The Secret Life of Houdini

by William Kalush

“No. They’re all right,” someone in the audience shouted. “It’s LeVeyne who’s all wrong.”

  That was too much for Mrs. LeVeyne. She stood up from her seat.

  “But what do you know about them?” she screamed.

  The audience ignored her as Houdini held up his hands.

  “Now I want you to hear the testimony of Reverend F. Raud.”

  Houdini pointed toward a woman in a side box who had just stood up. She was dressed all in black and wearing a long black veil that completely covered her face.

  “This is one of my investigators. She goes by the name of Frances Raud, but we call her F. Raud for short. F-R-A-U-D. She is disguising herself tonight because we have had reports that there are a number of photographers who are in attendance tonight with the explicit purpose of taking her photograph. At present, she is unknown to the mediums so she can continue her investigations.”

  Houdini turned to the LeVeynes.

  “I am greater than you are. I own a church. See, here are my certificates and my charter,” he said, pulling out some papers from a folder on a table next to him onstage. “They prove that I own a church. And Miss Raud is its pastor. So Reverend Fraud, please tell the audience your experience with Mrs. LeVeyne.”

  When children were too ill to come to his show, Houdini brought it to them.Library of Congress

  “This woman told me that my dead husband and dead child were together in the spirit world and were endeavoring to communicate with me,” Mackenberg said. “I asked her how she got these messages and she told me that her spirit guides had given them to her. I thanked her and offered her a dollar but she said her price for a reading was two dollars, which I paid her. I have never been married, nor had any children.”

  “I never saw this woman,” Mrs. LeVeyne screamed from her seat.

  “Now you said in the papers you were coming here to accept my challenge,” Houdini told Mrs. LeVeyne. “Will you keep your promise?”

  “The law says religion must not be commercialized,” she answered.

  “Just collect the two dollars,” someone in the audience shouted.

  Rose Mackenberg resumed her speech, but when she mentioned that she had purchased the charter to Houdini’s church from Hubert O’Malley, one of the area’s leading spiritualistic mediums, the theater became a bedlam.

  “Get him, make him prove something,” people shouted. It took a full five minutes to restore order.

  Then LeVeyne jumped to his feet.

  “Our Spiritualist Church will hold an indignation meeting next Sunday,” he shouted.

  “I drove out the fakes in California and I intend to drive them out of Massachusetts,” Houdini boasted.

  The audience cheered.

  “You are not a God yet!” LeVeyne shouted over the din.

  “No, but I know a great deal about mediums,” Houdini replied.

  “I’ll protect my wife—” LeVeyne began.

  “And I’m protecting the public,” Houdini finished.

  The audience cheered lustily.

  It was like that every night of his run in Worcester in December 1925. The Spiritualist segment that closed the show had evolved into a surrealistic town meeting where mediums and Houdini shouted each other down. It hadn’t hurt the box office. Houdini was selling every seat he could, except for the matinees, when he made sure there were blocks of free tickets distributed to the city’s crippled children or orphans.

  24

  I…Am a Fake

  WHAT IS YOUR FULL NAME?” THE gentleman from Michigan inquired.

  “My name is Harry Houdini.”

  “What is your business?”

  “I am an author; I am a psychic investigator for the scientific magazines of the world; and then I am a mysterious entertainer.”

  He had created a great legend and became the most famous entertainer alive. Now he was transforming himself into a public advocate. This should have been the acme of Houdini’s career, one of his proudest moments. He was sitting behind a table in the caucus room of the House office building in Washington, D.C., giving expert testimony with respect to proposed legislation that would ban people from “pretending to tell fortunes for reward or compensation” or “pretending to unite the separated.” He wasn’t just testifying, though; he was actually instrumental in getting the bill drafted, working closely with his old friend Sol Bloom, who had gone from organizer of the Midway Plaisance at the Chicago World’s Fair to music industry mogul to U.S. congressman. This was the culmination of Houdini’s crusade against fraudulent mediums, his own stage in the nation’s capital where our esteemed legislators could join with him in dealing with this menace to public order. Instead, it had devolved into a three-ring circus.

