The Secret Life of Houdini

by William Kalush

  By the March 1908 issue of Conjurer’s, Houdini began a comprehensive series of articles on cryptography. In the stated context of promoting a secret code so “magicians can secretly correspond with one another and exchange tricks and secrets without fear of the messages being intercepted by others,” Houdini published a series of techniques and a history of the art of cryptography, an art that he claimed “often…has been the means of giving me a friendly warning or clever hint to look out for myself.”

  He began by teaching the method of using what he mistakenly called a “windowed cipher” to communicate secret messages. In Germany Houdini purchased sets of pasteboards, properly known as a Cardan grille. In the example that Houdini uses, the original message would be the following: “Would like to prepare to leave my son at your house Saturday and if you wish for him to bring the late copy of the London Times do let me know, as I shall not refuse.” When read through the pasteboard filter that covers over certain letters, the message reads, “prepare to leave your house Saturday for London do not refuse.”

  The next magazine installment included instructions for producing invisible ink and another cipher that employed the grouping of letters or sentences to produce a new message. In the June 1908 issue, Houdini’s call for magicians to communicate via coded ciphers was echoed in a letter from an amateur magician named “Raymeen” Stone. He suggested that Houdini devote a page in each issue of the magazine that would be designated for a correspondence club of amateur magicians who could communicate to one another using one of Houdini’s cipher methods.

  Houdini’s literary ambitions were being channeled into areas other than magazine publishing too. On October 5, 1907, while he was performing in Los Angeles, Houdini went to a local synagogue where he recited the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, on the fifteenth anniversary of his father’s death. It might have been on his next train trip, from Los Angeles to Kansas City, when Houdini pulled out a piece of paper and modified a popular poem by Elizabeth Akers Allen called “Rock Me to Sleep.” Where Allen envisioned a backward flight of time so that her now dead mother could comfort her, Houdini had turned the poem into an ode to his dead father.

  In the fall of 1903, Houdini stood in front of the door of the Villa Frikell, hat in hand. He had been there all morning—to no avail. Still, he was determined not to give up. The photographer whom he had hired to snap a candid shot of the old German magician Wiljalba Frikell as he departed his home was lounging on the street corner opposite the house. There had been no sign of the conjurer, but Houdini was relentless. He had previously written the magician, requesting an interview, but he had received a curt note back, “The master is on tour.” At eighty-seven, Houdini knew that was impossible. He also knew that Frikell had been a recluse for the last fifteen years, and after speaking to Kotchenbroda police the day before, he was certain that the magician was at home.

  “I repeat, Herr Frikell has gone away,” his wife, who was leaning out of the window above the door, told Houdini.

  Houdini wouldn’t take no for an answer.

  “Madame, you must help me,” Houdini begged for the umpteenth time. “Herr Frikell is a master of magic, and I’m sure he would be happy to lend a helping hand to one like myself, who is ready to sit at his feet and learn.”

  Tears began streaming down Frau Frikell’s face.

  “There is nothing I can do,” she said.

  “Please inform your esteemed husband that I am writing the first true history of magic ever, and that the debt which he owes to the literature of magic can be discharged by simply sharing with me the information that he has,” Houdini pleaded.

  It went on like this for hours, Houdini badgering the old woman, the old woman leaning out the window, tears running down her cheeks, insisting that her husband was away. The truth was Frikell was lying grimly on a bed on the other side of the window, listening to every word Houdini spoke.

  Finally, physically exhausted, Houdini and his photographer left the house, but he didn’t give up. Houdini had been compiling material since the beginning of 1902 for his projected Encyclopedia of Magic, an ambitious book that would contain “the biography, incidents, etc., of every magician, from the time of Moses to the present year.” Frikell was desperately important to Houdini because Houdini had heard that the old magician had been the first conjurer to discard flowing draperies and cumbersome stage apparatus, a “revolution” properly attributed to Robert-Houdin.

