The Secret Life of Houdini

by William Kalush

  Judges sleeping with contestants in a contest that they are to judge was not a unique phenomenon, albeit a good strategy from Margery’s point of view. Carrington owing money to Crandon casts even more doubts on his ability to vote impartially, but what’s critical to this story is Carrington’s background. He was not only a psychic investigator but he was a skilled and knowledgeable magician too, who had written Houdini, thanking him for advising him before his entry into American vaudeville. Carrington also brought a friend of his into the Crandon circle, a man who spent a lot of time in and out of Lime Street in 1924. His name was F. Serrano Keating, also known as Fred Keating, and he too was an accomplished magician.

  In the middle of all this, Houdini filed his will. He left Bess his dramatic library and all his personal effects. Hardeen, who had given up his own career to run the ill-fated FDC, would receive Houdini’s magical apparatus, which was to “be burnt and destroyed upon [Hardeen’s] death.” Houdini’s library on Spiritualism and the occult was earmarked for the American Society for Psychical Research, his magic library to the Library of Congress. He made provisions for his assistants Vickery, Kukol, and Collins of $500 each, and pledged $1,000 to the SAM. The rest of the estate was set up in a trust to be divided equally among his siblings, with one proviso. “It is my express desire, intention and direction that no part either of the principal or income of my estate shall ever directly or indirectly go to SADIE GLANTZ WEISS, the divorced wife of my brother NATHAN JOSEPH WEISS and the present wife of my brother, DR. LEOPOLD DAVID WEISS.” This was a curious clause. We know that Houdini had traveled with Leopold as late as 1920 when they visited England. Sometime after their return something happened. One author who had access to Leopold’s files theorized that, in retrospect, Houdini may have blamed Leopold and Sadie’s unseemly liaison for the premature death of their mother. As if to punctuate the will, Houdini and his good friend Loney Haskell went to the Elks Club to deposit a letter specifying his funeral arrangements.

  Before Houdini filed his séance reports, he literally made Munn stop the presses and remove another pro-Margery article in the September issue. Then, for safekeeping, he kept a copy of the original article. Houdini was anxious to get a majority vote to discredit Margery immediately, but the other members of the committee, all academics, wanted more sittings. Houdini was shocked. Couldn’t they see she was a fraud using tricks that went back to the Davenports?

  Houdini family portrait before things shattered when Sadie (third from left, standing) divorced Nat (fifth from left standing), and married debonair bachelor Dr. Leopold (far right). From the collection of Dr. Bruce Averbook

  Crandon meanwhile came up with a new idea: solus sittings, one-on-one séances with just an investigator and Margery (and Walter, of course) present. Writing Doyle, he felt using solus sittings the “sitters can be converted as fast as they sit.” There was a danger in them, though. “The only negative that Houdini can get will be ‘no phenomena.’ There is a danger, as you can readily see, that he might insert his toe into the contact machine when he sits alone with Psyche and thus prevent a ring. She has been instructed, therefore, by the rest of the committee that if Houdini’s leg breaks connection with her she is to cry out at once ‘Houdini has broken his control.’ Furthermore, if the bell does not ring, Walter instructs friendly members of the committee, after a reasonable time, to come in quietly and seize the box for their examination before Houdini has a chance to withdraw whatever he may put in to prevent contact ringing.

  “It is such a pity in a big thing like this, that we have to plan to catch a crook!”

  The committee requested that the final sittings take place in New York, but that was scrapped when Dr. Crandon stated that he didn’t have time to come to New York and that he categorically refused to allow Margery to sit without him present. So everyone agreed to trek back up to Boston. This time they would bring along a “comfortable restraint” for the medium, one which would prevent her from moving her hands and feet and, as Houdini charged, cause the phenomena.