  The hearing room was packed with a motley group of Spiritualists, mediums, clairvoyants, gypsies, and astrologers. They filled up every chair and squatted in the aisles, peppering Houdini with a constant barrage of verbal abuse, ethnic slurs, and threats. The entire four-day hearings in February and May 1926 were an exercise in the theater of the absurd. Houdini gave demonstrations of slate writing and spirit trumpet manifestations to the congressmen. Senator Fletcher’s wife testified and claimed that in thirty-five years of psychic research she had never encountered a phony medium. Houdini flashed $10,000 in U.S. currency as a challenge to any medium to tell him what his father had nicknamed him, then Madame Marcia jumped up and screamed, “That money belongs to me! I predicted the election of President Harding and his death.”

  A Spiritualist named Charles William Myers took the witness stand and, referring to Houdini and Bloom, declaimed, “In the beginning…2,000 years ago, Judas betrayed Christ. He was a Jew, and I want to say that this bill is being put through by two—well, you can use your opinion.”

  Reverend H. P. Strack, the secretary of the National Spiritualists Association of America, speaking of Houdini, was shocked that anyone would heed the words of “a pronounced atheist and infidel.”

  After being insulted by witness after witness from the Spiritualist camp, Houdini requested to make a statement.

  “My religion and my belief in the Almighty has been assailed…. I have always believed and I will always believe. I am a Mason, and you must believe in God to be a Mason. My character has been assailed. I would like to have as a witness here Mrs. Houdini.”

  To the laughter of the crowd, Bess stepped forward.

  “One of the witnesses said I was a brute and that I was vile and I was crazy…. I will have been married, on June 22, 32 years to this girl…. There are no medals and no ribbons on me, but when a girl will stick to a man for 32 years as she did and when she will starve with me and work with me through thick and thin, it is a pretty good recommendation. Outside of my great mother, Mrs. Houdini has been my greatest friend. Have I shown traces of being crazy, unless it was about you?”

  The audience laughed.

  “No,” Bess testified.

  “Am I brutal to you, or vile?”

  “No.”

  “Am I a good boy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Houdini,” he said dramatically. The hearing room filled with applause.

  One of the few substantive moments of the hearings came when Rose Mackenberg was called to testify about her encounters with Mrs. Jane Coates and Madame Grace Marcia, two of Washington’s most notorious mediums. The congressmen actually allowed the two corpulent ladies, who had been sitting in the front row, to stand on either side of Houdini’s chief investigator. According to The Chicago Daily Tribune reporter, if looks could kill, their looks “would have seriously injured, if not destroyed the existence of Miss Rose Mackenberg.”

  Houdini poses with two famous mediums and a bevy of Congressmen before all hell breaks loose at the fortune-telling bill hearings in Washington, D.C. From the collection of Roger Dreyer

  Mackenberg began to recount her experiences of the previous day at the two mediums’ houses, Houdini prompting her as if he were a prosecuting attorney. Rose had just te
stified that Mrs. Coates had told her that “most of the senators did consult astrologers,” when the medium inched a little closer to the investigator.

  “I insist that Mrs. Coates keep away from the witness,” Houdini said. “What did she tell you about the White House and séances being there?”

  “I object!” Coates screamed. “You are talking about me. Mr. Chairman, I demand the right to answer this.”

  The gallery erupted into cheers.

  “You will have an opportunity to be heard,” Congressman McLeod said.

  “I suggest we finish with Madame Marcia first,” Congressman Houston said, trying to keep some logical thread to the testimony.

  “I am ill and I have something to say,” Coates insisted.

  “Madam Marcia told me her charge and I asked her if she would not accept less than $10. She said $10 or nothing; in fact, $15 for a written horoscope and $10 for the other. She said a number of Senators were coming to her for readings; in fact, almost all the people in the White House believed in spiritualism, and that she was very much chagrined to think that I was trying to reduce her fee from what she asked,” Mackenberg testified.

