The Magician and the Spirits

by Deborah Noyes

  “All right, Mama,” agreed Houdini, a devoted son, but he couldn’t shake his unease. As the German steamer Kronprinzessin Cecilie (Crown Princess Cecilia) chuffed out of the harbor, Cecilia Weiss grew smaller, obscured by the crowd.

  ABOUT A WEEK LATER, HOUDINI AND BESS TOOK A midnight train to Copenhagen for his first performance. His assistant, Franz Kukol, had given him a cable sent from Asbury Park, New Jersey, where some of the Weiss family were vacationing, but he didn’t read it until he reached Circus Beketow, where he would play for an audience including the princes of the royal family. He opened the cable during a press conference, and the news was devastating: his mother had died the night before, following a stroke. Houdini, who was already suffering from an ailing kidney, collapsed on the spot.

  When he came to, he wept inconsolably. A doctor had been called in to consult about his kidney, and Houdini ignored orders to admit himself at the hospital for tests.

  He canceled all engagements, booked passage for the Crown Princess Cecilia’s return voyage, and cabled his younger brother Theo to postpone the funeral.

  Before he and Bess set out for Hamburg and departure, Houdini found another unopened cable from Theo, an earlier message urging him to catch a steamer back. Their mother was stricken, it said; there was no hope; he should return home at once if he wanted to say good-bye.

  It was already too late, and the strained farewell dockside in Hoboken would be Houdini’s last memory of the person arguably dearest to him in the world.

  At his request, and against Jewish tradition and law, which require burial within a day after death, Cecilia Weiss’s corpse was not buried immediately. Although tradition forbids display of the body, she was laid out for viewing when Houdini arrived.

  Her form looked to him dainty and small, her features “still and quiet.” It was strange, Houdini wrote later, to see his industrious mother “resting for the first time in ‘Her Earthly Career.’” Houdini brought a chair from her room and sat by her body all night.

  Before she was buried the next day beside his father, Mayer Samuel Weiss, at Cypress Hills (Machpelah) Cemetery in Queens, New York, Houdini tucked the wool slippers he had brought her from Denmark into his mother’s coffin.

  The weeks that followed found him “bowed down.” It was all he could do to rouse himself and return to Europe to make good on old bookings.

  In Germany, Houdini collected into a single volume the letters written by his “Sainted Mother.” Each read to him like “a prayer” for her children, “a plea that we should be good human beings.” The letters often brought him to tears, and he felt bound by grief in a way that he never had been by chains or handcuffs. All his mighty publicity boasts—“Nothing on Earth Can Hold HOUDINI a Prisoner!”—must have stung of mockery in the shadow of her death.

  “My very Existence seems to have expired with her,” he told his brother, in letters written on formal black-bordered mourning stationery. “I try and scheme ahead as in the Past, but I seem to have lost all ambition.”

  “Ma Saw Me Jump!”

  Days before setting sail for Europe in the summer of 1913, Houdini hired a car and brought his mother and two of his brothers, Theo and Nat, to Cypress Hills Cemetery to visit the grave of his father, Mayer Samuel Weiss.

  Houdini’s competitive nature and deep love for his mother made for a complex relationship with his father, a brilliant man who had struggled to provide for the family. (“The less said on the subject the better,” Houdini once wrote about the poverty and difficulty of his childhood.)

  As an adult, he revered his father’s memory, propping Mayer Samuel’s portrait on his dressing-room table, but he admitted in diaries to feeling jealous and “insignificant” in his youth. He always wanted to be first—in Cecilia’s affections as in all things—and competed with his father and five brothers and a sister for her attention.

  Houdini’s last promise to Mayer Samuel was that he would always care for his mother. His work often took him away from her, but he honored this vow above all, escorting Cecilia to his performances when he could and taking a special pride in risking his life for her. After the first of what would prove many high-risk manacled bridge jumps, in Rochester in 1907, he bragged in his diary, “Ma saw me jump!”

  Houdini kissing his “Sainted Mother,” Cecilia, in Rochester, New York, 1908.

  Houdini had always loved Cecilia intensely—but not just because she was his mother. She was also his biggest and most important fan. The work he did, he did for her. The risks he took were for her also. “I am what would be called a Mothers-boy,” he once confessed. “If I do anything, I say to myself I wonder if Ma would want me to do this?” Though Houdini was only thirty-nine years old—still at the heights of his professional power—his mother’s absence was a kind of paralysis.

  Trying to ease both mental and physical strain in his life, he dropped his escapes for a while and assembled an all-magic show, the “Grand Magical Revue,” a project he enjoyed, though his promoters didn’t. They argued that people wanted—and now expected from him—the big-ticket escapes he’d staked his reputation on.

  After a weary year abroad, Houdini returned to New York in 1914 aboard the Imperator. His crossing from England, and a performance he gave on board for a select audience, made US headlines, appearing alongside rumors of war in Europe.

  Houdini aboard the SS Imperator with Theodore Roosevelt, 1914; fellow passengers have been airbrushed out of the picture.

