The Secret Life of Houdini

by William Kalush

  Houdini’s campaign against fraudulent mediums was costing him more than $40,000 a year out of pocket, “rather a large sum for private individual to lay out for this subject,” he wrote Harry Price. How could he not wage this war, though?

  “I believe the work I am doing is the greatest humanitarian achievement of my life,” he told a reporter. “I have spent many hours on the stage and public rostrum but now I am helping to alleviate the years of worry that is driving many to the brink of insanity by their inordinate desire to communicate with the dead.” Thinking ahead to retirement, he had Bess look for property on their last trip to Los Angeles. His plan was to finally build a bus that could be converted to a small stage, seating almost two hundred. Then he would “tour California taking his fight against spooks and their accomplices to the smaller towns.”

  The banner year of his crusade was 1926. In January, in New York, he exposed the Reverend John Hill, who manifested Rose Mackenberg’s dead “husband,” who wept and knelt before her. Houdini was particularly proud of this catch; Hill was the “self-claimed private medium to the Vanderbilts, Harrimans, Honeywells, Huntingtons and other prominent New York families,” he boasted. In February, he canceled one of his own lectures to attend a mass meeting of Spiritualists in Philadelphia who came to hear Malcolm Bird lecture on the Margery case.

  Houdini, still seething from the implication in Bird’s book that he was a bastard, leaped onto the platform and launched a shrill attack on Bird. “You liar, you contemptible liar,” he shrieked at the cowering journalist. “You lied in your book when you said my father was not married to my mother. Ladies and Gentlemen, in his book he said Houdini had his hands soiled and said that is his trouble, that my father was—now, do I look like a man like that. If a man would have said that to me I would clean the floor up with him, and so would any other man who loved and respected his mother.”

  Houdini offering the $10,000.00 prize in print. From the collection of Roger Dreyer

  Houdini’s campaign peaked in Chicago during an incredible eight-week stay at the Princess Theatre. Adding Ruth Mason and Lillian Stuart to his team of spies, Houdini unmasked more than eighty local mediums, some in spectacular fashion. The Spiritualists struck back. In addition to threatening his life, they inundated him with frivolous slander suits. Before he left town, he won a victory in the first case. His greatest victory, though, was the surprise visit to his dressing room from a stocky, matronly woman named Annie Benninghofen. Before she married, she had been known as Anna Clark, the “mother medium,” the woman responsible for mentoring Cecil Cook, the trumpet medium who Houdini had unmasked in New York. Benninghofen had been so moved by Houdini’s civic campaign and her own remorse that she offered to do anything to help him to stamp out the menace.

  “I really believed in Spiritualism all the time I was practicing it,” she told Houdini. “But I thought I was justified in helping the spirits out. They couldn’t float a trumpet around the room, I did it for them. They couldn’t speak, so I spoke for them. I thought I was justified in trickery because through trickery I could get more converts to what I thought was a good and beautiful religion.” Benninghofen’s public refutation of Spiritualism prompted death threats from her one-time brethren.

  Houdini’s show was in three acts now, a veritable greatest hits extravaganza. The first act featured his production of silks from a fishbowl and the original Dr. Lynn dismemberment illusion he had been entranced by as a child in the Midwest. The second act was highlighted by his now-famous Water Torture Cell escape. The Spiritualist debunking was the third and final act. By now Houdini had refined the portion of his show that dealt with Spiritualism to an entertaining romp through a gallery of rogues and their underhanded methods. “I have all reason to believe that this is the most important part of the evening’s entertainment and long after you have forgotten everything that has gone before I feel certain you will not forget some of the things said and done in the next thirty or forty-five minutes,” he began.

