Houdini’s unfortunate incident on opening night in Detroit finally prompted him to attempt his own bridge leap. “Having met with difficulty in freeing himself from a pair of handcuffs that he suspected had been tampered with while performing his stunt at the Temple Theatre Monday night, Houdini was determined to show the public that his marvelous powers of extrication have not been overrated,” The Detroit Free Press reporter noted in his coverage of the leap. So Houdini, with entourage and newsmen in tow, had stopped off at police headquarters to borrow two new pairs of their strongest cuffs. Then they went to a police barn, where they secured 150 feet of rope. They all boarded a streetcar and made it to the bridge, which was “black with humanity.”
At a few strokes past noon, Houdini jumped, the rope, which was tied to the bridge, trailing along behind him as he made his descent. He hit the water and disappeared. Two experienced oarsmen were waiting in a nearby boat in case of trouble. For a second, Houdini’s head bobbed above the water, and then it disappeared. Then one hand shot up from the surface of the water. It was unencumbered. Shortly after, his head and his other hand became visible. Houdini was free and he was alive. He climbed out of the water half frozen. His left hand had cramped up and was useless. The audience cheered heartily. They had seen something new in the world of entertainment—a life-and-death public spectacle.
Houdini repeated his bridge jump on May 4, 1907. In front of about 10,000 people, including his mother (whom he was concerned about since she had not looked well lately, he wrote in his diary) and Bess, he jumped from the Weighlock Bridge in Rochester, New York, without incident—at least to Houdini. Seconds after he leaped, a drunken man, fully clothed, yelled, “Well, goodbye, Harry” and followed him off the bridge into the canal. “He was a good swimmer,” Houdini noted in his diary.
On March 13, before his jump off the Seventh Street Bridge in Pittsburgh, Houdini told a reporter from The Pittsburgh Leader that the day before the leap he sent a cable to Hardeen, who was doing a similar act then in Europe, and the charges came to exactly $13. That same day Houdini’s mail consisted of 13 letters. He switched rooms at his hotel and the new room was no. 26, divisible by 13. The letters contained 13 new challenges, the license plate of the auto that drove him to the bridge totaled up to 13, and the cinematographer who was filming the jump had exactly 1,300 feet of film in his camera.
“I feel nervous today,” Houdini said. “There is a goneness in my innards that isn’t pleasant.” He ate an apple to settle himself down, then dove. It was exactly 1:13.
“In a minute and a half from the time I struck the water I had freed myself and was ready to rise to the surface,” Houdini told the press. “Small boats were cruising about looking for me and, as luck would have it, I came rushing up at great speed just underneath one of these crafts. So rapid was my ascent that in rising I hit my head a fearful blow…and sank back into the water again stunned and bleeding. When I struck that boat I thought of the thirteens of the day and concluded that it was up to me to battle for my life. Just when it seemed that all was over with me, I rose to the surface and willing hands dragged me to safety. It isn’t any fun taking your life in your hands. Really, I’m in earnest. If a fellow wasn’t married it would be a different thing, though even a single man oughtn’t to be hankering for chances to risk his life.”
Sequence depicting Houdini bridge leap in Boston.Library of Congress
Houdini seemed conflicted when facing these challenges. For the most part, he left his destiny in the hands of Fate. “While the manacles and shackles are being adjusted so that my limbs are powerless to move, I look down at the water flowing so far below; then I make up my mind I am going to do it,” he told a reporter. “From the time I let go till the moment I strike the water everything is blank, and my ears are filled with strange songs. If the season be winter with the temperature of the water in the vicinity of freezing, the ordeal is one to be dreaded. The bitter cold of the first plunge seems to cut right into my heart, and I very often bite my lips almost through, so great is the shock.”
