The Secret Life of Houdini

by William Kalush

  The Willard bout was like a tonic to the man who had seemed a shadow of himself after his mother’s death. “[Willard] was not only hissed out of the theatre, but Houdini struck him a blow that knocked him out of the theatre, knocked him down and out of the hearts of hundreds of thousands of his admirers,” the magician wrote his sister. “Honest, Gladys, I have received at least a million dollars’ advertising space from this fray…You will smile to know that I am greeted on the streets as, ‘Hello, Champion.’”

  Whether this was a courageous act of defiance or a cunning way of bullying a not-so-bright prizefighter into a David vs. Goliath no-win situation, Houdini seemed to be afraid of only one person in that theater, and she didn’t stand six feet seven inches tall. “Bess was in the wings,” he reported to his sister, “her face flaming red. I felt sure she was going to give me the dickens, and just think of it—there I was hurling defiance at the greatest fighter of the human race, and when I beheld my beloved little helpmate I actually was afraid. But she was with me. In fact in all my fights when she thinks I am right she is alongside, helping me load the machine guns. So when I noted that Bess was not angry with me, I did not give a rap about what Willard thought of me.”

  Houdini trumpeted his victory over Willard to all his friends, even sending clippings to his latest confidant and correspondent Quincy Kilby, who was keeping a Houdini scrapbook. His only regret was that his new friend, Jack London, the novelist, wasn’t at the theater that night. “As you will have noticed from the papers I am the Newspaper Champion Heavy of the World????? What a scene you could have written had you been present and witnessed the battle,” he wrote London. He was only half joking—London was an amateur boxer and an avid fan; as a celebrity journalist he covered the Johnson-Jeffries fight in 1910.

  Houdini and Bess had met Jack London and his wife, Charmian, a week earlier in Oakland. London and Houdini struck up a fast friendship and found that they had both been self-educated and had suffered privation before gaining wealth and fame. London was the literary equivalent of Houdini—a courageous, adventurous thrill-seeker who channeled his wide-ranging experiences into best-selling novels like The Sea Wolf and The Call of the Wild. There were differences too. London had been a longtime socialist and a strong advocate of women’s liberation. He had divorced his first wife after a torrid affair with Charmian Kittredge, who was five years his senior. Charmian shared his love of adventure and the outdoors, and her liberated stance toward their marriage included open sexual experimentation.

  The Houdinis meet the Londons. It was love at first sight. From the collection of Roger Dreyer

  Befriending a world-famous author certainly fed into Houdini’s own vision of himself as a literary man. Houdini made fast friends with London. The author and his wife had come to back-to-back shows, and Houdini dined solo with them the first night and with Bess on the second. Then the next day, Thanksgiving, he asked them to a holiday dinner in his hotel room, inviting Hardeen, who was appearing at a rival theater, to witness his new celebrity friendship. Houdini then had to leave for Los Angeles and his date with heavyweight destiny, but the couples made plans to get together again soon.

  “Charming Houdini,” Charmian London noted in her diary. “Shall never forget him.”

  He had stopped into the Trav Daniel Sporting Goods store to pick up a pair of white Spaulding track shorts. “They’re pretty good for underwear,” he told the awe-stricken young clerk, who, after screwing up his courage, gushed to the magician that he had loved his show the previous night at the nearby Majestic Theater. Never one to shun a compliment, Houdini struck up a conversation. And when the kid told Houdini that his older brother was a trick motorcycle rider, Houdini left the sporting goods store with more than just a pair of shorts—he had the concept for a new stunt that he would pull off the next morning.

  The clerk’s brother was Ormer Locklear, a twenty-five-year-old mechanic who had a fascination with cars, motorcycles, and airplanes. Houdini met him and instantly thought that Locklear had the requisite charisma and good looks to win over any crowd. So he proposed that Locklear drag him, hog-tied, behind his motorcycle down Fort Worth’s Main Street. While careening down the street, Houdini would make his escape. At first, Locklear was reluctant to participate in what seemed to be a recipe for disaster, but Houdini assured him that he would minimize all danger. “A good stuntman always knows what his limits are.”