  So he continued to bombard Frikell with letters and press notices of his act. When he was in Russia, he finally received a response. Herr Frikell would be happy to receive a package containing a certain brand of Russian tea of which he was very fond. The next day the tea went out, and shortly after, Houdini received the letter he had been waiting for. Frikell would see the young magician.

  Houdini immediately booked an engagement in nearby Dresden. He set a date for their meeting, Saturday, October 8, 1903. He even made arrangements for Frikell to come to Dresden a few days earlier to sit for a formal portrait with a photographer so Houdini could have an up-to-date photograph for his book. On the day of the sitting, Frikell called at the theater where Houdini was playing, but the attachés didn’t even bother to inform Houdini and then refused to give Frikell the name of Houdini’s hotel. After the show that night, Houdini stopped at a local café and was “much annoyed by the staring and gesticulations of an elderly couple at a distant table.” He had failed to recognize Herr Frikell and his wife. They, in turn, had been too timid to approach the headliner.

  Houdini arrived in Kotchenbroda well in advance of his two o’clock appointment, so he took a leisurely stroll to the Villa Frikell. Finally arriving, he rang the bell and it seemed peculiarly shrill to the magician’s ears. He was so excited at the prospect of meeting this great magician, a man who had spent sixty-two years in the world of magic. A lady opened the door.

  “You are being waited for,” she said.

  Houdini was led up to the drawing room, where the magician did await him. There was only one problem. Frikell was dead.

  Apparently the strain was too much for the old man’s heart. He had spent hours preparing for Houdini’s visit, arranging his programs, lugging out his gold medals and his photography albums. He had donned his best wardrobe and waited for his guest, young and happy once more, his wife said.

  “There we stood together, the woman who had loved the dear old wizard for years and the young magician who had been so willing to love him had he been allowed to know him,” Houdini later wrote. “His face was still wet from the cologne she had thrown over him in vain hope of reviving the fading soul. On the floor lay the cloths, used so ineffectually to bathe the pulseless face and now laughing mockingly at one who saw himself defeated after weary months of writing and pleading for the much-desired meeting.”

  “Two young people roaming around trying to make an honest million.” From the collection of Dr. Bruce Averbook

  Houdini didn’t go away empty-handed. He stayed that day and interviewed Frikell’s widow, and then he returned on several other occasions and continued the interrogation. His book would be the most comprehensive book yet written on the history of magic. Somewhere along the line, the focus of the book changed. Instead of chronicling the true stories of centuries of past masters, the book became a diatribe against one magician who had, in the author’s eyes, wrongfully stolen credit for the innovations of others. The Encyclopedia of Magic somehow morphed into The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin.

  Since the death of his father, Houdini had gravitated to father figures. In Europe in 1902, when he had begun his research for his encyclopedia, his first stop was the grave of his idol, Robert-Houdin. Houdini made it a point during his tours in England and the continent to honor his long-dead compatriots by restoring their sometimes-forgotten overgrown graves or placing elaborate wreaths in the name of the SAM (the Society of American Magicians) on the graves of more fortunate fellow conjurers. “I stood with my hat in my hand at the tomb of Robert-Houdin
, and with all the reverence and homage with which I respect his memory.” After meditating over the grave for a half hour, he laid a wreath on behalf of American magicians.

  On April 17, 1903, a little over a year later, Houdini tracked down an old conjurer in Muenster, Germany, named Alexander Heimburger. Houdini was thrilled to be in the company of a magician who had entertained President Polk in the White House. Alexander regaled Houdini with tales of the greats he had personally known—Robert-Houdin, Frikell, Bosco, Anderson, and Blitz. “Had he risen from a grave he could not better have commanded my attention,” Houdini wrote. Intending to just visit for a few hours, he would end up staying the whole day and dining with Herr Alexander, except “I had no desire to eat, but hungrily listened to every word Herr Alexander spoke.”

