The Secret Life of Houdini (77 page)

Houdini just smiled, picked up his hat and cane, and walked briskly out of the room. Mrs. Cook and her assistant, Miss Benson, were taken to the station and charged with obtaining money under false pretenses and fortune-telling. Several of her followers accompanied her to the station and were dismayed when the police refused to allow her to post bail.

Houdini replicated this scene all around the country, following up the leads his investigators uncovered. In Cleveland, accompanied by a newspaper reporter and in disguise, Houdini smeared medium George Renner’s trumpet with lampblack during the séance and shone his flashlight when he sensed the trumpets had been touched. In the light, Renner’s face and hands were smeared with the black substance. Renner was found guilty.

Houdini even struck at the heart of his enemies’ camps. For six years, he had been on the trail of a fraudulent spirit slate writer named Pierre Keeler. In 1925, he sent his very attractive niece Julia Sawyer up to Lily Dale in upstate New York, where Keeler was one of the featured mediums in residence. For three dollars, Julia got messages from a dead sister who never existed and from the spirits of two of her still-very-much-alive relatives. After the reading, she mentioned to Keeler that her wealthy uncle Bill was waiting for her at the railway station. Keeler accompanied her and after exchanging greetings, Uncle Bill, who was sitting in a wheelchair accompanied by a male nurse, whipped off his long white beard and revealed himself to be Houdini.

“I’ve got you Keeler,” Houdini shouted. He reintroduced his “nurse,” who was a New York reporter.

“Houdini, let me down easy,” Keeler begged. “We’re both in the same line.”

If he was being shut out of séance rooms, Houdini enticed the mediums into his theater. At the beginning of his run in every town, Houdini would post a public notice. In Hartford, he ran the following: “
HOUDINI CHALLENGES LOCAL MEDIUMS!—WARNING TO ALL ORGANIZATIONS OF SPIRITUALISTS
—Instead of abusing me you ought to thank me for calling attention to your subordinates; if they are not giving charters on the level,
STOP IT
! I am not fighting the religion of Spiritualism, but there are a number of mediums in town, who claim they are more than human and have the power to communicate with the dead. I hereby challenge the following mediums who have taken money from my operator to come to
PARSONS’ THEATRE TONIGHT
and take some more of my money.” He then listed the mediums’ names and addresses.

Some mediums even took the bait. In Indianapolis, Reverend Charles Gunsolas came onstage to answer Houdini’s allegations. When he denied the account of Rose Mackenberg, a large number of detectives from the National Detective Agency as well as Houdini’s private operatives stood in their seats in all parts of the theater and recited from their notarized accounts of their séances with Gunsolas. In Pittsburgh, Reverend Alice Dooley actually took up Houdini’s challenge to have the spirits answer three of his questions that were placed before her in sealed envelopes. The answers were nonsensical and when Houdini exposed her as a fraud, a woman follower stood up in the balcony and precipitated a near riot by her hysterical ranting. Houdini had to promise to meet with the local mediums and test them under more favorable conditions.

Houdini’s crusade drew unprecedented coverage. If he were in a city for a weeklong run, he would be the subject of front-page headlines every day of the run. Committed Spiritualists filled the papers with letters denouncing him as a charlatan and an Antichrist. Of course, all the attention was good for business, not only for Houdini. After the crusader denounced John Slater in Pittsburgh, the famous medium came to town and, riding Houdini’s coattails, sold out Carnegie Music Hall.

Houdini was genuinely baffled at the reaction of the Spiritualists. “They are holding indignation meetings all over America against my exposé, but as long as they are not willing to give a demonstration before what I would call a qualified committee, I will stick to my guns!” he wrote to Harry Price, the English psychic researcher. “You know I am not a skeptic.”

In fact, he was still looking for the one medium who could exhibit genuine powers. During Mrs. Cecil Cook’s trial in New York, Houdini was asked by her attorney if he believed that everybody who practices or professes communications with the dead are fakers.

“No, sir, under no circumstances,” he responded.

