The Secret Life of Houdini

by William Kalush

  The Secret Life of

  Houdini

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Copyright © 2006 by Light and Heavy, Inc.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Atria Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-9850-6

  ISBN-10: 0-7432-9850-0

  ATRIABOOKS is a trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonSays.com

  For three wonderful mothers—

  Cecilia Weiss, Lilyan Sloman, and Jean Kalush

  From the collection of Dr. Bruce Averbook

  Table of Contents

  Foreword

  Introduction

  1. THE OATH

  2. STARVING FOR A LIVING

  3. THE CELEBRATED CLAIRVOYANTS

  4. QUID PRO QUO

  5. THE KING OF HANDCUFFS

  6. M

  7. POLICE STATE

  8. TAMING THE BEAR

  9. THE CHALLENGE OF THE MIRROR

  10. LEAP OF FAITH

  11. KILL THY FATHER

  12. DEATH VISITS THE STAGE

  13. ABOVE THE DOWN UNDER

  14. THE EMPEROR OF SYMPATHY-ENLISTERS

  15. CHINESE WATER TORTURE

  16. FORGIVE

  17. FIGHTING OUR WAY TO THE GRAVE

  18. DEATH BY MISADVENTURE

  19. ART IMITATES LIFE

  20. SAUL AMONG THE PROPHETS

  21. LITTLE SISTER WILL DO EXACTLY AS BIG BROTHER SAYS

  22. MARGERY’S BOX

  23. MY OWN SECRET SERVICE

  24. I…AM A FAKE

  25. AN EYE FOR AN EYE

  26. THERE IS NO DEATH

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  About the Authors

  Foreword

  AS AN AMATEUR MAGICIAN, I FREQUENTLY ask members of an audience to just think of a famous magician. When I ask people to raise their hands if they happen to be thinking of Houdini, inevitably about three-quarters of the hands go up—this despite the fact that Harry Houdini died eighty years ago.

  No one would be more pleased with this than Houdini himself, who, as this book illustrates, sought throughout his life to imbed his image in the world’s consciousness. He did this with strenuous feats of daring that fully justify the appellation the authors apply—America’s first superhero.

  My own interest in magic ignited when as a child I saw the 1953 movie biography of Houdini, starring Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh. I ran immediately to my local public library and checked out what was then the only full-length biography, Houdini: His Life Story. It was written by Harold Kellock two years after Houdini’s death, with the “recollections and documents” of the magician’s wife, Beatrice. It was remarkably thorough for an authorized biography and is still a good read, but it was told, of course, from the perspective of a devoted spouse.

  There have been many subsequent biographies, and the better ones have each penetrated a bit deeper below the surface of the Houdini legend. But it is hard to imagine a more difficult subject for biographers than a man who was in his time one of the world’s foremost exponents of secrecy and who was determined to tell the public only those things that burnished his legend. Getting to the essence of the man—what made him tick—has been an extraordinary and almost always controversial task.

  The book you now hold breaks new ground. The evidence the authors have amassed is rich in new detail about many previously charted facets of Houdini’s life. More important, though, it opens a tantalizing new possibility: that Houdini might have used his expertise—along with the access his escapes and fame gave him around the world—to advise intelligence and security services in the United Kingdom and the United States, particularly in the years just before World War I. Working with fragmentary new evidence, the authors have put together a plausible case that, as the world headed toward war, there would have been high-level interest in some of what Houdini learned while escaping from various police and security service constraints in places like Germany and Russia and dealing with many of their officials.

  Houdini would undoubtedly love the fact that people will now have another set of clues to debate about his mysterious life—clues that will keep us talking about the “Master Mystifier” long into the future. In fact, I suspect that a hundred years from now the same large proportion of hands will go up for Houdini when some performer asks the audience to think of a famous magician.

  Houdini always said he would do his best to come back from the dead. As far as we know, he has never succeeded. But he would probably regard the endless fascination with his life and legend as the next best thing.

  John McLaughlin

  Former deputy director and acting director of the Central Intelligence Agency (2000–2004)

  Introduction

  HOUDINI DIDN’T DIE IN THE WATER torture cell. He didn’t have a mother fixation. And he wasn’t just a great showman. Eventually, all legends get cluttered by apocryphal stories, and the legend of the greatest professional master of deception is no exception. Much of what has become his story is fabrication. Ironically, the real story is better.

  Seven years ago, one of us had an epiphany. It was on April 6, 1999, Houdini’s 125th birthday. Bill Kalush was outside of David Blaine’s first stunt, “Buried Alive.” Blaine had been buried for a couple of days and since Kalush had planned the stunt with him, he felt it was only right to stand by him all day and night. At about four A.M., he noticed that some of the same people were coming back each night. They weren’t friends of the magician or even acquaintances. They were strangers who were somehow compelled to come at all hours to visit a man they didn’t know, concerned with his well-being. Somehow they had become emotionally attached to him. In that moment, Bill Kalush understood why we are all interested in Houdini. He, like Blaine after him, compelled us to feel for him and root for him.

