The Secret Life of Houdini (89 page)

“Yes, yes. That is the message. Harry—Harry!” Bess said, stifling tears.

“He says ‘Tell the whole world that Harry Houdini still lives and will prove it a thousand times and more.’ He is pretty excited. He says ‘I was perfectly honest and sincere though I resorted to tricks, for the simple reason that I did not believe it true, and no more than was justifiable. I am now sincere in sending this through in my desire to undo. Tell all those who lost faith because of my mistake to lay hold again of hope, and to live with the knowledge that life is continuous. There is no death. That is my message to the world, through my wife and through this instrument.’”

Bess lay back on the couch, almost delirious.

Houdini had broken through.

Houdini Breaks Chains of Death, Talks From Grave in Secret Code

Harry Houdini’s Message Arrives!

Houdini Speaks From Grave to Aid Spiritism

The news made headlines around the world the next day, fueled by moving accounts of the séance written by the two journalists present. Spiritualists around the world celebrated their greatest holiday yet.

Interviewed by reporters, Bess stood by the séance and made plans to go to the safe deposit box to retrieve the code. “My friends will call me mad, I know. I have received advice and warnings from many who are near to me not to go on with this. But it is what Harry asked me to do. He ordered me to do it. It was the arrangement we had before he passed on.” To reinforce her convictions, she issued a statement: “Regardless of any statements made to the contrary, I wish to declare that the message, in its entirety, and in the agreed upon sequence, given to me by Arthur Ford, is the correct message prearranged between Mr. Houdini and myself. Beatrice Houdini.”

The very next day the entire enterprise was smeared with not a taint but a large, messy stain of conspiracy. In a remarkable turnaround, the reporter who had written the previous day’s article, Rea Jaure, revealed that the entire séance and the transmission of Houdini’s secret code had been choreographed step by step by Ford and Bess. Under an even bigger headline, “Houdini Message a Big Hoax!” Jaure admitted that her initial article had been written the day before the actual séance, because Bess had taken her through a line-by-line rehearsal of the transmission. According to Jaure, Bess had invited her to many wild booze-fueled parties thrown by “temperamental people” in the weeks before the séance and had introduced the reporter to her escort, a young, attractive man named David Fletcher. Visiting Mrs. Houdini the day before the séance, Bess showed her the letter that contained the code that had been dropped off by Fast and Stafford. Jaure then borrowed the letter and rushed to her office to have a photostatic copy made. When she returned to Bess’s house at six
P.M.
she asked Bess what would transpire at the séance.

“I shall lie on the living room couch. When Mr. Ford enters…I will be introduced to him and say, “I don’t suppose you remember me. I came with others once a long time ago to Carnegie Hall, where you were denouncing Houdini from the platform.”

“‘Yes,’ Ford will say. ‘I was told afterwards that you were Mrs. Houdini. This is not a good way for us to meet again. Come, let us sit and see if I can convince you that I am at least sincere.’ Ford will appear to go in a slumber and directly say, ‘Hello, Bess, the guide will be David Fletcher.’ He will say ‘Houdini is here and wishes his wife as faithful in death as in life to receive his message.’”

Bess then continued her narrative about the séance. According to Jaure’s second article, it unfolded exactly as Bess had told her it would, except that the widow had forgotten to say, “Harry—Harry” until she was prompted by her friend Minnie.

The day after the séance, Jaure called Ford, who was ecstatic over the publicity the séance had generated. She wanted to meet him to discuss it and he told her he had to attend a lecture in New Jersey that night but that if eleven
P.M.
was not too late, he would stop by her house then. Jaure said she was working but that if they could agree on a time, she would leave work and meet him at her apartment. They set the assignation for 11:15
P.M.

Jaure got home by eleven, accompanied by William Plummer, her managing editor, and Edward Churchill, another reporter. The two men hid in the kitchenette. Arthur Ford arrived right on time. Sitting in the living room, Rea began by asking Ford if he remembered the “peculiar” party where they had met. “You went with Bess and I first met you as Mr. David,” she said.

