The Secret Life of Houdini

by William Kalush

  “The real Harry Houdini, who chats with his friends in the wings before and after his turn, is a serious sort of a chap. He has the physique of a young lion. His muscles are like steel. He has a nervous, artistic temperament. His hazel eyes are wonderfully eloquent and sympathetic. Before he makes his appearance at each performance, Houdini roams about the theater like a restless tiger. In his hands he carries a deck of cards with which he does a succession of wonderful tricks. He does this not to entertain the people with whom he is conversing, but to keep his fingers supple and agile…Before he goes on the stage he is all fire and excitement. When he comes off he is perfectly exhausted. Dark circles show around his eyes, and his face is pale under the rouge. He is glad it is over again. Why? Because Houdini says that someday a man will step upon that stage with a pair of handcuffs, whose lock he cannot unfasten. And when that time comes he will have to lay aside his scepter as King of Handcuffs. No circus performer enters the ring with the trepidation felt by Houdini when he steps toward the footlights. But he smiles and the audience remarks how confident he looks.”

  This was Houdini in Omaha in April of 1900, a snapshot in time courtesy of an anonymous reporter for The Omaha Daily News. Houdini’s leonine physique was known to anyone who ever saw one of his beefcake publicity photos, but the intensity and nervous energy that he summoned up just to prepare for his performances were appreciated only by those who were privy to the backstages of the vaudeville circuit.

  If you were backstage, you’d see that Bess shared all of Houdini’s “nervous strain.” Decked out in her Louis XIV costume, she’d anxiously wait in the wings as Harry entered his cabinet to defeat whatever cuffs were thrown his way. The magician would regularly talk to Bess while in his ghost box, sometimes just to alleviate her fears, other times in code if he had a potential problem. By 1900, Bess had been relegated to a lesser role in the performances. Still, the Omaha reporter thought it important enough to interview her too for his article.

  “Madame Houdini has a singularly sun-shiny disposition. For days at a time her husband works on his tricks far away from her, in city and county jails, mastering locks, handcuffs, and shackles. His name is an open sesame at any jail in the country.” In his very next sentence, the reporter revealed the next item on Houdini’s agenda. “In September, he sails for England,” he wrote, “where some severe tests await him in Scotland Yards.”

  Houdini had just finished his turn at the Orpheum, and now he was entering the parlor at 517 West Tenth Street, where Professor Paul Alexander Johnstone read palms. Johnstone, who was actually a magician, had been the most talked about palm reader in town and the local reporter, sensing a story, probably talked Houdini into letting his Herculean hands have the once-over. The enticement of a nice story with a reproduction of his palm probably sealed the deal.

  “I feel nervous,” Houdini said, as they walked over to West Tenth Street. “This constant fear of exposure is almost unbearable. I fully realize it is only a question of time until I am caught, and it is this suspense that causes my nerves to keep stirring.”

  Houdini settled into a large leather chair while the professor prepared the plaster of paris for the cast of his palm.

  “To be stripped of clothing and then locked in the strongest steel cage the jail can afford, and this too, with a hundred pounds of iron on your forearms and ankles, to hear the bolts of the cell door scrape and crash as they pass into their sockets, and then to walk out into the corridor and hand the officers their handcuffs and shackles unlocked! It makes me nervous.”

  “You have been caught once or twice, have you not?” Professor Johnstone asked as he dipped Houdini’s hand up to the wrist in the plaster.

  “Yes, twice,” Houdini replied, deliberately. “Once in Denver, and the man died the day after. Three months later, Nero, the great medium, detected how I performed these feats, and three days afterward he died. Rather a singular coincidence, don’t you think?”

  The palmist examined the cast of Houdini’s palm.

  “Unless you are exceedingly careful during your thirty-seventh year, a violent death is written in this line of life,” he said. “Your moneymaking period began, I should judge, last year. Provided you save, you will attain great wealth.”

  “How about my work?” Houdini inquired.

