Two weeks later, the uneasy relationship reached its turning point. Conan Doyle, planning a restful break at the Ambassador Hotel in Atlantic City, invited the Houdinis to join the family for a weekend. The two friends spent much of Saturday afternoon splashing in the hotel pool with Conan Doyle’s children, where Houdini showed off his ability to stay submerged for more than two minutes.
On Sunday, as Houdini and Bess sat on the beach “skylarking,” Conan Doyle appeared to suggest an experiment. Jean, he said, had offered to give Houdini a private demonstration of her talent for automatic writing. It was hoped that she might succeed in bringing through a message from Houdini’s mother, which would provide the final confirmation he had long sought. Turning to Bess, Conan Doyle asked if she wouldn’t mind remaining outside. The conditions would be more favorable, he explained, if Houdini came alone.
Houdini followed Conan Doyle back to his suite, where they pulled down the window shades against the bright sunlight. Jean sat at a table with a large block of writing paper and several pencils. The two men joined her, and laid their hands on the surface of the table.
Conan Doyle bowed his head to begin the séance with a prayer. “I had made up my mind that I would be as religious as it was within my power to be,” Houdini recalled, “and not at any time did I scoff at the ceremony. I excluded all earthly thoughts and gave my whole soul to the séance. I was willing to believe, even wanted to believe.”
Not entirely. The previous evening, Bess and Jean fell into conversation about Houdini’s relationship with his mother. On the beach that morning, Bess shared the details with her husband, so that he would not be surprised if any of this information reappeared under the guise of psychic knowledge. Certainly Houdini had every right to be cautious, but at the same time, his claims of open-mindedness were not wholly justified.
After some moments, Conan Doyle would write, Jean was suddenly “seized by a Spirit.” The psychic energies, she said, had taken hold more powerfully than ever before. Her body shook and her voice trembled as she called to the unseen presence to grant her a message. “Do you believe in God?” she asked. By way of response, her own hand pounded the table three times—signaling an affirmative answer. “Then I will make the sign of the cross,” she said, scribbling unsteadily on the block of paper. Next she asked if the spirit was that of Houdini’s mother, Cecilia Weiss. Again, her hand struck the table three times.
At that moment, Houdini later insisted, he focused all his energies on “feeling for the presence of my dearly beloved Mother.” He longed to believe, he said, and his entire body tensed with anticipation. He watched as Jean gripped the pencil and began to write in a strange, lurching fashion, as though her hand could not keep pace with the flow of thoughts.
“It was a singular scene,” Conan Doyle would write, “my wife with her hand flying wildly, beating the table while she scribbled at a furious rate, I sitting opposite and tearing sheet after sheet from the block as it was filled up, and tossing each across to Houdini, while he sat silent, looking grimmer and paler every moment.”
The message began: “Oh, my darling, thank God, thank God, at last I’m through—I’ve tried, oh so often—now I am happy. Why, of course I want to talk to my boy—my own beloved boy—Friends, thank you, with all my heart for this.”
The writing continued in this vein for fifteen pages. The spirit of Cecilia Weiss assured her son of her continuing love for him and of her great happiness in the spirit world. She told him that he would soon “get all the evidence he is so anxious for,” and that she was busy “preparing so sweet a home for him” for the day when they would be reunited.