“Yes, indeed,” the medium said. “Wasn’t it funny? Bess and I had a great time among those temperamental people, didn’t we?”

Then Jaure lowered the hammer. She told Ford that she had written her story twenty-four hours before the séance and showed him her original notes with the code written out by Bess. Ford’s face turned white.

“But you must play ball,” he pleaded. “Really. I would be glad to make financial compensation.”

“Reporters never take money,” she replied.

“Then I’ll give you tips on big stories. I have some very prominent people who call upon me,” he said.

“I get all the tips for stories that I want.” Jaure shrugged.

After Houdini’s death, Bess associated with some “temperamental” types.
From the collection of Dr. Bruce Averbook

“Then I will give you friendship—undying friendship.”

“The first thing you know David, you will be proposing.”

They both laughed.

“I understand that you and Mrs. Houdini are going on a free-lance lecture tour,” the reporter said.

“Well, I’m going to—I’m always making lecture tours,” he said.

“Who is financing this one?” Jaure asked.

“Why I am. Mrs. Houdini supplied the message and code, and I am supplying the finances.”

“Then you did not get the message from Houdini?”

Ford smiled. “You know, Rea, I could never have done that!”

Ford tried to get Jaure to admit that the
Graphic
couldn’t reverse their story after the first had already been in print, but the reporter told him that the story was just getting interesting.

“Is there anything—anything at all I can do to make them forget it? Anything I can do for you, Rea? You just play ball and I will give you a nice big story tomorrow.” Ford seemed desperate.

“But I am out to get a story to-night.” She smiled, thinking of the concealed men and their Dictaphone. Jaure made sure to walk the Reverend Ford out so that the doorman could see him again and be able to make a positive identification if need be.

Jaure’s second story exposing the hoax opened up the floodgates. Now Houdini’s friend the mentalist Dunninger jumped into the controversy. First he told the press that Houdini had told him shortly before he died that he would never contact anyone through a medium. Then Dunninger produced a new witness, a fish peddler named Joseph Bantino, who met with the press at Mrs. Houdini’s house to clear Bess’s name of complicity in the plot.

“You guys get me straight. I ain’t after no dough, see?” he told the assembled reporters. “If you guys think that, I’m gonna jam right now. I just ain’t gonna let nobody kick a lady when she’s down.”

Bantino, who had been brought to Bess’s place by Dunninger, told the newsmen that he was going out with a girl who knew Daisy White, who happened to live in the same building as Bantino. According to the fishmonger, Ford got the message from Daisy White, who had learned it from Houdini long before he had turned incorporeal.

Bess seemed bewildered by this revelation and she indignantly denied that Daisy White “had had her husband’s confidence.” Now all hell broke loose. People started shouting, Minnie Chester denounced Bantino, and Dunninger looked pained.

“They’ve dragged my name through the dirt enough,” Bess wailed, holding her bandaged head.

“Am I trying to help you or not?” Dunninger protested.

“You’d die for me. You’d die for me,” Bess sobbed, “releasing her head long enough to press one hand to her chest and extend the other dramatically toward the mentalist.”

Minnie’s fight with Bantino escalated. When Bess started crying hysterically, everyone left the house.
The New York Telegram
reporter reached Daisy White, who was at Arthur Ford’s apartment, and she admitted “slightly” knowing Bantino, and denied everything else.

Ford, meanwhile, began issuing broadsides accusing Jaure of concocting the hoax story because he wouldn’t “play ball” with her in her attempt to persuade Bess to publish her correspondence with the former editor of
The New York World,
who was in Sing Sing serving a life sentence for murdering his wife. The whole sordid affair had devolved into a “he said, she said” circus. What nobody realized at that time was that there had been a much bigger conspiracy to put Houdini’s message over—a conspiracy that stretched its way up to Boston and then across the ocean to the London home of one of the most famous writers in the world.

