The Secret Life of Houdini (86 page)

In a letter to Fulton Oursler, Doyle was even more forthcoming about Houdini’s fate. “His death was most certainly decreed from the other side,” he wrote. Part of his reasoning was that Houdini was hiding his real psychic powers under the guise of conjuring. “The spirit world might well be incensed against him if he was himself using psychic powers at the very time when he was attacking them.”

Given that Doyle felt that the spirit world “decreed” Houdini’s death, is there any reason to suggest that Doyle, like Annie Benninghofen and others like her, was capable of helping the spirits along in their desires? According to his contemporary psychic researchers, Doyle was a man who would brook no opposition to his ideas. “He was not a man who was accustomed to being told he was wrong,” Eric Dingwall observed. Nor was he above fudging with facts to support his spiritualistic theses. Walter Franklin Prince noted, “The mistakes of Houdini very frequently do not help his argument—that is, if he had got the facts straight they would have served his type of propaganda just as much, while Sir Arthur’s blunders nearly always work to the favor of his argument.”

Doyle was also not above using threats to force his will. In a dispute with Harry Price over Price’s exposure of one of his favorite mediums, Sir Arthur threatened to have Price evicted from his laboratory and suggested that if Price persisted in spewing “sewage” about phony Spiritualists, he would meet the same fate as Houdini.

It’s hard to extrapolate from these predispositions and suggest Doyle played an active role in enacting Pheneas’s death sentence on Houdini, but that’s not to say that Doyle’s circle’s condemnation of Houdini and the forecasting of his doom for standing in the way of their movement wasn’t read as a code by other Spiritualists. What gave all this an added sense of urgency was that Doyle and his intimates knew that time was running out. The great crisis of the world was at hand; they were in the end times.

On January 5, 1927, Dr. L. R. G. Crandon was one of the keynote speakers at the Thirty-second Annual Convention of the Massachusetts State Association of Spiritualists. Sharing the bill with him was William Elliott Hammond, the author of “Houdini Unmasked.” With Houdini out of the picture, Crandon and Margery had begun a national tour to promote the spiritualistic doctrine and fulfill Pheneas’s wishes for them to be the leaders of the U.S. movement.

The files of Walter Franklin Prince contained an astute analysis of Dr. Crandon. “[He] is a man who has never learned to play. He takes everything seriously. Mrs. Crandon, on the other hand, is extremely fun loving. Dr. Crandon took up Spiritualism as a violent hobby and Mrs. Crandon played it for all it was worth. He is able to pose as a martyr to science, likening himself to Galileo. A half million uncritical Spiritualists in the country regard Margery as a sort of Messiah. In this way Dr. Crandon receives a balm for his prestige in certain quarters, which he feels entitled to because of his surgical skill. Another interesting point is that Dr. Crandon’s upbringing has been violently anti-supernaturalistic and this whole business seems a reaction against this. He claims that Walter has entirely removed the fear of death for him. This fear was evidently of a rather morbid sort, judging by certain books in his library.”

There’s an especially poignant letter in the Margery archives that was written by Margery’s biological son to Dr. Crandon’s biological daughter, who the doctor had disowned after he divorced her mother. “Dr. Crandon…was a supreme egotist,” John Crandon wrote. “He could tolerate no one who opposed him in any way.” He paints a picture of a man who, because of his “pathological egoism” had to “be a big wheel,” suggesting that was the reason for the tremendous investment in Margery’s mediumship. Concomitant to all this, Crandon had control issues, to which John attested. “I never did
one thing
against Dr. Crandon’s wishes!” he told his stepsister. “In spite of the fact that I had no particular desire for medicine, I went into medicine for his sake.” He also wrote: “I owe everything I have to your father.”

