The Secret Life of Houdini

by William Kalush

  Houdini’s newfound passion became a source of friction between him and Bess. After they argued in a taxicab late one night, Houdini responded by leaving the house early the next day, visiting an old magician, bidding on more paintings at an auction, and buying Bess a solid silver case for her handbag to placate her. He wrote the cost of the case in cipher in his diary, which suggests that Bess routinely read his entries.

  Meanwhile, he was beginning to be confronted by a new rash of imitators. In Germany, both men and women began to perform Houdini’s handcuffed bridge jumps. Houdini’s response was to train a female German championship diver in both the bridge jumps and the can escape, but it seems that Houdini never had to actually employ her since his original female imitator quickly faded from the scene. By 1909, imitators began replicating his water can. In America, a German woman named Minerva, who dubbed herself “the Original Woman Jailbreaker and Handcuff Queen,” introduced her “newest sensation—the Death-Defying Water Escape from an Airtight Locked Barrel filled to the brim with water.” She even advertised herself as “more wonderful and mystifying than Houdini.” Years before, a female imitator had the gall to call herself “Miss Lincoln Houdini,” with the word Houdini being triple the size of Lincoln.

  Houdini was also being imitated by John Clempert, a former wrestler who had achieved some renown for his act, “The Man They Could Not Hang.” Unfortunately, one night, when Clempert’s noose slipped, they could. Clempert dangled from the rope unconscious for a full two minutes before his assistant realized something was amiss. Recuperating in a hospital bed, he dreamed up a new persona—the “Handcuff and Siberian Gaol Breaker.” Clempert began to feature many of Houdini’s escapes and even embellished the water can escape by combining it with the Metamorphosis. In his version, two cans were onstage, one full, and one empty. He went into the full one; his assistant went into the empty one. After a minute and a half, he escaped, but when he opened the filled can, it contained his assistant.

  Noting that Clempert was known as “the man they could not hang,” Houdini wrote, “Perhaps this is a pity, for when one man gets work on another’s reputation and has the impudence to rub the fact home by exposing the methods of the originator, words are useless.” Lawyers weren’t. After instituting a suit, Houdini seemed to have settled the case out of court. Clempert “held up a flag of truce,” Houdini wrote Goldston. “He has promised never to use my name in such a malicious manner and I believe he really means it.”

  Minerva and Clempert weren’t exceptional cases. A French performer named Steens imitated everything Houdini did, down to his advertising. Houdini’s escalation of his escapes from simply defeating handcuffs (or even jail-breaking) to cuffed bridge jumps and the water can escape had served to slightly winnow down the population of imitators. And with good reason. A man named Alburtus had attempted a straitjacket escape in the ocean at Atlantic City on a freezing day in January. The ocean was too violent so he went to the bay, dove in, and struggled to free himself. After going down twice, he finally surfaced free of his restraint. Unfortunately, he was unconscious by then and had to be saved by lifeguards moments before he would have drowned. A would-be escapologist named Menkis was fished out of the water unconscious after he dove in manacled. And in April 1909, a handcuff king named Ricardo jumped off the Luitpold Bridge in Landshut, Bavaria. He couldn’t escape from his restraints and he drowned.

  “I was honestly sorry to hear of Ricardos [sic] death,” Houdini told The London Umpire on July 25, 1909. “People who attempt these feats ought to know before exactly what they are doing. I don’t mind entering into competition with any man, for competition is healthy, but I do kick when they steal my act, do it badly, and then make a great shout. The fact that they are bad stealers is inclined to have an injurious effect on my show, because the people are prone to put all acts of a particular kind in the same basket.”

  In a fascinating footnote to the story, years later, an escape artist named Rex Palmer Gordon claimed to have been hired by Houdini to fail in his jump off the Luitpold Bridge—as Ricardo. “Joined Harry Houdini and as Rex Ricardo, jumped off the Leopold [sic] Bridge Barvia [sic]. This was done on a Friday. I was fished out unconscious. The Wife finished the week…HH came in on the Monday, did the job on Tuesday, with the usual success.” Houdini’s creativity in framing challenges, and in creating and then defeating his own competition, was brilliant.

