The Secret Life of Houdini (83 page)

At some point after midnight, Houdini called his friend Joe Dunninger, the mentalist.

“Joe, I just got in town today and have to hurry right out again,” Houdini said. “I want to move some stuff from the house. Can you come up with the car?”

Despite heavy rain, Dunninger got in his car. By the time he reached 113th Street, Houdini was waiting at the doorway of the house. He was wearing some ragged old clothes and a weather-beaten straw hat. There was a Holmes security officer there to make sure the alarm didn’t go off. Houdini had some bales of papers and magazines stacked up, and the Holmes employee helped load them into the car. Houdini tipped the man fifty cents.

Hungry, the two men stopped for something to eat. When they returned to the car, Houdini told Dunninger to drive through the park, but when they reached the Central Park West exit at Seventy-second Street, Houdini grabbed his friend’s arm.

Years after his experiment in the California soil, Houdini finally performed his Buried Alive effect.
From the collection of George and Sandy Daily

“Go back, Joe!” he said in a hollow, tragic voice.

“Go back where?”

“Go back to the house, Joe.”

“Why—did you forget something?”

“Don’t ask questions, Joe. Just turn around and go back.”

Dunninger complied. When they arrived the rain was even more intense, but Houdini got out of the car, took off his hat, and just stood in the downpour, looking up at the dark house. He returned to the car but said nothing. When they approached the exit of the park again, Dunninger noticed that Houdini’s shoulders were shaking and he was crying.

After a few seconds Houdini looked up.

“I’ve seen my house for the last time, Joe. I’ll never see my house again.”

Just as Houdini was hoisted into the air prior to his immersion in the upside-down water tank, he gasped and his face twisted in pain. In agony, he was released from the stocks, and a call went out to see if there was a doctor in attendance. An Albany bone specialist named Dr. Hannock examined Houdini in the wings and determined that the magician had probably suffered a fracture.

“You will have to go to the hospital at once,” he ordered.

Houdini just waved his hand toward the audience and told him he couldn’t disappoint them. Hopping back out onstage, he did his Needles effect on one leg and finished the rest of the program. Appreciative of his valor and courage, nearly the entire audience waited to cheer Houdini at the stage door after the show. Houdini went straight to the hospital, where doctors confirmed he had indeed fractured his left ankle and advised him to stay off his feet for a week. He stayed up all night and devised a brace that would permit him to perform the next day.

When Fulton Oursler read about his friend’s injury, he immediately dispatched a telegram to the theater. The next day, October 13, Oursler received a strange letter from a medium named Alice A. Wood, who for years had been Dr. Prince’s secretary:

Three years ago, [the spirit of ] Doctor Hyslop said to J. Malcolm Bird of the Psychical Research Society: “The waters are black for Houdini” and he predicted that disaster would befall him while performing before an audience in a theatre. Doctor Hyslop now says that the injury is more serious than has been reported and that Houdini’s days as a magician are over.

Oursler contemplated enclosing that message in a second letter he was sending Houdini but decided it would be in bad taste to forward that communication to someone who was trying to recover from an injury. Meanwhile, Oursler got a response from Houdini. It said, “Thanks for your wire. I have ‘only’ an interior fracture of the ankle….”

By five
P.M.
on Tuesday, October 19, the ballroom at the McGill University student union in Montreal was packed with the largest crowd in the university’s history. Every available inch was taken, and some undergraduates had even climbed up a ladder to get a better view. Professor Tait was the first to ascend the slightly elevated platform, followed by Houdini, Julia Sawyer, and Rose Mackenberg. After a short introduction from Tait, Houdini limped to the center of the platform. His face was pale and drawn; dark shadows played under his tired eyes.
Was this the same man who had filled half the world with awe and admiration?
some of the students wondered.

As soon as he began to speak, those questions were dispelled.

Houdini began with a short dissertation on magic. He told the students that his feats depended on iron nerve, dexterity, and perfect coordination, but they were all done by natural means. People lacked the true ability to see, he lectured; if they could only educate their eyes, they could readily see through almost every one of his so-called miracles.

To be an escape artist, he explained, you need to condition yourself to reject all fear. Our imagination magnifies, if not causes, our pain. If you condition yourself to reject the fear and the pain, you could achieve what seemed to be miraculous feats. To prove his point, he did something he’d done hundreds of times before: He sanitized a needle and stuck it through his cheek. No blood oozed out.

Then he got onto the topic of his lecture: spiritualistic frauds. He lauded those who followed Spiritualism as a religion, but he had only contempt for the “religious racketeers” who preyed on the most vulnerable people. The industry exploited the ignorant, and the credulous had grown to colossal proportions—these frauds were profiting to the tune of millions of dollars every year. “There [are] three kinds of mediums,” he declared. “Those who are honestly deluded, those who are psychotics, and those who are criminals.”

He excoriated Margery and Lady Doyle to such a degree that the next day’s
Montreal Gazette
headline read: “Houdini Assails ‘Slickest’ Medium—Reiterates Charges Against ‘Marjorie’ of Boston as Fake—Tilts at Lady Doyle.” According to him, he was the only person in the world to whom Lady Doyle had ever given a séance. “She produced for me twenty-three pages of classical English in a message from my mother…who [could not speak a word of English]…Don’t you ever believe that any medium can take a message for your Mother when she has passed to eternal rest.”

He pledged to continue his battle even though mediums the world over loathed him “with a deadly hatred.” He ended his lecture with a simple declaration. “If I were to die tomorrow, the Spiritualists would declare an International holiday!”

