One evening he came rushing out of the bathroom, his face lathered in shaving cream. “Bess, come quick!” He was nearly delirious with excitement. “I think my mother is trying to reach me!” Bess tossed her needlework aside and ran into the bathroom.
“Listen,” he whispered. They stood silently side by side, until Bess began to hear a muted, erratic tapping noise. “It’s some kind of code,” Harry said.
Bess followed the origin of the noise to the window, and pulled open the shade. Outside, the shutter was hanging loose from its hinges, and the wood was knocking against the house. It almost broke her heart to tell him; for a moment she considered letting him believe, but in the end, she could not.
Harry’s face fell. He laughed a little. “How ridiculous of me,” he said at last and went back to shaving.
Then the offer from Ben Rolfe at Octagon Films came for Harry to film The Master Mystery. Bess begged Harry to do it. California, she knew, could be a new start for them. But it was only after she had convinced John Sargent, Jim Vickery, Jim Collins, and two more men from Harry’s crew to come with them that Harry gave in. The men adored Harry, despite his fiery outbursts, the occasions on which he would fire them, then greet them the next morning as if nothing had happened. Periodically, they would raise their own salaries, as Harry always forgot to address such issues. When Bess looked at the books and questioned Harry about the raises, he defended them. “Of course it’s okay!” he told her, indignant. “Think of the high cost of living!”
So they were swept into the chaos of Hollywoodland—the poolside parties, the champagne on silver trays, the catered lunches behind painted wooden sets. It was a different world of celebrity from the one they had enjoyed in New York. The enchanted city was, essentially, a desert town, dusty and mountainous, that had been transformed into a kind of fairy tale—a self-made utopia. Everyone was there. They went to places like the El Fay Club and lived large—visiting Rudolph Valentino at Falcon Lair and William Randolph Hearst at San Simeon, his estate enormous with Gothic fireplaces, sundecks, pipe organs, pagodas, and projection rooms.
A month before their departure westward, Harry had surprised Bess with a weekend in Coney Island at the Brighton Beach Hotel. It was as extravagant as she had remembered, gold-gilded and marbled and salt-aired. But it also felt worn-out. Oddly, she had left feeling not nostalgic but indifferent, as if that part of her life had belonged to someone she barely knew, someone she might pass on the street with only a flicker of recognition. California, on the other hand, seemed fraught with glitz and energy, the hotels even more opulent than the Brighton Beach.
The studios were just being built, and Bess marveled at this vast landscape dotted with massive, skylit buildings, the warehouses filled with costumes, the miniature cities built overnight. It all seemed like a grandiose version of the playacting she had done as a child, but these actors performed with more gravity than she had, much the way Harry performed his own art onstage. The streets where the more modest moviemakers lived were lined with orange flowers and white-fenced houses. After supper people sat on their porches until the sun went down, and there was a lazy, dreamy quality to those California evenings that reminded her of the ones she had spent as a little girl in the rowhouse in Brooklyn, when one could still be anything.
Renting the house down the street from them in Laurel Canyon was another well-known couple, Jack and Charmian London. They had come to Hollywood from Sonoma to sort out contracts for screenplays of Jack’s work. Some years before, Jack had written a novel titled The Call of the Wild, which had garnered him instant fame. He’d led an adventurous life, which he liked to recount during late Friday night dinners. He had lived in Alaska during the Klondike Gold Rush, had spent time in a Japanese prison, and had tended grapes in a vineyard. He and Harry had an eerie number of things in common. Both had massive book collections; Jack’s first wife had been named Bess; and his mother had been a spiritualist performer, back when the art had first become popular.
Bess, for her part, was enamored with Charmian, who embodied the freedom of spirit Bess was still trying to achieve. She was dark-haired and voluptuous and seemed, to Bess, to be a more exciting and beautiful version of herself. What distinguished her most of all in Bess’s eyes was that Charmian was not simply her husband’s companion. She had a career of her own; she was a writer, too, and had published short stories.
