The Secret Life of Houdini

by William Kalush

  So Houdini didn’t have second thoughts as a Sergeant Waldron slipped his cuffs around the magician’s wrists and clicked them shut, but as soon as he retreated into his curtained-off cabinet, he knew that something was dreadfully wrong.

  Maybe I should just go out and denounce him. No, it’s probably better to wait. If I’m lucky, most of the audience will be gone. I just hope there are no reporters around. They’d write that it was my Waterloo.

  Outside, Waldron waited patiently. The audience didn’t share his equanimity.

  “What’s the matter, Houdini? You forgot your key?” someone shouted. The crowd laughed. After a half hour, the chuckles had turned to jeers. When Houdini finally emerged from his cabinet a full hour later, he had managed to get only one cuff off. It hardly mattered by then; the only people left were Waldron and Bess, who was bitterly weeping.

  “So, do you give up, Houdini?” the sergeant asked.

  “No,” Houdini spat. “But you rigged these cuffs. They’re impossible to get out of.”

  The policeman laughed. “You got me there. You can work on these till kingdom come and you won’t get ’em open. I fixed a slug in it so it won’t unlock.”

  Houdini was furious. He was even angrier after he had to saw through the metal to get the cuff off. That whole night, he replayed the humiliation over and over in his mind. And he vowed that never again would he accept a handcuff from a challenger without making them open the lock to prove that they were in working order. Not that it would matter. Not that he had a career left.

  “Well, Bess, I’m done for. The whole world will know that I failed to get out of a cuff. We may as well quit,” Houdini said, pacing their rented room. “I’ll take that job your brother-in-law offered to get me at the Yale Lock factory.”

  His words had a hollow ring. This turn of events was inconceivable. Just a week earlier, Houdini had worked out a quid pro quo with Rohan. The arrangement had even been spelled out in The National Detective Police Review, billed as “American’s Only Detective and Police Newspaper.” Houdini would give the police the “benefit of his skill.” In return, the police were supposed to boost his career, not destroy it.

  The next day a glum Houdini went back to the museum to pick up his props.

  “Well, two minutes late, are we?” Manager Hedges observed.

  “You mean I’m still working here? After I had to be sawed loose from those cuffs?” Houdini said.

  “Didn’t you get out of that cuff? That’s the first I knew about it,” Hedges said.

  “I couldn’t. They were plugged,” Houdini said.

  “Well if they were fixed, what’s the difference?” Hedges said. “Now get up on that platform and go to work.”

  Back to work he went. Waldron’s “exposure” of Houdini received virtually no publicity, about a column inch in The Chicago Journal. Even then the paper took Houdini’s side, noting that “they were not practicable handcuffs at all, having no lock whatever,” and that “the affair was simply a joke on the part of the officer.”

  From this point on, for the next year and a half, Houdini would traverse the country with a set game plan to establish his name. He would arrive in town and immediately arrange a visit to the local precinct. A large number of police officers and brass (and press, of course) would marvel as he escaped from any restraint the police would throw at him. The police chief would then comment, as if reading from a script, that he hoped it would never be his misfortune to have a prisoner like Houdini, and that the magician had helped the police improve their security for the future. Houdini would then get a commendation letter signed by the officers and patrolmen in attendance, and it would go into his burgeoning scrapbook.

  The point man for this arrangement was Lieutenant Andy Rohan in Chicago. In return for boosting Houdini, the police received tangible benefits. His expertise in the mechanics of police restraints was second to none. He began to expose cardsharping techniques, writing bylined newspaper articles exposing mechanical devices that literally secreted cards up the sleeves of the crooked card player, and spending hours demonstrating for reporters the secrets behind the three-card monte hustle. After revealing their techniques, Houdini sounded like a public service announcement: “All of which should warn an amateur not to wager money on cards when they are manipulated…A clever man can do everything but make them talk.”

  His prowess at card cheating sometimes reaped unwanted dividends, as it had a few years earlier in Coffeeville, Kansas, with the Dr. Hill medicine show. One night after his performance, he had been approached by two gamblers to break into the rear door of a gambling house after it had closed for the night. They didn’t want to steal anything, they just wanted to fix some decks of cards and clean up the next day. They offered Houdini $100 for the job. “Morally, I had no compunctions. It is dog eat dog with gamblers, and the hundred looked good to me,” Houdini wrote. “But so did life—and I knew that if we got caught I’d be strung up for my pains. I declined with thanks.”

