The Secret Life of Houdini (73 page)

That was all Houdini needed to read. Now he had two foes in Boston.

Wearing a fedora and a heavy wool overcoat to ward off the winter weather, Houdini stood in front of Boston’s City Hall and fanned $10,000 (about $400,000 today) in bonds in his hand. The eager photographers snapped away. Although Mayor Curley had found himself “unavailable,” City Collector William McMorrow was at the magician’s side as Houdini literally put his money where his mouth was.

“I agree to forfeit the sum of $5,000 to any charity selected by Mayor Curley if I do not detect, expose or have explained any mystery or manifestation performed three times in my presence and in the presence of the committee of newspapermen, clergymen and magicians,” Houdini announced. “This is especially aimed at Mrs. L. R. G. Crandon…. I have already challenged her and offered to forfeit the same amount of money if I am unable to duplicate or have duplicated every last one of her manifestations.

“Now I have another $5,000 in my hands here which I will put up as bond for my challenge to Professor McDougall of Harvard University. According to his statements, he does not need me to teach him anything about mystery and psychic phenomena. He has made serious charges against me with respect to the Margery mediumship. I will wager him a sum equal to his year’s salary that his knowledge of psychology will be useless to him if he lets me nail him into a heavily weighted packing case and throw him into the Charles River, a condition from which I have escaped repeatedly all over the world. I assure you that Professor McDougall’s friendship with Margery and all her spirit controls will not get him out of the box before he drowns.”

Houdini holding bonds worth $400,000 in today’s money. He’d offered half of it to Harvard professor William McDougall if he would escape from a packing crate thrown into the Charles River.
Library of Congress

“Wouldn’t it be difficult to collect on that bet?” one of the newspaperman asked.

“Yes,” Houdini smiled. “I guess I’d have to make the wager with the professor’s estate.”

Houdini strode out onto the stage, to the cheers of the packed auditorium. His firm steps resounded on the wooden boards of the stage, as he smiled and acknowledged the applause with several short bows. Then he turned serious and walked directly to the footlights at the edge of the stage.

“Ladies and Gentlemen. Before starting I would like to impress on your minds, if I may, please, that I positively am not here to attack any religion. Everyone has the right to worship in his own way as long as it does not conflict with the laws of the country or the laws of humanity. I am not a skeptic. I am perfectly willing to believe, my mind is wide open. For over thirty-five years, day in and day out, night in and night out, I have been seeking the truth. No one in the world has a greater right to want to believe than I. My parents are on the other side, and if there is anyone who worshipped their father and mother it is your humble servant,” Houdini intoned, standing on the lip of the stage of Boston’s Symphony Hall.

More than a hundred clergymen, press people, and magicians flanked the center of the stage as an extended committee. Even Mayor Curley and his children were in attendance. Margery, who had been invited, was not.

“And so that you may properly weigh the religious, I am called a charlatan, a mountebank, a vaudevillian, and an itinerant magician. I am proud of those names. It has taken me years to get to my position. And so that you may rightfully weigh my words—and I am not telling you this in a boastful manner—I honestly came from a family of scholars. I possess two wonderful libraries, one the fourth largest dramatic library in the world. I only tell you this because when they shout the words ‘itinerant magician’ I want you to come to my home in New York and look at my library. I am only telling you this in self-defense, because when I get to the Margery affair and tell you that two of the committee, one who calls himself Dr. Carrington, and who paid $75 for that title—” Houdini was interrupted by appreciative laughter.

“—he is good. And the other, who is a prize student—he is—I think he has won a second prize for some essay, J. Malcolm Bird—when I get down to the Margery séances I will give you my opinion of them, and then I am going to prove what I say. Therefore, despite the fact that they call me the itinerant magician I am very proud of it. It is an honest name. It is not purchased and not stolen.”

Houdini’s years of experience and his charm and charisma had completely won the audience over when he finished his introduction. Now he went on to give his own anecdotal history of the fraudulent Spiritualism. He talked about his early years as a spiritualistic medium, which gave him the knowledge to expose other frauds who might fool eminent men like Lodge or Doyle. “I am not denouncing spiritualism, ladies and gentlemen, I am showing up the frauds. I cannot show up an honest medium. But trot her out,” he said, to much laughter and applause.

Houdini exposing Spiritualists’ tricks onstage.
Library of Congress

He talked about his aborted séance with Lady Doyle, irate that Sir Arthur had assumed that his mother was illiterate and had been able to come through in English because she had studied it in the spirit world. “My sainted mother, God rest her soul, having been educated on the Continent and in a convent, read, wrote and spoke five languages but not one word of English!”

Now Houdini dimmed the lights and showed slides of famous mediums, dating back to the Fox sisters. When that was done, he invited a member of the committee onto the stage and demonstrated how fraudulent mediums did their slate writing trick. The beauty of his demonstration was that his volunteer was made to put a hood over his head, replicating the conditions of the séance room, while the entire audience got to see how the phony medium performed the effect. The methods exposed were captivating and highly entertaining. It was marvelous theater. Through the course of the evening, the audience interrupted him forty-three times with laughter and applause.

