“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. Yo
u 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.
Ford’s first ploy was to target Daisy White, Houdini’s alleged mistress. Soon, Daisy had full-out converted to Spiritualism, joined Ford’s church, and was lecturing on Spiritualism and magic.
On February 8, in trance, Fletcher brought Houdini’s mother through and received the forgive message. That night, Francis Fast, using what he called Bentley’s code, sent Doyle a cable in cypher informing him of the night’s activities. Doyle immediately wrote Crandon. “I had a mysterious cable from N York in cypher. It seemed to mean that our people had discovered the Houdini cypher and that the widow admits it. I await particulars.”
Doyle got his particulars in days. Ford sent him clippings from the newspapers and Fast fired off a letter. “The news itself, I felt was of such importance that I cabled the gist of it to you…. The message translated read: HAVE RECEIVED THROUGH ARTHUR FORD—OUR CIRCLE—HOUDINI CODE WIDOW ADMITS TRUTH PUBLICLY TODAY PLEASE ADVISE HORACE LEAF.” (Leaf was an English medium and friend of Ford’s.) Fast gave Doyle some fascinating details of the aftermath. “The frank and honest manner in which Mrs. Houdini accepted the whole thing was quite a revelation. First the publicity was of her own volition and she wrote Arthur Ford in her own hand a letter almost of gratitude…. I learned privately, last evening, from one who is friendly to Mrs. H. that when she received it, the strength and veracity of the message stirred her to tears, and now she awaits eagerly with reason to hope that the way may be made clear for the message from her husband.”
Ford would make her wait. In March he returned to England for three months, and then, with Doyle’s blessing, toured Sweden, Denmark, and Germany. By the time that Houdini’s mother began to transmit Houdini’s code to Fletcher in October, Ford already had the entire code. Daisy White would admit that she told Ford the code itself, but the actual content of the message could only have come from Bess. It’s not hard to imagine that Bess would do anything for Ford because by the time of the séance at her home, she had been hopelessly in love with the charming, effete medium for well over a year.
“Dine at Village Grove—home early no drink or weed.”
—BESS HOUDINI DIARY ENTRY, OCTOBER 19, 1927
Bess had been drinking heavily on the last tour, even before Houdini’s death. A year later, as the October 19 and other entries show, she was making an effort to curtail her input of drink and drugs, including marijuana. It was a losing battle. Meeting Arthur Ford didn’t help. Ford himself was a raging, and sometimes very public, alcoholic. One clever way he dealt with the problem of other people knowing about his habit was to have his “spirit control” Fletcher threaten to never come to another séance unless Ford stopped drinking. This is as silly and as brilliant as Margery and Walter arguing over a manifestation.
By the time of the confirmation Houdini séance at her house in January 1929, Bess was literally on her last legs. On New Year’s Eve, she had attended an all-night party with Arthur Ford. Too drunk to stand, she fell and struck the back of her head on the floor, rendering her unconscious. When she came to, she was taken home and confined to bed. She was on heavy painkillers to induce sleep.
On January 4, the day before the final Ford sitting where Houdini’s code came through in its entirety, Bernard Ernst, Houdini’s longtime lawyer and confidant, was summoned to Bess’s house. It was late at night and when he got there, Bess was unconscious after a suicide attempt. She had written him a letter early that day, which was handed to Ernst as soon as he arrived. In it, Bess told him about the many debts she had incurred, and the fact that she had to pawn her jewelry to pay them off. And she told him she had done a terrible thing. “I’m so ill—I want to go to Harry—he always shielded me from pain. There are some things I want you to attend to after I go. I am very weary. I thank you dear Mr. Ernst, you were a true friend to Houdini and his unhappy wife.”
This wouldn’t have been Bess’s first suicide attempt. She had made other previous attempts to take her life. Three nights later, Bess called Ernst to her home. She told him exactly what was going to happen at the next night’s séance with Ford. When Ernst accused her of giving Ford the code, she didn’t deny it, she just said she had no recollection of it. She told him that the code was in the safe deposit box of the Houdini Estate at Manufacturers Safe Deposit Company. When the lawyer informed her that he had inventoried what was in the box and that there was no sealed code from Houdini, Bess neglected to tell him that she had placed the code in the box in November, using, it was later discovered, an envelope that had been manufactured after Houdini had died. She also lied in telling Ernst that she hadn’t seen or communicated with Ford for several years, when in fact she was dating him for over a year and exchanging letters with him when he was in England.