On a hot day in July 1925, Houdini and his secretary, Oscar Teale stormed into the offices of the Francis P. Houdina Company, a radio equipment firm, which was located on upper Broadway in Manhattan, not far from his house. According to Houdini’s account, he was there to complain about some merchandise that was being charged to him, which he hadn’t ordered or received. When he saw a tag on a packing case that was addressed to “Houdini,” he tore it off and refused to return it to one of the employees.

George Young, one of the proprietors, had a different version of the story. He claimed that Houdini and his “father” had come to his office to complain that the company was using his name, spelled slightly different, to exploit their remote-control automobile enterprise. When he and a few of his workers tried to explain to Houdini that Francis Houdina was an inventor “of fifteen years standing,” Houdini refused to listen.

Then all hell broke loose. “I had to protect myself,” Houdini wrote to his pal Tommy Downs the following week. “You know the ‘gorillas’ here get a man on the floor and kick him insensible, cripple him and send him to the hospital. Two of the men started towards me and two were behind. Picked up a chair with such good results that they unlocked the door in a hurry and threw it wide open. You see they locked the door on me before they advanced, so that I should not get away. Teale was thrown up against the wall, staggering. Had no idea I was smashing up chandeliers. All I thought was to save myself. They have a charge of ‘disorderly conduct’ against me which is only a smoke screen to hide their real intentions.”

The Houdina incident was not the first time that Houdini had seemed to have irrationally lost his temper in the last year. On his last trip to Los Angeles, he discovered that the theater manager where he was to perform had placed photos of two of his supporting acts in the newspapers and omitted his. “Lost my temper,” he wrote in his diary. “I raised hell foolishly in Prazza office. All wrong on my part,
but I could not help it.
…I was so sore I had a headache all that afternoon.”

When Houdini wound up his tour in mid-June 1925, his lawyer and intimate Bernard Ernst, noting that Houdini looked drained, persuaded Bess to take a summer rental in Glen Head, Long Island. At first, Houdini thought that it might be a place where he could do “some writing and thinking,” but a cavalcade of invited relatives kept the house crowded all summer. “I have a four hour job of commuting every day, which upsets my ‘equilibrium’ as well as my business affairs,” he wrote to a friend just a week into the rental. As it turned out, Houdini spent only about ten nights in Long Island the whole summer.

The affairs he was tending to might not only have been business-related. According to gossip circulating in the magic world, Houdini had been smitten with a stunning redhead named Daisy White, who worked behind the counter of the old Martinka’s magic shop after Frank Ducrot, a friend of Houdini’s, had purchased the business. A voluptuous vixen with “mocking green eyes,” Daisy would enthrall her clientele by doing card effects, all the time bending over the counter and using her considerable cleavage as misdirection. Journalist Maurice Zolotow once quipped, “Houdini loved only two women, his mother and Daisy White.”

Houdini’s niece Marie Hinson Blood disclosed that Houdini would often “walk along the river in the early…evening” planning his next show and rejuvenating his “psyche.” On one occasion, Bess had prepared his favorite dinner, Hungarian chicken, spaetzle, and custard bread pudding, then she and their little niece waited and waited but Houdini never showed up. The next day, Bess would explain to the young girl that Houdini “forgot about the dinner as he was walking and thinking and never thought about time.” Invariably, a huge bunch of red roses would arrive the next day in an attempt to make amends. On August 2, Houdini, who was in a hotel in Boston, wrote Bess a strange note: “Honey Lamb Sweetheart It is 8
A.M.
No one pay any attention to me you are not with me. So even though you do get a ‘tantrum’ and give me hell, I’d rather have you with me.”

Houdini wrote to Kilby that he spent the summer “getting ready for my forthcoming season and battle with the spiritualists.” He added, “They are sure panning H---out of me, but consider it a compliment.” He began to lecture about the tricks of phony mediums to 150 detectives and rookies in the New York Police Academy, but he still seemed obsessed with one medium back in Boston. Planning to publish an addendum to his Margery pamphlet, Houdini desperately needed to find out her latest moves in the séance room. He enlisted Kilby to do some investigations on Crandon’s cronies and asked W. S. Griscom, a crack
Boston Herald
reporter, to keep him posted on the goings-on at Lime Street, giving Griscom his private phone number and telling him to call him “any night after midnight.”

