Harry Houdini

"Most successful football teams can usually point to at least one Houdini game."

"He's been a Houdini-type pitcher for the better part of the last four or five seasons."

   ---- Recent News Stories

That a vaudeville performer who was born in 1874 and who died in 1926 is still part of everyday culture of the Twenty-First Century is amazing. The big question is why and how? The conjuring profession that made Harry Houdini famous has largely vanished. Few people read his biographies or see the (inaccurate) movies and docudramas. But everyone still knows Harry Houdini.

It's now well-established that Harry was born Ehrich Weisz on March 24, 1874 in Budapest, Hungary, not in Appleton, Wisconsin, as earlier biographies stated. The deception was probably less his parents fault than his. When he began his international travels, Harry knew that being noted as a native born American on his passport had advantages. It wasn't unheard of for naturalized US citizens to return to a visit to their native country and then get slapped in the old country's army.

How Ehrich Weisz became Harry Houdini isn't clear. Reading early biographies you would think he picked his first name because of it's alliteration with his stage surname. After all, Harry Houdini certainly sounds better (to American ears) than Ehrich Houdini or Harry Weisz. At the same time, there is a natural Americanization from Ehrich to Eric to Erie. So it may be his American boyhood chums dubbed him Harry.

Harry's pop, Samuel, was the rabbi of the synagogue in Appleton. But he was not rehired after four years service. So the family moved to New York where we have the picture of Harry growing up in abject poverty supporting a widowed mother. But when his father died at age 63 in 1892, Harry was eighteen, and the older brothers were in their twenties - scarcely young waifs. Harry also had the leisure to practice and perfect his magic act, and he had enough of a healthy lifestye that he became a competitive cross country runner (but of the plethora of medals in the famous photo, Harry won only one).

Was the family poor? Yes. In dire life-threatening poverty? No, but it makes for good copy.

By the time his father died, Harry and his younger brother, Theo (known as "Dash") had chucked their day jobs (Harry had been a garment worker) and were working as professional magicians in and around New York. They billed themselves as "The Brothers Houdini". One of their most successful tricks was "Metamorphosis". Harry (or Dash) was tied up, put in a bag and then in a trunk. The trunk was chained and padlocked shut. Whichever brother was not tied up then stood on top of the trunk, covered himself and the trunk with a curtain, and lo and behold!, when the curtain was dropped a few seconds later, the two brothers had switched places. It was a good trick but not, as many people believe, Harry's invention. Like most stage magicians, Harry and Dash used tricks that were known or could be purchased from other conjurers or from magic shops and supply houses.

It was also in 1892 that Harry met a young Catholic girl named Wilhelmina Beatrice Rahner (called Bess). After a whirlwind courtship (three weeks, we hear) they got married with the religious differences causing some consternation in both families. Dash split off with in his own act, and Bess took his place. She was the perfect assistant for Harry. At eighteen, Bess, like Harry was an experienced performer, and at hitting maybe 5 feet, she was one of the few people who didn't tower over her 5' 4" husband.

Bess and Harry started out on what was the Dime Museum Circuit. This was the poor man's vaudeville; the hours long and the pay low. They tried different types of shows: straightforward magic, mind reading stunts, and even (to Harry's later embarrassment) phony séance performances. And of course, there were Harry's escapes. He claimed he could get out of any set of cuffs, but at that point, Harry supplied his own.

By 1898, Harry was frustrated. After six years he had really nothing to show for all the work. He was still "Dime Museum Harry". According to Harry's own account, he told Bess one more year. If they hadn't hit the big time, then he'd get a regular job. This story, unlike some of Harry's, is probably true since at one point Harry offered to sell his magic tricks (there were no takers) .

Then just like a storybook, Harry and Bess were in the right place at the right time. In 1899 Harry appeared in St. Paul, and in the audience was one of the successful vaudeville impresarios, Martin Beck. After the show, Martin asked Harry if he could really get out of regulation cuffs. Sure, said Harry, and Martin brought some in for the next night's show. Harry escaped with ease, and Martin became Harry's manager.

