The Secret Life of Houdini (85 page)

Houdini remained conscious and cognizant. On Saturday, he composed a letter to a friend. “Box offices here are S.R.O. which certainly makes me smug and quite happy. Except that I feel none too well at the moment, but suppose that I will get over this waviness in no time.”

His surgeon, Dr. Kennedy, remained at his bedside and the two had many interesting discussions about magic, Spiritualism, and related philosophical fields. At one point, Houdini turned to the doctor. “Doctor, you know I always wanted to be a surgeon, but I never could. I have always regretted it.”

Kennedy was taken aback. “Why, Mr. Houdini, that is one of the most amazing statements I have ever heard. Here you are, the greatest magician and the greatest entertainer of your age. You make countless thousands of people happy. You have an unlimited income and you are admired and respected by everybody, while I am just an ordinary dub of a surgeon trying to struggle through life.”

Houdini looked at Kennedy and smiled. “Perhaps those things are true, doctor, but the difference between me and you is that you actually
do
things for people. I, in almost every respect, am a fake.”

Early Sunday afternoon, a group of ashen-faced doctors hovered over the bed in room 401. Houdini was surrounded by his brothers Hardeen and Nat. Leopold had known enough not to come. Ehrie looked up at his kid brother Dash. “I guess I’m all through fighting,” he said with resignation. Bess, who had been admitted to the hospital herself a few days earlier, was finally brought into the room, accompanied by Harry’s sister, Gladys. When she saw her husband’s condition, she screamed.

“Harry! Harry!” she sobbed.

There was a tube inserted in one side of Houdini’s mouth. A doctor was listening through a stethoscope, monitoring his heartbeat. Tears were streaming down the faces of the doctors and the nurse.

Houdini’s eyes, those amazing penetrating organs, seemed to stare vacantly off into space. He struggled to say something, but then his eyes fluttered shut.

“He’s gone,” the doctor said.

Bess burst out laughing and they carried her back to her room.

It was 1:26
P.M.
, Halloween, and the Spiritualists were finally able to declare their national holiday.

From the collection of Dr. Bruce Averbook

T
HE SPIRITUALIST CELEBRATION HAD ACTUALLY ALREADY
begun.

On the day before Houdini died, Joseph DeWyckoff, the wealthy member of Margery’s inner circle, sat down and put his pen to paper. He wrote an extraordinary letter to his friend Crandon:

Dear Roy:

Excepting an occasional inclination due perhaps to hereditary strains, the Masonic principle of an “eye for an eye” seldom finds response in my mental make-up when I, personally, suffer from unkind acts of men. But—when my dear and good friends are wantonly and systematically injured by a campaign of persistent calumny and base and despicable lies—I must confess that the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth become a dead letter to me and I crave to pull “a tooth for a tooth” if not the entire dentistry of the offender in one clip!

For some days—a cad who has grossly injured my dearest friends and made Truth shriek again and again has been groping for the “fourth dimension” in Detroit—

I may be sinning, I ask forgiveness of the supreme intelligence, but I calmly await the result of this groping and I need not tell you what other thoughts are possessing me—A verse by Heine keeps ringing in my cranium which may be apropos:

“Keinen Kadish wird man sagen [No Kaddish will be said,]

Keine Messe wird man singen” [No mass will be sung.]

Permit me to say that “Kadish” is the name of the Jewish prayer—recited for the Dead and you know that “Messe” stands for Catholic “Mass.” When the immortal Heine thus sang he had reference to a jew-renegade.

With much love to you and Mina.
Yours sincerely,
Cheerio!
Joe

According to the certificate of death no. 14840 filed on November 20, 1926 with the State of Michigan Department of Health, the actor and lecturer Harry Houdini died of diffuse streptococcic peritonitis that was occasioned by a “ruptured appendicitis.” The “traumatic appendicitis” was thought to have been caused by a blow struck by a student of McGill University in Montreal during a playful sparring session in Houdini’s dressing room. It’s curious that all of Houdini’s doctors swore out affidavits saying that the root cause of his death was “traumatic appendicitis,” a condition that has never existed. These doctors must have known this fact. Because of the sparring-trauma-rupturing-neglect-death scenario, there was no consideration of other theories like foul play and, consequently, there was no autopsy. The only dissent seemed to be raised by New York publisher Bernarr Macfadden, who sent an open letter to the superintendent of Grace Hospital demanding to know what Houdini was fed during his hospital stay and what exactly was in Dr. LeFevre’s “mysterious” new serum. No answers were forthcoming from the medical community.

The next questions were raised by the underwriters of Houdini’s various life insurance policies. Because of a double indemnity clause, Houdini’s estate was seeking to collect twice the face value of the policies due to the accident. After an investigation, H. J. J. McKeon, the Montreal manager of New York Life Assurance Co., claimed that the report of Houdini being struck after his lecture at McGill was without foundation and that according to an interview with Abby Wright, the manager of the Montreal theater where Houdini performed, the magician was a “sick man” upon his arrival, bringing with him a nurse who had accompanied him to the McGill lecture and was overheard to say, “I must get him out of here at once,” at its conclusion. The insurance company salvo was immediately answered by Bernard Ernst and Houdini’s other attorneys, who obtained affidavits from the entire touring troupe affirming Houdini’s health prior to the punches and from Smiley, Price, and Whitehead, who described the dressing room incident. The specter of foul play had still not surfaced.

On Halloween night, the circle formed at 10 Lime Street and Walter soon whistled, signaling his arrival. He said that Houdini would have a long period of “acclimatization” and that the magician would be very confused and resistant to the idea of his death.

“
I am not sure but that I shall have something to do with Houdini and his admission,
” Walter crowed.

