The Secret Life of Houdini

by William Kalush

  Harry realized that he had to disabuse Bess of these notions. One night early in their marriage, the solution came to him. They were home and Harry innocuously remarked that Bess had never told him her late father’s first name. He then asked her to write the name on a piece of paper, crumple it in her hand, and burn it over the stove without showing it to him. Bess complied.

  “Now give me the ashes,” Houdini requested.

  He pulled his sleeve up and rubbed the ashes on his bare forearm, and, as if by magic, her father’s name, Gebhardt, mysteriously was emblazoned on his skin in bloodred letters. What Houdini didn’t tell her was that he had learned that effect within the pages of The Revelations of a Spirit Medium.

  “I was paralyzed with fear,” Bess remembered. “Then, slowly, a full realization of the significance of this diabolical thing dawned on me. In my early folklore, the devil, disguised as a handsome young man, lured girls to destruction. It was clear to me that I had married the devil. Stealthily, my eyes on Houdini, I backed toward the door, and then turned suddenly and ran, screaming frantically, from…the house.”

  Houdini caught up to her and pulled her into his arms.

  “Silly kid, it was only a trick,” he said, laughing.

  Bess kept screaming and started biting and kicking Houdini. She finally calmed down, they returned to their room, and he showed her how the simple effect was done.

  “By such demonstrations he gradually drove away my superstitions,” Bess wrote. “Among other things he taught me the secret of mind-reading and all the arts of legerdemain, including how to go into trances and tell fortunes. My inside view of the mechanism of such phenomena did more than anything else to exorcise the ghosts and hobgoblins that had peopled my world.”

  Before six months had elapsed, Houdini was integrating these new skills into the act. On January 1, 1895, they were touring the Wonderland circuit as “Professor and Mlle. Houdini, the Occult Expositors,” and critics were raving that their act “borders on the supernatural.” By June of 1896, Houdini had even incorporated Bess’s mind reading effects into his jailhouse publicity stunts. While at the station, he would have the police chief think of a card. A messenger was then sent back to the hotel where “Mme. Marco” waited with the question “What card was thought of?” Bess would send back the answer, which invariably was the correct card.

  Despite Bess’s swoon to avoid naming the murderer that November night in Garnett, Kansas, Harry and Bess were such a hit that their Spiritualist séances became a regular part of Dr. Hill’s show, usually performed on Sunday nights. Some nights Bess played the medium, others Harry enacted the communication with the spirits. The spirits were conveniently obliging, telling them the most intimate details of the personal lives of the astonished audience members who jammed the hall. When the spirits failed them, there was always the visit to the local cemetery with the sexton and old Uncle Rufus, the town gossip. Houdini would carry a notebook, and they’d go from grave to grave talking family history and family scandal. At the end of the day, the two locals would be tipped properly for their cooperation. What gossip Houdini didn’t get at the graveyard, he could usually pick up around the boardinghouse dining table.

  Houdini instinctively realized the power that was generated by these small, intimate biographical details. Audiences tolerated the song-and-dance numbers and the other routines, but they were starved to hear what Houdini and his spirits had to say about their lives. The reason that the séance act resonated so well was because it was presented as if it was real, down to Bess’s swooning. Although he would later remove the Spiritualist context, Houdini would take this energy that was generated by the audience implicitly believing in the reality of what they were experiencing and skillfully use it for the rest of his career.

  Sometimes the information that Professor Harry Houdini imparted was too much for the audience to bear. During the first week with Dr. Hill, on a cemetery reconnaissance mission, Houdini had found the fresh grave of six-year-old Joe Osbourne. At the next séance in Garnett, which broke the record for admissions at the opera house, Bess was in a trance when she suddenly said she had a message from “little Joe” for his parents. Someone rushed out and brought back a white-faced Mr. and Mrs. Harry Osbourne.

  “Joe says he’s in a happy place. And he says, ‘Don’t cry, Momma. There’ll be another one soon to take my place,’” Bess relayed.

  The fact was Mrs. Osbourne was pregnant, a shrewd guess by Houdini since they were a young, grief-stricken couple. After the séance, an irate Harry Osbourne came backstage to give Houdini a thrashing.

