The Des Moines Register from Des Moines, Iowa • Page 9

nf Sit Ji i VI Jill II 11 KJI i 1 muj m-i 4 i The Des Moines Register Wednesday, October 31, 1979 ryw mift, ((, I i Harry HonadlM are youa out there? 0 AP PHOTO- quiet in a theater, yes, you could really hear the watches ticking, it was that still." If the trail of Harry has proved somewhat elusive, tracking down traces of his wife, Bess, is a more satisfactory pursuit. She moved to Los Angeles in 1933 a bitter, unhappy and lonely old widow. She went to mediums looking for a message. Sid Fleischman, a screenwriter and novelist from San Diego, met Madame Houdini in 1935. He describes her as a little lady, about 4-foot-8, with white hair and an air of nobility about her.

Sid Fleischman came to know Bess and also Ed Saint, who was her manager and close friend. He remembers how Bess would have receptions for the magicians. She had a perpetual light burning before a photograph of Houdini. She was said to be a competent magician, but he never saw her do any tricks. On Halloween of 1936, 10 years after the death of Houdini, Saint set up a seance on the roof of the Hollywood Knickerbocker Hotel.

Benches were set up for 200 spectators. On a small table were arranged handcuffs, a loaded gun, a slate, a trumpet, a bell and other appurtenances of the spiritualistic profession. Saint said he would invoke the soul of Houdini to manifest himself and he was a very intense Invoker. As Bess once said, "He invoked and be invoked good Lord how that man did invoke that night" Saint, looking up into the starry night, moaned, "Manifest yourself, Harry. Give cs a sign.

Shoot the gun. Open the handcuffs. Write a message on the slate, tilt the table, speak in the trumpet Something. Anything. Make yourself known." The seance was broadcast worldwide.

It was an event of wide interest Nothing happened. And then Saint asked, "Mrs. Houdini, the zero hour has passed, the 10 years are up. Have you reached a decision?" She sighed. She slowly answered, "Yes, I have faithfully followed the Houdini compact for 10 years.

I do not believe that Harry Houdini can come back to me or anyone. It is over, finished. Good night, Harry." and with that she closed the frame of the double photograph and put out the light that had been burning ceaselessly for a decade. 1 I m' I 1 i i This Halloween marks the 53rd anniversary of Harry Houdini's death. Because he promised to contact the living if he could, each year seances are held by those who hope to hear from the great magician who failed to appear for his highly publicized 1936 seance in Hollywood.

Maurice Zolotow, a noted biographer of entertainment figures, retraces the past, meets an 86-year-old magician, and adds a little more to Houdini's legend. By MAURICE ZOLOTOW ram Ln Amilll MmhIm LOS ANGELES, CALIF. On Nov. 30, 1915, while giving performance of magic and mystery at Los Angeles' Orpheum Theater, Harry Houdini, the great escape artist, got Into a quartet with Jess Willard, the 6-foot-4, 240-pound "great white hope" who had beaten Jack Johnson and was now heavyweight champion of the world. It was Houdini's custom to invite members of the audience to come on stage and examine his shackles to guarantee their authenticity.

Willard was sitting in the first row of the first balcony. After several persons had accepted Houdini's invitation, the escape artist who was 5-foot-2 and 160 pounds suddenly cried out' in his high-pitched voice, "I need three more to make up my committee, but there is one gentleman in the theater tonight big enough to equal three ordinary men, and if he would kindly serve. But Willard did not care to go on the stage. "Aw, g'wan with your act," he cried. "I paid for my seat here." Houdini persisted, but Willard said he liked to get paid when be performed.

The argument got shrill. The audience began booing Willard, not Houdini. Willard, cursing Houdini, called him a "four-flusber" and a "faker." His Last Dare Houdini calmed the angry audience. He told Willard that "I will be Harry Houdini when you are not the heavyweight champion of the world." Perhaps it was just as well for Houdini that Willard did not come forward. Houdini liked to brag that he had absolute control of his muscles and that anybody could punch him in the solar plexus and it wouldn't faze him.

He liked to challenge strong men and pugilists to hit him. On Halloween of 1926, the great Houdini died of peritonitis the result of being punched yet another time in the stomach on dare. And this Halloween, as on every Halloween since bis death, serious believers in spiritualism, along with a few skeptics, will hold seances in and around Los Angeles to attempt to get in touch with Houdini's spirit For Houdini, who had crusaded against mediums and spiritualists, often said that if there were a life after death he would get in touch with his widow, Bess, or some other living person. And what better place for the great illusionist to return than Hollywood? Indeed, he was obsessed with making movies and being a star. He first played in a 16-episode serial, "The Master Mystery," which was filmed in New York in 1917; then, in 1919, Adolph Zukor signed him to a contract and he returned to Hollywood to make "The Grim Game" and "Terror bland." Houdini was so crazy about movies, in fact, that he started his own company, Houdini Pictures International.

