Harry 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.

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.

~ ~   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 image resolution 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.

“According to legend”, says Troy Taylor on his cool website Haunted Decatur, the venerable Lincoln Theater on North Main Street in Decatur, Illinois, has a narrow trap door nicknamed the “Houdini Hole”, commemorating Harry’s appearance there in the late 1910s.

“People believed that the hole had been cut for the magician to escape through during one of his illusions, and that the hooks below had held some sort of safety net,” Taylor writes, but in fact, he says, it was cut for a hose to release the water from his Water Torture Escape apparatus … that is, if Houdini even performed at the Lincoln at all.

Taylor cites sceptics insisting that Harry never played the Lincoln, and that anyone who believes so is probably thinking of Harry Blackstone (who had a very memorable return engagement there in 1942 when a fire broke out in the drugstore next door while the theatre was packed with schoolkids — he “tricked” them into evacuating calmly).

Taylor says a former theatre staffer told him there was no newspaper advertising for Houdini because “he wasn’t famous at the time”. If so, then the website has evidently got its timeframe wrong, because Harry was already a global superstar by the late 1910s. Houdini could have appeared there sometime in the 1890s, before his fame-fulfilling journey to Europe — except that the Lincoln wasn’t built until 1916.

Still, great entertainers like Ethel Barrymore, Al Jolson, Ed Wynn and Jack Dempsey (who put on a sparring exhibition) packed its 1,300 seats, and in 1926, the year Houdini died, the still-unknown Bob Hope was at the theatre “showing Decatur how to dance the Charleston”. As well, Taylor’s site is about haunted Decatur, so he’s got a great yarn about a stagehand named “Red” who supposedly fell to his death from the catwalk — and yet refused to quit his job.