“You’ve ruptured a blood vessel in one of your kidneys,” the doctor informed him. “This is not a trifling matter. I am going to prescribe that you return home at once and be confined to your bed for a period of at least two to three months. And I’m afraid that you must entirely abandon any strenuous stage work such as straitjacket escapes, your wet sheet challenges, basically all of your stunts that involve severe strain on your body.”
Houdini laughed. “Doc, that’s impossible,” he said.
Dr. Wholly shot him a severe stare.
“It is my duty to inform you that by continuing your present regimen you would be committing suicide,” he said soberly. “You must reconcile yourself to the fact that your strenuous days are over.”
Houdini laughed again.
“How long do you give me, Doc?”
“If you continue as at present, you will be dead within a year,” the doctor replied.
“You don’t know me.” Houdini shrugged.
The magician neglected to tell his mother or his wife about the doctor’s dire warning. In fact, rather than heeding the doctor’s warning, he struggled through the next three nights to finish his engagement, then canceled his Toledo dates and went back to New York. He set up shop on a couch in his library and spent the next two weeks lying there, sorting through the new additions to his growing collections. He also found time to catch up with his correspondence. “I…am confined to my bed with strict instructions not to move,” he wrote Goldston on November 20. “So I am taking a vacation laying on the broad of my back and doing some thinking. I have cancelled a number of weeks, but I will be able to go to work as the hemmorrage [sic] has already stopped, but must give the broken blood vessel a chance to heal.”
By November 30, Houdini was walking around. “I am allowed to go to work next week under the condition that I do not do any strait jackets for several months,” he wrote Dr. Waitt. On December 4, Houdini opened in Columbus, Ohio. He made a concession to his condition by reintroducing handcuff escapes for the first time in years. Throwing caution to the wind, on his first few nights back, he took challenges and managed to escape from a packing case, a U.S. mailbag with an especially challenging rotary lock, and from his own milk can, which was filled with beer and then locked in another wooden box. “Think I started into work too soon. Wish I had laid off another week,” he wrote in his diary. “Whilst walking down the street I slipped on the ice and fell right down flat, and I feel pretty certain that I hurt myself again.”
Houdini never let the kidney properly heal. By the middle of December, he was still in severe pain, and he was writing Waitt concerned that it was “possibly going to be a permanent worry.” The kidney was a source of concern for years, and Houdini took to sleeping with a pillow under his left side to protect it from pressure. What’s worse, a few months later he tore a ligament in his side while escaping from a wet sheet, which compounded his daily pain and anguish.
Still, he kept right on performing. At the end of 1911, Houdini sent Dr. Wholly some photographs of him escaping from a straitjacket with the caption “Still alive and going strong.” And for fifteen years, Houdini peppered the good doctor with clippings galore of his taxing and strenuous exploits, as if to rub in the message that there were some things that medical science couldn’t fathom.
The last act of the vaudeville show was winding down and the audience in the Colonial Theatre in Richmond, Virginia, was looking forward to the projection of the moving pictures, when a ruckus began backstage.
“I’m being cheated. Give me my money! I demand my salary,” the insistent voice wafted through the curtains. Another man tried to mollify the situation, but whoever was shouting was having none of it.
“I demand my entire salary immediately,” he screamed.
Shaken, the last performer cut his act short and hurried behind the curtain. Just then, the large white sheet dropped, and the movie began. And that was when Houdini, clad in a bathrobe, stormed out onto the stage.
“I’m Houdini—Harry Houdini,” he cried, shielding his eyes from the light that was projecting the images on the screen behind him.
“I want my money! These people won’t give me my salary,” he shouted.
Continuing his tirade, he rushed about the stage, blocking the images on the white sheet. Wary of a riot, H. B. Hearn, the theater manager, rushed out on the stage and collared Houdini. The two men struggled. Hearn began to literally drag Houdini off the stage, but the magician fought him every inch, clinging to every possible stage ornament and theater fixture to delay the inevitable. It was an amazing sight.
