by David Jaher
His desperation finally led him to Dr. Hill’s traveling medicine show, the lowest rung of entertainment. Barely able to afford the rail ticket, the Houdinis linked up with Dr. Hill in Kansas, where they performed on the wagon stage and occasionally in small-town opera houses. Between shows the magician sold toiletry articles and miracle elixirs. The Great Houdini had become a piker on the oily circuit. Yet his versatile gifts were not lost on Dr. Hill, who one day proposed something intriguing. With his flowing hair and inspired patter, Hill had the air of a wandering prophet. He wanted a different sort of act on Sundays, something to rouse the goddamn suds on Main Street. He asked if the magician could do a spiritist séance. Smiling confidently, Houdini said that he would raise the dead in every county.
The Spiritualist Ties
HOUDINI THE GREAT WILL GIVE SUNDAY NIGHT A SPIRITUAL SÉANCE IN THE OPEN LIGHT. So read the placards in 1897 when Houdini toured the prairie sticks. His spook show was imitative of the Brothers Davenport—two legendary magicians from his boyhood who seemed able to make instruments play while no living being had hands on them. In Houdini’s replication of the effect, volunteers tied him within a cabinet, where a guitar, a horn, and tambourine were placed upon a table. He should not have been able to free himself to reach these instruments, yet when the light was dimmed a spook recital started. Later, the chamber door blew open, revealing him, still roped and chained, to be the psychic conductor, not the player!
In those days there was a merging of spiritism and stage magic. It was the custom for cabinet test mediums to be cuffed or collared before a dark sitting. Without such restraint a crooked spook might slip into a white robe and waxen mask to fake their apparition, use their foot to raise the séance table, or put the spirit trumpet to their lips and imitate discarnate voices. Mediums were the first escape artists. The Scientific American revealed that it was by no occult force that these miracle workers freed their shackles. In 1897 an exposé called “Spiritualist Ties” explained the means by which crafty psychics slipped their ropes, cuffs, chains, and spirit collars. The report spoke of false bolts, concealed keys, and the slack in any rope tie.
Although Houdini employed such methods, his mental phenomena became his real bread and butter. Occasionally he pretended to put Bess into trance so that the audience might ask questions of the spirits. But most often it was he, the celebrated Psychometric Clairvoyant, who contacted the Other Side. He thought of himself as a psychic detective. When performing in a town he toured its graveyards and took down names of the dead to throw out at his séances. Sometimes he was accompanied in his prowling by a local tipster who filled him in on tragedies and family histories. He combed through health-board records and frequented boardinghouse dining halls in order to cull gossip for his sittings. The dead were active when Houdini visited.
For all that, he began to see that whenever he gave a séance solely by his wits, with no cheating or informant to assist him, his work was still convincing. “No matter what I pulled, someone in the audience was pretty sure to claim it as a direct message….When I noted the deep earnestness with which my utterances were received, and that I was being considered a medium of far more than ordinary psychic powers, I felt that the game had gone far enough.” Mediums had been arrested for doing what he did: taking money under false pretenses. Houdini also realized that despite the easy money, spook shows were a waste of his abilities. He wanted to be a famous showman, not another duper of the gullible.
No spirit would be his savior. Practically as soon as he stopped the necromancy routine, he met the gruff maestro who changed his life. He was back playing the dime museums, this time in Minneapolis, when a Hungarian stranger puffing a Cubana asked him and Bess to coffee after their act. He urged Houdini to abandon the little tricks; they were stock stuff. He pointed out that the magician had two stunts, Metamorphosis and his handcuff act, that no one else could touch. He offered to take him on if he would agree to change his program. And incidentally, he was Martin Beck, proprietor of the Orpheum Circuit, one of the largest chains of vaudeville theaters in the country.
Beck sat back and smiled presciently.
Soon after their meeting, Houdini gave away his prized pigeons and guinea pigs; there would be no more nights of pulling them from a top hat. His card tricks he would never abandon, but gone were many of the accoutrements of stage magic, as well as the mentalist act and the phantoms. The Houdinis had seen the last, they were sure, of Astral Station.
