The Secret Life of Houdini (78 page)

On top of the constant strain to produce for a nightly coterie of important people, Doyle was sending messages to Boston that when the calamity came Crandon and Margery “will be the centre of American hopes.” Doyle had often warned Crandon not to overtax the medium but Crandon flogged Margery relentlessly. After he brought Dingwall in for séances to counteract the negative
Scientific American
report, he immediately pushed her into sitting for a new group of Harvard students and professors after Dingwall failed to give her mediumship unmitigated praise.

By the time that Houdini played Boston in May, his spy network was already uncovering some damaging information on the Crandons. There had been allegations that Margery had slept with Carrington and had made advances on almost all of the male researchers, even the gray eminence Dr. Prince. According to Grant Code, one of the new Harvard researchers, who was also alleged to have slept with the medium, Houdini had actual photographic evidence of Margery’s sexual dalliances. That was nothing, however, compared with the information his private secret service obtained about Dr. Crandon.

August 4, 1925

Dear Sir Arthur:

Here is a little problem for Sherlock Holmes: about December first I had Mr. DeWyckoffe bring over a boy from a London home for possible adoption. December 21 I sent him back as unfit. January first came Dingwall. January 19th McDougall told Dingwall not to believe the teleplasm that it was probably something “surgically manipulated”. Four of the Harvard observers expressed an opinion in writing that the hand seen was something made or produced by me. In April 1925, our Secret Service Department at Washington received a letter saying that I had first and last sixteen boys in my house for ostensible adoption, and that they had all disappeared and advised the Department to look us up. Last week I had a telephone from the Boston manager of the White Star Line saying that an M.P. had sent a long questionnaire to the White Star Line at London concerning the going and alleged return of the English boy. It is quite apparent that there is an enemy here either Houdini or McDougall. It seems possible that there is an enemy in England (either McDougall or Dingwall). I will try to get the name of the M.P. In the meantime, ask Sherlock Holmes to think it over.

On August 10, 1921, according to a Boston newspaper clipping, Dr. Crandon’s
sons
, ages ten and eight, were rescued from a raft at Winthrop. John Crandon, Margery’s son, was the younger boy on that raft. The older boy was an English adoptee who was so unhappy at the Crandon household that he was trying to make his escape, bringing John with him. Two years later, when Margery began her mediumship, there was no trace of that boy in the household.

Beginning in early 1924, the good doctor reached out to his friends in the English Spiritualist world to be on the lookout for suitable boys to adopt. In June, Crandon told Doyle that he dispatched his sister Laura to England to “bring back to me a small boy whom we discovered there in December, whom we are going to adopt” by the name of Horace Newton. Crandon wasn’t through, however. “We are in a state of mind to adopt still another at the same moment if he could be found: a boy six to nine years old, free from tuberculosis, syphilis, alcohol or insanity in the immediate parents. It occurs to me that it is possible that you or Lady Doyle may know of just such a boy whom we could get for adoption.” Similar letters were sent to other friends.

Meanwhile, there were snags with the Horace Newton adoption. Horace was then residing at the National Children’s Home and Orphanage, because his parents were dead. His sister was balking at allowing the adoption because of Dr. Crandon’s demand that Horace be cut off from all communication with his family back home once the adoption went through. When Crandon backed off that demand, Iris, Horace’s sister, gave her consent. Crandon dispatched Joe DeWyckoff, one of “the faithful circle,” to pick up the boy and bring him back. “I want the boy brought in legally, of course, but for details in this matter I shall have to put the decision up to you, just as if you were doing it for yourself.” Crandon’s next letter to DeWyckoff amplified his agenda. “It occurs to me that if you get up against it legally in this matter your relations with the Financial Department of the Republican National Committee ought to be able to help…. We shall call the boy, if he comes, Edward Winslow Crandon. Perhaps you can get him in the way of responding to that. Tell him tactfully that it will be much pleasanter for him living in our house to have the same name as we have.”

