The Secret Life of Houdini (69 page)

What Houdini didn’t tell them yet was just how he had figured out that it was she and not Walter who had rung the bell. He had done some advance research and determined that Crandon always sat to Margery’s right. Since the séance was being played to him, he anticipated being on Margery’s left, and he had worn a tight “silk rubber” bandage around his right leg below the knee all day, making that part of his leg swollen and tender. The slightest flexing of Margery’s muscles or any movement of her ankles would immediately be discernible to him in his sensitive state.

That night’s sitting held at committeeman Comstock’s apartment was anti-climactic. Houdini was able to detect almost every time she made a move. She also used Walter to gain advantage to perform her maneuvers. At one point, Walter bellowed for everyone in the room to move back from the table so he could summon up additional energy. In reality, Margery moved back too, and was then able to bend her head and push the table up and over. Houdini caught her using this tactic twice. He had worked out a code with Munn, so that after a prearranged signal, they would break control and Houdini would have an opportunity to grope around the table in the dark. Twice her head ran into his hand. That was enough for him.

“Will I denounce and expose her now?” Houdini whispered.

“You had better wait a while,” Munn cautioned.

When it came time to ring the bell box, Walter literally hit a snag. The box was placed between Houdini’s feet and Margery tried to employ the same tactics as the night before, but she couldn’t move her foot far enough to apply the necessary pressure.

“You have garters on, haven’t you,” she finally said to Houdini.

“Yes,” he said.

“Well, the buckle hurts me,” Margery complained.

When he reached down to undo the garter, Houdini found that Margery’s stocking had been caught up in the garter, immobilizing her leg so that she couldn’t reach the bell box.

“You, Munn and Houdini, think you’re pretty smart, don’t you?”
Walter said.
“Straighten up there!”

When the séance was over, Houdini had Munn call the Committee into a room. Houdini explained Margery’s tactics. Rather than expose her right then and there, the committee decided to go back to New York, where Houdini would file a general report for the entire group. Mrs. Crandon was not to be informed that Houdini had detected her in fraud. Houdini was still pushing for rapid exposure, citing that other mediums had been.

“We will do it differently this time,” Bird said.

Houdini and Munn took a night train back to New York, and Bird rushed back to 10 Lime Street, to tell the Crandons everything that just had transpired in the secret meeting.

“I know something about Houdini that might interest you, but it’s a little embarrassing and I never even told my wife about it,” the Philadelphia patent attorney told his friend, who was a Houdini collector. It was sometime in the 1970s and the two were at a magic convention. “But I am telling it to you now, because she’s dead and gone and I’ll be going pretty soon anyway.”

He proceeded to relate that years earlier he had been invited to one of Margery’s séances at her home in Boston. As an out-of-town visitor, he was accorded the prime spot of controlling Margery’s left hand.

“As soon as the lights went out, in the dark, Margery took my hand and put it between her legs. She was naked under her robe. She tried to make me masturbate her but I was embarrassed and I pulled back,” he recalled, still sheepish all these years after the incident. “She pulled me in again and finally I just pulled my hand away and froze. I was very embarrassed.”

There is a long, rich, lurid history of sex in the séance room, especially between mediums and the men who investigated them. Sir William Crookes, the eminent British chemist who had discovered the element thallium, had sponsored a beautiful young medium named Florence Cook who materialized a female spirit called Katie King. King was supposedly the daughter of the famous pirate John King, whom other mediums materialized, yet she looked suspiciously like a young Victorian lady who pinned a handkerchief over her head, someone like Florence. Crookes’s insistence that the materializations were real made more sense when later psychic researchers revealed that the two were lovers, using the cover of the darkness of the séance room for their assignations.

Materialization séances were often just fronts for prostitution rings both in England and in America. Joseph Rinn, Houdini’s ghost-busting friend, reported that in the late 1880s there were more than a hundred mediums in New York City who advertised in the personal columns of newspapers, many of them actually madams who ran prostitution rings. As late as 1979, the sociologist Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross had clients have sex with “materialized spirits” as part of a therapeutic regimen for people with morbid fears of death.