That same day, Margery had issued a statement to the press about Houdini’s death. “We are sorry to hear of the passing of Houdini. He was a virile personality of great determination and undoubted physical courage. We have entertained him and our personal relations with him in this house always had been pleasant. At other times and places we have had our differences.”

That evening, Margery, hounded by newsmen, denied “emphatically” that “she had ever said a curse was upon Houdini or that he would die within a year.” Newsmen weren’t the only ones asking that question. Dr. Robin Tillyard, an Australian entomologist who had pledged his “admiration, devotion and love, eternally” to Dr. Crandon and Margery, wrote Crandon in December: “Do send me some details about Houdini’s sudden death! I have heard that Walter had said that he would ‘get’ Houdini. Is that true? If so, he might have influenced that young man, who, so I heard, punched Houdini in the abdomen. Also you will remember that Walter sent McD[ougall] a message through me (I never delivered it, of course) that he ‘would meet him again
soon, over here
.’ If he can deal with Houdini, he can probably manage McD. as well.”

Crandon was quick to answer Tillyard. “It is true that a McGill student is alleged to have punched Houdini in the abdomen at Houdini’s request but that he did it unexpectedly and probably caused a minute leak in his sigmoid flexure which caused peritonitis and death. Walter never said he would ‘get’ Houdini, but 71 times in our records he has said in the last 13 months ‘Give Houdini my love, tell him I will see him soon.’ I think that is what you heard him say, but it was addressed to Houdini and not to McDougall. Walter hates nobody and he was in no way a causal relation. He may see causes converging before we do. That is all.”

How Crandon can claim with such authority that Whitehead punched Houdini at the magician’s request is mystifying, especially since Whitehead would be the only one who took that position in the depositions for the insurance companies, but those wouldn’t take place until three months after Crandon wrote his letter to Tillyard.

Of course, Sir Arthur was asked to comment on Houdini’s death. “His death is a great shock and a deep mystery to me,” the noted author said. “He was a teetotaler, did not smoke, and was one of the cleanest living men I have ever known. I greatly admired him, and cannot understand how the end came for one so youthful. We were great friends.”

Except for the description of Houdini’s lifestyle, the entire comment is an unmitigated lie. Pheneas had predicted Houdini’s death for a year, dooming the magician for standing in the way of the great movement of which Doyle was the chief earthly representative. Since Houdini’s rebuff of Lady Doyle’s mediumship, the two had been great enemies, not friends.

If one were to suspect Houdini a victim of foul play, then the section of organized crime that was composed of fraudulent spirit mediums must be considered likely suspects. Consoling lonely and bereft people was big business and Houdini’s campaign and its attendant intense publicity made inroads in raising public consciousness about this ruthless con. That the Spiritualist opposition would use violence against exposers is well documented. Both Rinn and Houdini took the threats against their lives seriously enough for them to arm themselves.

The Spiritualist underworld’s modus operandi in cases like this was often poisoning. Both Houdini and Bess suffered from some form of nonspecific poisoning previous to Houdini’s death. Bess’s illness lingered and she was admitted to the hospital while Houdini was dying. According to Bess, the doctors considered her illness “so much more dangerous than his, at that time, and the doctors feared for my life.” Even though Houdini took the Spiritualists’ death threats seriously, there was much less emphasis put on security back in the 1920s. In Houdini’s last programs, he asked his audiences to relate stories of getting robbed by fraudulent mediums and he listed his home address for the responses. If someone were hell-bent on poisoning Houdini, it wouldn’t have been very difficult.

That the fraudulent mediums didn’t take kindly to a disruption of their cash flow was also evidenced years after Houdini died. In 1976, M. Lamar Keene wrote a book called
The Psychic Mafia
. The book’s title reflected perfectly its thesis, and it was written by a former fraudulent medium. Keene revealed that he had sat in on meetings where various means of “expediting the demise of certain elderly folk who were sure to leave a lot of money to the spiritualist cause were discussed.” During that discussion one female medium claimed to be an expert on the administration of untraceable poisons. Keene’s break with the mediums and his subsequent exposure prompted two separate attempts on his life. In the first, before the book was published, an assassin shot at him while he was strolling on the lawn of his Tampa home. He threw himself to the ground, and the bullet narrowly missed him, lodging in the wall. In 1979, he wasn’t as lucky. Strolling in Miami, he was gunned down by a hit man in a passing car and his femoral artery was severed. He was saved by the quick ministrations of the EMS. Detectives on the Miami police force told psychic researcher William Rauscher that the incident was an “attempted homicide” and that the gunman was probably a hired assassin deployed by the psychic mafia, which had warned Keene that if his book exposed names he would be killed.

After Houdini’s death, Max Malini, the sleight-of-hand magician who played on the same bill in New York with Houdini thirty-eight years earlier, had an interesting comment about his old friend. “He made a mistake in bucking up against educated men like Sir Oliver Lodge and Conan Doyle. Those men are not fakers. They believe in what they are doing. Harry thought they were like the bunco spiritualists he showed up so easily.”

If the phony mediums loathed Houdini for jeopardizing their incomes, Doyle and the true believers despised him for standing in the way of the New Revelation. Doyle had more of an impetus to dislike him; in his eyes, Houdini was possessed of spiritual powers himself, yet his public stance was anti-medium. Despite his public utterances, Doyle made no bones about his dislike for Houdini to his personal acquaintances. As early as November 1, 1924, Doyle, writing to Crandon about the SA investigation, predicted that both Prince and Houdini “will get his deserts very exactly meted out…I think there is a general pay-day coming soon that we can await it with equanimity.”