  A few years later Kalush met writer Larry Sloman. Sloman, a professional writer for most of his life, wrote books on topics as varied as Bob Dylan and ice hockey, and he wrote a major biography of the sixties radical Abbie Hoffman that relied on more than two hundred interviews and years of relentless digging through archival sources. As it happened, Sloman had read all of the major books about Houdini. What struck both of us was that there were huge gaps in Houdini’s life story and some puzzling inconsistencies. So we embarked on a journey to discover the real man.

  Early on, we discovered an important connection that most biographers had seemed to miss. The young Houdini, though stunningly creative and clever, couldn’t make enough money to succeed at magic. Hungry and crestfallen, he was ready to give up his dream, until he walked into a Chicago police station and met a detective who would change his life. Immediately after this fateful encounter, his picture graced the front page of a Chicago newspaper. That picture catapulted him to renown. Within months, he had gone from cheap beer halls and dime museums to the big-time—vaudeville. In one year’s time, he had gone from literally eating rabbits for survival to making what today would equal $45,000 a week. (Throughout the book, for the purposes of comparison, we have converted dollars in Houdini’s time to today’s values. This is a highly contentious endeavor, but we have relied on the unskilled wage conversion rate provided by www.eh.net, operated by Miami University and Wake Forest University.)

  Now came the next mystery. Why would someone who had finally made it big risk everything and leave behind lucrative contracts to go to England with no real prospects in sight? Perhaps what happened to Ho
udini next answers the question. Within days of arriving in England, Houdini met with a prominent Scotland Yard inspector and once again, his career took off. What was going on, and why hadn’t it come to light? In hindsight, Houdini made all the right moves, but at the time, they were wildly risky, even for a man who would come to be known for his death-defying stunts. Did Houdini know something that made sense of these seemingly suicidal career moves?

  Before we could even begin to answer these questions, we read and reread all the books about Houdini, as well as many from the magic field in general. Cognizant that we needed primary source material, we started to gather massive piles of photocopied documents. Houdini’s personal scrapbooks alone amounted to more than 17,000 pages. He was an astounding letter writer, perhaps writing as many as 150,000 letters in his life and receiving just as many. In our quest, we found thousands of pages of correspondence, but most letters have been lost to history. Oftentimes we found only one letter from an otherwise unknown intimate, knowing full well that there must have been hundreds more.

  Early on, we discovered an interesting letter from a man in Scotland who was reporting to Houdini that there were rumors circulating that he was a spy. Dots started to connect, and as we answered some questions, new ones began presenting themselves.

  When we looked back at why Houdini suddenly succeeded in Chicago after having done substantially the same act for years in anonymity, we found some stunning connections. The particular Chicago detective who boosted Houdini’s career at a most critical point was a member of an exclusive private club. Another club member was the chief of the U.S. Secret Service. We dug and dug and discovered that the chief was also a magician, and he admitted to using magicians as operatives. Perhaps this was the opportunity Houdini had needed.

  Then we found some startling new evidence about Houdini’s first visit to Scotland Yard. It turned out that the inspector who he had met with was actually England’s leading foreign intelligence officer, a spymaster who would go on to start England’s famed MI-5.

  We gathered more and more documents and found ourselves overwhelmed with data. Then we made a breakthrough in the form of Alexander, our fully text-searchable database, designed by computer genius Mike Friedman. We fed Alexander our photocopies and original books, then, in agreement with the Conjuring Arts Research Center, we scanned and digitized enormous swaths of magic history—whole runs of magazines, some of which were in circulation for more than one hundred years, and thousands of books. Alexander now contains more than 700,000 pages of magic material, with tens of thousands of references to Houdini.

  Once Alexander was operational, we started to break down Houdini’s life day by day, creating a timeline of every moment we could account for. Then we discovered Andrew Cook, one of the world’s leading espionage experts. Cook filled in our knowledge about MI-5 and then dropped a bombshell: He had in his possession a diary of Houdini’s spymaster friend from Scotland Yard. What’s more, Houdini was mentioned in the diary entries.

  There was, however, a fly in the ointment. Early spy records are notoriously incomplete. Spy agencies were miniscule by today’s standards and relied on co-opting all sorts of amateurs to ferret out information in foreign countries. These special agents were very often only given oral directions and filed oral reports. Anything that had been recorded on paper was often destroyed.

  A year into our research, we were spun in a whole new direction. Through a chance meeting at an annual Houdini séance, we met a lovely young lady who happened to be the great-granddaughter of Margery, the famous Boston medium, and Houdini’s nemesis. When we asked if she happened to have any of her relative’s papers lying around, we were stunned that she invited us to her home and opened up a closet filled from top to bottom with scrapbooks, letters, and photographs documenting Margery’s life as a medium. For more than eighty years, this material had gone unseen by any researcher. We pored over the thousands of documents and discovered the most amazing story of what really happened when Houdini took on the fraudulent Spiritualists. As a by-product, we learned a great deal about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Suffice it to say that he’s not the genial old duffer of popular portrayals.

