Mama Weiss felt so proud. She was sitting in the backseat of a luxurious Lenox automobile, being chauffeured from the Catskill Mountains back to New York City by two of her sons. Her son the doctor was driving. His practice was booming, his client list top-rate. It’s not everyone who could afford a Lenox. Now if only he would settle down and find himself a nice woman. And what needed to be said about her other son, the entertainer? He was the most famous magician in the world. Magician? He was the most famous entertainer, a real star of the highest magnitude. Still she worried about him all the time. Every time he came back to visit, he looked that much older. How could he possibly take care of himself, with all that traveling? At least he had a devoted woman at his side. If it weren’t for Bess, she was sure that he wouldn’t stop to eat a decent meal or even change his clothes, with all the running around after books and strange magic things, not to mention the jumping off bridges. Ah, if it makes him happy.
She leaned back and closed her eyes. Bess, sitting next to her, took her hand and cradled it. On her other side, Gladys, her daughter, was trying to sleep. She often thought about that terrible accident, the boiling water overturning and splashing Gladys’s face, mostly blinding her. She also wondered why God would have allowed something like that to happen to such a good person. Then her thoughts turned to her oldest son, William, the one that they had just left upstate. He had been diagnosed with tuberculosis. It was such a horrible word. Then she remembered how Leopold assured her that there were medical advances every day.
What Cecilia didn’t want to think about was her own health. Seventy-two now, she had had chronic stomach trouble for the last few years, bad enough that she would cry out in pain to her son the doctor. The Catskills helped, being in the fresh mountain air, but now they were on their way back to Harlem and, in a few days, Harry was leaving again for Europe. She felt like she hardly ever saw him. If he wasn’t far off someplace in Europe, he was touring in the States. Now he was going to play for the King of Sweden. Her pride took away some of the sting of regret to see him go. He had been home barely more than a month. And for the first two weeks he was playing at Hammerstein’s. He needed more of a rest than that.
She looked out the window of the car. In the distance, she saw the bright lights of New York. And then she made up her mind that they would go to the cemetery tomorrow. Visiting with her husband would help clear her mind and make her strong.
Whenever Harry was about to sail away, his mother insisted that he go to the cemetery to get his father’s blessing before leaving. So the next day, July 6, Houdini rented a car and drove his mother, brother Nat, and brother Dash to the cemetery. When they got out there, Houdini suddenly had a compulsion to lie down on his father’s plot so that he could say that he lay down there before Mother did, but Dash talked him out of the strange notion. Cecilia came to the cemetery often to get her late husband’s blessings and she was very proud of the immense plot that her son had bought for the family.
On the way home, Harry made a detour and stopped at a tea company that was a creditor of his brother Bill’s. Houdini told them that he would make good on his brother’s debt. His proud mother gave him a kiss. “Nu, wirdst du mehr gluck haben (Well, now you’ll have more luck),” she promised him.
On sailing day, July 8, Houdini awoke early. His mother was still in bed, weakened from the way that she had lain on the couch downstairs the previous night. Houdini thought that this was a sign that his mother was getting smarter and resting more. He didn’t want to acknowledge that she was getting weaker all the time. He hired another car and took his mother, his brother Bill, and Bess’s mother to Hoboken to see them off. Houdini was the last person to board the steamship; he kept boarding and then running back on the gangplank to kiss his mother good-bye. She was worried that the boat would sail without him and told him to get back on board, but he kept coming back to embrace and kiss her again.
The Weiss siblings (l to r): Nat, William, Harry, Dash, Leopold, Gladys. From the collection of Dr. Bruce Averbook
While he held her in his arms, she looked at him peculiarly.
“Ehrich, perhaps I won’t be here when you return,” she said.
She had expressed that morbid sentiment at his other departures and he tried to cheer her up, but he felt depressed himself because the “servant girl” who took care of his mother had just quit.
Finally he kissed her one more time.