  Joseph DeWyckoff, Margery’s multimillionaire supporter. From the DeWyckoff family collection of Carolyn Withstandley

  With the sittings scheduled for the end of August, it was time for Crandon to bring in his big guns. One of Margery’s most avid supporters was a wealthy steel mogul named Joseph DeWyckoff. DeWyckoff had a very interesting and checkered past. Born in Poland, educated in Russia and London, he came to America and practiced law but soon ran afoul of it himself. He was jailed in Boston for embezzlement, then a few years later fled Chicago after absconding with more than $3,000 from the law firm. He wound up in Havana, where, in 1898 he was recruited by John Wilkie, the Secret Service chief, as a co-optee and was involved in spying for the United States during the Spanish-American War. Perhaps as a reward, he was given the contract to salvage the Battleship Maine in the Havana harbor.

  By the 1920s, he had formed his own steel company and had amassed a tremendous fortune traveling to Europe to do business while exploiting his contacts in Russia. On one trip to London, he sold ten million dollars’ worth of war munitions to the Russian government. He was also an avid Spiritualist. On August 14, DeWyckoff and his wife, Minerva, visited Lime Street and sat with Margery. During this séance, Walter invented a new form of control. With DeWyckoff controlling Margery and his wife controlling Doctor Crandon, Walter was able to not only ring the contact bell but tap out messages in Morse code, as well as bang on a tambourine and whistle through a megaphone at the same time. DeWyckoff left Boston for a fishing trip in Maine but, convinced of the importance of the impending Houdini showdown, cabled Crandon from Bangor: “OWING PRAXIMITY [sic] OF COMMITTEES FINAL TESTS AND IMPORTANCE OF PREVIOUSLY TRYING APPARATUS IN FRIENDLY CIRCLE HAVE DECIDED FOREGO FISHING TRIPS RETURN BOSTON ARRIVING THERE TUESDAY PM STOP SHALL BE HAPPY TO ASSIST ACCORDINGLY IF AGREEABLE STOP KINDEST REMEMBRANCES TO MARGERY AND YOURSELF AND BROTHER WALTER IN WHICH MADAME JOINS ME DR WYCKOFF”

  Crandon had one more trick up his sleeve. Alarmed by reports that Houdini had constructed a large wooden box that would effectively prevent Margery from craning her neck and stretching out her legs to produce phenomena, he planned a counterattack. On August 18, a week before the showdown, he wrote Sir Arthur. “We frankly feared that with ‘Marjory’ in a mechanical control, in the dark, Houdini could only win by a blank [a sitting that produced no results] and hence he would by trickery insure a blank. Walter solved it by announcing he would give them nothing hereafter except by red light phenomena! If he is able to do this, and I have no doubt he can, no control, other than the eye will be necessary.”

  It would be a major breakthrough if Walter could produce his phenomenon with red light on in the room. The mediumship would come out of the dark, control could be visually checked, and there would be no need for anything as crude as Houdini’s big wooden box.

  While the Crandons were preparing for the invasion from New York, Sir Arthur was getting more details from Pheneas about the impending catastrophe, and about the spirit’s love for the medium.

  “I am full of love and joy,” Pheneas spoke. “I love our talks. I was with the Medium this morning. I had a message. I am in close touch with the Medium all the time.”

  “Do you alone influence the Medium?” Doyle wondered.

  “Sometimes it is her own guide,” Pheneas explained. “Would you like more about the catastrophe, as you call it?”

  “Yes, indeed,” Doyle said.

  Pheneas then went into another horrific prophecy of the accounting to come. Continents submerged, earthquakes in north England, tidal waves in the south of France, a huge storm in the north of Italy.

  “I hope I shall be strong enough,” Doyle worried.

  Pheneas reassured him.

  “Will the dear medium be at my right hand?” he asked.

  “Of course she will,” Pheneas said soothingly. “You must see it, friend, from her point of view. She does not think herself so essential, and therefore she has fears. She will be
close to your side, as she has been in the past, in the fight for the spreading of this great knowledge and comfort. She will come into her own with you and with her dear ones.”

  During the next séance, at their country home in New Forest, Pheneas provided more details of the impending doom, at the same time conveying how close he felt to the Doyle circle.

