The Secret Life of Houdini

by William Kalush

  Two nights later, the séance room became a three-ring circus. Walter made the bell ring, he talked and whistled through a megaphone, shook a tambourine, and brought Laura Crandon’s long-dead dog back, who barked obediently. On top of this, a strange psychic light spotlighted the tambourine. Margery’s laughter permeated the room. Stunningly, all of this phenomena was happening simultaneously.

  WOMAN ASTOUNDS PSYCHIC EXPERTS. BOSTON PROFESSIONAL MAN’S WIFE MAY WIN $2,500 PRIZE FOR MEDIUM, SAYS J. MALCOLM BIRD. NOT THE LEAST HINT OF FRAUD. SPIRIT CONTROL SCATTERS ROSES—SOMETIMES CARESSES WITH NON-MATERIAL FLOWERS. HER DEMONSTRATIONS ARE INFINITELY CONVINCING.

  The New York Times headline screamed. Three days later, the Times carried a follow-up story: “Margery, the Boston Medium, Passes All Psychic Tests. Scientists Find No Trickery in a Score of Seances. Versatile Spook Puzzles Investigators by Variety of His Demonstrations.”

  The world was welcoming Margery and Walter with open arms, thanks to J. Malcolm Bird’s glowing articles in Scientific American. Now the stage was set for a visit from Houdini. He had previously exposed two frauds who had applied for the committee’s prize money. George Valiantine was able to produce lights and have spirit trumpets prance around the dark room, at one point bopping Houdini in the head. But the manifestations weren’t considered evidential, considering that an electrical connection had been rigged to the medium’s chair that showed that all the phenomenon coincided with the times that the medium surreptitiously left his chair.

  When a young Italian named Nino Pecoraro had almost convinced the committee of his psychic powers, Houdini had to rush to New York from Little Rock, Arkansas. Despite being tied up with rope, Pecoraro, with the assistance of Eusapia Palladino, who while she lived had been a medium and was now acting as his spirit control, was able to ring bells and jangle tambourines. Houdini took one look at the 180-foot length of rope that had been used and realized that Pecoraro was really an escape artist who knew how to use slack to get out of the rope ties. When Houdini had finished tying him with a series of short ropes, a process that took the Master Mystifier an hour and a half, all Palladino could do was curse Houdini and complain that her young friend was uncomfortable. J. Malcolm Bird, the secretary of the Scientific American committee, had to restrain Houdini from arguing with the dead medium.

  Those were different cases, though. Margery wasn’t a professional medium and she had actually stated that she would refuse to accept any prize money. Her husband was a prominent Boston surgeon. These weren’t the fraudulent mediums that Houdini was used to debunking. He vowed to go into the séances with an open mind. If he determined Margery to be a fraud, he’d expose her in a second, but if she really had the power to channel the dead, he promised to scream that news from the rooftops.

  Still, Crandon was wary of Houdini and saw the sitting with the Scientific American committee as a potential skirmish. On June 6, he had written Sir Arthur: “We continue to sit with the Scientific American Committee every night. Every night I insist on their living up to their agreement and giving me signed copies of their notes…. if they ever make any announcements not consistent with these notes you can readily see I have the material to crucify them. We are not wasting any time in compliments or politeness. It is war to the finish and they know I shall not hesitate to treat them surgically if necessary.”

  Margery gives Houdini her best “come hither” look as J. Malcolm Bird (above) and Scientific American publisher O. D. Munn look on. From the collection of Dr. Bruce Averbook

  “It is not [Houdini’s] ‘clever lying’ but his acrid psychic atmosphere which stops phenomena,” Doyle responded. “I wonder if Walter can rise above it.”

  Walter fired the first salvo in the war. During his séance on July 11, attended by committee members Dr. Daniel Comstock, Hereward Carrington, and the magician Fred Keating, Walter manifested lights, rang the bell box, and then caused Margery’s breast to glow sporadically. He also took time to compose and sing a little ditty about Houdini: “Harry Houdini, he sure is a Sheeny, A man with a crook in his shoe. Says he ‘As to Walter, I’ll lead him to slaughter.’ ‘But,’ says Walter, ‘Perhaps I’ll get you!’”

