From nationalgeographic.com
The little red book, which contains Harry Houdini's recently deciphered notes, charts his rise as a performer and the key role of his wife, Bess, in turning his act from dime-store vaudeville into international stardom
In 1977, a 13-year-old named John Cox received his dream Christmas present: a coffee-table book by the era’s most famous magician—a TV star named Doug Henning—which chronicled never-before-seen photographs and news clippings of Harry Houdini, acquired from the master illusionist’s niece. The gift was by far the most thrilling addition to the teenager’s library, and, upon receiving it, Cox got so excited he threw up.
In the years to come, Cox would become a walking encyclopaedia of Houdini’s life as he pursued a day job as a screenwriter and film tech in Los Angeles. But he often wondered about one of the pictures in the book: It showed four pages from Houdini’s earliest-known diary, beginning in 1897. Information about the magician’s early life was rare, and as Houdini became famous, he’d often changed the details of his origin story, inserting exaggerations and fictions to bolster his mystique. Like the time he claimed he’d been shot in the hand by gamblers who tried to force him to pick the lock of a casino door in Kansas. (As with much of Houdini lore, this story has never been proven—nor entirely disproven.)
After his death, historians struggled to parse the truth from Houdini’s self-invented mythology. But there, in Henning’s tome, was a tantalizing artefact, filled with miniscule handwriting that seemed to be inscribed in code. Cox suspected the illegible scrawl disguised the great magician’s private thoughts and memories. But it would be more than 30 years before he discovered what was inside.
What Cox didn’t know at the time was that the petite datebook, bound in dark red fabric, had become a holy Houdini grail for a small and tight-knit community of magic aficionados. For years it was guarded by a collector named Stanley Palm, who occasionally opened his doors to serious biographers—though they found the book inscrutable. In 2004, Palm put the diary up for auction. Swann Galleries, based just off Madison Square Park, was set to sell it in October that year, and gossip columnist Cindy Adams, writing for the New York Post, joked that it “should bring $60,000 if it doesn’t disappear by then.” Bidding was heated, and competitors battled it out until one emerged victorious with a bid of $41,400.
To crack open the mysteries of Harry Houdini's first diary, a team of superfans assembled to hunt down obscure references and cross-check its contents with newspaper archives. Their efforts revealed a forgotten universe of trapeze acts, "hose teams," and travelling vaudeville.
The Collection of Dr. Bruce J. Averbook, The Averbook Magic Art Museum and Library, Cleveland Ohio
The winner, surgical oncologist and Ohio-based magic collector Bruce Averbook, knew the diary was special. When he first held the miniature book, he felt a thrill—maybe a little of Houdini’s DNA was still on its pages, he thought. The entries began in 1897 when Houdini was still a scrappy variety show performer touring a circuit of dime museums and small theatres. They ended in 1899, just as the magician was catching his first big break. He’d never updated the diary further but saved it for decades, along with a number of other scrapbooks and journals. When the magician died suddenly at age 52 of appendicitis—on Halloween in 1926—the little red journal passed to his wife, Bess. After she passed away in 1943, her possessions were spread out among her five sisters, and the diary eventually ended up with Stanley Palm, a collector and friend of the family.
After Averbook bought the diary, he also found it nearly impossible to decipher. Its entries were a jumble of shorthand, nicknames, and abbreviations. (A typically mysterious one, jotted down at the Sea Breeze Palace in Coney Island in 1897, read: “One of the 3 nudos fell from traps.” Another simply said: “Visited Insane asylum with [illegible] and Jenkins.”) Some of the words had been lost to time, and whole sections had been erased and rewritten in cramped, slanted script.
As the years passed, Averbook puzzled over the diary, which lived in an archival box at his house, and occasionally went on display at his lavish private magic museum. He also loaned it out to other exhibits on Houdini—including one at the Skirball Center in Los Angeles in 2011, which caught the eye of John Cox. Nearly 35 years after he’d first learned of the diary in his Christmas book, Cox gazed at it with his own eyes. He childhood excitement was revived. “I instantly knew that was something unique,” he recalls, “something that tells a larger, deeper story about a time shrouded in mythology.”
