By March of 1896, the ante had been raised. After an exhibition of escaping from handcuffs in the New Britain police station, Houdini announced that he would “release himself” from any pair of handcuffs that were brought to the show. Houdini had hit on a surefire way of demonstrating his prowess. If the audience couldn’t come with him to his exhibitions in the police stations, he would bring the authorities onstage.
On June 10, responding to announcements that Houdini would test “anything in St. John [New Brunswick] that could bind him,” Officer Baxter and private citizens Arthur McGinley and John McCafferty strode onstage laden with heavy chains, handcuffs, and leg irons. They wrapped the chains around his body and handcuffed Houdini with his hands behind his back. At the same time they shackled his feet. Helped into his small curtained cabinet that he called his “ghost box,” he took only minutes to emerge a free man. It was such a marvelous performance that many in the audience were convinced that he was “in league with the spirits.”
A few weeks later, at the Academy of Music in Halifax, after an announcement had been made that Houdini could release himself from any handcuffs that might be brought onstage, Sergeant Collins came forward with police handcuffs and with the assistance of Mr. Urnan, the chef at the Halifax Hotel, trussed the magician into an impossible-looking contorted position. It took him a little more than a minute to free himself. The performance was billed as “Escape from Dorchester.” The seeds of Houdini’s world-famous challenge handcuff act had been sown.
Houdini’s police challenges never failed to generate press, but he knew from his experience with circus parades that outdoor spectacles were instrumental in generating word-of-mouth publicity for those who might not read a daily newspaper. On a pleasant summer day in Halifax, Houdini invited the press, local dignitaries, and any curious bystanders to convene on a highway outside of town to see him make an escape that had never been attempted before. All of the local reporters showed up, one even accompanied by the owner of his paper. After all, who would want to miss seeing this young magician free himself after he had been tied onto the back of a horse like some Wild West desperado? After exchanging pleasantries with the group, Houdini mounted his steed. First his hands were tied behind his back and then the horse’s trainer bound Houdini’s feet together under the horse’s belly.
From then on things began to go downhill fast. Houdini had specified that he wanted the most docile beast they had in the stable, but whether by accident or malicious design, the trainer had brought a frisky, young, barely broken colt. Not used to having someone tied to its back, the horse began to buck furiously. There was no danger that Houdini would be thrown by the animal, but the very real possibility existed that the creature would just drop to the ground and try to roll its burden off, which would have crushed its human cargo.
Then the horse switched tactics altogether. To the dismay of Houdini, and the assembled press and local luminaries, the colt just took off at a breakneck pace down the road. Now there was no way that Houdini could effect his escape, not until the horse had been thoroughly tired out. It wasn’t until they rode for a few more miles that Houdini was able to work at the ropes and free himself. The only problem was that nobody was there to see it—the newsmen were halfway back to their offices by then, joking about the ridiculous stunt.
Houdini had made a rare miscalculation by not trying out the escape beforehand, but he learned a valuable lesson: You don’t practice in public. Plan ahead and be prepared for all contingencies.
Houdini started the straitjacket escape in 1899. This is a movie still taken twenty years later. From the collection of Roger Dreyer
The insane asylum patient lay still for a few seconds, his sweat pouring onto the canvas-padded floor. The only sound you could hear in the small cell was his staccato panting. If not for the fury in his eyes, you might have thought that he was finished. But he wasn’t.
Suddenly he started rolling over and over and over again, like a crazed dervish, kicking the floor as he twirled, every muscle in his body straining against the restraint. It looked like he was trying to lift his arms over his head, but it was all in vain. But still he struggled.
“It’s really much better than the restraint muffs we formerly used,” Dr. Steeves said, peering at the man through the small, barred window. “By crisscrossing the arms in front and strapping them securely in the back, the poor fellow has no chance of hurting others. Or himself. It’s really the most modern device we have. We call it the straitjacket.”
Dr. Steeves turned away from the small window.
“Now if we proceed down this corridor…”
Houdini really hadn’t heard a word the doctor said. He was still staring through that little window, entranced. Not because he was empathizing with the patient, although he had a soft spot in his heart for the weak and infirm. No, he was fascinated with the mechanics of the restraint device.
Now if he were only able to dislocate one arm at the shoulder joint, I bet that would give him enough slack to eventually get his arms free. But he’d need some solid foundation to place the elbow….
That night Houdini hardly slept at all. During the few moments that he managed to doze off, all he dreamt of were straitjackets, maniacs, and padded cells. The rest of the time he wondered how the audience would react to seeing a man bound into a straitjacket effect his freedom.
The very next morning Houdini called Dr. Steeves and borrowed one of the canvas jackets. By the end of the week, Houdini was escaping from a straitjacket onstage.
As creative as Houdini was, he still hadn’t really learned how to sell his escapes, except for the Metamorphosis, of course. When he retreated into his ghost box, and managed to writhe and twist until he could get that infernal straitjacket off, the audience didn’t know what to think, and they certainly missed all the drama. It wasn’t until 1904 that his brother Theo hit upon the idea of performing the straitjacket escape in full view of the audience, a simple but brilliant conception that Houdini immediately embraced.
