The Secret Life of Houdini by William Kalush, Larry Sloman Page B

the fall, the circus came to an end, and now Harry and Bess found themselves back in New York with no real prospects. Clearly discouraged, he paid a visit to his friend Joe Rinn. Rinn was now a leading figure in Spiritualist circles in New York. Through his father, the manager of New York’s largest hotel, he had met many of the leading Spiritualists, including Margaret Fox Kane, one of the founders of the movement. Rinn’s faith in Spiritualism had been shaken when his parallel interest in magic brought him to Martinka’s Magic Shop, then located on New York City’s Sixth Avenue. After establishing a friendship with Francis Martinka, one of the proprietors, Rinn discovered that many of the most famous mediums were Martinka’s customers, buying magic props that were essential to put over their séances.
    “I don’t know what to make of our business, Joe,” he said. “I feel that my handcuff and trunk escape act should make a hit with the public but it doesn’t seem to get across.”
    “Well, why not proclaim that you are released from your bonds by spirits?” Rinn suggested. “Let them prove otherwise.”
    “No, I can’t do that,” Houdini countered. “I got disgusted with myself when Bessie and I were doing our psychic act…The poor fools wept and believed we were in touch with the spirit world.”
    It was more than that though. Houdini would rather fail than dishonor his oath to his father by supporting his mother with the proceeds of a morally bankrupt enterprise.
    Rinn, as usual, offered to front Houdini some money, and Houdini, as usual, had too much pride to take him up on the offer. Around that time, Bess’s brother-in-law, who had good contacts at the Yale Lock factory, offered to get Houdini a job there. Houdini must have seriously considered it, because he later wrote that things had become so bad at the end of 1898 that, “I contemplated quitting the show business, and retire to private life, meaning to work by day at one of my trades…and open a school of magic.”
    He published an expanded version of Magic Made Easy , sixteen pages now, that included a full back-page ad for Professor Harry Houdini’s School of Magic at 221 East Sixty-ninth Street, which was his mother’s address. A perusal of that catalog made it clear that Houdini was about to call it quits because nestled in those ads for gypsy fortune-teller books and talking skulls and vanishing handkerchiefs and instructions detailing How to Hypnotize any Animal was a small ad on page ten. It read:
    57 HANDCUFF ACT .
    The only complete act of its kind. You defy the police authorities and sheriffs to place handcuffs or leg shackles on you, and you can easily escape. Price on application. If interested, write.
    No one was interested.

4
Quid Pro Quo
    T HE ROTUND, REDHEADED LIEUTENANT HAD JUST finished placing a pair of handcuffs on Houdini’s wrists, double-locking them to insure their security. He wasn’t through yet. Now he bent down, not an easy job for a man of his immense girth, and fastened a brand-spanking-new set of leg irons around Houdini’s ankles. With some effort, he straightened up and surveyed his work.
    “Hey, Andy,” Frank Corbus, one of his fellow detectives, yelled, “you’re going easy on the lad unless you use the newest jewelry.”
    Andy Rohan nodded. Corbus would know—he was legendary around the central station as one of the best sleight-of-hand men in the area. In fact, many of his colleagues had placed side bets that he could equal, if not excel, this Houdini fellow as a magician.
    “A capital idea,” Rohan said, and walked over to his desk. From the bottom drawer he removed a state-of-the-art set of handcuffs.
    “Get out of these handcuffs and leg irons and I’ll think that I’m walking in my sleep sure enough,” Rohan quipped as he snapped one end of the cuffs to the leg irons. Then he maneuvered Houdini into a crouching position and fastened the other end to the first pair of handcuffs. The