Presentation of Houdini is made possible in part
by the Oscar-Jay Bull Construction Company,
providing general construction, machinery installation, and
construction management services throughout the nation.
Ladies and gentlemen, presenting for your entertainment
and amazement, the King of Cups, the Master of
Manacles, Harry Houdini.
So sing right where you are for the final story, the incredible
story of the man who made the impossible possible.
He was a man who became a legend by breaking loose from locks.
He was the man who could slip any earthly bond.
Sixty years after the magician's death, the Kula Houdini
is still an expression that is part of our parliaments.
It still stands for something magical, something
all together amazing.
Of his contemporaries, perhaps only Charlie
Chaplin has had the sting power of this entertainer,
this escape artist who picked the medium of handcuffs and
manicles, and got a lot on the public's imagination.
Thank you, I'd like to thank you for being so patient.
This is a great honor for me to be here.
Today, this is where Houdini was born right over
there. They just passed the second light post.
It's a lot that still holds tight today.
In spring of '86, Doug Henning,
one of the country's top magicians, made a stop in
Appleton, Wisconsin.
The city that Houdini always
claimed as his birthplace, a sort of pilgrimage to pay
homage to the old master on his birthday.
Houdini was my inspiration for my
life when I was about seven years old.
Henning's tribute was one of Houdini's
favorite bits of magic, metamorphosis, the trunk
trick. Now, this illusion was first performed
by Houdini around 1898.
It amazed people then.
In fact, when Arthur Conan
Doyle saw Houdini do this, he actually thought
the magician dematerialized and passed right through
solid. It's the fastest illusion in the world.
When you have a little music, it's called "Metamorphosis."
Handcuffs, two chains around each one of Debbie's
wrists, locked with a pan locks.
Now Houdini is to do this.
It took him about 20 seconds to do, but today is a
little more water and times and things are faster.
We're going to do it in the third
of a second.
Good. Now, down Debbie goes inside
the satin sack.
Good. Help me throw into top with the
lap and call the way around.
Now, don't blink your eyes, you'll miss.
Metamorphosis, one, two, three, eight!
Magic. The delight comes from seeing reality.
Avability demolished.
Yet magic is above all of
showmanship, that extra kick.
Magic. Metamorphosis.
At his peak, Houdini was
one of the world's most highly paid entertainers.
He earned thousands a week.
And tens of thousands in a week saw him perform.
Houdini was born Eric Weiss in 1874, the son of
a poor immigrant rabbi.
The family was often shackled with money woes,
and when Eric was still a child, they left Appleton,
the first of many moves.
Metamorphosis. To change.
Young Eric had always dabbled with magic, but
things changed when he chanced upon the biography
of a glamorous French illusionist, Robert Houdin.
Magic became a means of escape from the commonplace,
the conventional.
Eric added an eye to Houdin
and took the name of his idol.
At the age of 17, he left his job as a cutter in a New
York City necktie factory to fashion a new career as
Harry Houdini, magician, King of cards.
Houdini's own history would have a
similar impact on Sydney Radner of Holyoke,
Massachusetts, here surrounded by his collection of magic
and Houdini memorabilia.
When I was a youngster, I read the biography in
one clip and I was hooked.
He was just the greatest thing on earth.
I mean, he was the hero of heroes.
Caught by the spell, Radner became a magician.
And just like Houdini, Radner
soon graduated from cards and became an ace escape
artist. He was a prot?g? of Houdini's brother, Hardin,
also in the business.
Radner is one of the last surviving experts on Houdini.
These are rather unusual locks that Houdini
had this collection.
Radner inherited through Hardin, the bulk of Houdini's
handcuff collection.
I'm a leaves obvious to you.
My guy is a very huge nut.
Hundreds of handcuffs, keys and locks,
items of release and confinement.
This is the very, very, very first graphic
that Houdini put together with his own notes and
the first clippings and so on.
And scrapbooks full of photos and stories,
the links to Houdini's past, the detail the life and
often very hard times of the magicians early days.
They spent on the road with his wife Bess, performing in dime
circus acts and burlesque shows.
This supposedly is the first story in which
Houdini got any kind of publicity for getting out of
handcuffs when he stopped in and literally challenged
the chief of police to get out of handcuffs.
The reason for the stop, the reason why he came
up with it is because he was traveling with an
American gandy show and they worked doing too
well so to drum up some publicity Houdini started to
do this handcuff bit.
The handcuff bit, the challenge act.
It would become Houdini's signature.
During his travels he would challenge the local
police to do their best to hold him.
Houdini simply could not be held
anywhere by any bars.
What began with handcuffs did not end there.
He got out of all kinds of
strange devices many times.
Never have he seen them before.
That is where the challenge is.