  Bedlam broke out. Mediums were shrieking, Spiritualists had jumped to their feet, arguing with the smaller number of Houdini partisans.

  Representative Hammer, a gentleman from North Carolina, looked perturbed as he banged his gavel and pleaded for order. The crowd finally quieted down.

  “While I was at Madam Coates’s place she said Houdini was up against a stone wall. She said, ‘Why try to fight spiritualism, when most of the Senators are interested in the subject? I have a number of Senators who visit me here, and I know for a fact that there have been spiritual séances held at the White House with President Coolidge and his family, which proves that intercommunication with the dead is established.’ Then she mentioned the name of Senator Capper, saying his wife had died recently, and that he attended spiritualistic séances. She also mentioned Senator Watson, Senator Dill, and Senator Fletcher, whose wife is a medium….”

  With each name, the clamor increased.

  “Liar!” “Faker!” “Traducer!” the audience shouted.

  Finally, there was too much commotion for Mackenberg to continue. The two mediums looked like they wanted to pounce on the undercover operative and began to advance menacingly toward her. Representative Hammer made them sit down.

  Meanwhile, John Ferguson, a fishmonger from Dayton, Ohio, advanced on Houdini, who had earlier made disparaging remarks about his medium wife.

  “I’ll break your nose,” he threatened, and was about to throw a punch just as Representative Hammer threw himself between the two men.

  “Gentlemen, if you are gentlemen, must act as gentlemen,” Hammer said.

  On the verge of tears, Hammer then called in the police, who finally restored order.

  Yet on the last day of the hearings, Hammer engaged Houdini in a bizarre line of questioning.

  “The original Houdini was a Hindu, was he not?” the congressman asked.

  “No,” Houdini replied.

  “You are Houdini the second?”

  “No.”

  “You are the original Houdini?”

  “No, the original Houdini was a French clock maker.”

  “I thought he lived in Allahabab,” Hammer said.

  “Are you joking?”

  “No, I am in earnest…. You said the other day that you were president of the Magicians Association of America.”

  “Society of American Magicians,” Houdini corrected him.

  “Is it a secret organization?”

  “No, only regarding our exploits.”

  “Have you branches in foreign countries? In Russia?”

  “Not in Russia,” Houdini said.

  “Have you ever been in British India?”

  “Never in my life, no sir.”

  “Were both of your parents Hebrews?”

  “Yes, sir…”

  “Is your father living?”

  “No, sir. Has this anything to do with this bill?”

  “No, but—”

  “I know that you are asking spiritualistic questions and I want to let you know that I know it,” Houdini flared.

  “No, I have been told that your people came from British India. That is all I was trying to find out. It is contended here that you are a medium and do not know it. These people really believe that you have divine power and that you won’t admit it. That is the reason I am asking you these questions.”

  “Pardon me,” Houdini said.

  “Have you ever been to Allahabab?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You have read the Arabian Nights stories?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “But you have never been there?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Where were you in 1925?”

  “In America.”

  “You were not out of America that year?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did you do any work in Alaska at any time?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Did you ever know a man by the name of Hugh Weir, on Collier’s magazine?”

  “Never heard the name before,” Houdini said.

  “Did you ever know a man by the name of D’Alory Fechett, a celebrated Frenchman in Paris?” Hammer asked.

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Is William J. Burns a member of your association?”

  Suddenly a significant question. Burns was a former Secret Service operative and Bureau of Investigation chief who had formed one of the largest private detective agencies under his name. Houdini had used his agency for his spiritualistic investigations. Burns was also, ironically, a friend of Conan Doyle’s.

  “He may—” Houdini began but was interrupted by his niece Julia Sawyer, who was there to testify about her undercover operations against mediums.

  “No,” she said flatly.

  “She knows every member of the organization,” Houdini added.

  “Have you any relation and has your association anything to do with the movie association and theatre association of America?” Hammer asked. “These questions I am asking you were not inspired by any Spiritualists.”