Bess told another version of how Ford got the code to a mutual friend of theirs named Jay Abbott. According to him, Bess said that she was washing her hands one day and her wedding band fell off. Ford quickly retrieved it. Engraved inside the ring, Bess maintained, were the words to “Rosabelle, sweet Rosabelle.” How the rest of the words of the code came through went unexplained.
At best, Bess was a dupe, at worst, an architect and coconspirator in pretending to bring Houdini back from the grave. This begs the question, Why? Was it just that she wanted coverage in the press? No, she wanted once and for all to claim her rightful place. She needed Houdini to come back to her, not to Milla Barry, or to Charmian London, or to Daisy White. Not to Leopold or to Dash. She needed him to come back to her, just as he had after his indiscretions. But her ruse didn’t work. She fooled no one.
After the séance, Bess fell into a deep depression. She derived no joy from having heard from her loved one. On January 27, she wrote Ernst. “I am so ill that when anyone speaks to me I want to scream, and if I anyone who knows me I’m almost as bad…the case against me about the message looks bad. Don’t you see I’m mixed up in a sordid affair? I cannot talk yet. This is why I tried to do what I did January 4…Having my friends believe me of deliberately betraying Houdini hurts—and it really hurts me sorely.”
In the meantime, Ernst had confirmed from multiple sources, including Daisy White, that Ford had made many purchases of gauze, phosphorescent paint, and mediumistic effects from magic dealers. He had also consulted some magicians in an attempt to learn tricks. Ernst also learned from Bess that she had attended many wild parties with Ford, including some which were held at a “speakeasy” alleged to have been run by Daisy White. It was rumored that both Bess and Daisy ran the “speakeasy,” which was also a brothel. At any rate, Daisy White’s petite fingerprints were also all over the transmission of the code to the leader of her church, and when some of Houdini’s friends threatened to expose Daisy White’s involvement, she threatened to go public with her sexual relationship with Houdini and she had “one or more witnesses” ready to vouch for her story.
Increasingly despondent, drugged, drunk, and delirious, Bess was admitted to the West Hill Sanitarium in the Bronx. She spent over a month there. “Spiritualism was a forbidden subject” there, she told Ernst. She was being deprogrammed and dried out.
Sir Arthur’s response to the Houdini message backfiri
ng was classic Doyle. He wrote a twelve-page article where he once again flogged Houdini for framing Margery, excoriated him for snubbing Lady Doyle’s message, and gave a glorious account of Ford’s transmission of the message. And in the end, he waxed poetic. “If these loving hands can meet through the veil, then ours also can do so…. Is that a sad or an irreligious thought?…As Houdini is today, you and I will be tomorrow. Is it then a message to be slurred over or obscured, that Death does not disconnect us or break our natural feelings, and that an all-wise Providence is giving this much-needed knowledge to a generation which has had much to endure? In this case a deliberate test was proposed. If it had not been fulfilled it would have been counted a strong argument against survival. But it was fulfilled. Surely it cannot be dismissed as if it never occurred.” After the Ford-Bess scandal broke, Conan Doyle made two corrections to his final draft. He added “apparently” after the “But” in the next to last sentence. And then he tacked on two sentences at the end: “It is true that in the last resort we are dependent upon the veracity and honesty of Mrs. Houdini. But I, for one, am not cynical enough to question it.”
Perhaps Doyle qualified his essay after receiving two long handwritten letters from Bernard Ernst that detailed much of the sordid information presented above. Ernst was careful to point out that he had handwritten the letters so that even his own secretary wouldn’t see the sad details of Bess’s descent into madness and despair. He then asked that Doyle keep the letters in confidence. Doyle’s response to that was also true to form. He immediately wrote his friend Dr. Crandon. “Now about this Houdini test. There is a dangerous snag there and Walter must not run up against it…. Houdini’s lawyer tells me that Mrs. Houdini has taken to drink, drugs, and the Lord knows what, and is thoroughly unreliable. He says there never was a letter in the strong box containing a code….” Crandon immediately typed the letter up and forwarded it to two members of his own circle.
The Secret Life of Houdini Page 61