  “How could we know of your family circumstances if the medium was not clairvoyant?” Houdini asked him. Then he had Bess rattle off a number of other family secrets that had Osbourne mystified as he left the opera house. This incident made an indelible mark on Houdini. Twenty-six years later, Hallie Nichols, who had been in the opera house that night, went to see Houdini give a lecture on Spiritualism in Kansas City. Receiving a note that she had been in his audience in Garnett years earlier, Houdini asked her to come backstage after the show. She dined with Bess and Harry, and Houdini asked her if she was still in contact with the Osbournes. She said she was and gave Houdini their new California address. He eventually sent the Osbournes a long letter of abject apology for trifling with their emotions.

  By the end of Dr. Hill’s engagement in Garnett, two local businessmen actually came to Houdini’s dressing room and offered him $25 if he would promise not to give any more séances in town. Perhaps they feared the skeletons in their closets might be rattled next.

  It was the same at every stop for the rest of the tour. In Galena, before another packed audience at the local opera hall on January 9, 1898, Harry played the role of the medium. Prior to the show, a local tipster had told Houdini that a black man named Benny Carter had been murdered recently, and two of his associates, who were suspects in the killing, were actually in attendance. Later, during the séance, Houdini seized on the information.

  “I’m getting a message now. I see coming before me, uh, it’s a man. A black man,” Houdini said, then paused dramatically, pawing at the air in front of him.

  “He’s lame—and his throat is cut from ear to ear. Who can this be?”

  He was almost screaming now.

  “He says his name is Benny. Benny Carter.”

  There was the sound of commotion from the gallery.

  “He says that he has a message for Bill Doakes and Jim Saunders. He says, ‘Yo’ boys bettah put yo’ razors away, or yo’ is sho’ goin’ ter be where Ah is now.’ Are Bill Doakes and Jim Saunders present?” Houdini asked.

  The hall was deathly silent. Then two men jumped up in the gallery and knocked some chairs over in their haste to make it to the exit.

  “Yes, dey is here, but they ain’t staying,” someone yelled out.

  By the beginning of February the Dr. Hill show had finished, and now Bess and Harry barnstormed the Midwest on their own. Houdini had made some good coin doing the Spiritualist séances, enough to buy himself a nice overcoat for $10, to spend $15 on a “fine red dress” for Bess, and to write in his diary that he “lived like a king.” There was even enough to deposit $100 cash on February 23, 1898 with L.A. Vories, the mayor of St. Joseph, Missouri, who was instructed to deliver said sum to “any person who can furnish or place upon him handcuffs from which he is unable to extricate himself or to so fasten him to a chair that he cannot release himself therefrom.” Bess was aghast—for one, she had no idea that he had saved up such a large sum of money. Then she felt it was reckless and rash to risk their nest egg on a challenge like that. She needn’t have worried. No one could defeat him, even though the mayor did hold the bankroll two extra weeks to see if there were any late challengers.

  Houdini’s newfound affluence was solely due to his séance work. His legitimate shows weren’t setting the box offices on fire. So for the next few months he decided that he and Bess would set up in the medium business. For the blueprint he
had only to consult his well-used copy of The Revelations of a Spirit Medium. From that book he learned of the existence of what was called “The Blue Book,” a central clearinghouse of personal information about clients that mediums shared. Houdini got into the mediums’ network and was able to get information on the local séance attendees in the town they had just arrived in. He also learned the Bible trick. A peek into a family Bible was sometimes better than hours of scavenging in cemeteries in terms of information and births and deaths in a family. So Harry and Bess became reps for a company that sold musical Bibles door-to-door. Of course, they would compare their musical Bible with the old-fashioned Good Book the family currently owned, allowing them to gather the much-needed data.

  Going all out as phony mediums certainly paid the bills, but the moral implications must have weighed heavily on the rabbi’s son’s mind. While he could rationalize doing a séance act with Bess as a way to save her from “objectionable” contacts in the poorer class of concert halls, the bottom line was he was preying on people who were grief-stricken and vulnerable. What was more absurd to him was that when the actual data that they had dug up was fully mined, Houdini could tell the most outrageous lies imaginable and at least one of these credulous believers would claim it as a direct message to them.