After the Marco show folded, Houdini convinced the old magician to loan him the props, and Harry mounted his own full-on magic show in Canada. Despite very favorable reviews, he couldn’t make it go. So with magic bookings still few and far between, the Houdinis tried anything to stay in show business. From the summer of 1896 until the fall of 1897, they wandered up and down the coast and ventured out to the Midwest, taking any work they could. Houdini appeared as Cardo, the King of Cards. They did a comedy routine, and they acted in melodramas. They wrote to prominent magicians like Alexander Herrmann and Harry Kellar, applying for work as assistants. Herrmann never responded to his brother’s distant cousin, but at least they got a nice rejection letter from Kellar.
Even when they were working, getting paid was sometimes harder than getting out of restraints. In Toledo, Harry arrived for a job at a vaudeville hall only to learn that salaries were not being issued. He marched into the box office, waited until enough cash had come in to cover his salary, and paid himself on the spot. The next day he quit. In Newark, a manager decided to lay him off for his Sunday show, which would have paid him $15, and wrote him a letter to that effect. Houdini read it, calmly tore it up, showed up at the theater on Sunday, and denied ever having received a letter. Negotiating on the spot, he did the date for $8.
It was Houdini’s brother Theo who, later performing as Hardeen, came up with the idea of doing the straitjacket escape in full view of the audience.New York Public Library
All of this strain took a toll on the frail Bess. She fell ill numerous times those first three years. By July of 1897, they were back in New York, where a depressed and dispirited Houdini went to four of the largest newspapers and offered to sell all his secrets, including those of his handcuff act, for twenty-five dollars. There were no takers. He tried to open a magic school, but except for one older man in Chicago, he had no pupils. Making a deal with his friend Gus Roterberg, a magic dealer in Chicago, he tried to sell magic effects, even publishing a cat
alog entitled Magic Made Easy. The orders were few and far between.
In the fall, when their season resumed, they were back on the road. They finished their first booking at a music hall in Milwaukee only to learn that the theater manager had swindled them out of their salary. Their next show was at Kohl and Middleton’s in Chicago, but in an attempt to make back their losses, Houdini dropped $60 in a craps game. Could their luck get any worse?
Nobody had seen anything like it in all their lives. They gathered around the front of the locomotive and watched as the railroad officials tried to pry the young man off the tracks so that the journey could continue. But pull as they might, there seemed to be no way that the brakemen could get the stubborn man off the rails. He was holding on with such force that his hands were bruised and bleeding.
By now a third railroad man had joined the struggle—to no avail. Houdini had dug his fingers around one rail and clamped his toes on the other. His muscles were like steel, but he was also using leveraging techniques so that a hundred railmen couldn’t get him off.
Finally the conductor walked over.
“Say, your damned trunks are onboard. How about letting us start?” he said.
Houdini immediately sprang off the track and walked over to Bess, who was standing among the crowd, fretting.
“I told you it would work,” he whispered to her as he hugged her. And then they both climbed on board for their trip to the Indian Territory.
Houdini had just gotten a solid fifteen-week booking to work with Dr. Hill’s California Concert Company, an old-time medicine show, and they were en route to join the troupe. In his mind, this could be their ticket to the big-time. They were to change trains at three A.M., but their train pulled in late and the express was ready to roll. To Harry’s horror, there were no porters around to help him move his four heavy trunks from the old train to the new one, and even with the help of a few fellow passengers, they had only gotten two of the trunks transferred when the order to disembark was given. If they missed this train, they would miss their first performance and jeopardize their future. So he hatched his little dramatic plan. That experience “has always seemed to me to be the turning point in my career,” he wrote. But not because he got to the engagement on time. “That was the first time I realised the public wanted drama. Give ’em a hint of danger, perhaps of death—and you’ll have ’em packing in to see you!”
Houdini immediately adapted to life with a traveling medicine show. Dr. Hill was a young man with long flowing hair, a silky brown beard, and a remarkable ability to produce silver-tongued oratory praising the virtues of his homemade patent medicine, an ability that was definitely enhanced by his generous consumption of store-bought alcohol. His partner, Dr. Pratt, was a benign-looking white-haired old man.
The troupe would pull into a town in a carriage that was large enough to transport Dr. Pratt’s organ. Stopping at a congested corner, Dr. Pratt would play while Houdini banged a tambourine and Bessie sang. After a crowd gathered, Dr. Hill would give a grandiose pitch for his wonderful medicine that could cure every illness imaginable. Houdini collected the coins from the eager crowd as Bess and the others dispensed the bottles. Then they’d announce their evening show at the local town hall, a show that cost only ten, fifteen, or twenty-five cents.
Within a short time, Houdini and his wonderful escapes became the focal point of the Dr. Hill show. Maybe all the struggle was finally starting to pay off. For six years now, Houdini had been leading a nomadic existence, soaking up technique and skills like a sponge, enduring hunger (he and Bess once subsisted for a few weeks on two rabbits they bought with a borrowed quarter), pain, and humiliation in his quest to make a name for himself. The responsibility that he had been given by his father was his constant companion—no matter how much he and Bess made, he was sure to send the biggest chunk of it back home to his mother. But that pledge transcended mere financial aid. Houdini was on a quest for respectability, for the legitimacy that had always evaded his noble and worthy father.
