The Secret Life of Houdini

by William Kalush

  On top of all this, his personal life seemed to be in turmoil too. After four years of living with Hardeen and his family, things had reached a breaking point. It’s uncertain why Houdini and Bess couldn’t tolerate Brooklyn any longer but after a period of unpleasantness, they decided to move back to the old brownstone in Harlem in the middle of a harsh cold spell in February. It took four twenty-foot vans to cart Houdini’s books alone. Once they were back in the house, the great cold wrought havoc on the plumbing. On top of that, a coal shortage had forced Houdini to burn fifteen-year-old shutters and Venetian blinds that had been stored in the basement.

  Even before he moved back to the house “I bot [sic] for my Beloved Mother,” Houdini was still grieving her death. “I am fighting hard not to feel melancholy for it is five years since My Sweet Mother went to Sleep, and I am still as worried as I was then.”

  There were other, darker, unspoken problems Houdini was confronting. “Been having a hard time with my private affairs,” he informed Kilby. “It’s been a bit cloudy of late for all of us,” he wrote Teale.

  They met in a small café in Greenwich Village. She had gotten there first and had just taken her white fur coat off, revealing her smart white serge dress, when he arrived. He paused before the table and devoured her with his eyes. Then he gallantly took her hand, kissed it, and sat down opposite her.

  “You were trembling all over when I touched your hand,” Houdini said.

  The woman in white blushed.

  “I hardly slept last night after our phone conversation,” she admitted. Houdini smiled.

  “You know, when I first came in here, I didn’t recognize you. You look just like a young girl,” Houdini said.

  “My charming magic man. You haven’t changed at all,” she said.

  “Did you get my letter? Actually, the letter within a letter. I addressed it to the woman in white,” Houdini asked.

  “No. It never came. Did you have the right address?”

  “Never mind. I’ll just have to re-create it for you in person,” Houdini said.

  “That would be lovely,” she sighed.

  A waiter came over. The woman in white ordered a glass of champagne, and Houdini settled for a soda water.

  “Would you like to see a menu?” the waiter asked.

  “I don’t think so,” she said.

  “You don’t seem human to me,” Houdini said, staring into her eyes. “I wonder if you have to eat.”

  “You’re so sweet,” she said. “So tell me what was in the letter.”

  “I wrote that now I know how kings have given up their kingdoms for a woman,” Houdini said, delicately stroking her hand. “You are gorgeous. You are wonderful.”

  A pause.

  “I love you,” he said.

  The woman in white trembled all over.

  According to Harold Kellock, who wrote Houdini’s official biography based on Bess’s recollections, after many years of marriage, Houdini used “many a deft little artifice to foster the romantic element.”

  “Mrs. Houdini, you are a modern woman of liberal ideas,” he would say. “You will not be angry if I keep a date this evening. I expect to meet the most beautiful lady in the world at such and such a corner at 6:30. I shall be home very late.”

  Bess would pick up the cue and dress herself in her most stunning outfits and make the rendezvous. Houdini would gallantly escort her into a waiting car and they would repair to a jazz club where Houdini would have made arrangements for a private dining room. Bess would order champagne and Harry would drink water. The waiters would fall for the “illicit and non-connubial atmosphere” of these assignations. According to Kellock, that old vaudeville gag—“‘Who was that lady I seen you with last night?’ ‘That wasn’t no lady, that was my wife’—might have been written seriously about these romantic escapades of Houdini.”

  This rendezvous was not part of a fantasy role-playing scenario. The declarations of love and the trembling hands and the hearts a-fluttering were as real as real could be. The woman in white was a lady, and she wasn’t his wife. She was Charmian London.

  From the collection of Roger Dreyer

  19

  Art Imitates Life

  WHEN HE HEARD THE NEWS THAT his friend Jack London had died in November of 1916, Houdini immediately dispatched a telegram to his widow Charmian. “Papers here report Jack’s death please let us know if this shocking information is founded on facts.” He signed it “your sincere friends Harry and Bessie Houdini.” London was only forty years old but he had been ill for years and, though his death was certified as due to uremic poisoning, there was speculation that he might have deliberately overdosed on the morphine he was using to control his pain. Though separated geographically, the two couples had become fast friends. When Charmian confirmed Jack’s death, Houdini immediately wrote his friend Kilby, who had been compiling a huge Houdini scrapbook, to tell him the news. “Did I ever send you snap shot of us both?” Houdini asked, with his eye on posterity.