  The Houdinis’ Spiritualist career sputtered to an end in Canada. One night, Houdini looked out over the audience and recognized a woman he had seen earlier on the street of the same town they were playing. She had been scolding her young son for riding recklessly on his bicycle. During the séance, Houdini called her out and told her that the spirits had prophesied that her young son would break his arm in a fall from his bicycle. As he later discovered, by the time the woman had returned home, the prediction had been fulfilled. The irony of his lucky guess turning out true was the final straw.

  “When it was all over I saw and felt that the audience believed in me…they believed that my tricks were true communications from those dear dead. The beautiful simplicity of their faith—it appealed to me as a religion—suddenly gripped me…from that day to this I have never posed as a genuine medium,” Houdini wrote. “I was brought to a realization of the seriousness of trifling with the hallowed reverence which the average human being bestows on the departed…I was chagrined that I should ever have been guilty of such frivolity and for the first time realized that it bordered on crime.”

  Giving up the Spiritualist buck put the Houdinis right back where they were before they joined up with Dr. Hill. Now they were forced to join a traveling repertoire group that specialized in corny melodramas. According to Bess, Houdini was so mortified to be in this production that he appeared under an assumed name and stuffed his cheeks with wads of paper so no one would recognize him.

  It was a mercifully short interlude as Houdini had previously signed up for a second tour with the Welsh Brothers Circus. In the intervening three years since they had last performed with the circus, the brothers had honed their troupe into the best and largest tencent show in the country. This time around, Houdini refused to go for the AND FOUND clause in his contract, so his salary was fixed at $25 a week for him to work as “King of Cards” and for the two of them to perform their Metamorphosis. The act went so well and garnered such rave reviews, that pretty soon they closed the show with it.

  Shortly after rejoining the circus, the Bard Brothers, an acrobatic act, came on board. Houdini struck up a fast friendship with them, and pretty soon he was seriously training as an acrobat. He started long distance running again, played baseball, and even worked one night as a clown on the horizontal bars. By the summer, he had mastered double and back somersaults and had perfected a routine where he would boomerang a playing card out into the audience, then do a back somersault and land in time to catch the incoming card.

  In the fall, the circus came to an end, and now Harry and Bess found themselves back in New York with no real prospects. Clearly discouraged, he paid a visit to his friend Joe Rinn. Rinn was now a leading figure in Spiritualist circles in New York. Through his father, the manager of New York’s largest hotel, he had met many of the leading Spiritualists, including Margaret Fox Kane, one of the founders of the movement. Rinn’s faith in Spiritualism had been shaken when his parallel interest in magic brought him to Martinka’s Magic Shop, then located on New York City’s Sixth Avenue. After establishing a friendship with Francis Martinka, one of the proprietors, Rinn discovered that many of the most famous mediums were Martinka’s customers, buying magic props that were essential to put over their séances.

  “I don’t know what to make of our business, Joe,” he said. “I feel that my handcuff and trunk escape act should make a hit with the public but it doesn’t seem to get across.”

  “Well, why not proclaim that you are released from your bonds by spirits?” Rinn suggested. “Let them prove otherwise.”

  “No, I can’t do that,” Houdini countered. “I got disgusted with myself when Bessie and I were doing our psychic act…The poor fools wept and believed we were in touch with the spirit world.”

  It was more than that though. Houdini would rather fail than dishonor his oath to his father by supporting his mother with the proceeds of a morally bankrupt enterprise.

  Rinn, as usual, offered to front Houdini some money, and Houdini, as usual, had too much pride to take him up on the offer. Around that time, Bess’s brother-in-law, who had good contacts at the Yale Lock factory, offered to get Houdini a job there. Houdini must have seriously considered it, because he later wrote that things had become so bad at the end of 1898 that, “I contemplated quitting the show business, and retire to private life, meaning to work by day at one of my trades…and open a school of magic.”