In Lima, Ohio, a young reporter named H. M. Walker saw a performance. He was impressed to see Houdini escape from handcuffs, transform water into ink, and do wonderful card manipulations. After the show, he went backstage to interview Harry. Perhaps because they were both young and both neophytes in their chosen profession, Houdini seemed to relate to Walker, and his stage mask slipped a bit.
“I haven’t learned to coin my thrill in publicity,” Houdini said frankly. “I think no one can beat me at magic—but I’m still obscure.”
And then he looked Walker straight in the eye and smiled. “It doesn’t bother me, however. I know I am going to be famous.”
3
The Celebrated Clairvoyants
WE HAVE JUST RECENTLY BECOME AWARE of a tragic situation in this good town of Garnett, Kansas,” the Great Houdini said.
The audience, which had filled the old opera house to the rafters that November night in 1897, held its breath. This was what they had been waiting for all night. Houdini, who along with his wife had the power, was going to reveal just who had killed Sadie Timmins. Sadie’s murder had been brutal, they knew that much. Sheriff Keeney had scoured the hills and the hollows of town for the murderer—to no avail. Now this outsider, this charismatic wonder-worker was going to contact the spirit world and get the inside dope. Well, maybe he could, the townsfolk thought. After all, he had already escaped from the old stone jail just minutes after the sheriff had locked him in there, and he was able to find all those items that had been hidden around town by the councilmen, while he was blindfolded. So naming an unknown killer might be a cakewalk for the likes of him.
“A lovely young lady, Miss Sadie Timmins, was discovered brutally murdered,” Houdini said. “Now, the sheriff, Mr. Keeney, is a good and a great man, and he has done everything that is earthly possible to bring the killer to justice.”
A buzz went through the crowd. Not everyone there believed that Sheriff Keeney was, in fact, so diligent.
“Earthly possible. We propose to contact the spirit world, our ancestors who lovingly and with great concern watch over our every movement on this sphere. You cannot hide a nefarious deed from the spirits!” Houdini thundered.
Then he signaled and Mlle. Beatrice Houdini, the celebrated “Psychometric Clairvoyant,” walked onto the stage. Bess was resplendent in an antique lace dress and a beautifully embroidered vest. Houdini sat her in a chair and tied a blindfold around her head.
Standing with his arm on Bess’s shoulder, he signaled backstage. A man walked out with a large sheet.
“In order to facilitate communication with the spirits, I will now have Mlle. Houdini covered by this shroud, concentrating her energy and filtering out extraneous vibrations that might interfere with our communication.”
The man covered Bess with the sheet.
“Before we begin, please join me in a few choruses of ‘Nearer My God to Thee.’”
The band began to play, and the entire assemblage sang the hymn together, until Houdini dramatically cut them off with a sweeping gesture of his hand.
Bess, who had been sitting upright, suddenly slumped to one side in her chair.
“Mlle. Houdini is in a trance state,” Houdini announced. “She is ready and receptive to answer questions about this tragedy.”
Houdini began to pace back and forth on the stage.
“Was Sadie Timmons murdered on her property?” he began.
“Yes,” Bess answered in a quavering voice.
“Can you tell us where?”
“In her kitchen,” Bess replied.
“With what instrumentality?”
“She was stabbed seventeen times with a butcher knife,” Bess said in a slow, robotic voice.
“Was the killer an intruder?”
“No.”
“So he was known to her?” Houdini stopped dramatically.
“Yes.”
Several women in the audience gasped audibly. The killer was an acquaintance, which meant
that the killer might even be right there in the auditorium.
“Can you describe the killer for us?” Houdini asked.
Bess began to breathe rapidly.
“He’s tall. With a black moustache and goatee.”
“More!” Houdini cried.
“I see lizard boots. And an old gold handwatch that’s got some sort of inscription.”
Bess was straining under the sheet.
“Go on!”
“A long brown suede duster. And I see the blood. Her blood is splattering against the coat. It’s getting on the coat and the boots. And the gloves. Black leather gloves with the fingers cut off. Now she’s struggling back. She’s hitting him and scratching him on his neck.”
The audience was transfixed, watching the frail, shrouded woman relive the horrific crime.
Houdini walked beside his wife.
“What is the murderer’s name?” he whispered. It was so quiet you could hear his utterance at the back of the hall.
Bess just sat there.
“His name,” Houdini repeated, louder this time. “What is the murderer’s name?”
Again, no response. He strode a few paces from his wife and then turned and faced her.
“Quick. Answer. What is his name?” he screamed.
Bess shivered and shrank down in the chair.
“Answer!” he screamed.
“It…it…” Bess stammered. The audience leaned forward as one.
“Answer!”
The medium started shaking.
“His name…” she said in a shaky tone. “His name is…is…is…”
Suddenly Bess threw up both arms and, with a sickening cry, slumped back into her chair.
Houdini rushed to his wife’s side and pulled the shroud off of her.
The Secret Life of Houdini Page 6