The Secret Life of Houdini (72 page)

Houdini’s box was also on Doyle’s mind. He called it a mystery, but he had some advice on how to get to the bottom of it—they should ‘reach’ Dr. Comstock’s assistant. “If Conant would quarrel with Houdini or if he were amenable to persuasion of any sort we should get at the facts,” he urged Crandon. What sort of persuasion, he left to the good doctor’s imagination.

On September 5, Pheneas decided to comment on the situation in Boston.

“There is a great deal going on in America at present…. The evil forces are very strong, but the forces of light are stronger. Truth always prevails. Houdini is going rapidly to his Waterloo. He is exposed. Great will be his downfall before he descends into the darkness of oblivion. He has caused a terrible fate…. Prince will not be far behind him. They will be centres of evil, like a whirlpool with its eddies, dashing humans to destruction.”

This was even before Doyle had received word from Crandon that Walter had claimed to expose Houdini. A few days later, Doyle asked for more information about the Crandons.

Lady Doyle threw up her hand.

“Houdini is doomed, doomed!”
Pheneas almost shouted.
“A terrible future awaits him. He has done untold harm. It will not be long first. His fate is at hand. He, and all who uphold him, will be, as it were, chained together and cast into the sea. Your friends the Crandons will even in this world reap the reward of their brave work…. In the fearful crisis which is soon to come, America in her sore need will find that she has here a sure and well tested bridge to that spirit world…. They will play a great part in the crisis and it is then that they willfully come into their own.”

Doyle wrote Crandon and reported Pheneas’s conversation. As if to underscore it, on September 11, Lady Doyle wrote directly to Margery. “My husband’s fine guide told us that all that you have done is going to have very great results in the future…. When the…upheaval comes to the world and America is stricken, as she will be…you will be a great centre…and they will flock to you as a bridge of knowledge & hope & comfort…We were also told that Houdini is
doomed
& that he will soon go down to the black regions which his work against Spiritualism will bring him as his punishment.”

This exchange of information among the mediums is significant. Sir Arthur believes what he’s told. Lady Doyle and Margery, however, are the women behind the curtains. Lady Doyle is writing to Margery in code. They can’t be overt because it’s always possible to have a letter intercepted. Lady Doyle’s message could be decoded as “You have doomed Houdini on your side, I have done likewise. Between the two of us, the word will get out and this bastard who is standing in our way will get exactly what’s coming to him.”

Houdini seemed circumspect during his September engagement in Boston. He confided in Prince that he was beginning to believe that Crandon was actively “aiding and abetting” his wife in the séance room but whenever the press asked him about the recent sittings, he declined comment. He even spurned an invitation to meet Margery when she phoned him during his Keith’s stay. The only thing new about his half-hour vaudeville turn was his thinning hair and the extra few pounds in his midriff. The motion picture that warmed up the audience was taken eighteen years earlier when he dove into the Seine and escaped the gendarmes. Then he did his Needle Mystery, brought Bess out of retirement once again for the Metamorphosis, and closed by escaping from a straitjacket.

Houdini’s reluctance to comment on the Margery case seemed strategic. A few months later, he had self-published a pink pamphlet called “Houdini Exposes the Tricks Used by the Boston Medium ‘Margery’ to Win the $2500 Prize Offered by the
Scientific American
.” In the pamphlet, which was chock-full of photos and line drawings of the séances, Houdini opened up. “I charge Mrs. Crandon with practicing her feats daily like a professional conjurer. Also that because of her training as a secretary, her long experience as a professional musician, and her athletic build she is not simple and guileless but a shrewd, cunning woman, resourceful in the extreme, and taking advantage of every opportunity to produce a ‘manifestation.’”

When Prohibition came, the loss of business caused Frank Brophy to close down his Hotel Princeton in Princeton-by-the-Sea, a picturesque seaside town about thirty miles south of San Francisco. Ironically enough, the tiny town boasted three piers in 1924, and they were in constant use to bring in the bootleg booze that was flowing up from Los Angeles. This process wasn’t as easy as it sounds with the California Prohibition director taking a proactive stance against this kind of smuggling, but even the bootleggers wouldn’t think that the authorities would send a swimmer into the frigid nighttime October waters to reconnoiter their “rumrunners” and report back. What human could possibly withstand that cold water for that long and not get hypothermia?

