The Secret Life of Houdini

by William Kalush

  The next morning the business manager of the circus visited Houdini. He proposed that Houdini and Kleppini stage a one-night duel, but Houdini refused. He did consent to testing Kleppini with a set of cuffs. After the challenge was announced, Kleppini tried to contact Houdini, but Houdini shunned his calls. Then the manager returned and asked Houdini which cuffs he would use. Houdini laid out twelve cuffs and told the manager he could choose one to his own liking. He selected a pair of French letter cuffs that opened when the correct letters were selected.

  “Which word opens this cuff?” the business manager inquired innocently.

  After securing a promise that he wouldn’t tell Kleppini, Houdini told him that by spelling out the French word CLEFS, which meant “keys,” the cuffs would open.

  The manager took the cuffs, ostensibly to show them to the circus’s owner.

  The night of the challenge, Houdini entered the ring with his bag of cuffs. He unpacked the dozen cuffs and, as expected, Kleppini pounced on the French cuffs.

  “I will open these cuffs. I challenge Houdini to lock them on me,” Kleppini shouted. “I’ll show him that it is us Germans who lead the world.”

  Houdini took the cuffs and secured them on Kleppini’s wrists. Then he addressed the crowd.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, you can all go home. I do not lock a cuff on a man merely to let him escape. If he tries this cuff until doomsday, he cannot open it. To prove this, though the regular closing time of the circus is 10:30, I will allow him to remain here until 2:30 A.M.”

  Kleppini went into his cabinet at nine P.M. He still hadn’t escaped a half an hour later, when the headlining ballet feature came on. By eleven P.M. almost the entire auditorium had cleared out, but Kleppini was still sequestered. Enraged, the circus owner screamed, “Out with Kleppini,” and some stagehands were ordered to topple the cabinet. Still manacled, Kleppini scurried into the dressing room as the remainder of the audience left in disgust.

  Houdini wasn’t finished. He walked over to the dressing room, where he stood guard over the door. At midnight, he allowed Kleppini’s wife into the room. At one o’clock, Kleppini finally gave in and asked Houdini to release him, but Houdini refused unless witnesses were present. After rounding up the circus owner and a reporter, Houdini still stalled until Kleppini admitted that he knew the combination was CLEFS, but was baffled when the cuffs wouldn’t open.

  Houdini laughed. “You are wrong,” he said. “If you want to know the word which opens the lock, it is just what you are—FRAUD.”

  Overnight, Houdini had changed the combination.

  In July of 1902, one of Houdini’s associates turned rival. Houdini had employed a machinist in Essen Ruhr named Josef Kinsky to produce a few pairs of handcuffs. When Houdini severed the business relationship, Kinsky began hounding him with a challenge to fasten him that got tremendous publicity. When Kinsky began to denounce Houdini by making speeches in public squares, the magician took up the offer.

  Houdini was to put up five hundred marks, Kinsky one hundred, with the victor’s take going to a fund for the town poor. An overflow audience packed an Essen hall and seemed to side with the local underdog until Kinsky, instead of attending to the fastening of Houdini, began a bizarre personal diatribe making all sorts of accusations against the escape king.

  “No talking! Tying!” the crowd screamed.

  Kinsky complied. For fourteen minutes he tied Houdini with a rope. “Sometimes it was disgusting to see how he tightened the rope,” the local newspaper reported. “We could see with our own eyes that Kinsky tied the American as you would tie a piece of cattle.”

  Houdini retreated to his cabinet and emerged seventeen minutes later. He was bloodied, cut up, his hands were swollen, but he was free. The audience gave him five curtain calls. “The American had won a victory that brought sensational proof of his skills, and his quiet, considerate manner brought him the sympathy of the audience to an even higher extent.”

  This challenge became part of the folklore of Essen Ruhr. Poems were written about it; songs were composed. A German comedian even dressed up as Diogenes, complete with lantern, and sang an ode to Houdini. Kinsky wasn’t finished with Houdini yet. He volunteered to be part of the Cologne trial, testifying for the defense of Patrolman Graff. “He offered himself as a free witness against me,” Houdini wrote, “but in his excitement, he became so boisterous that the Judges ruled his entire evidence out of Order. He was asked on oath whether I defeated him fairly, and he had to acknowledge that I was his Master.”