As the message poured forth, Conan Doyle broke in to ask if Houdini wished to pose a question, such as “Can my mother read my mind?” Later, there would be some disagreement as to whether this question had been spoken aloud or merely divined by the spirit. The answer came in forceful terms: “I always read my beloved son’s mind—his dear mind—there is so much I want to say to him—but—I am almost overwhelmed by this joy of talking to him once more—it is almost too much to get through—the joy of it—thank you, thank you, friend, with all my heart for what you have done for me this day—God bless you, too, Sir Arthur, for what you are doing for us—for us, over here—who so need to get in touch with our beloved ones on the earth plane.…”
When the message finally ceased, Houdini found himself in an uncomfortable quandary. Ironically, the younger and less devout Conan Doyle had written of just such a dilemma many years earlier. In The Parasite, when a reluctant Austin Gilroy attends a séance at the home of a friend, he expresses himself in terms Houdini might have recognized. “I like none of these mystery-mongers,” Gilroy declares, “but the amateur least of all. With the paid performer you pounce upon him and expose him the instant that you have seen through his trick. He is there to deceive you, and you are there to find him out. But what are you to do with the friend of your host’s wife? Are you to turn on a light suddenly and expose her slapping a surreptitious banjo? Or are you to hurl cochineal over her evening frock when she steals round with her phosphorus bottle and her supernatural platitude? There would be a scene, and you would be looked upon as a brute.”
In Atlantic City, the medium actually was the host’s wife, and Houdini knew full well that he ran the risk of seeming a brute. Still, the message had left him torn and unhappy. He had no doubts whatever as to the sincerity of the Conan Doyles, but he could not bring himself to take the demonstration seriously. “I sat serene through it all,” Houdini later wrote, “hoping and wishing that I might feel my mother’s presence. There wasn’t even a semblance of it.”
In the message, the spirit of Cecilia Weiss had advised her son to “try and write” from his own home. Now, as he struggled to collect his thoughts, Houdini picked up a pencil and asked, “Is there any particular way in which I must hold this pencil when I want to write, or does it write automatically?” He then wrote the name “Powell” on the writing pad. In recalling this later, Houdini stated emphatically that he had not been under the influence of spirits when he did so: “I wrote the name of ‘Powell’ entirely of my own volition.”
Conan Doyle was stunned. Dr. Ellis Powell, his “dear fighting partner in spiritualism,” had recently died in London. Clearly, Conan Doyle insisted, Powell had managed to make contact through Houdini. “Truly Saul is among the prophets!” he announced.
Houdini shook his head. He had been thinking of Frederick Eugene Powell, a magician involved in the publicity for The Man from Beyond, with whom he had been corresponding lately concerning a dangerous surgical procedure. Conan Doyle waved this explanation aside. Ellis Powell, he insisted, was the one man he would have expected to hear from in these circumstances. Obviously, Houdini himself had been granted the gift of automatic writing.
For the moment, Houdini let the matter rest, saying nothing of his uncertainty over his mother’s message. “I did not have the nerve to tell him,” he admitted later. It would not have made any difference if he had. Both men emerged from the séance absolutely convinced that his own view had been confirmed. Conan Doyle insisted that Houdini had been “deeply moved” by what occurred. Later, he claimed, Houdini told him he had been “walking on air ever since.”
Houdini withdrew and pondered the message. As he related the events to Bess, he could not overcome his doubts. Jean had marked the sign of the cross on the first page of the message, but Cecilia Weiss, the wife of an Orthodox rabbi, would never have transmitted a Christian symbol. Also, the message had come through in English, a language his mother did not speak. Furthermore, though the spirit presence claimed to be able to read her son’s mind, it did not pick up a series of thoughts that Houdini tried to communicate during the séance. Finally, the weekend in Atlantic City happened to fall on Cecilia Weiss’s birthday, a date of considerable importance to Houdini, but the spirit presence made no reference to this coincidence.
In time, when Houdini aired his misgivings, Conan Doyle had ready answ
ers. He insisted that the sign of the cross had nothing to do with the spirit’s earthly religion; his wife placed a cross at the top of all her messages to “guard against lower influences.” As for the language barrier, only a “trance medium” could be expected to produce a message in the spirit’s own tongue. A “normal inspirational medium,” by contrast, made use of a “translating effect” that occurred simultaneously with the flow of thought. Conan Doyle also asserted that the spirit had successfully read Houdini’s mind, and that Houdini admitted as much at the time. As for Cecilia Weiss’s birthday, Conan Doyle said, such things no longer mattered in the spirit realm.