Martin insisted Harry drop everything except the escapes (and that included Bess's name in the act). Now on the true vaudeville circuit Harry and Bess began making $60 a week - very good money at the time - and that soon went up to $120 a week - fabulous money at the time. By 1900, Harry was a headliner, and Martin arranged a brief tour in England. Harry and Bess were a sensation, and they stayed for five years.

It was not only the novelty of his escapes that soon made Harry into a living legend. Harry Houdini was probably the greatest self-promoter of all time, and a master at getting free publicity. The key (no joke intended) was the challenge escape. After arriving in town, Harry would go to the local police station and ask the cops to lock him in the cell "in a nude condition". With one exception (where the doors were opened by one lock at the end of the corridor), Harry got out. He would also escape from handcuffs after leaping into a river where the hardest thing, said Harry's brother Dash, was to keep the cuffs from falling off before you hit the water. Naturally the bridge leaps were attended by the press and huge crowds. Then of course, there was his upside down straight jacket release, and local firms and individuals would challenge him to escape from whatever restraints they could devise.

Harry's persona was a strange mixture of affability blended with spitefulness and stinginess with the latter characteristics tending to rise to the surface. One assistant said that Harry didn't really like people all that much. And there was the time one of his assistants and librarian, Alfred Becks, mentioned he had seen a rare book for sale but didn't have the money to buy it (which suggests that working for Harry wasn't all that lucrative). So Harry went to the shop and purchased it himself. He then gave it to Alfred, right? Nope, he kept it hidden, and when Alfred died Harry took the book from it's hiding place and placed it on the shelf.

The people Houdini particularly despised were the imitators who began springing up once he hit the big time. In addition to denouncing them in print (he took over and wrote the Conjurer's Magazine), he would even attend their shows with the intent of disrupting their performances, a practice it must be admitted that was often mutual.

What was particularly galling was that his imitators also included the "escape challenge" which Harry said was his sole invention. They even imitated his name, for crying out loud, and Harry often found himself contending with variously named Oudinis, Boudinis, Udinas, and Hardeens. Harry seemingly forgot that he himself borrowed many tricks from other magicians and had taken his own name from the great French magician, Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin, which it must be added, irriated Jean Robert's widow and daughter-in-law. When in France Harry had asked if he could pay his respects to Madame Robert-Houdin, and lay a wreath on Professor Robert's grave. The two ladies curtly informed him they did not wish to see anyone. Harry's response was quintessential Houdini. After a spittle flinging diatribe where he stated they should be happy to associate with his name - after all, Harry Houdini was far more famous than Robert-Houdin - he began a series of articles "exposing" Robert-Houdin as a hack performer, a mediocre magician, and a trick stealing thief. Later Harry combined the articles into a book, The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin, although it was really more of an unmasking of Harry Houdini.

Harry's competitors, in turn, often accused him of exaggerating his abilities. One Russian magician claimed that the famous "Metamorphosis" trick as performed by Harry and Bess was no big deal. So what if only took a minute for Harry to emerge and find Bess had taken his place? The version he and his wife did was vastly superior. After all, Mrs. Houdini was but a little slip of a girl, and his own wife was plump. But when it came to mano-a-mano challenges, Harry would always emerge the victor.

Houdini wasn't completely antagonistic to all competitors, though. He was quite tolerant of the Great Hardeen, although Hardeen had made Harry the butt of a practical and professional joke. In 1915, Harry and Hardeen were both appearing in the San Francisco, Harry at the Orpheum Theater and Hardeen at the one run by Alexander Pantages. To gain some publicity, Harry had staged an upside down straightjacket escape above one of the city streets. As Harry strained and fought to free himself, a group of men came through passing out leaflets bearing Hardeen's photograph and the words, "All this week at Pantages."

When Harry learned of the prank, he invited Hardeen, Hardeen's wife, Alexander Pantages and his wife, and novelist Jack London to dinner at his hotel. Everyone passed a pleasant hour. When the bill came Harry took it, bowed politely to everyone, handed the check to Hardeen, and walked out. Of course, "Hardeen" was none other than Harry's younger brother, Dash, who had continued his own show on the big-time circuit.

