In January 1906 Houdini packed Keith’s Theatre at 619 15th Street NW, thanks in large part to one of his best-publicised escapes. On January 7 he was stripped naked, handcuffed, chained up and locked in Cell 2 of the Tenth Precinct Jail, the same Death Row cell that 14 years earlier had famously held Charles Guiteau, the assassin of President James Garfield.

The cell at the time belonged to a convicted wife-strangler named Anderson, whose astonishment was matched by that of his fellow inmates as a nude Houdini quickly shed his manacles and opened the door, then all the other doors, and had all the prisoners switch cells. “I set all your prisoners free,” Harry said as he sauntered into the warden’s office. He gave him a moment to begin panicking. “But I locked them up again.” The story is amazing enough as it is, but EL Doctorow played it up even further in his novel “Ragtime”, shifting the location to the New York Tombs.

Onstage at Keith’s before a packed house, Houdini also emerged from, among other things, a zinc-lined piano box. The theatre, despite being designated a national landmark, was torn down in 1978.

In 1918, a block away and in sight of the Washington Monument, Harry performed his upside-down straitjacket escape from the Munsey Building, which occupied a site on E Street between 13th and 14th Streets where the Commerce Department and the Ronald Reagan Center now stand (see the Google Earth views below).

In February 1926 Houdini paid a visit to President Calvin Coolidge’s White House while he was testifying before Senate and House subcommittees on behalf of a bill aimed at prosecuting anyone in the District of Columbia “pretending to tell fortunes for reward or compensation”.

Harry’s appearance there should have been a feather in his cap, but as Benjamin Filene, curator of Wisconsin’s Houdini Historical Center, pointed out in an essay for the centre’s magazine Mystifier, the committee seemed more interested in finding out if he was a genuine wizard with occult powers of his own.

At right, with Republican Senator Arthur Capper, a former Kansas govenor who started out and ended up in a business that Houdini certainly knew better than politics, newspaper publishing.

Other critics insisted he was just grabbing publicity, and for much of his time in the witness’ chair he was defending himself against charges of being anti-religion — since spiritualism was widely accepted as a religion. Rather than rolling through the testimony using his formidable skills as a performer and an expert on psychic fakery, Filene writes, he was often alternately squirming and bristling at suggestions that he had supernatural abilities.

“You claim you have psychic power?” Congressman McLeod asked him. “They say I have,” Harry answered. “No one has. We are all born alike.” Spiritualist Jane Coates then took the stand and said, “I think Mr Houdini is one of the greatest mystics the world possesses today.”

“Repeatedly,” Filene writes, Houdini “tried to demystify spiritualist effects by showing that he himself could duplicate the illusions. The congressmen instead interpreted these demonstrations as evidence that, for better or worse, Houdini and the spiritualists were in the same camp after all.”

There was showmanship, to be sure, as when Harry slapped $10,000 in cash on the table as a wager that no medium could fool him. (The photo here actually shows him fanning out $5,000 in US bonds for the same purpose, but on a different occasion — he was placing the bonds in the trust of the mayor of Boston. Or was it $10,000 worth of stock in his film company, Houdini Pictures Corporation, as another source suggests?)

Then there was an uproar in the midst of the hearings when Houdini accused two mediums who were observing the proceedings of stealing money from him the night before. One of his investigators had paid the mediums for readings. But, right to the end, the elected representatives had something else stuck in their craw.

Congressman Hammer: “The original Houdini was a Hindu, was he not?”
Houdini: “No.”
Hammer: “You are Houdini the second?”
Houdini: “No.”
Hammer: “You are the original Houdini?”
Houdini: “No, the original Houdini was a French clockmaker.”
Hammer: “I thought he lived in Allahabab.”
Houdini: “Are you joking?”

Much inane banter later …

Hammer: “I have been told that your people came from British India. That is all I was trying to find out. It is contended here that you are a medium and do not know it. These people really believe that you have divine power and that you won’t admit it. That is the reason I am asking you these questions … Have you ever been in Allahabab?”
Houdini: “No, sir.”
Hammer: “Did you have anything to do with numerology? Do you know anything about it? The figure 3, you know, as numerology says, represents a serpent.”
Houdini: “I do not believe in that truck — in numerology.”
Hammer: “You do not believe in that any more than you do in astrology or fortune-telling or soothsaying? … There is none of that in your performances? It is all really tricks and sleight of hand?”
Houdini: “Yes, sir.”
Hammer: “I am very much obliged to you.”

Politicians never change, do they?

The proposed legislation against spiritualist hustlers, by the way, got nowhere. Too many senators’ wives were true believers.

Houdini’s most notorious shackled dive took place from Detroit’s original Belle Isle Bridge on November 27, 1906. He promoted his appearance at the local Temple Theater by being tied up in 113 feet of rope and locked into “the latest-model handcuffs”, and leapt from the draw span into the Detroit River, only to emerge moments later, freed of his fetters.

The stunt became mythical after Houdini and his publicists spread the lie that the river had been frozen over at the time, and that the magician dived through a hole cut for the purpose, only to be swept downstream by the current so that he had to rely on pockets of air beneath the ice as he frantically searched for the escape hole. The story was so good that the producers of the 1952 movie “Houdini” had Tony Curtis swimming around under the ice for eight suspense-filled minutes.

The old wood and steel Belle Isle Bridge burned down in 1915. Tourists can click here for a good site about Belle Isle.

It seems odd that Harry would let a story run amok like this, but publicity is publicity. He was not so fond of another myth that popped up out of the water with him, though. That was in Melbourne, Australia, which we’ll get to soon, and it involved him visiting the submarine land of the dead and bringing back a corpse with him.

“Houdini” the movie was released in July 1953, the month before I was born. I saw it when I was an adolescent and recently downloaded it from the Net through the, ahem, “magic” of bit torrent, but don’t tell the cops.

Tony Curtis seemed enough like Harry, possibly helped along by the fact that he too is of Jewish Hungarian descent. When he made this film he was still five years away from his only Oscar nomination (for “The Defiant Ones”) and six years shy of “Some Like It Hot”. Meanwhile his co-star and real-life wife at the time, Janet Leigh, still had “Psycho” seven years ahead of her. The photo below shows them with their daughters, the future actresses Jamie Lee Curtis and Kelly Curtis.

Running the set was George Marshall, who in his time directed nearly 200 movies, going back to 1916, a resume well-padded with golf-tip reels and dusty westerns but including “Destry Rides Again” in 1939 with Jimmy Stewart and Marlene Dietrich and “The Blue Dahlia” in ‘46 with Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake, plus a slew of good Bob Hope comedies.

On “Houdini” he was working from a script by Philip Yordan based on the old Harold Kellock biography, and the costumes — part of what everyone agrees was the film’s clever portrayal of the period — were by Edith Head. Producer George Pal has for some reason garnered credit for the film’s “otherworldly” effects, for which (I read) he was to secure a reputation in later pictures.

And none other than Joseph Dunninger, Harry’s old magician pal, served as technical director, guaranteeing the various magic tricks in the flick their authencity.

There’s not a lot in the movie about Harry chasing the spook-mongers, but the recurring theme in this bit of fiction (which I don’t recall from Kellock’s book, so it’s a Hollywood thing) is his lifelong connection with some supernatural force. This unseen helper guides him to the hole in the ice of the Detroit River as well as out of his straitjackets.

Viewers have pointed out amid chuckles one gaffe in the picture that occurs as Harry and Bess are being driven to a séance. The traffic shot they used in the rear window is on a loop that repeats several times, complete with the splice! Hollywood’s tricks didn’t always work.

Read all about the movie at iMDB.