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.

~ ~   H    H   ~ ~

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.

~ ~   H    H   ~ ~

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”.

Harry with silent-film comic Fatty Arbuckle in an undated photo and, at left, with Charlie Chaplin at the Lasky studio (now Paramount) in November 1919.

Houdini’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, unveiled in 1975, is at 7001 Hollywood Boulevard, on the north side of the street, across from Grauman’s Theater and not far from the Magic Castle.

The fact that it came a half-century after his death might reflect his dearth of box-office bonanzas in the movie business. Having made his cinematic debut doing his stunts for a 1901 reel for Pathe and then seeing his role as Nemo in a proposed “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” production sunk in 1916, he got serious about motion pictures with the 15-part serial “The Master Mystery”, which came out in 1919.

Its box-office success brought a contract with Famous Players-Lasky Corporation / Paramount Pictures, for whom Houdini made “The Grim Game” (1919) and “Terror Island” (1920). He flung himself into the shoots with typical verve and often ended up bloodied and bruised. He never used stunt doubles — unless he had to. Which brings us to the plane crash.

You can see it in “The Grim Game” and rest assured that you’re watching the real thing, because it wasn’t planned. Since it happened, of course (and no one was killed), it became the movie’s big selling point. Houdini was jumping from one plane to another in mid-air when the aircraft collided and got locked together, and tumbled into a swamp.

“When they pulled him out he was half suffocated from being buried in mud,” Harold Kellock wrote in his 1928 biography. Fortunately by the time Ruth Brandon wrote her book, the truth was known: Harry wasn’t even in the shot. He’d broken his wrist in a tumble during a jail escape and his arm was in a sling, so they used a double.

No double was required for the requisite love scenes in his pictures, but Houdini would probably have welcomed the subterfuge because, by all accounts, he was mortified at the idea of kissing a woman who wasn’t his wife. Bess was reportedly asked to leave the set on at least one occasion so he could get his smooching scene over with.

The actress on the receiving end of one love peck was Nita Naldi, pictured below on the set of 1922’s “The Man from Beyond”. Born Nonna Dooley in New York, she’d previously had Rudolph Valentino doing the kissing, in “Blood and Sand”.

Lasky dropped Houdini after “Terror Island” failed to burn up the box office, so he started his own production outfit, two in fact — Officers’ Mystery Pictures Corporation and Film Development Corporation (or does Houdini Picture Corporation count as three?) — and made “The Man from Beyond” (1921), which did fairly well for a sci-fi yarn about a man frozen in ice for centuries, only to emerge in a thaw and resume his life.

This was the flick with his Niagara daredevil stunt, a thrilling brink-of-the-falls rescue, a still from with is shown below, along with a shot of the cast and crew.

Next came “Haldane of the Secret Service” (1923), and even Kellock had to admit that this one “was simply a failure”. None of Houdini’s productions did as well as the investors had hoped, and Houdini, having drained his savings and his enthusiasm, vanished from the cinema.

He took his reels of movies with him, of course, and showed them — usually accompanied by his own commentary — at the beginning of his shows on a nine-week tour of the Keith theatre circuit. The audiences still didn’t like the films and the theatre managers begged him to stop, but he was booked for an additional five weeks all the same.

Below are a few other scenes from Cinema Houdini.

~ ~   H    H   ~ ~

Screen icon or not, while Houdini was in Tinseltown, he had to live someplace, and herein is a bit of a Hollywood Hills mystery.

For those of us who don’t live in southern California, the Internet provides only confusion about just where is and what constitutes Houdini’s 1920s home in Laurel Canyon. Websites are equally divided between calling it a gutted, haunted remnant and a restored mansion where record producer Rick Rubin throws parties for the likes of Leonardo Di Caprio and Paris Hilton, and where artists like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Marilyn Manson and Slipknot have used his studio.

The Google Earth Community is split, too. I tend to agree with findthetruthcom that it’s the place at 2398 Laurel Canyon Boulevard. Just to the north, Esmee has marked a red-roofed house as “The Mansion”. See the Google Earth image below.

Elsewhere, CaptainKundalini comments on gsbell’s post “1980s Hollywood hills party spot” that the burned-out home there, far to the south of this location, was not the residence of Mary Tyler Moore but Houdini, at 2350 Laurel Canyon. This is indeed the address given on some Houdini tribute sites.

Was it even a “mansion”? Biographer Harry Kellock described the Houdini home in Hollywood as a “small, Spanish-style bungalow”, and Ruth Brandon, once again, saw no reason to disagree in her book.

Back on the Web, various claims about Houdini’s “razed ruin” and/or “looming, turreted castle” vie for attention, including that Houdini himself never lived here, only his widow. It’s also said that, in between making feature films and serials, he held seances at his house, that there is a honeycomb of tunnels and secret chambers, that his magic secrets are stashed somewhere on the grounds, and that he’s still there in his coffin!