It was Dash, by the way, not Harry, who was the originator of the straightjacket escape in full view of an audience. At first, both Harry and Dash wiggled out of the jackets from behind a curtain or in a cabinet. The response was often lukewarm. Shoot, the audience felt, someone could have come from backstage and let them go. After one performance, Dash responded to the catcalls by saying the next night he would escape in full view of the audience (he was too pooped for an encore). He did, and when the audience saw how Dash had to struggle to free himself, they gave him an ovation. Dash sent the news story to Harry who promptly incorporated the out-in-the-open escape into his own act. Harry was not above a little imitation himself.

Do we know how Harry did his tricks? The answer is yes and no, but mostly yes. Certainly every trick Harry did can be performed by expert magicians today. But since there are a number of alternatives to achieving a particular effect, whether someone is using Harry's exact method may never be known. We should also remember that in the day before mass visual media, Harry's legend relied largely from newspaper descriptions of the tricks. Naturally the tellings could easily surpass the actual performance.

In a Houdini escape there usually was a trick to it. Harry took far fewer risks - both physical or concerning publicity - than people thought. Sometimes the "challenges" were arranged beforehand (and might even be his own assistants set in the audience). Recent authors have even uncovered strong evidence that his release from the multiple combination handcuff in the famous Daily Mirror challenge was a collusion between Harry and the newspaper. How else, they asked, did marks on the silver trophy bestowed on Harry by the Mirror show it been prepared months in advance? Someone on the paper figured Harry would get out.

It's very likely that a Houdini show as performed in his day wouldn't fly before a modern audience. Much of the time the performance had everyone staring at a drawn curtain or a closed cabinet, often for minutes - or in rare cases an hour or more - while the orchestra played "Many Great Hearts Are Asleep in the Deep". One magician just starting on his performing career in the early 1920's went to see Harry. He came away disappointed. From Harry's reputation, he expected to see miracles. What he saw was a magic show. Only one trick - Harry's Indian "needles" trick - impressed him. All the others (including the escapes), he could have done himself.

In the 1920's Harry was tired of the same old escape routines, and he started touring with a full evening magic show. Harry still performed his escapes, but added traditional Howard Thurston style tricks as well. As always (and as Harry himself said), most of a magic show is in the presentation. In typical Harry fashion he had special suits prepared so he when he walked out onto stage he could rip the sleeves off his jacket to show he - literally - had nothing up his sleeve.

By far Harry's most famous trick was making an elephant disappear at New York's huge Hippodrome. A crew wheeled a large box onto the stage. A trainer led out the elephant and led it up the ramp. The doors were shut, the box turned a quarter turn, and the back and front doors opened. Hey, presto! the elephant was gone.

The trick has become quite famous - legendary, in fact - in the history of magic. But if the viewer saw it he could probably guess the modus. It was done quite literally with mirrors. The box was not only large enough to hold an elephant; it could easily have held two. It was certainly large enough that the elephant - with its trainer could walk up the ramp and stand by one of the black painted walls. Then a mirror probably flat against the opposite wall with it's back also painted black - could be slid so it ran from the middle of the back door and the opposite corner at the front of the box. When the doors were opened, the mirror reflected the half of the box sans elephant. But to anyone looking through the door, the interior appeared empty.

Some of the audience remembered the trick as pretty pud. The doors were so small (to insure the mirror reflected only "safe areas"), and the auditorium so large that few could see into the box at all. Everyone else had to take Harry's word the elephant was gone. Also the joke was circulated that three stagehands wheeled the box on stage, but it took twenty men to wheel the "empty" box back into the wings.

But none of it mattered. A thousand people saw Harry perform a not very impressive trick. But millions read that Harry Houdini had made an elephant disappear. Another rung added to the Legend of Harry Houdini. But soon another activity began to absorb Harry more and more.

It is generally accepted by historians of magic - and by some people who saw Houdini perform - that his forté was escapes, not magic. As a magician, he was quite ordinary, and in some way, not that good. Orson Welles, the actor and movie producer, saw Houdini's last touring show in 1926. It was awful stuff, said Orson.

The Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries - as is our current Twenty-first Century - were times of scientific and technological advancements accompanied by great gullibility and superstition. Nothing demonstrated this better than the rise of spiritualism. In 1848 two young girls from upstate New York, Kate and Margaret Fox, learned they could make rapping noises with their toes without being detected. The raps were, they said, from spirits knocking out answers to questions in code. Kate and Margaret fooled their parents, their friends, and just about everyone else. Although in later years Mary confessed it was a fake (and demonstrated the technique onstage), the world was soon (and remains) filled with true believers in ghosts and spirits.

Houdini loathed spiritualists. Where he acquired his fierce antipathy isn't really clear. One story is a medium transmitted a message to him from his mother. Clearly recognizing a fake, Houdini was outraged that people would take money from bereaved relatives by fabricating messages from the dead.

Debunking astrology makes a great middle school science project, and exposing the tricks of spiritualists can be as simple. One of Harry's methods would be to require a medium to answer a private question that had a specific answer - something no medium does very well. He would seal the question in an envelope - sort of a "Great Carnac" performance - and the medium would touch the envelope and give a typically vague Magic 8 Ball reply. "It is possible," they might say, or "It will happen when the time is ripe." Then when the envelope was opened, Harry's question would be something like "Who was the Detroit chief of police I met in Europe? What year and in what city?" But as usual, proof of out and out fraud failed to faze the true believer.

Like today, spiritualists used higher-tech ghostly phenomenon to - quote - "prove" - unquote - ghosts really existed. Back then it was the famous spirit photographs. Although they clearly arose from chance (imperfections on the film, light leaks, and development errors) or simply out-and-out fraud, the spiritualists took them as conclusive proof that ghosts loved to pose. Sometimes famous ghosts would make a cameo, but tellingly, they always struck the exact pose of a known photograph or even a painting that was created while the person was living. Harry was once particularly amused when he saw a "genuine spirit photograph" where a number of the ghosts wore eyeglasses. Evidently there were some things you could take with you. Either that or there were plenty of ocularists working in the next world.

As far as spiritual manifestations went, Harry knew they were nothing other than conjuring tricks of the type he performed in his old Dime Museum days. It was also clear that mediums could summon the ghosts in direct proportion to the ease at which they could cheat. Spiritualists never seemed to wonder why you had to hide the medium either in a cabinet or in the dark for objects to levitate, trumpets to blow, or ectoplasm to emanate. So Harry began challenging mediums to reproduce their feats under controlled conditions. Few accepted his challenge. For those who did, though, with Harry at the wheel, the ghosts stayed away.

Harry's crusade against spiritualism brought him into contact and eventually into conflict with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the super-sleuth Sherlock Holmes. Sir Arthur had become the world's leading advocate of spiritualism. At first the relationship between the two men was cordial. Sir Arthur - or actually Sir Arthur's wife, Jean - demonstrated for Harry the phenomenon known as automatic (or spirit) writing. It was nothing more than Lady Doyle sitting down and writing what came into her head. But she and Sir Arthur maintained it was a message from Harry's mother, Celia. Harry watched politely but wondered how it was possible that 1) his mother - who could speak virtually no English while alive - now wrote in the perfect idiom, and 2) people as intelligent as the Doyles could believe in such rubbish.

The truth was Sir Arthur was a strange mixture of high intelligence, unique writing talent, sharp logic, imperfect literary judgment, and a willing credulity that could cross the line into out-and-out gullibility. His Sherlock Holmes stories have gained in popularity until Holmes is the most recognized character in English literature. But Sir Arthur rated his other and largely forgotten works as his best. Once he was able to free a man who had been wrongly convicted simply by reasoning and putting his thoughts down in an article. But in his belief in spiritualism Sir Arthur lost his critical facility completely.

Try as he could Harry couldn't make Sir Arthur see that his beliefs were founded on what was quite literally wholesale fraud and trickery. Finally Harry decided there was one way to drive his point home. He would show Sir Arthur a completely mind-boggling trick, something so amazing as to defy reality. Then after Harry assured him it was just a trick, surely Sir Arthur would be more discerning in what he believed. The performance took place in the library at Harry's home in New York City.

Harry asked Sir Arthur to take a writing slate and with some wires attach it somewhere so it could hang freely. Then he asked Sir Arthur to walk outside with pencil and paper - anywhere - and write down any sentence and then return. Sir Arthur did so, walking several blocks away. Making sure no one was around, the good doctor pulled out the pencil and paper and wrote down the words written on the wall to Belshazzar, "Mene mene tekel upharsin." (Daniel. 5: 25).