A new stunt found him at St. Louis Police Headquarters in the year 1899. The Great Houdini was stripped to his skin. His mouth was sealed with court plaster to prove no key or pick was hidden there. The chief of detectives and aides handcuffed Houdini’s hands behind his neck and double-locked the neck cuff to his back. He laughed and bade them add more chains. They placed irons on his legs. Left alone for two minutes, he slipped them like a snake.
He told a dumbfounded audience of policemen and reporters that he had been studying locks all his life, and knew more about their workings than any man alive. He swore there was nothing supernatural to his craft. He explained that he was very strong.
“Feel of that arm!”
“It felt like a pillar of steel,” reported the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The paper compared him favorably to the Prussian strong man Eugen Sandow, hailed as the most impressive male specimen alive. They appreciated Mrs. Houdini too—for her pluck in Metamorphosis, her “soft little voice” and “big dreamy blue eyes.” Bess had no costarring role, though, in most of the celebrated escapes that followed. Houdini vowed that he would leap cuffed and shackled from the Eads Bridge into the mighty Mississippi. As it happened, he would make as big a splash in the Mersey, Rhine, and Seine as any river in America.
Over the next twenty years the Handcuff King would escape virtually any kind of restraint. They locked him in a dreaded Siberian prison van, bottled him in a milk can, and entombed him in a block of ice in Holland. They shackled him to a spinning windmill, the chassis of an automobile, the muzzle of a loaded cannon. They put him in a padlocked US mailbag, roped him to the twentieth-story girder of an unfinished skyscraper, sealed him in a giant envelope, and boxed him in a crate nailed tight and dropped in New York Harbor. He emerged triumphant and smiling.
In March 1906, Houdini was stripped, double-cuffed, and ironed, and deposited in a cell in Boston’s impregnable Somerset Street prison. In sixteen minutes he had broken out. He had opened not only his own but every cell on his block. He had made his way somehow through two iron-barred doors secured with complex locks. He had slipped into a cell on the first floor where his clothing was being kept, then walked unnoticed past guards at one of three possible jailhouse exits. In the prison yard, reporters and prison officials followed his footprints in the snow to the wall where they stopped.
Such feats caused many to wonder if Houdini could slip this dimension altogether. It was speculated that he could dissolve his physical molecules into the ether then reappear in an instant, free of his confinement. In reality there were brutal physical tests in his life of magic. But just as a medium often needed the privacy of her spirit cabinet to perform, so the Handcuff King had his vaudeville “ghost house”—the enclosure onstage where he might retire to free himself from a challenger’s manacles. Conversely, he was known to appear at a magic show that imitated his own and challenge the escape artist to free himself from the same cuffs and restraints he used. He recalled how when one German pretender failed, he dragged him, still cuffed, to the footlights of a Berlin stage and ordered him to admit defeat or he would not release him. The nebbish had cried like a spanked babe. Houdini dealt that way with rivals.
The Great Leap
During the long period of Houdini’s ascent there had been a metamorphosis in America. Even the small towns that he played were now electric. Automobiles had taken over the thoroughfares, and vaudeville halls were being transformed into movie palaces. The Great Houdini had become a hero of the cinema screen as well as an escape artist. In the two d
ecades since his medicine show days, the magician had shunned spiritism; he was known instead for daring feats that were in keeping, so he told the press, with the laws of physical science.
But for all the applause he received, Houdini wished to move beyond his stratosphere of cinema and vaudeville entertainment. Unlike the champion boxer Jack Dempsey, whom some called a shirker, he had tried to enlist when war was declared and join the fight in Europe. No one begrudged that his age was against him, and with characteristic zeal he had contributed in other ways to the Effort. Houdini instructed sailors how to survive in the deep should their destroyer be sunk by the Kaiser’s torpedoes. He showed up at Army canteens and performed for the doughboys. He staged elaborate vaudeville benefits and sold Liberty Bonds totaling $1 million. He donated from his own pocket to build a hospital ward for wounded servicemen, dedicating the wing to his dear deceased mother. The magician had done his part in the War for Democracy. Nevertheless, it bothered him that he had observed the show, so to speak, from the grandstand, while younger men did the fighting.