  Now we intensified our research. We electronically searched through as many as two hundred million articles in all of the major newspapers and many minor ones. We searched through millions of census and government records that a few years ago would have required years to digest. We like to think that this is the first Houdini biography of the new digital age.

  What you’ll read in this text is what we surmise the story to be after reading tens of thousands of documents, chasing down thousands of leads, and making all sorts of connections. To make certain stories come alive for the reader, we’ve dramatized scenes using composite material, but although we occasionally shift what people said in time, we’ve always remained faithful to what the players said and thought. When we give you Houdini’s thoughts, they are based on interviews or letters in which he’s revealed them. We’ve made nothing up; in some cases, we’ve just turned the facts into dialogue.1

  Finally, we’ve spent countless hours discussing with each other and the world’s experts what it all means. We are happy to finally present you with the results of all our research, study, and pondering on not only what Houdini did but also who he was. We realized that the trajectory of Houdini’s life was influenced by forces that lay well below the surface. All of our lives are. Did these motivations include pride? Greed? Machismo? Lust? Vanity? Love? Whatever he was seeking, did he ultimately find it?

  We leave this for you to discover in the pages of The Secret Life of Houdini.

  The Secret Life of

  Houdini

  1

  The Oath

  THE FIRST SHOVEL-LOAD MISSED HIS TORSO and struck his neck, sending soil flying up his nostrils and into his mouth. He started choking and coughing.

  “Sorry, boss,” Collins said, looking down into the hole. “I guess the wind took it.”

  Stay calm. Conserve energy. Keep the heart rate down.

  Collins and Vickery continued to fill the cavity with moist Santa Ana soil. They had been at this since a little past dawn and their arms were beginning to ache with fatigue. They could only imagine how he must feel. Subconsciously, they moved into a rhythm, one scraping his shovel into the mounds of dirt piled high around them, the other sending his payload straight down into the dank hole. Vickery thought of how his friends would react when he told them of Harry’s latest stunt. Of course, that would have to wait until after it was performed. He’d never forget that oath of secrecy that he’d sworn and how seriously Harry seemed to take it.

  Am I pushing myself too hard? I’m forty-one but I look fifty. I’m so gray.

  Vickery began to admit to himself his concern. He had expected his boss to have no problem with the one-and even the two-foot “plantings,” as he called them, and he didn’t. But the four-and five-foot escapes seemed to really have taken something out of him. What if he hurt himself now, like the time he did in Buffalo? Ever since Harry had burst that blood vessel getting out of those chains, he was in such intense chronic pain he’d had to sleep with a pillow under his left kidney. Vickery never forgave himself for allowing those bastards to pull the chains so tight.

  It’s so much hotter down here. How can a few feet make such a difference? I’m starting to feel faint. Stay calm.

  By now the dirt had almost completely covered Houdini’s body. The shackles that held his ankles together were completely buried, and the content of two or three more shovelfuls would obscure the last traces of the handcuffs. He knew that his head would be covered next so he braced for the assault of the heavy soil, so as not to eat some again.

  This would be so much easier if I did it in a coffin. We could gimmick a plank. I’d be able to disperse so much more soil using that instead of my bare hands. I’d be out in half the time.

  As soon as he was completely covered by the soil, he began to go to work. Even though his assistan
ts were still filling in the last of the grave, he swiftly slipped out of the cuffs, crouched into a fetal position, and began working on the leg irons. Within seconds, he was free of them too. Now all he had to do was work his way up against the loose earth, slowly, methodically, timing it so that he would be just below the ground when they had finished filling in the hole. Then he’d claw through the loose topsoil and literally escape the grave. But he didn’t figure on panicking.

  It wasn’t the eerie darkness or the complete silence down there that horrified him; he had grown accustomed to that. It was the sudden realization that he was six feet underground—the legal requirement for corpses—that sent a chill up his spine.

  What if I die here? What a field day they’d have in the papers. Houdini Digs His Own Grave. I’d be a laughingstock.

  He gasped involuntarily. Now he began to claw and knee the soil without any concern that he’d get out before they had finished filling in the hole. But that momentary scare—the irretrievable mistake of all daredevils—had wasted a fraction of his breath, when every last fraction was needed to get out of the hole. Up above, Collins and Vickery and the others in the party had no idea of the drama that was unfolding four feet below them.

  No! This can’t be! Out! Get out!GET OUT!

  All of a sudden the weight of the earth above him felt like a thousand tons. His body stiffened and for one quick second he smelled the acrid odor of death. And then, for the first time in his life, he screamed for help. But that just made it worse. There was no way they could hear him, and now he was squandering what little air and energy he had left. He started pawing at the dirt above him like a wild animal, scratching his hands and arms on the coarse soil. He had long abandoned his slow, steady rhythmic breathing and now he was operating on pure instinct, swallowing and inhaling as much soil as air in one last desperate attempt to escape.