The Secret Life of Houdini (64 page)

One of the fairy photographs that fooled Doyle.
Conjuring Arts Research Center

The book’s subtitle said it all:
A Complete Exposé of the Modus Operandi of Fire Eaters, Heat Resisters, Venomous Reptile Defiers, Sword Swallowers, Human Ostriches, Strong Men, Etc
. Houdini had drawn on his sideshow and circus background and written a fascinating book revealing the secrets of these eccentric entertainers. The book was so good that the reviewers urged him to next set his sights on exposing phony mediums, who were beginning to be seen as a scourge on society. “If Houdini doesn’t do it, someone else will, sooner or later, but it should be Houdini,” the
Variety
reviewer argued. “He would have the moral support of every clean periodical in the country.”
The New York Times
was so impressed with Houdini’s “merciless exposure of miracle-mongers who claim to be endowed with mysterious powers” that they nominated him for membership in the Seybert Commission, a prestigious academic group that studied mediums, if they ever resumed their investigations.

In addition to the press, Houdini was being pressured to go full tilt against phony mediums by his close associates. His secretary in the SAM was Oscar Teale, a venerable magic theorist who had done an act exposing the tricks of phony mediums years earlier. Houdini was also consulting regularly with W. S. Davis, a New York City printer whose knowledge of the tricks in the séance room came firsthand; he was a reformed medium.

Although pressured by the Spiritualist opposition, Houdini still kept an open mind about the possibility of communicating with the dead. Having been unable to see some of the leading mediums in Great Britain, he sent his old friend and fellow magician DeVega to investigate mediums and report back their results. “I believe you could not be easily fooled,” he noted and offered to pay all expenses. A month later, DeVega obviously came through because Houdini wrote back: “Glad to get the confessions of the mdeiums [sic]. What I want particularly is Spirit Photos and their methods. I will willing[ly] pay all your expenses, to any sceance [sic] you may go to, nomatter [sic] what it is write it down in detail and send it along.” DeVega came through on that count as well, making a visit to the famous Crewe circle and sending back a full report. Houdini was grateful. “The detailed data you have ‘red-inked’ was especially interesting. Do you think you could dope out some way to duplicate this stuff, if you had the paraphernalia?”

Houdini kept up his correspondence with Doyle, and Sir Arthur, convinced of his friend’s supernatural power, was only too pleased to stay in touch. It would be a boon to the movement if Doyle could get Houdini to come out of the psychic closet and embrace Spiritualism. He would get his chance to facilitate that when they met again face-to-face in April of 1922 when Doyle came to proselytize in the land of the free.

It was only natural that with Sir Arthur in his home, Houdini would try a little experiment. The two men, along with Houdini’s lawyer and confidant, Bernard Ernst, were in Houdini’s library—a misnomer since Houdini’s entire house was filled with books and memorabilia—when the master magician produced what looked like a typical slate, eighteen inches long and fifteen inches high. Holes had been bored through the top two corners of the slate and long wires had been looped through the holes. A hook had been attached to the ends of the wires. Next to the slate, Houdini had brought out four small cork balls, an inkwell filled with white ink, and a tablespoon.

The slate was presented to Sir Arthur for his inspection. Bemused, he saw that it was a normal slate.

“Would you be so kind as to suspend the slate anywhere in the room by means of the hooks that are attached to the wires?” Houdini asked. “I want the slate to be able to swing freely in space. This is being done to eliminate whatsoever the possibility of any electrical connection to the slate itself.”

Sir Arthur and Ernst walked around the room and chose a spot. They hooked one of the wires over the edge of a picture frame, the other onto a large book on one of the bookshelves. Now the slate was free to swing in space. Satisfied, Houdini cleaned the slate.

Holding out the saucer that contained the four cork balls, Houdini asked Doyle to examine them.

“You will see that these are ordinary cork balls. In fact, you may select any one you like, then cut it in two with your pocketknife, verifying the fact that these are unprepared solid cork balls,” Houdini said.