When he got back, Harry took a set of five cork balls and asked Sir Arthur to verify they were cork all the way through. Sir Arthur cut one in half, and sure enough there was nothing amiss. Harry then took one of the balls and put it it in a pot of white ink. After they were soaked Harry took one in a spoon and held it up against the slate. Harry removed the spoon and the ball stuck to the surface of the slate! Then slowly, spookingly, the ball began to move, leaving a trail of white ink. It continued to move until it spelled out the words"Mene mene tekel upharsin". Sir Arthur was amazed.

If you believe, as do some, that the trick was so astounding that it has never been performed again and no one can explain it, you may be half right. At least half of the first statement may be true, but not the last. In any case, the trick had certainly been performed before. Harry had bought it from a Vaudeville magician named Max Berol. Part of the reason the trick seems so miraculous is that most descriptions leave a few things out. And of course, as in most miracles, it gets more miraculaous with each telling.

In one early biography of Harry (written for kids), the story was told as if Harry and Sir Arthur were by themselves. However, a second guest was actually there. That was Bernard Ernst, a magician-lawyer who was Harry's attorney and at the time president of the Society of American Magicians. Bernard left an account of the trick and wrote as if he was as amazed as Sir Arthur. But Bernard was probably in on it with Harry.

We were told that Sir Arthur picked out the place to hang the slate. So we have this small slate hanging by two wires in the middle of a brightly lit room, right? Not quite. The room just happened to be set up so that, by golly, the slate (which at fifteen by eighteen inches was scarcely small) could be hung most conveniently in a particular corner of the room. The corner - surprise! surprise - also held a hidden panel in the bookshelf (this was the house of Harry Houdini, after all). Also the slate was suspended by four wires - one at each corner - an important point to remember.

According to the usual telling, the slip of paper never left Sir Arthur's pocket. But again the truth here isn't quite as strange as fiction. Instead, Harry asked to verify that the paper was still folded. Sir Arthur handed it over and, you guessed it, Harry made a switch and with suitable misdirection read the message and conveyed it to his hidden assistant. Again we might not know the exact details here, but once the message was in Harry's hand it's no great mystery that Harry - and so Harry's assistant - soon knew what was on the paper.

All the balls really were cork, too. That is until Harry switched one for a substitute with a magnetic center, a move requiring a sleight of hand not difficult for an experienced magician. Now as Harry dipped the ball in the white ink and placed it against the slate, his hidden assistant placed an iron rod against the back of the well-secured slate. Naturally the ball, held by the internal magnet, stayed in place. With the assistant tracing the message backwards, the three men in the room saw the writing on the wall appear on the slate which was held in place by the four wires.

What he had just seen, Harry assured Sir Arthur, was a trick. Therefore Sir Arthur should be careful, Harry warned, about believing something is supernatural simply because he couldn't explain it. True what he had witnessed was a complicated trick, a trick that can be performed only by a skilled magician with considerable preparation and practice. But it was a trick and nothing more.

But Sir Arthur didn't think so. His explanation? Harry Houdini himself had supernatural powers! Soon Sir Arthur began to tell the world that Harry's escapes - which were also routinely performed by other magicians - were due to Harry's magical powers, his ability to dematerialize. This was Sir Arthur's faith at its classic best (or worst, depending on your point of view). To his dying day, Sir Arthur could never see the absurdity in adopting beliefs that were ultimately founded on believing tricks weren't tricks - even when the trickster admitted to doing the tricking.

Harry died on Halloween, 1926 of a ruptured appendix. Whether the appendix actually burst due to a test of strength where Harry let a college student punch him in the stomach is debated. Developing medical opinion is it did not.

Finally we need to mention there are some good and well researched biographies for those who want to learn more about America's most famous magician. But beware of the fictionalized movies and so-called docudramas. The 1953 movie with Tony Curtis was (and remains) the most famous and is fiction, poppycock, and balderdash. The 1998 TV movie with Johnathon Schaech weaves around with the actual events in Harry's life, but still throws in plenty of fictionalization. The 2007 movie starring Catherine Zeta Jones shouldn't even have used Houdini's name.