  Besides its being the busiest thoroughfare, Houdini chose Main Street because it was the only “paved” street in Fort Worth, the “paving” merely being a series of wooden stumps that had been inserted into the dirt to protect horses’ hooves. The next day, Houdini donned thick, quilted overalls and protected his head with a hood. He asked some volunteers to tie his hands behind his back and then, as he lay down on the street, a rope that was attached to Locklear’s motorcycle was tied around his ankles. With a large crowd lining both sides of the street, one of the locals shot a starting pistol and Locklear revved his cycle and took off, hauling his human cargo. Apprehensive about really gunning his engine, Locklear started off slow and gradually increased his speed. Within seconds, Houdini had freed his hands and untied the rope attached to the cycle.

  Houdini had chosen a very interesting time to make his first tour of Texas. On May 15, 1915, President Wilson had directed the Secretary of the Treasury to order the Secret Service to investigate an ongoing operation by German secret agents in the United States aimed at sabotaging the munitions industry, which was selling its armaments to the Allied cause. What they found was shocking. The German government had smuggled more than $150 million in cash (the equivalent of about $13 billion today) into the United States to finance sabotage, propaganda, and a conspiracy to get the United States embroiled in a diversionary war with Mexico by seeding Pancho Villa’s bandit rebellion against the U.S.-backed government of General Carranza. To make sense of all this intrigue, a new form of intelligence gathering and surveillance was needed. To that end, it was decided that the army’s First Aero Squadron, stationed at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, would be deployed in aerial surveillance missions.

  Beginning at the end of January 1916, Houdini spent a week in San Antonio, playing the Majestic Theater. Since January 1910, Fort Sam Houston in Texas had been the site of the aero division of the U.S. Army. That sounds grandiose because until April 1911, the army had only one plane and one pilot, Benjamin Foulois. The situation was so bad that a few months before, when the War Department wished to test the efficacy of using airplanes in war by attacking ground troops with dummy bombs, six aviators who were participating in a local aerial tournament in San Antonio were enlisted to fly their machines and bombard the detachment of troops from Fort Sam Houston.

  In April, things began to change. Houdini’s mechanist, Montraville Wood, spent most of April at Fort Sam Houston, flying the army’s Curtiss two-seater, sometimes alone and sometimes with a Lieutenant Beck, experimenting with his gyroscope, which could give the plane added stability in adverse wind conditions. Wood’s mechanical improvements were incorporated in additional planes that the army purchased.

  In July 1911, pilot Foulois was transferred to the Signal Corps in Washington and fell under the command of General Allen, who would go on to become the president of Wood’s airplane company. In December 1913, Foulois was assigned to the Signal Corps Aviation School in San Diego, where, the following year, he organized and assumed command of the First Aero Squadron. In the fall of 1915, Foulois’s squadron was moved by rail to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, then flew for the first time as a unit to Fort Sam Houston, where they were based when Houdini came to Texas.

  We know that Houdini entertained soldiers from Fort Sam Houston onstage on February 4 when they challenged him to escape from a seven-foot plank. There is anecdotal evidence that suggests that Houdini may have actually even flown during his stay in San Antonio. In a Providence newspaper, Houdini is credited as being “one of the heroes of the Panama-California exposition in 1915, a wizard of the first
order and last but not least an aviator of the United States Army.” Around the same time, while he was performing in Boston, Houdini told the noted Boston reporter Ira Mitchell Chappelle, “I’m an American, though first, last, and all the time. I’m an aviator, and in case there’s war, will surely be a member of the aviation corps.”

  It was high noon and Pennsylvania Avenue between Thirteenth and Fifteenth Streets was crammed with people taking up every available inch of space on the sidewalk. The more adventurous had shinned up light poles or hung out of the windows from the neighboring buildings. “Human beings don’t like to see other human beings lose their lives, but they do love to be on the spot when it happens,” an astute observer of human nature once said. Well, on April 20, 1916, he was proven correct. The police estimated that 100,000 people had shoved, pushed, elbowed, and wedged their way in front of the Munsey Building in downtown Washington, D.C., then spilled down the street for blocks and blocks. They also said it was the single largest assemblage of people in that city’s history outside of a presidential inauguration.