As if he didn’t have enough to do battling the Margery crowd and crisscrossing the country lecturing on the evils of phony mediums, Houdini was now back working for the government. In the February 17, 1967 edition of the
Oakland Tribune
, two longtime Bay Area residents were interviewed and they reminisced about their star-studded past. Hattie Mooser, along with her sister Minnie, had run a famous restaurant during Prohibition that all the visiting entertainers frequented. Their brothers George and Leon managed many famous magicians and were some of the men who encouraged Houdini when he was just starting out. According to Hattie, Houdini was visiting the restaurant one night when he pulled her out, hailed a cab, and directed the driver to cruise down to the waterfront so Houdini could point out where he had done some missions for the government. “Not many people knew it but Houdini helped the Coast Guard round up a ring of rum runners. They often asked him to assist an investigation because he was such a good swimmer and had trained himself to withstand cold. He would swim out to a suspected rum runner’s boat, look around, and report back to the authorities.”

This information was confirmed by an escape artist and Houdini buff who befriended the Moosers in the sixties. Both of the sisters told him that Houdini had worked for the Secret Service and had drawn on those experiences for his movie
Haldane of the Secret Service
. According to the women, Houdini’s skills as an illusionist who worked with equipment that contained hidden compartments was valuable to the government in assessing how the rumrunners were bringing their contraband onshore. Houdini’s interest in smuggling went back to his early days in Europe when he filed reports back via his
Dramatic Mirror
column. On January 8, 1904, writing from Scotland, he reported that a New York gang was smuggling jewels to the United States from Germany and France in tin boxes stuffed into the cadavers of Americans who had died in those countries.

Houdini may have had another connection to the rumrunning gangs that he was surveilling for the government. Many California millionaires, some of them in the budding movie business, were the financial angels for a bootlegging ring that smuggled rum over the Mexican border using not only coast-hugging ships but airplanes too.

Hattie often alluded to having an affair with Houdini. Even at ninety, in the small apartment she shared with her sister in Westlake, she kept a life-size autographed photo of him on her wall. “Houdini is mine!” she told the reporter. She might have cryptically revealed her liaison when she told another reporter that she and Bess watched as Houdini dangled headfirst nine stories above the ground on March 27, 1923, doing a straitjacket escape in front of the
Tribune
building. “Bess took my hand and her nails dug into my palm,” Hattie remembered. “It surprised me and I asked her what on earth was wrong. ‘It’s such a little bit of a thing, you’ve seen him do much more dangerous things,’ I told her. Bess held my hand tightly and said, ‘Yes, he has many tricks but he only has one heart.’”

That 1924 San Francisco visit must have been quite complicated. Bess was traveling with Houdini on this leg of his lecture tour, and besides Hattie Mooser, Charmian London lived nearby. Houdini had kept in touch with her since their affair in 1918 and, according to Charmian’s diary, she never could get “Magic Man” out of her consciousness. With Houdini in town, she found it impossible. Not immediately hearing from him, she decided to buy her own ticket to his show. That same day, she had lunch with a friend at the Mooser sisters’ restaurant, where Hattie regaled her with stories of Houdini’s early years. The next day she saw “Magics” [Harry and Bess] and when asked to meet them later she declined, “& feel like a fool!” Halloween was a particularly hard day. “Dream of Magic a lot…Poor night—Too intense from Magic. Calls up early. I am asleep. Calls up 12:30—will call up again in an hour to see where we’ll meet for an hour. Meet planned and I wait alone in apt., & finally sorrowfully leave.” Apparently that was the last she heard from Houdini. A week later she wrote, “Complete silence from Magic. Wonder if wire raised ructions.”

“Houdini Hits Conan Doyle—Magician Says Englishman’s Occult Teachings Are Menace to Sanity and Health,” trumpeted the Los Angeles headlines on the morning of October 29, 1924. After months of lecturing, and his contretemps with the Crandon crew, Houdini started to take the gloves off in public. “Doyle thinks he is a Messiah who has come to save mankind by instructing them in the mysteries of occultism,” Houdini told the reporter, as if he had read Pheneas’s mind. “But instead of that he is misleading the public and his teachings are a menace to sanity and health.”