  “Your brains will protect you,” the palmist replied. “I will trust to you getting out of anything put on you. You need not worry, Mr. Houdini. The safest way to keep you is to turn you loose on the prairie.”

  Johnstone was wrong about the prairie. On May 30, 1900, the man who two years earlier had been subsisting on potatoes and sleeping on benches under the stars was now willing to forsake a king’s ransom in weekly salary to accompany his wife aboard the S.S. Kensington to set sail for England, where nothing awaited him. Except Scotland Yard.

  From the collection of Kenneth M. Trombly

  6

  M

  FINALLY HE SAW HIM. THE HUNCHBACK disguise didn’t fool Police Inspector William Melville, who was in disguise himself as an anonymous businessman waiting for his train at Victoria Station in London. But the outline of a gun in the anarchist’s pocket did dissuade the inspector from boarding the train and accosting Meunier in his small compartment. So Melville summoned a railroad official and identified himself.

  “There’s a hunchback in the fifth carriage from the engine. I want to get him out of the train without arousing his suspicions. Will you inspect his ticket and tell him that he is on the wrong train?” Melville suggested.

  The official agreed and boarded the train. Shortly after, a concerned-looking Meunier leaped off the train. His feet hadn’t even hit the ground before the forty-four-year-old Melville had executed a flying tackle and knocked him to the platform. Astonished passengers gathered around the two men as Meunier, “fighting like a mad dog,” tried to escape Melville’s grasp. The Frenchman, summoning up all his strength, almost succeeded in dragging Melville under the wheels of the train, which was just about to depart, until some railroad men came to Melville’s aid. After a few more minutes, Meunier was finally subdued and, spewing oaths and threats, taken away. The next day’s coverage of the arrest in the papers included a large drawing of Melville straddling Meunier entitled “Exciting Arrest of Anarchists in London.” Melville had made sure that the press had been duly notified to be on hand at the station that night.

  William Melville, England’s most celebrated spymaster. From the collection of Andrew Cook

  By the end of the century, William Melville was the highest-profile police officer in England. He had been head of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch since 1893. Still hampered with a skeleton staff, he had a wide variety of informants in all strata of society, from foreign government agents to street prostitutes. Melville had developed particularly good contacts in the entertainment world. Most Londoners patronized music halls and theaters several times a week, so using showpeople as informants was vital in keeping track of the movements and associations of people of interest to Melville.

  Melville was also charged with protecting the safety of the various visiting royalty, receiving decorations for his service from more than half the crowned heads of Europe. He had much contact, some of it back channel, with his counterespionage counterparts in France, Germany, and Russia. In 1899, without his government’s knowledge, he had cooperated with the Okhrana, the Russian secret police, in arresting a Russian émigré who was publishing a newspaper that advocated the assassination of the czar. As a reward to one of his informants on this case, he had provided Sigmund Rosenblum with a new identity and a new passport so he could return to Russia. Melville’s creation, Sidney Reilly, would go on to become one of the cleverest spies in history—and the real-life prototype for Ian Fleming’s fictional character James Bond.

  By June of 1900, Melville could look back on his twenty-eight-year career and marvel at how far the working-class Irish lad from County Kerry had come. He had consorted with kings and prostitutes, politicians and ana
rchists, celebrities and criminals. And right now, steaming through the ocean on his way from America was perhaps the most intriguing man that Melville would ever meet.

  The Houdinis alighted in Southampton on June 9. They traveled up to London and took residence at 10 Keppel Street, a boardinghouse that catered to visiting American entertainers. The conventional wisdom was that Houdini spent weeks scouring the city for work, being turned down by manager after manager. The reality is that on June 14, a few days after their arrival, Harry Houdini, accompanied by London’s most prestigious theater manager, C. Dundas Slater, and his assistant, Edward A. Pickering, was ushered into the office of England’s most celebrated policeman and her majesty’s chief counterterrorism official. Houdini’s wife and assistant, Beatrice, was not privy to this meeting.

