The Secret Life of Houdini (84 page)

After a while, there was a knock at the door, and Julia ushered in a tall man wearing a long blue gabardine coat that seemed ill-fitting. He was carrying four books under his arm, and Houdini introduced him to the others as J. Gordon Whitehead. Whitehead had come by to return a book he had borrowed from the magician a few days before. It turned out that although Whitehead was clearly older than the other boys, approximately twenty-eight, he was also a theology student at McGill. “His face was ruddy, his hair very thin on top; his frame was powerful though loosely knit, and his neck was inordinately long. He spoke softly with an exaggerated Oxford accent,” Smiley remembered.

As soon as Whitehead entered the room, he dominated the conversation, peppering Houdini with countless queries, enough to annoy Smiley since Houdini kept turning his head to answer the man. Smiley was intrigued by what Houdini had to say.

“It seems that Houdini had been a detective for many years and had aided in unraveling so many mysteries and had read so many detective stories, that he boasted of being able to piece together any detective story, unknown to him of course, by hearing three or four paragraphs from different sections of such story,” Smiley wrote.

At that point, Whitehead, who conveniently had a mystery book with him, tried the experiment. After reading just three or four excerpts, Houdini was successful in relating the outlines of the plot. Was Whitehead a confederate in a preplanned exhibition to astound Smiley and Price? Again, we will never know. The episode was punctuated with one of Houdini’s favorite sayings—“Think of the trouble I might have caused if I had used my talents for ill.”

Then Whitehead changed course dramatically. He began to interrogate Houdini about the Bible. “What is your opinion of the miracles mentioned in the Bible?” he asked.

Houdini suddenly drew back. “I prefer not to discuss or to comment on matters of this nature,” he said. “I would make one observation, however—what would succeeding generations have said of Houdini’s feats had he performed them in Biblical times? Would they have been referred to as ‘miracles’?”

Whitehead seemed taken aback at this statement. He immediately turned the subject to Houdini’s physical prowess.

“Is it true, Mr. Houdini, that you can resist the hardest blows struck to the abdomen?” Whitehead asked out of the clear blue.

To Smiley, Houdini didn’t seem to be very proud of his abdominal musculature. He ignored Whitehead and said, “My forearm and back muscles are like iron! Feel them.”

The three complied and were duly impressed, but Whitehead was unrelenting, steering the conversation back to Houdini’s abdomen.

“Is it true that your stomach muscles can stand very hard blows?”

“My forearm and back muscles are extremely strong. They’re like iron,” Houdini repeated.

Whitehead wouldn’t be put off. “Would you mind if I delivered a few blows to your abdomen, Mr. Houdini?” he asked.

“Whether it was a matter of professional pride or whether Houdini felt that it would hurt his prestige to refuse—I do not pretend to know. Before I knew it Houdini had accepted this challenge and then and there he lay supine, but apparently not quite ready to receive Whitehead’s blows. Hovering over his outstretched form, Whitehead, with elbow bent, suddenly struck four or five terribly forcible, deliberate, well-directed blows to Houdini’s abdomen,” Smiley wrote.

Smiley froze with shock but Price leaped to his feet and pulled Whitehead off Houdini.

“Are you mad?” he shouted at the man with indignation.

Houdini had seemed to wince with each succeeding blow. Finally, he made an arresting gesture with one hand and, looking at Whitehead, a wry smile played across his face. “That will do,” he mumbled.

The atmosphere in the small room became charged with tension. Smiley felt that Whitehead didn’t at all seem repentant about his attack. He and Price felt so uncomfortable that the artist finished the portrait and packed to leave. Houdini seemed pleased with the drawing and asked Smiley to sign and date it.

“You made me look a little tired in this picture,” the mystifier said. “The truth is I don’t feel so well.”

Then the three visitors said their farewells and departed.

The first indication that something was wrong came at dinner that night. Houdini was continually rubbing his stomach, which alarmed the nurse. He admitted to her that he was in pain. He seemed to suffer through Friday evening’s performance and, according to Rosenblatt, “complained continually” about his pain.

He must have tried to maintain some stoic front because that night, according to Bess, Houdini threw a champagne party in his room and invited Julia and Sophie. Later that night, about two
A.M.
, Bess, who appears to have been rooming with her nurse, got a call from Houdini. Besides the pain, he was now experiencing horrific cramps. Bess massaged his stomach.