  The only problem is Alexander was dissembling. He had never met Robert-Houdin; his only contact with the French magician was when he wrote him to see if he could obtain the German rights to publish Robert-Houdin’s Memoirs. The French conjurer wrote back a charming letter thrilled to have heard from such an esteemed colleague but sorry that the foreign rights resided in his publisher’s hands. It is not known whether Heimburger ever actually obtained the rights, but the Memoirs were not published in German by Heimburger.

  When Houdini met with Heimburger, one of the things they discussed was Robert-Houdin’s Memoirs, the book that changed Houdini’s life. Heimburger was dismissive of Robert-Houdin’s work, telling Houdini “that Houdin never wrote his book, but had it written by a Parisian journalist…Alexander informed me that Houdin personally told him this,” Houdini wrote later. Alexander also told Houdini that his own memoirs, Ein moderner Zauberer (The Modern Magician), was “the best book ever written by a conjurer.”

  Houdini left Heimburger’s house starstruck. “Both extending to each other the best wishes, the old master returned to his books, while I with bowed head slowly walked out into the bright sunshine, deeply thinking of the various things engraved in my memory.”

  The old man gently opened a scrapbook.

  “I have brought you, sir, only a few of my treasures, sir, but if you will call—”

  Houdini heard nothing else. He can only remember raising his hands before his eyes, “as if I had been dazzled by a sudden shower of diamonds.” In the old man’s trembling hands were jewels that Houdini had been pursuing for years—original program and bills of Robert-Houdin, Phillippe, Anderson, Breslaw, Pinetti, and Katterfelto, many of the great conjurers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. “I felt as if the King of England stood before me, and I must do him homage,” Houdini wrote.

  The “King,” an old stooped man named Henry Evanion, was wearing such tattered clothing that the management of Houdini’s hotel was reluctant to even send him up to Houdini’s room, relegating him to a chair in the lobby. Evanion had read of Houdini’s interest in old magic programs and handbills, and they had arranged to meet at the hotel where Houdini was recuperating from a severe cold.

  Houdini’s idea of homage was to buy up Evanion’s immaculate collection. He went to Evanion’s home the next day, flu be damned, and spent almost twenty-four hours looking through the treasures. If it wasn’t for Hardeen and the doctor tracking him down and literally dragging him back to bed, he might have stayed for days. Evanion, an ex-magician and ventriloquist, had fallen on hard times. Houdini was making more money than he could spend. So the two began a symbiotic relationship, and in exchange for Houdini’s financial generosity, Evanion began to spend hours on end at the British Museum doing research for Houdini’s book and other topics of interest to the young magician.

  A year after they met, Houdini received word that Evanion had been hospitalized with throat cancer. After receiving additional word that he was declining rapidly, Houdini left Wigan, where he had been performing, and journeyed to London. He found Evanion unable to speak but learned that his chief anxiety was for the future of his wife and for a proper burial. Houdini came through on both counts. He immediately began sending Mrs. Evanion postal orders, and when he was notified of the old man’s death on June 17, he rushed to the Evanion household and paid for the lion’s share of the funeral costs. The unanticipated reward for his kindness was the “crown jewel” of Evanion’s collection—an entire book filled with Robert-Houdin programs.

  Between Houdini’s first visit to Heimburger in 1903 and the first issue of his monthly magic magazine in the fall of 1906, Houdini tracked down and spent time with several other old father figures who, in the course of their conversations, began to belittle the contributions of Houdini’s “guide and hero,” Robert-Houdin. These were men who all claimed to have witnessed Robert-Houdin’s performances, Henry Evanion and Sir William Clayton in England; Ernest Bach in Berlin; T. Bolin in Russia, who especially impressed Houdini with his anti-Robert-Houdin rhetoric; even Otto Maurer, who had a magical repository on the Bowery in New York. “The combined opinion of these men was that Houdin was not original, and that he was only a little above the average entertainer,” Houdini wrote. So, in essence, he was an imitator.

