The Secret Life of Houdini (82 page)

“The difference between you and them is evident, Harry,” Gertrude said softly. “They are afraid of dying.”

Harry nodded. “Do you know that Doyle actually thinks you smoke cigars and drink wine in the hereafter?” he marveled. “Can he not see the ineffable majesty of the Almighty? How can one not stand in awe of Him? Instead of being driven to his knees, he’s visualizing playing cricket!”

Houdini caught himself. He was starting to sound like his father, the rabbi.

Gertrude smiled. “Why do you think they maintain that they need mediums?” she asked.

“Because they cannot face themselves,” Harry shot back. “Is the power of the Almighty so trivial that all he can produce is a tipped table and the ringing of a bell? Would the God that created the most breathtaking mountain ranges and spectacular waterfalls stoop to manifest something as vile and base as ectoplasm?”

They sat and sipped their tea in silence. When Houdini snuck a peek at his pocket watch she knew it was time for him to go. He was about to start his tour and she knew she wouldn’t see him for a while, but when he paused at her door and she looked into his gray eyes speckled with yellow, she instantly knew that this was the last time they would ever see each other. He knew it too and, overcome, he rushed out.

When he was gone, she could only hope that if he could break through the veil and communicate with her, it wouldn’t be merely to send back a message. She hoped that he might grace her with a reply, one that hadn’t been made before he left her that last time.

The medium now sat in a wooden Windsor chair in a glass cabinet. Underneath her kimono, her undergarments were held to the skin by surgeon’s adhesive tape. Her wrists and ankles were fastened with No. 2 picture wire to eyebolts in the floor of the cabinet. The wire itself was made immobile by surgeon’s tape. Her hair had been cut short to preclude the possibility of hiding objects in it. To prevent any forward movement of her head, her neck was now immobilized by a locked leather collar that was fastened by a horizontal rope leading to an eyebolt in the back of the cabinet.

Despite all this control, it took Dr. J. B. Rhine and his wife, Dr. Louisa Rhine, one sitting on July 1, 1926 to see right through Margery. Rhine may have looked like a country bumpkin but he was an astute observer and he was infuriated that he had transferred from the University of West Virginia to move to the Boston area so he could study what he thought was a most promising case of mediumship. Besides figuring out every one of seven of Margery’s manifestations, he was irate at the behavior of the other sitters. “It is evidently of very great advantage to a medium, especially if fraudulent, to be personally attractive; it aids in the ‘fly-catching business.’ Our report would be incomplete without mention of the fact that this ‘business’ reached the point of actual kissing and embracing at our sitting, in the case of one of the medium’s more ardent admirers. Could this man be expected to detect trickery in her?” We don’t know whether Rhine was referring to Malcolm Bird or Joseph DeWyckoff.

Besides exposures, Crandon found himself in other trouble. “He is being sued for $40,000 for operating on a woman for cancer, when she was simply pregnant, and destroying the foetus,” Dr. Prince wrote another psychic researcher. “A highly incredible story which persists is that a boy who was in his family some weeks mysteriously disappeared. He claims that the boy is now in his home in England, but still official letters of inquiry and demand are received from that country. This is no mere rumor, for I was shown some of the original letters. I asked why the authorities in England did not look for the boy where he was said to be. M[argery] said that it was, she supposed, because they didn’t want to. Doctor C[randon], she tells me, was threatened with arrest by the immigration authorities at one time. The matter has been going on for more than a year. It is very mysterious.”

Crandon responded by giving lectures, accusing Houdini of preventing Walter’s manifestations in the séance room. To counteract the negative Harvard report, he commissioned a 109-page book entitled
Margery, Harvard, Veritas
, financed by Joseph DeWyckoff, and sent a copy to nearly every major library and university around the world. Bird began “doing his damnest” to ruin Houdini, trying to get information about the magician’s family.