Doyle chose a ball and cut it in half with surgical precision. Then Houdini had Doyle select another ball and, using the spoon, dip it into the inkwell and stir it, until the white ink had thoroughly permeated the cork. The ball was then left in the inkwell, allowing it to soak up as much ink as possible. Houdini then made Doyle a present of the other two balls.

“Have you a piece of paper in your pocket upon which you can write anything?” Houdini asked Doyle.

Not only did Doyle have paper but he had a pencil too. He was a writer, after all.

“Sir Arthur, I want you to go out of the house, walk anywhere you like, as far as you like in any direction; then write a question or sentence on that piece of paper; put it back in your pocket and return to the house,” Houdini said.

Doyle complied. He left the town house and walked for three blocks before he stopped, took out the paper, placed it in his palm, and scribbled the words “
Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin
,” a biblical quote. Then he folded up the paper, put it back in his pocket, and returned to the library.

“Now I want you to stir the cork ball once more, thoroughly saturating it in the ink and by means of the spoon, hold it up against the slate,” Houdini commanded.

When Sir Arthur complied, a strange thing happened. The cork ball stuck to the slate, as if it had a mind of its own. Then it suddenly began to roll across the clean slate, leaving a white trail of ink as it moved. The ink slowly formed the letter “M,” then an “e,” and an “n,” and before a thoroughly mystified Doyle, his phrase was mysteriously written out on the slate board. When the last word was completed, the ball suddenly dropped to the floor.

Conan Doyle was stunned. Houdini asked him to take the paper out of his pocket and verify that this was the phrase he had written. Of course, it was.

“Sir Arthur, I have devoted a lot of time and thought to this illusion; I have been working on it, on and off, all winter. I won’t tell you how it was done, but I can assure you it was pure trickery,” Houdini lectured. “I did it by perfectly normal means. I devised it to show you what can be done along those lines. Now, I beg of you, Sir Arthur, do not jump to the conclusion that certain things you see are necessarily ‘supernatural,’ or the work of ‘spirits,’ just because you cannot explain them. This is as marvelous a demonstration as you have ever witnessed, given you under test conditions, and I can assure you that it was accomplished by trickery and by nothing else. Do, therefore, be careful in the future, in endorsing phenomena just because you cannot explain them. I have given you this test to impress upon you the necessity of caution, and I sincerely hope that you will profit by it.”

Sir Arthur just smiled.
So Houdini’s still being cagy about his power,
he thought
. Is not this yet another demonstration of his psychic ability?

Houdini’s experiment was a gentle caution to Sir Arthur on his 1922 visit to the United States that there were greater things in this world than his devotion to spiritualistic doctrine.

Doyle had run into trouble before he had even disembarked from his steamship in New York. Attacked by a headline-hungry press, he was pressed to give his views on heaven. When he theorized that in the spirit world whiskey and cigars were available to those inhabiting their etheric bodies, the cynical reporters front-paged these statements, even making up new heavenly delights. “Doyle says they play golf in heaven” one headline screamed.

After lecturing in New York, Doyle took his road show to Boston, Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia. Back in New York in early May, he and Lady Doyle visited Houdini at his home. Conan Doyle was anxious to see Houdini’s Spiritualism library and seemed disappointed that so many of the books were antagonistic toward the subject. Claiming that the pro-Spiritualism books were scattered about the house, Houdini promised to devote an entire floor to the subject. He also tried to demonstrate to Doyle that certain séance room manifestations could easily be faked by showing him how “spirit hands” could be molded using a rubber glove and hot paraffin. Doyle was much more impressed by Houdini’s feat in the taxi ride back downtown. The master magician performed the simple little effect of seeming to slide the end of his thumb off and then reattaching it. Apparently, Houdini was convincing. Writing about the visit, Doyle told him, “I think what interested me most was the little ‘trick’ which you showed us in the cab. You certainly have very wonderful powers, whether inborn or acquired.”

Two weeks later, Houdini invited Doyle to attend the annual Society of American Magicians’ banquet. Since becoming president of the SAM, Houdini had made it a practice to invite distinguished guests from the upper echelons of business, politics, and journalism in an attempt to elevate the status of his profession, and at the same time, bask in the reflected glory of his prominent guests. By 1923, even President Harding was sending in regrets for not being able to attend.

