Accounts of Houdini’s show on that tour suggest that he was treading creative water. His half-hour turn was filled with one or two short effects, the Upside Down water cell escape, and a long monologue peppered with anecdotes from his movie career. In Nottingham, the newspaper’s reviewer actually apologized to his readers for writing advance promotion for the show once he had actually seen it. “Why on earth should Houdini imagine that any audience would be entertained by hearing a long and uncalled-for account of what he has been doing during the past six years…people go to a Vaudeville house to see a performance…not to hear a diatribe on the personal pronoun worked around ‘the story of my life, sir.’”
The cynical English critic didn’t understand but the people did. Houdini broke all records that tour, and earned the highest salaries of his career, pulling down $3,750 a week. “Blame it all on the fact I have been successfully in the movies,” he crowed to Kilby. “The Master Mystery has been showing over a year…so the people think they know me personally. Have to make speeches every night. It’s wonderful to think that after all my hard work, I can draw the Public without killing myself.”
With his mind still in Hollywood, Houdini hired a film crew and shot exteriors in England and France for a film about counterfeiting that he tentatively titled The Dupe. He found that the cameras were attracting gawkers that were ruining the filming. In what might be one of the first uses of concealed cameras, he was able to achieve natural-looking cameos from the unsuspecting extras. His heart was elsewhere too. In April, he sent Charmian London what she deemed a “sweet” letter, and when he returned to New York in July, she received two more “love-notes” from her Magic Man.
Once again flush from his film work and his record-breaking English dates, Houdini had added to his theater collection, and back in New York, he hired a full-time librarian to organize his entire library. On the advice of Robert Gould Shaw, the great drama collector, Houdini hired an eccentric seventy-four-year-old drama aficionado named Alfred Becks, who had spent ten years in charge of Shaw’s collection that resided at the library at Harvard University. Becks immediately moved into the Harlem brownstone.
With Becks’s unnecessary encouragement, Houdini added enormously to his library, running afoul of Bess in the process. For years, Bess had felt in competition with Houdini’s various collections, seeing them as a mistress vying for her husband’s attention. It got to the point where Becks would literally creep up the front steps, stash the new acquisitions in the vestibule, then sneak down and ring the basement bell for admittance. Passing Bess’s muster by appearing empty-handed, Becks would go upstairs, quietly open the front door, retrieve his cache, and spirit the books up to the library.
Too poor to amass a drama collection himself, Becks had his heart set on buying a set of drama books that were coming up at auction, which he thought he could obtain at a reasonable price. His mistake was to tell Houdini of the potential score. On the day of the auction, Houdini sent an emissary to bid on them under an assumed name. Becks returned to the house crestfallen and Houdini, ashamed, hid the books in the basement. When his faithful librarian died in 1925, Houdini, overcome with remorse and grief, sent three floral arrangements under three different names to make it appear that Becks had not been forgotten by his friends. After the funeral, Houdini returned to his home and wept over his loss. Suddenly he remembered his hidden stash. “Now I suppose I can get those books out of the cellar.” He brightened and dashed down, retrieved the package, dusted them off, and gave the books a prominent spot on his shelves. When this was done, he returned to his easy chair, groaned, “Poor old Becks!” and began to sob.
The audience had chuckled inappropriately at spots but when the primitive savages of Terror Island, to appease their god, stuffed the heroine into a small regulation office safe and threw it over a precipice into the ocean, only to have Houdini emerge from his submarine underwater at the exact spot where the safe landed so he could fiddle with the dial, open the safe, and rescue its human contents, it was enough to make the crowd laugh outright, which is not good when your film is a melodrama. Houdini’s third film received poor reviews but it was the script and not Houdini’s acting that was singled out for criticism. Variety savaged the writers and directors for “an almost incredible incompetency in providing a vehicle for Houdini which might prove less exasperating.” Even Houdini, who rated the film as “excellent” in his diary, was forced to admit that he didn’t “like the way it is cut. They have omitted important details.” His solution was to start his own motion picture company, where he would write, produce, and star in his own films with no outside interference.
