Harry Houdini's Secret Notes
Harry Houdini's Secret Notes
"the bibliophile instinct I had inherited took full hold of me..."
In the spirit of Halloween, allow me to present the notes of Harry Houdini—a man of many secrets. He took some of them to the grave; for example, we still don’t really know how he escaped the mirror cuffs. And while his death is probably not as mysterious as has been suggested, it does seem fitting that he died on Halloween of 1926.
This post begins with Houdini’s diary, which is itself rather secret. It has been in the possession of the descendants of Houdini's lawyer, Bernard Ernst, and they have not granted wide-spread access to it. Some biographers quote from it, but many of them were just quoting from the select few who have actually seen the diaries. In 2021, however, the History Channel’s “Harry Houdini’s Lost Diaries Revealed” offered the public glimpses of the diary.
In addition to his diary, Houdini was a self-proclaimed “bibliophile” (a lover of books) and an avid scrapbooker — throughout his life, he collected newspaper clippings in over a hundred scrapbooks.
Houdini’s scrapbook collection (totaling over 17,000 pages) reveals his deep study of the history of magic; spiritualism; and, most importantly, his own career.
Houdini’s Origins
The first, and most fundamental, of Houdini’s secrets is his birth place.
Houdini began life as Ehrich Weisz, the son of a Rabbi in Budapest. Fleeing antisemitism, the family moved to Appleton Wisconsin, where Houdini’s father would become the town’s first Rabbi. But Rabbi Weiss (their name was changed at immigration) ultimately lost this job and the family fell into poverty.
Even though he was clearly born in Europe, for the rest of his life, Houdini claimed to have been born in Appleton, Wisconsin. He does this, even in the pages of his own diary, where he writes:
I was born April 6 - 1874 Appleton Wisc.
Houdini identifies himself in the photograph as “4 years old/ HH / 1878.” Disappearing Ehrich Weisz, it seems, was the escape-artist’s first trick. Houdini re-imagined himself as an American kid, destined to live the American dream.
His’s birthday is a related secret. His birth certificate from Budapest clearly marks it as March 24th, 1874. But throughout his life, Houdini claimed to have been born on April 6th (as he does on this diary page). Biographers still haven’t figured out the reason for this fabrication.
To erase his immigrant origins, Ehrich Weisz would also have to change his name. He found inspiration in the great french magician, Robert-Houdin. He added an “i” to the end. For his first name, he Americanized his nickname, “Ehrie,” to “Harry.” Thus, Harry Houdini solidified a new identity — one that was further removed from his Eastern European heritage.
Houdini’s Mother
Houdini had two great loves in his life. Bess, his wife, and Cecilia, his mother. On his death bed, Houdini’s father asked his son to take care of Cecilia. Houdini took this responsibility seriously. Biographers suggest that part of his ambition was driven by his desire to take care of his mother. He labels the following picture, “My Two Sweethearts”:
In the same year this picture was taken, Houdini performed his famous bridge jump. His diary entry on his performance is especially moving because he was so proud his mother saw it.
Bridge jump and mother along. I wanted to have her with me, it being my first big jump manacled. Ma saw me jump!
If you’d like to witness this jump for yourself, here is original footage:
When his mother died, Houdini was distraught. He wrote in his diary:
The gang plank was pulled away and we started in to throw those long paper colored strips overboard to the folks onto the pier. Ma caught a few of them that I threw adroitly to her, and eventually we steamed away, and that was the last sight I saw of My Darling.
He visited his mother’s grave every night for a week after she was buried and recited the Mourner’s Kaddish (the Jewish prayer for the dead) for a full year.
Houdini’s Ruthless Ambition
Houdini is a fascinating figure, but he’s not necessarily likeable. The diary puts his ruthless ambition on display as he plots to sabotage competitors, records deaths of adversaries, and inflates his own importance.
It is difficult to overestimate Houdini’s ambition. He wanted to be the most celebrated performer in the world, and he would sabotage those who dared to imitate him. For example, a woman named “Minerva” had the audacity to imitate Houdini’s “water torture cell” escape.
Even worse, Minerva advertised that she was "more wonderful and mystifying than Houdini.” The diary reveals that an enraged Houdini tried to sabotage Minerva by training another woman in his water escape act. He writes:
I’m going to make a rival act for ‘Minerva’ so have advertised for good swimmer females.
Minerva’s fame soon dwindled on its own, but she was not the first or the last of Houdini’s imitators.