Bouncing balls enthusiast and Houdini fan Wayne Namerow sheds a lot of light on this mystery on his website Pinball History, where he displays some great memorabilia, including a key that may have once opened the gate at 2398-2400 Laurel Canyon Boulevard. This was, he says, a large estate owned by a Dr Walker who befriended the Houdinis when they moved out west.

It’s not clear whether Harry was ever a guest at Walker’s place, Namerow explains, but after he died Bess and her manager-companion Edward Saint (who we shall meet again soon) stayed there in the guest house, which would explain the word “bungalow”.

The 1918-vintage Walker mansion was razed by fire in 1959, Namerow says, adding that he visited the estate in 2001, shortly before new owners took possession and began renovations. It was during this process that Namerow obtained the key, which he believes must have opened either the gate or a large trunk and “was probably the property of Bess and may have also belonged to HH”. He also reports that saw no ghosts, although a visitor to his site characterised the streaks in one of his photos from the estate as “spectral images”.

The brush fire that other sources agree levelled the mansion in 1959 left only the walls and a portion of the garage. Whether it was Rick Rubin who bought the property in 2001 and rebuilt it or not, I’m still waiting for guidance.

Music-wise, apart from the above-named artists, the UK video art and music group Psychic TV supposedly lost its entire sampling library in a fire at the Rubin-owned Houdini Mansion, where the Beatles allegedly first dropped acid, Mick Jagger, David Bowie and Jimi Hendrix were guests, Errol Flynn and Motley Crue partied, and Linkin Park recorded “Minutes to Midnight”. This is just more confusion, since all this stuff happened in another house nearby owned by Frank Zappa.

ADDED MAY 2008: Google Earth’s imagery has had a resolution boost, and below is what “the Houdini Mansion” looks like now. More and more public events are taking place there, with a recent “Partysearch” celebration advertising the address as 2400 Laurel Canyon Boulevard.

~ ~   H    H   ~ ~

The daunting task that any moviemaker faces in trying to encapsulate Houdini’s astonishing life doesn’t stop them from focusing on at least a portion of it. The 1953 Tony Curtis biopic “Houdini” tackled the whole subject and didn’t do too bad a job, although fiction crept in to cause lasting damage, as explained in this post.

In 2008 director Gillian Armstrong let fiction loose for “Death Defying Acts”, in which Guy Pearce portrayed Harry wrestling with the supernatural while falling in love with Catherine Zeta Jones in 1920s Edinburgh. The plot wasn’t too bad, though, and Timothy Spall’s remarkable acting as Houdini’s protective manager, Sugarman, earned the movie extra credit.

In June 2009, plans were announced for a movie version of William Kalush and Larry Sloman’s book “The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America’s First Superhero”, which is visited in several posts at Houdini Reappears.

Jeff Nathanson, who’d scripted “Rush Hour 2″ and Steven Spielberg’s “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” (with George Lucas), “Catch Me If You Can” and “The Terminal”, was chosen to direct the screen adaptation for Summit Entertainment and give Harry’s life an “action-thriller” spin — “featuring a character who is part Indiana Jones and part Sherlock Holmes”, as one online report put it.

~ ~   H    H   ~ ~

In June 2008 it emerged that a trove of Houdini’s props had been gathering dust in the basement of the Washington Mutual bank building at Sunset and Vine in Hollywood.

The Los Angeles Daily News reported that the basement is home to both “the Magicians Hall of Fame museum” and the Pacific Pioneer Broadcasters huge collection of artefacts from radio’s golden era, but everything was sealed off in December 2004 when an underground municipal transformer blew up and contaminated the former NBC Radio building with carcinogenic PCBs.

The premises were cleaned up — except for the magic and radio caches, because their owners couldn’t afford the decontamination cost, which could top $1 million. Efforts were underway to have the courts order the city to pay, with the city insisting that there had in fact been no contamination. Washington Mutual reached its own deal with the city over costs.

The blog Franklin Avenue identified the magic facility as “the Society of American Magicians’ Hall of Fame and Magic Museum”.

~ ~   H    H   ~ ~

On Halloween 2008, Houdini’s star was unveiled once more — restored eight years after it was found to be damaged on the 25th anniversary of the day it was originally dedicated.

The photo above from EntertainmentToday.com shows Penn & Teller, JoAnne Worley, Tippi Hedren, Siegfried Fischbacher of Siegfried & Roy, stage actor Neil Patrick Harris and Magic Castle co-founder Milt Larsen doing the honours at Hollywood Boulevard and Orange Drive, thanking benefactors including the Academy of Magical Arts, David Copperfield and Lance Burton.

Also on hand was Hardene Houdini, the grandson of Harry’s brother, and Irene Larsen, whose late husband Bill co-founded the Magic Castle with his brother Milt. Bill and Milt’s father, William W Larsen Sr, was with Bess at the “last” Houdini séance in 1936.

A reception followed at the Magic Castle, a block away, where members rededicated the newly renovated Houdini Séance Room, with resident medium Leo Kostka pointing out one of the largest collections of Harry’s gear, including handcuffs, a straitjacket, a Metamorphosis trunk and a milk can.