By Beverly O’Shea
THE ERICKSON TRIBUNE

Nobody will ever learn escape artist Harry Houdini’s secrets from the lips of Dorothy Perkins. “I promised I would never tell,” says the stage performer who now lives at Seabrook.

That promise was made the day the teenaged ballet student was selected as Houdini’s assistant, although she said she had gone to New York’s Longacre Theater to watch the auditions calling for a young dancer. While she watched what she estimated were 100 girls seeking the job, she was spotted in the audience and persuaded to audition too. When they picked her, she adds, they told her they knew she was the one when she walked on the stage.

On tour
They had to get started rehearsing right away because they were scheduled to begin their national tour in Hartford in a few weeks. She was in two of Houdini’s acts: one as the Radio Girl, another as a Slave Girl.

The Radio Girl act began with the placing of a table on the stage for a thorough examination to show nothing was hidden there. Then a large radio was put on top, again with nothing in it. The music of the Charleston started playing, giving Dorothy her cue. She would stick one leg out of the top of the radio, then the other, and then she would jump onto the stage and start dancing the Charleston.

As the Slave Girl, she was in a skimpy burlap costume tied to a pole (the only thing on the stage) because “she’s been a naughty girl,” the audience was told.

The lights went out and the girl, no longer tied to the pole, came out in a butterfly costume to perform a ballet number.

That experience ended in Buffalo. Perkins recalls that she and another assistant had just left the room of Houdini, who hadn’t been feeling well, when two young male fans entered and one of them hit him in the stomach. at day in 1925, Houdini died of peritonitis from a ruptured appendix.

Life after Houdini
Perkins went on to have small parts in two Broadway shows, travel to Europe, and marry. After a stint in Palm Beach, her travels brought her back north to New Jersey.