  Captain Peck of the Washington police department stood on the makeshift platform in front of the building as the man was escorted by the police through the frenzied crowd. The rope, a sturdy thick variant, had been tested and retested to make sure that it would hold the man’s weight. Finally, about twenty minutes past noon, the rope was securely affixed to the man by the authorities.

  And then the public hanging began.

  Houdini, who had just been securely fastened into a straitjacket by two attendants from an area mental hospital, was hoisted by his legs one hundred feet into the air, parallel with the fourth story of the massive office building. For a few seconds he was completely still. Then, as the crowd gasped, he began to jerk frantically from side to side, the veins in his face standing out like great purple cords. It seemed that his arms had some play now; he was able to jerk them from side to side. The crowd cheered. Now he had managed to work his arms slowly and painfully over his head. A huge cheer reverberated through the human canyon. One by one, he opened the straps, managing to unfasten them through the heavy canvas with his extremely strong fingers. With each strap liberated, the crowd roared anew. Now he was completely free of the restraint, and he held it mockingly in the air for a few seconds before he released it and it fluttered in the wind to the street below. The audience yelled as one, and Houdini crossed his arms on his chest and pulled himself halfway up, saluting the crowd with an upside-down bow.

  While Houdini is strapped into his straitjacket, more than a few curious onlookers gather. From the collection of Dr. Bruce Averbook

  Houdini’s outdoor upside-down straitjacket escape was one of the greatest publicity stunts ever devised, appealing to both the finest and the basest instincts of his audience simultaneously. It was the pinnacle of his stunts, primarily because it was the only outdoor stunt he ever did where the escape was in full view of the audience. Much of what he did onstage was hidden from view; the bridge or pier jumps used the water to mask the action. The suspended straitjacket was perfect from start to finish, and Houdini dangling in the air above thousands and thousands of astonished spectators became the magician’s iconic image—an image that was inspired by a visit to a young man’s attic in Sheffield, England.

  Even dangling upside down in a straitjacket, Houdini knew to pose for the camera. From the collection of Dr. Bruce Averbook

  One of the most spectacular outdoor stunts in history. From the collection of George and Sandy Daily

  Houdini did it first in September of 1915 in Kansas City, where five thousand people watched as he was hoisted twenty feet in the air and then shed his restraint. By the middle of 1916 the crowds had swelled ten or twenty fold and the height had increased to as high as two hundred feet. For the most part, Houdini retained his early formula for a successful publicity stunt—he did the escape hanging from the building that housed the local newspaper, guaranteeing front-page coverage, and he performed it exactly at noon, ensuring himself a street filled with lunchtime spectators.

  Of course, he would have to come to the site a day earlier to “inspect” the building and the harness and speak with the local authorities who would do the strapping of the jacket, spurring a newspaper article that would promote the actual event the next day. In San Antonio, he met the two police officials who were charged with securing his straitjacket and hoisting him up.

  “String me up just as high as you can. If I drop I want to be sure it’s going to be the finish. I’d rather have a lilly [sic] in my hand than go through life crippled and a burden to others,” Houdini told them, within earshot of the eager reporter who scribbled down each word. After all, human beings don’t like to see other human beings die, but…

  As dangerous as it looked, the upside-down straitjacket escape was somewhat safer than his manacled bridge leaps or escapes from submerged crates, even when he started affixing an additional safety rope after a stray wind blew him into the side of a building and cut him badly. But when you’re dangling one hundred feet in the air by your feet, twisting and jerking to free yourself, anything can happen. In Oakland, California, after he had freed himself and thrown the jacket to the adoring crowd, when he gave the signal to be lowered, he didn’t budge. During his gyrations, he had entangled the ropes. He was forced to hang upside down for a full eight minutes until a ladder, held secure by six men, was extended off the roof and a window cleaner shinned down it and untangled the ropes.

