“I entered this ring feeling like a doomed man,” Houdini said. “There were times when I thought that I could not get out of these handcuffs. But your applause gave me courage, and I determined to ‘do or die.’ I have never seen such handcuffs, locks within locks. I thought this was my Waterloo, after nineteen years of work. I have not slept for nights. But I will do so tonight.”
He went on to praise the Mirror for their “gentlemanly treatment and fair play,” and the Mirror representative, in turn, asked Houdini’s permission to present him at a later date with a beautiful solid silver replica of the handcuffs. Houdini agreed. In fact, the newspaper went one better. Houdini wound up with both the original cuffs and the replicas. And therein lies the real story behind the most important challenge of Houdini’s life.
The stirring story of Houdini’s triumph over the Mirror Cuffs made every newspaper in England (and there were thirty dailies in London alone at that time). Yet Houdini’s own notations about the escape in his diary are strangely low-key. On March 17, the actual day of the greatest escape in his career, Houdini wrote: “Mirror matinee. I defeat the Mirror, London, Eng. at Hippodrome. Made such a sensation the public carried me on their shoulders.” The next day’s entry read: “All English newspapers have wonderful accounts of me escaping out of Mirror handcuffs, greatest thing that any artist had in England. Extras were out and it was a case of nothing but ‘Houdini at the Hippodrome.’”
It is absolutely bizarre that Houdini should describe with much greater detail an escape from a plugged handcuff at Blackburn a few months earlier than his triumph over the most deviously designed handcuff-king-breakers ever produced. Perhaps there was really nothing he could write about?
On March 20, three days after the challenge, Houdini showed up at the Mirror offices. “I want to make a challenge,” Houdini told the editors. “You challenged me. Now I challenge the world.” And he handed them a prepared statement.
A CHALLENGE TO THE WORLD
London Hippodrome, March 20, 1904
To Whom It May Concern!
Since my success in mastering the celebrated Daily Mirror Handcuff it has come to my knowledge that certain disappointed, sceptical [sic] persons have made use of most unjust remarks against the result of last Thursday’s contest.
In particular, one person has had the brazen audacity to proclaim himself able to open the Mirror Handcuff in two minutes.
Such being the case, I hereby challenge any mortal being to open the Mirror Handcuff in the same space of time that I did. I will allow him the full use of both hands; also any instrument or instruments, barring the actual key. The cuff must not be broken or spoilt. Should he succeed I will forfeit 100 guineas…
HARRY HOUDINI
According to the Mirror, challengers wrote in from all over the country. On March 28, a reed-thin twenty-three-year-old “with long hair and abstracted mien” named Bruce Beaumont came onstage during Houdini’s show and was presented with the cuffs. Houdini had heard that Beaumont’s wrists were abnormally thin so he told the audience it would be unfair to lock the cuffs on him since he could slip out of them in an instant. Instead, Houdini locked the cuffs and then handed them to Beaumont to open. Beaumont went into a long diatribe on the ethics of challenges, prompting such booing that the orchestra was ordered to drown him out. After an animated conversation with the house manager, Beaumont tried to open the manacles, “ran his fingers through his lank hair, struck attitudes, made speeches, and eventually flung the manacles down in a temper.” The stage manager reappeared and asked the audience if he should be booted off the stage. When they responded decidedly in the affirmative, Beaumont was thrown off and an army of stagehands came on to clear the stage for the “Plunging” Elephant act.
Years after Houdini’s victory, suspicions were raised that there may have been some complicity in the Mirror challenge. Rumors were circulated in the English magic community that Houdini had really been defeated in his ghost box and he communicated via code with Bess, who then pulled the Mirror representative aside and tearfully implored him to give them the key to restore her husband’s reputation. In this account, it was said that Bess passed the key to Houdini in the glass of water that she brought him.