Houdini’s lectures were having other more concrete effects too. After he left the Los Angeles area, police raided a group named the National Independent Spiritualist Association and indicted its president, vice president, and eight other officers on charges of conspiracy and fraud. One of the officials was charged with luring many of his five hundred female clients to his office, where he enticed them to pose nude. The undercover investigation was aided by a L.A. reporter who had been in close contact with Houdini the whole time.

Houdini’s efforts were beginning to draw the notice of Spiritualists besides the Margery camp. On December 9, 1,500 Chicago area Spiritualists met to protest Houdini’s attacks on their religion. Calling him an ignorant “itinerant paid magician,” Reverend C. Burgess ridiculed Houdini’s attacks on such distinguished men as Doyle, Lodge, and Barrett and claimed that the magician belonged in an insane asylum.

Back in Boston, Doyle was assuming a larger and larger role in the Margery damage control efforts. Crandon seemed ready to defer to Doyle’s advice on almost every issue, including who would get to sit with Margery. When Eric Dingwall, an investigator from the British Society of Psychical Research, attempted to get sessions with Margery, Doyle reminded him that he was the gatekeeper to the medium. Angry at Dingwall for his part in exposing one of Doyle’s favorite mediums, he foolishly wrote Dingwall, “I have been desired to cable Mr Crandon how far they would be wise in acceding to your request to sit with ‘Margery.’ I cannot answer this until I have some assurance that the injustice done to Hope will be removed. How can I possibly recommend you to a second medium when the first has been so illused? Mr. de Brath seemed to think yesterday that there was some chance of a revision of the Hope case. Should I have your assurance to that effect I would regulate my reply to Mr Crandon in accordance.”

Doyle’s strategy backfired. Dingwall, irate, immediately sent Crandon a copy of “the extraordinary letter” from Doyle “in which he tries to make a bargain with me upon the case of Mr. Hope.” He also forwarded Doyle’s letter to the council of his organization. Chagrined, Crandon had no choice but to allow Dingwall to come to sit with Margery.

Meanwhile Margery was forced to deny the charge, published in Houdini’s pamphlet, that she had threatened Houdini with a good beating. “Can you imagine any lady making any such threat?” she asked innocently. “Did you ever hear anything so absurd? And Houdini is as strong as a horse, too,” she chuckled.

By the end of December, Margery had more denying to do. Banner headlines across the country proclaimed, “Houdini Gets Death Threat—‘Evil Spirits’ Put Curse on Him.” The articles went on to report that Houdini had been condemned to death by “evil spirits” for impugning the validity and honesty of Margery’s mediumship. Houdini publicly scoffed at the threats, telling the papers that “this Boston group can’t even give me a pimple by sticking hat pins through my photograph and, what’s more, they can’t get in touch with the dead by retiring into fake trances in fake medium cabinets.”

Once again, Margery was in denial mode. “Magician Conjured Story That ‘Evil Spirits’ Were Loosed to Kill Him in Year for His Own Amusement, Mrs. Crandon Claims,” the papers reported. “All talk by Houdini that spirits are plotting his death within a year is not only false but absurd,” Margery said. “Why, I never heard of ‘Black Magic.’ I regard his statement as a joke.” But confirmation of the curse came from an unlikely source. Earl Rand, Margery’s ex-husband and current grocer, confirmed that his mother-in-law had attended a séance at the Crandons’ in October where Walter appeared and announced that he gave Houdini
“but one year more to live.”

In November, the SA committee issued a preliminary report that was inconclusive; Prince, Comstock, and McDougall remained swing votes, and desired more time to study the mediumship. In October, Prince had a one-on-one sitting with Margery. After Walter rang the bell box, Prince speculated that Margery might have had an apparatus concealed beneath her gown. She immediately stripped it off, leaving herself nude, and gave it to him for examination. Whether this was done under red light was not recorded.

By December, Houdini’s strident anti-Margery statements had rankled the rest of the committee. Dr. William McDougall, the Harvard professor of psychology, had been out of town for the Houdini sittings but on his return he lambasted the magician in the press. “I understand that he came with his beliefs already fixed and was unable to admit any possibility of there being a new force,” he said. “The only thing which I personally hold against him is his attempt to make it appear that the committee was on the point of awarding the prize to the Crandons until he stepped in and saved it from itself. This I strongly resent, as it makes him seem to have a monopoly of intelligence and of caution. I do not require Houdini to teach me something about which I probably know more than he does.”