The Secret Life of Houdini

by William Kalush

  “Then he looked up at me and I was amazed, for I saw in his eyes that look, impossible to imitate, which comes to the medium who is under influence,” Doyle wrote. “The eyes look at you, and yet you feel that they are not focused upon you.”

  Houdini explained to Doyle that he had been thinking of his good friend Frederick Eugene Powell, a magician who was about to go out on the road with one of Houdini’s touring companies to promote his film The Man From Beyond.

  Now Doyle was more convinced of Houdini’s mediumship than ever. And more intent on persuading him to go public as a Spiritualist.

  The day after the Atlantic City séance, Doyle wrote Houdini and urged him to go on the lecture circuit and talk about his experiences with Spiritualism. “I can see you sometime, as your true experiences accumulate, giving a wonderful lecture, Phenomenal Spiritualism—True and False in which, after giving an account of your adventures with fakes, you will also give an account of those which bear inspection. It would be a very great draw. Fake photos and true ones. I could fit you up with a few of the latter,” Doyle wrote.

  Then he dropped a bombshell. “I may say that your mother again came back with words of passionate love through Mrs. M[etcalfe] of Brooklyn last night. She said, ‘My son has now told his wife that he is mentally convinced of the truth of this revelation, but he does not see his way and it is dark in front of him. He is now seated in his room thinking it over.’”

  Doyle was relentless. The next day he sent Houdini another letter refusing to accept Houdini’s Powell explanation, since at the Metcalfe sitting on Sunday night, Doyle’s Powell had come back and told him that he was sorry that he had to speak so abruptly at Houdini’s sitting. “It confirms me in the belief that it was Powell. However, you will no doubt test your powers further.”

  Back in New York the following Tuesday, Houdini ran into Doyle and, recounting the séance, told him, “I have been walking on air ever since.” They also had a long talk about Houdini’s “powers.” Houdini described an inner voice that gave him advice during the execution of some of his dangerous bridge jumps. “He stands above some awful place from which he will spring,” Doyle later wrote. “He has to wait patiently—sometimes for many minutes—until something within him tells him that the time is ripe for his effort. This, he says, is universal among all men who do such stunts. ‘If you don’t wait for that moment you have about as much chance as a celluloid dog in Hell.’ He was tempted once to trust himself instead of his unseen guides, and then he nearly broke his neck. ‘You stand there,’ he said, ‘swallowing the yellow stuff that every man has in him. Then at last you hear the voice, and you jump.’ It may be the subconscious self which assures itself that all is well. It may be spiritual.”

  During the Doyles’ stay in New York, their friendship blossomed. The Doyles went to a screening of The Man From Beyond, and Conan Doyle delighted in the last scene of the movie. The hero and the heroine are united, reading a passage from Doyle’s The Vital Message. “The very best sensational picture I have ever seen,” Doyle accommodated Houdini by giving the papers a capsule review. “It holds one breathless…one of the really great contributions to the screen.”

  He did another favor for Houdini before he left for home, giving him a letter of introduction to Miss Besinnet, the celebrated medium who Doyle had made a detour during his tour to sit with. “I have gone far in giving you that letter to Miss B., for you have the reputation, among Spiritualists, of being a bitterly prejudiced enemy, who would make trouble if it were possible,” Doyle wrote Houdini. “I know that this is not so, and I give you this pass as a sign that I know it. She is safe in your hands.”

  On the eve of the Doyles’ departure back to England, Houdini invited them to celebrate his twenty-eighth wedding anniversary at the theater. Houdini, called up from the audience, did his Needles effect and literally stopped the show. The next day, the magician accompanied the Doyle family to the ship to see them off.

  Back home, the two men kept up their correspondence, trading medium stories. By August, Houdini began to lecture on Spiritualism, but not before he invited W. S. Davis to preview and critique his talk. Davis seemed disappointed and wrote Houdini that he was handling the subject too cautiously. “I must do it,” Houdini wrote back, “otherwise they will not allow me at the seances.”

