The Witch of Lime Street

by David Jaher

  Surprisingly, his outlook would change through the influence of a Spiritualist. Sir Oliver Lodge had presented as pioneering research what Dr. Crandon had always associated with superstitions of the horse-and-buggy days: that old black magic. “We met again,” the doctor said of their encounter. “We became friends. Sir Oliver suggested some reading for me, and I began, feeling somewhat foolish, but certainly intrigued.”

  Dr. Crandon soon realized that the séance was the one place where science and the pursuit of a hereafter merged. Darwin had solved the mystery of the origin of man, but what of his postmortem fate? The answer might be revolutionary, for biology and classical physics would become as outmoded as orthodox religion if Lodge were right about Spiritualism and the Ether of Space.

  Thus, as the 1920s started, a new horizon beckoned to Dr. Crandon. This had as much to do with his family life as the Spiritualist revival. One of the preeminent surgeons in Boston, Dr. Crandon was a gynecologist and obstetrician. He knew that he would not be delivering his own baby—as he was no longer able to reproduce—so the Crandons decided to take in an orphan. Roy’s father, who had been president of the Ethical Society of Boston, encouraged such humanitarian impulses. But oddly—as if Roy thought forsaken children were more an English tradition—the child he desired was searched for and found through intermediaries in London.

  Roy had always wanted a son; if his name were to die, that was no kind of immortality. To his consternation, though, the London orphan did not adjust to his new home in Beacon Hill. Both the new child and Mina’s son called their patriarch Dr. Crandon rather than Father. Whatever issues developed in their home beyond that is a matter of privacy.

  But we do hear about these boys through the Boston newspapers in the summer of 1921. They had been playing off Point Shirley on a raft that tore loose from its mooring. Caught in a current, they were carried toward dangerous waters. Hundreds watched while two strong swimmers rescued them. The newspapers identified the distressed children as “two small boys, six and eight years respectively.” The younger child was John, Mrs. Crandon’s son. The older was the English boy who remains nameless and unknown; saved from the sea but lost in the ether.

  The Wand of Youth

  The first stop for the magician was the cemetery. Upon returning to New York from one of his movie productions or magic tours, it was his ritual to visit the Queens grave site of Cecilia Weiss. At the height of his fame he told a movie magazine that his greatest ambition was to prove himself worthy of the mother who raised him. The umbilical was the one bond he had never slipped in his career as an escape artist. Even when touring abroad, as long as Cecilia lived he would try to return home for her birthday. When anxious he would rest his head on her chest—just like when she calmed him as a child. He had always wanted to be the center of his mother’s life, but this was rarely possible growing up. She had six other needy children vying for her affections and a defeated husband whom she cherished. Her third son, Ehrich, hoped to do something extraordinary to win her attention. When he grew up to jump from bridges, his mother was his imagined audience.

  Before winning acclaim as an escape artist, he had been a trickster on the dingy circuit—a medicine-show mountebank, even a fraud medium. Yet when it came to judging right from wrong he had a venerable model in his father. Rabbi Mayer Samuel Weiss had always abided by the strictures of the Talmud and had also earned a law degree in Budapest to bolster his authority. Many evenings he recited moral fables to his sons and daughter. But despite his scholarly air, he was in worldly ways a failure. There was no magic in Mayer Samuel’s life except for his young and devoted second wife, Cecilia. His efforts lacked the relentless drive that would become their third son’s trademark.

