Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle

by Daniel Stashower

  From the first, Houdini placed himself in an untenable position by pretending to be more open-minded on the subject than he actually was. Eager to cultivate a friendship with the famous author, Houdini dodged and parried when Conan Doyle sought his opinions on various mediums. “How people could imagine those men were conjurors is beyond me,” Conan Doyle had said of the Davenports. Houdini’s answer was a masterwork of ambiguity: “I can make the positive assertion that the Davenport Brothers were never exposed.” This was true to the extent that their tricks had never been found out, but it was hardly the whole truth. Ten years earlier, Houdini had traveled some eight hundred miles to interview Ira Davenport, the surviving brother, and learn the secret of the “Davenport Rope Tie” that made their act possible. He knew perfectly well that the Davenports weren’t genuine mediums—Ira had cheerfully admitted it. Still, when Conan Doyle attempted to pin him down, Houdini feinted: “Regarding the Davenport Brothers,” he wrote in a letter, “I am afraid that I cannot say that all their work was accomplished by the spirits.” This open-ended statement seemed to satisfy both men.

  “Let me say,” Conan Doyle was to write of Houdini, “that in a long life which has touched every side of humanity, Houdini is far and away the most curious and intriguing character whom I have ever encountered. I have met better men, and I have certainly met very many worse ones, but I have never met a man who had such strange contrasts in his nature, and whose actions and motives it was more difficult to foresee or to reconcile.”

  On the one hand, Conan Doyle recalled, he had known Houdini to round up five hundred barefoot children and have them all fitted with boots, while at the same time he grew indignant at being charged two shillings to have a suit pressed. Conan Doyle also professed himself to be astonished by Houdini’s “obvious and childish” ego, as on the occasion when the escape artist introduced Theo Hardeen—a famous performer in his own right—simply as “the brother of the great Houdini.”

  Vanity aside, Conan Doyle admired that “essential masculine quality” of courage Houdini possessed to such a conspicuous degree. “Nobody has ever done, and nobody in all human probability will ever do, such reckless feats of daring. His whole life was one long succession of them, and when I say that amongst them was the leaping from one aeroplane to another, with handcuffed hands at the height of three thousand feet, one can form an idea of the extraordinary lengths that he would go.”

  It is worth noting that Houdini did not actually perform that stunt, which Conan Doyle would have seen in the Houdini movie entitled The Grim Game. The escape artist had been sidelined by a broken arm during the filming, and a stunt man had to perform the feat in his place—a fact Houdini kept closely guarded.

  Houdini, for his part, regarded Conan Doyle as “just as nice and sweet as any mortal I have ever been near.” He felt flattered by the famous author’s attentions, and arranged to have their picture taken together at every opportunity. Whatever his reservations, Houdini genuinely believed that if anyone could show him a true psychic manifestation, it would be Conan Doyle. “[W]hatever one’s views on the subject,” he would write in A Magician Among the Spirits, “it is impossible not to respect the belief of this great author who has wholeheartedly and unflinchingly thrown his life and soul into the conversion of unbelievers. Sir Arthur believes. In his great mind there is no doubt.”

  Clearly Houdini respected Conan Doyle, but he could not bring himself to approach the matter in such an uncritical fashion. “You will note that I am still a skeptic,” he told his new friend, “but a seeker after the Truth. I am willing to believe, if I can find a Medium who, as you suggest, will not resort to ‘manipulation’ when the Power does not ‘arrive.’”

  This did not entirely satisfy Conan Doyle, who recognized the deep suspicion behind Houdini’s words. “It wants to be approached not in the spirit of a detective approaching a suspect,” he cautioned him, “but in that of a humble, religious soul, yearning for help and comfort.” For Conan Doyle, Houdini represented far more than an ordinary skeptical inquirer. He recognized that if he could bring Houdini into the fold, he would have won an ally who could carry the message around the world.

  For the moment, at least, Houdini seemed willing to play along. “I am very, very anxious to have a séance with any medium with whom you could gain me an audience,” he insisted. “I promise to go there with my mind absolutely clear, and willing to believe. I will put no obstruction of any nature whatsoever in the medium’s way, and will assist in all ways in my power to obtain results.”

