Houdini(12)

Houdini also performed escapes from restraints used to confine criminally insane individuals, including “crazy-cribs,” which were lightweight beds with extensive straps. He invited more “one-time-only” challenges from the public, which lead to his escape from ropes in which he dangled from the Heidelberg Tower’s roof in New York City. He also escaped from the belly of a huge sea creature found in Cape Cod, which was brought to a stage and chained closed after Houdini climbed inside.



Houdini additionally introduced escapes from torture chambers brought from around the world, including the Chinese sanguaw, the Scottish gibbet, and the German iron maiden torture chest. Houdini devised yet another, more complex torture chamber for himself: the Chinese Water Torture Cell, or the Upside Down (USD). In this device, Houdini was shackled upside down with his feet in stocks and lowered into a vat of water. The stocks were then closed with padlocks. Many people at the time believed that Houdini was only able to escape from the cell by using supernatural abilities to dematerialize and re-materialize. Only a few people in the world know how Houdini actually did this trick.



Houdini’s years of constant, physical performances took a strain on his body. In 1911 he suffered his first lasting injury, a broken blood vessel in a kidney sustained when he was tied too tightly in one of his public challenges. The doctor told Houdini that he needed to stop his contortionist activities for good, but Houdini refused. He tore a ligament in his side soon after.



Houdini began to need help lugging around his huge amount of equipment. But he risked exposure of his secrets by employing assistants. He carefully selected helpers, whom he paid well and made take oaths of secrecy about what they learned about his magic. Even still, the assistants were never told the whole story behind any trick, just in case one were to betray him. Likely Dash and Bess were the only two people who knew how Houdini really pulled off his tricks.



In July of 1913 Houdini left for Europe again. He got word of his mother Cecilia’s grave illness soon after arriving and headed straight back to her bedside. Unfortunately, Cecilia passed away before Houdini arrived, and Houdini returned to his European tour with a grieving heart.



In Nuremberg, Germany, he defied a court order that forbid him from performing the Chinese Water Torture Cell under the waters of a lake near Nuremberg; he was prosecuted by the police and won the case. Houdini was the only one who didn’t seem to take pleasure in the ridiculous proceedings; he sat lost in grief in the courtroom. Houdini saw that his black mood was having a negative effect on Bess’s health and resolved to bounce back. He took Bess on a vacation in the French Riviera but indulged in a morbid fascination with a cemetery there.



Houdini tried starting a new show based solely on illusions instead of on escape tricks, including an illusion invented by another magician, the Expanding Cube. Houdini performed this illusion by telling the audience that his wife was inside a small die, and then “making” the die expand, removing the enlarged item to reveal Bess, sitting on the platform. However, other performers also used this trick, and audiences wanted Houdini to perform his trademark escapes, not other magicians’ illusions.



On a boat trip back to the United States, Houdini performed for an amazed President Theodore Roosevelt. A photograph of the president and eight men from the ship, including Houdini, was taken. Houdini had the other men in the picture airbrushed out and presented the photo of himself and Roosevelt to the public as the original photograph.



Houdini’s next tour abroad was delayed by the breakout of World War I. He turned back to touring in the United States, still struggling with grief over the loss of his mother. He leased the house in Harlem that his mother had lived in for the last years of her life and turned to new tricks: walking through a brick wall, being buried alive, and, most famously, the Suspended Straitjacket Escape. His “walking through a brick wall” trick, in which he literally seemed to do what the trick’s title indicates, made a big sensation but was quickly discarded by Houdini as too easy to replicate and too hard to orchestrate (one had to build a genuine brick wall for each show). In Los Angeles, he agreed to escape a six-foot deep grave, shackled by handcuffs. He reported later that he panicked and nearly died.



Houdini’s crowning escapade of this era was being hung, upside down and straitjacketed, from tall buildings, far from the ground. Houdini first did this trick in Minneapolis from the building of the city newspaper, and he repeated it on skyscrapers in Omaha, San Antonio, New Orleans, New York, and Providence, among others. Huge crowds turned out to see this breathtaking stunt. This trick was as dangerous as it was attention grabbing. Several other performers died trying to replicate the feat; safety hazards lay in tangled ropes, fractures of ankles and necks from the upside-down position and heavy pulleys, and the risk of catching overhead wires or hitting a wall while struggling to get free. While performing in Oakland, Houdini met the famous writer Jack London and his wife Charmian, which produced another photo opportunity for Houdini to pose with a famous person and circulate the picture among friends and family.