  In 1878, four years after Ehrich’s birth, Mayer Samuel found a rabbinical position in the town of Appleton, Wisconsin, and brought his family from Hungary to join him in the New Wilderness. In the magician’s memory, his parents sit together under pine trees in an Appleton park, drinking coffee, speaking intimately—a moment of connubial bliss during an unusually stable period for the family. It was not that life was easy in Appleton; Mayer Samuel earned a mere $750 yearly as a rabbi—barely enough for the frugal Weisses to scrape by. In light of all that followed, though, Ehrich idealized an early childhood that included surrey rides, winter sledding, and steamer excursions on the Fox River. Most exciting of all was when the traveling circuses—Barnum’s and Forepaugh’s—pitched their tents outside of town. Sneaking under canvases, the boy encountered firewalkers, Arabian jugglers, and magicians—with names like “Peerless Mysteriarch of Three Continents” or “The Wonder Working Wizard of the World”—who claimed to be from mysterious places like Venice, Persia, and Hindustan. No itinerant trickster ever claimed wholesome roots, but Ehrich Weiss would one day declare himself a clergyman’s son, a boy brought up with small-town values. Nevertheless, he owed his inspiration to diabolists like the Englishman Dr. Lynn, who dismembered his patients onstage with a surgeon’s saw then magically reassembled them.

  There was greater magic beyond the circus canvas. Appleton was where the world’s first hydroelectric plant went into operation. Mysterious forces were harnessed in its operation. And this was somehow related to the work of Thomas Edison, the Wizard of Menlo Park, who lit homes in New York City without a gas lamp or a candle. But unfortunately for the Weisses, Mayer Samuel could not keep up with the march of progress. The Jewish community soon dismissed him as rabbi of the Zion Congregation. His inability to adapt, to learn a new language, had cost him his position. He was fifty-four and had no other opportunities in Wisconsin. A dark period for the family began. Relocating to Milwaukee, they lived off Jewish charity—often switching residences to elude persistent creditors. Of this time Ehrich later recalled, “the less said the better.”

  His parents sent him back to Appleton to apprentice as a locksmith—invaluable training for a future escape artist. By the age of twelve, however, he already felt confined. His father’s hopes dashed, Ehrich decided that it was only through finding work in a traveling circus—he’d once performed rudimentary rope tricks as “Prince of the Air”—that he could earn enough to help the family. With confidence in his repertoire of street-fair magic, he hopped a side-door Pullman bound for Kansas.

  ♦

  The magician rarely spoke publicly of his trek across the Midwest as a child—the locomotive whistle would never be his siren. But traveling many years later in the comfort of a parlor car he would remember the exhilaration of the boxcar hop and feel again the bite of steam and cinder. By the 1920s he would practically require a circus train to convey his ensemble and magic apparatus. And it would give him satisfaction to know that he, a former freight tramp, could now command a Pullman.

  For over a year after running away, Ehrich Weiss sought a magical fix for his family’s troubles. Hoping to become his mother’s provider, he sent her little more than postcards from places like Kansas City and Hannibal. In his recollections, he hooks on with a circus but more likely survived as a street performer, beggar, and shiner. He then tramped back to the place where his family had originally arrived in the United States—in 1887 he returned to New York City and reunited with his father.

  Having failed to hold a congregation in Wisconsin, Mayer Samuel was shopping his rabbinical skills in the ghetto. One year later, Ehrich’s income as a messenger and newsboy, combined with his father’s as a Hebrew tutor, was enough to send for the rest of the family. Cecilia and Ehrich’s siblings joined them in a tenement on East Seventy-fifth Street that shook with the passage of the Third Avenue El train. Nothing could be further from pastoral Appleton. There were fewer buildings, though, on the West Side of Central Park and farther north were shrub and swampland. Through this morass Ehrich Weiss ran ten miles regularly. He would set a record for racing the loop around Central Park. Running and athletics were his escape from the indignities of ghetto poverty. He developed into a powerful swimmer, practiced gymnastics and acrobatics, and went to the fin
als of a city boxing championship before illness forced him to bow out.