But it was Tony's movie that really caused many of the popular misconceptions about Harry which sadly are still prevalent. Most of all, Harry did not die because he failed to do the Chinese Water Torture trick, something some people still believe. The movie has Tony first agreeing not to do the trick because Janet Leigh (i. e., Bess) thought it was too dangerous. But when the audience hoots, hollers, and catcalls, he does it anyway. Then he drowns and is still able talk.

True there are tenuous connections with the real Harry. He did on one occasion agree not to perform a dangerous stunt. But it was the "Bullet Catching" trick, and it was the elderly master magician, Harry Keller, who asked Houdini not to do it.

And the famous "below the ice" escape in the movie? The one where Tony had to find patches of air beneath the ice so he could breathe? Well, it never happened either although it has also cropped up even in some books. Yes, Harry escaped from handcuffs and a box after being lowered into a river, but photographs show there was no ice.

And so who made up the story about the ice and spread it to the world?

You guessed it. Harry Houdini.

References

Houdini: The Untold Story, Milbourne Christopher, Thomas Cromwell Company, 1969. Probably the first biography that tried to separate the wheat from the chaff, and point out that Harry had something of a mean streak. Milbourne was a professional stage magician as well as a scholar of the history of conjuring. A must have for Houdini afficianados, although Milbourne did have to rely a bit much on Harry's own versions. Milbourne himself, we should say, would also debunk phony mentalists on television, but was often frustrated because the television shows would make sure his debunking was cut out before the broadcast.

Houdini!!!: The Career of Ehrich Weiss, Kenneth Silverman, Harper Collins, 1996. Recent reviews rate this as the best biography of Harry, it gives a lot of detail regarding his performance itinery.

The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America's First Superhero, William Kalush and Larry Sloman, Atria Books, 2006. Highly publicized, this book is the newest biography. However some of the new revelations are largely speculative - I mean, yes, Harry wrote some "reports" to the head of Scotland Yard (whom he had become quite friendly with), but should conclude Harry was an out-and-out spy? Also the proposed possibility that Harry was murdered is also given way too much credibility.

That said, the book is worth reading, and here you read that the silver handcuffs awarded by the Daily Mirror were probably made months in advance. There are also some new lights thrown on the relation of Harry with Bess which helps explain Bess's rather contradictory statements in her later life. It seems that while Harry was a life long teetotaler, he married a young woman who developed quite the problem with booze and drugs. Bess suffered from depression, was subject to "spells", and even once attempted suicide.

At the same time, the reader needs to remember the state of medicine during Harry and Bess's lifetime. In the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries, what were courteously called "ladies complaints" were often treated with liberal doses of alcohol and opiates. Before the Harrison's Narcotics Law of 1914, drug and alcohol addiction was quite common among prim and proper ladies. Bess's "spells" and "illnesses" continued after Harry died. Her statements on whether Harry communicated with her during seances are contradictory and confused, and you read of her having a severe injury from a fall. Almost certainly we are seeing the continued effect of alcoholism and drug use.

Also there is a brief discussion of the more - ah - interesting aspects of seances that you almost never consider. After all, get a bunch of men and women, sitting in a dark room, holding hands, and, well, things happen.

Houdini: A Pictorial Life, Milbourne Christopher, Thomas Cromwell Company, 1976. Another must-have for Houdini scholars. Be warned! Newer editions (ca. 1998) have poorer quality reproductions than the first edition. The new edition even did away with some color illustrations, substituting black and white.

As of this writing some good quality first editions can be found.

This book, by the way, spills the beans about the trick Harry did for Sir Arthur. There's also a brief description in "Houdini's Impossible Demonstration" by Massimo Polidoro in the Skeptical Inquirer Magazine, July 2006.

Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to Disappear, Jim Steinmeyer Da Capo Press (2003). Jim is not normally a performing magician per se (although he has performed), but instead a designer and creator of magic tricks for professional magicians. Although this book is apparently about Harry's trick on vanishing the elephant, it's really about a much more difficult trick - vanishing a donkey. This was a trick invented by magician Charles Merritt. Charles sold the trick to Harry although Charles told Harry he should vanish an elephant instead. By reading Charles's patents (yes, patents) and talking to a donkey trainer, Jim was able to work out the details of the vanishing donkey. He even performed it before an audience of professional magicians. It was, as they say, a hit.