  Houdini was never rash and reckless when it came to stunts in which he faced the possibility of death, always maintaining that the only successful wizards were safety-first wizards. Still, he was performing escapes both on and off the stage that did carry the possibility of death, even if he had taken sufficient precautions to work the odds heavily in his favor. On June 17, 1908, Houdini, heavily manacled, dove off Young’s Pier at Atlantic City, New Jersey, before a crowd of more than twenty thousand. He usually jumped feetfirst into waters that he was unfamiliar with, but on this day, he decided to dive, despite being warned against that by the lifeguards. He knifed through the water perfectly but then struck his head on the bottom of the ocean floor. Dazed and bleeding, he somehow managed to remove his handcuffs.

  During his run at the Euston Palace of Varieties in London, he accepted a challenge from a local dairy to escape from one of their milk churns. Although it was a huge churn, Houdini was cramped inside it, and the airholes that had been drilled were insufficient. “I realized that in my efforts to escape I was exhausting the available oxygen,” Houdini remembered. “It was useless to shout for help, as my cries would not be heard…. I rocked the churn back and forth, but could not escape…. Suddenly, in my thrashing, I overturned the churn, and it fell on the stage.

  “The cover was held down by clamps, and as luck would have it, the churn fell so that one of the clamps struck the floor, and the blow dislodged it. The cover came loose, and I pushed it off. The air rushed in.”

  In 1909 alone Houdini had serious difficulties escaping from a wet sheet challenge, injured his wrists severely when he was hung from chains, and “all but choked to death” from the pressure of a leather collar when his bed slipped from position during a challenge to escape from a “crazy crib” restraint used on lunatics. And at the end of the year, Houdini had to undergo an operation to lance an infected boil on his derriere that had been worsened by the constant pressure from one of the straps on his straitjacket.

  Besides the risks, Houdini was now running into resistance from local authorities, who were loath to allow him to perform some of his outdoor stunts. Early in November 1908, Houdini was set to leap from Westminster Bridge in London while both handcuffed and straitjacketed, but the chief commissioner of police refused to give permission for the attempt, fearing that the huge crowd would block traffic. Houdini was threatened with imprisonment if he went ahead without official sanction.

  Clempert the Siberian copycat.New York Pubic Library

  Steens replicates another Houdini poster. From the collection of George and Sandy Daily

  The following April, Houdini did just that in Paris. The newspaper report was wonderful and read:

  The many idlers who were basking in the sunshine close to the river noticed an automobile pull up at the Morgue. A man clad in the briefest of bathing costumes descended, to the wonderment of the spectators. Two fellow-passengers gripped the scantily-clad man, secured his wrists with handcuffs and bound his arms tightly. The crowd, believing it had to do with a band of lunatics, shouted for police assistance.

  Four policemen, who had been dozing on duty at the side of Notre Dame, suddenly woke up and ran towards the wildly gesticulating crowd. In the meantime the principal lunatic, by the aid of a ladder, had climbed to the roof of the Morgue. He stood there for a moment with his enchained hands held above his head, while the four policemen below looked helplessly on: Come down, said one policeman, coaxingly. The man’s reply was to plunge headlong into the river. He is gone without a doubt, was the general comment of the spectators of the incident.

 
There was an immediate rush to the bank. Two working men and a policeman flung off their coats and plunged in, hoping to save the madman when he came to the surface. He appeared presently with his arms freed from the chains, and before the police could reach him was rescued by a boat which put out from the opposite bank. On reaching shore he jumped into the motor, and was driven on.

  The police, however, discovered Houdini’s identity, and he is said to be prosecuted for being improperly dressed and for bathing in the Seine during prohibited hours.

