The Secret Life of Houdini (65 page)

On Saturday, at four-thirty in the afternoon, Houdini met Doyle and his two boys in the swimming pool of the Hotel Ambassador. Houdini taught the boys how to dive and float. Sir Arthur marveled at Houdini’s feat of holding his breath underwater. Later, Lady Doyle joined them as Houdini and Doyle sat on some deck chairs, looked out at the blue Atlantic Ocean, and talked Spiritualism. Doyle told Houdini about a wonderful spirit photographer named Mrs. Ada Deane who had been producing amazing results. Houdini held his tongue, knowing that the Magic Circle in London had trapped the medium red-handed with marked plates, but he was amazed to hear that Doyle had raised $125,000 on his lecture tour, the money all earmarked for the Spiritualist cause.

During their conversation, Doyle’s children ran up and told Houdini that they had no fear of death, since the spirit survives physical extinction. The group, sans Bess, all repaired to a swimming meet that evening where Houdini forced an antsy Conan Doyle to stay to the end lest he disappoint the young boys vying for prizes.

On Sunday, Houdini and Bess were sunning themselves on the deck chairs when a small boy led Conan Doyle to them.

“Houdini, if agreeable, Lady Doyle will give you a special séance, as she has a feeling that she might have a message come through. At any rate, she is willing to try,” Doyle said.

Then he turned to Bess.

“We would like to be alone. Two people of the same mind, either positive or negative, could interfere with Lady Doyle getting any writing from the spirits that controlled her. You do not mind if we make the experiment without you?” he said.

“Certainly not, go right ahead, Sir Arthur; I will leave Houdini in your charge,” Bess said.

Sir Arthur marched Houdini to their suite, and Lady Doyle proceeded to deliver the fateful message from Houdini’s mother.

After the séance was over and the letter from Houdini’s mother had been read, Conan Doyle advised Houdini to follow his mother’s advice and practice automatic writing when he went home.

Houdini picked up one of the pencils.

“Is there any particular way in which I must hold this pencil when I want to write, or does it write automatically?” Houdini asked.

Then he poised the pencil over the pad and wrote down the word “Powell.”

Sir Arthur was thunderstruck. He jumped up in the air when he read that word. “The Spirits have directed you in writing the name of my dear fighting partner in Spiritualism, Dr. Ellis Powell, who has just died in England. I am the person he is most likely to signal to, and here is his name coming through your hands. Truly Saul is among the Prophets. You are a medium!” Doyle rejoiced.

According to Doyle, Houdini, who had looked “grimmer and paler” as he read the letter from his mother, was genuinely moved at the end of the séance and when he tried to do automatic writing, a strange look came over him.

“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 real, 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.