What wasn’t amazing was that Houdini had taken his private dispute up with his audience. For as long as he had been performing, Houdini had always made it a point to relate to his audience and get them on his side. Early on, he had talked with his audiences even when he was holed up in his ghost box, escaping from his restraints. Whenever he played in a foreign country, Houdini practiced and learned at least his patter in that language, and if his attempts at communicating were unintentionally humorous, all the better, for then they were on his side.
What he said made all the difference. Houdini didn’t lecture his audience, he didn’t speak down to them. An astute reviewer in Sydney, Australia, had revealing insight into Houdini’s psychological tactics in dealing with his audience:
He is the Emperor of Sympathy-Enlisters. It is a thing which has gone far towards making him the success he is. Usually he prefaces his turn with a plaintive speech in which he refers to the kindness and fair play shown him by his Australian audiences. One gets a vague idea that other audiences used to tear him from his mysteries and kick him into insensibility. Always the gods cheer Houdini’s tribute to their moderation vociferously. His gentle, trusting ways make them love him. For myself, I have not the heart of a god. I find it hard to give him my unreserved sympathy. He is too aggressive to pose as a mild genial character to the deception of persons of discrimination. F’rinstance, he suppresses opposition with the firmness of 27 Russian policemen. If an objection is raised to any phase of his performance—for instance, it may be thought that the ropes that bind him are too loose—Houdini immediately suspends his business and insists acidly on the objector’s taking it over himself. Which is of course ridiculous, though the gods, being one-eyed as a result of the Mysteriarch’s blandishments, cannot see it. The other night a youth was foolhardy enough to take over the business, whereupon the gods demanded his instant death, preferably by strangulation, and were appeased only when the interrupter was ejected, none too gently…A good showman is Houdini. He introduces the personal element into his turn with great effectiveness. But, as I mentioned before, it doesn’t impress me one single durn.
This critic presupposed a certain degree of cynicism in Houdini’s stance toward his audience but in reality the performer did feel an emotional bond with his patrons. In London in December of 1910, British theater managers began dropping their star performers from some matinee shows to save on salaries, even though the acts were billed to appear. When the manager of the Holborn Empire tried to do that to him, Houdini acquiesced as long as the audiences were informed. The appointed day, at matinee time, Houdini noticed that he was still being billed to appear. He confronted the manager and argued that he should be allowed to do his act. He was rebuffed.
Houdini waited backstage that afternoon and just as another performer was about to take the stage, he rushed out and explained to the audience that through no fault of his own, he was not allowed to perform. He suggested that the crowd either secure the return of their money or remain in their seats until his next turn later that day. Despite the police being called in, at least half the audience remained seated until the next show. Then, when Houdini was announced, he was given a thunderous ovation. Before he proceeded, he again explained the situation in detail, even reading correspondence between him and the management.
In Richmond, Virginia, Houdini’s troubles with management had been brewing all week long.
At the Friday night show, in which he had been billed to escape from a navy challenge, he took to the stage and informed the crowd that the management had requested him to cancel the engagement, but he would leave it up to the audience to decide. Of course, the audience voted overwhelmingly to allow him to go ahead with his number. Houdini then spent forty-three minutes in escaping from a deep-sea diving suit in which he had been bolted, hands manacled behind his back. The next night’s fracas began when manager Hearn was settling up with Houdini after his show and informed him that $400 was being withheld from his salary as a fine for his speech to the previous night’s house. That led to the screaming match and Houdini’s disruption of the motion picture segment of the evening’s entertainment.
Even after being pulled offstage, Houdini continued to protest and refused to leave the theater. Hearn called the police, who arrested Houdini backstage for disorderly conduct. Meanwhile a huge crowd had congregated in front of the theater, blocking Tasewell Street, waiting for Houdini to exit out of the stage door. The police outfoxed them and spirited the star through a rear entrance and straight to the station house, where a fellow performer named Edward Stevens paid $50 in bail and gained his release. After his release, Houdini vowed to stay and fight the matter in court but later decided to travel to Trenton for his next engagement. “They refused to pay me my money,” he told a local reporter. “I will admit that I became excited, but who wouldn’t cry for $400—even make a bigger fuss than I did?”