Houdini also fills the diary with exaggerations of his importance and hyperbolic accounts of fans’ adoration. He writes:
Was cheered over and over again as they sang, ‘And will you no come back again.’
Mob waited for me + took me shoulder high. Carried me home and upstairs. Had to make a speech from the window.
Seats sold on stage & prices were doubled!! Record house!!
Houdini’s biographers doubt that a mob of fans actually carried Houdini into his home, as he writes. Instead, they suggest that this was part of the fantasy life Houdini constructed for himself.
The diary also reveals that Houdini paid off men to challenge him onstage, and wrote about it in code in his diary.
Friday challenge, box built onstage. Had three men of Burrows sawmill, same firm as last time. Gave the foreman Cockburn pray pound 2/ the other two men received be quick/.
According to Houdini’s code, “pray” refers to 1 Pound and “be quick” referred to 2 Shillings.
Incidentally, “pray” and “be quick” were code words from Houdini’s time as a mind-reader. Bess and Harry Houdini worked out a routine where code words represented numbers. For example: Pray = 1, Answer =2, Say = 3, Now = 4, Tell=5, Please=6, Speak=7, Quickly=8, Look-9, and Be Quick=10. Ruth Brandon explains how the duo used the code words during performances:
…if the mind reader needed to know the number on a dollar bill—say, 59321884778— Bess, holding the bill might speak as follows: “Tell me, mind reader. Look into your heart. Say, can you answer me, pray? Quickly, quickly! Now! Speak to us! Speak to us quickly!
Houdini performed these tricks after intensive study, as revealed by his many scrapbooks. Here, for example, is a page with clippings from 1889 about “The Mind Reader at Work” and “How to Locate Small Articles.”
Mind reading was just the beginning of Houdini’s relationship with spiritualism.
Houdini’s Obsession with Death: Spiritualism
Given the nature of his work, Houdini’s obsession with death is perhaps not so surprising. What is surprising, at least to me, is his obsession with spiritualism — a belief that the spirit and body exist separately and that it is, therefore, possible to communicate with the dead.
In the 1890s, Houdini began exploring spiritualism by attending séances and reading everything he could get his hands on. He took his mother to a séance to try to contact his father. Houdini was not convinced. Eventually, Houdini began performing séances himself. William Kalush and Larry Sloman discuss how Houdini would prepare for shows by visiting a town's graveyard with the local sexton. He brought a notebook to record all the local gossip as they walked among the graves.
Then, on stage, Houdini used that information to persuade audiences he was actually talking to the dead.Ultimately, Houdini turned against spiritualism because he thought it unethical to prey on those who were grieving. Now, he obsessively cut out all the articles he could find that might help him on this crusade. For example, he created a series of pages with clippings that he titled “Miscellaneous Views Regarding Spiritualism; Addresses, etc.”
Teaming up with Scientific American, Houdini supported a competition intended to disprove spiritualism.
The SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN will pay $2,500 to the person who produces, under its test conditions and to the satisfaction of the Judges, an objective psychic manifestation of physical character, other than a photograph, and of such sort that permanent instrumental record may be made by its occurrence.
Houdini was proud to be one of those judges. When Scientific American included an advertisement for this competition inside of an article on séances, Houdini cut it out, pasted it into his scrapbook, and made sure to underline his own name.
Houdini also kept a collection of what he called “exposes” that chronicled all the ways that spiritualists had duped the public. He records the newspaper title and date for each clipping.
Houdini’s fight with spiritualism culminated when he agreed to a séance with Lady Doyle (Arthur Conan Doyle’s wife). Lady Doyle claimed to contact Houdini’s mother and wrote out a long letter purportedly communicated by Cecilia’s spirit. Houdini knew immediately that Lady Doyle had not spoken with his mother. For one, Cecilia never really learned English — the letter’s language. Secondly, the letter contained a cross. Cecilia, having been Jewish, never would have suggested such a symbol.
The thing is, though, that Houdini desperately wanted to believe in spiritualism. He and Bess agreed that after his death, he would try to contact her. They came up with a series of secret codes that, if spoken by a spiritualist, would let Bess know it was really him. But, no matter how many séances Bess attended after her husband’s death, she never heard those code words. Houdini fans still hold séances every Halloween to try to contact the great performer.