  “God bless you! I love being with you. Is it not nice round the fire? I am one of the family in the home circle. I will guard over you in this house as long as you sojourn in it. That is a word the medium never uses. Her tongue could hardly say it. She is very tired to-night.”

  “You do her good,” Sir Arthur enthused.

  “We love her,” Pheneas spoke. “We have chosen her for this work.”

  From the collection of Roger Dreyer

  22

  Margery’s Box

  WHEN COLLINS AND HOUDINI FINISHED SETTING up their wooden enclosure in committeeman Comstock’s room at the Charles-gate Hotel, it looked more like a crate for an old-fashioned slant-top desk than a device to restrain a human medium, except for the holes bored out to allow Margery’s head and arms to protrude from the box. Houdini had been extremely secretive about his “fraud-preventer,” refusing to allow Bird to drive the device up to Boston, especially since Bird was leaving a few days prior to the August 25 séance. Once in Boston, Houdini refused to be seen at his hotel and when he met an associate at the Back Bay railroad station, he dragged him to a telephone booth where he held his conversation with the door closed, explaining to reporters that he was being “watched” and “shadowed” by “hostile interests.”

  Apparently Margery hadn’t yet learned to perform her effects under red light, so the séance would be conducted in the dark again. When Crandon arrived and saw the wooden cage that Houdini had devised, he objected to it vociferously and demanded that Margery have a dry run in the box with members of her friendly circle. This was granted and at 9:15 a group of sympathizers, who included Crandon’s sister Laura and Joe DeWyckoff, sat with Margery for a half hour. “Leave everything to me and be of good cheer,” Walter assured them. At 9:45, the committee was ushered into the séance room and Margery’s friends exited. Crandon also demanded a change in the order of the circle. Instead of Munn controlling Houdini’s left hand, he asked that Comstock be assigned that job. Houdini later complained that Comstock did such a good job of it that he was unable to break free to paw around in the dark to detect implements.

  Houdini in Margery’s box.Library of Congress

  The séance began. Eight minutes into the sitting, the bell box, which was on a table in front of the cabinet, rang and there was a corresponding loud noise. Houdini reported that the front of the crate had been forced open and the two thin brass strips that held the box together had been bent. He immediately accused Margery, a strong woman, of lifting the lid with her shoulders, stretching out her head, and pressing down on the bell box. Crandon suggested that Walter had broken the cabinet and the two men got into a shouting match. At 10:13 Walter called for a recess and asked for his friendly circle to return.

  The friends of Walter met in the room for twenty-two minutes, Walter whistling “with his best cockiness.”

  At 10:35, the committee returned. Bird, who had not been at the first sitting, tried to have a seat but he was excluded from the room by the rest of the committee. Margery’s circle was allowed to remain in the back of the room.

  After eight unproductive minutes, Walter piped in.

  “Houdini, have you got the mark in just right? You think you’re smart, don’t you? How much are they paying you to stop these phenomena?”

  “This is costing me,” Houdini replied. “$2,500 a week to be here.”

  “Where did you turn down a $2,500 contract in August?”

  “In Buffalo,” Houdini said.

  “Where were those contracts?” Walter asked. “You didn’t have a job for this week.”

  “What do you mean by this, Walter? This talk isn’t psychic research,” Comstock intervened, trying to be the voice of sanity while addressing a spirit.

  “Comstock, take the box out in the white light and examine it, and you will see what I mean,” Walter said.

  Comstock complied and returned to the room to report that a small rubber eraser from a pencil had been jammed between the two boards where they make contact. It wasn’t impossible to actually ring the bell, but it was about four times harder to make the connection, which shouldn’t affect a strong incorporeal spirit but would be a calamity for a person who was straining to push the board with her forehead. Since the contact box hadn’t been examined before the second committee sitting, suspicion for the plant would point to the “friendly” circle, who had just been in the room at Walter’s request. After the eraser incident, the séance was ended.