  Reminding the audience of his $10,000 challenge to any medium, he reveled in the lawsuits and threatened to expose “every last one” of Chicago’s three hundred mediums. Then he gloated about Margery. “I caught Margery, the medium in Boston, the most wonderful medium that ever medied…Bird wrote voluminous articles about her…I detected her the first night and exposed her and called her a fraud, but [the professors] had been examining her for one year, and a year later they apologized to me…. They admitted they were wrong. They were gentlemen. When I walked into the séance room and saw that beautiful blonde, her applesauce meant nothing to me. I have been through apple orchards. And they call that a religion?”

  With each new assault, the spiritualists countered back with lawsuits and indignation meetings. Houdini became the focal point of all their opposition, not only in America but also across the globe. Just a few months earlier, a delegate to the International Spiritualist Congress in Paris had moved for strong action to protect psychic workers because “at the instigation of a certain magician, some of our best mediums, principally in Boston, have been prevented from holding séances.” A British resolution to protect the seers from charges of fraud and insanity was adopted enthusiastically.

  They also countered with vicious letters attacking Houdini. “I get letters from ardent believers in spiritualism, who prophesy I am going to meet a violent death soon as a fitting punishment for my nefarious work,” he told a magazine writer.

  The first leg of Houdini’s 1926 tour ended in May, giving him almost four months away from the stage. “Am going to lay off…and do nothing but investigate and look into these fraudulent medium affairs,” he wrote a friend. He also found time for other, related projects. In August, he exposed a different kind of mystic. Hereward Carringon, his nemesis on the Margery committee, was promoting a young “Egyptian” fakir named Rahman Bey, who claimed that he possessed supernormal powers that were able to help him achieve marvelous feats like arresting his pulse, piercing his cheeks with needles without bleeding, and cheating death by having himself buried alive in an airtight coffin. While the young mystic performed the feats, Carrington provided an ongoing commentary on the young man’s mastery of yogic power and “cataleptic trance.”

  What was particularly galling to Houdini was that he had already exposed these so-called miraculous feats in the pages of his book Miracle Mongers and Their Methods. After going with Rinn to see Bey perform, Houdini issued a challenge. “I guarantee to remain in any coffin that the fakir does for the same length of time he does, without going into any cataleptic trance.” His job got a little tougher when Bey duplicated his own burial stunt in the Dalton swimming pool, where he stayed submerged for a full hour. On August 5, before a prestigious invitation-only audience, Houdini entered the pool area of the Shelton Hotel. He submitted to a quick exam by a physician, who pronounced him fit but who worried that he could only survive in a sealed box of that dimension for three to four minutes.

  Houdini immersed in a coffin in the pool of the Shelton Hotel.Library of Congress

  “If I die, it will be the will of God and my own foolishness,” he told the assemblage. “I am going to prove that the copybook maxims are wrong when they say that a man can live but three minutes without air—and I shall not pretend to be in a cataleptic state either.” Stripped down to trunks, he stepped into a specially built, but not gimmicked, galvanized iron casket that was lowered into the pool. Despite some additional weights that had been added, eight swimmers had to stand on top of the casket to keep it submerged. Even still, one lost his balance and the coffin shot up out of the pool. It was quickly resubmerged.

  Houdini managed to stay in the coffin for more than an hour and a half. Despite a three-week-long vigorous workout regimen that burnished him into top shape for a fifty-two-year-old, Houdini emerged exhausted, irritable, and with grossly abnormal vital signs. According to one eyewitness he looked “deathly white.” Once at home, he wrote the details of his experiment for a physiologist with the
U.S. Bureau of Mines, cognizant that his experience might help trapped miners. He still had a metallic taste in his mouth and felt weak, but disregarding his mother-in-law’s pleas to get some rest, went off to the YMCA, where he spent an hour playing handball and sprinting on the indoor track.