Houdini also used an undercover medium named George to investigate mediums, including Margery. The only correspondence from him to Houdini that survives is a rambling five-page letter that shows what serious business this had become. Tailed around New York, followed onto trains by private detectives, George pleaded with Houdini, noting that he had been providing him with valuable information. “Let me remind you I have
always
been on the level with you and others. If I were not on the level I would never have written so much about workers in my own handwriting and on my typewriter and in other ways mentioned certain things to you about workers. For one in my position to double-cross you, to betray you in
any
way would be tantamount to ‘business’ suicide. I know full well what you could do to me if I double-crossed you. It would be a comparatively easy matter for you to make all kinds of trouble for me by publishing what I wrote for you, you could also make trouble with the police even though my work is clean and on the level, and I never take money from poor people, or young girls, but give them good advice free, and lie to them and say the spirit says not to take the money.”

In May, Houdini played Boston. While he was performing at Keith’s, Dr. Crandon dispatched a rich businessman friend named Carl Dennett to report back on the show, which included a demonstration of Houdini’s exposure of Margery. Dennett was vocal in defending Margery during the Q&A period and Houdini invited him back to his dressing room for further discussion. Dennett wrote Crandon that Houdini was “very anxious to find out who I was and arranged to have men follow me when I left his dressing-room but we were able to throw them off the trail, so that he could not learn my identity.” The Crandon spy was wrong. A few days later, Houdini sent Dennett a scathing letter complaining about how the businessman had been misrepresenting their encounter all over Boston.

The
Herald
’s Griscom became an invaluable ally to Houdini. As a top local reporter, he was welcomed into the séance room and given a seat of honor next to Margery. Walter took an immediate liking to him and said that he wanted him to come back the next week whether the Crandons wanted him to or not.
“If you don’t come, I won’t,”
Walter pouted. Griscom’s letters to Houdini are filled with good insights into her new manifestations and juicy gossip about her investigators. When the Crandons asked Griscom about Houdini, the reporter said that he liked him a lot and felt him sincere in his attitude to psychic research. “Well, I like and respect Houdini’s attitude much more than most of the others,” Margery said. “At least he’s not afraid to say where he stands, which is more than most of the others will do.”

Crandon and Walter didn’t share Margery’s opinion of Houdini. At the next séance Griscom attended, Crandon brought up the magician. “Houdini’s exploded,” he blustered. “He’s done for.” Walter immediately agreed. “
Yes, it’s all over with Houdini, that faker; why, he tried to plant the kid. But he didn’t get away with it, did he?
”

Ultimately Griscom told Houdini that the deeper he investigated, the more blatant the fraud became to him. “You…have to admit that they are damn clever magicians. You should get them in your show,” he wrote. Houdini agreed that they were clever. “I believe she has improved and must work like a professional at the present time,” he wrote back. To his mind, Dingwall “certainly must have given her a liberal education” in preparing for a “master séance.”

While Houdini worked behind the scenes to penetrate the Crandon camp, Dr. Crandon employed several attack dogs to go after Houdini. J. Malcolm Bird began a cross-country lecture tour to publicize his book on the Margery mediumship and at every stop he lambasted Houdini for attacking Margery for mercenary reasons. Mark Richardson, a noted bacteriologist and an early advocate of Margery’s cause, wrote countless letters to the other committee members, decrying that they never disassociated themselves from a rogue like Houdini. “I think we have Houdini on the run,” a friend of Margery named Nola wrote the editor of
The Banner of Life,
a Spiritualist publication that continually blasted the magician. “From what I hear about town he is a nervous wreck. Says this is his last appearance in vaudeville and perhaps in Boston. Amen!”

Upholding the banner of the Spiritualist movement was making Margery even more of a nervous wreck. As early as April 1925, Dr. Crandon’s sister wrote a confidential letter to J. Malcolm Bird. “My family doesn’t know I am writing. Mrs. C[randon] is reaching her limit nervously—& the goose who lays the golden eggs is going to be killed unless there is some let up somewhere. She is threatening not to sit at all for any of you anymore…The doctor doesn’t realize the nervous strain of having so many people there all the time. She is frightfully nervous.”