Houdini knew there would be trouble when he spied the cop standing at the entrance to the pedestrian walkway on the Willis Avenue Bridge in Harlem.
“They’re on to us,” he told Hardeen, who was sitting in the backseat of the car. Behind the wheel, Houdini’s publicist, Fred Rosebush, just chomped on his cigar and grimaced.
“Lemme handle this,” he said and pulled the car to the side of the road. The three of them got out of the car. A few journalists were congregating at the side of the bridge. Rosebush approached the policeman, who was Sergeant Donnelly of the East 126th Street Station.
“Which one of youse is Houdini?” Sergeant Donnelly inquired.
Harry identified himself.
“Let me make myself clear. You dive off the bridge, I’m hauling you in. In fact, I’m hauling all youse in. We’re wise to you.”
Rosebush tried to reason with Donnelly—to no avail. So the three men rushed back to the car and drove to the Alexander Avenue Station, where Captain Post was consulted. The captain was cordial enough and seemed to feel there would be no harm done by Houdini’s leap from the bridge, but he just couldn’t take the responsibility of granting official sanction to the event.
Back at the bridge, Rosebush told Donnelly that the captain wouldn’t help them out.
“In that case, you might as well go home, because I have no intention of allowing you to carry out this exhibition.”
“How about if we jumped from a rowboat?” Rosebush suggested.
May 22, 1907 in Pittsburgh. Houdini is mid-jump. From the collection of Dr. Bruce Averbook
“If you try that, I’ll get the harbor squad to send up a police launch and stop you.”
Rosebush pulled Houdini and Hardeen aside. They conferred and agreed. Rosebush pulled the reporters aside and told them to watch the river from the bridge.
Rosebush had obviously prepared for this eventuality, because within minutes, a boat rowed by Frank Jones, bearing Rosebush and Houdini and his brother, stopped in the middle of the Harlem River, in perfect line of sight of the reporters congregated on the bridge. Just as Hardeen had affixed the leg irons to his brother, and as he was clamping the handcuffs on him, a police launch drew up alongside.
“Serves him right,” Sergeant Donnelly said from the bridge.
The police on the boat began arguing with Rosebush and threatened to run the whole lot of them into the station.
“Look, we’ll be finished with this in two minutes,” Houdini promised. “I’ll dive in, release myself, and the lads from the papers will get their stories. There’s nobody else here. There’s no boat traffic. If this exhibition doesn’t turn out successfully, I’m the only one who stands a chance of being hurt.”
Either Houdini’s eloquence or Rosebush’s display of gratitude finally swayed the policemen’s minds. They literally turned their backs, and Houdini plunged into the river, and came up unfettered but wet. The next day, the coverage in the papers was minimal. The Mirror ran less than a column inch, noting that Houdini freed himself in less than a minute. The Telegraph coverage was downright embarrassing, spending almost the entire article on the negotiations between the police and Rosebush. When it came time to talking about Houdini’s leap, all the reporter could say was, “Why prolong it? He won.”
By April of 1912, Houdini had never really conquered his home city. One of his few close calls came in a New York City jail in Yorkville, where “Chief Searcher and Locker-Up” Hughey Cooney peeked through a grate and saw Houdini working at the lock with “a piece of wire.” In actuality, what they thought was a piece of wire was probably a needle that had been retained in his mouth after doing his Needles effect, which was often a preamble to his jail escapes. Houdini had revealed that technique in his book Handcuff Secrets. To remedy his neglect in his home city, Houdini had to come up with one great stunt that could force the jaded ink-stained scribes to sit up and take notice.
The feat was scheduled for eleven A.M. on July 7. By the appointed hour, Pier 6 on the East River was “crowded to suffocation” with curious onlookers. Even the pilings of the pier were festooned with a bevy of small boys, clinging on for a good view of the proceedings. Houdini and his entourage, which numbered about fifteen, and the box were aboard a barge that was connected to the Catherine Moran, a well-known local tugboat. Unlike his previous attempts at bridge jumps in New York City, the newsmen came out full force to see this stunt, arriving in groups of six or more. There were at least twenty photographers present and a film crew that Houdini had hired to document the event.