The next morning, Bess found a note from Houdini.

“Champagne coquette. I’ll be at the theatre about noon.” He signed it, “HH Fall Guy.”

With so little sleep, Houdini dozed in his dressing room before the Saturday matinee, and, according to Rosenblatt, nearly fell asleep during his performance. Later that afternoon, he complained of awful pains in his stomach, “just where I got the blows,” he told the nurse. She gave him a Sedlitz powder for his indigestion. During the evening’s performance he was so weak and in so much pain that he was unable to raise his left foot to step into a cabinet used during a vanishing illusion. Collins had to assist him both then and at a few other points during the performance.

After Saturday’s evening show, the troupe prepared to take an overnight train to Detroit, where they were scheduled to open their run on Sunday night. Houdini sat in an armchair in the lobby of his hotel, the Prince of Wales, reading a newspaper and waiting for the others. There was a door in the back of the lobby that led to a bar called the Pig and Whistle. As Houdini sat and read the paper, three young men entered the lobby from the bar and walked up to the magician. One of them, who according to eyewitnesses appeared burly like a football player, without any warning, delivered a crushing blow, right through the newspaper, to Houdini’s stomach.

He doubled over in pain.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” he said to the stranger, and then slowly stood up and walked out of the lobby.

The opening night sold-out crowd at the Garrick Theater in Detroit was getting antsy. Houdini’s show was scheduled to start at eight-thirty, but after a short announcement that there was a delay due to the late arrival of personnel and equipment from Toronto, it was almost nine and there was still no sign of the mystifier. Suddenly, the familiar strains of “Pomp and Circumstance” echoed through the theater and Houdini walked onstage.

“We have just made a thousand-mile journey from Montreal, and we are tired,” he exaggerated, as he began to perform magic. From the beginning, the audience sensed something was wrong. He covered a bare table with a large cloth, but he was so clumsy in uncovering the table that the audience was able to see how a bowl filled with water and a goldfish had appeared. When it came time to unfurl a long silk streamer from the bowl, Collins had to step in and pull it out for him. Houdini tried to maintain a good front, though. When he began to do a card effect, a heckler from the balcony threw his own deck of cards onto the stage and asked the magician to use them instead of his own. At first, Houdini frowned at the interruption, but then he gingerly bent down, retrieved the cards, and used them for his effect, to the delight of the audience. Clearly something was wrong, though. Several times during the show, he touched his side and whispered to people in the wings.

As he walked through the curtains at the end of the first act, he collapsed and had to be carried to his dressing room. His temperature was 104 degrees, but somehow he willed himself to go back out onstage. A doctor had examined him before the show and had urged him to go to the hospital immediately, but Houdini had refused. “They’re here to see Houdini,” he spoke of the sold-out house. “I won’t disappoint them.” Somehow, he made it through the Spiritualist portion of the show, challenging local Detroit mediums, but he was speaking faster than ever, and his sentences sometimes trailed off. When the last question had been taken from the audience, Houdini looked down at the footlights, said good-bye to the audience, and slowly walked backward, bowing at each step. When he made it through the curtain, he collapsed.

He was rushed to his dressing room, where he lay down. The outer corridor was filled with well-wishers but only F. L. Black, a collector friend of his, was allowed inside. Black talked to him for a few minutes and went away with the impression that he was “suffering intensely.” Even still, Houdini found time to type a reply to his friend Fulton Oursler’s letter, telling him that while he was in the Midwest he hoped to find time to go to Toledo to have a séance with the medium Ada Besinnet.

An ambulance was waiting outside the theater but Houdini stubbornly insisted on taking a cab to his hotel room. At the hotel, Bess became hysterical and insisted they call the house doctor. A young physician named Daniel Cohn, who was substituting for the vacationing Hotel Statler doctor, saw Houdini. He was so concerned that he called a staff surgeon at Grace Hospital, Dr. Charles Kennedy, who arrived at the hotel around three
A.M.
Kennedy concurred on immediate hospitalization but Houdini balked. Finally they called his New York physician, Dr. William Stone, who got on the phone with the magician and ordered him to the hospital.