  On his summer break Houdini turned his energies to his library and his literary output. He weekended at his lawyer Bernard Ernst’s Sea Cliff, Long Island, summer home and carried a trunkful of scraps and notes for various book projects involving magic, imploring Ernst for his assistance. One of these might have been his autobiography, sections of which had been completed and are unfortunately lost. He even began work on a novella, tentatively titled Lucille, which featured the ultimate villain—a man who possessed an insider’s knowledge of magic. He had begun collaborating with the horror writer H. P. Lovecraft on a number of magazine stories and with Oscar Teale on a book on the effects produced at spiritualistic séances. Ultimately, the lion’s share of his attention was focused on a monumental history of superstition that spanned from biblical days to the present. Despite exhaustive research that included consultations with scholars of all “creeds,” he worried that his efforts would go unrewarded. “I am very busy working on a book that I think is of the greatest importance—the only unfortunate part is that I have not a college grade nor possess degrees, and therefore it may not be taken as serious as I would like it to be,” he wrote Davis. To help polish his rough edges, he planned to attend Columbia University and take English courses, a project perhaps partially motivated by the editors of Who’s Who, who overrode his own capsule description of “occupation” from “actor, inventor and author,” substituting “magician” instead.

  Houdini formed yet another corporation, Houdini Attractions, Inc. Its mandate was to buy, lease, produce, exhibit, or publish “literary, dramatic and magical works and productions, including the magical entertainment heretofore given by Harry Houdini.” Ever more intellectually ambitious, he made plans to start an accredited university of magic and, with Dr. Wilson of The Sphinx, drew up a proposed curriculum. Houdini had the singular capacity to hold grudges for years and then forgive and forge a close relationship with his former enemies. After fighting viciously with Dr. Wilson for many years, the two had reconciled and Houdini immediately began to venerate him as a father figure. Long-standing disputes with Dr. James W. Elliot, champion card manipulator, and Dr. Saram Ellison, founder of the SAM, ended in a similar fashion, only we had to take Houdini’s word on their rapprochement since by then, both men were dead.

  Houdini mainly stayed home that summer of 1926, organizing and poring over his cherished books. The volumes engulfed the entire house, from basement to attic. “You know, I actually live in a library,” he told one woman who wrote him to ask about a fine point in the history of Spiritualism. One day in July, his friend the magician Charles Carter, who was touring, visited him in Harlem. On his train ride back to his home in San Francisco, Carter sat down and wrote Houdini thanking him for the experience.

  “I actually live in a library,” Houdini wrote. This was just his desk. From the collection of George and Sandy Daily

  “Perfectly amazed at the profundity of erudition you are the justly proud possessor of, both in the tomes and manuscripts of your library, and that which is stored away in your massive brain,” Carter wrote. “How I should like to spend days browsing about through the great labyrinth of historical and other data which encompasses you. I am afraid though that too many tears are dried by the dust of some of those valuable, and at the same time sorrowful records.

  “It seemed too that these have saddened you for behind your wholesome laugh there is irony and a wee bit of the weariness that comes with thought. But be consoled as I am for some things always remain the same such as our eternal lament, our tears and the evenings weariness—the immeasuraby [sic] crushing weariness!”

  On August 20, Houdini left the following note for Bess in his safe deposit box at the Lincoln Safe Deposit Co. on Forty-second Street, opposite Grand Central Terminal:

  AUGUST 20, 26

  Darling Wife & Loved one

  In case you feel so disposed destroy all of these negatives. I am not important or interesting enough for the world in general & so it is just as well you destroy them unless you yourself either have a book written or write it yourself for pastime—but otherwise destroy all film. Burn them

  Your devoted husband

  Houdini

  I bequeath all these negatives to my beloved wife Beatrice Houdini and the only one who has actually helped me in my work.

  Houdini

  “Are you still in pain, Harry?” Gertrude Hills asked, worried. She felt responsible in some way for his injury that summer. After all, he was performing at the benefit at her suggestion, and she had no idea that in his attempt to free himself from the straitjacket he would injure himself so.

  “I still don’t feel myself,” Houdini admitted. “I just can’t seem to shake this ptomaine poisoning.”

  “This might be very serious. Suppose you should die from it?” Gertrude worried.