On August 27, while preparing for a leap into the San Francisco Bay, he wrote his good friend Dr. Waitt back in Boston. “Tomorrow I will take a leap from the wharf into the Frisco Bay…Perhaps some day my time will come like that, but being a Fatalist, it worries me very little.” After jumping into the deep, dark, and cold Mississippi River from a steamer in New Orleans, he dreaded the experience. “That’s an awful river,” he told a local reporter. “The worst I have ever been in…It’s only a question of time that the man who works trained lions and tigers gets his violent passage to the other world, and it is pretty much the same with me.” The reporter noted a tinge of sadness in Houdini’s voice. “I’ll get in the water some day, my trick will fail, and then good night!”
The stillness in the room was suddenly shattered by a muffled sound that was coming from inside the coffin. A few of the men in the front row ran up, pulled the curtain back, and rushed to the side of the casket.
“I need some more air,” the muffled voice inside urged.
The men conferred, and a janitor was sent for. He had a hand drill and he perforated the coffin, a few times on each side.
“That’s better,” Houdini said, and the men withdrew, drawing the curtain behind them.
Earlier that day, Houdini had returned to his old haunt at the Boston Athletic Association to give the members a special treat. He was going to escape from a coffin with the lid screwed on. Now here he was, reposing in a “regulation, sound casket” that was placed upon three sawhorses so that Houdini could not get any assistance from any hidden confederates who might have rigged a trap-door below.
Still wearing his frock coat, he was handcuffed, shackled around his ankles, and lifted into his wooden enclosure. He struggled to briefly sit up, said, “Goodbye” to his audience, and then the lid was screwed into place, and the curtain was hung around the coffin.
At first, the audience watched the screen with rapt attention, especially after the new airholes had been bored into the casket. Gradually, their attention drifted from the curtain, and cheerfully confident that this test would pose no problem to the famous Houdini, they began to light up fine cigars and discuss sports, world events, and business. The time passed, and the haze of cigar smoke grew thicker, and then finally there was “the sound of a soft pad of feet as of some one landing on the floor.” The curtain was suddenly whisked aside, and there stood Houdini, his frock coat disheveled, his collar and tie vanished, his shirt ripped open, and his bushy hair speckled with wood shavings. He was “panting like a stout man who has caught his car,” one reporter wrote. Yet he was smiling. The cuffs and manacles were later found inside the coffin, which was still sealed. Houdini’s reemergence was greeted with a hale round of “bravos” and applause, and many silk top hats were jiggled in his honor. It had taken him sixty-six and a half minutes to make his escape.
The escape had taken another toll on Houdini, at least that was what he told the reporters. “I was very tired after it was all over and the worry was as bad as the work,” he said. “All the time I was in there I was thinking of death.”
In private, he relished the fact that his promoter Paul Keith had managed to spirit him away from the more inquisitive committee members who wanted to examine him after the escape—to a steam room where a search would be superfluous. “Coffin affair a great big success,” Houdini wrote in his diary. “Created more talk than anything I have ever done in Boston. Paul Keith sneaked me into the Turkish bath after show. That is, a committee desired to search me but we fooled them all and Paul grinned for two days.”
Some of Houdini’s greatest challenges were in front of Boston audiences, and this stint in early 1907 was no exception. He escaped from a giant football, a five-foot regulation hot water boiler, a crazy crib, a rolltop desk, and a glass box—a challenge designed by his confidant Dr. Waitt. On February 4, from Providence, Houdini wrote Waitt, “How is the glass box-lets getting along?” Eleven days later,
Waitt and some other challengers (a few who were friends of Houdini) stood onstage with a three-foot-long, two-foot-wide, and two-and-a-half-foot-high glass box that was held together by metal hinges and special bolts. The bolt heads inside the box were specially made to be smooth and not capable of being unscrewed. After having the box outside the theater to be examined by the audience for days, at the last minute, other bolts were substituted that had small imperceptible grooves on the inside. All Houdini had to do to escape was to smuggle in a small crescent shaped tool and unscrew the bolts from the inside. This unique bolt is a modified version of an espionage technique where similarly hollowed-out bolts are used to transmit secret messages.