  The gamblers wouldn’t take no for an answer. Houdini had gone back to his hotel and had fallen asleep, when he was roused to go to the local telegram office to pick up an urgent message from New York. It was just a ruse. On the way to the office, he felt the cold sensation of a gun muzzle right behind his ear. The gamblers marched him to the opera house, where he got his “pickers,” and right to the back door of that gambling joint. As soon as he picked the lock, he jerked the door open, knocking down the two ruffians in the process. He dashed inside, locked the door behind him, and waited for the men to leave. He didn’t figure on one of the gamblers spying him through the grating of the cellar window and firing off a shot. Houdini had raised his hand to shield himself. To the end of his days, Houdini carried that bullet in his hand.

  Houdini and Bess had just settled into their hotel in St. Paul, Minnesota, when the magician read the newspaper reports. A handcuffed criminal had escaped from the police, who were now combing the city in an attempt to find him. Then, oddly enough, over the next few days, every time that he left his room, whether it was to go dine or to travel to the Palm Garden, where he was performing, Houdini noticed that the doors to the two rooms that were directly adjacent to his also opened, and each time, the same two men walked into the corridor at precisely the same time he had.

  X-ray showing the bullet in Houdini’s hand. From the collection of Kevin Connolly

  One afternoon at about three-thirty, Houdini heard a scuffle in the hallway outside his room. He stepped outside to investigate, and he saw his two mysterious neighbors fighting with a man who was wearing a long opera cloak. The two men finally managed to subdue their lone victim. And then he saw that underneath that long cloak, the man’s hands were handcuffed.

  “It’s all right, Houdini,” one of the detectives said. “We knew he’d come to you.” They were so confident, they hadn’t even bothered to inform the magician that he was being used as bait.

  An escaped con with a hankering to shed his bracelets wasn’t the only big fish that Houdini reeled in during that engagement in St. Paul. One night a party of theater managers came to see his show. One of them was Martin Beck, the powerful impresario who ran the Orpheum vaudeville circuit, which had a virtual monopoly on all the good theaters in the Midwest and on the West Coast. Beck, who was based in Chicago, had probably read about Houdini’s escape from Rohan’s cuffs. Now he wanted to see the magician do it firsthand. He returned the next night with three sets of cuffs that he’d purchased. Houdini defeated them all.

  Back in Chicago, Beck sent Houdini a telegram offering him a tryout in his theater in Omaha at the end of March. He’d pay him sixty dollars a week, come see the show, and “probably make you proposition for all next season.” From the beginning, Houdini’s relationship with Beck was contentious. Beck advised Houdini to cut out all his magic effects and to present only handcuff escapes and the Metamorphosis. Houdini compromised by keeping his card work but omitting the silk handkerchief routine and shipping off the birds to a f
riend in Chicago, who promptly ate them.

  When Houdini first set foot into the Creighton-Orpheum Theater in Omaha, he felt like he was entering another world. With its eight-hundred-plus plush seats and lavishly appointed dressing rooms, Harry had finally made the big time. Sharing the block with an equally impressive mansard-roofed mansion of a local mining magnate, Houdini was literally and figuratively in a new neighborhood. No more sharing a dime museum stage with the Marvelous Little Askenas Triplets or The Dog-Faced Boy.

  Houdini was ready for prime time. “He gives a performance that rivals in almost every respect the showing made by any of the better known magicians,” one critic wrote, comparing him favorably to Alexander Herrmann and Harry Kellar. One night, responding to Houdini’s challenge, a committee of five local businessmen ambled onstage to challenge Houdini to escape the handcuff they produced, which featured a time lock mechanism that couldn’t be opened in less than sixty minutes. The cuffs were fitted and locked; Houdini retreated to his cabinet and the wait began. After four minutes, there wasn’t a sound to be heard anywhere in the auditorium. Then “thirteen seconds more and the professor stepped quietly from the tent. The handcuffs were dangling from the tip of his right forefinger, while a smile of triumph curled his lips. He was roundly cheered and the committee retired somewhat abashed,” a local paper reported.