It would take another decade for Averbook to retire from his surgical practice, decide he was ready to crack Houdini’s code, and contact magic historian Mike Caveney, who runs a small magic book imprint in Southern California. Caveney, in turn, assembled a team from the magic world, a group of people so obsessed by the art of illusion, and by Houdini himself— including Cox, who runs the popular blog Wild About Harry—that they might tap into the vaudevillian’s mind and figure out his secret script. If they succeeded, the reward for their troubles was potentially stupendous: an unprecedented look at the young, ambitious Ehrich Weiss just before he exploded into stardom and rebranded himself as the “King of Handcuffs,” the great Harry Houdini. They called the project Escaping Obscurity.
In the world of Houdini fanatics, just a handful are considered top scholars on the mysterious performer, and they follow each other’s work closely. Chief among them is the actor Patrick Culliton, who likes to say he ghost-wrote Houdini’s autobiography, by which he means the 1997 two-part Houdini Unlocked that stitches together the magician’s first-person stories. Then there’s Joe Nataro, who runs a blog specializing in Houdini’s movie appearances and fiction writing. And Bill Kalush, founder of New York’s Conjuring Arts Research Center and author of the authoritative biography The Secret Life of Houdini. Recently, sportswriter Joe Posnanski entered the fray, authoring a book entirely about Houdini's superfans.
And then there are the collectors of Houdini’s artefacts. David Copperfield, the most famous magician since Houdini, has a collection so complete it includes everything from Harry H.’s bathtub to his personal library, bookshelves and all, which are displayed in his private museum in Las Vegas. “If he stood in one spot he’d see his entire life surrounding him,” Copperfield said to National Geographic of the space. Long ago, Copperfield said, he took a valuable lesson from his idol’s success: to capture imaginations you must tap into something deeply human. For Houdini, that was escaping. “The things that really resonate are the things people have already in their dreams,” said Copperfield. “That’s what I learned from Houdini.”
Averbook, who began collecting as a student during his surgical fellowship in Maryland, had gathered an impressive array of artefacts over the years, but little had been seen outside the minuscule world of magic collectors. So when Averbook and Caveney decided to publish Houdini’s diary, they went directly to the obsessives—starting with John Cox, who felt like he’d been preparing for the task his entire life. As a young kid, he’d become enthralled by his father’s stories of a man who could escape any constraints. Cox hadn’t been raised with religion, but to him, Houdini felt like a miracle worker. He first began drafting a book on his hero at age 12. In high school, he handed out business cards with the title “Houdini Enthusiast,” and performed escapes in a tailor-made straitjacket. For years, he had been slotting every morsel of information on Houdini—mined from books, newspapers, and first-hand sources—into a document on his computer that chronicled the magician’s life week by week. Once, he asked a therapist to help him understand the roots of his obsession—they were both stumped.
Using digital images of the little red book, Cox began the daunting work of decoding Houdini’s shorthand. He crosschecked entries in the diary with his chronology spreadsheet, starting with an amusement park show in Dayton, Ohio, on June 14, 1897 and ending with the word “Los Angeles”—which marked Houdini’s triumph as a vaudeville headliner—on June 25, 1899.
As Houdini moved across the country, a lost world of turn-of-the-century circus troupes and vaudeville circuits emerged in his diary entries. Houdini was learning acrobatics, recording stunts and accidents, and admiring his fellow performers. But the people, theatres, and locations scribbled down were only a fraction of the story. So Cox enlisted helpers who specialized in the circus, in early 20th-century history, in magic and in old-fashioned handwriting. Some were Houdini fans; others friends of friends. Together, they helped him recover words, names, and phrases lost to time, often crowdsourcing the most obscure and illegible entries. The “3 nudos,” for instance, turned out to be a trapeze act—and one of the acrobats had fallen from the bar.
