The Dangerous Book of Heroes Read online

  Copyright © 2009 by Matt Haley

  In the act, Dash would bind Houdini with ropes, put him inside a bag and then the trunk, and lock it securely. Dash then closed curtains around it and stepped behind it to count to three. On three, Houdini would throw back the curtain and Dash would be revealed inside the trunk, bound as his brother had been.

  The act was not a success at first. Houdini thought it might be the fact that he spoke bad English, with a strong New York accent. He began to work on polishing his grammar and diction as well, moving further away from the Jewish immigrant from Hungary that he had been.

  When Harry was eighteen, his father died. Harry knew he had to support his mother and worked even harder to perfect the act. The trunk trick was going over well, and he began to concentrate on escapology and drop some of the usual rabbit-in-hats, card, and coin tricks. He could do all that, but no one could work knots, chains, and handcuffs the way he could.

  In 1894, when working the cabaret circuit on a low billing, Houdini met the eighteen-year-old Wilhemina Beatrice Rahner, “Bess.” He was just twenty, she eighteen. They married after only three weeks, and he adored her until his death. Her mother was appalled at Bess marrying a Jew and sprinkled holy water around her house whenever he came to visit.

  Houdini made Bess his assistant, and Dash struck out on his own. He too had a successful career as a magician, but it is amazing to think that of all of his contemporaries, the name Houdini was the one that everyone came to know. It wasn’t the magic that made him, but the physical prowess and incredible showmanship.

  Houdini and Bess worked every night, taking any booking they could get, no matter what the billing. A turning point was a week’s booking at the Tony Pastor Fourteenth Street theater. Houdini had to borrow a tuxedo for the first night. He called himself “the King of Handcuffs,” and the crowd loved the act, but it was a hard business and every break seemed to be followed by the return of poverty. Desperate for work, the Houdinis joined a traveling circus. Harry even made himself up as “Wild Man” for a time, growling at the audience through cage bars—anything to earn a buck and keep body and soul together.

  It was around this time that the entire troupe was locked up for performing on a Sunday—forbidden by the laws of the time. When the sheriff had gone, Houdini borrowed a pin from his wife and opened the cell door, letting them all out. It gave him the idea for stunts that would irritate police in a number of countries for years afterward. He also visited an insane asylum and became interested in the possibilities of working with a straitjacket. It suited him perfectly, as escaping from one involved no trick, just strength, dexterity, and practice.

  His life at that point was one of traveling around the country to shabby clubs and bars—anywhere that would take his act for a night. At times, he and his wife starved, and at the lowest point, Houdini offered to sell his secrets to a newspaper for twenty dollars—only to be turned down. He began a conjurer’s school for a while but earned little from it. Next came a fifteen-week booking with a medicine show in Kansas, and it was there that he met a group of traveling acrobats. Part of their act was throwing their one-year-old son around the stage. Away from the crowds, Houdini caught the toddler when he fell down some stairs.

  “That’s some buster your kid took,” he told the parents. They kept the nickname, and Buster Keaton went on to become a famous silent-film star and director of knockabout comedies.

  When the show went bust, Houdini, in desperation, turned to a new act. Spiritualism had become popular all over the country, and as a professional magician, he knew the tricks that mediums would use to fool an audience into thinking they could speak to the dead. Houdini booked a show and visited a local cemetery to take notes from the gravestones. He reduced some of the audience to tears with the extraordinary “accuracy” of his knowledge. He kept the act going for a time but despised himself for making money from the true grief of his audiences. In the end he stopped the performances completely. For the rest of his life, he made it a personal mission to expose the charlatans in the world of Spiritualism, destroying the careers of a number of the more famous ones, who used all his tricks and had none of his scruples.

  His career to that point had been hit-and-miss, with nothing to raise him above the hundreds of similar acts traveling the boards in America as the nineteenth century came to an end. In 1898 he realized that publicity was everything. Newspaper headlines would fill the largest halls with audiences. First he tried walking into newspaper offices and challenging them to tie him up or chain him, but the cynical journalists assumed his handcuffs were props and threw him out. Remembering the experience of getting a circus out of jail, he challenged the Chicago police instead, saying that they could use their own cuffs and lock him in a cell. To his delight they agreed, and Chicago newspapers sent reporters to cover the event.

  It was barely minutes before Houdini walked out of the cell, but the first attempt was met with indifference. The reporters heard he had visited the cell the day before and assumed he’d made a key from a wax impression. Indignantly, Houdini offered to do it again—this time naked and with his mouth checked and sealed with wax. His clothing was placed in another locked cell. For a second time, he strolled out in just minutes, fully dressed and grinning.

  By the time the newspapers were on the stands the following morning, he was famous. Most important, he now had all the ingredients that would make him the best-known escapologist of his generation.

  Modern magicians assume he used keys, though he always denied it, or wire to pick the locks if he hadn’t. He did apprentice to a locksmith for a time and studied handcuffs until he knew them as well as any man alive. Even so, there were times when it all went wrong. Once during each performance, he would challenge the audience to produce some restraint to test him. In Chicago, a burly policeman produced a set of standard handcuffs. When Houdini went behind a curtain, he found that he could not spring the lock. He came out again and the man triumphantly explained that he had jammed the locks with lead. The great Houdini would have to be sawn out of them. Houdini’s defeat made the papers, with gleeful headlines. He was mortified and never again allowed cuffs to go on without examining the workings first.