Houdini’s last view of his beloved mother. From the collection of Dr. Bruce Averbook
“Get along, in God’s name,” she shooed him away.
“Look, ladies and gentlemen,” he appealed to the crowd on the pier. “My mother is pushing me away from her.”
“No, that’s not so,” she said, embarrassed.
He finally boarded and the gangplank was rolled away. As he stood on the deck, waving to his mother and mother-in-law and his brother, Cecilia asked him to bring her back a pair of warm, woolen house slippers. “Don’t forget, size six,” she said. Houdini and Bess started throwing long streamers to the folks back on the pier. Houdini’s aim was impeccable, and Cecilia grabbed a few of the streamers he threw.
As the ship steamed away, Bess and he yelled, “Mama, hold them, Mama.” And Mama Weiss held the streamers until the force of her son’s sailing away split the paper in two.
Houdini landed in Hamburg on July 16 and took the midnight train to Copenhagen, arriving at ten in the morning. His assistants met them at the station. Houdini deposited Bess in their hotel room and then he and Franz headed for the theater. On their way Kukol gave Houdini a cable that had come before he arrived.
He performed at the Cirkus Beketow that night, before two members of the Danish royal family. Afterward he was feted at a press reception. During a lull, he remembered the cable, read it, and collapsed to the floor, unconscious.
Library of Congress
16
Forgive
MY DEAR LITTLE MOTHER. POOR MAMA,” he sobbed after coming to. The cable that he had neglected earlier contained the message that his mother had died. Moved by his grief, the reporters and dignitaries left the room.
Too weak to even walk, Houdini was helped to the hotel by Bess and his assistants. He seemed to be in a trance, and Bess found him incapable of thought or action. Back in his room, he was helped to bed, where he lay in abject agony. A Danish doctor was called and, after an examination, he told Bess that the shock of Houdini’s mother’s death had precipitated an attack of chronic kidney disease. He ordered immediate hospitalization, but Houdini mustered up enough strength to reject that idea. In lieu of that, the doctor recommended a long rest cure.
Bess and the Danish physician went outside to consult, leaving Houdini alone with Jim Collins, one of his trusted assistants. As soon as they departed, Collins locked the door and walked back over to the bed. He bent over his shattered boss.
“Mr. Houdini, can’t you do anything for your mother?” he asked.
The question seemed to jar Houdini from his stupor.
“What do you mean, Jim?”
“You know what I mean,” Collins said. “Can’t you do anything for her?”
An uneasy silence fell between them.
“Do I understand you, Jim, that you think I really possess some power whereby I could help my mother?” Houdini finally said.
“Yes.”
Houdini sighed.
“No. No, Jim, this is the will of the Almighty, and God’s will be done. There is nothing that can be done.”
Collins slowly sat down next to the bed.
“Maybe I could go back to America for you,” he suggested.
“No,” Houdini said. “We’ll all go back on the next steamer.”
That Houdini’s own assistant believed that he possessed superhuman powers is telling, but it was really only a residue of the myth that Houdini had been creating for almost twenty years. Despite his denials, Spiritualists were convinced that Houdini was able to dematerialize and pass his etheric body through so
lid substances like packing cases and water cans, rematerializing once free of the constraints. Others posited that Houdini weaved his magic by hypnotizing the entire audience. In any rate, many were in agreement that Houdini possessed some potent powers. “You could have founded a religion on the strength of what you were doing,” one friend wrote him, a religion that presumably would encompass resurrection of the flesh.
Houdini immediately canceled his engagement, even though in Denmark breach of contract was a criminal offense. Herr Beketow took sympathy on his grief-stricken star, and Houdini later repaid him by taking out a large boxed ad in the circus’s program, thanking him for his display of sensitivity. Now arrangements for the return trip had to be made. When it was ascertained that the party would have to wait until the twenty-third for the return trip of the ironically named steamer, Kronprinzessin Cecilie, Houdini immediately cabled Hardeen and ordered him to delay the funeral. Houdini’s desire to see his mother one last time took precedence over Jewish law that mandated immediate burial. Apparently the other children of the rabbi acceded to Houdini’s unorthodox request.
