The Secret Life of Houdini (57 page)

Thanks to the enormous backstage area at the Hippodrome, Jennie was able to rush out onstage in a full trot, led by her trainer. The giant pachyderm, which was almost eight feet tall and scaled in at more than five tons, looked ominous as she circled Houdini a few times, her head swiveling from side to side in time with her thunderous short steps. When she finally came to a stop next to the magician, she positively dwarfed him, but her ferocity seemed somewhat muted by Houdini’s touch of placing a baby-blue ribbon around her neck and an oversize fake wristwatch attached to her left hind leg.

“As you can see, Jen-nie is dressed up like a bride,” Houdini quipped. “Though she weighs over ten thousand pounds, she is gentle as a kit-ten. To demonstrate her tran-quil nature, Jennie will now give me a kiss.”

On cue, the elephant sidled up to Houdini, lifted her huge trunk, and leaned her face down to the magician’s. Houdini rewarded her with a handful of block sugar.

Houdini bonds with Jennie before he makes her disappear.
From the collection of Kenneth M. Trombly

“I think that Jen-nie may be the single largest contrib-u-ting factor to the sugar shortage,” Houdini joked. “Perhaps there will be more sugar for us after she disappears.”

“Now Jen-nie, say good-bye to the audience,” he commanded, and Jennie waved her head and trunk on cue. As the orchestra broke into a march, the trainer led her up the ramp into the trailer. The stagehands immediately closed the back doors and pulled both the back and front curtains shut. Since the trailer had been positioned sideways, they then took up positions at each end of the enclosure and, with the aid of a block and tackle, slowly moved the huge box a quarter turn so that the circus “cage” front windows faced the center of the audience.

Houdini signaled for the music to stop.

“Although she is a very large beast, she will literally vanish in the space of a few seconds, so I want you to watch very closely,” Houdini warned.

A drumroll commenced. Houdini clapped his hands and the stagehands rushed to either end of the enclosure and pulled aside the curtains on each end.

“As you can plain-ly see, the a-ni-mal is complete-ly gone!” Houdini intoned.

And he was right. The stagehands, some of whom were dressed as circus clowns, peered through the box and under it. And the audience members who sat in the center sections could look straight through the box and see the Hippodrome’s brightly lit backdrop. The elephant had disappeared.

There are magicians and magic historians who claim that Houdini, while a brilliant escape artist, was at best a mediocre magician. An escape artist, by definition, is a magician. Escapes are just another branch on the tree of magic; they are not a tree unto themselves. They are a form of magic in that they have not only an effect but also a secret method. His escapes notwithstanding, Houdini was still brilliant as a magician even if some said he wasn’t graceful like Howard Thurston, or that he lacked the urbanity of Charles Carter. But Harry Kellar, dean of magicians, said, “He is a grand man when you know him and he stands head and shoulders above all other magicians of our time.” Houdini mystified other magicians too. “I hear Carter has been in to see me half a dozen times and as yet hasn’t properly doped out the elephant illusion,” Houdini boasted to Kellar. Even today there is no consensus as to how he managed to do it.

If some magicians thought the Vanishing Elephant wasn’t good magic, the press and the public certainly did. The spectacle received rave reviews. “So Mr. Houdini puts his title of premier escape artist behind him and becomes The Master Magician,” Sime Silverman wrote in
Variety
. William Hilliar, in his magic column for
Billboard
magazine, waxed poetically: “Houdini’s prodigious presentation of perfect prestidigitation at the New York Hippodrome, where twice daily he causes a huge elephant to vanish in thin air in about ten seconds, has amazed New York…. When a magician can become the big feature of the Hippodrome Show of Wonders, and he is billed like a circus, the art is certainly on the boom. What are you going to do next, Harry?”

What was next would have to wait. Originally booked for two weeks, Houdini’s elephant mystery drew so many people to the
Cheer Up
revue, which had been running for a month before he even joined the show, that his run was extended to an amazing nineteen weeks, the longest engagement in one theater in Houdini’s career. That Houdini would present what he called the largest illusion in magic history at the Hippodrome was quite fitting. With a seating capacity of more than five thousand and a stage that could comfortably contain an entire circus, re-creations of warring armies, water ballets, diving horses, and a five-hundred-person chorus, it was the largest and grandest theater in New York. It’s a testament to Houdini’s genius as a magician that he was able to hold a capacity crowd spellbound as he performed not only the largest illusion, with the aid of Jennie, but one of the smallest, his Needles.

To Houdini’s mind, his success in presenting the largest illusion in magic history was revitalizing the entire art. All aspects of magic interested him. He made voluminous notes on every field. Although only considered a top card expert in his own mind, he did associate with the crème de la crème, occasionally even hosting the likes of Henry Gavin, aka Arthur Finley, still considered by many to be the most skilled card expert of all time. “Magic is now the vogue,” he wrote Kellar. “My efforts are bringing it back into style…. The public are commencing to like magic, and actually demand same. Good. Twill make it good for Thurston and all other illusionists.”

Emboldened by his triumph as a grand illusionist, Houdini dreamed of opening his own magic theater, inspired by the Parisian theater of Robert-Houdin of sixty years earlier. He found a small theater near Times Square that held three hundred, and Houdini hoped to entirely remodel it to look like an Egyptian temple, similar to Maskelyne & Cooke’s Egyptian Hall in London. He hoped to employ in his new “Temple of Mysteries” state-of-the-art electronics such as “talking machines” that could be set in motion by the weight of a patron as he stepped on certain spots on the floor. Houdini claimed to have the backing of a few prominent Broadway producers, including Oscar Hammerstein and Charles Dillingham, who created the
Cheer Up
show, but in the end, the money-men were too savvy to try to finance such an ambitious project as the war raged.