  “You did not get those out of the air,” Houdini fumed. “Why are you asking me those peculiar, irrelevant questions? They haven’t anything to do with the bill and are not the kind of questions that a man in your position would ask. They were given to you by some rabid medium and I am surprised that you should ask me same. You did not make them up yourself. You did not get them out of your head.”

  “That is all right as to where I got them, but I did not get them from any spiritualist, and I did not get them from any divine power either, because I do not claim that God makes revelations to me…. Did you have anything to do with numerology? Do you know anything about it? The figure 3, you know, as numerology says, represents a serpent.”

  “I do not believe in that truck—in numerology.”

  “You do not believe in that any more than you do in astrology or fortune-telling or soothsaying?”

  “All in the same junk basket,” Houdini said.

  “There is none of that in any of your performances? It is all really tricks and sleight of hand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I am very much obliged to you,” Hammer concluded.

  At the close of the last day of hearings, Madame Marcia approached Houdini in the corridors of the House of Representatives.

  “You’re a smart man, Mr. Houdini,” she began. “But perhaps I can tell you something you don’t know.”

  “What’s that, Madame Marcia?” he asked genially.

  “When November comes around, you won’t be here.”

  “How’s that?” He grinned.

  “You’ll be dead,” she said.

  Mackenberg didn’t escape the ire of the Spiritualists either. During her testimony, Jane Coates suggested that she saw right through the “widow” who came for a reading. “You a
re doing a work that is killing you,” she told Mackenberg at their sitting. “In your heart you are sick of the whole dirty job and if you don’t stop it, you will not live 18 months.”

  Rose Mackenberg’s startling testimony of séances in the White House and Spiritualism in the Senate rocked Washington. The White House didn’t deign to comment but “friends of the Coolidges” assured the press corps that “neither the president or Mrs. Coolidge is interested in spiritualism.” The following day’s Washington Post headlined “Houdini Expreses Regret to Coolidge—Leaves Letter Deploring Yarn About ‘Seances Held at White House.’” It was a misleading headline; it reported that Houdini personally hand-delivered a letter to Coolidge at his executive offices that expressed regret that the president’s name had been dragged into the hearings. In actuality, the article accurately noted that Houdini’s letter contained Rose Mackenberg’s affidavit of her conversations with the mediums. Houdini himself was quoted, “Believe me, it was no desire of mine to embarrass the President, but I have spent a large portion of my time and fortune in this fight against fraudulent mediums and I am accustomed to accept the facts without garnishment, no matter how unpleasant they may be.” In other words, he couldn’t sugarcoat the fact that mediums had penetrated into the upper echelons of the Washington political scene.

  Can it be a mere coincidence that the senator who controlled the Senate side of the committee responsible for the fortune-telling bill, Senator Capper, was named by Mackenberg as a devotee of séances and that to this day the Senate hearings on that bill have never been published by the Government Printing Office? According to contemporary newspaper reports, the Senate hearings were just as raucous and contentious as the House ones. In August, Houdini wrote a friend to report that his bill “has not reached Congress as yet and I do not know what will happen to it, unless the Senators are interested, and I think that they are. I think they were more interested in my manifestations than they were in the mediums. I was sorry to see that, as I really am sincere about the law.” With Mackenberg naming names of prominent senators connected with the Spiritualist movement, it’s not a surprise that the bill died in committee.

  Houdini had begun his campaign against mediums in the nation’s capital by pleading with President Coolidge back in January of 1926 to throw his “vast influence” with the campaign to abolish the “criminal practices” of spirit mediums, but after his own investigation he was convinced that the president and his wife were believers and that he could prove his case. They certainly fit the profile, having recently lost a son. After the hearings, Houdini wrote his friend the journalist Walter Lippmann, who had been the special assistant to the secretary of war during World War I. “Sorry to tell you that I have heard on rather good authority that they do hold séances in the White House and am looking for further proof regarding same. This is, of course, in strict confidence.”