  Imitators continued to plague Houdini as he returned to play the British provinces after his Russian trip. And it wasn’t only onstage that they inconvenienced Houdini. On December 10, 1903 he took out a personal ad in a Huddersfield newspaper. “Will the gentleman who calls himself Houdina or Houdiana, and who in a fit of absent-mindedness walked away from Huddersfield forgetting to pay his board bill to Mrs. Scott of St. Peter’s street, kindly send the lady her money. It is very impolite to disguise yourself under a name which may sound like mine, and then walk away without paying your bills. I will not be responsible for any bills made by this gentleman.”

  Houdini was back in the English provinces, breaking all attendance records, but it was trying, grueling work. On December 14, he was at the Palace in Blackburn, the scene of the dreaded Hodgson contest. “Back to this wretched town,” he wrote in his diary. “Of all the hoodlum towns I ever worked, the gallery is certainly the worst. Had a tough job with a heel named Wilson.” Houdini had been challenged onstage that night by this young man who seemed more intent on making speeches from the stage then testing the Handcuff King. “He would not let me examine his cuff, so after a lot of speech making he wanted to walk off the stage. [Then] I sneaked behind him and tore the cuffs from his grasp and snapped them on myself. Well, you ought to have heard the booing that was my share to obtain…” Houdini wrote. “I went into my cabinet and found out that he had deliberately cut away the whole inside of the lock and it was ten minutes ere I had both hands free. Instead of applause once again I was booed. Then I snapped them on to the rods near the footlights and it took Wilson twenty minutes to take them off himself and he had to use three kinds of instruments to do so. He was applauded and I was booed.”

  Perhaps it was incidents like this that made Houdini contemplate retirement. Less than a week later the theater reporter for the Blackburn Standard and Weekly Express wrote, “I hear that Houdini, having made his ‘pile’, intends shortly to retire from the stage, for the demand made on him by his performances and the brutality to which he has not infrequently to submit, are making inroads on his health.”

  On top of that, he was now meeting resistance from the local police departments, whose jail cells were so vital to the publicity. On December 28, Houdini noted in his diary that the police chief of Birmingham wouldn’t lock him up. “Said Houdini would not get any advertisement out of him.” Houdini did much better in Sheffield. The chief constable there challenged Houdini to escape from the cell that twenty-five years earlier had held Charles Peace, one of the most notorious criminals in English history. Commander Charles Scott gave Houdini a glowing letter of commendation for his escape from the triple-locked cell. Scott was a contact of Melville’s and would later work closely with him to ferret out German spies in England.

  Houdini continued to smash records in the towns where the police were cooperating but when he returned to London and opened at the Hippodrome on February 29, 1904, attendance had fallen off, despite having staged a special exhibition for the press at the offices of the London Weekly Dispatch. Houdini borrowed more than 131 pounds of antique manacles from John Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors and escaped from irons that had held prisoners at the Bastille and some of London’s most famous criminals, but it didn’t seem to increase his box office. “House very poorly visited. Hope business will pick up,” he wrote in his diary. “Superintendent Moy again to hand. Very touching man. Touched me for five Quidlest [quid].”

  Even br
ibes to the police weren’t helping. On March 4, Houdini was refused permission to be locked up at the Bow Street police station. Three days later he wrote to the police commissioner of London for permission to break out of cells. On March 9, the police chief of old Jewry wrote back. “I am directed by the commissioner to acknowledge receipt of your letter of the 7th, and to say that he regrets being unable to grant you permission to make the attempt of effecting an escape from any police cell in the city.” This was a crippling blow to the formula that was producing record box office receipts. With a jail cell escape and the attendant publicity out of the question, Houdini needed something spectacular to ensure that his star would remain on the ascendancy.

  “If there are any challengers in the house, will they please step upon the stage now?” Houdini said.

  A neatly dressed gentleman left his seat and walked up the steps onto the stage of London’s Hippodrome.