  He was just as much a sensation in Kansas City, the next stop on the Orpheum tour. One night, he was challenged by a man with a pair of double-lock cuffs. Rather than having them fastened with his hands in front of him, Houdini suggested that they be locked while his arms were behind his back. The committee complied. Houdini stepped back into his cabinet, but for the first time ever, he didn’t draw the curtain, so he was still standing in full view of the audience. For a full minute he stood there motionless and then he suddenly threw the handcuffs disdainfully to the floor. Houdini wrote in his diary: “1st time I took off Hcuffs with curtain open…was the hit of act.”

  Houdini’s handcuff act created such a sensation that he began to be billed as “The Wizard of Shackles, A Man of Marvels.” Sometimes it was merely “Man of Shackles,” other times Bess got equal billing as half of “The Houdinis.” By Joplin, Missouri, Houdini had finally decided on a billing commensurate to his ability. From then on, he was “The King of Handcuffs.” The handcuff act became such a phenomenon that local merchants began featuring him in ads.

  Not everybody appreciated the newly crowned Handcuff King’s brash and boastful style of self-promotion. One critic, after admitting that his escape work was wonderful, felt that “Houdini wastes a lot of valuable time in telling the audience how good he is.” And the Nebraska Clothing Company hinted at collusion with the police in its ad in The Kansas City Star. The ad must have rankled Houdini, because on his next stop through Kansas City, four months later, he visited the clothing store and confronted the employee who wrote the ad.

  “I’m Houdini. You’re from Missouri. I’ll show you,” he said, and then he escaped from cuffs, did some card effects, unlocked a door lock using a wooden toothpick, produced a fine cigar out of thin air, pulled a pristine match out of a black inkwell, and lit up. The next ad recounted all this and added, “Give Houdini a few more years and he’ll have cigars to burn and money to burn as well.” By the time they had finished lavishing praise on Houdini, there were barely a few lines left to tout the ties they had on sale that week.

  The train was just about to leave the station in Albuquerque to make its run to San Francisco, and Houdini was missing. He had left the car over an hour ago, promising to bring back some ice cream to take the edge off the intense desert heat, and that was the last Bess had seen of him. Then, just as the starting whistle blew and the train’s engine began to wheeze, she looked out the window and there he was, running like a madman with a huge can under his arm. George, the porter, had to literally haul him aboard the train.

  “Come, folks, ice-cream for all,” Houdini shouted gleefully as he walked down the aisle of the train. Bess sighed with relief.

  “George, you’re also in on this party, and here’s a small present for your kindness,” Houdini said, dropping five shiny new silver dollars into the porter’s hand.

  Bess was aghast. They had been down to their last five dollars, an amount that had to last them until they got paid in San Francisco. They had even shared a single cup of coffee each morning to economize. As soon as Houdini sat down, she interrogated him.

  “Where did you get that money? Did you kill someone?”

  “No, sweetheart,” he laughed. “Let’s eat the ice-cream first.”

  George produced dishes for all their fellow passengers, and everyone enjoyed the delicious treat. Everyone but Bess, who was too nervous to eat, especially after she caught a glimpse of her husband’s pockets, which were near bursting from the weight of seventy-five silver dollars.

  Later, Houdini explained that he had run into a crap game in town. He had secreted three of their five dollars in an inner pocket and tried his luck with the remaining two bucks. He described the game in detail, a description that was incomprehensible to Bess but left George the porter delirious with joy at Houdini’s good luck. The $2 wager had been parlayed to eighty-five dollars. It was a fortuitous rest stop indeed.

  This trip to the West Coast may also have been Houdini’s first mission for the U. S. Secret Service. The counterfeiting of silver dollars in the Western portion of the country was a major problem for Wilkie in the spring of 1899. On the same day that Houdini was stepping off that train to San Francisco, his pockets bulging with silver dollars, there was an article in The Los Angeles Times warning that both California and the entire West Coast were being flooded with dangerous counterfeit coins manufactured using the hot-die process. Since the counterfeits were being generated from a mold of a legitimate silver dollar, the design and the weight of the fake coins were indistinguishable from the legitimate ones. “Secret Service officials are laboring earnestly to apprehend the offenders,” Wilkie promised.

