The Dangerous Book of Heroes (48 page)

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 distraught 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.

His interest in the film business vanished as quickly as his infatuation with planes. The end of the war, with so many dead, had brought about a resurgence of Spiritualism, and Houdini was appalled at an industry that made money out of the pain of others. He knew all the tricks of course—he had once used them himself. Even so, he understood the desperate need that made people believe. He longed to speak to his mother again and attended dozens of séances in the hope of meeting someone with real talent. He also made a pact with his wife that they would try to reach each other after death. To that end, he gave her two passwords: “Rosabell” and “believe.” A true medium would be able to reveal them.

He found no one of real talent, and in anger he set out to debunk the entire industry. On one famous occasion he traveled to see a Cleveland medium, George Renner, who claimed to have spirits speak through a megaphone. In the darkness, Houdini put lampblack on the mouthpiece and when the “spectral voices” had stopped and the lights came up, there was Renner with blackened lips, blissfully unaware that he had been exposed.

To his stage act, Houdini now added a section on Spiritualism, where the audience could see what he did, while the people at the table wore sacks on their heads. It was a success, and in response to his act and his written articles, lawsuits for defamation were brought against him from the prominent Spiritualists of the day—at one point adding up to a million dollars. Houdini engaged his own lawyer and carried on. He never tired of revealing the lies of those who claimed to speak to the dead, read tea leaves, or tell the future from the stars. On astrology, he said: “They cannot tell from a chunk of mud millions of miles away what is going to happen to me.” He even
proposed a law to have fortune-telling made illegal, but it was rejected.

Using only what he called “natural methods,” Houdini proved that the mystical powers claimed by an Indian fakir were false. Like that performer, Houdini had himself sealed into a watertight coffin, then submerged in the swimming pool of New York's Hotel Shelton. Inside he had a telephone in case it went wrong. Doctors estimated that he had enough air for only three to four minutes, but he survived ninety underwater, almost twice what the fakir had managed. Once again, Houdini had shown that “mystical powers” could be equaled or beaten by strength and ingenuity. The Spiritualists hated him.

At the same time, he perfected his masterpiece, which he called the Chinese Water Torture Cell. In it, he was hung upside down underwater, chained, and manacled. Years of physical strain were beginning to have their effects, and it was his most difficult stunt, but he did it over and over again, to delighted audiences. At last, a bone in his ankle snapped and he had to abandon the water torture for a time until it healed.

His act continued despite the injury, and as always, Houdini pushed himself to the limits of endurance, driven by some need to go faster and further than he ever had before. He and Bess took the show to Montreal in 1926. He gave a lecture on the tricks of Spiritualism there, and afterward three young fans came to see him backstage. One of them brought a picture he had drawn of Houdini. Another was a keen amateur boxer.

Resting his broken ankle, Houdini was lying down reading letters when they approached him. The boxer asked if it was true that Houdini could take any punch. Houdini was distracted, but he nodded. Without warning, the young man hit him four times in the abdomen. Houdini bore up well and sent them away with smiles, but he felt terrible pain, which only grew as the hours passed. Regardless, he traveled to Detroit for the next show, arriving with a temperature of 102 degrees. It was 104 by the time the show was due to begin. The water torture was out because of his ankle, but he managed to finish
the rest of the show. He was close to collapse, but even then refused to see a doctor. At last, when it was clear he was dying, he was rushed to the hospital. His appendix had been ruptured and peritonitis had set in, the organ rotting inside him. His last words to his brother were “I'm tired of fighting, Dash.”