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

that Houdini immediately embraced.
    After the Marco show folded, Houdini convinced the old magician to loan him the props, and Harry mounted his own full-on magic show in Canada. Despite very favorable reviews, he couldn’t make it go. So with magic bookings still few and far between, the Houdinis tried anything to stay in show business. From the summer of 1896 until the fall of 1897, they wandered up and down the coast and ventured out to the Midwest, taking any work they could. Houdini appeared as Cardo, the King of Cards. They did a comedy routine, and they acted in melodramas. They wrote to prominent magicians like Alexander Herrmann and Harry Kellar, applying for work as assistants. Herrmann never responded to his brother’s distant cousin, but at least they got a nice rejection letter from Kellar.
    Even when they were working, getting paid was sometimes harder than getting out of restraints. In Toledo, Harry arrived for a job at a vaudeville hall only to learn that salaries were not being issued. He marched into the box office, waited until enough cash had come in to cover his salary, and paid himself on the spot. The next day he quit. In Newark, a manager decided to lay him off for his Sunday show, which would have paid him $15, and wrote him a letter to that effect. Houdini read it, calmly tore it up, showed up at the theater on Sunday, and denied ever having received a letter. Negotiating on the spot, he did the date for $8.

It was Houdini’s brother Theo who, later performing as Hardeen, came up with the idea of doing the straitjacket escape in full view of the audience. New York Public Library
    All of this strain took a toll on the frail Bess. She fell ill numerous times those first three years. By July of 1897, they were back in New York, where a depressed and dispirited Houdini went to four of the largest newspapers and offered to sell all his secrets, including those of his handcuff act, for twenty-five dollars. There were no takers. He tried to open a magic school, but except for one older man in Chicago, he had no pupils. Making a deal with his friend Gus Roterberg, a magic dealer in Chicago, he tried to sell magic effects, even publishing a catalog entitled Magic Made Easy . The orders were few and far between.
    In the fall, when their season resumed, they were back on the road. They finished their first booking at a music hall in Milwaukee only to learn that the theater manager had swindled them out of their salary. Their next show was at Kohl and Middleton’s in Chicago, but in an attempt to make back their losses, Houdini dropped $60 in a craps game. Could their luck get any worse?
     
    Nobody had seen anything like it in all their lives. They gathered around the front of the locomotive and watched as the railroad officials tried to pry the young man off the tracks so that the journey could continue. But pull as they might, there seemed to be no way that the brakemen could get the stubborn man off the rails. He was holding on with such force that his hands were bruised and bleeding.
    By now a third railroad man had joined the struggle—to no avail. Houdini had dug his fingers around one rail and clamped his toes on the other. His muscles were like steel, but he was also using leveraging techniques so that a hundred railmen couldn’t get him off.
    Finally the conductor walked over.
    “Say, your damned trunks are onboard. How about letting us start?” he said.
    Houdini immediately sprang off the track and walked over to Bess, who was standing among the crowd, fretting.
    “I told you it would work,” he whispered to her as he hugged her. And then they both climbed on board for their trip to the Indian Territory.
    Houdini had just gotten a solid fifteen-week booking to work with Dr. Hill’s California Concert Company, an old-time medicine show, and they were en route to join the troupe. In his mind, this could be their ticket to the big-time. They were to change trains at three A.M. , but their