Soon enough, this debate would spill into the public arena, causing bitter recriminations on both sides. For the moment, as the Conan Doyles finished up their tour of America, Houdini kept up appearances in the hope of salvaging the friendship. He invited Conan Doyle and Jean to join him as he and Bess celebrated their wedding anniversary, and he waved from the dock as the family sailed for home on June 24.
Four months later, Houdini published an article in the New York Sun in which he expressed disenchantment with the spiritualist movement. “I have never heard or seen anything,” he wrote, “that could convince me that there is a possibility of communication with the loved ones who have gone beyond.” He had said much the same thing in a New York Times article that appeared during Conan Doyle’s tour, but this new statement, coming on the heels of the séance in Atlantic City, struck Conan Doyle as a personal affront. Houdini’s intransigence, in Conan Doyle’s view, could only be taken as an insult to Jean. “I know by many examples the purity of my wife’s mediumship,” he insisted, “and I saw what you got and what the effect was upon you at the time.” Angry as he was, Conan Doyle resolved to say no more on the subject, as he had “no fancy for sparring with a friend in public.”
Conan Doyle returned to America the following year for a second lecture tour, taking the spirit message as far west as California. By this time, relations with Houdini had grown so strained that the press anticipated a major clash—“Sir Arthur Coming to Answer Houdini,” read one headline. Their relationship now alternated between public criticism and private apologies. “I have had to handle you a little roughly in the Oakland Tribune,” Conan Doyle wrote from Los Angeles. “I can’t imagine why you say such wild things which have no basis in fact at all.”
“I am commencing to believe that at last I am ‘famous,’” Houdini wrote after a public salvo of his own. “Newspapers are misquoting me.”
Their paths crossed in Denver, where Houdini had come to perform on an Orpheum circuit tour, but they could no longer find any common ground. “Our relations are certainly curious and are likely to become more so,” Conan Doyle remarked, “for so long as you attack what I know from experience to be true, I have no alternative but to attack you in return. How long a private friendship can survive such an ordeal I do not know, but at least I did not create the situation.”
The final blow came shortly after Conan Doyle’s return to England. In Our American Adventure, there had been some attempt at a détente. “I may add that Houdini is not one of those shallow men who imagine they can explain away spiritual phenomena as parlour tricks,” Conan Doyle had written, “but that he retains an open—and ever, I think, a more receptive—mind towards mysteries which are beyond his art.” When it came time to write Our Second American Adventure, chronicling the 1923 tour, this pretense was dropped. Conan Doyle had praise for Houdini’s skills as a magician but found him “most violent in his expressions of contempt and hostility” toward spiritualism.
Houdini’s A Magician Among the Spirits, published in 1924, gave his side of the Atlantic City séance. “I have no desire to discredit Spiritualism,” he wrote. “I am willing to be convinced; my mind is open, but the proof must be such as to leave no vestige of doubt that what is claimed to be done is accomplished only through or by supernatural power. So far I have never on any occasion, in all the séances I have attended, seen anything which would lead me to credit … that it is possible to communicate with those who have passed out of this life. Therefore I do not agree with Sir Arthur.”
From this point forward, Houdini and Conan Doyle communicated only through the letter columns of the press. Many of their exchanges centered on a contest sponsored by Scientific American magazine. To publicize its investigation into the paranormal, the magazine had offered “$2,500 for an authentic spirit photograph made under strict test conditions and $2,500 for the first physical manifestations of a psychic nature produced under scientific control.” When Houdini was asked to serve on the investigating committee, Conan Doyle expressed outrage at the “capital error” of placing an enemy of spiritualism on such a body. “The Commission is, in my opinion, a farce,” he wrote.
One of the first to apply for the Scientific American prize was Nino Pecararo, an Italian medium who had impressed Conan Doyle some months earlier. Although securely tied to a chair, Pecararo had caused a handbell to ring and a tambourine to float through the air. When Houdini tied Pecararo up, there were no manifestations.