  A little more than four months after the Doyles had received the fateful message from Houdini’s mother, Houdini destroyed his relationship with Sir Arthur. He didn’t set out to do it, and he certainly didn’t comprehend that the ramifications of an article he wrote would forever change his life. In fact, he wasn’t even writing about his friend Doyle.

  In October, the New York General Assembly of Spiritualists, taking a tack from Houdini and Rinn, offered a reward of $5,000 to any person who could produce by “trickery, fraud, or deception” eight specific manifestations of spirit power. Houdini answered the challenge in his article entitled “Spirit Compacts Unfilled.” It was a throwaway sentence in that article that enraged Doyle. “My mind is open. I am perfectly willing to believe, but in the twenty-five years of my investigation and the hundreds of séances which I have attended, I have never seen or heard anything that could convince me that there is a possibility of communication with the loved ones who have gone beyond.”

  That one sentence made Lady Doyle mad. Doyle was asked to comment by the newspaper but he decided to write Houdini instead. “I felt rather sore about it. You have all the right in the world to hold your own opinion, but when you say that you have had no evidence of survival, you say what I cannot reconcile with what I saw with my own eyes. I know, by many examples, the purity of my wife’s mediumship, and I saw what you got and what the effect was upon you at the time,” Doyle wrote. “I have done my best to give you truth.”

  Writing years later, Doyle was still furious recalling the affront to his wife’s mediumship but he played loose with the facts, claiming that Houdini had asked for the séance. “The method in which Houdini tried to explain away, minimize and contort our attempt at consolation, which was given entirely at his own urgent request and against my wife’s desire, has left a deplorable shadow in my mind which made some alteration in my feelings for him.” [emphasis added]

  Houdini immediately replied to Doyle’s letter. “You write that you are very sore. I trust that it is not with me, because you, having been truthful and manly all your life, naturally must admire the same traits in other human beings.” After explaining why he would have thought of his friend Powell, he got to the heart of the matter. “I know you treat this as a religion but personally I cannot do so, for up to the present time I have never seen or heard anything that could convert me.”

  Houdini was being coy. Before he had walked back with Doyle to the séance, Bess had employed their old second sight code and, using subtle language and gestures, had already tipped Houdini off that Lady Doyle had been pumping her for information on Houdini’s relationship with his mother the night before the séance. He still went into the séance with an open mind, but when he saw Lady Doyle draw the sign of the cross and then have his mother unleash a torrent of sappy words in perfect English, without even mentioning that that day happened to be her birthday, Houdini was crestfallen.

  Too polite to overtly abuse his friends, Houdini took his umbrage out on Doyle in a sly way. When asked to begin his mediumship by practicing his own automatic writing, Houdini made a big show of grabbing the pencil. Doyle had mistaken Houdini’s penetrating Master Mystifier’s glare for the otherworldly gaze of the mystic. In Houdini’s later written account he admitted that using Powell’s name was a “deliberate mystification” on his part. “Or let us say a kindlier word regarding my thoughts and call it ‘coincidence.’” It seems evident that Houdini knew of Doyle’s friend’s death and had used the name to turn the tables on Doyle and thoroughly mystify the man who was intent on converting him. Houdini couldn’t resist the little bit of perverse pleasure he enjoyed from letting Doyle believe what he had done was re
al, even though he fully knew it would further strengthen Doyle’s irrational convictions.

  Doyle had invited Houdini to another séance that day, one that was being conducted with his Brooklyn friends. Again, Houdini wasn’t impressed.

  “I noticed that, at a séance, Sir Arthur would ask a question and then change his mind and ask another one. Eventually, when he would get an answer to a question, he had evidently forgotten that he had asked that specific one, and, on receiving a reply to same, would naturally think that he had never spoken on the subject before,” Houdini wrote in his day book. “All during the séance he was willing to believe. It was not a case of being deceived, but merely a case of religious mania.”

  Houdini’s New York Sun article must have been embarrassing to Doyle for other reasons besides the perceived affront to his wife. Apparently Doyle had been spreading the word in England that Houdini had seen the spiritualistic light. A few weeks after Houdini’s response to Doyle, he received a letter from E. J. Dingwall, who was a researcher for the Society for Psychical Research in England. “Dear Houdini—Is there any truth in the story of Doyle that you got an evidential message from your mother through Lady Doyle? Also that you have become an automatic writer?”