Houdini was admitted to Grace Hospital at about four
A.M.
Monday morning. They sought a private room for him since he was so famous, but there were none available. “Well, if there is nothing but a double room, that will do for me,” Houdini said. Dr. Cohn took his new patient’s case history. When he asked his occupation, Houdini answered, “Author. And magician.” From the start of his stay, he was a model patient. Every time an attendant or nurse would do the most trivial thing for him, like mopping his brow or giving him a sip of water, he would look them in the eye, smile, and thank them.

For reasons unknown to this day, Houdini wasn’t operated on until Monday afternoon. He requested to walk into the operating room and was upset when the request was denied, but as the two young, burly stretcher orderlies wheeled him in, Houdini put up his mitts and joked, “Say, I can still lick the two of you.” Houdini also had one other strange request right before surgery. He called Dr. Kennedy to his bedside and, pointing at Bess, said, “Please keep that woman out of my room all the time, because she is the most peculiar woman I have ever known in my life.” This request was complied with, and Bess was kept away for days.

Dr. Kennedy made an exploratory incision right down the middle of Houdini’s abdomen. From the previous night’s examination and interview with Houdini, Kennedy suspected that the blows Houdini received in Montreal had ruptured his intestine or caused a clotting of the large blood vessels to the intestine. Appendicitis was never seriously considered because he was told the blows had been struck on the left side of his abdomen and that was where Houdini reported his pain.

According to one newspaper, right after the exploratory incision, “pus overflowed from Houdini’s abdomen and spilled onto the floor of the operating room.” Kennedy was shocked to see that Houdini’s appendix was “a great long affair which started in the right lower pelvis where it normally should, extended across the midline and lay in his left pelvis, exactly where the blow had been struck.” He concluded that Houdini’s appendix had ruptured, allowing deadly poison to seep into his system. He removed the gangrenous mass that had been Houdini’s appendix and closed him up.

Immediately after the surgery, a medical bulletin was issued to the waiting reporters. It noted that Houdini had been operated on for acute appendicitis and that the physicians “expressed grave concern regarding his chances of recovery. Delay in applying for medical attention may hurt his chances of recovery, they indicated.” Privately, they gave him twelve hours to live. At ten
P.M.
, another bulletin was issued stating that his condition remained unchanged, he was still under the effects of ether, and that a team of physicians remained at his bedside.

One of that team was the young Dr. Cohn. Thrilled that he had such a famous patient although he was just out of medical school, he spent night and day at Houdini’s bedside. As the magician’s condition seemed to stabilize, Dr. Cohn listened with rapt attention as Houdini, in halting sentences, reminisced about his childhood in Appleton. One night, Houdini suddenly turned to Dr. Cohn.

“I have a yen for Farmer’s Chop Suey,” he said.

Since Houdini had no appetite during his hospital stay, the request was probably made out of sheer nostalgia for his childhood. Farmer’s Chop Suey was a popular dish in Jewish homes—a medley of raw vegetables slathered in rich sour cream. The dutiful doctor walked across the street to a nearby delicatessen and brought back two portions.

“If I die, don’t be surprised if phony spiritualists declare a national holiday,” Houdini mused, between bites.

On Tuesday a post-operative specialist named Dr. George LeFevre was brought to Detroit from Montreal, where he been attending a conference. LeFevre was a homeopathist who had devised an experimental serum to combat the poisons circulating through Houdini’s G.I. tract. LeFevre seemed pleased with Houdini’s condition after the serum was administered. He noted that the magician’s temperature had dropped to 99.4 and his pulse was 100. Collins telegraphed the news back to coworkers in New York. “
HAS IMPROVED WONDERFULLY DOCTORS PLEASED WITH RESULTS BUT STILL VERY GRAVE BETTER SIGNS DAILY SATURDAY DECIDES THE TURN WILL KEEP YOU INFORMED HOPE BAGGAGE AND ANIMALS STORED OK HUNDREDS OF WIRES DAILY FLOWERS AND LETTERS COLLINS
.”

On Friday, October 29, Houdini’s condition worsened. Peritonitis had developed and the poison had spread to his intestines and paralyzed them. A second operation was ordered. “Mr. Houdini has reacted to the second operation much better than we expected he would,” the medical bulletin read. “His condition is very grave, but hope for his recovery has not been entirely abandoned. His temperature is 103, pulse 130 and respiration 40.”