  “I’ll be happy to cuff him, Mr. Slater, but you must realize that Scotland Yard darbies are not stage handcuffs,” Melville said. “These are the last word in scientific manacles.”

  “Well, the lad’s game,” Slater said. “If he can get out of your handcuffs, then he’s got a job awaiting him at my theater.”

  Melville looked the young American over. He did seem confident. Opening a desk drawer, he pulled out a pair of handcuffs.

  “Follow me,” he said, and led the men out into a corridor of the building. He stopped next to a pillar.

  “Well, here’s how we fasten the Yankee criminals who come over here and get into trouble,” Melville said, and, encircling Houdini’s arms around the pillar, he snapped the handcuffs on.

  “I’m going to leave you here while Mr. Slater and his colleague and I go out for lunch,” Melville smiled. “We’ll be back for you in a couple of hours.”

  They started toward the door.

  “Wait!” he cried. “I’ll go with you. Here’s the way Yankees open the handcuffs.”

  He threw the cuffs on the ground and caught up with the three men. Melville was visibly shaken. He looked at Houdini and then smiled and held out his hand.

  “Scotland Yard won’t forget you, young man.”

  Houdini had passed his audition. Slater drove him back to his office and signed him to a two-week contract at the Alhambra Theater, London’s most prestigious music hall.

  In 2004, Andrew Cook, one of the world’s leading experts on British espionage, published a book called M—MI-5’s First Spymaster. Cook, who had spent years working for England as a foreign affairs and defense specialist, parlayed his contacts to gain access to classified intelligence services archives and, for the first time ever, document Melville’s heretofore hidden life. In the course of that research, he obtained the only known copy of one of Melville’s diaries—the rest were presumably sanitized by the agency, MI-5, that Melville ultimately worked for.

  Given what Cook knows about Melville’s disposition and responsibilities, he finds it highly unlikely to think that the inspector would entertain Slater, Pickering, and Houdini at his office and allow a fresh-off-the-boat unknown magician to escape from Scotland Yard handcuffs as an audition for a theater engagement.

  The audition was for a job with Melville.

  Like Rohan and Wilkie, Melville’s counterparts in America, the Irishman perceived Houdini as a most valuable asset. Obviously, his ability to defeat any lock would come in handy to the Scotland Yard inspector, who often found himself in the position of breaking and entering premises where valuable information might be secreted. Melville saw Houdini as an ideal operative in another arena as well. As early as 1896, Melville had recognized the necessity for gathering information outside of Britain. At first happy to view the police of other nations as some sort of international brotherhood, Melville recognized that his counterparts in France, Russia, and Germany were spying on England during the normal course of their activities. While the idea of finding “suitable men to go abroad to obtain information” would not be part of his official duties until his work with what would eventually be designated MI-5, Melville began to groom operatives while still at Scotland Yard.

  Houdini would be the ideal agent to relay information to Melville from abroad. He was nomadic, travel being a regular part of his work. He was also, of course, well-versed in techniques of secrecy and deception. Since his reputation hinged on his ability to escape from confinement and to produce other mystifying magical effects, it was natural for him to carry with him a large assortment of strange items, including lock-picking tools.

  Unique to Houdini was his ability to interact with a country’s police officials and do demonstrations inside their jails. No other operative could amass such a wealth of vital information with respect to the security, cells, locks, and prisoner conditions in a country’s jails. As early as 1900, according to Cook, Melville was interested in gathering information in Germany, being prescient enough to see the Germans as Britain’s future adversary. Houdini had the added bonus of being able to speak German fluently.

  27th June 1900—Guest of HH at Alhambra

  —FROM INSPECTOR MELVILLE’S DIARY

  It was an odd sight, the British newshounds carrying ancient, rusted handcuffs and leg irons into the magnificently appointed Alhambra Theater in Leicester Square. With its Moorish facade, opulent private box tier, and dark and mysterious canteen, where many a well-heeled gentleman bought expensive champagne for the ballet girls after their performances, the Alhambra was the premier music hall in England. Dundas Slater, its manager, had summoned the press to a special private preview of his next great attraction, Harry Houdini, the young American Handcuff King. To pique their interest, Slater had encouraged them to bring their own restraints and challenge Houdini, intimating that if they could foil his escape, there might not be an opening night after all.