Houdini, the Book-Lover
Of everything I read while preparing this post, my favorite was a posthumously published 1927 interview called “Houdini’s Literary Escape.” In it, Houdini repeatedly refers to himself as a “bibliophile” (a lover of books). The article begins by describing Houdini’s NYC home as a warehouse of books, scraps of paper, and antique posters:
A three-story house crammed with fifteen thousand books, fifty thousand prints, half a million cuttings and four tons of theatrical bills stands on an obscure New York block and domiciles a bibliophile–Houdini the Handcuff King. A dozen and a half rooms are lined with shelves and these with books, old, new, small, large. One is heaped with filing cases of prints. The basement is full of antique posters.
Houdini amassed a huge collection of material related to magic, and he was always looking for more. He boasts in the New York Times:
As I possess the largest collection (private or public) in the world of material regarding magic, magicians, books, scripts, spiritualistic effects, documents, steel engravings, automata, am still looking for anything that would embellish my collection of interest on the subject of magic or mysteries.
This collection included other magicians’ scrapbooks, which contain notes on tricks and the history of magic. For example, he received one of Harry Helms’s scrapbooks from the man himself (he was a magician and juggler from Wisconsin). Houdini clearly notes this fact on the cover, writing “I got this from →… ” The arrow leads to Helms’s name. Of course, Houdini also signs his own name.
Houdini also kept many scrapbooks of his own. One of them was devoted entirely to other magicians and their tricks. Here, he collected advertisements, brochures, and newspaper articles, including one about his namesake, Robert-Houdin.
But where did this impulse to collect (and read) books come from? Houdini credits his father, Rabbi Weiss.
"My father had been one of the earliest rabbis in the middle west,
a talmudic scholar of note, and a writer of speculative disquisitions. He had reared me in the love of books. I felt the sin of destroying a book, and I kept the offending volumes I bought…
When asked to name his favorite author, Houdini named his father. His love of books, he claimed, was “inherited”:
I found myself with a growing library on magic, the bibliophile instinct I had inherited took full hold of me, and I collected systematically.
Houdini’s love of books was, for me at least, the most wonderful of Houdini’s secrets—even if it was a secret he wanted known. In his interview with The Bookman, Houdini makes a point of saying “I am reading Virgil today,” and muses on magic tricks in the Bible. He also explains that he has begun work on a new project, “a treatise on literary plagiarism,” built from the notes he took while reading:
In my reading I have caught numberless parallel passages, and have made notes of them. I shall compile them.
But this was not to be. Houdini died shortly after the interview. I wonder what kind of scholarly career Houdini might have had if he had lived longer. I wonder, too, if Houdini would have been able to escape the theatrical identity he had created for himself. He was, and remains, the all-American superhero.
I hope you enjoyed learning about Houdini, the secret (and secretive) bibliophile. If you are interested in reading something a bit more academic, go over to Oxford University Press’s Blog, where I’ve contributed the post “How did Tennyson Write In Memoriam?” and I’ll guide you through one of the poet’s “Butcher’s Books.”
Thank you, as always, for reading. Please hit the heart to let me know you enjoyed this post. Seriously. It makes me so happy to know that people are enjoying this newsletter.
Till next week,
Jillian
Brandon, Ruth. The Life and Many Deaths of Harry Houdini. Random House Publishing Group, 2003, p. 69.
Kalush, William, and Larry Sloman. The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America’s First Superhero. Simon and Schuster, 2008, p. 60.
Houdini willed the vast majority of his scrapbooks to the Library of Congress, which has yet to digitize them. So, because I have not yet made the trip to D.C., this post is based primarily on the scrapbooks digitized by the University of Texas, Austin. You can view all of them here.
Cited in Brandon, p. 221.
He is referring to Wisconsin.
Buranelli, Prosper. “Houdini’s Literary Escape.” The Bookman, Jan. 1927, p.612.
Buranelli, p. 612.
Buranelli, p. 612.
Another wonderful post. Houdini was certainly a character... I wonder how many other famous performers kept scrapbooks like him?
Also, at some point, surely there must be an essay out there debating the differences between scrapbooking and commonplacing... :)
It must be a really tough time to be a magician, illusionist or trickster these days, the Internet is revealing all of their secrets!
god this is incredible: Houdini identifies himself in the photograph as “4 years old/ HH / 1878.” Disappearing Ehrich Weisz, it seems, was the escape-artist’s first trick. Houdini re-imagined himself as an American kid, destined to live the American dream.