Then it was time for his well-advertised Margery exposure, but first he wanted to perform a little miracle. He took two pairs of slates and showed them to the audience, all four sides perfectly clean and empty. Then he bound two slates together and did the same for the second set.

“I want you to watch me very carefully, ladies and gentlemen, because if things are right, this will be a very extraordinary experiment—if things are right.”

He walked over to a committeeman and asked him to hold the slates over his head so the entire audience could see that he wasn’t a confederate.

Then he picked up a standard dictionary and asked another man to drop a card that he provided him into any part of the book he desired. Since it was a very thick book, Houdini told the audience that it would be impossible for any human being to give him the correct numbers of the pages that the card had been inserted between. So he had to call upon the “best known spirit in the world” to give him a sign of his presence.

“Spirit, I command you to read the first and last words and the numbers on the two pages,” Houdini intoned.

“Where is the gentleman who selected the pages? What number is that please?”

The man told Houdini the pages were 116 and 117 and that the first words on those pages were “crowfoot” and “ice.”

“I have called upon the best known spirit in the world today to give us a sign. And when I say the best known spirit, it must be the one that is known best to all present. And so there can be no mistake, that I have not shoved anything between there, watch it please, because when it is all over they will say ‘Well, I saw him insert something. You are a confederate.’ A string? Nothing.”

Houdini opened up the first pair of slates. The numbers “116” and “117” were marked on it, along with the words “crowfoot” and “ice.”

And then he opened up the second set of slates, reminding the audience that he had asked the well-known spirit to show them a sign. There were two photographs between the slate and Houdini held them up for the audience to see. The first was a photo of a young Walter Stinson, Margery’s brother and spirit guide. The second had been autographed. It read,
“My last photograph. Love to all, Walter.”
It was a photo of Walter taken minutes after he was crushed to death between the engines on the night of his fatal accident. Houdini’s ire toward the Crandons had reached ghastly proportions.

The year of the forewarned great catastrophe, 1925, began with Conan Doyle and Houdini at each other’s throats again. On January 26, Doyle’s defense of Margery was published in
The Boston Herald
. The editors waxed sonorously that Sir Arthur was using the very methods of deduction made famous by Sherlock Holmes to make sense of all the phenomena produced by Margery. Noting that he was writing this essay on Christmas Day, he felt that it was an appropriate time to fight for truth and to help restore the honor of a “most estimable” lady such as Mrs. Crandon. There were no bombshells in the piece, only an indictment of Houdini as an egomaniacal, discredited researcher who had been bribed to sabotage Margery’s victory by planting a rubber eraser and a ruler during the séances. Houdini’s master plan was foiled at each turn by Walter, who protected his “
kid
” sister both by warning that Houdini would
“slip a die into the contact box”
two days before it even happened, and by calling him out for planting a ruler so she could use it to reach the bell box and make it ring.

Houdini immediately threatened to sue Sir Arthur unless a retraction was forthcoming, although he admitted that he didn’t really take the attacks too personally since some of Sir Arthur’s “sharpness” might have been a reaction to Houdini’s belief that Lady Doyle was not a valid medium. There was one other mitigating possibility too, Houdini related. Conan Doyle was a “bit senile” and therefore easily “bamboozled,” but he still felt that Doyle was a menace to mankind.

While he was sparring with the Spiritualists, his own investigations into the mysteries of life after death continued. Repeated exposure to fraudulent mediums hadn’t made him lose hope of contact with the dead. His brother Bill had been fighting tuberculosis for years and had been living at a sanitarium in Saranac Lake, New York. During a heavy snowstorm, Houdini drove up to the mountains and stood on Bill’s front porch and performed some new effects for him. As Bill’s condition worsened, Houdini had a phone installed at his bed and instructed the nurse to ring him when the end was imminent. Shortly after the New Year, the call came and with the nurse holding the receiver to his brother’s ear, Houdini shouted, “Remember our compact. After you die, communicate with me.” A minute later, Bill was gone. Houdini holed himself up in a room on the top floor of his house and waited for twenty-four hours, going without food or drink, for the message that never came.

Back in Boston, Margery was sequestered too. Just a few short months ago, Margery was a
nom de séance
in a report by Bird on a promising new medium, but with the unbelievable exposure from the Houdini sittings and the challenges, Mrs. Crandon found herself a Spiritualist superstar. She was quickly deluged with mail, asking for séances. Her failure to show up for Houdini’s challenge and his exposure of her methods necessitated some new stunts in the séance room. She began trying them in October, relying less on physical manifestations and more on mental manifestations, but her sittings with Prince were less than revelatory for him. By the end of December, though, she received a very interesting letter from a Charles K. Tripp. “I have read, with a great deal of interest, the articles in the paper in reference to your controversy with Harry Houdini. I have known Houdini for some twenty-five years. I was once expelled from Keith’s Theatre through the stage door because I volunteered to act as one of the committee that he had asked for, to come upon the stage. I brought suit against Keith’s for assault and this was settled out of court to avoid publicity. I was a manufacturer of mechanical apparatus from 1890 until 1898 and had manufactured apparatus for nearly all the best magicians in the country at that time. If I can be of any assistance to you in showing up Mr. Houdini as being one of the greatest fakers in the century I will be glad to do so.”