  In the audience at that performance was former president Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt. (His preferred nickname was “the Colonel,” a reference to military service preceding his term of office.) A great sportsman and adventurer, Roosevelt had recently returned from a wilderness expedition to map the Amazon rain forest’s unexplored River of Doubt. When his prestigious fan requested a séance, Houdini cast back to his days as a fake medicine-show spirit medium. In a wild coincidence, Roosevelt happened to ask “the spirits” where he was the previous Christmas, and Houdini happened to be able to produce a rigged spirit slate with a map of lower South America and the River of Doubt chalked on. “It was a shame the way I had to fool him,” he recalled later.

  The next morning on deck, the former president asked, “man to man,” was the map produced by “genuine Spiritualism”?

  “No, Colonel,” Houdini admitted. “It was hokus pokus.”

  In a souvenir photo taken aboard ship, Houdini appears to be standing alone on deck with Roosevelt; in fact, Houdini airbrushed five other men out, leaving just himself and the Colonel. Ever the savvy self-promoter, he had his doctored portrait copyrighted, handing out many hundreds of publicity copies.

  Back in New York, overwhelmed by memories, Houdini leased out the elegant Harlem brownstone that he and Bess had shared with Cecilia and other family members at intervals for the past ten years. “The Home is a Home no longer for me,” he concluded, “and must be disposed of.” He and Bess temporarily moved in with Theo’s family in Brooklyn.

  Theo was a magician, too, billed as Hardeen. Not surprisingly, the assertive Houdini (who had launched his little brother’s career) expected top billing offstage as well as on, so living conditions must have felt a bit cramped for everyone.

  Houdini continued to visit the gravesite in Queens often. Diary entries from the time prove that his grief was as raw as ever: “Here I am left alone on the station,” he wrote in one, “bewildered and not knowing when the next train comes along so that I can join my mother.”

  A few days after Houdini’s return to the United States, the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his wife were assassinated. In the coming months, Czar Nicholas II rallied his army, Germany invaded Belgium and declared war on France, and Britain declared war on Germany. With armies engaging along the western front—the main theater of war in France and Belgium—Houdini canceled his ove
rseas bookings and agreed to play the Keith and Orpheum vaudeville houses throughout the United States instead.

  His sixteen-month tour included stops in Boston, upstate New York, Canada, the Midwest, and elsewhere. In Kansas City, he debuted one of his most dangerous and spectacular stunts.

  A theatrical poster advertising Houdini’s magician brother, Hardeen, 1931.

  Over a period of three years after his mother’s death, whenever he performed in a big city with skyscrapers, Houdini riveted audiences with his Suspended Straitjacket Escape. From the back of a horse-drawn wagon (usually parked at the curb near a major daily newspaper), he greeted the crowd through a megaphone, laughing and joking, waving his hat as fans waved theirs back. Volunteers fitted his arms into the canvas or leather straitjacket, tying them over his chest, and then he lay flat while his ankles were bound. Finally he was hoisted up by crane—up and up, dangling head down, sometimes hundreds of feet in the air. While the masses craned their necks and murmured below, he began to squirm and twist and thrash, blood running to his face, the tendons in his neck swelling, until he had miraculously freed himself from the straitjacket and let it fall to earth.

  I Want to Be First

  In 1914, many Americans were still calling the nightmarish conflict across the Atlantic “Europe’s war,” but it was out there, looming large, and entertainment was a welcome distraction. Houdini brought a mind-boggling illusion back to New York with him that year called Walking Through a Brick Wall. He had a small army of masons construct a high wall right onstage; it ran from rear to front, so the audience could see both sides of the stage. With fanfare, and the usual committee culled from the crowd to assist and inspect his work, he appeared to pass right through the brick barrier to the other side of the stage.

  He dropped the illusion, though, when another magician claimed ownership. Houdini couldn’t bear to be copied—“puny attempts at duplication” enraged him—and the accusation called for swift action. He stopped performing Walking Through a Brick Wall and gave it over to his magician brother, Hardeen, the one professional imitator he didn’t denounce (unless it made for good publicity). “I want to be first,” Houdini told reporters, “first in my profession. . . . I have tortured my body and risked my life only for that.”

  Houdini suspended in a straitjacket at the Police Field Day Games at Gravesend Race Track in New York, August 29, 1920.

  It was a dangerous stunt, one that over time killed several imitators. Houdini himself had, on past occasions, gashed his head on a window ledge in rough winds and hung stranded when a suspension crane jammed and ropes tangled. A window washer came to his rescue with a length of tied towels, luckily, before the pressure in his head did him in.

  The master showman understood that he wasn’t alone in his growing fascination with mortality and madness (the idea for the straitjacket escape struck during a visit to an insane asylum in Canada, one of his many asylum visits). “The easiest way to attract a crowd,” he observed, “is to let it be known that at a given time and a given place some one is going to attempt something that in the event of failure will mean sudden death.”

  Poster advertising Houdini’s 1919 motion picture The Grim Game.

  But within three years, exhausted from extreme emotional and physical stress, Houdini decided to “work entirely” with his brain. It was a timely decision; in 1916, movies were beginning to challenge vaudeville as the dominant form of popular entertainment, and many stage stars like Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin were making the leap to Hollywood—as would Houdini on and off.