It was alleged among Crandon’s enemies in Boston psychic circles that the doctor had threatened an investigator who had the temerity to touch some of the ectoplasm that Margery produced. He was quoted as saying, “If he had carried out his test, he would never have left the house alive.” Young John Crandon is the source of another disquieting story about his stepfather. According to his recollections, Dr. Crandon and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle made a late-night trip to a hospital morgue to lift fingerprints off a cadaver to assist Margery in her production of fingerprints during her séances.

In 1932, Eleanor Hoffman, Dr. Prince’s secretary, cultivated a friendship with Margery and began filing confidential reports to Dr. Prince. Some of their conversations pertained to the Houdini-inspired investigation by the Secret Service and the British M.P. Harry Day into the disappearance of young boys in the Crandon household. Margery’s statements affirm that there was at least one additional boy other than Horace Newton who came over from England. According to her account, this boy’s parents were still alive, although poor, and Crandon’s sister Laura took the boy from a home and brought him to Boston. They kept him all summer and wanted to adopt him, but according to Margery, the family would not allow the adoption so they returned him to England. Before he was allegedly returned, Margery said that “the poor little fellow had adenoids and had to be circumcised,” so Crandon performed the operation at home. After the operation, “the little fellow sat up in bed and looked at himself and said, ‘I aren’t pretty anymore,’ and John told him that was all right, he looked like that too.”

When the little boy left, according to Margery, “people wrote asking his whereabouts, and the prime minister of England cabled to ask where he was and demanded a cable reply. Why people even said Dr. Crandon committed illegal operations on little children and murdered them,” she told Hoffman. Doyle seemed worried, too. In an undated letter during Day’s investigation, he wrote Crandon, “Concerning that blessed boy—was he lost on the way back? This answer reached me today. I have to know the details of the affair in case I have to meet any question.”

On the same day that Margery related the circumcision story, she opened a closet door to put away some fingerprints Walter had produced and showed Hoffman a “whole rack of pictures of little children—most of them really lovely.” When Hoffman commented on the pictures, Margery told her: “Those are Dr. Crandon’s caesareans—aren’t they sweet? All caesareans.” As far as we know, Crandon was a surgeon who was not noted for delivering babies, naturally or by Caesarean. There were much more than one hundred pictures of young children in Crandon’s closet.

When Houdini received the blows to his stomach in Montreal, the prime minister of Canada was Mackenzie King, a closeted Spiritualist who used to hold séances to commune with his dead mother and dog. King’s secret interest in the spirit world was only revealed to a shocked Canadian public in 1950, two years after he had finally left office.

A similar revelation might have transpired in the White House. Houdini had been intent on proving that his assertions about séances in the Coolidge family were correct. In 1929, in a letter to British psychic researcher Harry Price, Crandon informed him that a Theron Pierce, “a man long interested and active in psychical research,” had been formally delegated by the ASPR, which Crandon controlled by then, to represent that society during Margery’s London experiments. “You may further recognize him as a host…to the President and Mrs. Coolidge last summer for three months. Mr. Pierce’s estate was the summer White House.”

The Pierce family obtained their vast wealth through oil interests. Was Pierce close to Joseph DeWyckoff, another Spiritualist multimillionaire? Did their influence extend up to the White House?

The man who viciously assaulted Houdini in his dressing room remained a stranger to history until Montreal journalist Don Bell began a twenty-year journey to ascertain his identity. Bell’s groundbreaking book only added fuel to the notion of a conspiracy against the master magician. Joscelyn Gordon Whitehead was the son of a pool hall owner in Kelowna, British Columbia, a small town with a rough reputation. Although he wrote that he graduated from Kelowna High School on his McGill student card, Bell could find no record of Whitehead’s attendance there. What he heard from close associates of Whitehead was a different story. According to them, Whitehead’s father was a British consul in either Hong Kong or Singapore, and Joscelyn was believed to have had a proper English education before enrolling at McGill.