When the lecture broke up, Houdini was surrounded by a circle of admirers in the billiard room downstairs on his way out of the building. According to eyewitness accounts, Houdini was only too happy to prove his mastery over pain and his ability to withstand hard blows “without personal injury” by challenging anyone to deliver a punch to his stomach. Houdini’s public display of his abdominal prowess was a new development in the mystifier’s arsenal, but as far back as 1918, in an interview with a female magazine writer, Houdini bragged that he was extremely proud of his washboard stomach, “an endowment…of an ancestral cleanliness.” According to the showgirl/spy Alberta Chapman, by 1925, Houdini did informal demonstrations of his ability to withstand punches. On this occasion at McGill, a nineteen-year-old ex-football player named Gerald Pickelman took up Houdini’s challenge to hit him with all his might. The magician withstood the blow and left the building. After performing at the Princess Theatre that night, he rushed to a Montreal radio station to do a live interview about his campaign against fraudulent mediums.

On Wednesday night, Houdini unleashed his attacks on the local Montreal mediums. After enduring some heckling from Spiritualist sympathizers in the audience, he introduced Sawyer and Mackenberg, who gave detailed accounts of their séances in town. Then, switching gears, Houdini began naming some prominent Montreal residents who were in the audience. As if he were a seer, he recounted intimate details of their private lives. After their amazement died down, he explained that his same spies had passed on all that information to him, employing the same methods that crooked mediums use to fleece unsuspecting victims.

The next day, a Montrealer named James P. Clarke dispatched a letter to Conan Doyle. Clarke had been in the audience the previous night and had taken exception to Houdini’s exposé. During the Q&A period, when Houdini was asked how prominent men like Doyle thought it worthwhile to study psychic phenomena, Clarke reported that Houdini had gone off on a tirade against the celebrated author. “His reply was grossly insolent, insofar that he spoke of you as being just a ‘writer of detective stories’ and eaten up with but one subject. Furthermore he said you were no different from the ordinary man—intellectually that you were not a scientist—and acted like a ‘big school boy’ at a conference in New York. He also stated you would believe anything—and the contemptuous manner in which he passed this remark was exceedingly unfair.

“And now I come to the most important part. As a final retort he said he wished you were there in front of him. He would ‘tear you to ribbons.’ Obviously he was taking advantage of the distance between London and Montreal. As these remarks were passed publicly, before a large crowd, I think it only right you should know of them. I was shouted down when I indignantly objected—he had the crowd with him.”

On Thursday, October 21, Pheneas came to the Doyle circle.

“
All is going admirably. All is according to schedule,
” he said. “
Those who have misled others and stood in the way of God’s light they shall be removed
.”

“But there will be the terror which they suffer,” Doyle worried.

“
No, there will be no time for terror,
” Pheneas spoke. “
It will all be very sudden. You remember years ago how I warned you not to go abroad. You would not be here to-night if you had not taken my warning. I have kept pictures of what would have happened to you. I will show them when you come over. The evil forces had plotted your destruction.
”

“I am greatly obliged to you,” Sir Arthur said.

“
It was not so much for your sake as for the sake of the world that we saved you,
” Pheneas responded.

Sam Smiley, along with his friend Jacques Price, waited anxiously outside the Princess Theatre on Friday morning. Smiley had hung on every word during Houdini’s lecture at his school, all the while sketching the magician. When his fraternity brothers brought the drawing backstage after one of Houdini’s shows, the magician was delighted to autograph it and told them to invite the artist to come to his dressing room on Friday so that he could render another portrait for his own personal collection.

At about ten minutes before eleven, Houdini, Bess, Julia Sawyer, and Sophie Rosenblatt emerged out of a car in front of the theater. Some passersby who were examining the outdoor display of locks, chains, and manacles congregated around Houdini. Sophie reminded him to eat something, but Houdini brushed her off. He told her that if he was hungry he could always get something to eat, and then, ever the showman, he miraculously produced a hot dog from the coat lapel of one of his admirers.

When Smiley reminded him who he was, Houdini seemed delighted that he had come and ushered the two students to his small, dank dressing room. The magician offered the boys a seat and then, after taking off his coat, opening his collar, and rolling up his shirtsleeves, he lay down on a couch on the opposite side of the room. Apologizing for reclining on the couch, Houdini told the boys that he had to get rest because of his accident in Albany. His ankle was still bothering him but he had willed himself to conceal his limp during all his shows. This was no exaggeration; he would later write to two friends telling one that the injury had rendered him “a semi-invalid” and complaining to the other that “the broken bone in my foot is causing a lot of worry.” He propped himself up on a few pillows and wondered if it would be all right if he read some of his correspondence before he posed.

Smiley’s first impression of the magician was confirmed in these close quarters. “His sallow complexion, his tightly drawn skin, the dark shadows encircling his tired-looking deep-set eyes, the muscles about the temples and at the side of the mouth twitching nervously—here was a picture of a man who was a little weary and much in need of a long, carefree vacation. His mouth and eyes were tense and firm; they revealed the overwhelming desire and the tremendous will to fight fatigue and illness with the mind.”

As Smiley began to draw, the showman regaled the boys with a biographical sketch. He talked of adopting the name Houdini—“The name…was like magic…It stuck.” He talked about his movie career and told them that he would not return to that arena—the returns were too meager. When the conversation turned to his secrets, Houdini demurred, but told them that in a year or two he would write a book revealing those secrets and hold off publication for many more years. When talking about the feats of the Indian fakirs he even demonstrated how he could, by dint of will, make it appear that his heart had stopped beating and his breathing had ceased.