The Secret Life of Houdini

by William Kalush

  Houdini fully expected to fly again. He was in constant communication with Montraville M. Wood, who was modifying and perfecting his own airplane with a unique gyroscopic stabilizing system. Their correspondence showed Houdini’s penchant for secrecy. After being berated by Houdini for showing a fellow magician some of his letters, Wood meekly noted that the letter in question merely recorded Houdini’s purchase of his Voisin and “what you thought of it.” “Never have I ever spoken of getting letters from you regarding any secret work, let alone showing them,” Wood promised.

  Houdini’s plans weren’t exactly secret. At the beginning of August, Houdini attended an auction of the curios from the recently defunct Huber’s Museum. He bought an Egyptian mummy for $3 and spent $6.50 for the first working electric chair. “I made my debut here years ago, at next to nothing a week. I want this chair for sweet sentiment’s sake. It came while I did my first week at Huber’s,” Houdini said. He also told the press that he would fly in America before he went back on tour in England later that month. It doesn’t appear that he attempted a flight, but he did bring the Voisin to England. And after an American named John Moisant broke a propeller on his way to a record Paris to London flight, and was stranded south of London, Houdini wired him a few days after disembarking in Liverpool. “Have 2 complete sets of alum. propellers that I use on my Voisin biplane fitted for an E.N.V. Motor also all kinds spare parts & all sizes of wires if you wish them am pleased to let you have them with my compl so that you can complete your journey.”

  When Moisant didn’t reply, Houdini sent an indignant letter, amazed that Moisant hadn’t the courtesy to respond to a letter in which “I offered you GRATIS my entire Biplane, Propeller, and any spare part you might have been able to make use of…my offer to you as from an American to an American. ought to have been at least acknowledged.”

  Shamed, Moisant got in touch with Houdini. They made plans to meet in September. Moisant’s days as an aviator were numbered, however; he died competing for a $4,000 prize at an air meet in New Orleans in December of 1910. Houdini maintained contact with his brother Alfred, who founded an aviation school in Mineola and later supplied aircraft to the United States for the surveillance of the Mexican border.

  While Houdini’s interest in aviation continued, the high rate of fatalities among the pioneer pilots must have given him second thoughts about taking to the skies again. “I would advise you to leave flying aside…our best flyers have been killed,” his friend Alex Weyer wrote him in January of 1911. “You have made a sensation, be satisfied.” It was true. From 1907 to 1910, thirty-five pilots were killed in sensational crashes. The next year, another forty-one would meet their grisly fate.

  Military research into aviation increased greatly. Houdini’s mechanist, Montraville Wood, spent most of April in San Antonio, Texas, flying test flights with United States Army planes modified with his gyroscopic innovation, which enabled the planes to fly in windy conditions. General Allen, the signal corps leader who was the most vocal proponent of U.S. military aviation, retired and formed a private company with Wood to exploit his invention. When Wood’s aero club of Illinois promoted an air meet in Chicago in August, with $100,000 in prize money, Houdini traveled to the Windy City during his summer break and hobnobbed with the elite of the aviation world, including Glenn Curtiss and Orville Wright, who mistook him for a native Australian and “wanted to know all about my country,” he wrote Bess, who remained back in New York, ill. “At one time I saw twelve machines in the air. I never before saw such wonderful sights. No accidents today. Twice I grew weak in the knees at near accidents. A Curtiss flyer, Beachy, dived 3,000 feet, but, as his machine did not break, he was saved.”

  Houdini wrote too soon. A few days later, two pilots were killed in separate accidents. William Badger was thrown one hundred feet to the bottom of an aviation pit on the field when his propeller broke. He died hours later of a broken neck. Later, St. Croix Johnstone fell five hundred feet to his death into Lake Michigan when his Moisant monoplane malfunctioned. The day after the meet ended, Houdini participated in a benefit flying show for Johnstone’s widow, who had been in the audience when her husband died. His hands and feet were shackled, and then he jumped from a plane that flew fifty feet above Lake Michigan, releasing himself under the water. The benefit raised $15,000.