The most notorious medium who used her sexual charms to seduce her scientific investigators was Eusapia Palladino, the same woman who was channeled by Nino Pecoraro when Houdini tied him into submission. Palladino had no qualms about sleeping with her sitters; among them were the eminent criminologist Lombroso and the Nobel Prize–winning French physiologist Charles Richet. After being discredited, Palladino’s career was revived in 1909 when Hereward Carrington, acting as her manager, brought her to the United States. Whenever she would be caught cheating during séances, Carrington chalked it up to laziness and her stubborn Italian temperament. Once prodded to produce, he claimed she came through with flying colors.

Besides actual sexual activity, there was often an element of voyeurism in the séance room. Eva C (Carriere), a medium who had originally used her real name, Marthe Beraud, until she was exposed, claimed to be able to produce large quantities of a strange, otherworldly substance called ectoplasm, which was thought to be produced by the bioenergy of the spirits. She was investigated extensively by the highly regarded German physician Freiherr von Schrenck-Notzing, who would watch as Eva’s sponsor (and mistress) Mademoiselle Bisson would, during the course of the pre-séance examination, introduce her finger into Eva’s vagina to ensure that no “ectoplasm” had been loaded there beforehand to fool the investigators. The whole procedure was so enjoyable for Eva that she often stripped nude at the
end
of a séance and demanded another full-on gynecological exam.

It wasn’t surprising that there would be an air of sexuality suffusing the Margery séances, especially when, prior to the sittings, Dr. Crandon would proudly display nude photographs of Margery during the throes of her mediumship duties. Margery was perhaps the most beautiful medium since Florence Cook. According to Thomas Tietze, her biographer, “She was a slim and pretty woman whose roundness of limb and pertness of attitude men found ‘too attractive for her own good.’ She dressed well and the fashions of the twenties were good to her. Photographs show clear, frank eyes and an expression both saucy and penetrating.”

Besides her physical attributes, Margery also had the useful ability to make people think that their relationship with her was unique, creating a network of secret allies, who might then be induced to drop control of her hand at a crucial moment during a séance. Malcolm Bird was captivated by her, a likely outcome even though he had already been warned by committee member Dr. Walter Franklin Prince that if he wanted to be taken seriously as a psychic researcher he had to “avoid falling in love with the medium.” Bird attributed her interpersonal skills to her remarkable ability as a “drawer out.” “She possesses an insatiable curiosity, and that one of the ways in which she most effectively feeds it is by just that devise [sic] of shrewdly guessing that something is so and then drawing out the persons that would know about it if it were. And her shrewdness as a guesser is approached only by her skill as a drawer out,” he wrote years later.

Bird had moved in with the Crandons during the earlier months of the investigation, a dubious practice for a supposedly impartial observer. In fact, Crandon’s heretofore unseen correspondence reveals that Bird was actively conspiring with them in stage-managing the séances and achieving a positive vote from the majority of the committee. It’s likely that Bird would have loved to have slept with Margery but anecdotal reports suggest that she found him repulsive. Apparently, at that point, she had reserved her amorous affections for Hereward Carrington, the champion of Palladino and a voting member of the
Scientific American
committee.

Margery’s relationship with Dr. Crandon had always been rocky and volatile. When Carrington moved into their spare room on Lime Street, the stage was set for a torrid tryst. Margery was open about her affection for the English researcher. One night before a sitting, she approached Carrington in the parlor and, in front of Crandon and the other sitters, embraced him and asked, “Wouldn’t you like to kiss me?”

“What was I to do,” Carrington would later write. “She was there in my arms…”

According to a later investigator who got close to Margery, she told him that she had an affair with Carrington that was so intense that Carrington asked her to sell the Lime Street house, which was in her name, and elope with him to Egypt. Bird confirmed that Margery and Crandon had been on bad terms during this period, with Crandon acting decently toward her only after she produced a good séance. Bird also confirmed Margery’s account of an affair with Carrington but he added an interesting addendum—Carrington had borrowed a considerable sum of money from Crandon that he was unable to repay.

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.