  To some degree this was disingenuous on Houdini’s part, and his critics have attacked him for taking advantage of Conan Doyle’s kindness to gain audiences with mediums who might otherwise have turned him away. This is probably unjust, as Houdini never had any particular trouble finding his way into séance rooms and took a particular delight in wearing disguises when he went behind enemy lines. At the critical moment, he would whip off his wig and glasses and shout, “I am Houdini! And you are a fraud!”

  No disguises were necessary when Houdini sat with Eva Carrière, who had impressed Conan Doyle in France, and Mrs. Wriedt, who claimed to produce the voices of departed family members. On both occasions Houdini came away unimpressed. Mrs. Wriedt had been so intimidated by Houdini that the hour-long séance passed without incident of any kind. Eva C. also sat motionless through several sittings, but subsequently managed to produce several “extrusions of ectoplasm” from her mouth, which had been examined beforehand. Houdini reported to Conan Doyle that he found the manifestations “highly interesting,” but was “not prepared to say that they were supernormal.”

  Privately, he recorded that the demonstration had not impressed him in any way. Eva Carrière had a remarkable talent for producing strange objects from her otherwise empty mouth, but so did Houdini himself. The medium’s effects reminded him of his own “Needles and Thread” trick, in which he swallowed a packet of loose needles and cotton thread, showed his mouth to be empty, and then pulled the cotton strand from his lips with the needles neatly threaded at regular intervals.

  By now Conan Doyle had grown impatient with Houdini’s equivocations. He invited Mrs. Wriedt to Windlesham and reported to Houdini that a spirit voice had been plainly heard. “Now, is that not final?” he asked. “What possible loophole is there in that for deception?” Houdini could not bring himself to accept Conan Doyle’s assurances so readily. His confidence plummeted when Conan Doyle wrote an ecstatic letter describing the Cottingley photographs as “a revelation.” For once, Houdini managed to maintain a discreet silence.

  Baffled by Houdini’s intransigence, Conan Doyle began to suspect an ulterior motive. Within two months of their first exchange of letters, when Houdini spoke of an investigation with the Society for Psychical Research, Conan Doyle asked, “Do they never think of investigating you?” Elsewhere, he expanded on the point: “My dear chap, why go round the world seeking a demonstration of the occult when you are giving one all the time? Mrs. Guppy could dematerialize and so could many folk in Holy Writ and I do honestly believe that you can also. My reason tells me that you have this wonderful power, for there is no alternative, tho’ I have no doubt that, up to a point, your strength and skill avail you.” To Conan Doyle’s way of thinking, this explained everything. Handcuffs, straitjackets, and packing crates were no obstacle to a man who could dematerialize. Houdini would simply allow himself to be trammeled up in whatever constraint his audiences could devise, then reduce his body to ectoplasm and ooze free in the manner of a snail discarding its shell. Moreover, this theory accounted for Houdini’s otherwise inexplicable hostility toward spiritualism. Houdini’s psychic powers, Conan Doyle would later contend, obliged him to adopt this pretense of disbelief. “Is it not perfectly evident,” he wrote, “that if he did not deny them his occupation would have been gone forever?”

  Houdini took care to refute such notions. It was enough for him, as he declared with characteristic modesty, to be considered the world’s grea
test showman. “Sir Arthur thinks that I have great mediumistic powers and that some of my feats are done with the aid of spirits,” he would write in A Magician Among the Spirits. “Everything I do is accomplished by material means, humanly possible, no matter how baffling it is to the layman.”

  The friendship reached its crisis during Conan Doyle’s 1922 lecture tour of America. Houdini had invited the entire family to stay at his home on West 113th Street, but Conan Doyle declined, saying he needed to stay “semi public” to deal with the press. Nevertheless, Conan Doyle expressed great eagerness to see Houdini again—“your normal self, not in a tank or hanging by one toe from a skyscraper.” Houdini and his wife, Bess, attended one of the Carnegie Hall lectures, and the Conan Doyles took in a showing of Houdini’s latest film, The Man from Beyond, at the Times Square Theatre. As he watched the film, which touched on the subject of reincarnation, Conan Doyle was treated to the sight of Houdini reading from one of his own spiritualist books—The Vital Message—on-screen. Afterward, Conan Doyle was so pleased with the movie that he provided an open letter to help publicize it. “I have seen the Houdini picture The Man from Beyond,” he wrote in part, “and it is difficult to find words to adequately express my enjoyment and appreciation of it. I certainly have no hesitation in saying it is the very best sensational picture I have ever seen. It is a story striking in its novelty, picturized superbly and punctuated with thrills that fairly make the hair stand on end.”

