The Secret Life of Houdini

by William Kalush

  Houdini had created and stage-managed his biggest rival. He had had a hand in producing the very challenges that he would claim credit for defeating. And every night, there was the possibility of someone bringing a tampered lock to defeat him and ruin his reputation (just as he would send his brothers to his rivals’ shows with similar equipment). It was no surprise that by March of 1908, Houdini would tell a reporter that he was laying up treasures “against the day when the public gets on to me.”

  Since 1900 Houdini had added an additional layer to this already convoluted landscape. Working as an agent for U.S. government agencies, international police associations, and special branch at Scotland Yard meant compartmentalizing a whole side of his experience that was shared on a strictly “need to know” basis. Houdini, a keeper of secrets by trade, now had a whole other secret life to protect. By 1906, there seemed to be some slippage in keeping these identities distinct and separate.

  In April of that year, Houdini self-published his ninety-six-page book called The Right Way to Do Wrong. Billed as an “exposé of successful criminals,” the book was for the most part a recounting of the successful ways con artists, bunko men, and pickpockets bilk the public, but it goes much further than simple three-card monte exposés. “It has been my good fortune to meet personally and converse with the chiefs of police and the most famous detectives in all the great cities of the world,” Houdini writes in the introduction. “To these gentlemen I am indebted for many amusing and instructive incidents hitherto unknown to the world.”

  His idea was to sell this book at his shows, and correspondingly, a portion of the book is a pitch book of sorts, a whole chapter recounting highlights in Houdini’s career. In a chapter on “Humbugs,” he even gives his physician brother Leopold a plug, noting that, “Dr. L. D. Weiss, of New York, discovered that he could detect a fake mummy from an original by placing it under his X-Ray machine.”

  The book received good reviews, although one magic journal complained that there wasn’t a chapter exposing Houdini’s handcuff act, supposing that it was “The Wrong Time to Do Write.” Apparently the book wasn’t as favorably received by Houdini’s friends in the world of law enforcement. According to The Sphinx, the book was banned by the police in England and Germany, and an article on rare books published in The Providence Sunday Journal in 1937 noted that The Right Way to Do Wrong was rare because “so well did it answer its title that the Government asked Houdini to withdraw it and he complied.”

  He didn’t completely gag himself. Talking to the press was as much a part of the creation of the Houdini persona as actually appearing onstage. On March 11, 1906, a few weeks before Houdini published The Right Way to Do Wrong, he did a long interview with a reporter for The Boston Sunday Herald, where he revealed that his extensive contacts with criminals always make him a target for requests from criminals to teach them escape techniques. “But he is always on the side of law and order, and has contributed much valuable information to the secret service department of the government.”

  In the first decade of the twentieth century, Harlem was a fairly safe place to live. Houdini’s brick town house, which had been built in 1895 and purchased by him in 1904 for $25,000, was part of a “genteel enclave” according to The New York Times, close to both Central Park and Morningside Park. So it was definitely an aberration when on July 24, 1906, Houdini wrote in his diary that his brother Leopold “thought he heard a burglar in my apartments. He must be mistaken. Have discovered no losses so far…”

  It was a different story a year later. On October 25, 1907, he had returned to the town house a little after midnight. Exhausted from his rigorous schedule, he fell directly asleep but was awakened by a noise in his second-floor bedroom. Allowing a few seconds for his eyes to get acclimated to the dark, he thought he spotted a man crouching in a corner of the room.

  The last thing that the intruder expected was for his prey to jump off the bed and attack him. He immediately drew a razor and slashed wildly. The two men wrestled out into the hall and tumbled down a flight of stairs, locked in a deadly embrace. The noise woke Houdini’s mother up, who ran into the hallway and started screaming. The two men continued their struggle in the hall, with the intruder, who had lost his razor to his victim, now getting the raw end of the blade. He had enough, and he opened a door and attempted to escape down the stairs to the basement. He wasn’t quite fast enough. His coat was just a touch too long, giving his opponent a chance to grab it, and the two men tumbled down another flight of stairs.

