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.
At some point after midnight, Houdini called his friend Joe Dunninger, the mentalist.
“Joe, I just got in town today and have to hurry right out again,” Houdini said. “I want to move some stuff from the house. Can you come up with the car?”
Despite heavy rain, Dunninger got in his car. By the time he reached 113th Street, Houdini was waiting at the doorway of the house. He was wearing some ragged old clothes and a weather-beaten straw hat. There was a Holmes security officer there to make sure the alarm didn’t go off. Houdini had some bales of papers and magazines stacked up, and the Holmes employee helped load them into the car. Houdini tipped the man fifty cents.
Hungry, the two men stopped for something to eat. When they returned to the car, Houdini told Dunninger to drive through the park, but when they reached the Central Park West exit at Seventy-second Street, Houdini grabbed his friend’s arm.
Years after his experiment in the California soil, Houdini finally performed his Buried Alive effect. From the collection of George and Sandy Daily
“Go back, Joe!” he said in a hollow, tragic voice.
“Go back where?”
“Go back to the house, Joe.”
“Why—did you forget something?”
“Don’t ask questions, Joe. Just turn around and go back.”
Dunninger complied. When they arrived the rain was even more intense, but Houdini got out of the car, took off his hat, and just stood in the downpour, looking up at the dark house. He returned to the car but said nothing. When they approached the exit of the park again, Dunninger noticed that Houdini’s shoulders were shaking and he was crying.
After a few seconds Houdini looked up.
“I’ve seen my house for the last time, Joe. I’ll never see my house again.”
Just as Houdini was hoisted into the air prior to his immersion in the upside-down water tank, he gasped and his face twisted in pain. In agony, he was released from the stocks, and a call went out to see if there was a doctor in attendance. An Albany bone specialist named Dr. Hannock examined Houdini in the wings and determined that the magician had probably suffered a fracture.
“You will have to go to the hospital at once,” he ordered.
Houdini just waved his hand toward the audience and told him he couldn’t disappoint them. Hopping back out onstage, he did his Needles effect on one leg and finished the rest of the program. Appreciative of his valor and courage, nearly the entire audience waited to cheer Houdini at the stage door after the show. Houdini went straight to the hospital, where doctors confirmed he had indeed fractured his left ankle and advised him to stay off his feet for a week. He stayed up all night and devised a brace that would permit him to perform the next day.
When Fulton Oursler read about his friend’s injury, he immediately dispatched a telegram to the theater. The next day, October 13, Oursler received a strange letter from a medium named Alice A. Wood, who for years had been Dr. Prince’s secretary:
Three years ago, [the spirit of ] Doctor Hyslop said to J. Malcolm Bird of the Psychical Research Society: “The waters are black for Houdini” and he predicted that disaster would befall him while performing before an audience in a theatre. Doctor Hyslop now says that the injury is more serious than has been reported and that Houdini’s days as a magician are over.
Oursler contemplated enclosing that message in a second letter he was sending Houdini but decided it would be in bad taste to forward that communication to someone who was trying to recover from an injury. Meanwhile, Oursler got a response from Houdini. It said, “Thanks for your wire. I have ‘only’ an interior fracture of the ankle….”
By five P.M. on Tuesday, October 19, the ballroom at the McGill University student union in Montreal was packed with the largest crowd in the university’s history. Every available inch was taken, and some undergraduates had even climbed up a ladder to get a better view. Professor Tait was the first to ascend the slightly elevated platform, followed by Houdini, Julia Sawyer, and Rose Mackenberg. After a short introduction from Tait, Houdini limped to the center of the platform. His face was pale and drawn; dark shadows played under his tired eyes. Was this the same man who had filled half the world with awe and admiration? some of the students wondered.
As soon as he began to speak, those questions were dispelled.
Houdini began with a short dissertation on magic. He told the students that his feats depended on iron nerve, dexterity, and perfect coordination, but they were all done by natural means. People lacked the true ability to see, he lectured; if they could only educate their eyes, they could readily see through almost every one of his so-called miracles.
To be an escape artist, he explained, you need to condition yourself to reject all fear. Our imagination magnifies, if not causes, our pain. If you condition yourself to reject the fear and the pain, you could achieve what seemed to be miraculous feats. To prove his point, he did something he’d done hundreds of times before: He sanitized a needle and stuck it through his cheek. No blood oozed out.
Then he got onto the topic of his lecture: spiritualistic frauds. He lauded those who followed Spiritualism as a religion, but he had only contempt for the “religious racketeers” who preyed on the most vulnerable people. The industry exploited the ignorant, and the credulous had grown to colossal proportions—these frauds were profiting to the tune of millions of dollars every year. “There [are] three kinds of mediums,” he declared. “Those who are honestly deluded, those who are psychotics, and those who are criminals.”
He excoriated Margery and Lady Doyle to such a degree that the next day’s Montreal Gazette headline read: “Houdini Assails ‘Slickest’ Medium—Reiterates Charges Against ‘Marjorie’ of Boston as Fake—Tilts at Lady Doyle.” According to him, he was the only person in the world to whom Lady Doyle had ever given a séance. “She produced for me twenty-three pages of classical English in a message from my mother…who [could not speak a word of English]…Don’t you ever believe that any medium can take a message for your Mother when she has passed to eternal rest.”
He pledged to continue his battle even though mediums the world over loathed him “with a deadly hatred.” He ended his lecture with a simple declaration.
“If I were to die tomorrow, the Spiritualists would declare an International holiday!”
When the lecture broke up, Houdini was surrounded by a circle of admirers in the billiard room downstairs on his way out of the building. According to eyewitness accounts, Houdini was only too happy to prove his mastery over pain and his ability to withstand hard blows “without personal injury” by challenging anyone to deliver a punch to his stomach. Houdini’s public display of his abdominal prowess was a new development in the mystifier’s arsenal, but as far back as 1918, in an interview with a female magazine writer, Houdini bragged that he was extremely proud of his washboard stomach, “an endowment…of an ancestral cleanliness.” According to the showgirl/spy Alberta Chapman, by 1925, Houdini did informal demonstrations of his ability to withstand punches. On this occasion at McGill, a nineteen-year-old ex-football player named Gerald Pickelman took up Houdini’s challenge to hit him with all his might. The magician withstood the blow and left the building. After performing at the Princess Theatre that night, he rushed to a Montreal radio station to do a live interview about his campaign against fraudulent mediums.
On Wednesday night, Houdini unleashed his attacks on the local Montreal mediums. After enduring some heckling from Spiritualist sympathizers in the audience, he introduced Sawyer and Mackenberg, who gave detailed accounts of their séances in town. Then, switching gears, Houdini began naming some prominent Montreal residents who were in the audience. As if he were a seer, he recounted intimate details of their private lives. After their amazement died down, he explained that his same spies had passed on all that information to him, employing the same methods that crooked mediums use to fleece unsuspecting victims.
The Secret Life of Houdini Page 56