Houdini took on many varied challenges, including an escape from a “crazy crib.” From the collection of Roger Dreyer
From 1904 on, Houdini was the only escape artist who accepted such a wide panoply of challenges. Although many of his imitators would do handcuff and rope challenges, only a very few accepted more difficult challenges. Brindamour escaped from challenge paper bags and packing boxes; Mysto did a variation of the box challenge by getting out of a sealed coffin; and Houdini’s brother Hardeen accepted challenges against Houdini’s explicit wishes. Houdini struck back in a fury. He exposed Mysto onstage, called Brindamour a cross-dressing fancy dancer, and shunned his own brother until Bess was forced to make peace.
What set Houdini apart was that he managed each challenge from inception to execution, if he didn’t invent them completely. The vast majority of the hundreds of challengers who confronted Houdini weren’t accomplices. They were legitimate businesses that were, in effect, challenged by Houdini to challenge him. Even so, the challenger didn’t have unlimited scope and control over what they could build. Houdini would happily give the details to the packing clerks and box makers. If needed, he would supply blueprints. The box was delivered to the theater a day or so before the challenge so it could be displayed to drum up business.
Sometime before the box would make its way to the stage, one of Houdini’s assistants would remove a couple of long difficult screws and replace them with shorter ones. Once it was onstage, the challengers would come up, look over their box, be none the wiser, and nail the magician in, making sure to use countless nails and put them in the most difficult patterns. It didn’t matter in the slightest; Houdini wasn’t going out through the nailed-on top anyway.
As early as 1904, Houdini came up with the brilliant idea of “re-challenges.” He would do a challenge packing case and then have the same firm re-challenge him, claiming that they knew that he had somehow tampered with the box. In 1913 in a broadside headlined HOUDINI EXPOSED!, the employees of George Scorrer, Ltd., wrote, “Dear Sir, During your last visit to Hull, you escaped from a Packing Case, but in its construction we were restricted regarding the nails and the manner of driving them home. WE ARE FAR FROM BEING SATISFIED with the result of that test, and to settle all arguments We defy you to allow us to build A STRONG PACKING CASE, of extra heavy lumber, making use of any size common flat-headed French wire nails and no restrictions placed as to the amount or manner.” Sometimes these cases were even built on the stage in front of the audience. Houdini had a different method from the pre-made box challenges, but he escaped nonetheless.
In an age of virtually no mass communication, when people relied on local newspapers for their news of the world, very few theatergoers knew that this “special” challenge was something Houdini had done routinely all along his itinerary. When Houdini visited, it was imperative to go to the theater, because who knew if this would be the one night that the invincible escape artist would fail.
Houdini took all sorts of seemingly unique and unrelated challenges. He escaped from a sea monster, lit cannons, a giant football, wheels that were rotating, milk churns, diving suits, and iron boilers. Many of these he did only once and they were absolutely sensational. These one-of-a-kind challenges seemed unique, but Houdini realized that the sea monster and football escapes were more or less the same as escaping from large leather pouches or sailcloth sacks. Escaping after being chained to a lit cannon is still just a chain escape.
In some instances he refused challenges of unique escapes that didn’t fall into his normal classifications. An old sea captain wanted to lock him in a diving suit with leaden boots and then throw him into thirty fathoms of water and have him escape without getting wet. The employees of an electric company proposed to blow a giant lightbulb around him and have him escape without breaking the glass. A plumber wanted to place him between two bathtubs and then spike them together. A German committee proposed handcuffing him to four horses and then have them race off in opposite directions. In San Francisco, a builder offered to build a house onstage and brick him in it. Although Houdini never accepted these challenges, they set his mind working, and he did invent a method to get out of a challenge house built around him, but he never used it.
Not content with his Boston area shows, Houdini even gave a private performance at the home of a prominent Bostonian named J. S. Fay. The magician’s appearance was conceived in a discussion Fay had with Herbert Leeds, a well-to-do Bostonian who was a perennial contender for the America’s Cup yacht race. Fay maintained that, as a nautical man, he could tie Houdini so securely that Houdini couldn’t escape. Leeds was willing to wager that Fay couldn’t. The bet was for $1,000. Leeds offered to split his winnings with Houdini and the contest was on.