  Once more, the Houdinis were saved from a low point, this time by Martin Beck, a theater manager who saw potential in the act and became a mentor for a time. He offered Houdini regular bookings and the princely sum of sixty dollars a week. That is the equivalent of almost fifteen hundred dollars a week today and shows the extent of Beck’s faith in Harry Houdini. It was the first taste of the big time, and Houdini grasped it with both hands. On Beck’s advice, he dropped the last of the card tricks and focused his act on three main events. He would swallow needles and thread, then pull the thread back out of his mouth with the needles threaded in a neat line. The trunk trick remained, and he continued with miraculous escapes from chains and ropes. With Bess, he traveled to San Francisco and once again challenged the police.

  The San Francisco police were intrigued by a man who thought he could get out of their best cuffs. They strip-searched him before putting on ten pairs of handcuffs and manacles around his ankles. He dropped them all at his feet in just moments. The newspapers reported his triumph, and the chief of police said publicly: “Should Houdini turn out to be a criminal, I would consider him a very dangerous man, and I suggest that the various officers throughout the United States remember his appearance in case of future emergency.” You just can’t buy that sort of publicity. The Houdinis went on to Los Angeles, where they did it all over again.

  Martin Beck advised that Houdini should travel to Europe and make a name for himself there. His advice was farsighted, and the Houdinis went by passenger ship to London on a tour that would make him world-famous. In the American embassy in London, Houdini had to fill out a passport application. He put his birthplace down as Appleton, Wisconsin, and rubbed away another piece of his past.

  The tour didn’t start well. The manager of the London Alhambra Theat
re was skeptical about the grand claims Houdini made and refused to honor the booking. Houdini was furious, and eventually the man agreed that Houdini could go ahead if he could beat the policemen of Scotland Yard. Houdini insisted on going straight to that ancient police station.

  The English policemen were amused at the brash American escapologist. They agreed to his challenge and handcuffed him to a pillar with a few pairs of their handcuffs. With a smile, a senior policeman pointed out that they weren’t “stage handcuffs.”

  “Here’s how we fasten Yankee criminals who come over here and get into trouble,” he said, adding with a chuckle that he’d come back and set Houdini free in “an hour or two.”

  As the policeman turned to go, Houdini said, “Wait, I’ll go with you.” The handcuffs fell to the floor with a clang, and Houdini walked out. Magicians still argue about how he managed that. The story quickly became famous, and Houdini packed London theaters for six months.

  Riding a wave of success, Houdini and Bess traveled to Germany, where in 1900 he moved on to the signature escapes that would become his trademark. The first was in Dresden. In front of a large crowd, he was manacled and bound. He was about to be thrown into the river when the local police stopped what was clearly a murder in progress. Houdini was forced to move onto a boat midriver to complete the stunt.

  He sank below the surface, and many in the audience held their breaths with him. One minute went by, then another. The audience began to pale, realizing they had witnessed a terrible death.

  Then he surfaced, to wild applause and immediate arrest. He was fined a tiny amount, for publicity that was priceless. It was not the last time he would run afoul of the law. In the German city of Cologne, Houdini was accused of using trick manacles by a policeman named Graff. Houdini’s entire career depended on the fact that he used real police-issue ones, so he sued. The case came before the highest court in Germany and a judge who was not at all sure how to resolve it. In the end, the judge took Houdini into his office and showed him the safe there. He told Houdini that if he could open the safe, he would go free.

  Copyright © 2009 by Matt Haley

  Left alone, Houdini must have had a moment of doubt. He was a genius with locks, but safes were not his specialty. Disaster lay before him. Listlessly, he turned the handle of the safe and the door swung open. It had been left unlocked. The judge was amazed and more headlines followed.

  In all, Houdini stayed in Europe for four and a half years. In Holland he had himself strapped to the blade of a windmill. In Moscow he escaped from an “escape-proof” steel prison van. How he did it is still a mystery.

  On his return to England, an event occurred that shows why Houdini was more than a man with keys and hidden lock picks. His challenge to the audience was taken up by an English weight lifter named Hodgson. Houdini spotted that the cuffs Hodgson had brought had scratches around the locks. At first Houdini refused, but Hodgson was adamant. He said Houdini claimed he could escape from anything, so he should not back down. The audience agreed, and reluctantly Houdini allowed himself to be chained and bound in a kneeling position. A cabinet was placed around him.

  He was in trouble from the beginning. As Houdini had suspected, the locks were all jammed. The orchestra played on while the crowd waited, and waited.

  Houdini’s arms began to turn blue, and he asked to have the chains loosened and then replaced. Hodgson told him to admit defeat and give in. Houdini glared at him and returned to the cabinet.

  It was just under two hours before he came out. He was sweating heavily. His clothes were torn and his arms and wrists were bleeding. He threw the pile of manacles at Hodgson’s feet and told him to get out. The crowd went wild.

