The Secret Life of Houdini (45 page)

The procession started on the Long Wharf of Boston Harbor and continued through the winding streets to Keith’s Theatre. Crowds of people followed the bizarre parade, others just stood on the sidewalk and watched in awe as Houdini’s next great challenge was publicly displayed. “It” was a giant 1,600-pound sea monster that had been fished out of the ocean, a “what is it” that locals had identified as a cross between a whale and an octopus. Ten prominent Boston businessmen had challenged Houdini to be fettered with handcuffs and leg irons and escape from the hollowed-out “belly of the beast.”

The scene onstage on September 26, 1911 was unbelievable. It took a dozen stagehands to carry out the “turtle-tortoise-fish or whatever it is,” and turn it on its back on the center of the stage. Its abdomen had been sliced open, affixed with metal eyelets, which held a long thread of steel chain. Before the escape was attempted, Houdini was forced to sign a document that would release the owners of this monster from any liability should Houdini fail the test.

Then the steel chain was slackened, and Houdini crawled into the carcass, pausing to spray some strong perfume where his head would lie. He gave a signal, and handcuffs and leg irons were fastened to him. Then the committee went to work. Smiling through their labor, they tightened the chain, passed it around the creature’s back, and secured it with locks. The cabinet was then placed around the beast and the orchestra struck up.

After fifteen minutes, the screens of the cabinet were thrown open, and there was Houdini, “grease-covered, pallid and perspiring,” holding the handcuffs and leg irons aloft in triumph. On examination, the beast was as securely locked as it had been before. Houdini was not unscathed. His first words were to the stagehands, requesting them to open the windows and give him some air. Houdini had underestimated the toxicity of the arsenic solution that the taxidermist had used to preserve the sea monster, and, locked inside, he had been adversely affected by the fumes.

A few weeks later, on November 16, Houdini faced another great challenge—admitting to himself that he was sick enough to get professional attention. Perhaps Houdini himself had bought into the myth of invincibility that he projected to his adoring public. He certainly didn’t take his myriad physical ailments that seriously. In fact, he wasn’t really even sure where he had incurred this latest injury. Since returning to the U.S. vaudeville stage in September of that year, Houdini had put himself through a battery of more and more bizarre and strenuous challenges. At first Houdini thought that he had been injured in Buffalo in the middle of October, when a gang of longshoremen crushed one of his kidneys while tying him up in chains during a challenge. On reflection, it also could have occurred in Detroit at the end of the month, when five men stuffed him in a bag and strapped him shut using round straps that pulled so tight he felt something give. At any rate, he had been passing blood for the past two weeks, and he couldn’t hide his pain and discomfort from Bess, but more important, from his mother, who was visiting him during his engagement in Pittsburgh. He had worried about his mother recently. That summer she had had such severe stomach problems that he had sent her to a hotel in the Catskills to recuperate. He certainly didn’t want to contribute to his mother’s unease. So, as a concession to her more than anything else, he walked through the doors of Mercy Hospital and consulted with a Dr. Wholly.

“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.