  Conan Doyle gave endorsements rather freely during this tour. In Washington, D.C., the husband-and-wife team of Julius and Ada Zancig gave him a private demonstration of their mind-reading act. “[T]heir remarkable performance, as I saw it, was due to psychic causes,” Conan Doyle stated, “and not to trickery.” As Zancig was a member in good standing of the Society of American Magicians, and had often shared a bill with Houdini, Conan Doyle’s faith would seem to have been misplaced. When notified that Zancig’s secret had once appeared in a newspaper, Conan Doyle brushed the information aside. Perhaps, he reasoned, the Zancigs were reduced to artificial methods “when their powers are low.”

  At one stage, according to the legendary magician Milbourne Christopher, Houdini invited Conan Doyle to his home with the idea of giving him an object lesson. In his private study, Houdini displayed a large chalk slate hanging against a wall. He then gave Conan Doyle a free choice of four cork balls, cutting one of them open so it could be examined. The ball Conan Doyle selected was dropped into a container of white ink.

  Houdini instructed Conan Doyle to write a secret message on a slip of paper. To insure that Houdini could not observe the message in any way, he told Conan Doyle to leave the house and walk as far away as he liked before writing anything down. Conan Doyle walked more than three blocks, paused to scribble a message, and then returned. On entering the library, Conan Doyle was handed a spoon and told to fish the cork ball out of the white ink. Next, Houdini directed him to carry the ink-soaked ball across the room and hold it up to the chalk slate. When Conan Doyle did so, the ball mysteriously adhered to the slate. Slowly, almost hesitantly, the cork ball rolled across the surface of the slate, leaving a trail of ink as it did so. As the ball rose and fell, animated by an unseen force, the ink trail spelled out a strange message. With becoming solemnity, Houdini asked Conan Doyle to read it aloud. The message was a biblical quotation: “Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin”—the exact words Conan Doyle had written on his folded slip of paper.

  Needless to say, Conan Doyle was baffled, as anyone would have been. Houdini gave himself a moment to enjoy his friend’s consternation, then offered a word of caution. “I did it by perfectly normal means,” Houdini said. “I devised it to show you what can be done along these lines.”

  Predictably, Conan Doyle suspected Houdini of employing his supposed supernatural gifts. Houdini could easily have disillusioned him by revealing the secret of the effect, but his professional pride would not allow it. Conan Doyle would have done well to take Houdini at his word. The escape artist had purchased the slate-writing effect from a friend who had performed it in vaudeville for many years. In the seemingly innocuous setting of Houdini’s private study, the effect became even more baffling. Suffice it to say that the walls of Houdini’s study were not as solid as they appeared.

  In June 1922, as the lecture tour drew to a close, Houdini extended an invitation to the Conan Doyles to attend the annual banquet of the Society of American Magicians. The affair was to be held in the grand ballroom of the McAlpin Hotel, and with Houdini as the master of ceremonies, the evening promised to be something more than the usual magicians’ get-together. “You will meet some notable people,” Houdini promised, “as some of the city officials and big business men will be there.”

  For Houdini, the banquet presented another opportunity to disabuse Conan Doyle of some of his spiritualist convictions, or at least to demonstrate some of the ways in which séance room effects could be achieved by earthly means. Accordingly, he arranged that the after-dinner entertainment would include a number of spirit exposés. Soon, Houdini would be doing this type of thing onstage. He would take particular delight in demonstrating a séance table technique for producing spirit messages: while volunteers held both of his hands, Houdini scrawled a message on a chalk slate, unseen by the volunteers, using his feet.