  Houdini had been receiving orientation on counterfeiting techniques around the same time from police officers in Kansas City. On April 10, 1899 he paid a visit to police headquarters where he conferred with Chief Hayes, Inspector Halpin, Captain Branham, and the detective squad. After Houdini demonstrated his ability to escape from their cuffs and shackles, Chief Hayes took him to a back room and showed him a machine that had been employed to make counterfeit $20 pieces. According to the newspaper account, “Houdini was much pleased with the machine, and when shown how simple it was laughed heartily.”

  Houdini’s first visit to California coincided perfectly with the anticounterfeiting operation launched by Wilkie. From June 2 to July 29, Houdini shuttled back and forth between San Francisco and Los Angeles, the two California cities where major counterfeiting rings had just been uncovered. Chief Wilkie also made a trip to California at exactly the same time, a trip “believed to have been connected with the attempt now being made to break up gangs of counterfeiters operating on the Pacific Coast,” The Washington Post reported.

  Houdini being shackled in front of San Francisco policemen.Conjuring Arts Research Center

  In San Francisco, Houdini insisted on renting a hotel room for six dollars a week, which included running water and a gas stove, luxuries they usually eschewed. It also came with a flea infestation that kept Bess awake and scratching into the wee hours, while Houdini slept peacefully. He also slept through a minor earthquake that rolled both him and Bess out of bed and onto the floor. The next day, he was at the central police station. With the consent of Chief Lee, Houdini demonstrated his prowess in escaping restraints in front of four hundred officers, using a table set up in the center of the assembly room as a makeshift stage. At one point, he simultaneously escaped from four pairs of handcuffs and an Oregon Boot, a fifty-five-pound weight that encircled one leg and was secured by a combination lock. The ensuing publicity helped pack the Orpheum for his two-week run.

  In Los Angeles, Houdini
repeated his performance in Chief Glass’s office at the central police station, much to the delight of an old policeman named Commodore Hill. Hill, an avowed Spiritualist who had previously been the laughingstock of the department, saw Houdini’s escapes as confirmation of his religion. “I tell you, boys, it’s the spirits,” Hill said. “I have seen the same thing dozens of times at Spiritualist meetings, and there can’t nobody do these things but spirits, I tell you.” Comfortable with blurring the line, Houdini refused to confirm or deny Hill’s assertion and told the policemen they should figure his method out for themselves. He did take umbrage with Hill’s declaration that he could tie up Houdini with rope to the point where he couldn’t escape. Houdini made a second trip to police headquarters and escaped Hill’s ties with ease.

  By now, Houdini was mastering the art of publicity. He became expert at bantering with reporters, giving them succinct, quotable answers to their queries. He began generating articles as well, big two-page spreads like “How I Effect My Rope Ties” that featured him posing for a seven-shot series of photos demonstrating his escape. “Any one can do the escape act if they only know how,” he wrote. “This being aided by spirits in a dark cabinet is all bosh. Of course one must do the act out of sight of the audience, just as I do the escape from handcuffs at the Orpheum, or after people had seen how simple it is, they would not pay to see it again.” Houdini’s rope tie exposé article was the beginning of a cunning strategy to expose an act after he had stopped performing it, thereby making it much more difficult for his imitators to follow him. This salting the earth strategy would be implemented throughout his career.

  With a full media blitz saturating the newspapers in San Francisco and Los Angeles, it seemed oddly timed that the first exposé of Houdini’s act should be printed in San Francisco on the last day of Houdini’s western engagement in Los Angeles, but there it was—a full-page story by “Professor Benzon,” an English card conjurer who had just moved to San Francisco, complete with photos of the magician unlocking handcuffs by means of a key in his mouth. The Los Angeles Call picked up the story the next day and prompted a curt response from Houdini. “Why I can do the trick stripped stark naked,” he told the reporter. And that’s exactly what he did, making an unscheduled return to the San Francisco police station, where he shed his clothes, was examined by a police surgeon, and proceeded to escape from ten pairs of police handcuffs that crisscrossed his arms and connected to leg shackles. Then, for good measure, he made an escape from a leather belt used to restrain the violently ill. At the conclusion of the demonstration, Houdini revealed that the Orpheum management had retained his services for the coming week, and that he had challenged Benzon to escape from his cuffs. If Benzon succeeded, Houdini would pay him $100. If he failed, all the magician wanted was “the privilege of cutting off his whiskers on the Orpheum stage.”