  Mrs. Weiss’s screams alerted a neighbor, Dr. Reuss, and a passing policeman, Patrolman McCarty. They rushed into the house, and Mrs. Weiss led them to the basement, where she saw her son lying on the floor in a pool of blood, critically wounded. She wailed. The two men, spying an open door that led to the backyard, ran out. They saw blood on the steps and they followed the trail over a series of several fences and into a vacant lot, where they discovered the razor. The intruder had escaped.

  From the collection of Roger Dreyer

  11

  Kill Thy Father

  ON OCTOBER 26, THE DAY OF the attack in his town house, Houdini was playing an engagement at the Orpheum Theatre in Los Angeles. As great as he was, he couldn’t be in two places at once. It was his brother Leopold, who closely resembled him, who was set on by the razor-wielding intruder. The police began to look for a “negro” perpetrator. In the dark, Leopold hadn’t actually seen his assailant but guessed his race from his contact with the intruder’s hair.

  The morning after the attack, Dr. Weiss’s servant, Frank Thomas, a black man who worked all day at the town house and left to sleep at his own domicile, reported for work at eight A.M. By then, the police had already cast a net of suspicion upon him, since there had been no signs of forced entry, and he was the only “negro” employed on the premises. Leopold allowed him to resume his duties, but he kept a wary eye on him all morning. His suspicions were aroused when he noticed that Thomas was keeping one hand shut, his fingers closed down over the palm. Using the pretext of handing him an object, Dr. Weiss grabbed the man’s hand and peeled back his fingers. An examination revealed several strips of court plaster on his palm. Thomas was perfectly calm when he explained to his employer that he had tripped on a curbstone the previous evening on his way home and had cut his hand when he fell to the pavement.

  Accepting the explanation, Leopold allowed Thomas to continue working. When a maid later found the black man’s “cheap seal ring” lying in a dark corner in the lower hall, the very spot where the struggle ensued, Leopold called the police, despite Thomas’s protestations of innocence. Detectives hauled the servant to the station house, Thomas still maintaining that he had nothing to do with the attack. After a grueling cross-examination by acting-captain Maher, the officer “asserted” that Thomas had made a full confession. He was locked up and, after pleading guilty at his trial, received a sentence of ten years and seven months to eleven years and seven months.

  The motive was just as flimsy as the evidence. The newspaper reports vary. One suggested that Dr. Weiss had recently received a $1,000 check drawn on a Wall Street bank. When he presented the check, the bank refused to honor it, arguing that he hadn’t identified himself properly. He called a friend and asked him to accompany him to the bank and vouch for him. It was “supposed” that the servant had overheard that conversation and believed that Leopold would have a thousand dollars cash in the house. Ironically enough, by the time the two men reached the bank, it had closed for the day.

  The other story was similarly convoluted. This account quoted Leopold as saying that he was in a quandary whether to deposit the check in his account with the Knickerbocker Bank because of their “unsettled” conditions. He called a friend, who advised him to place the money in a safe deposit vault, which he did. He claimed that Thomas overheard his conversation and “doubtless” thought he had the cash in the house. When he saw the intruder in his room, he claimed that he was in the process of “fumbling amo
ng my papers.” In a pitch-black room.

  Why an employee who had access to the house would try to murder his employer rather than steal something at another more convenient time was not considered. And why a vicious would-be murderer would report for work seven hours after he had inflicted more than one hundred wounds on his employer was similarly never addressed. Judging from the description of the fierce hand-to-hand battle where the razor changed hands, a few minor cuts on one hand doesn’t quite jibe with the report of a severely wounded assailant trailing blood over three backyards. With the confession in place and Thomas’s long sentence, the matter ended. Amazingly, Houdini managed to keep his name out of any of the newspaper accounts of an attempted murder at his home.