  The following October, Charmian found herself in New York overseeing the final details of the publication of her latest book. She saw Houdini perform and after the show, the two met. Within two hours of their meeting, Charmian sat down and wrote the conjurer a letter. Noting that Houdini seemed almost “shocked” to see her looking “so well and blooming,” Charmian took a defiant stance. “I refuse to be beaten! I am going to put in whatever years life still hold for me as profitably in the pursuit of happiness as I possibly can. You have lost and suffered. Am I not right in my attitude?” Informing him that she would relocate for a while in New York, she hinted at future meetings. “Someday, at exactly the right time and place, I shall tell you more about this past year and the other remarkable experience I have had that I’ve really carved out for myself. This is your letter. Please destroy it (but don’t forget it.) C. L.” There were no salutations to her friend Bessie.

  On January 17, 1918, Charmian received tickets from Houdini to see his wonderful elephant vanish at the Hippodrome. They met backstage after and began to keep in closer touch by phone. A week later, a “declaration” that Houdini made to her over the phone “rather shakes me up,” she wrote in her diary. Two weeks after that she was referring to him as “Magic Lover.” Other than cryptic references in letters to Houdini’s friends (“Been having a hard time with my private affairs”), all we have is Charmian London’s account of their affair as recorded in her diary. (The Houdini connection was discovered a decade ago by brilliant Houdini biographer Kenneth Silverman.) Some of the passages are even written in a stenographic code, the only decipherable entry being “278,” Houdini’s address in Harlem. What we can comprehend paints a picture of a passionate, romantic whirlwind. There’s swooning, trembling, experiences that stir to the depths. Charmian can barely sleep, “too swept still.” For his part, Houdini’s declarations continued: “I’m mad about you.” “I give all of myself to you.” And the ultimate accolade: “I would have told her—my mother—about you.”

  The liaison continued through April, when she made plans to return to her home in California. She took a side trip to Boston first, and when she returned to New York, their telephone conversations seemed inadequate. “Am I never going to see you again?” Houdini pouted. As her date of departure loomed imminent, his despair grew. “Poor, sad, lonely thing,” she wrote. “He is very alone, & worse than he had feared.” With Charmian back in California, Houdini could only write to tell her how much he missed her and take some solace in the “magic of memory.” It had been a confusing few months for the master magician, and there had been quite a few changes in his life, some of which were speaking to Houdini’s fundamental conception of himself.

  “A plot with international ramifications was revealed to the police late yesterday afternoon to waylay and assassinate Houdini, the magician appearing in Cleveland this week,” reporter John De Koven of The Cleveland Leader revealed on December 23, 1916. “The actor, according to the information which was transmitted t
o police headquarters by a mysterious telephone call, is to be lured to the E.9th St. pier, where he will be set upon by thugs, knocked over the head, bound with leather strips and flung through the ice off the end of the pier…. The person who telephoned the warning yesterday is believed to be a woman, the voice, according to the police, being feminine with a noticeably foreign accent. It implicated John Royal, manager of the Hippodrome, as one of those in the conspiracy and indicated that he would be active in persuading Houdini to go to the pier. The time set for the attempt, according to the telephone message, is at noon today.”

  De Koven could go no further without revealing to his readers that Houdini was in on the plot. In fact, he had been traveling around the world filming scenes such as these for a projected motion picture in which he would star. What was brilliant about this ploy was that Houdini was framing the filming of his picture as a stunt, inviting the audience to assemble, watch, and then, hopefully, flock to see more of him at the Hippodrome.