It’s a dramatic story, but it’s dead wrong. For one, Bess didn’t even offer Houdini water, the stage manager, Parker, did. And it would be hard to hide a six-inch key in a glass of water. The story also suggests that Houdini was woefully unprepared for this contest. And we now know that this was not the case. More recent theories have claimed that Houdini conspired with the locksmith, Hart, to build the cuffs and then to present them to the Mirror and suggest a challenge to Houdini. Proponents of this theory note that Houdini had used a Birmingham locksmith to fix some Bean Giant cuffs that he would use on imitators. We also know that Houdini had spent two weeks in Birmingham just prior to opening at the Hippodrome in London. That would have given him ample opportunity to at least examine the cuffs that “no mortal man could pick.”
The problem with the Houdini-Hart conspiracy theory is that there is no solid evidence that Hart actually ever lived. Additionally, the notion that anyone had spent five years preparing this super cuff to defeat handcuff kings is implausible when the math is done. In 1899 in England there were no handcuff kings and no challenge handcuff act. Houdini was just starting to succeed in the United States. Additionally, the Mirror couldn’t have commissioned the cuffs five years previously; at the time of the challange it had only been in existence a few months.
The silver replica cuffs presented to Houdini by the Daily Mirror. Inset: The unique markings that proved the replica cuffs were made a year prior to the challenge.David Copperfield’s International Museum and Library of the Conjuring Arts
We have had the unprecedented opportunity to inspect both the original Mirror cuffs and the solid sterling replica that the Mirror presented to Houdini after the contest, both of which now reside in David Copperfield’s wonderful collection. What struck us immediately is the fact that the cuffs are not adjustable. In fact, if they were not fitted precisely to Houdini’s wrist size, there would have been no contest. Still, the cuffs revealed greater mysteries than that.
Every item made of sterling silver in England at that time had identifying marks from the London Assay office, which could date its manufacture and even signify the part of the United Kingdom, the city, and the maker who produced it. With the great help of Houdini expert Bill Liles, we analyzed the marks on the sterling replica, and an amazing fact surfaced. The replica of the cuffs, which were presented to Houdini after his triumph, was actually manufactured the year prior to the challenge. Since the trophy was an exact replica of the original cuffs that fit Houdini’s wrists, and since The Daily Mirror representative intimated to the audience right after Houdini’s success that “a beautiful solid silver model of the handcuffs would be made,” it’s evident that The Daily Mirror conspired with Houdini to create a highly dramatic and exciting challenge. In the light of this information, the initial challenge and the actual contest take on the patina of a marvelously orchestrated show.
Houdini’s relationship with the Mirror (and in addition, The Weekly Dispatch, which hosted his antique-irons-busting feat weeks before the Hippodrome challenge) seemed unusually cozy. The publicity surrounding the Mirror Cuff challenge was played out for weeks and it created a sensation, boosting circulation at a time when the Mirror had just undergone a drastic repositioning due to severe circulation losses. So there was an incentive to cooperate with Houdini on a major challenge. The most telling evidence of complicity lies in the fact that both The Weekly Dispatch and the Mirror were owned by Houdini’s good friend press baron Alfred Charles Harmsworth. Harmsworth had his own economic interests at heart, of course, but he also had a political agenda that relied on keeping Houdini’s name prominent as the most celebrated mystifier in the world. The next stage in his relationship with Houdini would unravel six years in the future and take place half a globe away from England.
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With the Mirror Cuff challenge, Houdini effectively scorched the earth under the feet of his handcuff imitators for all time. He was now literally, and not hyperbolically, the King of Handcuffs. That was precisely his intent. Houdini had designed an earlier prototype of the Mirror Cuffs that featured a single Bramah lock on handcuffs shaped like a figure eight. He slyly called them “Hungarian Cuffs” after their inventor. Unsatisfied, he developed the diabolical Mirror Cuffs. Thanks to his friend’s newspaper, a challenge was made; he accepted it, there was tremendous publicity, and, on one night infused with drama, he defeated the world’s most devious handcuffs.
Now he had his Excalibur, a sword with which to vanquish his enemies. He immediately issued “a challenge to the world.” Beat this! Hardly anyone even tried. Houdini had even convinced his competitors that the Mirror Cuff challenge was real.