One former circus performer named Jessica Jane looked at a note Houdini made about a turning a somersault without “the mechanic.” She recognized the reference instantly as an apparatus still used by acrobats to help them practice flips.
For a particularly tough entry—“Rode wheel like a Prof.”—Jane set the picture as her phone’s lock screen, hoping that the message would come to her if she saw it consistently. Eventually it was cracked: Houdini was bicycling like a professional while vacationing in Bridgeport, Connecticut. As they worked on the diary, Jane also took Cox to Circus Vargas outside Los Angeles, so he could experience one of the last family circuses left in America, a final remnant of Houdini’s world. The performers there still toured and lived as Harry and Bess had some 125 years earlier.
Though many biographers paint this period in Houdini’s life as frustrating, the illusionist was getting critical training in sideshow skills. From the Japanese Akimoto acrobat troupe, he learned how to swallow and regurgitate tools such as lock picks. From contortionists he picked up tricks to help him escape ropes and straitjackets. He wrote of constantly improving his act with new techniques, and the money he and Bess earned went toward marketing posters and photos. In the diary’s early entries, Houdini wrote of honing his soon-to-be famous handcuff escape. As he and Bess toured with circuses and performed in dime museums, he also began to appear at police stations, challenging them to restrain him. He succeeded all but once.
Young Houdini, many believed, was a serious man with a “titanic ego” who struggled in obscurity. At first, Cox feared his hero would be unlikeable. But as he read on, the opposite became apparent. Here was the real guy—not the myth—and he was charmingly relatable. As Cox and Jane puzzled through an entry in which Houdini described running away from bike cops, she texted, “It's like getting to become friends with him, and I love it!!!” “He's nicer, funnier, smarter, and a better overall person than I ever knew.” Cox replied.
Other entries required arcane knowledge, including one finally cracked thanks to input from an expert on silent film star Buster Keaton, who advised Cox that the “Keatings” mentioned in the book were, in fact, the Keaton family. Meanwhile, Jim Steinmeyer, an illusion designer and magic historian, helped decode an entry from Monday, August 1, 1898, when Houdini made note of seeing a “hose team” at practice. Steinmeyer recognized it as a reference to a now-lost tradition in which firefighters would race in their wheeled hose carts, and spectators—Houdini included—would gather to watch. “The diary opened up this world that doesn’t exist anymore,” Cox says.
Old newspaper clippings also came in handy. Throughout the diary, Houdini mentioned a figure called “Lewis the count,” whom he appeared to be tracking. But the count’s identity was impossible to crack. Cox was stumped. Then, one day, as he looked through an 1897 issue of Pennsylvania’s Freeland Tribune, Cox finally found the man who was traveling with Houdini in the Welsh Bros. Circus. In each new town, Lewis would visit the local newspaper offices, proclaim his aristocratic title, and announce that he was searching for a wealthy wife to ensure a comfortable retirement.
In reality, the “count” was a colourful character named H. Stanley Lewis, who specialized in creative publicity. Even though the newspapers seemed aware of the ruse, they gladly ran articles on the boisterous charlatan. Houdini watched Lewis carefully, perhaps internalizing a lesson: newspapers would apparently publish a good story regardless of its truth. Later in life, Houdini strategically applied this knowledge as he toured the world to drum up local interest in his challenges and embellish stories of his feats.
And then there were the entries chronicling Houdini’s private life with his wife, Bess. And once Cox dove into those, he made a discovery that would change the story of how Houdini really became a legend.
Bess Houdini was no sidekick. Like her husband, she radiated moxie and street smarts. They met in Coney Island in 1893, where they were both performing. Until Bess retired from their act in 1908, the two would remain partners on and off stage. In theatres, they would pair up with a wide range of talents: sometimes performing as spiritualists conjuring the dead; others as a singing and comedy duo.
