The Secret Life of Houdini (79 page)

She described their year touring as the most wonderful year in her life. In contrast to many people in the magic community who, without ever having met Houdini, dismissed him as an arrogant egomaniac, Dorothy thought that he was “so kind, so thoughtful.” She never saw him turn down a person who needed money, telling her, “I’ll never forget what it is to be without money.” They also shared a belief in the “hereafter,” Dorothy remembered. Houdini told her that he was trying to contact his mother. “I know it’s impossible,” he said, “but if there’s any way at all, I will do it.”

According to Dorothy, even though Houdini adored Bess, she thought it was “strange” that she never saw any tenderness expressed between the two of them. Houdini was all business, working all day with Collins on the show, having a communal dinner with Bess, his nieces, and Dorothy, and then going back to work on the business end of the show with Mr. Smith, his tour manager. That left the days open and Bess and Dorothy became running partners. Bess was a “funny duck,” a real “free spirit,” who shocked Dorothy when she gave her an introductory course in sex education. Every day they’d go out shopping, one time even buying matching fur coats, and then they’d lunch together and just laugh at “anything.” One time they came back from their day’s excursion with chameleons on leashes.

When they were playing in Buffalo, Bess and Dorothy rented a car and went to Niagara Falls. On the Canadian side of the border, on a whim, Bess decided to buy a bottle of liquor and smuggle it into the United States, which by then had been dry for three years. They succeeded. That night at dinner someone mentioned their brush with the law. It was “the only time I remember Houdini really getting angry,” Dorothy told us. “His eyes snapped and he said, ‘Do you realize the adverse publicity we would have had if they had found that liquor?’”

According to Dorothy Young, affectionate displays like this were less frequent later in the Houdinis’ marriage.
From the collection of Dr. Bruce Averbook

Houdini was only a few minutes into his exposé of fraudulent mediums—the third act in his one-man
Houdini
revue—when he was interrupted by a local Worcester, Massachusetts, man.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Armstrong LeVeyne, the husband of a local medium, shouted.

“Then come up here and tell the audience,” Houdini suggested. LeVeyne ambled up to the stage.

“History repeats itself,” he began. “Christ was persecuted and now we Spiritualists are being persecuted. Some day, as in the case of Christ, the people will see the light!”

“But Christ never robbed people of $2, did he?” demanded Houdini.

“Your tricks are frauds,” shouted LeVeyne. “You are duping the public exactly as you claim Spiritualists are.”

“I studied years to do what I’m doing,” Houdini countered. “The people know I am deceiving them. I give them optical illusions for entertainment, part of which is derived from their efforts to discover how I do it. I challenge you to duplicate my feat with the locked water tank or any other of my tricks.”

LeVeyne refused. The audience hissed him.

“Letty LeVeyne was my mother. She was a famous Australian vaudeville star—the greatest woman who ever lived. I loved my mother. I love my wife. I am here today to protect my wife. My wife is a member of the National Spiritualist Alliance, and she is backed by it. She is backed by law. She is backed by the people, and she is backed by the White House. She will give a demonstration at any time of her psychic ability, an endowment given her by the Deity.”

“All right, let her perform here,” Houdini countered. “The public is here, eager to see her perform.”

“This is not the place. We need a church,” LeVeyne shouted. “How can this be considered a church even for a few minutes when so many women appear on stage half-dressed?”

For a moment it looked like Houdini was going to jump across the stage and attack LeVeyne. The audience broke out into derisive boos and hissing. Then Houdini called Bess and her niece Julia Sawyer from out of the wings.

“Folks, this is my wife, Mrs. Houdini, to whom I have been married thirty-one years. And this is Miss Sawyer, my niece. Have you anything to say against their characters?”

“No. They’re all right,” someone in the audience shouted. “It’s LeVeyne who’s all wrong.”

That was too much for Mrs. LeVeyne. She stood up from her seat.

“But what do you know about them?” she screamed.

The audience ignored her as Houdini held up his hands.

“Now I want you to hear the testimony of Reverend F. Raud.”

Houdini pointed toward a woman in a side box who had just stood up. She was dressed all in black and wearing a long black veil that completely covered her face.

“This is one of my investigators. She goes by the name of Frances Raud, but we call her F. Raud for short. F-R-A-U-D. She is disguising herself tonight because we have had reports that there are a number of photographers who are in attendance tonight with the explicit purpose of taking her photograph. At present, she is unknown to the mediums so she can continue her investigations.”

Houdini turned to the LeVeynes.

“I am greater than you are. I own a church. See, here are my certificates and my charter,” he said, pulling out some papers from a folder on a table next to him onstage. “They prove that I own a church. And Miss Raud is its pastor. So Reverend Fraud, please tell the audience your experience with Mrs. LeVeyne.”

When children were too ill to come to his show, Houdini brought it to them.
Library of Congress

“This woman told me that my dead husband and dead child were together in the spirit world and were endeavoring to communicate with me,” Mackenberg said. “I asked her how she got these messages and she told me that her spirit guides had given them to her. I thanked her and offered her a dollar but she said her price for a reading was two dollars, which I paid her. I have never been married, nor had any children.”