  Houdini began publishing his research on Robert-Houdin as a series of articles called “Unknown Facts Concerning Robert-Houdin” in the first issue of his Conjurer’s Monthly in September 1906. Houdini’s major indictment was his claim that Robert-Houdin stole other magicians’ intellectual property and claimed the effects as his own. Throughout the series of articles, Houdini continually maintained that his mission in this book would be to restore the credit to magicians whose accomplishments had been consigned to the dustbin of magic history. “My opinion of Robert Houdin is that he had a wonderful good opinion of himself, and thought it was not such a wrong thing for him to take other people’s brains and annex them as his own,” he wrote in an early installment. And later, when writing about the old master Robert Heller, he was even more emphatic. “Look at the various Arts and Professions, and then at the old-time Magicians; none of them have been properly remembered!…A painter when he dies, leaves behind paintings, an author leaves as a monument some of his books, the music master leaves his inspirations, but how can a magician leave behind a positive proof of his genius?…So I contend that it is about time that someone should extol the virtues of the poor past and almost forgotten Magicians.”

  No one could argue with that noble pursuit. It’s poignant to see Houdini battling for respect for the forgotten father figures he cultivated in his research, even more so when we see that Houdini dedicated the book to his own father, who, in his eyes, was a great scholar who never got his just recognition in this world. Houdini claimed to believe that Robert-Houdin had obscured the true history of magic. Halfway into the magazine serialization, Houdini had come up with a new name for the book. No longer The Encyclopedia of Magic, now it would be called Robert-Houdin’s Proper Place in the History of Magic. And his new mission statement became: “I am actuated only by a desire to set forth before the world of magic, the true facts as ascertained by me during years of earnest investigation at home and abroad, and to do justice to those who preceded Houdin and to whom he owed a greater debt than he set forth in his autobiography.” Houdini’s desire to take what he saw as his rightful place in the generations of scholars that his family tree produced is palpable here.

  The French magic community was justly outraged at Houdini’s defilement of their national hero and immediately came to Robert-Houdin’s defense and started to attack Houdini in their journals.

  All that was missing was a challenge. Not for long. By the next issue of Conjurer’s, the last to have an installment, Houdini had given up any pretense that this fight wasn’t personal. “In the Robert-Houdin articles we fairly revolutionized the history of magic,” Houdini frothed. “Robert-Houdin has been uncrowned as the king of conjuring and automata, and the crown has been distributed, bit by bit, among the earlier magicians to whom it rightfully belonged. Men on two continents who once proclaimed Robert-Houdin as magic’s hero now refer to him as the Prince of Pilferers,” he lied.

&
nbsp; Robert-Houdin, the great master and source of Houdini’s name.Conjuring Arts Research Center

  Debate over The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin raged for years. The book wasn’t entirely without merit. As a history of magic, Houdini did find some new, interesting information through his discovery of rare clippings, broadsides, and images that went back about one hundred years, but the book’s anecdotes and analyses are riddled with errors and outright lies. The question remains—why?

  Houdini was an intelligent man who understood human nature. His career attests to that. We know that it’s not out of character for Houdini to lash out against his perceived enemies. He did that his entire life, taking aim and doing damage to imitators and those who might have insulted him or his family. None of those episodes even come close to his animosity toward a long-dead magician to whom he owed an enormous debt and who, unlike his imitators and enemies, couldn’t defend himself. Even though he had publicly denounced his former mentor, he never once broke faith with Robert-Houdin’s theories and repeatedly emulated, by his actions, his once-revered role model.

  It’s too simplistic to say that Houdini was brainwashed by the bitter old Alexander Heimburger, who fed him a steady diet of lies about the French magician he never met. It’s charitable to suggest that this coterie of old, long-forgotten, unsuccessful magicians, who poisoned him with respect toward Robert-Houdin, stirred pity in him. Perhaps attacking the elegant French magician became a way to claim glory for them who, in Houdini’s mind, might have stood in as surrogates for his own father, another revered old man who never received the recognition and acclaim that his son felt the world owed him.