Two months later, he had moved on to expand the purview of his challenges. Back in 1902, in Essen, Germany, he had escaped from his own packing case. To drum up publicity, he offered a reward—come to my show, prove that the case was gimmicked, and you’ll collect the prize money. Two years later he introduced an inspired refinement of that idea. In May of 1904, on the night before he was to receive the beautiful solid sterling replica of the Mirror Cuffs, Houdini accepted a challenge from a company called Howill & Son. “Having witnessed your show, and if you think you can escape out of any trunk, you are mistaken.” Escaping out of a box that is so cleverly gimmicked that no one in the audience can figure out the deception and win a prize is shrewd. Escaping from a box that someone else builds and brings to the arena is heroic. For the rest of his life, Houdini would challenge the world to bring him their boxes and straitjackets and crazy cribs and mailbags and leather pouches, secure him in them, and watch as he miraculously escaped without leaving a trace. From that point on, Houdini would never be conceived of as merely the king of anything. Now he would be a Superman.
Houdini had just left the room when another guest, a colonel in the military, invited Bess to have a glass of champagne with him. For some reason, she decided to see how her husband would react to her flirting with a strange man.
Houdini had been under a lot of pressure of late. Near the end of his Hippodrome run, he had fallen ill, but somehow managed to complete his last week. He then collapsed from the strain, and on a doctor’s advice, canceled his show in Newcastle. “First time I ever disappointed,” he noted morosely. And now this.
Houdini returned to the party to witness Bess sipping champagne, sitting on the colonel’s knee, and gazing coquettishly in his eyes, his arm around her waist. Houdini’s face registered “incredulous horror,” and “his knees sagged as if he had received a knockout blow.” Bess had to rush to his side and help him to a taxi. He was speechless. Back home, he wept all night and brooded about the disaster for days.
Whether this was Bess’s notion of retaliation for an indiscretion of Houdini’s is unknown, but the whole scene was symptomatic of their day-to-day struggles. Bess’s severe mood swings and regular temper tantrums are duly recorded in Houdini’s diary. “Raised hell because I kidded on the phone to the operator,” one despairing entry reads. He even saw fit to document a rare tenderness. “Bess has been very sweet lately; hope she keeps it up.” Two weeks later, the hopes were dashed. “When I get home, she is sore, and is sore for the night.”
On May 27, Houdini, Bess, and Hardeen sailed for New York, Hardeen sporting a “blue” eye and a scratched face as a result of a fight in a German club. Martin Beck, Houdini’s old manager, was on the trip with them, but Houdini spurned his offer to upgrade the three of them to first class, preferring the informality of second-class cabins. In reality, Houdini would have stuck out like a sore thumb in first class. He had so little regard for his attire off the stage that once a friend who was waiting for him to arrive for a show at the stage door almost mistook him for a janitor. There was a method to his déshabille. The old clothes he wore were often garments that his mother had given to him when the family was too poor to afford a better wardrobe.
Houdini also spurned Beck’s offer of bookings in the United States, since his intention was to get some rest before sailing back to England at the end of August. They arrived in New York on June 2 and Houdini stayed up all night and into the next day catching up with all his brothers. Then, over the next few weeks, he went on a whirlwind buying spree.
He paid $25,000 cash, equivalent to $2.5 million in 2005, for a four-story brownstone at 278 West 113th Street in Harlem, “the finest private house that any magician has ever had the great fortune to possess,” he boasted, conveniently forgetting Robert-Houdin’s manse in St. Gervais. To the Hungarian immigrant, it was a mansion, the physical manifestation of the fulfillment of the pledge that he had made to his father when the whole family was crammed into a walk-up tenement. In the town house, he would house his mother, his brother Leo, and his sister, Gladys, and have rooms and rooms left over for the beginnings of his soon-to-be-massive collection of magic and Spiritualism books. “Someday when I’m too old to perform, I’ll spend my time writing about magic. And I won’t have to search for source material. It will be here,” he told his mother. He customized the bathroom with a large eight-foot mirror, before which he would practice hour after hour, and an oversize sunken tub, where he could practice his underwater endurance.