DeWyckoff tried to use his connections in Washington, making certain to keep the Crandons’ name out of the talks. He didn’t have much luck, so his new strategy was to bring Horace in as a visitor and at the end of the expiration of his visa, take him to Montreal and reenter using the quota law. Apparently, Horace came here on a visiting visa. He didn’t last long at 10 Lime Street. At the end of December, Margery brought him aboard the S.S
. Doric
and shipped him back to England. According to Crandon’s friend, the doctor of the ship, Horace/Edward Winslow had “quite a successful trip” being “very popular with everybody.”

Crandon’s letter to Doyle seven months later was the first time that the doctor acknowledged that he was being investigated in connection with a potential multiple missing persons case. He was absolutely right that Houdini had a hand in the matter. What Crandon didn’t know was that Houdini had enlisted his newspaper friends at
The Boston Herald
to do some investigations of their own. On June 12, A. J. Gordon, Griscom’s colleague, wrote Houdini. “The U.S. inspectors have been up to see me regarding the boys. Have you heard anything more from England on the matter. As soon as you do for[ward] the information to me, so that I may transmit it to thos[e] working on the story with me.” Twelve days later Griscom wrote Houdini, telling him: “Gordon wants me to ask you…what you are doing to find out about that boy in New Jersey. This…particularly interests us.” At one time, the body of a “homeless” boy had been found on the fringes of the vast estate that Margery inner circle member Joseph DeWyckoff maintained in Ramsey, New Jersey.

Doyle responded to Crandon’s letter to Sherlock Holmes by asking him to find out the name of the British M.P. so Doyle could make inquiries. “I seem to see the hand of the Roman Catholic Church and not of a private individual, but perhaps Watson speaks not Holmes,” he wrote. Four months earlier, he had written Crandon suggesting that the same Vatican hand had enlisted Houdini through his Catholic wife.

Strangely, many of the letters to Doyle regarding the investigation into the boys have been expunged from Crandon’s files, an anomaly for a man who seemed to keep every last newspaper clipping about Margery’s mediumship. We do have Doyle’s side of the correspondence, and it reveals that Doyle was continuously asking Crandon for more information. On August 22, Doyle found out the name of the M.P. and was beseeching Crandon: “I am not clear how many boys have gone across. You will let me have the facts….” On September 1, he wrote Crandon again with some background information on the British politician spearheading the probe. “I want all the information you can give me about the boys and I will then be in a position to tackle him [the M.P.] if the occasion should arise.”

Doyle did take up Crandon’s defense to the M.P. In his first letter to the politician he wrote, “I am sure that you would not wish to act as the unconscious agent of any personal enemy, so I should be extremely obliged if you would permit me to tell [Crandon] how the matter arose.” After more correspondence, the M.P. was put in direct contact with Crandon. Crandon wrote him explaining that he had adopted Horace Newton, “an attractive boy, an orphan in an institution” but the boy “did not seem to fit in our household” and was sent back. “In return for this information…I beg you to tell me who was interested to find out these facts. Your communication I will give you my word to keep private and personal. For my good faith, I beg to refer you to Mr. George E. O’Dell, through whom I was introduced not long ago to Mr. Ramsey MacDonald.” MacDonald was the former prime minister of England and then current head of the Labour Party to which this M.P. belonged.

While waiting for the answer, Crandon wrote Sherlock Holmes again. He deduced that a British M.P. would “only pay attention to a request from a Britisher.” So that narrowed down his suspects to McDougall, Dingwall, and possibly Maskelyne, the British magician who was a chum of Houdini. At that point, Crandon concluded it was McDougall. Crandon was no Sherlock Holmes. The British M.P. wrote him back informing him that it would be “a breach of confidence were I to disclose the names of those who called my attention to the original circumstances.” That M.P. was none other than Mr. Harry Day, one of Houdini’s closest friends for more than twenty years.