  Dingwall’s letter had a chilling effect. Houdini had been walking a fine line with Doyle, not being fully candid in the hopes that he could continue to use Doyle’s credibility to gain access to the mediums for his research. Now this tactic was blowing up in his face. Houdini had been working his entire life toward a singular goal—respectability. Houdini knew that with his conversion, Doyle would have snagged the ultimate trophy for his cause. “Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has repeatedly told the Spiritualists that I eventually will see the light and will embrace Spiritualism,” he wrote later. Apparently, Doyle was claiming that eventuality had come to pass.

  On December 19, 1922, Houdini swore out a deposition and had it notarized. It began:

  THE TRUTH REGARDING SPIRITUAL SÉANCE GIVEN TO HOUDINI BY LADY DOYLE

  Fully realizing the danger of statements made by investigators of psychic phenomena, and knowing full well my reputation earned, after more than thirty years experience in the realm of mystery, I can truthfully say that I have never seen a mystery, and I have never visited a séance, which I could not fully explain; and I want to go on record regarding the séance given to me by Lady Doyle in the presence of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, at Atlantic City, June 17, 1922.

  Houdini went on to document that he never felt his mother’s presence in the slightest, she couldn’t speak or write English, and he wrote the name “Powell” of his own volition. He ended the statement with “I put this on record so that, in case of my death, no one will claim that the spirit of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s friend Ellis Powell guided my hand.”

  As far as we know, at that point, no Spiritualists had threatened the mystifier’s life. One of them had prophesied his death, however. Doyle had saved face after the Atlantic City séance fiasco by claiming that Houdini was too nervous at the séance to admit that it had been genuine, but the Doyles also believed there was another reason that Houdini denied the authenticity of Lady Doyle’s message from Mrs. Weiss. It seems that the medium had received an additional message from the spirits in Atlantic City, and this message indicated that Houdini would die very soon.

  They gathered around the table again, the same as the night before and the night before that. Lady Doyle had her pad and pencil at the ready. Conan Doyle soothed her and held her hand and the communication started flowing. But on this night there was a major breakthrough. Tonight, Sir Arthur was going to be in direct communication with his own spirit guide, a guide who would control him, literally, for the rest of his life. Conan Doyle’s mother made the introduction, but first she had to thank Sir Arthur for making plans to lay flowers on her grave.

  I am so happy, my beloved son. We all know and love you for the thought. But not while you are so busy, dear one. I can’t bear you to tire your dear self.

  “What about the undeveloped spirit?” Conan Doyle asked. During the last séance, an undeveloped spirit had come to them for advice.

  Your guide says you did him untold good. He has progressed far. He is almost here. His mother guards and helps him onwards and up. Your guide is such a high soul! He loves you beyond words. You are often with him at night. He helps and instructs you over here. The name is Pheneas. He is a very, very high soul, sent especially to work through you on the earth plane. He died thousands of years ago in the East, near Arabia. He was a leader among men. He wants me to say, dear one, that there is much work before you.

  “In this world?” Conan Doyle asked.

  Why, of course, my darling, it is here on this grey earth that you are needed. Your guide is here. He places his arm round you and kisses your brow and blesses you, and blesses you both. It gives us such joy over here to see the love light always round you in your own dear home. It is our earth centre. We are happy in that sweet atmosphere. Bless and keep you all, my dears. Your guide is here.

  “I am proud to have such a guide,” Conan Doyle said.

  And then, for the first time, his guide spoke directly to him.

  Pheneas speaking. We are brothers. Your wife is invaluable to us. We use her a great deal.

  “Do I work on right lines?” Conan Doyle fretted.

  You are right. Go on as you are doing. You are doing far more than you have any idea of. It is far-reaching, the effect of it.

  “What is this sign which we hear of?” Conan Doyle asked.