Still in obvious distress, Houdini was accompanied by the Danish specialist as far as Germany, where a local doctor took over. In Bremen, the dutiful son remembered his mother’s last wishes and purchased a pair of woolen slippers, size six. The weeklong return trip gave Houdini ample time to imagine the circumstances of his mother’s death over and over again in his mind. Houdini most likely got the true details of her demise when his brother Leopold met him on the revenue cutter. He would have learned that Cecilia had accompanied Hardeen to his Asbury Park engagement on July 14. That day, Hardeen jumped off a fishing pier while manacled and chained. In the evening, he did challenge handcuff releases, and then escaped from a straitjacket and the Milk Can. Later that night, back at the Imperial Hotel, Cecilia suffered a severe stroke. A local doctor pronounced her condition serious. Theo called his sister, Gladys, and she arrived the next morning. By then, Cecilia was on the critical list.
Nonetheless, Hardeen continued his performances. After Wednesday’s show, he went directly to his mother’s bedside. She tried to tell him something about Houdini, but the stroke had impaired her speech. She fell into a fitful sleep. Shortly after midnight, she died.
As soon as Houdini entered his house, he went straight to the parlor where his mother’s corpse had been laid out for burial. “She looked so dainty and restful, only a small spot on Her cheek, and the Face which haunted me with love all my Life is still and quiet, and when She does not answer me I know that God is taking Her to His Bosom and giving Her the peace which she denied herself on this earth,” he wrote in his diary. “And tomorrow Mother will be laid alongside of Her best friend, one for whom she mourned ever since he obeyed the mighty command…. And I know if there is a Meeting Place, Both are Happy in this event, which leaves all us children miserable, unhappy, and mindfull [sic] of sorrow.”
Harry brought a steamer chair from his mother’s room and placed it by her side. He would not move from that chair until the next day. At some point he placed the new slippers inside the coffin.
It was a dismal day, and it perfectly mirrored Houdini’s mood. Once again, he set out for the cemetery. Wearing a black suit, a black bow tie, and a black hat, he strolled distractedly among the rows of graves, noting each marker. Just the week before he admitted to his diary that he was “feeling a bit better,” but quickly he qualified that with, “but July 17 is always in my mind.”
Even here in Monte Carlo, thousands of miles from where Cecilia lay at peace, Houdini could find solace only among the dead. He had tried to reenter the land of the living in September, when he left New York after almost daily visits to the cemetery and traveled to Germany to fulfill his contracts, but it was hard work. On September 16, 1913 Houdini opened in Nuremberg, performing the Needles and the Water Torture Cell. “Act works beautifully,” he wrote in his diary. And then “had a terrible spell after show on account of my darling Mother.” Even before his opening, Houdini had spent days getting his mother’s letters typed up in good German so that he could bind them in book form and carry them with him. It was a poignant exercise. “Many a bitter tear I am shedding. In the entire lot of letters, which I have saved since 1900, each is a love story, a prayer to God to protect her children, a plea that we should be good human beings.”
Mr. and Mrs. Houdini in Monte Carlo. From the collection of Dr. Bruce Averbook
Two days later, the German authorities tried to maintain that Houdini was not a good human being and hauled him into court for presenting a professional performance without obtaining police permission when he jumped manacled into the Dutzend Lake twice in one day. He was fined fifty marks for bathing in the water, fifty marks for not obtaining prior allowance for the performance, and an additional twenty marks for walking on the grass. Houdini naturally appealed the case, and the local police became laughingstocks in the press when it was revealed that they had attempted to prevent the jump into the lake on the day after it had occurred. It was also wryly noted that while city authorities had warned Houdini against carrying out his publicity stunt, the city’s municipal streetcar administration had placed additional cars in service to transport the thousands of citizens who flocked to see a performance that was verboten.