  July 23, 1924

  Dear Sir Arthur,

  Tonight Houdini and Mr. Munn, owner of the Scientific American, sit with us for the first time and will be here several days. I think Psyche [Margery] is somewhat stirred up over it internally because of Houdini’s general nastiness. She is vomiting merrilly [sic] this morning. However, some of her worst days have given the best sittings.

  L. R. G. Crandon, M.D.

  That night Margery and Walter both got their first glimpses of Houdini. He came to 10 Lime Street accompanied by magazine owner O. D. Munn, and they convened in the fourth-floor room where the Crandons held their nightly séances. Just down the hall, Margery’s twelve-year-old son had been locked into his bedroom, to nullify any accusation that he was a confederate of his mother. The circle that night consisted of Margery, her husband, a man named Conant, who was the lab assistant for the committeeman Comstock, who was absent, Munn, Houdini, and Bird. Carrington had left town to avoid sitting in the same room with Houdini.

  Margery sat down in her makeshift cabinet, really just a three-fold screen. As usual, Dr. Crandon sat at his wife’s right, controlling her right leg and hand. Houdini was given the position of honor at her left. Bird lurked outside the circle, making sure Crandon’s control over his wife was never broken by circling the fingers of Margery and Crandon with one of his hands. To test Walter, the bell box and a megaphone were in the room. The lights were dimmed.

  Soon the sound of whistling filled the room. Then there was whispering. Walter had arrived.

  “Very interesting conversation you two men had on the train,” Walter addressed Houdini and Munn. “I was there. I can always be where my interests lie.”

  After a few minutes, Houdini felt something touch him on the inside of his right leg.

  “That’s me,” Walter said gleefully. He repeated this a few times more.

  Walter then requested an intermission, asking that the contact bell box be brought out of the medium’s cabinet and placed in front of Houdini. This was done but nothing happened.

  “I need the illuminated plaque. Bird, go fetch it and bring it back and put it on the contact board,” Walter ordered.

  Bird left his post, but couldn’t find the plaque.

  “Control,” Walter yelled, before Bird had a chance to get back to the circle. Everyone held hands again, making sure the medium’s hands were accounted for.

  “I’ve got the megaphone in the air,” Walter said. “Houdini, where should I throw it?”

  “Towards me,” Houdini said.

  Seconds later, the megaphone crashed at Houdini’s feet.

  “Bird, take your place in the doorway,” Walter commanded, and before Bird could even get there, Margery’s cabinet was thrown violently on its back.

  A third intermission was taken, and a red light was turned on to rearrange the cabinet.

  The illuminated plaque was brought in and put over the contact board. During the last part of the sitting, the plaque was seen to oscillate and move slowly back and forth and then finally, the contact box rang, once long and several times with short peals.

  Walter had produced.

  After the séance, committee secretary Bird drove Houdini and Munn to the hotel where they were staying. Bird, as usual, was lodging with the Crandons. The secretary parked his car in front of the building and the three men held a quick postmortem. Of course, Houdini took the floor first.

  “Well, gentlemen, I’ve got her,” Houdini said confidentially. “All fraud—every bit of it. One more sitting and I will be ready to expose everything. But one thing puzzles me—I don’t see how she did that megaphone trick.”

  Bird suggested some hypotheses that the committee had come up with, including the idea that the megaphone was on her shoulder.

  “It couldn’t have been there,” Houdini said
, adding that he had explored that possibility during the séance. Suddenly a look of relief crossed his face.

  “The megaphone was on her head. That’s the slickest ruse I ever heard of,” Houdini marveled.

  His reasoning was simple. When Bird had left the room that freed up Margery’s right hand and foot, leaving her husband as the sole control, which was no control at all. Using her right hand, she tilted the corner of the cabinet enough to place her foot under it. She then quickly picked up the megaphone with her free right hand, and placed it on her head, as if it were a dunce cap. Throwing the cabinet over was easy with her foot under one corner. Then Walter immediately asked for control and Margery gave Houdini her right foot. With the megaphone already loaded on her head, she had no need for her hands being free; a simple tilt of the head in the desired direction would achieve her purposes.