Leg ironed, manacles, straight jackets, jail
cells, packing cases.
A US government regulation mail bank.
A man-sized football, a man-sized
envelope, a man-sized sausage skin, anything that could be
closed and confined Houdini took on.
He accepted challenges from carpenters, lunatic assignment
to heads, submarines, suffragettes.
This is what made Houdini, Houdini.
These challenges required not only an impressive
knowledge of locks and picks, but also a certain amount of
sheer bravado, something that Houdini had in abundance.
This success was not an easy thing to capture.
Early in their career, business was so bad for the
couple that Houdini nearly took a nine to five
job with the Yale Lock Company.
He needed a break, so in 1900 he took on what
would be his biggest challenge.
At age 26, with $50 in his pocket and not a single
booking to his name, Houdini set sail for Europe.
There the master of manacles confounded Scotland Yard.
And Houdini was a hit.
His reputation secured in England,
France, Germany, Russia.
The success in Europe made Houdini an instant
headliner at home.
The days of hardship were over for the couple.
For the next 25 years, Houdini
captivated the press in the public.
He became so synonymous with wonder
that two Houdini eyes would become a word.
It would capture an entry in the dictionary.
Houdini was a superb athlete, small only five
foot five, but extremely strong.
Young Eric Wise had tried out for the
Olympic swimming and diving teams.
And even at age 50, Houdini could still hold
his breath underwater for up to four minutes at a time.
That's the Niagara Falls when he did the man from beyond
that and best in Houdini.
Marie Blood, Houdini's niece, here shown visiting the magician
on a movie set recalls visiting the Houdini household as a young
girl. But I'm the last one that actually lived with him
in his home.
I'm the last one alive.
I would knock on the door and they'd say, "Memory!"
And I'd go in and I'd jump in bed with him.
And he would hold me and hug me.
And then he would pinch me with his toes.
He could work his toes the way
you would your fingers.
[Music]
Yet magic is as much manipulation of the mind
as it is manipulation of fingers or toes.
One of the top in the current crop of magicians, Harry
Blackstone, on Houdini.
His ability to communicate with the audience was
unsurpassed. It was wonderful.
And they remember that and the people felt that
when they saw him perform they saw a true miracle.
Miracles, of course, should be difficult to do.
Early in his career, Houdini
hit upon this important secret, make it look hard,
even if it isn't.
Following his escape from the
milk can, which was done inside of an enclosure, that one
of his assistants came over to the enclosure where Houdini had
long before escaped but hadn't presented himself
to the audience.
And said, "Harry, you're reading
the newspaper in there.
I can hear you turning the
pages. Do it more quietly."
And Houdini's remark was "Tell the orchestra to play
louder." So apparently when he finished reading
his newspaper, he would then take some of the water and
throw it on himself and come out and go through the grand act of
having just barely made it up.
Some claim that as a magician Houdini was only average.
No one doubts that as a showman
he was an unsurpassed genius.
Houdini was, in my opinion, one of the true
greatest showmen in American history, the other BNPT
Barnum. And I don't think that any other person
before or after have equaled the two.
But there's no question Houdini was
Houdini and Houdini's spent a lifetime making
sure that his name was in the paper bigger and
better than someone else's.
Everything he did was with a press in mind.
When others took on handcuffs,
he jumped off bridges.
When others copied his milk can escape, he created the Chinese
water torture cell.
Houdini was keenly aware of his
competition and kept scores of scrapbooks on other
magicians. Blackstone's father, Harry Blackstone's senior,
was one of the top magicians of Houdini's era
and one of Houdini's most bitter rivals.
Well, for instance, there were items
on Houdini's performance contract that he always
used. And it said that neither Blackstone nor
Thurston could work any theater that the great Houdini
worked for 30 days before or 30 days after.
As he gained more confidence,
that became three months before and three months after.
He hated competition.
Consider the case of the packing case.
And he brought my dad up on charges of having stole his idea
of the underwater box escape.
Well, interestingly enough, my father had newspaper
clippings that predated Houdini's attempts at
doing this.
And Houdini said, "Well, if you really
did, it show me the box that you escaped from."
And my dad said, "Yes, it's over in the warehouse."
This was when they were both in New York City.
They went over to the warehouse and lo and behold
that box, that trunk that my father had been using
for many, many years was gone.
Never to be seen again until in 1928, two years after
Houdini's death.
The great Joe Dunninger, the mentalist and
collector of Magic Memorabilia, went to Houdini's home in
Uptown in New York City and said to Beatrice, "I want to
some of the material that Houdini had some of
the memorabilia to put into my collection and to
purchase it and best said sure go ahead whatever you
want." And he said, "Well, all of these books and
papers and things, I need to carry them home."
She says, "Well, there are a bunch of boxes and
things down in the basement."