  Before he left Europe, Houdini, aged just twenty-seven, visited the grave of Robert-Houdin in Paris, to pay his respects. Houdin’s family spurned his attempt at contact, and he returned to America with his wife. They bought a four-story house in Manhattan, and he put his mother in it. However, Martin Beck’s promise that American theaters would clamor for Houdini was not yet coming true. The Houdinis returned to London, where he could earn two thousand dollars a week, the equivalent of forty-five thousand dollars today. Almost all of it went on rare books and tricks, as his personal collection of thousands of volumes grew steadily. He bought entire libraries as easily as single books.

  Back in Europe he perfected an escape from a straitjacket while hanging upside down, far above a crowd. We can never know for sure how long it took him, as he had long before realized that an appearance of real struggle made his escapes more of an event. Nothing could look easy, even to the Great Houdini. His fame grew steadily, and he took great pleasure in being too fully booked to accept an offer of five thousand dollars a week from a New York theater. It was clearly time to come home.

  All through his career, Houdini was sensitive to the fact that he had to keep the act fresh and come up with greater and more baffling escapes. In Washington, D.C., he had himself locked in the cell that had held Charles Guiteau, the assassin of President Garfield. The lock was a five-tumbler combination and could not be reached from the cell itself. It was a suitable challenge, and Houdini was stripped, searched, and left there, only to walk out moments later. His escape was so quick, in fact, that he spent a little extra time letting the prisoners out and then putting them back into different cells.

  In Boston, locked in another police cell, he let the waiting guards and journalists think they had succeeded before he called them from a theater halfway across the city. Around the same time, in 1906, Houdini published the first of his books: The Right Way to Do Wrong, which was a study of techniques used by petty criminals. It was so comprehensive that many feared he had written a textbook for thieves and con men. It sold very well, and Houdini began a publication called Conjurors’ Monthly Magazine and took on a secretary. He also began work on The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin—the hero who had fallen from his pedestal for Houdini. The book was published in 1908 to great success.

  Meanwhile, his escapes had become ever grander, though he never stopped the challenges that were taken up around the country. He escaped from a huge leather football, an iron boiler, a piano box, a thick sack, tarred ropes, packing cases, and whatever else was brought to his theater performances. Even so, he suspected that his act was becoming stale and worked on a new escape that would set the world on its heels once again.

  It involved a milk can just big enough to hold him in the fetal position. It was filled with water and securely riveted together. He was handcuffed and the can secured with six padlocks on the outside. He asked audiences to hold their breath along with him. He had practiced holding his breath in his bath until he could survive for astonishing times, but it added a vital element of tension to the performances. He also had a stagehand ready with an ax to strike off the padlocks. The audience literally held their breath as the seconds ticked agonizingly by—one minute…two…. At two minutes fifteen seconds, he broke out. It was his greatest triumph, and his fame was renewed. He hardly needed to embellish stories of this sort, but Houdini knew the importance of myth and legend and added details to his achievements, so that a river plunge became a struggle under the ice or a childhood trick became picking up needles with his eyelids while hanging upside down. Not since P. T. Barnum had a man understood so well that the legend could be bigger than the man. Even so, the man himself was simply extraordinary.

  Copyright © 2009 by Matt Haley

  At the height of his fame, he returned with Bess to Europe and adoring audiences. There he fell in love with the new airplanes and bought one for five thousand dollars. From Germany, he took the plane by ship to Australia, where he was welcomed like a returning son. His was not the first flight in Australia. It was probably the second, but the newspaper coverage meant it might as well have been first. Houdini had conquered the air, and his interest in flight waned as quickly as it had struck him.

  In 1913, while in Copenhagen, he received a telegram that his mother had died. He was distraugh
t and broke all his contracts to go home. For a long time Houdini was inconsolable and visited her grave constantly. Eventually, he recovered enough to complete his European contracts. While he was there, he bought the secret to walking through a brick wall from the English magician who had created it. By 1914, Houdini was back in New York and performing it for audiences to great acclaim. It was described as “the Wonder of the Age.”

  World War I broke out that year, and Houdini went to the recruiting offices, though he was forty-three. His offer to fight was refused, and instead he performed for the troops. His legendary generosity involved him doing coin tricks with real gold coins and letting the soldiers keep them. One source estimated that he gave away almost seven thousand dollars this way, a vast sum for the day. He was becoming a statesman for magic, with immense influence, so it is no surprise that he became president of the Society of American Magicians. Years later it came out that he also paid wages to poverty-stricken members from his own pocket.

  In 1918 he made an elephant disappear at the New York Hippodrome. But the film business was booming, Buster Keaton was famous, and Houdini turned to the new medium with as much panache as his stage shows. He always played a detective who could escape from anything, and the films were only reasonably successful, though they leave a record of the man that is still available today. He usually did his own stunts, which at least once resulted in him breaking his wrist. He was no longer a young man, but Houdini remained convinced that a life of tough exercise, with no tobacco or alcohol, gave him a sort of perpetual youth. He claimed that he could withstand any blow as long as he tensed his muscles first.