All In The Mind

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30390, 14 March 1964, Page 10

All In The Mind

A dislike of school started the great American illusionist Harry Houdini on the career that was to make him internationally famous. This was one of the facts about “the handcuff king” recalled recently by a journalist, Betty Ross, who knew Houdini well. Houdini was only 10 when his mother decided that he might as well give up school, and apprenticed him to a locksmith. There he discovered he had a facility for opening locks. One day the local chief of police came in with a handcuffed prisoner. The key to the handcuffs had been lost and he wanted the locksmith’s help to free the man. While the locksmith went in search of the right tools young Houdini began fiddling with the handcuffs, and in a moment they were open. After that, whenever the police station wanted help on a similar job, they sent for young Harry. The remark of an admiring friend that he was good enough to go on the stage first spurred Houdini to

study other illusion acts and build up a programme to present in the music halls of New York. The programme did very badly but brought him a wife, for he married his young assistant, Bessie, who advised him to concentrate on becoming a king of escapists. Among feats Betty Ross recalled was one in which Houdini emerged free, though wet, a minute and a half after having been firmly closed, handcuffed, in a tank where the water came over his head. Only once in his life, he had told her, had he been afraid. That was when he was buried handcuffed, six feet down in the earth. As the last shovel of earth went on the grave he gave a scream that nearly cost him his life, because breath control was vital for taking off the handcuffs and fighting his way to the surface. The only clue Miss Ross ever gained to the secret of Houdini’s magic was on an autograph photograph, across which he wrote: “My brain is the key that Bets me free.”