“Jack’s having a bad day today,” Charmian told her, as they set up their sun umbrellas. The seagulls wheeled overhead. Bess looked at the water where the men were wading. Jack London had been sick for years with uremic poisoning, and was on and off morphine.
“Is there anything we can do?” Bess brushed the sand off her arms. “You shouldn’t feel obligated to go with us tonight, you know.”
Charmian shaded her eyes. “Darling, we wouldn’t miss it. We’ve seen those doorknob tags.”
Bess had come up with the idea to distribute thousands of tags promoting Harry’s movie; they were printed with the words This lock is not Houdini-proof. “Yes,” Bess said, “Harry’s particularly fond of those.”
Charmian laughed. “A picture that will thrill you to the marrows, I’ve read.”
“I certainly hope so. The Man from Beyond didn’t fare so well. Harry put so much into that one, too.” Bess shielded her eyes from the sun. “I feel happy here—happier than I’ve ever been in New York. And I think Harry’s found his first real friend in Jack. What Jack does, his writing, I mean—it’s like Harry’s art. His account of the San Francisco earthquake in Collier’s—I’ll never forget it. And for three days and nights this lurid tower swayed in the sky, reddening the sun, darkening the day, and filling the land with smoke. It was both beautiful and terrifying.”
“Yes, but Harry deals in secrets, not in words. That’s much more fascinating. I imagine you know many of them. His secrets, I mean.”
For a moment Bess saw herself as she imagined others must see her—glamorous and full of mystery. She wanted to be those things in California. She didn’t just want to be, for all her first-class travel and royal introductions, a middle-aged woman who’d loved the right man. As she discovered, people liked her in Hollywood. From the moment they’d arrived, several years before, the invitations had come to their house in her name, too, not just in Harry’s. And she felt useful; she enjoyed sweeping about the parties, negotiating Harry’s contracts and soliciting others. Since Harry had begun his own production company, putting him in charge of his scripts and casts, there was more than enough work to keep her in the office all afternoon.
And Harry had been infinitely more romantic since they had come to Los Angeles. On occasion he seemed so full of energy that she could see a glimmer of the old Harry. He liked to play little tricks on her. Once she had come home from a luncheon to find a note in her bathroom. Mrs. Houdini, it began, you are a modern woman of liberal ideas. You will not be angry if I keep a date this evening. I expect to meet the most beautiful lady in the world at the corner of Hollywood and Sunset Boulevards at 6:30. I shall be home very late. She had dressed herself in a blue dress and found Harry waiting where he said he’d be, with a car ready to take them to a jazz club. That night he planned their anniversary party at the Hotel Alexandria, and the long, crystal-bedecked tables they would have, filled with food and orange blossoms and hundreds of people.
“Yes,” Bess told Charmian. “I am privy to many of his secrets. But many of them are frightfully mundane.”
“Oh, I doubt that.”
Bess felt a drop of water on her cheek and looked up to see Harry standing over her, soaking wet. She squealed and threw him a towel. “You devil, don’t get me wet!”
Jack had taken a seat behind Charmian and was cradling her head in his lap, massaging her scalp. It was clear he adored her.
“Come on, Bess.” Harry held out his hand. “We should get home and dress.”
In 1919, at the premiere of The Master Mystery, Bess had stepped out of the car in front of Harry to a dizzying line
up of flashbulbs. The theater had fit only three hundred but there were five times as many as that in the crowd, pushing their way toward the red ropes in front of the entrance. Harry was used to attention, but he wasn’t used to the blinding Hollywood fame. Hands had reached out to grab him. He’d turned and looked uncomfortably at Bess.
“It’s just like your magic shows,” she’d told him, grasping his elbow. “Just hold up your head and smile.”
Harry’s producer, Rolfe, had swept them through the doors and ushered them into the lobby, where reporters peppered Harry with questions about the logistics of his escape scenes. The movie was a smash. In one scene Harry, hanging by his thumbs, managed to get the antagonist into a chokehold using only his legs. Reaching into the man’s pocket with his toes, he extracted a key that freed him from his restraints. The audience had gone wild for it.