  Houdini had made a short motion picture in Paris in 1901, but he saw the potential for a career in the movies as early as 1912. In November, his friend Billy Robinson had written him that Houdini’s old friend who used to manage the Coliseum in Glasgow was now running a cinema where they were clearing more than the equivalent of $1,250 a week showing films all day. “He said it was the only game nowadays. And he is right,” Robinson noted. Houdini agreed. In June of 1913, he approached E. F. Albee, one of his old managers, who still ran vaudeville houses on the Keith’s circuit. Sounding him out on doing movies, Albee was adamantly against the move. “Your value in vaudeville would be very much lessened on account of your name being advertised as extensively as it would be in motion picture houses,” he told Houdini.

  In February of 1915, Houdini had meetings with representatives from Universal Film in connection with a filmic adaptation of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The role was tailor-made for Houdini’s aquatic abilities but negotiations broke down. “I am afraid that I want too much money,” he wrote Kilby. “For your judgement is right the Managers will object, and if I do not get a big sum close to Fifty Thousand I cannot afford to take a chance at this time of my life. Perhaps in a few years when I can’t get work??? I may take less. I hope not.”

  Though Houdini continued to hire a crew and film some of his celebrated stunts, his real involvement with the motion picture business began in 1917 when he reached an agreement to star in a movie for the Williamson Brothers, the creative duo who had contracted with Universal for the Jules Verne movie. J. Ernest Williamson and his brother George had pioneered the development of undersea photography, adapting a deep-sea tube that had been invented by their father, who was a sea captain.

  “Expect to leave for the Bahaman Islands, within eight weeks, to be featured in the sensational film and am receiving the biggest money every paid for a single picture,” Houdini bragged to Harry Kellar on March 31, 1917. Six days later, the United States entered the war.

  Houdini’s teaming up with the Williamson Brothers to make a submarine film was headline news the following week. Cognizant of the world situation, Houdini tried to spin his new movie career as patriotic service. “I want to call attention to the fact that I am a true American citizen,” he told the newspapers, “and that I am convinced the Williamson inventions can be utilized in our country’s defense should Uncle Sam find himself embarrassed by enemy submarine boats. My patriotism received quite an impetus as I pondered this, and it is gratifying to be associated with such a business-like organization—one that will make sacrifices for the country’s good if necessary.” He also informed the newspapers that he would escape from the Williamson tube without breaking the two-inch glass, while it was underwater, without allowing any water to enter the vessel. The photographic evidence would then be incorporated into the film, which was tentatively called Houdini and the Miracle.

  “I am doing this because I wish to leave behind a legacy to posterity to prove irrefutably that I was actually within the chain wrapped packing cases, steel boilers, nailed-up coffins and other unusual containers in which I have been manacled and thrown overboard times without number,” Houdini told the press. “Through the aid of the Williamsons’ devices for submarine photography, I will be able to release myself in full view of the camera. There can be no doubt whatsoever henceforth as to the authenticity of my performance.”

  Houdini had been tracking the smugglers for days now with no luck. So when he stumbled onto an old warehouse that was being used as a dormitory and staging area for the gang that he had been reconnoitering, he devised an incredible plan to destroy it. He removed all the supporting pilings of the three-story building, leaving only those that were absolutely necessary to keep the building standing. Then he covered the roof with dirt and stones so it bore an incredible resemblance to the surrounding area. When the signal was given and the last supports destroyed, the building would implode three stories and the roof would blend right in so no one could tell that any alteration in the landscape had been made.

  While preparing the building for destruction, Houdini noted that there were subterranean passageways that led right from the warehouse to the docks, where the submarine base was located. This made him alter his plans slightly. Now he would rig the building so that it would set on fire when the phone would ring, and the fire would not only implode the building but also distract any onlookers so they wouldn’t see their mad dash to the submarine base. Houdini wasn’t alone on this mission. He had a young man named Jimmy and a girl named June, both of whom he had rescued from the smuggling group. Houdini felt an extra responsibility toward June. She was the daughter of his friend, the chief of the Secret Service.