  “Will you permit me to fasten these on your wrists?” the man asked Houdini, holding out a pair of handcuffs. And what a pair they were. They were extraordinarily heavy, with a single cuff that fastened both wrists. The lock itself featured two Bramah locks: one larger-than-normal outer lock with eight sliders, and nested inside it, a normal-sized Bramah lock that contained six sliders. The key to unlock the cuff was six inches long.

  Houdini examined the cuff and handed it back to the challenger.

  “These are not regulation cuffs,” he shrugged.

  The man then motioned for the orchestra to stop playing. “On behalf of my newspaper, The Daily Illustrated Mirror, I have just challenged Mr. Houdini to permit me to fasten these handcuffs on his wrists. Mr. Houdini declines. In the course of my journalistic duties this week I interviewed a blacksmith at Birmingham named Nathaniel Hart who has spent five years of his life perfecting a lock, which he alleges no mortal man can pick. The handcuff I wish to fasten upon Mr. Houdini contains such a lock. The key alone took a week to make. The handcuffs are made of the finest British steel, by a British workman, and being the property of The Daily Illustrated Mirror, has been bought with British gold. Mr. Houdini is evidently afraid of British-made handcuffs, for he will not put on this pair.”

  Houdini could only repeat that the cuffs were not “regulation,” and he turned his back on the journalist and proceeded to allow himself to be fettered by three other challengers who had also taken the stage. He freed himself from their cuffs in minutes.

  Determined, the Mirror representative then asked Houdini if he could examine one pair of the cuffs he had just defeated. Houdini handed him a locked pair. The reporter walked over to the steps leading up to the stage and smashed the cuff on one of the steps. It sprang open.

  “So much for ‘police regulation handcuffs,’” the newsman said.

  The audience roared with delight.

  “Now Mr. Houdini, you claim to be the ‘Handcuff King.’ Everywhere I see huge posters of your feats. If you again refuse to put on these handcuffs, my contention is that you are no longer entitled to use the words ‘Handcuff King.’”

  The gauntlet had been thrown. Houdini turned to the audience.

  “I cannot possibly accept this gentleman’s challenge tonight, because I am restricted as to time. His handcuffs, he admits, have taken an artificer five years to make. I know, therefore, I can’t get out of them in five minutes. There is not one lock in those handcuffs, but a half a dozen or more. I will make a match if the management here will allow me a matinee someday next week to make a trial. It will take me a long time to get out—even if I can do so.”

  Mr. Parker, the stage manager of the Hippodrome, was consulted and plans were finalized for the test to occur on the following Thursday, March 17. Two days after being challenged, Houdini wrote in his diary, “London in an uproar…All papers have an account. Press full of ‘match,’ Mirror, and Houdini.” He finally had the event that would surpass any publicity he could have received from a London jailbreak.

  Houdini was scheduled to perform at three P.M. on Thursday, but the four thousand spectators who jammed into the Hippodrome impassively waited through six other performers until it was Houdini’s turn. At precisely three P.M., a determined-looking Houdini entered the arena and received a standing ovation. Bess was on one side of the stage, resplendent in a black Knickerbocker suit.

  “I am ready to be manacled by the Mirror representative if he be present,” Houdini said.

  The reporter stepped into the arena and was greeted with a polite round of applause. The two men shook hands.

  “Can I ask for a committee comprising of audience members to come onto the stage to ensure fair play for both sides?” the journalist said.

  A rush of people from all parts of the auditorium descended on the ornately carpeted stage.

  Then Houdini stepped forward.

  “If any of my friends are present, will they please step up into the arena now to watch out after my interests?” Houdini said.

  There was another procession of people leading to the stage. By now, almost one hundred people, in morning dress, some holding their top hats, had climbed onstage and were surrounding the small red-curtained cabinet.

  Now it was time for the bondage. The journalist put the handcuffs on Houdini’s outstretched wrists and snapped them shut. He produced the long key and turned it six times, with some difficulty, securing the lock. He nodded at Houdini, who stepped into the spotlight.