Soon, however, the tables tilted the other way. An attractive young medium named Mina Crandon, known to the public as “Margery,” had created a sensation in her native Boston. In the comfort of her Beacon Hill séance room, Margery produced a startling range of phenomena including bright lights, strange raps and whistles, messages in many languages, rose petals that seemed to fall from thin air, and megaphones that flew across the room. Margery’s spirit control was her own deceased brother, Walter, a rough-talking fireman who had been crushed to death in a railway accident in 1911.
Before applying for the Scientific American prize, Margery traveled abroad and built up a consensus of favorable opinion from European experts. One of these, inevitably, was Conan Doyle, who stated “beyond all question” that her powers were genuine.
For Margery’s Scientific American test, Houdini came up with the idea of building a wooden “control box.” Margery was to sit inside a sturdy enclosure with her head protruding, in the manner of a steam cabinet. Holes at the sides of the box would allow her to reach through, but only to join hands with other sitters, so that her movements would remain under strict control. Margery agreed to these conditions, and for a time it appeared as if the device had curtailed her powers.
Soon, however, the challenge took an unexpected turn, as Conan Doyle related in a gleeful letter to Oliver Lodge. “There have been great doings at Boston,” he wrote. “At the [séance], Houdini passed his hand through the hole in the box (under pretense of seeing if the medium was all right) and dropped inside a folded carpenter’s ruler. At once Walter screamed out ‘Houdini, you unutterable cad! What do you mean by dropping that ruler!’” In fact, what Walter had actually said was “Houdini, you God damned son of a bitch, get the hell out of here and never come back!” Conan Doyle cleaned up the language for Lodge’s benefit, but pulled no punches about the consequences. “It should be the last of him as a Psychic Researcher,” he gloated to Harry Price, “if he could ever have been called one.”
Hoping to ensure this outcome, Conan Doyle wrote an article based on correspondence with Margery’s husband. He protested that Margery had been the victim of a “very deadly plot” and expressed surprise that a distinguished body of American investigators should have tolerated Houdini’s “outrageous” behavior. The escape artist, responding in the press, wondered how Conan Doyle could form such conclusions from a distance of 3,500 miles. In his view, the ruler had been planted to impugn his testimony, and he resented that anyone would take Walter’s word over his. “Also, Sir Arthur is a bit senile,” Houdini was quoted as saying, “and therefore easily bamboozled.” The situation, he suggested, might well call for legal action.
The threat of a slander suit did nothing to silence Conan Doyle. A few months later he sounded off on the subject of “Houdinitis,” a syndrome based on twin fallacies. “The first is that Spiritualism depends upon physical phenomena for its proofs,” he wro
te, while the “second is that manual dexterity bears some relation to brain capacity.”
While the former friends traded insults, Margery’s spirit control weighed in with a grim prediction. Houdini, said Walter, would be dead within a year.
* * *
Houdini managed to thwart Walter’s prediction, but only just. He died on October 31, 1926, of complications following a blow to the stomach. Happily, Conan Doyle managed to recover his better nature on this sad occasion. “I greatly admired him,” he told the New York Times, “and cannot understand how the end came for one so youthful.” He wrote a long and heartfelt letter to Bess, assuring her that he would never again say an unkind thing about her husband. “Any man who wins the love and respect of a good woman must himself be a fine and honest man,” he told her. “I am sorry that shadows grew up between us.”
For all of this, now that Houdini could no longer dispute him, Conan Doyle allowed himself free reign in putting forward his beliefs about the escape artist’s strange powers. The following year he published a two-part article in The Strand entitled “Houdini the Enigma.” Describing an especially baffling packing crate escape, Conan Doyle once again advanced his dematerialization theory. “I contend that Houdini’s performance was on an utterly different plane,” he insisted, “and that it is an outrage against common sense to think otherwise.” To the end of his life, Conan Doyle continued to hope that Houdini would manifest his spirit presence in some public forum, thus ending the debate for all time.
Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle Page 45