  Even before he had published his opus on criminality, The Right Way to Do Wrong, Houdini had started devoting more and more of his time to literary pursuits. “We have records for five generations that my direct fore-fathers were students and teachers of the Bible and recognized as among the leading bibliographers of their times,” he would boast. Years later, he would begin to write a book that dissected the old myths and stories of the Bible, but for now, he was content to channel his literary ambitions into a new monthly magazine devoted to magic. Houdini-style magic.

  Houdini always had an ambition to both organize magicians into a strong fellowship and to propagate (some might say impose) his own vision of the future of magic on his fellow performers. In 1906, he took steps to achieve both of those goals. He became a vice president of the Society of American Magicians, the strongest association of magicians in the United States. And he began to publish a thirty-two-page monthly magic periodical named Conjurer’s Monthly.

  He might not have started Conjurer’s if he would have received more attention from The Sphinx, the reigning number one magic magazine in the United States. When Houdini returned from Europe in 1905, he implored The Sphinx’s editor, Dr. A. M. Wilson, for more coverage. Wilson replied that he would be happy to run Houdini’s picture often, as long as he paid the prevailing advertising rates. This led to a longstanding bitter feud, and the creation of the new magazine.

  Conjurer’s Monthly was unlike any magic magazine ever published. With a staff that included most of his family, and editorial contributions from friends like Joe Hyman and Harry Day, the magazine had the feel of the monthly newsletter of a very dysfunctional family.

  The first issue in September 15, 1906 set the tone. It was spotted with tacky ads for detective agencies, in-laws’ restaurants, a Viennese hair and scalp specialist who claimed to have performed wonders for President Roosevelt and Mrs. McKinley, and Theodore Hardeen—“The King of all Handcuff Kings and the Mighty Potentate of all the Monarchs and Jail Breakers (bar Houdini).” Houdini’s opening salutatory claimed that he didn’t wish to “supplant any other paper” and that he had “no axes to grind,” then in the very next paragraph he complained that every other magic magazine was in the hands of businessmen who use them as “‘grafting’ catalogues.”

  Hardeen, the “Official European Correspondent,” wrote about a fistfight he had with card sharpers onboard a steamship. Houdini printed personal letters from friends like Harry Day and even an angry letter from a stranger who wrote, “I have seen you perform once, but what good are you to society?” Alongside this bizarre content was a terrific article by Houdini called “Handcuff Secrets Exposed.” Besides tipping legitimate escape techniques like employing a false finger or using a split key (Houdini’s own invention), the article detailed some very clever and helpful showmanship techniques. “In addressing your audience do not become bombastic or overbearing in demeanor but speak as you would to critical friends, thereby gaining their confidence and sympathy and no matter what may worry or trouble you, never let your audience detect any irritability or ill temper, but always display a bright and pleasing manner.”

  Conjurer’s truly reflected Houdini’s personality. Houdini began a feature, “Answers to Various Questions,” that contained gems like “Knocker. To H––l with you. And all others like you. We shall do whatever we feel like, and no amount of advertising will make us change our plans.” His book reviews displayed a similar truculence. Reviewing a book called Mediumship (in the monthly feature “Reading and Rubbish”), written by “A medium under control,” Houdini noted that the more he read of the book, the more he was convinced the author “was under the control of the warden of an asylum” and that if the book were to be sold through the U.S. mail, “we feel sure that the Government’s sleuths will be sent out after the publisher.”

  Old scores were settled with enemies (he called an English magic dealer who sold his handcuff secrets an “errand boy clerk”), veiled attacks were made on fellow performers (“The American Illusionist, who…appeared before King Edward and Queen Alexandra, cuts but a sorry figure. Like the mercenary, flat-headed, pride-inflated individual that he is, he imagined that his future standing would be rated by the present he received from his royal patron.”), but Houdini’s greatest wrath was reserved for his escape act imitators. Houdini relished printing police accounts of his competitors’ failures to escape from jail cells and he even encouraged his readers to send in local reports of their defeats. Houdini’s diatribes against his opposition were picked up by other columnists, including Leonard Hicks, a handcuff expert and mechanist who would later be mentored by Houdini. Hicks skewered a “near handcuff king” named Miller and then offered that if “Miller does not believe it in print, let him call at the hotel, and I’ll tell it to him personally, where he will find me near the big chair in the lobby. He will be able to recognize me by the club and gun on my knee.”