  What the paper didn’t report was that Houdini had hired a film crew to film the entire episode. By June, Houdini had incorporated the films into his turn and had choreographed his act to perfection. When it was time for his performance, the house lights were dimmed and two short films were shown, one of his Rochester bridge jump, the other his dive into the Seine. Then the lights came up, the curtain slowly rose, revealing a shiny zinc water can surrounded by several pails, all guarded by three imposing-looking uniformed assistants standing at attention. As the drama intensified, without even a word being spoken, Houdini strode onto the stage to a standing ovation.

  After two solid weeks, the high winds had finally died down, and the mechanic, a small, stout Frenchman named Brassac, had cleared the plane to attempt a takeoff. The German army officers made their last inspection of the Voisin biplane—one of the few Voisins in the world. Reportedly, there were only a couple dozen aviators in the world at the time, so this was an excellent opportunity for the German regiment stationed at the Hufaren parade grounds in Wandsbek, a small town outside of Hamburg, to learn the rudiments of aviation, a technology that the military knew would be an essential component of future warfare.

  The Voisin was an interesting-looking aircraft. It resembled a big box kite, thirty-three feet long by about six feet broad with four vertical panels, dividing the main surface into four large cells. Its wingspan was nearly thirty-three feet. The rudder was off to the rear of the plane, nested in a six-foot-square box-shaped tail, connected to the plane by four outriggers. This particular Voisin had been souped up with a state-of-the-art E.N.V. 60?80 horsepower engine, and it had a steel-shafted single aluminum eight-foot propeller that was capable of 1200 revolutions per minute. There were no ailerons on the craft since the Wright Brothers had patented those devices, so the rudder functioned both to stabilize as well as steer the aircraft.

  The pilot settled in the cockpit and adjusted his goggles. His cap was worn backwards, the style of all aviators at that time. Brassac spun the propeller and the engine started. All was set. Smoothly the plane taxied for a bit on the ground and then lifted up into the air. The German soldiers cheered lustily. Suddenly, after just a few seconds in the air, the plane nose-dived and plummeted to the ground.

  Brassac and some of the soldiers rushed to the wreckage. The front end of the plane had taken most of the impact, not a good omen for the pilot. Ironically enough, the rear panels that surrounded the rudder were totally intact, as were the side canvas panels, both of which were emblazoned with large letters that spelled “HOUDINI.”

  13

  Above the Down Under

  HOUDINI WALKED AWAY FROM HIS FIRST flying mishap with his dignity more injured than anything else. Although he would write in his diary, “I smashed the machine. Broke Propeller all to hell,” the plane itself and, most important, the engine, had sustained little damage. A new propeller was ordered from Paris and arrived in two weeks. Houdini counted the days until he could once again attempt his first successful flight.

  His interest in the nascent field of aviation had become almost an obsession. In 1903, just six years before Houdini purchased his plane, Orville Wright had achieved the first sustained, controlled flight in a heavier-than-air, powered aircraft. It took another three years until that feat was duplicated in Europe by Houdini’s acquaintance Alberto Santos-Dumont, flying 722 feet in Paris. By 1908, Houdini already saw the possibility of incorporating the airplane into one of his spectacular outdoor stunts. He told a London reporter that he offered $5,000 for the use of one of the early Wright Brothers’ planes. His plan was to be handcuffed and flown over London, where he would parachute from the plane, escape from the manacles on the way down, and land safely in Piccadilly Circus. The scheme was scrapped when no safe way to parachute from the aircraft could be devised.

  By 1909, great strides were being made in aviation. Houdini was in London on July 25, when a Frenchman named Louis Blériot became the first man to fly across the English Channel by airplane. He had been taught to fly by Houdini’s future engineer, Antonio Brassac, who also designed the monoplane that made the trip from Calais to Dover Castle in thirty-six and a half minutes. For his efforts he received a $5,000 prize, just one of many offered by Houdini’s friend Alfred Charles Harmsworth, who now owned and used the title Lord Northcliffe. Northcliffe’s interest in aviation had grown proportionately to his wealth and power. A few weeks later, Houdini, along with a half-million other cheering spectators, attended the weeklong First International Air Meet in Reims, France. It was the social event of the year as royalty, government officials, military experts, and the crème de la crème of European society watched the daredevil fliers pilot their odd-looking flying machines.