Pheneas had been upset lately at Doyle. His constant fishing for information and news about the coming catastrophe had prompted Pheneas to start calling him “
Whale
.” And his impulsive behavior had caused Pheneas to chastise him.
“Do not act on your own too much,”
Pheneas told him.
“We are three, the Bridge, you and I. When you get loose on your own we are like a cart where one trace is loose and one is fastened.”

In the summer of 1926, William Elliott Hammond, a Spiritualist missionary lecturer, published a pamphlet entitled “Houdini Unmasked.” After attempting to counter Houdini’s charges that a belief in Spiritualism often led to insanity, depravity, or violence, Hammond quoted one of Houdini’s speeches: “Tell the people all I am trying to do is to save them from being tricked and to
Persuade them to leave spiritualism alone and take up with some genuine religion
.” Irate, Hammond struck back. “We should like to inform our professional enemies, including Houdini, that the strength of Spiritualism and its numbers are unknown—it should be so. Now that we are being attacked openly we shall focus our numbers, if for no other reason than that of defense. Our enemies seem to say, ‘Be ready, gods, with all your thunderbolts; dash (them) to pieces….’ The Crusaders and Houdini will live to learn that we Spiritualists are in this contest, struggle, war or fight…and we intend to stay in it until the end. We will go down if we must, but we shall do so with our colors flying!!…We say to our professional enemies, ‘let slip the dogs of war’ and give battle. You shall find the leaders of Spiritualism inspired by the words of Roosevelt—Aggressive fighting for the Right is the noblest sport the world affords….
Victory is ours for the fighting!
”

The threats had been ratcheted up another notch.

Margery posing proudly with the cup Doyle sent her.
From the collection of Dr. Bruce Averbook

On September 1, Houdini wrote Bess another of his little notes, while his manager was counting up the “monies.” He signed it: “Love and kisses and lots of them as always your husband until and after the curtain rings down on our lives, e’er to the crack of Doom.” He signed it “Harry Houdini (Ehrich).”

One Saturday afternoon in September the phone rang at Fulton Oursler’s house.

“Hello, Oursler. Listen, I’m leaving on tour in a little while. Probably I’m talking to you for the last time.”

It was another manic call from Houdini. For the last four months, the magician had been exhibiting suspiciously uncharacteristic behavior, including aggressive confrontations and severe mood swings. Oursler, who was the top editor at
Liberty
magazine, and who under the nom de plume of Samri Frickell had been active in exposing fraudulent mediums, had been inundated by calls like this one during that time. They would come at all hours of the day or night, but as a night owl, Oursler dreaded the seven
A.M.
calls the most. During these conversations, Houdini had seemed unusually quarrelsome. “In his voice there was a feminine, almost hysterical note of rebellion as if his hands were beating against an immutable destiny,” Oursler wrote later.

“What is it?” the editor asked.

“You know my detective system?”

Oursler was well aware of Houdini’s secret service. He knew that Houdini had undercover operatives deep in almost every major Spiritualist circle and church.

“They are going to kill me,” Houdini asserted.

“Who?” Oursler wondered.

“Fraudulent spirit mediums. Don’t laugh. Every night they are holding séances and praying for my death.”

Oursler remembered that Walter, Margery’s spirit control, had put a curse on Houdini’s life. When he raised the issue, Houdini admitted that these curses and predictions weighed on his mind.

“But that’s not all I wanted to tell you,” the magician continued. “They are beginning to take notice of you too. The fake mediums are circulating your picture and your biography all over the United States.”

“How do you know that?” Oursler asked.

“I have a copy of the data they are sending out about you. When I return from my tour, I’ll show it to you. Meanwhile, keep to yourself what you know,” Houdini said, and hung up.