“I never saw this woman,” Mrs. LeVeyne screamed from her seat.

“Now you said in the papers you were coming here to accept my challenge,” Houdini told Mrs. LeVeyne. “Will you keep your promise?”

“The law says religion must not be commercialized,” she answered.

“Just collect the two dollars,” someone in the audience shouted.

Rose Mackenberg resumed her speech, but when she mentioned that she had purchased the charter to Houdini’s church from Hubert O’Malley, one of the area’s leading spiritualistic mediums, the theater became a bedlam.

“Get him, make him prove something,” people shouted. It took a full five minutes to restore order.

Then LeVeyne jumped to his feet.

“Our Spiritualist Church will hold an indignation meeting next Sunday,” he shouted.

“I drove out the fakes in California and I intend to drive them out of Massachusetts,” Houdini boasted.

The audience cheered.

“You are not a God yet!” LeVeyne shouted over the din.

“No, but I know a great deal about mediums,” Houdini replied.

“I’ll protect my wife—” LeVeyne began.

“And I’m protecting the public,” Houdini finished.

The audience cheered lustily.

It was like that every night of his run in Worcester in December 1925. The Spiritualist segment that closed the show had evolved into a surrealistic town meeting where mediums and Houdini shouted each other down. It hadn’t hurt the box office. Houdini was selling every seat he could, except for the matinees, when he made sure there were blocks of free tickets distributed to the city’s crippled children or orphans.

I…Am a Fake

W
HAT IS YOUR FULL NAME?” THE
gentleman from Michigan inquired.

“My name is Harry Houdini.”

“What is your business?”

“I am an author; I am a psychic investigator for the scientific magazines of the world; and then I am a mysterious entertainer.”

He had created a great legend and became the most famous entertainer alive. Now he was transforming himself into a public advocate. This should have been the acme of Houdini’s career, one of his proudest moments. He was sitting behind a table in the caucus room of the House office building in Washington, D.C., giving expert testimony with respect to proposed legislation that would ban people from “pretending to tell fortunes for reward or compensation” or “pretending to unite the separated.” He wasn’t just testifying, though; he was actually instrumental in getting the bill drafted, working closely with his old friend Sol Bloom, who had gone from organizer of the Midway Plaisance at the Chicago World’s Fair to music industry mogul to U.S. congressman. This was the culmination of Houdini’s crusade against fraudulent mediums, his own stage in the nation’s capital where our esteemed legislators could join with him in dealing with this menace to public order. Instead, it had devolved into a three-ring circus.

The hearing room was packed with a motley group of Spiritualists, mediums, clairvoyants, gypsies, and astrologers. They filled up every chair and squatted in the aisles, peppering Houdini with a constant barrage of verbal abuse, ethnic slurs, and threats. The entire four-day hearings in February and May 1926 were an exercise in the theater of the absurd. Houdini gave demonstrations of slate writing and spirit trumpet manifestations to the congressmen. Senator Fletcher’s wife testified and claimed that in thirty-five years of psychic research she had never encountered a phony medium. Houdini flashed $10,000 in U.S. currency as a challenge to any medium to tell him what his father had nicknamed him, then Madame Marcia jumped up and screamed, “That money belongs to me! I predicted the election of President Harding and his death.”

A Spiritualist named Charles William Myers took the witness stand and, referring to Houdini and Bloom, declaimed, “In the beginning…2,000 years ago, Judas betrayed Christ. He was a Jew, and I want to say that this bill is being put through by two—well, you can use your opinion.”

Reverend H. P. Strack, the secretary of the National Spiritualists Association of America, speaking of Houdini, was shocked that anyone would heed the words of “a pronounced atheist and infidel.”

After being insulted by witness after witness from the Spiritualist camp, Houdini requested to make a statement.

“My religion and my belief in the Almighty has been assailed…. I have always believed and I will always believe. I am a Mason, and you must believe in God to be a Mason. My character has been assailed. I would like to have as a witness here Mrs. Houdini.”

To the laughter of the crowd, Bess stepped forward.

“One of the witnesses said I was a brute and that I was vile and I was crazy…. I will have been married, on June 22, 32 years to this girl…. There are no medals and no ribbons on me, but when a girl will stick to a man for 32 years as she did and when she will starve with me and work with me through thick and thin, it is a pretty good recommendation. Outside of my great mother, Mrs. Houdini has been my greatest friend. Have I shown traces of being crazy, unless it was about you?”

The audience laughed.

“No,” Bess testified.

“Am I brutal to you, or vile?”

“No.”

“Am I a good boy?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Houdini,” he said dramatically. The hearing room filled with applause.

One of the few substantive moments of the hearings came when Rose Mackenberg was called to testify about her encounters with Mrs. Jane Coates and Madame Grace Marcia, two of Washington’s most notorious mediums. The congressmen actually allowed the two corpulent ladies, who had been sitting in the front row, to stand on either side of Houdini’s chief investigator. According to
The Chicago Daily Tribune
reporter, if looks could kill, their looks “would have seriously injured, if not destroyed the existence of Miss Rose Mackenberg.”