In the diary, Bess was an omnipresent figure. They were young, in love, and seemed to live a carefree life, despite financial struggles that sometimes left them without enough money to even get to their next gig. In one entry, the twenty-something couple was out on the town, dancing until 2 am at a “cakewalk” where couples tried to outlast each other to win a piece of cake. Another night, they painted the town with advertising posters for their show until nearly daybreak.
During his decoding efforts, Cox discovered a startling 1908 article in the Pittsburgh Gazette Times called, “Where a Mr. and Mrs. Act Didn’t Pay.” In it, Bess described how she transformed her husband into a solo star—a key role that no biography had ever detailed.
After their second circus tour as a magical duo, the Houdinis found themselves in a rut. Bess proposed a revamped act: instead of joint billing, they should rebrand her husband as simply “Houdini” the escape artist. She urged him not to give up on the handcuffs, and on their dream of performing on the esteemed vaudeville stages.
“[T]he following week “Mr. and Mrs. Houdini” disappeared from the program and the single word Houdini had taken their place,” the article read. “From that time dates the rising tide of Houdini’s fortune.”
Over the next year, this routine would catapult the couple from small-town attractions to big-city headliners. But first, an embarrassing failure: in the inaugural show to bill the singular “Houdini,” at the Palm Garden Beer Hall in St. Paul, Minnesota on March 6, 1899, the couple lost the key to the trunk with Bess locked inside. Harry had to break the locks to set her free. Yet the next few shows went smoothly—and that’s when they caught the eye of a German vaudeville booker named Martin Beck, who was visiting from Chicago.
Beck took Houdini to dinner and advised him to ditch the magic tricks but keep the handcuffs. Then he offered him a try-out for the Orpheum, one of the largest theatre circuits of the day. After shows in Omaha and Kansas City, Beck sent him to the flagship in San Francisco where reviewers honed in on the young sensation, ignoring the more famous actress billed as the headliner.
“The handcuff act seemed like a scam in dime museums,” Cox says. “Put him in a respectable house and he's the Beatles: so new, fresh, handsome and funny.”
A month later, Houdini’s $20-a-week act was raking in ten times that salary. In the diary he noted that Bess bought a new dress. They would never play another dime museum again.
But Houdini very nearly missed his rendezvous with fate at the Minnesota beer garden. And it was all there, detailed within the diary, as Cox eventually learned. Indeed, Harry Houdini was supposed to be playing another gig that night. But on March 2, it was cancelled. The magician despaired, writing in his diary, “shattered all my air castles and spoiled 20 weeks work.”
As he worked on this diary entry, Cox texted Colleen Bak, a midwife who writes Houdini-inspired poetry and previously tended to his grave in Queens. Knowing her knack for deciphering Houdini’s messy scrawl, Cox would often text photos for her to work on. “I think he is being figurative,” Bak back. “Castles in the air can be a way of referring to something you are dreaming about or hopeful for.” They realized that he was mourning the missed opportunity during one of his lowest moments yet—unaware that this would lead directly to his big break. Cox responded: “Had that not happened, we may never have had Houdini.”
From there on out, the diary chronicled Houdini refining his handcuff act, as he began to understand what the audience wanted. “Mon april 21 1899 - first time i took off h cuffs with curtain open was the hit of the act,” reads one diary entry. The public lapped up the visual suspense, never certain if the man on stage could pull off his superhuman stunts. Eventually, Houdini would evolve this act into unprecedented dramatic displays of endurance and strength, from prison escapes to jumping from a bridge, shackled, into icy waters.
The diary ended in July 1899—the whole month was left blank. Harry Houdini was too busy to write. That month, in San Francisco, he would escape from handcuffs at City Hall, and from a straitjacket in the Receiving Hospital. By the next year, he would be commanding stages across Europe and America. “He doesn't need a diary anymore to record every 10-cent expense, and his hopes for success,” says Cox. Finally, “he escaped obscurity.”