  On May 24, 1921, Houdini was visiting at the offices of his lawyer, Bernard Ernst. It was six P.M. and Houdini needed a contract drawn up, but Ernst was hungry for dinner, so they agreed to go have a bite to eat and return to the office to do the legal work. Forgetting the time, Ernst led Houdini out the Liberty Street entrance of the building, which was routinely closed at six. He turned and began to walk toward the other entrance, but Houdini didn’t follow. Ernst turned around and saw him huddled over the lock.

  “Come on,” he said a few seconds later. “It’s open.”

  When Houdini asked Ernst what he thought of his feat, Ernst made the mistake of telling him that he would expect Houdini would be able to open a lock like that, and that he had assumed the magician was familiar with it in advance.

  For the next few hours, Houdini fumed. Finally, after the contract was drawn up, Houdini couldn’t restrain himself.

  “You didn’t seem to think very much of my opening those swinging doors. Now I want to show you that I am Houdini. Let me see your office safe,” he requested.

  Ernst took him to a room that contained a six-foot-high, four-foot-wide Herring-Hall-Marvin safe.

  “Make sure that it’s locked and leave me alone with it for sixty seconds,” Houdini said.

  Ernst complied. After a minute, Houdini called him in, turned the combination to the correct numbers, and opened the safe. Ernst was truly amazed. He knew that Houdini had never seen this safe before. Now he showered praise on his friend.

  Houdini pulled out a letter from a large safe company that thanked him for calling attention to a defect in the locks that they used in their safes. Ernst was duly impressed. Then, in an uncharacteristic moment, Houdini pulled out a small object that he carried in a leather bag that was enclosed in a metal case dangling from his trousers on a key ring chain. Although Ernst refused to give details of this “gimmick,” we now know that Houdini was showing Ernst a safe-opening micrometer. In the September 1907 issue of Conjurer’s Monthly, Houdini revealed the existence of a version of that safe-opening micrometer, a device made from a common watch, which, when customized even “in the hands of the average person,” can open any combination safe lock.

  Because of the nature of deception, magic devices and espionage tools have certain elements in common, such as hiding and transmitting information and working with codes. Like Dr. Wai
tt’s special bolts that had dual use, magicians and spies alike have used hollowed-out coins, small hollow containers that could hide tools or documents and then be secreted in various body cavities, and shoes like those invented by Mokana that have a hollow heel. Before he left the United States, never to live there again, Billy Robinson wrote a book called Spirit Slate Writing and Kindred Phenomena. In it, Zanzic’s old running partner described a number of the devices that would seem as equally suited for espionage as for pretending to contact the dead. He detailed thirty-seven different methods for secret writing. These various methods, some using heat, some chemicals, and others light, were in great demand and interest and in fact would play an important part in spy communication during World War I. He also detailed how to read other people’s letters without opening the envelopes by using alcohol to render them temporarily transparent. Another clever method for the same result involved using an embryologist’s egg glass to look within opaque envelopes. Especially subtle methods to share information while being closely scrutinized were given in several variations and in detail; two were for special ways to use secret writing devices attached to hands that couldn’t be seen. He even taught how to use a piece of thread to send secret Morse code directly to a medium’s (or another operative’s) head. A new secret at the time, which is now called black art, allowed for agents or magicians to move about without being seen, wearing a specialized form of black clothing. Robinson also described a primitive way to gimmick a fountain pen so it could shoot a cap. Years later, an acquaintance of Houdini’s named Clayton Hutton, one of the major creative forces to create escape material and methods for the military, would make a deadlier version to help captured British airmen and troops escape from the Nazis during World War II.