The Secret Life of Houdini (7 page)

There is one other interesting aspect of this Risey story. It was reported in the papers of June 22, 1894, which means that it probably took place the previous night. The fact that Bess Raymond of the Floral Sisters was in the wings cheerleading for Houdini was no accident. On the next day, after knowing each other a little more than a week, they would get married.

Bess, whose real name was Wilhelmina Beatrice Rahner, was a Brooklyn girl from a strict German Roman Catholic family. Her father had died at an early age, and she was consigned to working at a brother-in-law’s tailor shop. But she had wanderlust in her blood and a natural inclination toward singing and dancing, so when she was sixteen, she got a job as a seamstress in a traveling circus. Soon afterward, she made friends with two girls, the Floral Sisters, who had a song-and-dance act. Within weeks, she had persuaded them to let her join the group.

Harry’s brother Theo had arranged a blind date with two of the sisters for Harry and himself. Love-at-first-sight ensued, and soon Harry and Bess were inseparable. Houdini didn’t have the money to properly woo his love (Bess would later crack that she had “sold her virginity to Houdini for an orange”) and according to her account, not only did she have to contribute the lion’s share for her wedding ring but also had to loan Harry the $2 needed for the marriage license. Besides the civil ceremony, Bess claimed that they were married twice more, once by a rabbi and once by a Roman Catholic priest.

Cecilia welcomed Bess into the family, but it was quite a different story for Bess’s people. “Though the matter had not been mentioned, I gathered from Ehrich’s appearance that he was a Jew,” Bess wrote, “and in our simple Catholic upbringing, a Jew was a person of doubtful human attributes.” In fact, Bess’s mother shunned her daughter for twelve years after her marriage, relenting only when Houdini and one of his brothers traveled to her home in 1906 and refused to leave until Mrs. Rahner would agree to pay a visit to her then seriously ill daughter.

Houdini was gaining not only a wife but a partner too. He had decided that Bess would replace his brother Theo in the act. For one, she was much smaller, less than five feet tall and weighing in at under ninety pounds. She’d have a lot less trouble making the switch in the trunk than Theo, who was much larger than his diminutive older brother. Besides, Harry had been upset with Theo when they were first starting out. Theo had botched the substitution trunk bit by forgetting to bring his gimmick into the trunk, making him a prisoner. The act had to be stopped as a red-faced Theo was freed. That gaffe cost them the rest of their booking at the Imperial Music Hall in Manhattan and from that time on, it was Harry who was bound and locked in the trunk.

That night, Houdini led his brother and Bess on a walk toward the roaring ocean. There was a strange feeling in the salt air, the crescent moon peeking in and out from behind rapidly moving clouds. They walked over an old bridge that traversed some fast-running brackish water. Suddenly, in the middle of the bridge, Houdini stopped and stood in silent contemplation. Somewhere in the distance, a church bell rang out twelve peals.

As soon as that last ring faded, Houdini took his brother’s hand and clasped it with Bess’s. Then he slowly raised both their hands aloft.

“Beatrice and Theo, raise your hands to Heaven and swear you will both be true to me,” Houdini intoned. “Never betray me in any way, so help you God.”

Theo and Bess repeated the vow after him. Then Houdini kissed Bess and shook Dash’s hand.

“I know you will keep that sacred vow,” he said with satisfaction, having done everything in his power to protect his magic secrets.

But this was too much for the constitutionally frail Bess.

“By this time I was in a state of panicky terror,” she remembered. “The eerie sky, the lonely bridge in a waste of marshland, the black water—and then this dramatic and terrible vow—these things seemed wholly abnormal and strange. It was apparent that this Houdini whom I had known less than two weeks was…probably a madman, and his brother was no better. I glanced at the black water and wondered what those two strangers intended to do to me next in that lonely place…. Houdini sensed my fears and immediately began to lead me away and reassure me. By the time we reached the lighted streets his gentleness and tenderness had restored my tranquillity.”

The next morning, Theo began initiating Bess into the mysteries of the trunk effect, which they called “Metamorphosis,” resigned to the fact that the meager income generated by the act would preclude his further participation. And from the perspective of pure showmanship, the substitution trunk would be transformed and enhanced with Bess in the act. Now it would be a true metamorphosis, with a cuffed, bound magician being magically transformed into a cuffed, bound, beautiful female.

“Your attention toward this end of the hall! Here you will find a clever young man. He will mystify you if he can, a great magician, it’s no bunk. Houdini, look at him; there he goes into the trunk.” Professor Hudson Langdon, the barker at Huber’s Fourteenth Street Museum, would steer the audience drifting by to Houdini’s slice of the stage in the Curio Hall. Competing for the attention of the crowd with Unthan, the Legless Wonder; Big Alice, a fat lady; and Blue Eagle, who would break boards over his head to show the strength of his skull, Houdini and Bess began doing as many as twenty shows a day.