  At the end of the day, however, as when it started, Ehrich Weiss was now just another Jewish garment worker. And so, it turned out, was Mayer Samuel, who worked for the same Broadway necktie cutter as his son. To the disgrace of the son his learned father had become a sweatshop sheeny. While manning sewing machines in an airless hovel, Mayer Samuel’s health began to fail. The greenhorn, never able to learn English, was stricken with cancer of the tongue. Following an operation to remove the tumor, he died of shock, according to the doctors. Ehrich would recall that after the failed surgery at Presbyterian Hospital, as he tried to console his weeping mother, she replied, to his surprise, that if he’d had paradise for twenty-eight years he too would cry. Paradise he could not provide her, but he was determined to give her those material things his father had failed to. As soon as he became a vaudeville star.

  It was after his father’s death that Ehrich put away his running togs and applied himself as never before to magic. He developed with his brother Dash an escape called Metamorphosis, in which the magicians—one bound in a trunk, the other standing next to it—exchange places and outfits almost instantaneously. Those who saw the brothers perform the trick in the beer halls knew it was only an illusion—a curtain was quickly drawn and opened at the moment of the changeover—but mein Gott, those boys could move like lightning!

  For Ehrich, the greater transformation was when he became Harry Houdini; the new moniker a tribute to his hero, the French illusionist Jean Eugéne Robert-Houdin—the forefather of modern magic. At that time Houdini began playing the dime-museum circuit. Within, patrons could find a chamber of horrors and waxworks of villains like John Booth cocking his derringer or Marat bleeding to death in his baignoire. Indecent contests were held—of the kind where fat ladies raced one another or Amazon Queens wrestled male volunteers. Some of these establishments also housed displays of grotesque medical specimens, and all had live performances in the curio hall. Houdini first presented his handcuff act there, but he was merely a sideshow performer.

  It was the freaks these crowds had come for.

  They came to see Unthan the Armless Wonder Man use his toes to play a violin or shoot an arrow at the ceiling. And they came for Mrs. Mattie Lee Price, the Electric Girl with spiritistic powers. Houdini had watched other occult acts like Mattie’s, but she was the best of them. The waifish girl held a billiard cue extended while a trio of male volunteers failed to force it downward. She tapped a table with a walking stick and suddenly it rose on two legs and gyrated. With only the pressure of her hand, she caused a cane chair to move across the room while a heavy man was occupying it. Above all they came to see the beautiful Cuban Evatima Tardo entice a rattlesnake to flare up and sink its fangs into her milky arms and shoulders. Even Houdini was shaken when, after Evatima wrenched the serpent from her arm, a physician injected its poison into a rabbit, which instantly went into convulsions and died “in great agony”—grisly proof that the snake queen was no faker.

  While Houdini never found a magician to mentor him, he acquired many tricks from these freaks to add to his arsenal. From Unthan he learned to use his toes like fingers; by observing the Electric Girl he grasped the rules of force and leverage; and the sword swallowers taught him to use his throat to conceal—and regurgitate as required—keys, lockpicks, and larger articles.

  But it was Evatima whom he most admired, for she had this impenetrable aura. It was said that she could stop her heart from beating and control her circulation. She claimed to be immune to the germs of fatal diseases and oblivious to any kind of pain. To the astonishment of a committee of Chicago physicians, she casually stuck hatpins through her cheeks and knitting needles deep into her forearms. In Chicago, the City of the Fair, she met Houdini, and while nothing came of it romantically he was smitten by her mysterious power and gaiety. “I never had a pain in my life,” she told reporters. “I don’t know what an ache is. I am always happy, never sad.”

  Nothing seemed to faze her. Occultists believed that Evatima Tardo had developed the psychic gift of detaching from her physical to her astral body; thus, her mind was no longer connected to the torture. Houdini also wanted to learn to transcend the physical; but ultimately he came to realize she was vulnerable. As it turned out, she was immune to the venom of the cobra and the spider tarantula, but not the jealous lover. When that third and most dangerous species caught her cuddling in a Memphis restaurant with another man, he shot them both with a Remington revolver. Then he put a bullet through his own temple and joined them in that place where the big tent is struck and the barkers are silent.