It bled him. His final film was "The Man from Beyond." Houdini played a man frozen into immortality in a block of ice in Alaska who is freed and brought back to civilization and falls in love with the same woman he knew in his previous existence. As a curiosity, "The Man from Beyond" is intriguing, but whatever mysterious qualities Houdini possessed when he strode onto a stage were not present on film. Houdini lived in Los Angela for about two years, yet researchers have never been able to discover where he lived or how he spent his leisure hours or who his friends were. Some insights can be gathered into his personality, however, from a venerable wonderworker by the name of Dai Vernon.

He is 86 years old, with twinkling eyes and an ironic smile, and he is the elder statesman of magic fcr the whole world. He holds court at the Magic Castle, a private "magicians' club" in Hollywood. Almost every evening magictaes professionals and amateurs come from all over the world to shake the bands of "the professor," as be is called, and to listen to his stories. Vernon knew Harry and Bess well. He remembers once asking Theo Hardeen Harry's younger brother, who also did an escape act "Wasn't Harry ever leery of jumping Into the icy waters of a river with six pairs of handcuffs and lag irons on his bloody body?" This was in the famous over-board-box escape, in which a shackled Houdini was ensconced in a packing case, which was roped and then dropped Into a river.

Hardeen laughed his bead off and replied, "Listen, Dai, the hardest part of that trick was this: The springs on those cuffs were so weak that the hardest part was not to shake when you got into the box because otherwise them damn handcuffs would fall off by theirselves." "Brain is the Key" Vernon smiles, recollecting that Houdini could always make you believe he was doing a hard stunt "He thought he was the smartest man that ever lived," Vernon says. "He'd think he was doing you a big favor if he gave you one of his calling cards on which he wrote a slogan he said he made up. It was 'My brain is the key that sets me "He was a ruthless egomaniac. He was a monomaniac. He could not stand any other magician.

He tried to get a monopoly on magic. He sent his stooges to break up other people's acts. He once set fire to the Hagenbeck and Wallace Circus because it had a magician doing some of his illusions." But it was not what be did so much as bow be did it that made Houdini an overpowering performer on stage. He cast a spell on you. You believed him.

Jean Eugene Robert Houdin, the 19th-century French magician after whom Houdini named himself, dnce said that a magician is an actor playing the part of a magician, and Harry Houdini was a brilliant actor. He could plan an effect and stage it with a sense of rhythm and timing. Take his Chinese water-torture trick, in which his ankles were locked into a pair of stocks. The stocks had a small gimmicked opening into which he could insert his fingers and spring the stocks when be was immersed, then raise himself up and leap out of the glass cage dripping wet A curtain had, of course, been drawn around the cell as he made his escape. The showmanship lay in having three men dressed in raincoats and firemen's helmets and bearing axes, and Houdini crying, "If I fail to escape in three minutes, these men will smash the glass." Vernon recalls that when Houdini took a deep breath wheeeeee just before he was lowered into the water, you could feel the audience freezing in terror.

"Why," he says, "you could hear a pin drop, it was so Ben Houdini stands beside her husband's "shrine" a few days before her last attempt to reach him la the spirit world la October 1931. Harry Hoadlnl had asked that bis wife attempt to reach him for 10 years after his death; if she had no communication from him she would make no further attempts. The handcuffs at the lower right side of the shrine had been closed since his death. "If these should snap open during the seance," she said, "then' I shall know Harry's spirit has been near." The caffs sever opened. Houdini died of peritonitis on Oct.

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Ambasudor Thomas Watson Jr. began his first official day of work in Moscow Tuesday after his unconventional arrival at the U.S. Embassy on foot perplexed Soviet guards. The 65-year-old former chairman of IBM, an amateur sailor and mountaineer, has taken to walking to work from his official residence instead of traveling the three-fourths of a mile in his official Cadillac Fleetwood limousine with American flag flying. Unprepared for the ambassador's new ways, Soviet police guarding the embassy briefly challenged the ambassador's identity Tuesday and once last week.

Guindon 11111117 fl mmmMmml MJ W4fl yaffil thi, M.mnmmm I 'Pops' dressas up Baseball's Willie "Pops" StargeU has been inducted into a Hall of Fame of the Men's Fashion Association of America. SUrgell, the 38-year-old captain of the newly crowned World Champion Pittsburgh Pirates and World Series Most Valuable Player, received the association's Hall of Fame award for accomplishments, visibility and a persocj style that "others seek to emulate." I PIV- 1979 LA. Times Synd. I resistable value all for or'y $10.50 with any purchase from the Givenchy HI Fragrance Collection. Parfum, 2 oz.

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And, as no evening is complete without the fragrance of Givenchy, the Signature Evening Bag comes with Givenchy HI Eau dt Toilette, 1 oz. and Partum, 2cc. An ir- Dead Retired Gen. William Hege, whose unit captured the Remagen Bridge and established the first Allied bridgehead over the Rhine River in a critical World War battle, died Monday at Munson Army Hospital In Fort Leavenworth, Kan. The BoonviUe, native was 85.

Banes Wallis, the British scientist whose World War II Inventions included the "bouncing bomb" that destroyed Germany's Mohne and Elder dams, died Tuesday in Leather-head, England. He was 92. Wo Downtown 244-4211 Merle Hay Mall 276-4545 A chicken on its way to a costume party..