Now they stepped out of their car, Bess swathed in white silk, to see a paltry crowd of a hundred or so waiting for autographs. Bess glanced over at Harry, who looked stricken. “There’s—there’s no one here,” he muttered.
“Don’t let on that you’re disappointed,” Bess said.
Harry set his jaw and tried to smile. Inside, their friends were waiting to celebrate—Gloria Swanson and the Londons and Sargent and Vickery drinking champagne in the carpeted lobby.
“It’s too late,” Harry said, his face darkening. “It’s failed. I can tell.”
“You can’t tell a damn thing.”
“Well, it’s not the weather that’s keeping them home.”
Harry spent the screening slouched in his seat, glancing surreptitiously at the audience for their reactions as they watched him rescue Gladys Leslie from a vile gang of counterfeiters. He’d put his best work into this picture, his most daring escapes, even going so far as to stage an elaborate heist on a Hollywood street to promote the movie, leading to the unveiling of an enormous movie banner.
The screening received polite applause. Afterward, anticipating Harry’s dark mood, Bess stood up in his place and invited everyone to join them at Sunset Inn in Santa Monica.
Managed by the famous restaurateur Eddie Brandstatter, Sunset Inn was the place where many of the movie actors spent their evenings, because it was elegant but cheap, and there really wasn’t as much money in movies as everyone thought. The restaurant featured a hot and cold buffet and a dizzying rotation of cocktails on illicit menus; California was far from the grips of Prohibition, and everyone knew it. Actors and singers of all levels of fame were encouraged to give impromptu performances. By the time they arrived, Al Jolson was lounging at the bar, and Charles Harrison was on the stage crooning “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows.” Bess was quietly awed by these guests. Sometimes it seemed she had invented them, and the whole life she’d stepped into here—the perfume of the women’s corsages, the lights glittering at the bottoms of the hills—was just smoke.
Clara Bow hadn’t been at the screening, but she was at the restaurant, nursing a glass of red wine. She had Hollywood in a tailspin, claiming engagements with everyone from Gary Cooper to Victor Fleming. Now she came sauntering up to Harry, batting her little-girl eyelashes, and set her glass of wine down on the table beside him. “Well if it isn’t the great Harry Houdini,” she said in her tiny voice. “I’ll tell you. I’ve been dying to see you do your needle trick.”
She blinked at Bess with a small smile. Bess laughed and picked up her own glass. “Go on, Harry,” she said, refusing to be baited. “Do a few tricks.”
The night before the filming of his first love scene with Marguerite Marsh for The Master Mystery, Bess had woken up to find Harry pacing the hallway, unable to sleep. Bess had led him back to bed. “Oh, go ahead and love her, for God’s sake,” she’d told him. “Customers don’t pay to see their leading men be faithful to their off-screen wives.” And she had kept her word; she wasn’t angry. Flirtations by other women only served to make Harry more appealing as a star.
Now she saw Harry brighten at Clara’s invitation to perform. Live magic was his forte; he carried a deck of cards and little tokens of magic in his pocket at all times. “If I can rustle together some needles, I’ll swallow them for you,” he told the actress.
A crowd had gathered around them. Bess went into the kitchen and came back with an orange. “Forget needles,” she told Harry, tossing him the orange. “You know he can swallow this?” she asked the onlookers.
“Oh, do tell me you’re kidding,” Clara said.
Jack London clapped Harry on the back. “Oh, I’ve seen it,” he said. “I’m not sure whether it’s illusion or some kind of grotesque reality.”
Bess retreated toward the bar in search of Gloria Swanson; she wanted to talk to the actress about convincing Paramount to allow her a role in Harry’s next picture. When she couldn’t find her, Bess circled back toward Harry on the other side of the room.
As she approached, Harry stepped out of the crowd. “Mrs. Houdini,” he said, holding out his hand. “Would you care to have dinner with me?”
“Harry, no,” she said. “We can’t go off by ourselves at your party.”
“I’ve already reserved us a table.” He gestured toward one of the many open tables at the back of the room. He led her to her seat and pulled in a nearby server. Bess ordered an Aviation cocktail.