The Houdini Show began its fall tour on September 7 at the Majestic Theatre in Boston. By now another set of professors who were working under the auspices of the American Society for Psychical Research was testing Margery. Near the end of Houdini’s first week, two members of the new committee visited him backstage. Houdini told them that he would be delighted to duplicate Margery’s new manifestations for the new committee, using the same apparatus, but he was shocked that Crandon would permit him to visit Lime Street again. Around that time, Houdini received a call from Amadeo Vacca, one of his undercover agents, who warned him that Margery had a new effect in her repertoire that was designed to thwart Houdini’s replication of her phenomenon. After a series of curt communications (some by registered mail) between Houdini and Crandon, each side blamed the other for backing out of the confrontation. It was clear from the correspondence that Crandon had believed Houdini would not be able to duplicate Margery’s feat while tied in the glass cabinet, and this was his final attempt to destroy Houdini’s reputation. Crandon had falsely claimed in his last letter that after Houdini had an in-depth two-hour conversation with the researchers and learned “the detailed rigidity of the Margery control, [he] discreetly and wisely declined to come.”

Houdini was greeted in Boston by even more lawsuits from Spiritualists. Now he had more than one million dollars in actions hanging over his head. He was taking these suits so seriously that before he left on tour, he sold his complete show, outfits, illusions, paraphernalia, and wardrobes to Bess for the sum of $1. So when he began the last part of the show, his spiritualistic exposés, he pointed out a court stenographer who was sitting in the orchestra pit, taking down his entire speech in shorthand. Houdini then introduced a local judge who told the audience that he had vetted the legal statement read by Houdini. When two spotters for the management alerted Houdini that there were two people in the audience taking down every word for the opposition, Houdini magnanimously offered them transcripts of his official notes and proceeded with the exposé.

Houdini slowly climbed into the glass-fronted brass coffin. It fastened shut, and the coffin was gently lowered into a huge glass-fronted vault. Then the sand came, a full ton of it, slowly obscuring the coffin and its occupant. One small misstep and Houdini would be suffocated onstage under a mini-mountain’s worth of sand.

Within two minutes, Houdini was free. The escape, called the Mystery of the Sphinx, was the magician’s first new escape in years, but he had been working on it for ten years, going back to those experiments in the moist Santa Ana soil where he had to literally claw his way to the surface to survive, where a lesser man would have succumbed. Even at age fifty-two he was coming up with new ever-more death-defying escapes. He debuted the effect in Worcester, Massachusetts, and it went over well. Because of the intense preparation necessary, Houdini decided to hold it for venues where he would be playing at least two-week stands.

In Providence, the next stop of the tour, Houdini and Bess went to dinner with H. P. Lovecraft and Clifford Eddy Jr. Both men were working on a book for Houdini called
The Cancer of Superstition
but Eddy was also an undercover operative for Houdini, filing many field reports on his visits to fraudulent mediums. Houdini had been expecting to hear from a man named C. R. Sharp, who apparently had some valuable “spiritualistic papers,” relating to an exposé of a medium, that he was to deliver to the magician. Sharp never showed, however. Shortly after meeting with Eddy and Lovecraft, Bess was stricken with a non-specific form of poisoning, probably from food. Houdini immediately summoned Sophie Rosenblatt, a nurse who had worked for the family previously; but by Friday, October 7, Bess’s condition had deteriorated so badly that Houdini stayed up all night comforting her. She improved a little the next day, which was the last day of the run, so Houdini arranged for her and Sophie to leave straight for Albany, the next tour stop, while he took a late night train to New York, where he had meetings scheduled for Sunday.

Houdini conferred with “some of his associates” even while on the midnight train to New York. His Sunday meeting with his lawyer was to review the millions of dollars’ worth of lawsuits from the Spiritualists. At six
P.M.
sharp, Houdini arrived at Ernst’s, but the family was still at their weekend retreat. Sleepless for more than sixty hours, Houdini dozed off on the living room sofa for twenty minutes, until the Ernsts returned home. When the meeting concluded, he checked in with Rosenblatt in Albany and decided to postpone his train back.