The question of Harry (and so Bess's) height is also addressed. Here we're told that Harry's height was 5' 1" which is at odds with other books saying Harry was around 5' 5". However if you compare the famous picture of Harry shaking hands with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and scale their heights accordingly, a 5' 1" Harry will put Sir Arthur at about 5' 7", a bit short of average height for the day. On the other hand, most in photos you see Sir Arthur towering above everyone else; and we read Sir Arthur was tall. So we'll go with six feet. That puts Harry at 5' 4" and comparing Bess's photos when she stands next to Harry (and others) we put her height at about 5 feet even.

For average heights by year, see "A History of the Standard of Living in the United States". EH.Net Encyclopedia, Richard Steckel, edited by Robert Whaples. July 22, 2002. http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/steckel.standard.living.us.

The Odds Against Me, John Scarne, Simon and Schuster (1966). The autobiography of master sleight of hand and card magician (and later gambling consultant), John Scarne. John said he met Harry in the early 1920's, and he thought Harry's card manipulations a bit clumsy and amateurish. It was John who came away from a Houdini show disappointed because he expected miracles and got a magic show.

A word of caution. John, like Houdini (and many other showpeople), was a consummate self-promoter, and at times you come away think that he, John, was almost the master and Harry the neophyte. This is the way John describes Harry's competition with Rahman Bey, the Indian magician, who would allow himself to be buried alive and who remained in a water summersed coffin. John tells us of a befuddled and perplexed Harry who believed air must have been fed to the coffin somehow. You come away believing Harry never figured out how Rahman did it and that Harry came out second best in this battle of the magicians.

John's account is completely contrary to what is known from contemporary statements and writings. The "trick" was (but don't try this at home, kids) achieved by proper breath control. And Harry bested Rahman Bey by a large margin. The Bey remained submerged for 20 minutes; Harry for an hour-and-a-half.

Some of John's other stories are likewise dubious. He told how he was invited to Bugsy Siegel's apartment where he did some card tricks for Bugsy (always called "Ben" to his face unless you wanted a punch in the nose) and his friends. He later told how the conversation drifted to blackjack odds. But in another book, John placed the conversation about blackjack in the casino. That's not the real problem, though. One trick John said he performed that night would have required him to have previously snuck outside Bugsy's hotel room and stick a playing card on the window.

Sneak around outside Bugsy Siegel's window at night? Like Eliza Doolittle said, "Not bloody likely!"

John also remains controversial in his claim regarding deducing the odds for blackjack and the best way of play. CooperToons own Monte Carlo calculations (using his handy-dandy C++ compiler) indicates John was correct for the odds playing with a single full deck where the player also goes by the dealer's rules (a bit less than 6 % against the player). But John's calculations break down if you play down to the last card and alter from the dealer's rules. To get real blackjack odds under specific manners of play you have to run computer intensive simulations, something John could not do.

That said, John Scarne was certainly honest in his many "How-To-Gamble" books. You cannot, he said, play a game with negative odds for the player - which is the way casinos run their games - and end up with a positive expectation; ergo, win. Things are really a bit worse than John said, though. Computer calculations show that even when playing at fair odds, an individual with a limited bank roll pitted against a casino with essentially unlimited cash will also go bust. If you gamble at a casino, he said, no matter what the system, eventually you will loose. All his books could really do, he said, was show you how to loose your money slower.

Now that's real spirtual advice.

MagicAndIllusion.com at http://www.magicandillusion.com/ This site has a index of famous magicians on the online library History of Magic at http://www.magicandillusion.com/libr/libr01.html. Biographes are at the link "Who's Who in Magic" and Harry's biography is at http://www.magicandillusion.com/libr/whos/HH/hou-h01/hou-h01.html. There's also a biography of Harry's brother, Dash, or professionally Theo Hardeen.

This is one of the best online sites about Houdini since it is careful to point out the uncertainties of what we know and to identify the contradictory sources. All biographies should do this but this site does it better than most.