Houdini’s recent experience with his Film Development Company might have given him pause before rushing into this new business venture. Since early 1918, he had been infusing cash into the company to keep it afloat. As the months progressed, Houdini forced his creative partner, Dietz, to give back stock and cut back on his salary. With his brother Hardeen now working full-time at the plant, Houdini painted a rosy enough picture to entice a fellow magician stockholder named Arnold DeBiere to advance more money into the corporation. Even Harry Kellar, in California, added to his FDC portfolio. Houdini’s optimism was misplaced. By April of 1918, he was writing Kellar that “Dietz is the smoothest liar I ever met” and later that month, he fired Dietz summarily. “I am afraid that I shall have to THROW Dietz out of the factory. Getting too [incompetent], shiftless and he is always working and not accomplishing anything,” Houdini wrote Kellar. “He will ruin us. We [turned] out more work since he left than when he was with us, and the real improvements of the machine belong to your friend Houdini…. I have become quite an expert re the factory and handle it as if ’twere a handcuff…. So it is time that I took charge myself and either go one way or the other.”
It was going south. Perhaps anticipating bankruptcy, Houdini transferred the title of his house to Beatrice’s name on July 23. A few weeks later, Houdini’s former friend DeBiere tried to engineer a hostile takeover, forcing Houdini to beg Kellar to allow him to vote his shares, giving Houdini a clear majority and total control. By the end of November, Houdini was entertaining thoughts of selling the business outright or affiliating with another factory, with more than $65,000 of his own cash invested to that point. There was a prospect of a sale in February of 1919 but the Chicagoan who was looking for an East Coast plant apparently didn’t like what he saw, so Houdini was forced to infuse cash into the business all through 1919. On top of that, in April he made another investment, buying up a majority ownership of Martinka’s, the venerable old magic business in New York. Within a year, he had bailed out, apparently able to keep seeding only one failing business at a time.
By the end of October 1920, even Houdini’s unflagging optimism in his FDC seemed dissipated. Kellar had reached the end of his own rope and had sent a representative to Houdini to handle the sale of his stock. “I informed him of our financial difficulties, and as a matter of fact, have just loaned the F.D.C. another 3,000 dollars,” Houdini wrote Kellar. “Hardeen has pawned his bank books so that we could get [film] stock to keep the factory open. It certainly has been an awful drain on my finances, let alone the terrible worry. Am not doing anything as yet, but trying to interest capital in a Houdini Mystery Corporation. If only I had invested my money in production, we would at least have some pictures to ‘peddle.’ My associates in the Master Mystery cleared, according to their books, 70,000 dollars, which they squandered on salaries and overhead expenses. I have over 100,000 dollars invested in the F.D.C. but have never received a penny from same. This does not include the many weary months I spent in and around the place trying to make a success of what an ordinary man in the business would have known was a failure. My education is certainly costing me a high price.” Kellar seemed to have taken pity on his friend. Less than two weeks later, he instructed his representative to sell all of his stock to Houdini’s sister, Gladys, for the princely sum of $1.
Houdini’s attempt to “i
nterest capital” for his movie production company fared little better. “Been somewhat unfortunate in my choice of associates for the Mystery Picture Co.,” he wrote Kilby in October. Four months later, that had presumably changed. In association with a principal in the Boston Orpheum Theatre and a Boston banker named H. V. Greene, Houdini finally settled on a name and incorporated the Houdini Picture Corporation, capitalizing it to the tune of $500,000. “I am investing $25,000 of my own money and let us hope I shall have better luck than we have had with the F.D.C.,” he wrote Kellar. Houdini’s confidence must have been shaken, though, when Greene’s Boston-based finance company shortly faced multiple lawsuits from irate investors for misrepresentations.