  Houdini’s determination to work with his brain was more than a reaction to the changing landscape of American entertainment. He was growing older; inevitably, his strength and physical power would fail him, and he would no longer be able to carry out the feats that had made him famous.

  Celluloid Detours

  In 1916, wise to the growing popularity of photography and moving pictures, Houdini opened the Film Development Corporation, which offered high-speed film processing. At first, it seemed the West Hoboken, New Jersey, company would prosper, but Houdini wasn’t a businessman, and the company failed financially.

  He had only slightly more luck in front of the camera. His first starring role was in The Master Mystery, a cliff-hanger serial in fifteen episodes. The Grim Game (1919), Terror Island (1920), and others followed, but while fame assured Houdini an audience, his acting and range of expressions were limited. Opening his own movie studio to showcase his screen work didn’t help matters. The physical power and presence of his escapes was diminished on-screen. Everyone knew movies were an “illusion,” so his feats were just part of the mechanism.

  Bess Houdini with her husband’s book collection, 1926.

  His intellectual ambition also echoed old feelings about his father. A respected scholar who toiled in obscurity and poverty, Rabbi Mayer Samuel had both let his family down (in material terms) and inspired their devotion. Houdini had craved his father’s approval almost as much as his mother’s love. At the same time, he blamed him for the lean and difficult years of his childhood and the shame that went with them.

  Determined to be more than a showman and to honor his erudite father’s memory, Houdini put together what he claimed was the world’s largest collection, private or public, of material relating to magic and things mysterious. He traveled with a vast library and made the acquaintance of literary giants like Jack London and Rudyard Kipling. But his meeting with an especially influential man of letters would lead to one of the most surprising celebrity friendships of all time.

  FOUR

  The Torch Bearer

  “I do not say that I think, but I say that I KNOW that the dead live and come back to us. I have seen them. I have heard them. I have touched them. If I did not believe the evidence of my own senses I should not be sane.”

  ~Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

  The supremely logical detective Sherlock Holmes, one of the most popular literary characters ever, earned his creator fame and legions of adoring fans. But by the time Sir Arthur Conan Doyle met Houdini, in 1920, the author saw his beloved creation as a means to an end; the fictional detective was a ticket to “recognition, perhaps friendship, at the firesides throughout the world.” Sherlock Holmes had paved Doyle’s way as “the torch bearer of spiritualism.”

  With the First World War, Spiritualism had grown from earnest parlor games and theater in the dark to true religion. Doyle saw himself as a prophet of the faith, entrusted with a “new Revelation.” Spiritualism was “the most important development in the whole history of the human race,” he claimed, and it was his job to shout it from the rooftops.

  Deception—or Consolation?

  Popular belief in Spiritualism came and went after one of its founders, Maggie Fox, publicly denied the faith in 1888 (her sister Kate corroborated their fraud the same year), confessing that the rapping and phenomena she and her sisters had staged were a “horrible deception.” This might have been the end, as she intended, “the death blow” for Spiritualism, but with the outbreak of World War I, belief swelled again. Eight million died in muddy trenches and on battlefields; and on the eve of peace—in the spring and summer of 1918, in an age before widespread vaccines—an influenza pandemic wiped out many millions more.

  By 1920, nearly every person in England, for example, had lost someone dear. Newspapers and magazines on both sides of the Atlantic were full of reports—sincere, sensational, or otherwise—of psychic phenomena, and the spirit debate raged among scientists, ministers, magicians, and the ordinary public.

  Red Cross emergency ambulance station in Washington, DC, during the influenza pandemic of 1918.

  The man who had, in Sherlock Holmes, presented a genius of deductive reasoning wasn’t the only educated convert to the idea of communication between the living and dead. In the 1920s, as in the late 1800s, many great minds
were engaged in this issue.

  Notable scientists subjected mediums to controlled investigations. Some, like the English chemist Sir William Crookes, a president of London’s academy of science, the Royal Society, played an avid and active role. Others, intrigued or skeptical or both, joined organizations like the Society for Psychical Research (SPR).

  “Spiritualism is a humbug from beginning to end. It is the greatest humbug of the century. . . . Every so-called manifestation produced through me in London or anywhere else was a fraud. Many a time I have wept because when I was young and innocent I was brought into such a life.”

  —KATE FOX (JENCKEN), 1888

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, circa 1900.

  Back in England honoring contracts he had made before the war, Houdini sent Sir Arthur Conan Doyle a copy of his book The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin, hoping to engage the author in friendly dialogue.

  Doyle enjoyed the book, which touched on the history of magic; but he objected, in his reply, to Houdini’s claim that the legendary Davenport brothers were not mediums but stage performers.

  Normally outspoken in his opinions, Houdini held back. Doyle was too important (and possibly intimidating) a contact to alienate.

  But as the correspondence continued, and Doyle’s arguments in favor of the Davenport myth wore on, Houdini finally, diplomatically, replied: “I am afraid that I cannot say that all their work was accomplished by the spirits.”