  By April 19, 1916, the day before his massive outdoor stunt in the nation’s capital, Houdini’s weariness seemed to be catching up with him. “I’ve about reached the limit, it seems to me,” he told the Washington Times reporter. “For the last thirty years…I’ve been getting out of all sorts of things human ingenuity has devised to confine a human being. Up to date there hasn’t been anything made that confined my activities to any alarming extent. But some day some chap is going to make one. And I’m going to quit with a clean record before he comes along. I’ve about made up my mind that this is the last stunt I’ll perform. Hereafter I intend to work entirely with my brain. See these gray hairs? They mean something. I’m not as young as I was. I’ve had to work hard to keep ahead of the procession. I’ll still be entertaining the public for many years to come. But I intend to do it along lines not quite so spectacular. As an escapist extraordinary I feel that I’m about through.”

  Two days after Houdini’s huge stunt, President Wilson, who was continuing to try to steer the United States on a course of neutrality despite Germany’s ever-more-blatant submarine attacks on unarmed American merchant ships, snuck away from the White House with his new bride to see Houdini escape from his Water Torture Cell. The next afternoon, Houdini paid a visit to the Senate visitors’ gallery. While presiding over the session, Vice President Thomas Marshall spotted Houdini and waved to him. Other senators stopped their business and followed suit.

  A page was dispatched to Houdini and delivered a note, inviting him to the vice president’s chamber. When Houdini complied, the senators called a recess and crowded into the vice president’s chambers. “It was the proudest day of my life,” Houdini would later say.

  Buoyed by the honor accorded him by the president and the Senate, Houdini went back home and came face-to-face with his own mortality. He had spent part of his forty-second birthday at the grave of his parents. Now, three weeks later, he ran into old Mrs. Leffler, his landlady when he and his father first moved to New York. “I nearly cried, as she was a pal of my Dad and Mrs. L is the only one left of the Old Guard,” he wrote in his diary. Two weeks later, on Mother’s Day, he sent flowers to all the “Mothers graves” he knew, and then visited Mrs. Leffler and hand-delivered her a bouquet. The following week, after seeing his dentist, he took a sentimental trip to the East Sixty-ninth Street apartment where his dad died. He stood there in silent meditation for half an hour, replaying his father’s final exit from the building. “It grieves me more now than it did then,” he wrote in his diary. He
remembered comforting his mother that day, asking her not to weep. “If you had 28 years of heaven, you’d weep too,” she responded. As a tribute to his parents, Houdini commissioned his friend Oscar Teale to design an extravagant exedra that used many tons of Vermont granite. After years of restoring the graves of magicians he had never known, it was time to honor his parents’ final resting place.

  Wearied by the constant touring and the years of abusive challenge escapes, Houdini came up with a get-rich-quick scheme, “which if it only materializes half way decent, will bring in lots of money to my celler [sic],” he wrote a friend. With the film business beginning to make major inroads into competing entertainment forms, Houdini was approached to bankroll a German aniline dye expert named Gustav Dietz who invented a new process for developing film stock that was allegedly cheaper and better than the methods that were currently in use. Houdini seeded the company to the tune of $4,900 in September and then approached friends and raised $100,000 in capital. August Roterberg, one candid friend who didn’t invest, was wary of Houdini’s business acumen. “You are old enough to know that there is a vast difference between inventing a successful developer and developing the developer, or in other words handle it along commercial lines and make it pay. I hope that you won’t fall down on the latter part.”

  Houdini’s relentless publicity seeking and his innate understanding of what was believable combined to push his name into the language. As early as 1899 the word Houdini began to be used synonymously with escape. Newspapers referred to escaped criminals as Houdinis or as “doing a Houdini.” By 1917, the guardians of the language noticed that cartoonists, lexicographers, preachers, the Literary Digest, and even a U.S. congressman were using Houdini’s name as a comparison for other people’s activities in elusion. Houdini didn’t completely understand the power of his own name then, and he petitioned a popular publisher to have “houdinize” added to their dictionary. He was successful, but ironically, he didn’t understand that as a verb, “houdinize” was meaningless, since the word Houdini had already become a noun and adjective.