  “No man should regret dying because of a good act,” Houdini said. “In fact, it’s a privilege.”

  His attitude was no surprise to her. Four years before, he had even foretold his own death to her. And the last time they met, he went into his wishes for his funeral in elaborate detail. “I will not raise a finger to detain myself one moment from joining my mother,” he told her. She knew he meant it too.

  He hadn’t always been that open, though; it took a while for them to get past his innate shyness, especially when it came to matters of the soul. Now, after all these years, the door was open wide. He had found in her someone who had suffered spiritually as much as he had, she thought.

  The tea had steeped by then and she filled two cups. When she came back in the room, Houdini was poring over one of her new books about reincarnation.

  “You know, sometimes I wonder if I truly am a reincarnation of a great old magician,” Houdini mused. “Magic never did seem a mystery to me.”

  “I don’t know if you were a magician, but I know you’re an old soul, Harry,” she said.

  He put the book down and returned to his chair. The tea was bracing.

  “How could Doyle and Lodge delude themselves so?” He shook his head. “They’re far too intelligent to be dupes of that movement. How can you call it ‘religion’ when you get men and women in a room together feeling each other’s hands and bodies?”

  “The difference between you and them is evident, Harry,” Gertrude said softly. “They are afraid of dying.”

  Harry nodded. “Do you know that Doyle actually thinks you smoke cigars and drink wine in the hereafter?” he marveled. “Can he not see the ineffable majesty of the Almighty? How can one not stand in awe of Him? Instead of being driven to his knees, he’s visualizing playing cricket!”

  Houdini caught himself. He was starting to sound like his father, the rabbi.

  Gertrude smiled. “Why do you think they maintain that they need mediums?” she asked.

  “Because they cannot face themselves,” Harry shot back. “Is the power of the Almighty so trivial that all he can produce is a tipped table and the ringing of a bell? Would the God that created the most breathtaking mountain ranges and spectacular waterfalls stoop to manifest something as vile and base as ectoplasm?”

  They sat and sipped their tea in silence. When Houdini snuck a peek at his pocket watch she knew it was time for him to go. He was about to start his tour and she knew she wouldn’t see him for a while, but when he paused at her door and she looked into his gray eyes speckled with yellow, she instantly knew that this was the last time they would ever see each other. He knew it too and, overcome, he rushed out.

  When he was gone, she could only hope that if he could break through the veil and communicate with her, it wouldn’t be merely to send back a message. She hoped that he might grace her with a reply, one that hadn’t been made before he left her
that last time.

  The medium now sat in a wooden Windsor chair in a glass cabinet. Underneath her kimono, her undergarments were held to the skin by surgeon’s adhesive tape. Her wrists and ankles were fastened with No. 2 picture wire to eyebolts in the floor of the cabinet. The wire itself was made immobile by surgeon’s tape. Her hair had been cut short to preclude the possibility of hiding objects in it. To prevent any forward movement of her head, her neck was now immobilized by a locked leather collar that was fastened by a horizontal rope leading to an eyebolt in the back of the cabinet.

  Despite all this control, it took Dr. J. B. Rhine and his wife, Dr. Louisa Rhine, one sitting on July 1, 1926 to see right through Margery. Rhine may have looked like a country bumpkin but he was an astute observer and he was infuriated that he had transferred from the University of West Virginia to move to the Boston area so he could study what he thought was a most promising case of mediumship. Besides figuring out every one of seven of Margery’s manifestations, he was irate at the behavior of the other sitters. “It is evidently of very great advantage to a medium, especially if fraudulent, to be personally attractive; it aids in the ‘fly-catching business.’ Our report would be incomplete without mention of the fact that this ‘business’ reached the point of actual kissing and embracing at our sitting, in the case of one of the medium’s more ardent admirers. Could this man be expected to detect trickery in her?” We don’t know whether Rhine was referring to Malcolm Bird or Joseph DeWyckoff.