  It is this way. God has ordained that a great light shall shine into the souls of men through a great external force which is slowly penetrating through into the earth’s sphere. It is something which the most ignorant must see and believe. It will come very soon. The world will be staggered. It is the only thing which can arouse the lethargy of the human race. Such a shock! It is like Sodom and Gomorrah.

  “It is destructive, then?” Conan Doyle worried.

  Not entirely so.

  “Will it be here?” he asked.

  Yes, it will be here and everywhere. It must be. The world of men will not wake otherwise. And this truth has got to be as a great cloud of knowledge settling down all over the world. All the shams and ceremonies must be swept away for ever, and only this sweeping power can do that.

  This has been a happy evening for me. I have often wanted to come to you, for you see you are so much to me, and it hurt that I meant nothing to you. Now we are close. It will be easier for me to work through you in consequence.

  Then, for the first time, Lady Doyle spoke up.

  “Have I done wrong by being angry with the persecutors of the Cause?” she asked.

  Quite right, my dear soul, Pheneas assured her. We, too, are furious, so how can we blame you for being so? But they too will know the truth very soon. It will be the biggest thing that has ever happened in the earth’s history. But great blessings will follow. All the shadows will flee away.

  “Is it like Atlantis?” Doyle asked.

  Yes, very much. Only much bigger—more sweeping and different.

  “But how would any cataclysm convert folk to Spiritualism?” he astutely asked.

  By what everyone will see for themselves at that supreme time. Another time I will tell you more—much more. There will be no preparation.

  “Shall we go to America?” Doyle asked.

  It is God’s will. It is ordained.

  “The children too?” he said.

  Yes, emphatically. Yes. You are all needed, each in your own way doing work for the cause.

  Pheneas’s first message was of a total upheaval of the world order. The enemies of the cause would be meeting their end in a cataclysm similar to those that befell the heathens at Sodom and Gomorrah. With Lady Doyle enjoying more prestige thanks to Pheneas’s commendations, she began to assert herself on the Doyles’ second American adventure. Shortly after arriving in New York, she went to a Westinghouse studio on the top of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel and b
roadcast a wireless message extolling Spiritualism to 500,000 people. Doyle was impressed. “The stars were above, the lights of the huge city below, and as I listened to those great truths ringing out in her beautifully modulated voice it was more like an angel message than anything I could imagine.” A few weeks later, that angel voice turned strident. With Doyle lecturing in Pittsburgh, Lady Doyle, back in New York, publicly rebuked Mayor Hylan when he made some unflattering comments about “that man Doyle” and his Spiritualist beliefs. Then she wrote a long newspaper article that was headlined “Mansions in the Sky Like Our Earthly Home Says Lady Doyle.”

  On the second lecture tour, which covered the Western states that Doyle had neglected on his first go-round, pretenses were dropped and battle lines were drawn between him and Houdini. Instead of feting Doyle, the SAM, which Houdini completely controlled, offered to reproduce any of the most puzzling phenomena that Spiritualism had to offer. “Conan Doyle has seen fit to call magicians tricksters…. Sir Arthur has not shown himself a competent judge,” the SAM officer and brilliant magician Servais LeRoy told the press.

  Relations with Houdini were deteriorating rapidly. When Lord Carnarvon, an explorer who led an expedition to the tomb of King Tut in Egypt, died under mysterious circumstances, Doyle was quoted around the world theorizing that an evil spirit may have been responsible. “I think it is possible that some occult influence caused his death,” Doyle said. “There are many legends about the powers of the old Egyptians, and I know I wouldn’t care to go fooling about their tombs and mummies. There are many malevolent spirits.”

  Houdini jumped into the controversy. He agreed with authorities that the death was due to blood poisoning from an insect bite and asked Doyle why no other Egyptologists had befallen a similar fate. Despite the controversy, Doyle still harbored hopes of converting Houdini to the cause and referred him to mediums who might sway him. “I have found the mediums very averse to sitting with you, and they all regard you as one who has insulted them, but I do my best to clear away that impression,” Doyle wrote Houdini on April 30. There was one medium who would never sit with Houdini again, and she was Lady Doyle. “Pray remember us all to your wife,” Doyle ended that letter. “Mine is, I am afraid, rather angry with you.”