“I do wish you wouldn’t have liquor tonight,” he said, frowning. “I wanted to talk to you.”
Bess pressed her lips together. “Don’t lecture me, Harry. It’s supposed to be a celebratory night.”
His face softened. He reached across the table and took her hand. “You know, when I first came in here, I didn’t recognize you. You looked just like a young girl.”
“You charmer.” Bess smiled. “You know you received another bag of mail today. The old ladies love you.”
Between films Harry would occasionally perform in venues around Los Angeles. Since his mother’s death, he would bring bouquets of roses with him and incorporate the flowers into his act, tossing them into the lap of any gray-haired lady in the audience. One of his most cherished letters had arrived shortly after the release of his first picture. Among the letters from enthralled moviegoers was one from a frail old woman who had attended one of his shows. How did you know I needed a rose? she asked in delicate script. I am very lonely. I came to your performance to see the crowds, to know there were others on earth. A lonely, lonely woman, and you threw me a rose. Harry had clutched the letter to his chest, his eyes tearing, as if it were his own mother who had written him.
The waiter came to their table with two menus pasted onto white cardboard. When he left, Harry put down the menu and said, “We can’t stay.”
Bess looked up. “Why? We have nothing to do tomorrow.”
“No. I mean we can’t stay here. In California.”
Bess laughed. “Of course we can.”
Harry cleared his throat. “The picture’s a flop.”
“How could you know that? It’s only just premiered.”
“Oh, come on, Bess. You saw the crowd tonight. I may get fan letters, but people have tired of my movies.” He rubbed his hand across his face. “I’m not an actor. I’m a magician. I’ve put everything into the film company when I should have been working on my magic. And the money’s nearly gone.”
Bess shook her head. “Don’t talk to me like a child, Harry. I’ve seen the books. I know exactly how much money we’ve spent. There may not be enough to live lavishly, but we’re not done—” She stopped as she saw his face darken. Her whole world seemed to be collapsing around her—all the easy simplicity of their new life out West, the dreams she had of their retiring there, adopting children . . . He was taking it all away from her.
Harry slammed his fist on the table. “We are done if I say we’re done.”
“No, Harry.” Bess stiffened. “You don’t get to take this away from me. We have a home here. You can go crawling back to New York if you’d like. But I’m staying.”
“And do what? Everything you h
ave to do here is because of me.”
“Oh, you’re cruel,” she said.
Harry didn’t answer. Across the room, Al Jolson had taken the stage and was singing, There’s a lump of sugar down in Dixie and it’s all my own, she’s the sweetest little bunch of sweetness I have ever known.
“Mr. Harry Houdini!” A red-cheeked young waiter rushed over to their table and pumped Harry’s hand. “Congratulations on your new picture.” He hunched toward Bess in an awkward bow. “I didn’t get to meet you last night, Mrs. Houdini. But it’s a pleasure.”
Bess smiled. “You must be mistaken. Harry and I weren’t here last night.”
The boy looked confused. “But you were sitting at this same table. I nearly spoke to you then, but I couldn’t get up the courage.”
Harry scribbled an autograph on a napkin and gave it to the boy. “Wonderful to meet you,” he said.
The waiter’s face turned red. “I’m—I’m sorry for the interruption.” He rushed away, clutching the napkin in his hand.
Bess looked at Harry, confused. “You weren’t here last night, were you? You said you had a meeting at the studio.”
Harry’s face grew dark. “It was nothing to mention.”
“What was nothing?”
“I had dinner with Charmian.”
His voice sounded very far away to her.
“Charmian?” she repeated.
“Please don’t be dramatic. I wish you hadn’t drunk so much tonight.”
“Don’t you dare try to turn this back on me!” She couldn’t believe what he was telling her. “Are you—are you having an affair with her?”
Harry waved his hand. “No! Nothing like that.”
“How could you do this?” Her voice broke. She stood up, knocking the silverware to the floor. “And with Jack being sick—”
“I know Jack’s sick, damn it!” Harry banged his fist on the table. He lowered his voice. “Would you sit the hell down? You’re making a scene.”
Mrs. Houdini Page 22
