheers, he did a magnificent header off the twenty-foot-high structure, cutting into the water clean. Unfortunately, the water itself was anything but. The Yanna had such a reputation for its muddy water that Sydney residents mocked it by claiming it was the only river in the world that ran upside down. For a few seconds the crowd nervously awaited Houdini’s fate. Suddenly, two figures emerged from the mucky water. The impact of Houdini’s leap had dislodged a corpse from the muddy riverbed. The event so disquieted Houdini that he momentarily froze and had to be helped into the waiting police launch. When he was interviewed later, Houdini said that the river was so muddy that he had sank up to his waist in the mud on impact. When he was asked how he liked the flavor of the Yanna water, he grimaced and said it was “the least toothsome” water he had ever consumed.

When he played Sydney, Houdini replicated his feat off a high dive platform at the municipal baths. Before a huge crowd, Houdini mounted the ladder to the highest platform, thirty-one feet from the surface of the water, which was eighteen feet deep. After being chained and with his hands manacled behind his back, Houdini jumped feetfirst, but the twenty-five pounds of iron tilted him forward and he struck the water face-first. He nursed a puffy eye for several days.

Houdini’s historic first Australian flight.
From the collection of Dr. Bruce Averbook

Before he took to the stage in Australia, Houdini made it clear in the press that though he invented the handcuff challenge act, he wasn’t much interested in doing it anymore. Now he would present “mysteries” like freeing himself from a straitjacket and the Milk Can escape, which, by the way, he had also invented, even though an Australian imitator named Tommy Burns had been doing that escape and claiming it for his own. At the end of March, when he got to Sydney, he even brought Bess back onstage to perform the Metamorphosis.

In Sydney, just as in Melbourne, Houdini’s theatrical shows seemed almost to take a backseat to his forays into the substratosphere. On March 29, during his show, he told the sold-out audience that he had telegraphed Digger’s Rest for his plane since he wanted to fly in Sydney. On that news, the audience gave him an ovation. And he delivered. He rented a racetrack in Rosehill for £100 and announced an “Air Week,” during which Houdini would fly daily, weather permitting, between nine
A.M.
and three
P.M.
Houdini had to pay Brassac a tidy sum to induce him to stay in Australia, as the mechanic was anxious to get back to the Continent and compete for the big purses that were being offered for flights.

Houdini’s exhibitions in Rosehill were being monitored by George Taylor, the founder and secretary of the Aerial League of Australia. Taylor was a fascinating shadowy character who was in the forefront of promoting the military applications of both aviation and wireless technology in Australia. Trained as a builder, he worked as a cartoonist for a periodical named
Punch
in the 1890s and then segued into town planning. A pupil of Lawrence Hargrave, the Australian who had designed the box kite that had been modified into the Voisin, Taylor was the first man on the continent to fly a heavier-than-air machine, navigating a glider on December 5, 1909. Earlier that year, on April 28, he had founded the Aerial League of Australia in Sydney, a pressure group intent on promoting the military applications of aviation.

While pressing his aviation theme, Taylor also founded the Wireless Institute of Australia on March 11, 1910. Two weeks later, on March 28, while Houdini was in Australia, Taylor transmitted the first military wireless signal in Australia. His work on both aviation and wireless communication earned him a position as lieutenant in the Australian Intelligence Corps.

According to the Australian National Aviation Museum, Houdini brought his Voisin to Australia at the invitation of Taylor’s newly formed aerial league, which was convinced that flights by Houdini could be of enormous help in promoting their military aviation agenda.

If Digger’s Rest was the dress rehearsal, away from the prying eyes of critics, Houdini’s flights at the Rosehill racetrack were a spectacle. Before cheering crowds that filled the grandstand, Houdini began a week’s worth of demonstrations somewhat inauspiciously. His first trial went well, but on his second attempt to ascend, the plane just hugged the ground, mystifying Brassac. Undaunted, Houdini made a third attempt and got airborne. After some harrowing lists to the left and right, Houdini straightened out the Voisin, but his landing was so rough that he was literally thrown from his seat, landing on his hands and knees some distance from the machine. Luckily, both Houdini and the plane were intact and he made many other successful flights during that week.