He went down there and he was just lovely trunk
and he said, "Best can I have this?"
She said, "Sure, take it."
So he grabs it by the handle and
starting to bounce it up the steps.
And the trap door, which was used in
this thing, fell open and inside of it on a small
brass plaque, it said the property of Harry and
Pete Bhutan, my father and his brother's real name.
So that missing trunk somehow appeared in Houdini's
basement and that's one of the great unsolved
mysteries of magic.
Houdini did not always stick to
magic to make his mark.
In 1910, he set out to conquer the skies above
Australia. He set about this feat.
Even if history forgets Houdini, the handcuff
king, it must write my name as the first man to
fly here.
After several failures on March 16th,
Houdini's fragile, voisel and plane inched Skyward.
The handcuff king broke free of the bonds of gravity and
captured an entry in the record books.
I think that most people have forgotten that.
So Houdini was wrong, but they
never forgot Houdini.
He was a man who could change
with the times, metamorphosis, when movies came in Houdini
plunged into a film career.
He battled my aguffalls.
He battled nasty thugs.
And Houdini, of course, battled his way out of
jails during his brief career on the silver screen.
Yet Houdini could not beat back a different sort
of pain.
All of his life Houdini was deeply devoted
to his mother.
When she died while Houdini was
brought on tour, the magician was devastated.
Letters to relatives, bordered in black, spelled out his grief.
I can't seem to get over it.
Sometimes I feel all right, but when a calm moment
arrives, I am as bad as ever.
My heart will always ache for our darling
mother. He longed to share some final words, and
from this longing began Houdini's foray into
spiritualism. He made the acquaintance of Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle, a tall, courtly English gentleman,
the creator of Sherlock Holmes, and one of the
world's most ardent believers in spiritualism.
Through Doyle's auspices, Houdini's
DNA attended hundreds of seances.
The magician knew all the tricks necessary
to manufacture a message.
Yet his desire to communicate with his mother was so strong
that he turned to spiritualism.
When it gave him no reply, he turned on it with a vengeance.
It looks entirely different than Houdini, but this is Houdini.
It disguised that he would typically make up and go and
visit the medium and go and get information and then invite
mediums to the audience and debunk them right in
the audience and start to produce challenges for
$10,000, anyone who could do anything that he could
not expose or could not duplicate and so forth.
With disguises and detective work and absolute
dedication, Houdini took on the debunking of the
spiritualists. It was a typical Houdini performance,
but then he approached ball endeavors with an
unabashed intensity.
Consider his literary collection.
Here at the Library of Congress
rest the results of those efforts, the bulk of Houdini's
books on magic and spiritualism, all 4,000 of them and over
100 scrapbooks stuffed with clippings.
Houdini, of course, had to have the
biggest the best collection in the world and he
succeeded. To be the best, that was what he wanted.
The recently retired curator of the Houdini
collection Leonard Beck.
To be the best, all the time,
all the time.
All this work had a purpose.
It's well known that Houdini
made a practice of going to the graves of the dead, the
Egyptians and making sure those graves were well taken care of.
There are things to me, he's a man trying to find roots for his
art to justify his art perhaps so much to himself.
Maybe the word there is roots and it
is the season.
Nothing like a more than a man making
pilgrimages to the graves of the saints, so to speak.
The man then became a saint, a kind of mountain,
a Mount Everest for other magicians to overcome.
Not a mountain.
If anything, he's like the
great wave that tends to keep pushing us toward the
shore, he has been the one who made magic an acceptable
variety medium.
It is an acceptable art form.
Driven by competition and his own curiosity,
Houdini constantly topped himself and made magic
into something new.
Others pulled a rabbit from a hat, Houdini made
an elephant disappear.
Others swallowed fire, Houdini swallowed sewing needles and
then pulled them from his mouth, threaded.
Others did dovex, Houdini used an eagle.
The magician's inventiveness resulted in patents such as
a diving suit and a constant flow of new illusions.
He wanted to escape from a block of ice,
tricky tried only in the movies, and he had plans to go
over Niagara Falls in a barrel.
He never made it.
In October of 1926, Houdini began what he described
as his farewell tour.
Early on, he broke his foot in the
Chinese water torture cell.
Then in Montreal, he had an unusual encounter
backstage. Sydney Radner.
Some students came back and one of the students asked him if it
was true.
He heard stories about his physique and so on
and said, "Ask him if it was true if he could take
a blow on the stomach."
Houdini said, "Yes."
He was really male on the
student's estimate.
He could test him and Houdini said,
"Yes, this student became a good wallop and Houdini said,
"No, I gotta be ready.
Let me know.
I wasn't ready."
He said, "All right, now try it."
So he loud him and hit him again.
