The Secret Life of Houdini by William Kalush, Larry Sloman Read Free Book Online

the sprouts, to ascertain that they were real. A few spectators stepped up and confirmed this.
    Again he covered the sprouts and resumed his singing. And after more applications of powder and more hand passing and more lyre playing, and some more frowns, finally he cackled with delight and threw the cloth to the side, revealing two mature mango trees, thirty inches high.
    The crowd applauded and threw change into the hat of the lyre player, who made the rounds. And when the throng dispersed, Harry Houdini and his brother Theo went into their tent to divvy up the proceeds.
    Houdini was desperate to make a living as an entertainer, and if that meant dressing up as a Hindu conjurer and charming a snake or performing the Indian basket (where the yogi puts a small boy into a basket that barely contains him, closes the lid, and then pierces the basket repeatedly with his sword), then so be it.
    The Houdinis wouldn’t have made the pilgrimage to Chicago if it hadn’t been for a twenty-two-year-old native son named Sol Bloom. Initially the plans for the fairgrounds next to the world’s fair were quite tasteful. Conceived by a Harvard professor, the intent was that a leisurely stroll down the grounds would be a reenactment of the evolution of mankind—beginning in Africa, spanning the Near and Far East, and culminating in Europe.

The Midway Plaisance at the Columbian Exposition of 1893, as viewed from the giant Ferris wheel. From the collection of Jim Steinmeyer
    But then Bloom got involved. He had a P. T. Barnum–like sense for the bizarre and the spectacular and had made a name for himself by managing a theater in San Francisco. When the Harvard professor faltered, Bloom was brought in. Exhibitions of peasant cheese production went by the wayside, and acrobats, fire-eaters, and belly dancers were hired. Lots of belly dancers. Bloom even wrote a song for them, a ditty that became a standard for the suggestive dance craze that would be known as “Hoochy-Koochy.”
    Bloom was also a magician, so the word got out in the magic community that if you got to Chicago that summer, you might get to pocket some of the change that the millions of tourists would leave behind. The Brothers Houdini stayed on the fairgrounds for about a month, until Harry dispatched his younger brother home and moved across town to take some solo work at Kohl and Middleton’s Dime Museum. Dime museums were among the lowest rungs of show business, usually large rooms where long stages had been partitioned off to exhibit several entertainers at once. Often the most popular of these entertainers were the freaks and other curious aberrations of the human form.
    Houdini had worked at Kohl and Middleton’s before, and he could count on periodic work from Mr. Hedges, the manager. Now that Theo had gone, Houdini’s turn consisted of simple magic effects and some card work. It was routine work, a chance to earn some shekels before returning to New York, but his return to Kohl’s reminded him of an invaluable lesson he had learned on that same stage.
    During his last appearance there, Houdini had been on the bill with a woman named Mattie Lee Price. Mattie was only twenty-two years old, barely ninety pounds, and had the sickly appearance of a “consumptive.” Yet this weakling was able to perform feats requiring such superhuman strength and endurance that most of the people who witnessed them were convinced that she had assistance from either good spirits or the devil himself. As wondrous as these feats appeared, Houdini, who knew they were done using subtle leverage techniques, attributed her sensational notices to the management of her husband, Mr. White, who was a brilliant salesman and showman and whose verbal eloquence “‘sold’ the act as no other man has sold an act before or since.” During the engagement, Miss Price’s affections were alienated by a circus grifter who had come between the symbiotic pair. By the next stop, Milwaukee, White was gone