Those were the good venues. One time, while they were on their honeymoon, the newlyweds were booked at a wine room, which was basically a low-class bordello that featured entertainment. “We opened and when I found out what kind of a theatre it was, good night and good bye,” Houdini wrote. More often than not The Great Houdinis, as Harry billed them, would play raucous beer halls where the alcoholic audience took great delight in calling for the “hook” for acts that didn’t please them. Bess’s petite figure didn’t help. The fashion in those days was for “generously curved amazons” and Bess felt that most managers “looked askance at my uncompromising flatness.” One time they couldn’t get a booking at a dime museum or even a beer hall, so they tried to break into a burlesque show. “What the hell do you think I’m running?” the manager said, after eyeing Bess over. “A kindergarten?”

By the end of 1894, the Houdinis were playing small theaters in the South. On the road, they had established a rhythm of sorts. Harry never slept more than four hours a night and he used the additional waking hours to their fullest. He was always up at five, shopping for whatever meager provisions their current income would allow. Then he’d pick up some coffee and bring it back to their furnished room while Bess would sleep in. Houdini would then go out and hustle, visiting barrooms, buying playing cards, and doing some card effects to raise extra cash. In January they were thrilled to get an engagement in New York at Tony Pastor’s, a prestigious, legitimate vaudeville theater. Despite their taking ads out in the theatrical papers, the booking did little for their career, as they were buried way down at the bottom of the bill. After that it was back to the lowly dime museums. Bess got so discouraged that she actually left the act when they were playing Huber’s, leaving Houdini to finish the engagement solo.

An early poster for the Houdinis depicting their celebrated Metamorphosis.
Library of Congress

It was one of those early spring rains that chilled to the bone. The darkness was so thick that Harry and Bess began to think they were hopelessly lost. Still they plodded on through the mud, each carrying one end of the trunk that doubled as both their stage prop and their luggage. They walked for what seemed like miles, until they heard a voice from out of the darkness calling them.

“Is that the Houdinis?”

“Yes, sir,” Harry answered back.

A hand swooped down out of the dark and pulled them into what looked like the entrance of a cave. Peering into the dark, they could barely make out that it was an old railroad freight car that had been transformed into living quarters. A lantern flashed in front of their faces.

“Well, what do you do?” a man with a walrus mustache asked them. He was Mike Welsh, one of the proprietors of the Welsh Brothers Circus.

“Anything,” Houdini blurted out. They were desperate to make this potential twenty-six-week gig stick.

“Well, the first thing that you do with this outfit is to work in the sideshow,” Welsh said. “You do Punch and Judy—the wife, mind-reading. In the concert, Houdini to do magic, wife to sing and dance—then your trunk trick. And, of course, you are in the parade. Twenty-five a week and cakes.”

They understood the money part, and later they would discover that cakes meant meals. For the rest of his life, Houdini would rave about the wonderful food that was served up by the circus chef.

Clear on their commitments, Welsh then escorted Harry and Bess down the narrow corridor of the train car.

“Here are the Houdinis,” he shouted.

“Hello,” “Welcome to our city,” “Good evening,” a chorus of voices came at them from behind the partitioned-off makeshift rooms. Welsh stopped at one of these miniscule compartments and pulled the flimsy curtain to one side.

Harry and Bess pose for their first professional pictures in 1894.
Library of Congress

“This is your lodging,” he said. They looked in and saw a single cot, which was taking up almost all of the available space. The partitions between rooms were made of cardboard. After Welsh left, Bess, soaking wet and upset at the bizarre cramped quarters, fell onto the cot, crying hysterically. Houdini comforted her at first, but then he set down to work and began to scribble some little rhymes for her song turn.

The next morning when Houdini signed his contract, he didn’t bother to ask what the words “
AND FOUND
,” which were inserted after his salary, meant. He found out a few nights later when the audience began clambering for “Projea, the Wild Man of Mexico,” an advertised attraction. It seems that the regular “wild man” was ill and wasn’t on this run. Backstage, the managers conferred, and John Welsh approached Houdini.

Welsh Brothers Circus Troupe, 1896. Harry and Bess are in the front row; in the back marked “6” is Houdini’s close friend Jim Bard.
From the collection of Kevin Connolly

“Put some paint on your face and get in the cage. They want the wild man,” he said. And then he explained that “
AND FOUND
” meant whatever other work for him they could find. So Houdini cheerfully rumpled up his hair, painted some red stripes on his cheeks, made his chin blue, dabbed black paint around his eyes, improvised a caveman outfit out of a burlap sack, and climbed into the cage as Projea. Then they pushed the cage onstage and Clint Newton, the show’s director, approached with some raw meat. He tore off a piece and threw it into the cage. Projea pounced on it and tore at it with his teeth, growling and shaking the bars from time to time.

Houdini’s willingness to try anything was a function of his insatiable thirst for knowledge of every aspect of show business—and his shrewd ability to take unrelated skills and use them to his own advantage. By treating the dime museum freaks with dignity and respect, he befriended them and soaked up skills that would later be useful. A. Lutes, an armless man, so impressed him with his ability to use his toes as fingers that Houdini practiced and practiced until his own toes developed prehensile abilities, which would be invaluable to him in later escape work. He learned the techniques of circus strongmen, fire-resisters, and sword-swallowers. On the Welsh Brothers Tour, he befriended a member of the San Kitchi Akimoti, a Japanese balancing act, who taught him how to seemingly swallow objects and then regurgitate them at will by hiding them in his gullet.