The question of whether or not Houdini was deliberately killed may never be fully resolved. There is no doubt that the death of the world’s greatest magician benefited the Spiritualist movement and only their movement. Crandon may have had the greatest motive to get rid of Houdini in the first place, but once Houdini was gone, it was Doyle who immediately understood the implication of his death and went to work. Once the Spiritualists make contact with Houdini and he becomes their de facto spokesman from the other side, they have won. Houdini’s legacy, his reputation, the respectability that he was yearning for his whole life, the status that he, even on his deathbed, thought he never achieved—all that could be hijacked in one fell swoop.

Dunninger was very clear about how to go about this. “There is one primary rule in the fakery of spirit mediumship. That is to concentrate upon persons who have suffered a bereavement.” When Houdini died, who had suffered a greater bereavement than Bess? Who would be a more convincing conduit for Houdini’s message than the grieving widow who loved him so much?

Within two weeks of Houdini’s death, Doyle had written Bess. If he couldn’t convert her husband, he would go to work, with all his silky eloquence, on, as he called her to Crandon, “the widow.” Frustrated by the delays on January 8, he sent Crandon a directive. “I wonder whether it would not be possible for Walter to get us something really evidential about Houdini. If he made inquiry I think he would find that the period of coma is very much less than he has thought…I am in quite intimate touch with Mrs. H who is a splendid loyal little woman. She seems quite to accept our point of view but is very keen on getting some evidence which she can give to the world.”

Doyle knew just the man who could get that evidence. The Reverend Arthur Ford.

Arthur Ford grew up in Fort Pierce, Florida, in a Southern Baptist family. His first inkling of his psychic power came in the army in World War I when he would hear the names of his fellow soldiers and days later, read the same names on the casualty lists. In 1924, he became a full-fledged trance medium, controlled by “David Fletcher,” a pseudonym for one of his childhood friends who had died back in Florida. Ford was extraordinarily ambitious and before he turned thirty, he headed his own Spiritualist church in New York.

“When I first met Arthur Ford, I could hardly believe that this was indeed the already-celebrated medium,” Conan Doyle would later write. “He is a young, clean-shaven, fresh-faced man, carefully dressed, with all the appearance, and indeed the habits, of a man of the world, who thoroughly enjoys the things of this life. He is gentle, sympathetic, and likely to be popular with the ladies. His manner is silky. His voice is low. He is a man who would be popular in any company, however cosmopolitan, and who would be quite at home in the gayest circles.” In short, he was the man for Doyle’s job, which was to get the Houdini message through and validate the Spiritualist agenda, and, at the same time, hijack Houdini’s legacy.

Houdini would not be the first Spiritualist adversary who Doyle brought back seeking penance. In 1927, Doyle’s skeptical friend the writer and publisher Jerome K. Jerome died. Soon afterward a medium friend of Doyle’s brought back a message: “Tell him from me that I know now that he was right and I was wrong…. Make it clear to him that I am not dead.” Doyle immediately trumpeted the message to the world. Similar sentiments had been brought back, through Lady Doyle, from Sir Arthur’s mother.

Ford quickly became Doyle’s protégé. “We
must
put the séance on a business footing,” Doyle wrote Ford. “It is your job as writing is mine. You must let me send you such a cheque as is suitable.” Plans were made for Ford to proselytize around Europe. In short time,
The Psychic News
was referring to Ford as Sir Arthur’s successor, “the psychic apostle of this age.” But first he had business in New York.

After staying in London for six months, Ford returned to the United States. In the fall he wound up in Boston and met with the Crandons. As Ford was the first to admit, the state of Spiritualism in the United States was quite sorry, as Houdini’s crusade had made serious inroads into combating spiritualistic influence. Perhaps as the opening salvo on the Spiritualist side, the bizarre Carnegie Hall “debate” between Howard Thurston and Ford was staged. Ford went on the attack; Thurston conceded all his points. It’s instructive to realize that Thurston was a friend of both Doyle and Crandon and a Spiritualist sympathizer. This event was also where Ford met Bess.