That wasn’t the only disappointment Houdini was facing as 1918 began. His business venture, the Film Development Corporation, was hemorrhaging money, and Houdini was trying to stem the flow with large cash infusions from his savings. Between Houdini’s outlays and his sacrifices for the war effort, he was facing a cash crisis for the first time since his sideshow days. It was so bad that he was forced to curtail additions to his growing library. Commenting on a theater collection that had just gone up for sale, Houdini told Kilby that “if I had been flush would have spent a great deal more.”

On top of all this, his personal life seemed to be in turmoil too. After four years of living with Hardeen and his family, things had reached a breaking point. It’s uncertain why Houdini and Bess couldn’t tolerate Brooklyn any longer but after a period of unpleasantness, they decided to move back to the old brownstone in Harlem in the middle of a harsh cold spell in February. It took four twenty-foot vans to cart Houdini’s books alone. Once they were back in the house, the great cold wrought havoc on the plumbing. On top of that, a coal shortage had forced Houdini to burn fifteen-year-old shutters and Venetian blinds that had been stored in the basement.

Even before he moved back to the house “I bot [sic] for my Beloved Mother,” Houdini was still grieving her death. “I am fighting hard not to feel melancholy for it is five years since My Sweet Mother went to Sleep, and I am still as worried as I was then.”

There were other, darker, unspoken problems Houdini was confronting. “Been having a hard time with my private affairs,” he informed Kilby. “It’s been a bit cloudy of late for all of us,” he wrote Teale.

They met in a small café in Greenwich Village. She had gotten there first and had just taken her white fur coat off, revealing her smart white serge dress, when he arrived. He paused before the table and devoured her with his eyes. Then he gallantly took her hand, kissed it, and sat down opposite her.

“You were trembling all over when I touched your hand,” Houdini said.

The woman in white blushed.

“I hardly slept last night after our phone conversation,” she admitted. Houdini smiled.

“You know, when I first came in here, I didn’t recognize you. You look just like a young girl,” Houdini said.

“My charming magic man. You haven’t changed at all,” she said.

“Did you get my letter? Actually, the letter within a letter. I addressed it to the woman in white,” Houdini asked.

“No. It never came. Did you have the right address?”

“Never mind. I’ll just have to re-create it for you in person,” Houdini said.

“That would be lovely,” she sighed.

A waiter came over. The woman in white ordered a glass of champagne, and Houdini settled for a soda water.

“Would you like to see a menu?” the waiter asked.

“I don’t think so,” she said.

“You don’t seem human to me,” Houdini said, staring into her eyes. “I wonder if you have to eat.”

“You’re so sweet,” she said. “So tell me what was in the letter.”

“I wrote that now I know how kings have given up their kingdoms for a woman,” Houdini said, delicately stroking her hand. “You are gorgeous. You are wonderful.”

A pause.

“I love you,” he said.

The woman in white trembled all over.

According to Harold Kellock, who wrote Houdini’s official biography based on Bess’s recollections, after many years of marriage, Houdini used “many a deft little artifice to foster the romantic element.”

“Mrs. Houdini, you are a modern woman of liberal ideas,” he would say. “You will not be angry if I keep a date this evening. I expect to meet the most beautiful lady in the world at such and such a corner at 6:30. I shall be home very late.”

Bess would pick up the cue and dress herself in her most stunning outfits and make the rendezvous. Houdini would gallantly escort her into a waiting car and they would repair to a jazz club where Houdini would have made arrangements for a private dining room. Bess would order champagne and Harry would drink water. The waiters would fall for the “illicit and non-connubial atmosphere” of these assignations. According to Kellock, that old vaudeville gag—“‘Who was that lady I seen you with last night?’ ‘That wasn’t no lady, that was my wife’—might have been written seriously about these romantic escapades of Houdini.”

This rendezvous was not part of a fantasy role-playing scenario. The declarations of love and the trembling hands and the hearts a-fluttering were as real as real could be. The woman in white
was
a lady, and she
wasn’t
his wife. She was Charmian London.

From the collection of Roger Dreyer

W
HEN HE HEARD THE NEWS THAT
his friend Jack London had died in November of 1916, Houdini immediately dispatched a telegram to his widow Charmian. “Papers here report Jack’s death please let us know if this shocking information is founded on facts.” He signed it “your sincere friends Harry and Bessie Houdini.” London was only forty years old but he had been ill for years and, though his death was certified as due to uremic poisoning, there was speculation that he might have deliberately overdosed on the morphine he was using to control his pain. Though separated geographically, the two couples had become fast friends. When Charmian confirmed Jack’s death, Houdini immediately wrote his friend Kilby, who had been compiling a huge Houdini scrapbook, to tell him the news. “Did I ever send you snap shot of us both?” Houdini asked, with his eye on posterity.

The following October, Charmian found herself in New York overseeing the final details of the publication of her latest book. She saw Houdini perform and after the show, the two met. Within two hours of their meeting, Charmian sat down and wrote the conjurer a letter. Noting that Houdini seemed almost “shocked” to see her looking “so well and blooming,” Charmian took a defiant stance. “I
refuse
to be beaten! I am going to put in whatever years life still hold for me as profitably in the pursuit of happiness as I possibly can. You have lost and suffered. Am I not right in my attitude?” Informing him that she would relocate for a while in New York, she hinted at future meetings. “Someday, at exactly the right time and place, I shall tell you more about this past year and the other remarkable experience I have had that I’ve really carved out for myself. This is your letter. Please destroy it (but don’t forget it.) C. L.” There were no salutations to her friend Bessie.