Houdini’s racetrack engagement was extended into May. And the publicity was exactly what Taylor and his aerial league had hoped for. “People who scoff at the idea of warfare in the air ought to have been at Rosehill race track on Sunday. Shortly after noon, when, with a roar like a thousand maniacs released, the Voisin biplane, which had been tugging at its moorings for a week in vain endeavor to break away, was released by command of the pilot, Harry Houdini,”
The Daily Telegraph
reported. After a vivid description of Houdini’s flight, the paper noted that “men tossed up their hats; women grew hysterical and wept for sheer excitement. A hundred men rushed toward the biplane, pulled the happy aviator from his seat, and carried him, shoulder-high, mid deafening cheers and salvos.”

Houdini had been earlier lauded by
Punch
for raising the consciousness of the dangers of aviation advances. “Here is Houdini, who is an amateur, a beginner. He has taught himself to fly here amongst us, and shown us what his machine can do. He may be doing it for advertisement; he may be doing it out of mere love of adventure. The reason does not matter…When his great machine was circling and whirring round like a gigantic bird, the great thought was ‘What of the future?’ We in Australia are remote from the great world centres. We are peculiarly exposed to attack…We are building ships and training men…We are making no provision to defend ourselves against an enemy in the air. Yet the battles of the future will go to whoever is strongest in the air.”

On April 29, Taylor and his aerial league honored Houdini at a special meeting at Town Hall. The crowd had been warmed up with a screening of Houdini’s flights, so the magician, who had rushed over directly from his show across town, entered the hall to a standing ovation. He was presented with the trophy, a scroll in the form of a plane and a wooden plaque with a winged bas-relief globe that depicted the Australian continent.

Houdini was the perfect spokesman for the wonders of flight. “Aviation is the most wonderful thing in the world today,” he told
The Brisbane Daily Mail
. “To fly in an aeroplane is an experience worth living for.” Summing up his flying experiences down under in a periodical Taylor published called
Building
, Houdini wrote, “I was proud to fly here first, proud for myself and proud because I speak the same tongue as Australians, because I come from that great United States that was British born.”

Houdini’s mission was a great success. It put the debate about flying on the front pages of the newspapers. The next year, the Aerial League of Australia published a twenty-page booklet by Lieutenant George Taylor (Australian Intelligence Corps), titled “Wanted at Once! An Aerial Defence Fleet for Australia—A National Call to Australians.” Peppered with pictures of both Taylor and Houdini flying, it again warned of the threat to Australians from a Japan that was on the brink of modernizing an air force. All this agitation worked. Australia’s minister of defence, George Pearce, visited the United Kingdom in 1911, and after conferring with colleagues at Brooklands, the home of British aviation, decided to set up an aviation school in Australia under his ministry. He ordered four planes from the British government and chose two instructors to begin preparations for what would become Australia’s air force.

The Aerial League appreciated Houdini’s work.
From the collection of Dr. Bruce Averbook

By 1916, the newly formed Australian Flying Corps was accomplished enough to send a complete flying unit to fight alongside the English in the Middle East. By 1917, three more squadrons were fighting with distinction in France. Its Third Squadron was engaged with the German air force the day that Manfred von Richthofen, “The Red Baron,” was killed, a devastating blow to the morale of the German air corps. Even up to the last day of the war, the No. 2 squadron of the AFC was bombing the German army, which was retreating on the Western Front. “These pilots came down and fairly strafed the Hun, they bombed him and attacked him with machine guns from only fifty feet, flying amongst the tree tops; they were magnificent, they reveled in this work which was great military value to all,” General Trenchard, the commander of the Royal Flying Corps, remarked. All told, 460 officers and 2,234 Australians served in the AFC during the war, and 178 were killed, a substantially smaller casualty rate than most armies. Houdini’s inspiring flights over Australia had made a contribution to helping the Allies win World War I.

By 1910, Houdini had been at his game almost twenty years, and it was finally taking its toll. On his arrival in Australia, reporters were shocked to see a thirty-six-year-old whose hair was turning gray, an outward manifestation of the battering of both his body and his psyche. Perhaps it was because of the remoteness of Australia; perhaps it was with the perspective that was gained by being one of the few human beings on the planet who had soared like a real-life Icarus into the sky; maybe it was just homesickness, but Houdini seemed more vulnerable than ever when he sat down with a reporter from
The Daily Telegraph
in Sydney. It seemed like he wasn’t as much answering questions as unburdening his soul.