  Perhaps his performance revitalized Houdini’s interest in flying. Even though he didn’t fly again that year, he had his Voisin “remodeled” in 1912. Despite Wood’s entreaties to bring it back to the States, Houdini left it in storage outside of London. In May of 1913, he authorized Donald Stevenson, a mechanist and semiprofessional magician who, along with Houdini’s friend Billy Robinson, had been designing unique plywood model aircraft since 1911, to “settle” the storage account and “remove the machine.”

  The advertisement for his show at the Empress Theatre of Varieties in Brixton said it all. “£1000 AEROPLANE—First time on any stage,” additionally promising that the airplane would be “introduced and fully demonstrated every performance.” And it was. At a certain point of the show each night, the escape artist took a break from his usual rigors of handcuff escapes and introduced his newest prop—his actual airplane. He patiently explained how the machine worked and he even climbed up into the pilot’s seat and took the audience through a simulated takeoff. When asked if he would attempt to fly the English Channel anytime soon, he simply smiled and said, “Find me a channel more difficult than any that has been passed, and that is what I wish to undertake.” And then John Clempert performed his “Death Defying Water Escape from a Galvanized Iron Tank filled to the brim with water, locked with two lids and eight padlocks.” The addition of an extra lid and two more padlocks apparently gave him the license to claim that he was the originator of the escape.

  While Houdini was buying up electric chairs at auction back in the States, Clempert was already attempting to steal his latest persona—that of the dashing daredevil airman. There is no evidence that Clempert actually ever flew—in fact the clippings that Houdini pasted into the special scrapbook, devoted wholly to his imitators, read, “John Clempert Means to Fly” and report, “his education in aviation and his experience so far have been conducted in modest privacy.” That didn’t stop Clempert from hauling an airplane on stage, just weeks after Houdini had established a world record in Australia.

  Clempert wasn’t Houdini’s only bane. When he returned to fulfill engagements in England in the fall of 1910, he was confronted with another dreaded female imitator, Empress, “The Female Houdini,” who was doing a facsimile of his act, escaping from cuffs, straitjackets, water cans, and packing boxes.

  Houdini’s immediate response was to hire a new assistant, an Irishman named Jimmy Collins who was an excellent carpenter and metalworker. In December, Collins signed his formal oath, “I hereby swear by God the Almighty, not to reveal in any manner to anyone, no matter who it might be, nor even to give the smallest hint, of the secrets, instructions, plans, apparatus, constructions you have confided in me in reference to the execution of your numbers. Should I in any manner directly or indirectly act against this oath, you will have the right at any time to begin court action against me for perjury…” and began to work with Houdini on a new way to cheat death nightly that would outdo the Milk Can, which had been debased in value by his many imitators.

  It was easier to do this than to get the spelling of “Needle” right. Houdini’s assistants (l to r). James Vickery, unknown, Jim Collins, and Franz Kukol hold the thread. From the collection of Kenneth M. Trombly

  At first, they experimented with an escape from ice. Houdini’s original conception was to don a diving suit and helmet and be lowered into a glass water tank. A chemical solution that would quickly freeze would be poured in all around his body. Once the ice was solid, the tank would be covered and the escape effected. Except it wasn’t that easy to come up with such a solution. During their months of experimentation, Houdini almost came down with pneumonia, and the id
ea was ultimately abandoned. One can only imagine Houdini’s reaction when his friend Billy Robinson wrote him in February of 1912 that he had heard that Clempert had produced “the Escape from a Block of Ice” in one of the English provinces.

  By now Houdini had three full-time assistants, Franz Kukol, James Collins, and James Vickery, and he added other local helpers when the situation demanded. In England, he hired Lewis Goldstein, who was struck immediately by Houdini’s dedication to his craft. “Houdini was an intense man, so completely devoted to his work that he rarely thought about anything else,” Goldstein wrote. “We were continually working and Houdini thought nothing of waking us in the middle of the night to send us scurrying off for wood to build some new gimmick, or to have us wet down the hotel’s bedsheets and wrap him in them to see if he could master a new escape.” According to Goldstein, Bess was the glue that kept the crew together and working harmoniously. “The pay was small, but she’d supplement our salaries by playing cards with us and intentionally losing.”