Unfortunately, the police were also present, and they made it clear that they would not allow Houdini to proceed from any pier under their jurisdiction. If Houdini didn’t drown himself, they were convinced that someone in the massive crowd would wind up in the drink. Undaunted, Houdini implemented Plan B. He would fill up the barge with his friends and reporters and photographers and steam out to Governor’s Island, which was federal property and not subject to local police control. Houdini retreated to the bridge of the barge and, like a doorman in an exclusive club, began selecting the people who would be allowed onboard. The assembled crowd on the pier howled with disappointment as the tug began its journey.
Once in the federal waters, the preparations began. Houdini stripped down to a nice new white bathing suit and demonstrated that he had no implements on his person. The box was brought out and examined by all the newsmen present, to assure that there were no gimmicked sliding panels. Dr. Leopold Weiss, the attending physician, and Houdini’s brother, informed the press that the box was precisely twenty-four inches wide, thirty-six inches high, and thirty-four inches long. At the appointed time, it would be weighted down with 180 pounds of iron. At this time, the handcuffs and leg irons were passed around for the newsmen’s inspection and two reporters were enlisted to place two pairs of each on Houdini, Houdini’s cinematographer capturing every minute of the preparation. Then the pine box was opened, and Houdini crouched inside it. The lid was placed on the box and nailed down, and then iron bands were also nailed to the crate. Thick rope was wound around every side of the enclosure, and the leaden weights were attached. Dr. Weiss pointed out that there were many holes punctured into the box, in order for it to sink most rapidly.
Then it was time. A platform was placed on the outside of the barge leading into the water. A small rowboat manned by a longshoreman, holding two of Houdini’s assistants, was launched. The assistants held tightly to a safety rope that was tied to the box, so that it wouldn’t drift away in the stron
g current. And then the crate was pushed into the water.
Within seconds, it was completely submerged. After about a minute, some of the newsmen began to get a bit antsy.
“This is going too far,” one of the concerned scribes said.
“’E’s all right,” one of Houdini’s assistants reassured him.
And just then, “smiling and puffing,” Houdini resurfaced. He held his arms aloft in a victory salute, to show that his hands were unencumbered. Two nearby tugs tooted a salute, and the passengers on a passing Staten Island Ferry, which was jam-packed with people hoping to get a glimpse of the escape, cheered themselves hoarse. Houdini swam back to the barge. The box was retrieved and carefully inspected by the newsmen. It was intact. The escape artist was congratulated, and then the tug rushed back to Pier 6, where hundreds of people mobbed him until he was spirited away by a waiting car.
“If the public knew how much I really flirt with death in some of my stunts, I would never be accused of getting advertising free,” Houdini later told a friend. It was certainly true with the underwater packing case. Even though Houdini had cleverly gimmicked the crate, there was always the danger that the box could get stuck in mud and trap him underwater. Joe Rinn, Houdini’s friend who observed the escape, held his breath in suspense until he saw his friend resurface. He understood the risk his old running partner was taking.
Two years later, Houdini replicated his feat, but this time he turned it into a citywide extravaganza. He obtained permission from Police Commissioner Woods to be thrown into the water from a tugboat two hundred feet from Pier A in Battery Park. The event was highly publicized and an hour and a half before the spectacle, four cars left Hammerstein’s in the theater district in a slow cavalcade down Broadway toward the Battery. Stuffed with theater officials, newspapermen, carpenters, even Dr. Weiss with his medical satchel, they were followed by Houdini himself, clad in his swimsuit and driving a sixty-horsepower flashy racing car, with Hardeen riding shotgun. The procession was stopped twice by police and reprimanded for distributing handbills announcing the event. All along the parade route, Houdini and the other cars were cheered by passersby. When they finally arrived at the Battery, more than 100,000 people had lined the seawalls, filled up the streets, and were hanging out of the windows of the business district skyscrapers for a view of the proceedings. Additional police reserves had to be called to push the crowd back as the early-bird spectators were in danger of being pushed right over the seawall into the water.
The Secret Life of Houdini Page 31