  What Houdini didn’t tell them yet was just how he had figured out that it was she and not Walter who had rung the bell. He had done some advance research and determined that Crandon always sat to Margery’s right. Since the séance was being played to him, he anticipated being on Margery’s left, and he had worn a tight “silk rubber” bandage around his right leg below the knee all day, making that part of his leg swollen and tender. The slightest flexing of Margery’s muscles or any movement of her ankles would immediately be discernible to him in his sensitive state.

  That night’s sitting held at committeeman Comstock’s apartment was anti-climactic. Houdini was able to detect almost every time she made a move. She also used Walter to gain advantage to perform her maneuvers. At one point, Walter bellowed for everyone in the room to move back from the table so he could summon up additional energy. In reality, Margery moved back too, and was then able to bend her head and push the table up and over. Houdini caught her using this tactic twice. He had worked out a code with Munn, so that after a prearranged signal, they would break control and Houdini would have an opportunity to grope around the table in the dark. Twice her head ran into his hand. That was enough for him.

  “Will I denounce and expose her now?” Houdini whispered.

  “You had better wait a while,” Munn cautioned.

  When it came time to ring the bell box, Walter literally hit a snag. The box was placed between Houdini’s feet and Margery tried to employ the same tactics as the night before, but she couldn’t move her foot far enough to apply the necessary pressure.

  “You have garters on, haven’t you,” she finally said to Houdini.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Well, the buckle hurts me,” Margery complained.

  When he reached down to undo the garter, Houdini found that Margery’s stocking had been caught up in the garter, immobilizing her leg so that she couldn’t reach the bell box.

  “You, Munn and Houdini, think you’re pretty smart, don’t you?” Walter said. “Straighten up there!”

  When the séance was over, Houdini had Munn call the Committee into a room. Houdini explained Margery’s tactics. Rather than expose her right then and there, the committee decided to go back to New York, where Houdini would file a general report for the entire group. Mrs. Crandon was not to be informed that Houdini had detected her in fraud. Houdini was still pushing for rapid exposure, citing that other mediums had been.

  “We will do it differently this time,” Bird said.

  Houdini and Munn took a night train back to New York, and Bird rushed back to 10 Lime Street, to tell the Crandons everything that just had transpired in the secret meeting.

  “I know something about Houdini that might interest you, but it’s a little embarrassing and I never even told my wife about it,” the Philadelphia patent attorney told his friend, who was a Houdini collector. It was sometime in the 1970s and the two were at a magic convention. “But I am telling it to you now, because she’s dead and gone and I’ll be going pretty soon anyway.”

  He proceeded to relate that years earlier he had been invited to one of Margery’s séances at her home in Boston. As an out-of-town visitor, he was accorded the prime spot of controlling Margery’s left hand.

  “As soon as the lights went out, in the dark, Margery took my hand and put it between her legs. She was naked under her robe. She tried to make me masturbate her but I was embarrassed and I pulled back,” he recalled, still sheepish all these years after the incident. “She pulled me in again and finally I just pulled my hand away and froze. I was very embarrassed.”

  There is a long, rich, lurid history of sex in the séance room, especially between mediums and the men who investigated them. Sir William Crookes, the eminent British chemist who had discovered the element thallium, had sponsored a beautiful young medium named Florence Cook who materialized a female spirit called Katie King. King was supposedly the daughter of the famous pirate John King, whom other mediums materialized, yet she looked suspiciously like a young Victorian lady who pinned a handkerchief over her head, someone like Florence. Crookes’s insistence that the materializations were real made more sense when later psychic researchers revealed that the two were lovers, using the cover of the darkness of the séance room for their assignations.

  Materialization séances were often just fronts for prostitution rings both in England and in America. Joseph Rinn, Houdini’s ghost-busting friend, reported that in the late 1880s there were more than a hundred mediums in New York City who advertised in the personal columns of newspapers, many of them actually madams who ran prostitution rings. As late as 1979, the sociologist Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross had clients have sex with “materialized spirits” as part of a therapeutic regimen for people with morbid fears of death.