He also purchased a farm in Connecticut to use as a country retreat and spent $450 on a family plot in the Machpelah Cemetery in Cypress Hills on the Queens-Brooklyn border. Two days later, he had his father, his half brother, and his maternal grandmother disinterred and reburied in the new plot. “Saw what was left of poor father and Herman,” Houdini recorded in his diary. “Nothing but skull and bones. Herman’s teeth were in splendid condition.”
In July, Houdini and Hardeen took a sentimental visit to Milwaukee and Appleton. They visited old neighbors and caught up with Herman’s widow. In Chicago, they visited with their friend Gus Roterberg and saw their brother Nat, who was working in Chicago at that time. A note sent to Bess from Chicago suggests that Bess’s absence on the trip might have been due to more tension between the two. The week apart seemed to have smoothed things over. “We will arrive Tuesday morning at 42nd Street Station & if you want to meet me, why I Think I would Kiss you in front of the audience, so as to show you that alls well.” Bess took him up on the offer and met him at the station. “She looks a treat in her pale blue dress. Am certainly pleased to see her. I missed her on my trip,” he confided to his diary.
With posters like these, it’s no wonder Houdini went after his imitator Hilbert.New York Public Library
Frank Hilbert’s turn at the Cardiff Empire Theater, called “The Bubble Burst,” had just begun when the first cries came from the audience. Hilbert had shown how a Handcuff King could conceal instruments in various parts of his clothing and open his cuffs, when a gray-haired bespectacled old man with a beard began waving his cane in the pit.
“You’re a fraud, you’re a damned fraud,” the man screamed with surprising vigor for someone his age.
Simultaneously, two women sitting near the rear jumped up in their seats. One of them was waving a pair of handcuffs she held aloft.
“This man does not use police regulation handcuffs. He has cuffs of his own. But I have some regulation handcuffs here and I challenge him to open them,” she yelled.
The old man continued yelling, and he was soon surrounded by the theater manager and two constables. He began to swing his walking stick wildly, and it took another constable to subdue him. As they started to drag him to the side exit door, his beard fell off. It was Houdini. In the rear of the theater, the two women, who were Bess and Houdini’s sister, Gladys, rushed up to the fracas.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, see how they are treating me,” he began screaming. “It is not right.”
“Shame, shame,” some people in the audience yelled.
“Give him fair play,” another suggested.
Fair play was the la
st thing on the manager’s mind. They had been alerted by Mr. Oswald Stoll, the theater owner, that Houdini might try to disrupt Hilbert’s exposé, but Houdini’s disguise, which had been professionally administered by a hairdresser who Houdini hired and included a waxed modified nose, completely fooled the theater management. When they realized the old man was Houdini, they followed Stoll’s orders, which were to eject him immediately.
“What shall I do, Mr. Lea?” one of the constables asked the manager.
“Throw him out,” Lea said. Then Lea grabbed Houdini by the throat and tore at his collar.
“We’ve been waiting for you,” he said, and threw Houdini into one of the constables. Houdini fell to the ground, and his knee struck one of the seats, numbing it. Then the constable kneed him in the ribs and slapped his hands over Houdini’s mouth so he couldn’t cry out.
Just then, Hardeen, who was also in the audience, although not in disguise, ran up and attempted to throttle Lea, but was held back by a constable.
Houdini was carried out the side door and thrown four feet down into a muddy alleyway. He screamed in pain and claimed that his leg was broken. Hardeen arrived on the scene, and his brother asked him to flag down a cab. Two of the constables pulled Houdini to his feet, and just as he began to walk away, Lea kicked him in his leg. Houdini almost fell again.
“Don’t you do that again,” he glared at the manager.
“Oh, that was an accident,” the manager smiled.
A cab came and Hardeen and Houdini fled the scene.
Later that night, the two brothers entered the King’s Theater and rushed onto the stage. Houdini’s hair was disheveled and his collar still unbuttoned. He spoke in a hoarse voice.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, I must apologize for appearing like this, but I have been thrown out of the other theater,” he said.
The Secret Life of Houdini Page 19