  Houdini showed his appreciation too. Even though he’d fire his longtime assistants in a rage (and forget about it the next day), he often, according to Collins, gave them “substantial presents and bonuses to show his appreciation.” On March 2, 1913, at the Finsbury Park Empire Theatre in London, he stopped his show and called Franz Kukol center stage. He told the audience that Kukol was the best assistant he had ever had, traveling with him for ten years from Russia to Australia. He then presented Kukol with a beautiful gold pocket watch and chain inscribed with these ten-year anniversary dates.

  While devising his next sensational escape, Houdini began to take more unusual and dangerous challenges. In Chatham in February 1911, he accepted one issued by four petty naval officers:

  We CHALLENGE you to stand in front of a loaded Government 8-cwt. Steel Gun, to which we will secure you, insert a fuse which will burn 20 minutes, and if you fail to release yourself within that time you will be blown to Kingdom Come.

  In lashing you to the muzzle of the gun, we will place a rifle barrel between your arms behind your back, bringing your hands on your breast, where we will securely lash them. Your feet we will tie off to an iron ring which we will nail into the floor. Your body we will lash against the muzzle of the gun in such a manner that we believe it will be impossible for you to free yourself.

  Test must take place in full view of the Public.

  A packed house watched as the sailors’ conditions were executed. Houdini immediately kicked off his shoes and untied the majority of the knots in the rope with his toes. Although the local police chief had denuded the challenge of its danger by permitting the cannon to be loaded but refusing to allow the naval men to light the fuse, Houdini still escaped with ample time left.

  Less than ten days after the cannon escape, Houdini received a letter from an obscure magician in Cape Town, South Africa. F. J. Peers, an escape artist, acknowledged that Houdini was the “inventor” of the Milk Can escape. If Houdini was not to tour South Africa, Peers requested permission to perform the escape there, in a can that Houdini’s friend Will Goldston would produce. Moved by Peers’s courtesy, he granted the magician exclusive South African rights to the effect. But, when he learned that the Great Raymond, an established fellow American magician who capitalized on the popularity of escapes, had ordered a milk can from an English dealer named Munro, Houdini fired off a letter complaining that Raymond had purchased the can knowing that it was Houdini’s “original invention,” and that it was patented. “I never objected to a small artiste taking any portion of my performance with which to make a living, but when any artiste with a reputation of which he might be proud, or of which he boasts, does so, I believe that it is only just and right that the said artiste should pay a royalty for any Trick that he gets or buys.” Houdini noted that Raymond hadn’t obtained his permission and by planning to use it in Spain, a country where Houdini hadn’t patented the effect, it didn’t release him from a “gentlemen’s code of honor.”

  Raymond responded with a flip dismissal of Houdini’s claims, even going as far as to say that he was surprised that Houdini should take exception to Raymond performing the effect since “the Kennington Road inventor, who sold you the trick, has sold variations of it to many artistes of lesser note, and nearly all magical dealers, and conjuring supply houses the world over, now make and catalogue the CAN.” Raymond also noted that there were at least ten performers in South and Latin America performing the Milk Can escape. In one last salvo, he promised Houdini that if by chance they should be in the same city, he would “be pleased to arrange my programmes, so that they will not, in any way, conflict with yours.”

  Houdini was beside himself. In exasperation, he made a stunning confession in his return letter. “I don’t believe that it was your intention to insult me; if you did, you are simply living up to your reputation of arrogance. You, above all others, know that I invent my own Mysteries, my own Tricks, create my own Challenges—which you know better than my European imitators [emphasis added].