  “Ladies and Gentlemen, I am now locked up in a handcuff that has taken a British mechanic five years to make. I do not know whether I am going to get out of it or not, but I can assure you I am going to do my best.”

  The famous Mirror Cuff challenge at the Hippodrome. Houdini’s ghost house is visible on the left. From the collection of Pavel Goldin

  The audience cheered heartedly as Houdini withdrew into his cabinet. By now, Houdini was using a small cabinet, approximately three feet tall, so all his exertions would be from a kneeling position. The orchestra began with a waltz. After two and a half minutes a clicking noise was heard from the cabinet. The committee thought that Houdini was free, but there was no sign of Houdini.

  Time passed by. An operatic selection succeeded the waltz. Then, twenty-two minutes into the challenge, Houdini stuck his head out of the curtain.

  “He is free! He is free!” several people shouted. Their joy quickly turned to disappointment when they realized that Houdini just wanted to look at the complicated lock in strong light. Houdini retreated into his cabinet and the band played on.

  Then at thirty-five minutes, Houdini emerged again. His collar was opened, and sweat poured off his face.

  “My knees hurt and my legs have cramped,” Houdini explained. “Please allow me to stretch them. I am not done yet.”

  The Mirror Cuffs and key.David Copperfield’s International Museum and Library of the Conjuring Arts

  The crowd cheered. Mr. Parker, the manager, brought Houdini a glass of water. Then the Mirror representative conferred with Parker. Parker nodded his head and signaled to an assistant. In seconds, the assistant was back with a large cushion.

  “The Mirror has no desire to submit Mr. Houdini to a torture test,” the journalist said. “If Mr. Houdini will permit me, I shall have great pleasure in offering him the use of this cushion.”

  Houdini pulled the cushion into his ghost house and resumed his work, the silken walls of the cabinet quivering from his efforts.

  By now, the tension became unbearable for Bess and she rushed out of the arena. Twenty minutes went by. The audience was fixated on that tiny cabinet. Suddenly Houdini came out, but the whole assemblage moaned as one when they noted that the handcuffs were still affixed.

  Houdini looked like he was on the verge of collapse. He slowly advanced on his challenger.

  “My coat is hurting me. Will you remove the handcuffs for a moment in order that I may take it off?” Houdini asked.

  The journalist considered the request.

  “I am indeed sorry to disoblige you, Mr. Houdini, bu
t I cannot unlock these cuffs unless you admit you are defeated.” The journalist seemed to think that there might have been more to Houdini’s request than met the eye.

  “Cut your coat off,” someone from the gallery shouted.

  And Houdini did precisely that. He maneuvered his fettered hands until he pulled a penknife from his waistcoat pocket. Then he opened the knife with his teeth, and with a jerking motion, threw his frock coat up over his head. Then he calmly began to cut the seams of his coat. He finished by tearing at the coat with his teeth. It finally hung from his arms by a mere shred and some of the committeemen removed the remains.

  The audience yelled themselves frantic. Some screamed at the Mirror representative for refusing Houdini’s request. Everyone was disheartened to see that Houdini had not made a dent in getting free from the restraints.

  An odd audience member implored Houdini to “give it up.”

  “Go on, Houdini,” others encouraged him.

  And he did. He retreated back into his cabinet and began a last, desperate attempt to free himself. The frame of the cabinet rocked and the curtains fluttered from the exertion.

  Houdini had been locked up for more than an hour. Then, just as the orchestra was finishing a stirring march, Houdini suddenly bounded out of the cabinet, holding the shiny handcuffs in one hand. He was free.

  The audience roared with delight. Men pulled their hats off and waved them in the air. Hugs were exchanged. The ladies fluttered their handkerchiefs. But Houdini was not right. He half-fainted into the arms of one of the committeemen, hysterical, tears streaming down his cheeks. “Thank God! Thank God!” he murmured.

  Houdini was helped backstage, but the audience still refused to disperse. They stood and cheered and exchanged handshakes for a full five minutes until he haltingly walked back out. He was immediately lifted onto the shoulders of some of the committeemen, who bore him in triumph around the auditorium. Then the crowd implored him to speak.