The photos on this page showing Houdini performing his midair straitjacket stunt were taken at times and places not necessarily linked to the text.
In September 1915 Houdini employed his customary ploy of ensuring maximum press coverage by getting the Kansas City Post in on his act. He was placed in a straitjacket and hoisted 35 feet up the side of the newspaper’s headquarters before making his escape. An adoring crowd, the involvement of the authorities and front-page coverage were all assured in one stroke, along with a sell-out at the local theatre.
While playing the Majestic Theater in San Antonio that same year, 12,000 people watched the straitjacket escape repeated from a high floor of the San Antonio Express building. In Los Angeles it was the turn of the Tribune, and upwards of 25,000 people came to see the spectacle.
Austin’s Driskill Hotel belongs in the Harry Houdini version of the “George Washington slept here” game. Mind you, the Driskill drips with history — whether Houdini was ever a guest or not seems almost superfluous.
In August 2009 many news media in that part of the US were repeating a report that “rare and personal” items that Harry had “given a lifelong Austin friend more than 50 years ago” were going on display at the Driskill Hotel at 604 Brazos Street, “where Houdini often performed”.
It’s a good story, apart from the friend not being identified, Houdini having been dead more than 50 years, and no proof that he ever performed at the Driskill. There’s no mention of Houdini on the Driskill’s own website, which invests quite a bit of Flash time into sharing its history.
But this news item said the hotel would briefly be showing artefacts including a bust of Harry, “a stage coat worn by his wife Bess for a European tour” and “one of Houdini’s props that he was able to escape from in just 17 seconds”. Replicas would be on sale to raise money for the Austin Magic Camp, evidently a children’s project.
Over to the Society of American Musicians, members of which assembled in Austin in 2004. A summary recounts one member saying Houdini had stayed at the Driskill in 1916 “at a rate of $2.50 per night”.
They proceeded to the Paramount Theatre, “which was known as the Majestic then. The Paramount was built in 1915 and [the guide] told the group of the myth that Houdini had placed a hole in the roof of the Paramount, which is still visible today”.
The report offered no further elaboration on either of these places, and it’s not clear whether the Majestic Theater referred to was the one in San Antonio mentioned above, or whether Austin had its own Majestic.
The website A Buffet History of Austin has Houdini en route from San Antonio to Austin in 1916 “for a show at the Majestic”. Clearly there’s confusion about whether Harry was touring the South in 1915 or 1916, but the Buffet continues:
“The Travis County sheriff challenged Houdini to escape from his jail. While in San Antonio, Houdini had escaped from a pair of handcuffs while suspended 75 feet in the air. The sheriff sniffed at his feat, saying that any number of his inmates could wriggle free of such bonds given enough time. If Houdini wanted a real challenge, he would be glad to set the contortionist up and then set him straight.”
There is no indication that Harry made time for the sheriff.
Meanwhile back at the Driskill, history was a rambunctious, cow-wrangling visitor. Jessie Lincoln Driskill, a former Confederate colonel who’d earned and lost a fortune selling cattle to the South, arrived from Missouri and built the hotel in 1886. Another bovine baron, Major George W Littlefield of the Texas Rangers, was the inn’s fifth owner.
In 1908, according to the Austin Buffet, two prominent local lawyers fought “a pitched gun battle” in the lobby over a disputed ranch. One had a double-barreled shotgun and a revolver, the other a pistol, but neither managed to inflict serious injury.
Fast-forward to 1934 and the young Lyndon Baines Johnson is enjoying his first date with Lady Bird in the hotel dining room. Things worked out well, as they would again in 1960 and 1964 when LBJ chose the Driskill as the place to watch election results come in, the first declaring him vice president of the US and the second reconfirming him as president.
The Driskill had right from the start been the traditional venue for state governors’ victory celebrations.
In 1969, though, it was closed for remodelling and almost never reopened, until its designation as an historic landmark saved it from demolition. It was reborn in 1973, restored to its original opulence with the lobby decked out in Greek columns, a marble floor and a stained-glass dome. With 189 guestrooms and suites, it was, as of 2009, managed by Destination Hotels & Resorts of Denver.
Returning to Kansas City for a chilling moment, the local newspaper Dos Mundos carried an article in October 2007 about the town’s 1888-vintage Hotel Savoy, still doing well for itself — apart from the ghosts.
The hotel, the paper said, had more than once had President Harry Truman as a guest and, yes, Harry Houdini came by too.
The article offers no date, and nor does it elaborate on the claim that he “got trapped inside a phone booth” there!
It sounds like a rusty old joke, but Curtis Hogh, who runs the restaurant in the hotel, waxed quite serious about there being five ghosts in residence.
Not Houdini’s. One is an oft-spotted man in a purple jacket in the basement who the staff believes died in the tunnel that once linked up buildings downtown.
Occupants of Room 505, where a woman died in the bathtub, complain that the shower keeps turning itself on and off. And, during recent renovations, Hogh said, antique beer bottles were discovered in a wall containing messages “revealing confessions to three murders”.
