Secrecy was such a fixture of Harry Houdini’s life, it should have been his middle name. We remember him now as the greatest escape artist who ever lived – a tough, squat Hungarian-born Jewish American who freed himself from everything from handcuffs, chains and straitjackets to coffins, iron maidens and torture racks – but he was basically an illusionist; a conjuror. While millions may have swallowed the myth that he achieved his escapes using nothing but brute strength, extreme plasticity and superhuman self-belief, in fact there was often something up his sleeve, so to speak – something he knew about and the audience didn’t. His equipment would be customised, rigged, interfered with. The myriad containers that imprisoned him would come apart in ingenious ways. To accomplish his famous escape from a big milk can full of water, for instance, he could simply remove the top section, whose ring of false rivets gave a convincing illusion of indestructibility. Even when he leapt shackled into the Mississippi, the Seine or Aberdeen harbour, there was something he wasn’t letting on about the ties that bound him, whether it be dodgy cuffs or concealed lock-picks.
Enough secrets for one life, you might think. But now there are more nails emerging from the strongbox that has preserved his reputation for 80 years since his death. Two American authors have suddenly announced that Houdini was more than the world’s greatest showman. In their forthcoming biography, The Secret Life of Houdini, William Kalush and Larry Sloman say he was a secret agent; a spy. They suggest that he gathered top-secret information in Germany when he performed there before the first world war. They say he could have been involved in the surveillance of anarchists in Russia. And they maintain that without his services to international espionage, Harry Houdini may not have become the star whose extraordinary exploits are still the stuff of legend today.
By 1894, the year he turned 20, the struggling magician Ehrich Weiss had a wife, a new act and a new name: Harry Houdini. He and his beloved, Bess, joined an American travelling circus and performed as the Houdinis, attracting limited attention with a magic act. But Houdini still needed a lucky break – and it was a Minnesota beer hall in 1899 that apparently served as the escapological equivalent of Liverpool’s Cavern Club in 1961, where one Brian Epstein chanced upon a performance by the Beatles. After Houdini made short work of some cuffs brought to him by the impresario Martin Beck, Beck offered him a headlining vaudeville gig and the princely fee of $60. A full contract was to follow, with Houdini playing smart theatres in big cities from Chicago to Los Angeles, and his fame suddenly began to grow.
According to Houdini’s latest biographers, William Kalush and Larry Sloman, the steep fame curve that the showman enjoyed in the early years of the 20th century wasn’t simply the result of ingenuity, hard work and showbiz karma. They maintain that Houdini formed a secret pact with top American detectives in Chicago, whereby they would help him achieve stardom on the condition that the great escapist teach them the tricks of his trade.
If this extraordinary claim is true, it provides a possible solution to one of the many mini-mysteries within the enigma that was Harry Houdini’s odd career. He would frequently turn up at police stations to demonstrate dramatic escapes from handcuffs, manacles, straitjackets and prison cells – all in the name of free publicity. “I defy the police departments of the world to hold me,” he would boast. At best, this behaviour was wasting police time; at worst, as he casually chucked off the shackles designed to restrain the most psychopathic criminals, he was advertising the inadequacy of police equipment. But, of course, they would have to grin and bear it if they had been instructed to indulge every whim of a covert police adviser. If a performer such as David Blaine were to ask for this level of police co-operation nowadays, would he receive it?
But Houdini’s new biographers go further. They say that Houdini was probably employed by the intelligence services – on both sides of the Atlantic. When Houdini sailed to Britain in 1900, at the midpoint of his life, he met the Special Branch superintendent William Melville at Scotland Yard, escaped from some regulation cuffs and passed on some lock-picking secrets. Shortly afterwards, they claim, Melville became head of the Britain’s secret service and recruited Houdini for espionage work.
It was in the same year that Houdini pitched up in Germany, where he captivated theatre audiences in Dresden and Berlin. This was a time when diplomatic tensions were building: both Britain and America saw Germany as a growing threat to the world order. There were real fears in the US that the Germans were scheming to invade American waters and seize colonies in Latin America. And not only was the German ruler, Kaiser Wilhelm II, pushing ahead with a plan to increase the power of the German navy, challenging Britannia’s maritime supremacy, but he had supported the Boers fighting the British in South Africa.
One known spy who definitely was operational in Europe around this time – and these were the days before the existence of the CIA, MI5 and MI6 – was Sidney Reilly, on whom Ian Fleming modelled the character of James Bond. Reilly posed as a German in the Netherlands to uncover the truth about Dutch aid to the Boers. He may even have been the same age as Houdini – one of the slippery spy’s possible birth dates is March 24, 1874: the day Ehrich Weiss was born in Hungary.
According to Kalush and Sloman, Houdini may have been snooping into German weaponry secrets. During a three-week run of shows in Essen, in the industrial Ruhr district, he was challenged by the Krupp company to escape from some of its most fiendish handcuffs. Krupp didn’t just make hand restraints: it was a big munitions manufacturer, and Houdini was allowed to visit the factory.
A German newspaper claimed that criminals were lining up to meet the great lock-breaker and learn his secrets. And it was in Germany that Houdini became tangled up in the legal system. He was hypersensitive to criticism, and when a newspaper, the Rheinische Zeitung, claimed he was a fraud who had, among other things, attempted to bribe a policeman into secretly giving him a key to help him escape some fetters at police headquarters in Cologne, he hit the roof. He sued his accuser and, in a highly theatrical turn of events, ended up performing escape routines in the courtroom to clear his name – which he triumphantly did.
Feted by the public, buttonholed by criminals and known to the police, Houdini could hardly have had a higher profile in Germany at this point. If the German authorities got wind of any involvement in espionage, they appear not to have acted on it. In fact, the new biography notes that they were strangely co-operative with him. He was to return to Germany for further shows before the first world war, and he was so popular there that he was rumoured to be a German spy. Houdini later wrote about his involvement in an international exchange of police information: he gave the German police details of top criminals, published in a book by a Boston chief inspector who was a member of the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP), the American-based network founded in 1893 to foster co-operation between cops across the globe. In return, the Germans gave him some similar material from their files to pass on.
Houdini’s next great foreign adventure was in Russia. Arriving in Moscow in 1903, he introduced himself in customary fashion to the police and persuaded them to let him escape from a “carette”, a jail-on-wheels in which prisoners were transported to Siberia. But the Russian police treated him roughly – Houdini later hinted they had even subjected him to an anal examination before the stunt.
The writer J C Cannell, in his 1926 book The Secrets of Houdini, claimed that Houdini somehow tore into the metal floor of the vehicle to effect his escape.