  He published an expanded version of Magic Made Easy, sixteen pages now, that included a full back-page ad for Professor Harry Houdini’s School of Magic at 221 East Sixty-ninth Street, which was his mother’s address. A perusal of that catalog made it clear that Houdini was about to call it quits because nestled in those ads for gypsy fortune-teller books and talking skulls and vanishing handkerchiefs and instructions detailing How to Hypnotize any Animal was a small ad on page ten. It read:

  57 HANDCUFF ACT.

  The only complete act of its kind. You defy the police authorities and sheriffs to place handcuffs or leg shackles on you, and you can easily escape. Price on application. If interested, write.

  No one was interested.

  4

  Quid Pro Quo

  THE ROTUND, REDHEADED LIEUTENANT HAD JUST finished placing a pair of handcuffs on Houdini’s wrists, double-locking them to insure their security. He wasn’t through yet. Now he bent down, not an easy job for a man of his immense girth, and fastened a brand-spanking-new set of leg irons around Houdini’s ankles. With some effort, he straightened up and surveyed his work.

  “Hey, Andy,” Frank Corbus, one of his fellow detectives, yelled, “you’re going easy on the lad unless you use the newest jewelry.”

  Andy Rohan nodded. Corbus would know—he was legendary around the central station as one of the best sleight-of-hand men in the area. In fact, many of his colleagues had placed side bets that he could equal, if not excel, this Houdini fellow as a magician.

  “A capital idea,” Rohan said, and walked over to his desk. From the bottom drawer he removed a state-of-the-art set of handcuffs.

  “Get out of these handcuffs and leg irons and I’ll think that I’m walking in my sleep sure enough,” Rohan quipped as he snapped one end of the cuffs to the leg irons. Then he maneuvered Houdini into a crouching position and fastened the other end to the first pair of handcuffs. The magician was so trussed-up that it was impossible for him to even walk.

  “I don’t think you’re going anywhere without the aid of these,” Rohan said, as he dangled the keys in front of Houdini’s face.

  Houdini just smiled.

  “I guess you’ll need some assistance to get to your cabinet,” said Rohan, gesturing to two detectives who were watching the demo
nstration. Detectives Duffy and Fitzgerald lifted Houdini up and carried him over to the makeshift cabinet that had been set up in the middle of the large room.

  Lieutenant Andrew Rohan of the Chicago Police Department.Library of Congress

  Houdini began laughing.

  They deposited him in the cabinet and then closed the curtain. The room was still for a couple of minutes, and then the silence was shattered by the thud of steel hitting the floor. A minute later, the curtain was pushed back, and Houdini emerged, holding the irons and cuffs in his hand.

  “Here are your handcuffs, Mr. Rohan. Please remember that good scrap steel is going for a quarter of a cent per pound,” Houdini said.

  The crowd in the roll-call room buzzed with excitement.

  “I’m having a nightmare, sure enough,” Rohan said, as he took the irons from Houdini. The detectives circled Rohan and examined the cuffs. They were amazed to see that they were securely locked and undamaged in any way.

  The year 1899 was getting off to a good start for Houdini. He had come to the Midwest on December 5, merely to fulfill some earlier bookings, still pessimistic about his future as a magician. Toledo went poorly, and he was laid off halfway through his engagement. Grand Rapids didn’t go much better, but he could always rely on Middleton’s in Chicago, where he’d make some extra money by selling his small pitch book between shows. Then he could go back to New York with a little bit of a financial cushion before he had to make the decision that he was dreading.

  This time in Chicago something different happened. It’s not known who made the initial contact, but for two days before this exhibition at Central Station on the evening of January 4, Houdini conferred with Lieutenant Andrew Rohan, a fixture on the Chicago police force since “Twenty-second Street was a swamp,” the papers wrote. After these meetings, Rohan had arranged for Houdini to give a demonstration of his escape artistry right in the middle of the roll-call room, before an audience of more than two hundred people that included a good number of the police brass, all of the city detectives, a “miscellaneous assortment of experts,” and, of course, the press. The only person missing that night was one of the deans of the Chicago press corps, a friend of Rohan’s, who had coauthored a massive history of the Chicago police in 1887. No, John E. Wilkie couldn’t be present that night in Chicago. He was busy in Washington, D.C., serving as the new chief of the U.S. Secret Service.