  The most notorious medium who used her sexual charms to seduce her scientific investigators was Eusapia Palladino, the same woman who was channeled by Nino Pecoraro when Houdini tied him into submission. Palladino had no qualms about sleeping with her sitters; among them were the eminent criminologist Lombroso and the Nobel Prize–winning French physiologist Charles Richet. After being discredited, Palladino’s career was revived in 1909 when Hereward Carrington, acting as her manager, brought her to the United States. Whenever she would be caught cheating during séances, Carrington chalked it up to laziness and her stubborn Italian temperament. Once prodded to produce, he claimed she came through with flying colors.

  Besides actual sexual activity, there was often an element of voyeurism in the séance room. Eva C (Carriere), a medium who had originally used her real name, Marthe Beraud, until she was exposed, claimed to be able to produce large quantities of a strange, otherworldly substance called ectoplasm, which was thought to be produced by the bioenergy of the spirits. She was investigated extensively by the highly regarded German physician Freiherr von Schrenck-Notzing, who would watch as Eva’s sponsor (and mistress) Mademoiselle Bisson would, during the course of the pre-séance examination, introduce her finger into Eva’s vagina to ensure that no “ectoplasm” had been loaded there beforehand to fool the investigators. The whole procedure was so enjoyable for Eva that she often stripped nude at the end of a séance and demanded another full-on gynecological exam.

  It wasn’t surprising that there would be an air of sexuality suffusing the Margery séances, especially when, prior to the sittings, Dr. Crandon would proudly display nude photographs of Margery during the throes of her mediumship duties. Margery was perhaps the most beautiful medium since Florence Cook. According to Thomas Tietze, her biographer, “She was a slim and pretty woman whose roundness of limb and pertness of attitude men found ‘too attractive for her own good.’ She dressed well and the fashions of the twenties were good to her. Photographs show clear, frank eyes and an expression both saucy and penetrating.”

  Besides her physical attributes, Margery also had the useful ability to make people think that their relationship with her was unique, creating a network of secret allies, who might then be induced to drop control of her hand at a crucial moment during a séance. Malcolm Bird was captivated by her, a likely outcome even though he had already been wa
rned by committee member Dr. Walter Franklin Prince that if he wanted to be taken seriously as a psychic researcher he had to “avoid falling in love with the medium.” Bird attributed her interpersonal skills to her remarkable ability as a “drawer out.” “She possesses an insatiable curiosity, and that one of the ways in which she most effectively feeds it is by just that devise [sic] of shrewdly guessing that something is so and then drawing out the persons that would know about it if it were. And her shrewdness as a guesser is approached only by her skill as a drawer out,” he wrote years later.

  Bird had moved in with the Crandons during the earlier months of the investigation, a dubious practice for a supposedly impartial observer. In fact, Crandon’s heretofore unseen correspondence reveals that Bird was actively conspiring with them in stage-managing the séances and achieving a positive vote from the majority of the committee. It’s likely that Bird would have loved to have slept with Margery but anecdotal reports suggest that she found him repulsive. Apparently, at that point, she had reserved her amorous affections for Hereward Carrington, the champion of Palladino and a voting member of the Scientific American committee.

  Margery’s relationship with Dr. Crandon had always been rocky and volatile. When Carrington moved into their spare room on Lime Street, the stage was set for a torrid tryst. Margery was open about her affection for the English researcher. One night before a sitting, she approached Carrington in the parlor and, in front of Crandon and the other sitters, embraced him and asked, “Wouldn’t you like to kiss me?”

  “What was I to do,” Carrington would later write. “She was there in my arms…”

  According to a later investigator who got close to Margery, she told him that she had an affair with Carrington that was so intense that Carrington asked her to sell the Lime Street house, which was in her name, and elope with him to Egypt. Bird confirmed that Margery and Crandon had been on bad terms during this period, with Crandon acting decently toward her only after she produced a good séance. Bird also confirmed Margery’s account of an affair with Carrington but he added an interesting addendum—Carrington had borrowed a considerable sum of money from Crandon that he was unable to repay.