  When Conan Doyle got wind of Houdini’s plans, he declined the invitation. “I fear that the bogus Spiritual phenomena must prevent me from attending the banquet,” he wrote. “I look upon this subject as sacred, and I think that God’s gift to man has been intercepted and delayed by the constant pretence that all phenomena are really tricks, which I know they are not. I should be in a false position, for I must either be silent and seem to acquiesce, or else protest, which a guest should not do.”

  Houdini backpedaled. “I assure you,” he wrote, “it was only with a view of letting you see mysterious effects and only for your special benefit that this was being put on; therefore I assure you as a gentleman that there will be nothing performed or said which will offend anyone. My motive was a sincere desire from the heart and an expression of good will.” Houdini went on to repeat his assertion that “big men” would be present—a fact that held no attraction whatever for Conan Doyle—and mentioned that the famous magician Howard Thurston, himself “a firm believer in spiritualism,” would also attend. Conan Doyle relented. “Of course we will come,” he wrote. “All thanks.”

  On Friday night, June 2, the big men assembled as promised. The guest list amounted to a virtual dream team of magic, including Thurston, Adelaide Herrmann, Max Malini, Carl Heller, John Mulholland, The Great Raymond, Horace Goldin, and Theo Hardeen. Houdini had also reeled in the postmaster general of New York, the director of the New York Public Library, department store mogul Bernard Gimbel, and Alfred Ochs, publisher of the New York Times.

  According to an account published in Billboard, Houdini showed himself to be a “tactful, affable and pleasant” toastmaster, three words not normally associated with him. After dinner, the banquet room was cleared with “marvelous celerity” and converted into a makeshift auditorium. Sixteen guests were called upon to entertain. Horace Goldin, who had not expected to perform, borrowed a pair of handkerchiefs and held the room spellbound for twelve minutes. Houdini, having shelved his spiritualist effects, trotted out a classic effect from his stage repertoire. “Mr. Houdini gave a perfectly amazing performance,” Conan Doyle enthused, “in which having been packed into a bag, and the bag into a trunk, corded up and locked, he was out again after only a few seconds’ concealment in a tent, while in his place his wife was found, equally bound, bagged and boxed, with my dress-coat on which I had put upon him before I tied his hands behind him.” This was, of course, the legendary “Metamorphosis” substitution trunk mystery, the effect that had lifted Houdini out of the dime museums decades earlier. The sight of the diminutive Bess Houdini in Conan Doyle’s evening coat, with the sleeves dragging nearly to the floor, gave the presentation an unexpectedly comic
finish.

  Conan Doyle himself participated in the after-dinner entertainment. As his contribution, he set up a projector and showed moving pictures of what appeared to be prehistoric animals. These were stop-action clay animations, created by special effects pioneer Willis O’Brien for use in the movie version of The Lost World, which was then in production. “It struck me that it would be very amusing if I could mystify the mystifiers,” Conan Doyle wrote in Our American Adventure.

  In order to bring his audience to the “tiptoe of expectation,” Conan Doyle offered a pointedly ambiguous word of introduction. “These pictures are not occult,” he said in part, “but they are psychic, because everything that emanates from the human spirit or human brain is psychic. It is not supernatural. Nothing is. It is preternatural in the sense that it is not known to our ordinary senses.”

  It is hard to imagine what the assembly made of these remarks. As the New York Times reported, the audience was left to draw its own conclusions as to whether the “sober-faced Englishman was making merry with them or was lifting the veil from mysteries penetrated only by those of his school.” If Conan Doyle intended to create uncertainty over the origin of the film, he succeeded brilliantly, as the careful distinction between “supernatural” and “preternatural” phenomena may not have been quite as illuminating as he intended. Many of the guests that night were familiar with the Cottingley photographs and would have known that Conan Doyle had some peculiar ideas about “preternatural” images.

  The next day, Conan Doyle wrote a letter to Houdini and made copies available to the press. Fearing that the episode might cast doubt on the origin of his lecture photographs, he admitted that his “cinema interlude” had derived from The Lost World footage, and emphasized his intent to fool the magicians. “I had to walk very warily in my speech,” he noted, “so as to preserve the glamour and yet say nothing which I could not justify as literally true.” He ended with a gracious nod to Houdini’s own baffling display: “And now, Mr. Chairman, confidence begets confidence, and I want to know how you got out of that trunk.”