  That was bait enough for The London Evening Sun’s representative, the same man who had earlier exposed Slater’s last big sensation, the Georgia Magnet, a Mattie Lee Price–type leverage queen. He came onstage carrying a pair of antique irons and greeted Houdini, who was dressed in his best formal high white collar and tails, his normally unruly curly hair parted neatly in the center. Houdini’s ghost house, which by now was actually a small waist-high enclosure consisting of metal piping and a black fabric that hid Houdini on three sides and could shield him totally by drawing the curtain on the front, had been set up on the stage.

  The Sun reporter manacled Houdini with the antique slave iron. It was so rusty that it looked like it couldn’t be opened even with a key, but Houdini cheerfully submitted to its bondage and then withdrew to his ghost house. In less than three minutes, he reappeared, the irons dangling in his hand.

  “I don’t know how you did it, but you did!” the reporter marveled and cordially shook Houdini’s hand.

  After a few more tests, Houdini allowed himself to be handcuffed behind his back and have his feet secured. Then, facing the audience and kneeling, he freed himself in full view of the spectators. He escaped from everything they threw at him, and then he mystified the group with his Metamorphosis trunk and some card effects.

  Seated in the audience, Inspector Melville and some of his colleagues from Scotland Yard watched the proceedings with special interest.

  The resultant press coverage was enormous. Houdini was universally praised and deemed worthy of his self-anointed titles. Many papers ran large drawings and engravings of him. “It was a remarkably clever exhibition by Mr. Harry Houdini, who describes himself as the World’s Greatest Mystifier and King of Handcuffs,” The Morning Herald reported. “Perhaps the highest tribute to Mr. Houdini’s slipperiness is the fact that he has completely mystified the police of America, who have given him many testimonials.” The would-be exposer from The Evening Sun even suggested, “if [Houdini] is wise, he will start an academy for the teaching of scientific lock-picking.” Ironically enough, a few short years later, Melville would do exactly that, using Houdini’s techniques as the core curriculum.

  The mysterious Chinese conjurer walked onto the stage from the wings and was met there by his diminutive assistant, Suee Seen. She
was standing next to a small table that held a large bowl filled with water. In her hands was a long fishing pole that she handed to the magician.

  The Alhambra crowd stirred. This fishing effect had never been seen in London before Chung Ling Soo began performing it. They settled back expectantly in their seats to behold a miracle.

  Soo pulled a small piece of bait out of his pocket and attached it to the hook that was dangling at the end of a five-foot line. Then he suddenly cast the line out over the heads of the audience, his long ornate Chinese robe flapping from the jerky motion. He paused for a few seconds and then slowly moved the bait from right to left, as if a mysterious school of invisible fish were swimming over the heads of the crowd. The mystery was heightened by focusing the spotlight directly on the dancing bait. Then, suddenly, Soo snapped his wrist, the line buckled, and a small goldfish miraculously appeared. Soo slowly withdrew the pole and unhooked the fish. He delicately dropped it into the waiting water, and it vigorously circled the bowl. He did this twice more, adding two more goldfish to the water. With that, Suee Seen appeared and carried the bowl to the wings, while Chung Ling Soo, the mysterious and Marvelous Chinese Conjuror, clasped his hands together, swirled them up and down, and graciously bowed to the audience.

  Soo was concluding his engagement at the Alhambra, and his mysterious act had never failed to enthrall the audience, but tonight they were just as excited to see the debut of this new Yankee, this Handcuff King who was challenging the world to attempt to restrain him. Finally, the wait was over. Houdini, resplendent in his finest attire, strode confidently onto the stage in that marvelous, ornate theater. He stood bathed in the blue-white glow of the spotlight, took a deep breath, and began to address the audience.