  Houdini over Hamburg. From the collection of Kenneth M. Trombly

  Houdini was transfixed watching, as he would later describe it, “the aeroplanes floated about the sky like albatross soaring above some floating food.” He was immediately determined to buy one but uncertain of which type. Looking down the list of events, he saw a mechanic’s race listed, and deducing that they were certainly in the know, he watched carefully as Antonio Brassac piloted a plane owned by a man named Rougier to first place. That plane, a Voisin, attracted Houdini’s interest. He had been set to buy a Curtiss biplane, which had won the speed race, but it didn’t appear to be as safe as the Voisin. “I remembered I was but a timid bird, and I wanted to take no chances at the start,” Houdini recalled.

  At the same time, Houdini was designing his own aircraft. He had sent Montraville M. Wood, one of the mechanical geniuses who labored behind the scenes for Houdini, schematics for a small airplane, but Wood could not get it to work. Wood was more optimistic about a larger plane that he was testing and was grateful to get clippings and news reports about the latest in flying machine technology from Houdini in Europe.

  In November, Houdini, who was playing in Hamburg, attended the opening day of Aviation Week and watched as a French mechanic named Pequet flew a Voisin airplane. While he was soaring high in the sky, flames started shooting off his plane, and seconds later, his benzine tank exploded. Pequet began to glide down to Earth, but when he was still twenty feet from the ground, he was forced to leap from his craft as the flames threatened to envelop him. He suffered minor injuries to his chest from the fall. Still, Houdini was impressed. “That machine is mine,” he thought.

  A few days later, it was. Houdini had located an exact replica of Pequet’s biplane, perhaps even the very craft he had seen at Reims. It was built by the Voisin Brothers. Houdini paid $5,000 for it and then ponied up a bit extra to import Antonio Brassac, who was so attached to the plane that he had “sobbed like baby” on the news that it had been sold to Houdini. With Brassac on hand to assemble the machine and to instruct the fledging pilot, Houdini was poised to become the twenty-fifth man to conquer the air in a powered craft.

  First, he had to find a place to fly. There were few airports then, so Houdini entered into an arrangement with the commander of the German army troops at Wandsbek, near Hamburg. In exchange for using the Hufaren parade grounds as an airfield, Houdini would instruct the German soldiers in the mysteries of flight. And for six hundred and fifty marks, Houdini could rent a shed to serve as a hangar for his Voisin.

  Now all he needed was for the weather to cooperate. Brassac was bizarrely maternal toward his craft, and he was loath to have Houdini attempt to fly if there were any traces of wind. For the first few weeks, they experienced stormy
German winter weather, and Houdini was forced to sit behind the wheel with the plane in the shed, familiarizing himself with the fairly simple controls. When the steering wheel was pushed forward, the plane would ascend; pulled back, it would descend. The rudder was controlled by a foot pedal. There was also a choke to the side of the steering wheel that controlled the engine.

  On the first windless morning, Houdini had his accident. After the new propeller arrived and the weather cooperated, Houdini tried again. On November 26, 1909 the magician made a successful flight over the parade grounds, witnessed by fewer than fifty people. He didn’t stay aloft too long, but it was long enough for photographers to record the event. Houdini duly dispatched pictures of the flight and of him in the plane, surrounded by German soldiers, to publications around the world. Three days later, he took out a $25,000 life insurance policy with the Albingia Company of Hamburg. On the back of the policy, Houdini recorded, “This is the first insurance ever taken out re accident in an aeroplane. I had to pay 10 marks (about 25 cents) every time I made a flight.”

  It was a sensible move. Flying was very dangerous then. On September 7, a few weeks after the Reims show, the French pilot Eugene Lefebvre crashed his Wright Model A and earned the unenviable distinction of being the first pilot of a powered aircraft to die while flying. A little over a month later, at the same airfield in France, a student pilot named Richet turned his Voisin completely over and fell sixty feet to the ground. The plane was totaled and Richet was lucky to only break a thigh and have one of his eyes gouged out.