Unable to prove his mettle under fire, he was presented with an opportunity, late in 1919, to show what he could do in water. While filming a moving picture on Catalina Island in California, he took part in a real-life nautical drama. A small vessel had been disabled and was in immediate danger of capsizing or smashing into the rocks off Sugar Loaf Point. In response to the crew’s distress calls, Houdini quickly secured himself to a line and dove into the turbulent waters. Shielding himself from the surf with a life preserver extended in front of him, he propelled himself with froglike strokes toward the stranded men—who, as if so directed, were waving and yelling for help. While onshore a crowd in front of the Hotel St. Catherine cheered the star’s effort to save them.
The scene did not unfold as it would have in one of his melodramas. Exhausted, Houdini was cut on the rocks and battered almost unconscious. He had to be saved by deep-sea divers. It took a motor launch nearly forty-five minutes to cut through the waves and reach the party. Even so, he wondered to himself if he could have pulled off the feat when he was younger.
♦
Although he was forty-six in 1920, Houdini was admired for his strenuous magic at a time when the average male, according to H. L. Mencken, was “more like a rabbit and less like a lion.” Teddy Roosevelt had died the previous year and with him went the rugged life the Colonel had once championed. “Americans were getting soft,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote. Yet Houdini still expressed the tenacious spirit of the ghetto. The magician was a straight arrow, a teetotaler; he worried that to lose his edge might mean his days were over. He slept a mere four hours a night in his quiet townhouse on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He ate blandly and in moderation. He had no children to distract him. His wife helped him train. His energies were devoted entirely to his escape art.
While Houdini had come a long way, there had been little compromise with middle age. His bushy hair was thinner and graying, his jawline slacker, yet his blue-gray eyes had lost none of their famous intensity. Even at this later stage in his career, his ambition was insatiable. It was his intention to inaugurate the 1920s by jumping handcuffed off Manhattan’s Woolworth Building, the tallest building anywhere, and parachute down, while somehow escaping his shackles, to an area cleared out for him on Broadway.
His friend Orson Munn could imagine the spectacle. The publishing scion who guided Scientific American regularly escorted small parties up the electric lift to the fifty-eighth-floor observation turret of the Woolworth—where his offices were—and with a view more breathtaking, he promised, than that of any Coney Island Ferris wheel. Despite the postwar slump, Munn expected a decade of progress. Thanks in large part to his father’s client Thomas Edison, whose inventions Munn & Co. helped to patent, the movies were a thriving industry, the phonograph a household necessity, and any number of new marvels were anticipated by his magazine.
In the Rathskeller, an ornate eatery in the basement of the Woolworth, Houdini told Munn that unfortunately his great leap was deemed too dangerous. The city would not grant him a permit. He made it clear to the publisher, however, that 1920 would be a year of magic. He had a book coming out, Miracle Mongers and Their Methods; the release of his new movie to promote; and, more immediately, he was going to tour his favorite European country. For the first six months of the year, the Great Houdini was to fulfill bookings that had been canceled in Great Britain during the War. He also intended, while overseas, to look into the astonishing claims made by Sir Oliver Lodge and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle that they were communicating with their dead sons across the Barrier. And so, just as Sir Oliver arrived from England, Houdini made the reverse passage.
The American Mysteriarch
When Sir Arthur went to Portsmouth to see Houdini perform, he was revisiting a place where many things had begun for him. It was almost thirty years earlier that Dr. Conan Doyle set up the first home of his own in Southsea, a suburb of the great port, and opened his first medical office in a meager residence there. Even then he aspired to another occupation. The young physician had the ability to energetically pursue two goals simultaneously, and in Portsmouth he had produced his most unique creation—one that would allow him to end an unsatisfactory and unprofitable career as a doctor—his first Sherlock Holmes story: A Study in Scarlet. Doyle’s critical faculties would often be compared to those of his fictional detective. When he was an unknown doctor, a supposed new cure for tuberculosis was introduced by Robert Koch, a respected German bacteriologist. Doyle was one of the few to call it a false hope. And he was proven right, unfortunately for his first wife.