On January 26, 1907, before the principals and ten close friends from their Somerset private club (who also made considerable side bets), Houdini allowed himself to be tied in Fay’s living room, where a makeshift roped area, not unlike a boxing ring, had been constructed. Fay instructed Houdini to take off his coat, vest, trousers, collar, and necktie. He did not allow Houdini to remove his shoes, since he had heard of the escape artist’s facility with his toes. Using stout cord, heavy silk fish line, and some twine, Fay got to work. He wound the cord so tightly around Houdini’s neck that his tongue came out of his mouth from the pressure. Two of the men, both doctors, protested that Fay was choking Houdini.
“He’s expanding the muscles of his neck,” Fay explained. “I have to pull the rope tight enough to overcome that.”
“I cannot breathe,” Houdini said.
Fay shrugged and told him that the rope would expand. One of the doctors was so adamant that Houdini was being choked that Fay finally relented and loosened the cord a bit.
Then he bound his wrists so tightly that the cord was invisible from the swelled flesh. He then spent over an hour trussing Houdini. Finally, he was satisfied. Houdini then spent the next seventy-three minutes getting free, all with Fay watching him from six inches away, making sure that no hidden knife was used. Fay was a good sport, though, and he cheerfully paid off the bets. In all, a total of more than $10,000 was wagered.
“It was the hardest experience I ever had,” Houdini told a Boston reporter. “He tied me so tightly that I shall have these welts on my wrists for weeks. I thought one time he was going to choke me, and I guess he would if the doctors present had not made him desist…Though I am physically sore, I had a good time, and I am glad if I gave a company of very entertaining gentlemen a pleasant morning.”
Houdini spent most of the rest of 1907 confronting newer and stranger challenges. “Am in my usual rush. Three strange challenges. Gee but its hard to keep a[t] it all the time,” he wrote Waitt. And after spending eighty minutes escaping from another boiler challenge in Toledo, he made a note to himself in his diary, “Must invent some new means of enlightening my labors. This challenge is the limit.” Sometimes, Houdini would confront an astounding nine challenges a week.
Even his downtime wasn’t relaxing. He was taking summers off and trying to spend time on his farm. In 1904, when he was ill and ordered to rest by his physician, he bought his farm and then spent three weeks cutting down twenty huge trees by himself. Desirous of a road leading up to the house, he single-handedly cleared a series of boulders from the path, some weighin
g more than three hundred pounds.
Houdini opened his fall 1907 season with a new secret weapon against his competitors—his brother. Hardeen had been enjoying success in Europe, especially with Houdini in America for the last few years. Now the competition was heating up here, and old rivals like Cunning and new upstarts like Grose, a young Canadian, were still a threat to Harry’s hegemony. Houdini realized that the same strategy that he had used in Europe would work here. At that time, Houdini was performing for the Orpheum circuit out west and Keith’s in the east. The major opposition to those companies was the newly formed Klaw & Erlanger circuit. Unbeknownst to his own promoters, Houdini engaged in secret negotiations and booked Hardeen with the rival group, effectively blocking his authentic opposition from the best competing houses in the cities Houdini would play.
Houdini milked the “rivalry” for all it was worth. He brought reporters along when he boarded Hardeen’s incoming ship to meet him “and learn his intentions.” It was reported that the brothers had a long consultation on the dock and made peace. “I was very much alarmed, to learn that my brother was coming,” Houdini told the press. “He says that he will not antagonize me, however, and will not attempt to discredit my name of ‘Houdini,’ though he is under contract to work in this country. We have always loved each other, and I felt very badly when I heard that he was going to fight me, but I guess the country is big enough for both of us.”
Genuine bad feelings were generated when Hardeen went a little overboard in his publicity drumming. When asked by reporters about his attitude toward Houdini, he magnanimously told them that he had great admiration for him—so much so that he was willing to engage him as his assistant for a grand a week. “This got into print and it got Harry on my neck,” Hardeen later recounted. “It was all right, he said, to bill myself as greater than Houdini—but this was going too far! I promised never to do that particular thing again—and good feeling was restored.”
The Secret Life of Houdini Page 22