By October of 1921, seven months after incorporating, Houdini had wrapped two full-length feature films. For once, he had complete creative control, coming up with the storylines, hiring a screenwriter or writing the script himself, choosing a director who worked under his supervision, and orchestrating the distribution and promotion. What he chose to put on the screen was fascinating. The Man From Beyond, self-described on the invitation to the premiere as “the weirdest and most sensational love story ever told on the screen” certainly lived up to the first part of its billing. Houdini played Howard Hillary, a shipmate who had been frozen in an Arctic wreck for more than one hundred years until he was revived by explorers. Back in civilization, he is brought to the home of Professor Strange, one of the brothers of the explorers, where he witnesses the nuptials of Felice, the professor’s daughter. Convinced that Felice is actually his own lost love, and still unaware that he had been in suspended animation for more than a hundred years, Hillary disrupts the ceremony and tries to claim Felice for his own. Committed to a mental hospital, he has no trouble escaping from a wet sheet bondage, and he spends the rest of the movie battling evil scientists and convincing Felice that she harbors the soul of his own long-lost love.
With one film in the can, Houdini immediately started in on his next project. A handwritten page filled with “M.P. Ideas” (motion pictures) survives from that time. A catalog of small bits that he would incorporate into the films, it reads like a litany of escape, or spy, work:
POISONING —tip of pen, or flap of envelope.
CONCEAL revolver in valise to murder person opening it…
COAT GAG —pin message on waiters coat, or chalk mark to give signal to confederate, as waiter turns around…
CUTTING out eyes of painting to see in other room…
TAPPING telephone—3 times with key, as signal to confed[erate].
Houdini had three scripts under consideration. One, The Mystery of the Jewel, was another film about reincarnation based in ancient Egypt. Yar, the Primeval Man chronicled the adventures of a caveman. Houdini finally chose the third, Haldane of the Secret Service. (Viscount Haldane, i.e., Richard Burton Haldane, Lord Northcliffe’s friend and the Secretary of State for War in the Liberal government during Edwardian Britain, had chaired the subcommittee in 1909 that recommended the creation of a British Secret Service.) Houdini played Heath Haldane Jr., the secret agent son of a U.S. Secret Service agent who had been murdered on the job by an international counterfeiting ring. He’s drawn into investigating the ring when he comes to the aid of a young woman who’s being attacked near Washington Square Park. His investigations lead him to a warehouse on the Hudson River, the distribution center for the fake currency. Detected by the bad guys, he’s overpowered, roped up, and thrown into the Hudson. Freeing himself from his bonds, he swims to a transatlantic steamer headed for London, where he has a clandestine meeting on Westminster Bridge with agents from Scotland Yard. His investigation takes him to Paris and then to the gang’s lair, an old monastery in a rural village, where masquerading monks capture him and bind him to the spokes of a huge waterwheel. After a surprise ending that reveals the true identity of Dr. Yu, the “mysterious Chinaman” in charge of the operation, Houdini wins the day, captures the bad guys, and proposes to the heroine, who had gotten caught up with the gang inadvertently.
Nita Naldi vamps it up in The Man From Beyond. From the collection of Roger Dreyer
“I know it will displease you to hear this but I have just discounted between $8,000 and $10,000 worth of notes for the Film Developing Corporation,” Houdini wrote Kellar in October of 1921. “Poor Dash is not well…He works very hard giving all his time to the laboratory. It will be a Godsend for all of us if we get away from it in a legitimate manner. The only good of the whole thing is that it was the cause of my going into pictures. Let us hope that I have not made a serious mistake. My two pictures are finished. Now I must put them on the market and will see how good they are.”
Marketing the movies was essential. Since he was an inexperienced producer, the films went way over budget and Houdini was forced to take a nine-week vaudeville engagement, his first in two years, to offset their costs. On the eve of his first production’s premiere, Houdini used every bit of his P. T. Barnum-esque marketing skills to promote his movies.