His troubles in Germany didn’t even rate a mention in a letter to Hardeen. Writing on black-bordered mourning stationery, he confessed, “I am working in a sort of a mechanical way and feel so lonely that I dont know what to do properly, but am hoping that eventually I will have my burning tears run dry, but know my Heart will ALWAYS ACHE FOR OUR DARLING MOTHER. Dash, I knew that I loved Mother, but that my very Existence seems to have expired with HER, is simply writing my innermost thoughts. I trust that The Almighty will allow Our Darling Mothers Prayers to sheild [sic] us, and that She from Heaven will look cown [sic] on us and guide our footsteps on the Rightous [sic] path. With all my efforts, I try and still my longing as I Know positively that Mother would not like the way she Passing Away has effected [sic] me, but what can I do, All HER LIFE was spent in making Motherly Sainted Love to us, and I am simply weeping at our Loss. My brain works naturally, and I try and scheme ahead as in the Past but I seem to have lost all ambition…. Must try to cheer up and be a man…. Bess seems to be sick to me, but perhaps she is anxious about my welfare, for I must worry her.”
By November he was still miserable. Now playing in Paris, although Houdini did great business thrilling audiences with the Needles effect and the Upside Down, he was “very melancholy” and only met one challenge the whole month. Still obsessed with Cecilia’s death, he wrote to Hardeen near the end of the month. “Dash its [sic] TOUGH, and I can’t seem to get over it…. Time heals all Wounds, but a long time will have to pass before it will heal the terrible blow which MOTHER tried to save me from knowing.” This cryptic reference remains a mystery to this day.
Houdini canceled his December Paris dates and took Bess to Monte Carlo to divert himself with the casinos. He won two thousand francs but soon got bored with the gaming tables. What seemed to pique his interest was the special graveyard that contained the bodies of people who had committed suicide after losing their life’s fortunes. Houdini made several visits to this bleak landscape. It’s unlikely that he himself was contemplating such a grisly fate but if he was, the visits seemed to disabuse him of that notion. “A terrible feeling pervades the first time one sees the graves, and thinks of the human beings who finish their lives in this manner.” More sociologist than potential suicide, Houdini made some acute observations about the phenomenon in his diary. He noted that there were more suicides in winter than in summer; that the casino workers would stuff money into the bare pockets of recently discovered suicides to suggest other motives than financial; and that the casino now offered to pay for shipping bodies back to their hometowns to “keep things quiet.” A grave of a man and woman who committed suicide together particularly fascinated him.
My mother has been the on
e great love and adoration of my life. I have loved others, but it has seemed to me always that beneath and above any other affection was my love for my beautiful mother.
Houdini scholars have always emphasized Houdini’s seemingly over-the-top devotion to his mother. In the context of his time, Houdini’s sentiments don’t seem excessive. Houdini didn’t pen the mother tribute above; Clyde Fitch, the most popular playwright in America in the early 1900s, wrote it. “A mother is a mother still/ The holiest thing alive,” the poet Coleridge observed, and Houdini quoted that in a letter to Bess seeking to differentiate his love for her and Cecilia. “My Dear Girl, whereas I say you are mine, my mother claims me as her son. So the two loves do not conflict…. Indeed I love you as I shall never again love any woman, but the love for a mother is a love that only a true mother ought to possess, for she loved me before I was born, loved me as I was born and naturally will love me until one or the other passes away into the great Beyond, not passing away but simply let us say ‘gone on ahead.’”
Though he didn’t follow the Jewish religion to the letter, as witnessed by his postponement of his mother’s interment, Houdini did believe in an after-life—one where the deceased might even be able to intercede with God on behalf of those still living. In 1916, Houdini was interviewed by a Cincinnati journalist who came across a picture of an austere-looking, gray-haired, bearded man in his dressing room. “That’s my father,” Houdini told him. “I think [he] has given me my success. When he died he asked me to pray for him every night. He would watch over me and assure my success…. I have followed his request.”
The Secret Life of Houdini Page 33