  “Whoever told you that I purchased my Trick from a Kennington Road inventor is a damned contemptible cad and liar…It does not interest me to know that 10 performers are working cans and barrels, it interested me to know that you have taken my Trick, without my permission, and are presenting it.”

  In anger, Houdini had let slip an amazing indiscretion. He had admitted, in writing, that he actually created his own challenges. A careful analysis of Houdini’s challenge broadsides confirms his admission. It reveals that shipping clerks in New York and factory workers in the English provinces challenged Houdini using exactly the same language and phrasing, and raising the exact same concerns about Houdini’s previous escapes. Houdini colleagues like Dr. Waitt were actively conspiring with him to create a creative challenge and then acting as part of a “neutral” committee to test the escape artist’s skills. Houdini, master showman, left little to chance.

  Houdini’s dispute with Raymond remained unresolved and ten years later, the two men confronted each other in person and a shouting match and some fisticuffs ensued. Shortly after that, Raymond publicly apologized to Houdini before an assemblage of the Magicians Club of London that Houdini founded and presided over as president.

  The procession started on the Long Wharf of Boston Harbor and continued through the winding streets to Keith’s Theatre. Crowds of people followed the bizarre parade, others just stood on the sidewalk and watched in awe as Houdini’s next great challenge was publicly displayed. “It” was a giant 1,600-pound sea monster that had been fished out of the ocean, a “what is it” that locals had identified as a cross between a whale and an octopus. Ten prominent Boston businessmen had challenged Houdini to be fettered with handcuffs and leg irons and escape from the hollowed-out “belly of the beast.”

  The scene onstage on September 26, 1911 was unbelievable. It took a dozen stagehands to carry out the “turtle-tortoise-fish or whatever it is,” and turn it on its back on the center of the stage. Its abdomen had been sliced open, affixed with metal eyelets, which held a long thread of steel chain. Before the escape was attempted, Houdini was forced to sign a document that would release the owners of this monster from any liability should Houdini fail the test.

  Then the steel chain was slackened, and Houdini crawled into the carcass, pausing to spray some strong perfume where his head would lie. He gave a signal, and handcuffs and leg irons were fastened to him. Then the committee went to work. Smiling through their labor, they tightened the chain, passed it around the creature’s back, and secured it with locks. The cabinet was then placed around the beast and the orchestra struck up.

  After fifteen minutes, the screens of the cabinet were thrown open, and there was Houdini, “grease-covered, pallid and perspiring,” holding the handcuffs and leg irons aloft in triumph. On examination, the beast was as securely locked as it had been before. Houdini was not unscathed. His first words were to the stagehands, requesting them to open the windows and give him some ai
r. Houdini had underestimated the toxicity of the arsenic solution that the taxidermist had used to preserve the sea monster, and, locked inside, he had been adversely affected by the fumes.

  A few weeks later, on November 16, Houdini faced another great challenge—admitting to himself that he was sick enough to get professional attention. Perhaps Houdini himself had bought into the myth of invincibility that he projected to his adoring public. He certainly didn’t take his myriad physical ailments that seriously. In fact, he wasn’t really even sure where he had incurred this latest injury. Since returning to the U.S. vaudeville stage in September of that year, Houdini had put himself through a battery of more and more bizarre and strenuous challenges. At first Houdini thought that he had been injured in Buffalo in the middle of October, when a gang of longshoremen crushed one of his kidneys while tying him up in chains during a challenge. On reflection, it also could have occurred in Detroit at the end of the month, when five men stuffed him in a bag and strapped him shut using round straps that pulled so tight he felt something give. At any rate, he had been passing blood for the past two weeks, and he couldn’t hide his pain and discomfort from Bess, but more important, from his mother, who was visiting him during his engagement in Pittsburgh. He had worried about his mother recently. That summer she had had such severe stomach problems that he had sent her to a hotel in the Catskills to recuperate. He certainly didn’t want to contribute to his mother’s unease. So, as a concession to her more than anything else, he walked through the doors of Mercy Hospital and consulted with a Dr. Wholly.