Bell discovered that after Houdini’s death, Whitehead became a virtual recluse, living in a dank apartment that was stacked from floor to ceiling with old newspapers. The only human interaction he seemed to have had was with various women who were interested in spiritual pursuits. One of these women happened to be Lady Marler, a wealthy heiress and the wife of Sir Herbert Marler, a long-time ally of the Canadian prime minister and a one-time ambassador to the United States. Lady Marler was said to be extremely close to the devout Spiritualist prime minister. How she got to be close to Whitehead was never determined.

A close examination of the depositions given by Whitehead, Price, and Smiley reveals some interesting facts. When Whitehead appeared at Houdini’s dressing room that fateful day, he had already had a prior relationship with the magician. He had come to return a book he had borrowed and Houdini was well enough acquainted with him to introduce him to the other two students. According to Whitehead’s deposition, he had several encounters with Houdini that week. In one, Whitehead claimed that the two had spoken about longevity and that Houdini had given him an advance copy of the November
Scientific American
. A perusal of the table of contents revealed that there was an article about longevity in that issue written by Houdini’s old friend A. A. Hopkins.

What’s curious about Whitehead’s account is that he claimed that he called upon Houdini in his room at the Mount Royal Hotel. Bell learned that Houdini’s troupe had been staying at the Prince of Wales Hotel that was adjacent to the Princess Theatre. In Houdini’s archives, there are several notes in Houdini’s handwriting, even one to Bess, written on Mount Royal stationery. Was Houdini maintaining a separate hotel room in a different hotel? Why would he do that?

We know that Houdini had double agents who had ties to the Spiritualist community. Could Houdini’s interactions with Whitehead have been an attempt to create another such agent? If Houdini was taking the threats on his life seriously, as we know he was, it would be prudent for him to maintain a separate hotel room away from the others in his group. Whitehead stated in his deposition that he had called on Houdini at the Mount Royal twice, one time leaving his card. They had obviously met before the punching incident on Friday, and in fact, Whitehead claims that they met twice after the incident. The later visits may have been intended to make light of his vicious attack on Houdini. What’s certain is that Whitehead’s line of interrogation in Houdini’s dressing room that fateful Friday is eerily reminiscent of Spiritualists who sought to engage people in discussions of the Bible to promulgate their claim that Jesus and His disciples were spiritualistic mediums who performed miracles.

Whitehead’s insistence on talking about the miracles of the Bible seemed to catch Houdini off guard. When he refused comment and suggested that he would have been considered a miracle worker in biblical days, Whitehead seemed disturbed by his answer. The assault took place just seconds later. According to Whitehead, Houdini invited the punches, but we know from the other two eyewitnesses that it wasn’t the case. Was the wry smile that crossed Houdini’s face after the pummeling a realization that the Spiritualists had gotten to him? Was the attack the fulfillment of Margery’s threat to have her friends beat him up? Was the bizarre assault in the lobby of the Prince of Wales hotel part of a Spiritualist plot?

There were hundreds of people at Grand Central Station on November 2, awaiting the train that would bring Harry Houdini back to New York for the last time. As his coffin was borne through the station, people wept openly and bared their heads. Two days later, more than 2,500 people jammed into the Elks Club in New York for the funeral. A far larger number of people thronged the streets outside, almost closing it off to traffic. All of Houdini’s siblings, including Leo, attended. Bess, wearing a veil and a black silk dress, was accompanied by Sophie Rosenblatt and collapsed when the coffin lid was permanently affixed. Rabbi Bernard Drachman eulogized Houdini, claiming: “He possessed a wondrous power which he never understood and which he never revealed to anyone in life.” Rabbi B. A. Tintner added: “He was exceptional, a unique personality, and besides that, he was one of the noblest and sweetest of men.”

Mourners line up before Houdini’s coffin.
From the collection of John Cox

After the ceremony, as the last strains of Chopin’s Funeral March faded, a procession of twenty-five cars tied up traffic as it made its way through the Manhattan streets and over the Queensborough Bridge. When they reached the gravesite at Machpelah cemetery in Queens, Bess collapsed again.