  The committee and others had convened in another room for some post-séance chitchat when Houdini suddenly realized that Margery and Crandon were missing. He found them back in the séance room, surrounding the box, talking in hushed tones. Unaware of his presence, he watched as they measured the gap in which her neck was secured. The size of the aperture had been an issue earlier in the night, but when he spoke to them about it later, they claimed that it was fine.

  Before the next night’s sitting, Dr. Crandon insisted on inserting into the record a statement from Margery that there was “no precedent in psychic research where a medium has been so enclosed,” maintaining that “such a closed cage gives little or no regard for the theory and experience of the psychic structure.” By now, Margery’s camp was theorizing that the medium herself was responsible for ringing the bell box, under Walter’s bidding, through the agency of a pseudopod that extended from between her legs and, acting as a lever, actually produced the manifestations. Obviously, the box would block this “psychic structure.” Why Walter, who had previously ravaged furniture and overturned cabinets and whacked people on the head, couldn’t himself press down on the box and make the bell ring was never addressed. Before the séance began, Bird again tried to attend, a row ensued, and the secretary resigned on the spot from the committee because of accusations of misbehavior, betrayal of committee, and collusion with Margery, charges that had been leveled by both Prince and Houdini.

  With these administrative details out of the way, Margery entered the room and climbed into her cabinet-box. For this sitting, Houdini would control her left hand and Prince her right. Houdini later recalled that as he carefully watched her face, he “could tell by the way she pulled down on her neck that she was ‘reaching’ for something.” Convinced that she had concealed something, he repeatedly told Prince not to let go of her right hand until the séance was over.

  At 9:14 the séance began. Nine minutes later, Walter arrived.

  “Houdini you are very clever, indeed, but it won’t work,” Walter said. “I suppose it was an accident those things were left in the cabinet?”

  “What was left in the cabinet?” Houdini asked.

  “What did you do that for, Houdini?” Walter raged. “You God damned son of a bitch. You cad you. There’s a ruler in this cabinet, you unspeakable cad. The idea of your putting up a plant like that on a girl. You won’t live forever Houdini, you’ve got to die. I put a curse on you now that will follow you every day for the rest of your short life. Now you get the hell out of here and don’t you ever come back or I won’t!”

  Dr. Comstock intervened. “Walter, if you will reflect for a minute you will see that this box has been in the room where there are tools and workmen and it is indeed possible that someone may have left or locked a ruler in it.”

  “That is possible,” Walter admitted. “I apologize to Houdini. You may cut all the nasty words out of the record, but leave all the rest.”

  Houdini asked that the entire abusive remark remain part of the record.

  That ended any chance for any phenomena. Collins was called in and he swore on his mother’s life that the ruler wasn’t his. The séance dragged on for another two and a
half hours, but with the medium in the box, which was locked this night, the bell box remained silent.

  “A great chance I have to do anything with all you and myself in this state of mind,” Walter bellyached. “I admit I lost my temper,” he said toward the end of the night. And then he said, “Goodbye.”

  What was most significant about this sitting was that the Crandon camp, who had control over the signed séance minutes, immediately falsified the record to make it appear that Houdini had been caught planting the ruler and was remorseful for his actions in the séance room.

  In Crandon’s version of the séance, which was immediately published in Spiritualist periodicals around the world, and later in both Bird’s and Crandon’s books, when the lights were turned up after Walter’s tirade against Houdini, the magician had buried his face in his hands and was almost weeping.

  “Oh, this is terrible. My dear sainted mother was married to my father! This is terrible. I don’t know anything about any ruler. Why should I do a thing like that?”

  In another Crandon version, Houdini was reputed to have said, “I’m not myself. I don’t feel well.”

  According to Bird’s book, Houdini was reacting to the original significance of the term “son of a bitch”—namely that he was a bastard. It’s interesting that this allegation was made by the Margery camp. At that time, there had been rumors circulating in the magic community that Houdini and Hardeen were half brothers. For this story to be dredged up suggests that some insider might have been feeding Crandon information to use against Houdini. At any rate, the Crandons certainly knew how to push Houdini’s buttons; any slur against his mother would be considered more than fighting words.