The Secret Life of Houdini (48 page)

None of these conditions materially affected Houdini’s performance. The locks were immaterial to the escape and stipulating that they be “exactly as I leave them” makes Houdini’s job easier. Houdini himself would later discard the iron cage, since the horizontal bars gave people the idea that he could climb up out of the cell using the bars as leverage. Houdini always offered to move the cell to any part of the stage. The water being clean only enhanced the effect on the audience. Campion’s supervision was immaterial. Giving Houdini four minutes to complete the task was more misdirection. Houdini would usually escape within a minute from the cell. With Campion’s stipulated time frame, Houdini would actually have three more minutes to increase the tension in the audience before leaping out from behind the curtain.

It had taken numerous letters and then seventeen telegrams, but finally Clayton Hutton found himself sitting in the office of Major J. H. Russell, an intelligence officer of the British War Department. With the threat of a second war with Germany looming larger every day, Hutton figured that his experience during World War I as a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps would make him a useful asset. In addition to that, he had spent four years as a protégé of Lord Northcliffe, whose patriotism could never be questioned. Hutton’s experience as a journalist and later as a publicist for the motion picture industry could be valuable for the Intelligence Division. Or so he thought. Apparently, Major Russell didn’t share his enthusiasm. It seemed that the major had deigned to see the crackpot, who had continually sent him missives, in an attempt to end his annoying communications once and for all. Until Hutton happened to mention that twenty-five years earlier, as a young man, he had tried to outwit Houdini at the Birmingham Empire.

Russell immediately perked up at the sound of the conjurer’s name.

“I’ve got a copy of the original challenge in my wallet. I remember how—”

“Let me see it,” Major Russell broke in surprisingly.

Hutton fished the tattered paper out of his wallet that contained the challenge. Back in April 1913, Hutton had been working at his uncle’s timber mill in Saltley, England. A big magic fan, he attended Houdini’s show and was so impressed that he went backstage afterward to meet him. Houdini had announced that he would give £100 to anyone who could produce a wooden box from which he couldn’t escape, so Hutton offered to take him up on the challenge using his uncle’s carpenter. Convinced that Houdini’s packing cases were gimmicked, Hutton suggested that they build the box on the stage, in full view of the audience. Houdini agreed, with the stipulation that he be allowed to visit the mill and converse with the carpenter who would construct the box onstage.

With his uncle in the dark, Hutton invited Houdini to come to the timber yard at lunchtime. On the appointed day, a hansom cab drew up and out stepped Houdini, resplendent in a fur-lined coat and “gaudy carpet slippers” and “smoking a fat cigar.” He pulled Ted Withers, the master carpenter, to the side and engaged him in a long chat. Then, to Hutton’s astonishment, Houdini began pacing off the front wall of the mill. The next day, Hutton arrived at work to see a bright yellow poster covering the front wall, advertising Houdini’s show.

The night of the challenge, Hutton and three of his colleagues brought the pieces of the box onstage and Withers assembled it. Then Houdini was handcuffed, put in a sealed sack, and laid inside the box. The carpenter then nailed the lid shut and the crate was roped. The orchestra played some loud martial music and fifteen minutes later, Houdini emerged from his tent, bathed in perspiration, dangling the handcuffs from one hand.

It wasn’t until 1920 that Houdini confessed to Hutton that he had paid Withers £3 to affix only two nails into the end of the crate where his feet would rest. Then he simply pushed the end panel out with his feet, shimmied out of the box, and, using a small hammer and some proper nails that were concealed in the post of his ghost box, he then hammered the panel back on, under the cover of a Sousa march.

Major Russell was enthralled with this story, interrupting Hutton’s narrative many times to ask penetrating questions. When Hutton finished his account, Russell abruptly pushed aside some paperwork, stood up, and signaled Hutton to follow as he walked down a long corridor.

“You may be the very man we want,” he said. “We’re looking for a showman with an interest in escapology. You appear to fit the bill.”

Hutton was then introduced to a Major Crockatt, who bade him repeat his Houdini stories and quizzed him on the psychology of escapes. Within minutes, Hutton had been enlisted to work for MI-9, a division of military intelligence that was charged with developing gadgets that would help troops, especially airmen, who found themselves behind enemy lines or captured to escape and make their way back to England. Houdini had been the first escapologist who had tutored English intelligence in escape and lock-picking techniques. Now Hutton, a protégé of both Houdini and Lord Northcliffe, began to design unique escape aids. He created a tool set inside a cricket bat, hid Gigli saws in shoelaces, created cigarette holders that were actually high-powered telescopes, and silk maps of Europe so thin that they could be secreted inside playing cards and gramophone records. He even magnetized every safety razor in Great Britain so they could be used as impromptu compasses. Even from the grave, Houdini had helped alter the course of world history.

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.