If he didn’t have enough trouble, now Crandon saw the entire credibility of Margery’s mediumship in deadly peril when the Harvard investigators issued their report at the end of October. What the doctor didn’t know was that Houdini spy and
Herald
reporter Griscom was instrumental in forcing the Harvard people into their condemnation with his behind-the-scenes tactics. When he learned that one researcher’s account of the sittings was about to be published in
Atlantic
magazine, he convinced Crandon to show him the official reports of the Harvard committee’s séances, giving Crandon a chance for damage control before the magazine article hit the stands. Griscom told Houdini that his purpose was twofold: one, to get a scoop for his newspaper, and, two, to create such “a stink” that the scientists on the committee would have to “talk in self-defense.” Griscom spent two days at Lime Street, poring over the records, and having many interesting talks with the medium.

Griscom’s plan worked to a tee. His newspaper account stated that the Harvard preliminary report, which the reporter played up as a final report and which was signed by the junior researchers, stated that the investigators, while discounting supernormal phenomena, all agreed that the Crandons acted in good faith. When the bigwig Harvard professors on the committee heard that, they immediately issued a statement accusing the Crandons of fraud, a statement that was signed by three of the four men who issued the original nonfraud summary.

While perusing Crandon’s official séance reports, Griscom stumbled upon an interesting entry. In the séance of June 30, one of the Harvard investigators saw Margery draw three objects from the region of her vulva. One was not described. One was shaped like a flat hand or a glove. The third resembled a baby’s hand.

Griscom’s letter to Houdini on the eve of Halloween was jubilant. “This is really all a great triumph for you. ‘Margery’ said to me the other day, ‘Just think how Houdini will shout. He will say that he discovered in one sitting what it took the Harvard crowd eight sittings to find out.’” (Margery was wrong. Houdini wrote his friends that it took the Harvard investigators six months to accomplish what he did in one night.)

“I answered that of course you would, and also you would be able to say you discovered the methods she used, too. As a matter of fact, Houdini, I am convinced, and so is Gordon and absolutely all of the Harvard crowd, that Dr. Crandon himself has a double personality in all this business. In other words, he is a sincere believer and at the same time overlooks or participates in the trickery. As the Harvard people say, he has amnesia, is cuckoo, nuts or what have you.

“I also believe that ‘Margery’ might take a chance and confess if Crandon did not firmly believe. She knows it would end all their relations and she doesn’t dare do it. She and I had a private conference the other afternoon and I advised her to admit it was all a hoax. She smiled broadly and asked how she could when it wasn’t true. Then she said, with a grin, ‘Aren’t people damn fools. Such damn fools. The investigators most of all. I should like to write a book about investigators. Do you know, some of them say they hear voices and all that sort of stuff.’

“I agreed and she went on, ‘I respect Houdini more than any of the bunch. He has both feet on the ground all the time.’ That was somewhat significant. It was significant in another way, too, because ‘Walter’ had said exactly that about me in a sitting a week earlier. Funny how ‘Walter’ and ‘Margery’ use the same phrases and think so exactly alike.

“Although she had never actually confessed, when we are alone it is tacitly admitted between us that the mediumship is all trickery. I think she respects me on exactly the same grounds that she does you, because we weren’t taken in by her. But not Crandon. He is a fanatic on the subject, and can’t be argued with. He is now trying to get the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to start a new investigation. He wouldn’t do that if he wasn’t crazy.”

Dorothy Young was a seventeen-year-old tourist in New York City when she answered an ad in
Variety
for a “girl dancer for Broadway show and tour of the United States.” She jettisoned her parents and went to the Longacre Theatre, where she was the last to audition. She did a Charleston and she was hired on the spot. At the time, Dorothy had no idea who Houdini was, but he told her that he had been famous for years and this was his dream—the chance to star in his own Broadway show. She signed a contract, went with Bess to choose materials for her costume, and then ran into her parents, who absolutely forbade her to go. Houdini then set up a meeting with her minister father and her mother. He promised to look after Dorothy as if she were his own daughter, so she was allowed on the tour.

On the train to the first show, Houdini called her into his private car, sat her down, and talked to her all about his life. He even did some magic for her. After a while, it was time for dinner and the two of them joined the others in the dining car. “I remember the expression on Mrs. H’s face when he came back from talking to me. I didn’t like the expression,” Dorothy said. “So when we were having dinner, as young as I was, I made up my mind, ‘Mrs. H will be my friend, not Houdini.’”