For Doyle’s “special benefit” Houdini had arranged after-dinner entertainment where prominent magicians would reproduce séance room effects. The magician undoubtedly saw this as part of Doyle’s ongoing education, but the mystery writer recoiled at what he perceived as an affront to his religion. “I fear that the bogus spiritual phenomena must prevent me from attending the banquet, which you have so graciously proffered. I look upon this subject as sacred, and I think that God’s gift to man has been intercepted and delayed by the constant pretence that all phenomena are really tricks, which I know they are not,” Doyle wrote Houdini. Houdini immediately backtracked and promised Doyle that “There will be nothing performed or said which will offend anyone.”

It was a gala evening. After the first course had been served, every guest received a silk, gold-trimmed Houdini mascot doll. It had taken Bess three solid months to dress each doll individually. After dinner was completed, Doyle addressed the assemblage. He began by confessing that he had a friendly feeling for conjurers because they helped to destroy the great enemy of real Spiritualists, the crooked mediums. “On the other hand when a conjurer does occasionally attack spiritualism as a whole, he deals in a subject which he does not understand,” Doyle maintained. Suddenly, he announced that he would show a motion picture that featured extinct animals. He described the pictures as “psychic” and “preternatural” but not “occult” or “supernatural.” He also claimed that the pictures would speak for themselves and that he would answer no questions regarding them, either for the guests or the press. With a straight face, Doyle had the lights dimmed and the screen filled with startlingly detailed images of very realistic-looking dinosaurs “clawing and biting, and fondling in the primaeval slime.”

The next day’s newspapers were filled with accounts of Doyle’s “hoax” at the magicians’ dinner. “Whether these pictures were intended by the famous author and champion of spiritism as a joke on the magicians or as a genuine picture like his photographs of fairies was not revealed,”
The New York Times
reported. “The audience was left strictly to its own conclusions, whether the sober-faced Englishman was making merry with them or was lifting the veil from mysteries penetrated only by those of his school who know the secret of filming elves and ectoplasm and other things unknown to most minds.”

Doyle admitted in a letter to Houdini the next day that his presentation was merely to provide “a little mystification to those who have so often and so successfully mystified others.” What he didn’t admit was that it was really a sneak preview of the film version of his novel
The Lost World
. If some modern-day anthropologists are correct, this would have been the second hoax that Sir Arthur perpetrated involving this book. Ten years earlier, a gravel pit near the village of Piltdown yielded an amazing discovery: the remains of an early human fossil that could be considered to be the missing link between apes and homo erectus. It took forty years from this discovery for academics to realize that the so-called Piltdown man, the pride of British science, was a clever fake, a composite of a human skull and the jaw of a female orangutan. There were other bones, teeth, and antlers from extinct mammals found at the site. In 1983, a researcher named John Winslow theorized that the perpetrator of the Piltdown Hoax was none other than Conan Doyle. Doyle had access to all the exotic bones on his many forays overseas, he lived in the vicinity of the find, he described the area in his novel
The Lost World
, and, tellingly, he had a motive—to embarrass the materialists in the scientific community in England then. One of their most prominent members, Edwin Ray Lankester, the director of the British Museum of Natural History, was an avid anti-Spiritualist who had exposed the self-styled Dr. Henry Slade, the leading medium of his day. Richard Milner, an anthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History, concurs that Conan Doyle had the strongest motive to mount the hoax and suggests that Doyle didn’t reveal his authorship because with the outbreak of World War I, Doyle desired to be an advisor to the government. A hoaxer would have much less credibility.

Flying high from his successful showing at the SAM meeting, Doyle set his evangelical sights on Houdini. On June 9, he invited Houdini and Bess to join him. “Why not come down—both of you? The children would teach you to swim! and the change would do you good,” Doyle enthused.

Houdini gladly accepted the invitation, suggesting they come down for the weekend of June 17. Doyle seemed pleased. “There will be a few Spiritualistic friends from Brooklyn (barristers) but you won’t clash,” Doyle informed Houdini, after he had already accepted Doyle’s invitation.