Houdini felt pains that night and felt
that it was just muscle strains and so on and
continued with the show.
Houdini's superb physique was no match for the first
unexpected blow.
It ruptured his appendix and
paratonitis set in.
The doctors gave him less than
12 hours to live, but Houdini hung on for over
a week.
He died early in the morning on October 31,
Halloween. I remember going outside and I had heard
my parents talk about that he was in the hospital.
I don't think they knew the extent of how sick he was
and then all of a sudden we heard on the street,
the extras.
It's a year ago that used to do that
and I ran in the house and I said to my mother,
"They're outside.
They're yelling extra Houdini
dying." Houdini was buried with a pill of letters from
his mother under his head and over his grave
the American Society of Magicians spoke a magic wand.
Yet the memory of his magician has not dimmed.
Amid the waves of neon, downtown Niagara Falls,
Canada, one can pick out the lights of an unusual museum,
the Houdini Hall of Fame.
This museum which has been called a shrine dedicated
to my memory contains the only authentic display
of Houdini equipment and memorabilia in the
world. After all, it's flashy and theatrical and
visited by thousands of tourists Houdini would love
it. Henry Mueller, owner of the Houdini Hall of
Fame, describes one of the exhibits.
And in the envelope is an original letter from Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle to Houdini, where Houdini took
ten words in that letter and circled the ten words.
Then he wrote ten code words which I have in my
pocket and the combination of those twenty words,
the ten words circled and the ten words in my
pocket make up the secret message which will come
back if Houdini comes back.
Houdini believed that if anybody could come back
after death it would be he.
And this is the particular pair that Theodore Hardin
told me that Houdini said he would open up if
he came back in a physical way.
This has appeared on numerous seances on the
center of the seance table.
Special handcuffs and special codes.
Houdini may have scorned the spiritualists
but to his wife he left a secret message that would
spell out her pet name, Roosevelt, and the word
believe if he returned.
Scores of seances later in Houdini's silence has
been his final victory over the spiritualists.
Yet other mysteries remain.
These here were devices that Houdini used
when he was in Germany, believe it or not, to open
many of the German locks.
Now, of course, people say, well, how could he conceal?
Well, I thought he did it very well.
The answers to some of Houdini's tricks were sometimes
glaringly simple.
If he said put this pair of
handcuffs on there and he would control which one was
on 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th, this was important
because if he had examined handcuffs and he found out
that one might be very, very difficult and might
be a problem, the trick there is to get it way up
here. Now, let's get seven or eight pairs of
handcuffs on and then get the ones that are difficult
up here.
So when you took off the first five or six,
the seventh could be slipped.
Other solutions take some detective work,
such as the search for a mystery man, Jim Collins,
seen here and there in Houdini's photos.
Collins was Houdini's chief assistant for many,
many years and a magic show of any kind depends
very much on a chief key assistant.
He is all important in the ways that I can't
begin to tell you without exposing tricks.
Sometimes the trick lay in a lump
of clay.
And what he would do is during the course
of checking to see if handcuffs were working right
or locks were working right, he palm this in his hands and got
two impressions.
One this way and one and wise.
With those, his crew, his assistants
could anticipate and get among the collection a
lock pick that would be suitable for him to use
on that particular lock or handcuffs.
Or did his wife simply hand him a key
hidden in a handshake.
The mechanics of magic can be easy to grasp or purchase.
Houdini himself bought his famous illusion of
walking through a brick wall from another magician.
Tricks are easily obtainable, but tricks explain only
part of Houdini's mystery.
After his death, Bessarothi's words about her husband,
he buried no secrets.
Every conjurer knows how his tricks were done, with
the exception of just where or how the various traps
or mechanisms were hidden.
It was Houdini himself that was the secret.
What makes greatness?
Dumbness over the others in your field.
Of course, the gap between what you
were and what you could have been and he really made
something out of himself.
Maybe that's greatness.
He was of an era in which he personified what the
great hordes of Europeans who came to the United
States to escape the political problems that
were in Europe, that he was the personification of the
great escape.
Magic teaches this very important lesson
about life and that's it nothing is impossible.
We can escape from the earthly and imaginary
bonds that we create for ourselves.
That's more what Houdini did.
Most of us live lives that are often
contained and cautious.
We keep our dreams locked away, our eyes closed
to possibility.
Houdini caught our heart by
breaking free from poverty, gravity, from bonds of
steel and iron.
Houdini, he made himself a living
by escaping from rocks and chains.
He made himself a legend by showing us that limits
of any kind are illusions.
Houdini, he made himself a legend by escaping
from rocks and chains.
[Music]
Presentation of Houdini is made possible in part by the Oscar
J. Bull Construction Company, providing general construction,
machinery installation and construction management services
throughout the nation.
[Music]