Portsmouth was a place of many haunting associations for Sir Arthur. It was there he fell in love with and married a warmhearted and devout young patient of his named Louisa Hawkins. They would have two children, Mary and Kingsley; but Touie, as Arthur called his first wife, would suffer from consumption. She never lived to see the War with Germany, the death of her son, or her husband’s transformation into the Saint Paul of Spiritualism. Doyle’s psychic journey also began at Portsmouth. Having renounced Catholicism before he arrived, he took up, to Touie’s chagrin, a study of the supernatural religions—Spiritualism and Theosophy. The latter sect was sullied for him when Madame Blavatsky, its leader, was unveiled as a brazen trickster by an investigation conducted by the Society for Psychical Research. Conversely, what drew Doyle to Spiritualism was the credibility, to his mind, of some of its adherents in Portsmouth, a martial city. When royal officers, sensible and sturdy, spoke of their convincing experiences with the séance, Sir Arthur took notice, though he found his own initial experiments with it unconvincing.
There were many memories for Sir Arthur, if not ghosts, in Portsmouth. Shortly after he, at the age of twenty-four, hung out his medical shingle at Bush Villas, his little brother, Innes, was sent by their mother to live with and assist him. As their father was not there for the boy, Doyle assumed the patriarchal duty, and he encouraged Innes’s budding interest in the military. The brothers would stand in those days outside the post office, waiting for news of the campaign in Egypt; and at the harbor, they watched the troops embark for Africa to fight the Arabs or the Zulus, just as one day Innes hoped to.
By 1920, Innes was buried in Flanders, but to Doyle it made no difference where his brother’s physical remains were kept—what comfort could anyone hope to find by communing with a gravestone and laying wreaths on granite? It pained the dead, he believed, to see their families mourn them. What they wanted, as much as the bereaved, was contact!
It had taken months before Sir Arthur was able to receive a message during a séance, but presently he claimed to be in touch with Kingsley and Innes as often as when they were alive in England. All that was needed to reach the dead, he said, was a gifted intermediary: the spirit medium.
♦
It was clear to any visiting American that the war his country was forgetting about still haunted England. Rationing was still in effect and limbless veterans rattled
their tin cans on street corners. The very stature of Englishmen seemed diminished by the calamity. “Where are the monstrous men with chests like barrels and moustaches like the wings of eagles who strode across my childhood’s gaze?” George Orwell would wonder. “Buried, I suppose, in the Flanders mud.”
To these depleted Isles came the Great Houdini, the personification of American vitality. He arrived to find a country still in the throes of the Spiritualist revival. He had heard that Sir Oliver Lodge’s testament on his communications with his dead son had been more popular in wartime Britain than the Bible. More than a year after the Armistice there was still an uproar over Doyle’s New Revelation. Books on ghosts and supernaturalism were pouring from the presses. Sir Arthur was sparring with the Church over the legitimacy of the séance religion. Houdini had been corresponding with Doyle and had no doubt that the doctor turned author was genuine, but many occultists were up to their old tricks again, he suspected.
The papers had begun to complain of a plague of Theosophists, demonists, table rappers, and Tibetan sages. Having seen these actors thrive in his dime-museum days, Houdini recognized them returning like vultures after the carnage. Psychic arts once practiced by a young Houdini were again in fashion—the outcome of death the pressing question: “Did Private Tommy Atkins or Hans Boches or Johnny Crapaud, or now Sammy American, when he was killed in the trenches, pass forever away from the reach and communication of father, mother, wife, children or sweetheart?” the Herald Tribune had asked. Houdini pasted the article in his scrapbook sometime before leaving for England. There were really only two types of stories he collected: those on his escapes, and those on spiritism.