  They were all on the third floor when they heard stirring downstairs. That meant that one of the smuggling crews was back. Now Houdini had to figure out a way for them to escape without being detected. They did a quick survey of the room and noticed all the windows were nailed shut. Jimmy was about to smash a window to get away when Houdini restrained him. Grabbing a large section of flypaper that was hanging from a distant wall, Houdini placed it on the window. Using the edge of June’s diamond ring, Houdini cut a large circle out of the glass and carefully removed it, soundlessly, since the glass had adhered to the flypaper.

  Houdini disappeared into one of the third-floor bedrooms and came back with a handful of bed sheets. He made a ladder of the sheets, threw it out the window, and slowly lowered Jimmy and June out on the side of the warehouse that faced away from the busy street. They were all to rendezvous on the dock, but first, he had to prepare the firebug. He spread paper and straw all over the floor and then set up a row of candles, all connected by a shoelace. He tied the other end of the shoelace to the bell of the telephone. When the hammer would ring, which it would as soon as he called, it would tug on the string, pull the candles over, and start a blaze that would soon cause the structurally weakened building to implode. He had just lit the very last candle when three men rushed into the room and overpowered him.

  The smugglers forced Houdini into a chair and, with strong rope, lashed him to it.

  They hadn’t left the room for thirty seconds when the phone rang. It was the gang’s leader, checking on the warehouse. Nobody was there to answer and within seconds, the candles were toppled and an inferno began to rage all around Houdini. With no time to spare, he frantically squirmed in his chair, using any available slack to loosen his bonds. The flames were lapping at his feet when he finally broke free of the restraints and literally dove through the window. He caught himself on the outer ledge of the window and quickly kicked his shoes off. Using his big toes as pincers, he held onto the cables that held up the roof coping and made his way from window to window. Just as he jumped the final six feet to freedom, there was a loud blast and the warehouse seemed to vanish. He didn’t have time to admire his landscaping because he was already on his way to the docks.

  It’s been said that all writing is autobiographical. The above rendering of
Houdini’s treatment for a film that he never made supports this idea. Houdini biographer Bernard Meyer said, “It was not only as a highly imaginative and versatile performer but also as a storyteller and maker of motion pictures that Houdini left a legacy rich in clues concerning the secrets of his mind and heart. These stories and films of which he was the author, or at least the co-author, are for the most part obvious self-portraits which, while not qualifying as great art, often provide a revealing and often surprising glimpse into the darker corners of his character, apparently unsuspected and unexplored by some of his biographers.” Meyer’s theory anticipated the new evidence of Houdini’s espionage work. In many of Houdini’s films, he plays characters who are Secret Service or Justice Department agents. When he wrote these films, he was partially writing about himself. Doing so wasn’t unique; the great novelist W. Somerset Maugham also worked as a secret agent for the U.S. government during the Great War, and he too memorialized his contribution in his novel Ashenden: or the British Agent.

  When it was time for Houdini to make his first movie, he presented the Williamson Brothers with the above scenario for a film that he tentatively called The Marvelous Adventures of Houdini: The Justly Celebrated Elusive American—and indeed Houdini’s cast of characters was very telling. Harry Houdini was described as “Harry Houdini, as known to the public,” implying a hidden covert side that remained unknown. The leading lady was named Beulah, “the personification of refinement,” at ease in the highest social circles in London and Germany, a world traveler whose heart would beat rapidly when she saw Houdini cheat death, but who was existential enough to know to live in the present. Was Beulah’s character based on the cosmopolitan Charmian London?

  Houdini’s character interacts with someone named Siddons, “the Chief of the Secret Government Police,” he wrote in his description. “Such a man as would be selected by the brain force of a great nation, to have complete control of the Secret Service, in fact a prototype of Flynn—suave, polished, a gentlemen [sic], and silent as the Sphinx.” William James Flynn had worked for the Secret Service in New York since 1897, except for a two-year interlude from 1910 to 1911 when he stayed in the city to weed out corruption in the NYPD’s Detective Bureau. Rejoining the Secret Service in 1911, he succeeded Wilkie as chief in 1912 and ran the bureau out of his New York office. He resigned in 1917, the same year that Houdini wrote this scenario. Flynn would later produce a film that exposed fraudulent spirit mediums at the same time that Houdini would wage his own crusade against them.