As he had aged and sought respectability, he had disavowed some of his earlier publicity stunts, like sending seven bowler-hatted men to a Paris corner where, on cue, they would doff their chapeaus and reveal that each bald head had a letter painted on it that collectively spelled H-O-U-D-I-N-I. With his financial health on the line, Houdini threw all caution to the wind. He printed up an elaborate press kit for The Man From Beyond that contained reviews and even suggestions for the local cinema owners on how to exploit the movie. One tactic was to create a rubber boot with a rubber stamp built into the sole that would stamp the word “Houdini” with each step. He suggested that the booted promo man be sent out early in the morning so the rush-hour crowds could see the freshly imprinted message.
Another ploy was to dress an actor up in the clothes of a hundred years prior and have him placarded as “The Man From Beyond.” “This must be done in a very dignified way,” Houdini warned. Another idea was to invite as many centenarians as the local promoters could find to the theater as guests and promote the old folks’ reunion heavily.
Taking no chance on failing to make a huge opening splash, Houdini debuted the film at the Times Square Theater in New York in April of 1922, and trotted out one of Powers’s elephants to reprise his Vanishing Elephant illusion. A few weeks later, when the film opened wide, he sent out three separate touring troupes to play on the same bill as the movie. With all the hoopla, the film didn’t draw very well. The critics were kind but noted that the film had a schizophrenic quality about it; as a melodrama it was adequate, with one rescue scene from the rapids leading to Niagara Falls absolutely top notch. The problem was that the film was reaching for literary and spiritual import too. “The trouble is that the resumption of high literary meaning in the rest of the story is all bosh. So the net effect is pretty unsatisfactory. Serial melodrama and screen uplift won’t mix,” the Variety critic opined.
Houdini’s moguldom came to an abrupt end with the release in November of 1923 of Haldane of the Secret Service. He came up with another great promotional campaign, including thousands of doorknob tags that read, “This lock is not HOUDINI-proof. He could pick it as easily as you pick a daisy. See the Master-Man of Mystery HOUDINI in Haldane of the Secret Service. A picture that will thrill you to your marrows.” Despite the promotion, the reviews were brutal and the audiences were sparse. Even Variety was forced to note, “Perhaps the renown of Houdini is fading, or more probably the Broadway managers were wise to how bad a film this one is…. There is only one [escape], and that is a poorly staged affair showing the star free himself from a giant water mill…instead of going in for his specialty Houdini waltzes around in a tuxedo and dress suit.”
A little picnic on the movie set. They obviously weren’t serving Harry’s favorite repast. From the collection of Dr. Bruce Averbook
Haldane was the death knell of the Houdini Picture Corporation. Succeeding productions were shelved and the company dissolved. In retrospect, Houdini’s involvement in movies, f
inancially speaking, was a nightmare. He had to sue the Williamson Brothers twice, once to recoup a $2,500 promissory note for money he had advanced them, the second time for back salary from a movie that never got made. He wound up in litigation over his fifty percent share of the profits for the hugely successful Master Mystery. When he branched out on his own and took charge of the productions, his quirky sensibility and attempt to run away from the elements that made him successful onstage doomed their success. The only positives from Houdini’s involvement in motion pictures were that it spread his fame worldwide and greatly increased his vaudeville salary, ironically at a time when he had no real interest in performing again.
“I believe magicians are much much too honest to succeed away from our own business and this is not a jest,” he wrote his friend Goldston. “We are so busy with illusionary material that the businessman in a legal way out-trades us.” Now, nearly fifty, and with his best days as an escape artist behind him, he had squandered a fortune and suffered his greatest failure yet. It was time for a metamorphosis.
From the collection of Ricky Jay
20
Saul Among the Prophets
ATLANTIC CITY, NEW JERSEY—JUNE 18, 1922.
The Secret Life of Houdini Page 41