  The Magician in Love

  It was during his dime-museum days that Houdini first began to seek professional mediums. In séances attended with his grieving mother, he attempted to contact the spirit of Mayer Samuel, who had once believed communication with the dead was possible. Houdini pawned his dead father’s watch to hire the mediums, but the messages they relayed from the life hereafter were catch-all sentiments. What he heard was spirit twaddle, clearly not the disembodied voice of Mayer Samuel. The disappointing results, not to mention Houdini’s encounters with spooks on the flimflam circuit, were convincing him that there was no such thing as genuine mediumistic power. He had seen much in his short life, but no marvel that he found unexplainable.

  This was twenty years before the ghostly War, when the virtuous Victorians, Lodge and Doyle, imbued the Spiritualist movement with science and fervor. In Houdini’s youth, the séance was stigmatized as an illicit rendezvous in a back parlor. Psychic mediums often advertised their wares in the personals section of the New York Herald, such services being fronts, Houdini suspected, for prostitution, badger games, and other methods of extortion. Just when he began discrediting superstitious practices, though, he met a special girl who felt differently. There was no witch tale she did not believe in.

  An eighteen-year-old Brooklyn girl of German origin, Bess Rahner was at a music hall when Dash Houdini introduced her to his brother, the senior performer in their magic duo. While just one year older than she, Harry felt the urge to shield her from his rough-and-tumble circles, including brawny Dash, as she was barely ninety pounds and looked like a child when wearing certain outfits. Bess had a lovely, slightly accented voice and large, naïve blue eyes that seemed unaccustomed to navigating the world of grown-ups. She was a seamstress for a tailor shop and a singer with the Floral Sisters. But given that her troupe played the beer halls on the Bowery, her innocent airs may have been more show than substance. Bess would one day joke that she sold her virginity for an orange to a destitute Houdini. Their courtship, such as it was, lasted only a couple of weeks before they exchanged vows and celebrated their matrimony at the carnival resort that was West Brighton.

  There was good reason for their elopement. Bess’s people were Roman Catholic, and her mother was horrified to learn that she had wed not just a Jew but a lowly showman. Cecilia Weiss, by contrast, hugged her son’s wide-eyed shiksa bride and murmured that she was now her daughter. Still, it was a shock for Bess to be abruptly removed from her mother and ten siblings. She didn’t really know her new husband; the Weisses’ ways were foreign to her. And becoming Mrs. Houdini meant training to be a part of Harry’s daunting magic act.

  Houdini wanted to teach Bess to appear to be psychic, as well as assuage her fear of black magic. One night, he asked her to write the name—that she had never told him—of her dead father on a piece of paper and then burn it in a gas flame he lit. As he directed, she handed him the ashes. When he rubbed them on his thick forearm, her father’s given name of Gebhardt instantly appeared etched on his skin in bloody letters. Bess screamed in horror and fled their tenement. “Silly kid, it was only a trick,” he explained when he caught her outside and calmed her.

  In time, he taught her the secrets of second sight and prestidigitation; he showed her how to slip into trances like a spirit medium and tell fortunes. He wanted her to replace Dash
in the Houdini show, so that they could stage the kind of psychic act that was then the rage on vaudeville. “Professor Houdini” received the coin from the volunteer in the crowd. Bess on the stage revealed the date inscribed on it. He took the business card from the spectator. She announced the name and address on it. “The wonderful mystical demonstrations of Prof. and Mme. Houdini continue to be a source of wonder to all who witness their marvelous exhibition,” a newsman applauded.

  As Bess was more agile than Dash, the Houdinis would also develop an electrifying Metamorphosis. Yet they were still small-time. After three years of marriage, the couple had appeared in the Welsh Brothers Circus in Pennsylvania, where Houdini performed as both a magician and the Wild Man of Borneo—a caged beast that crawled around in chains while spectators tossed him cigars and cigarettes to eat, and the ringmaster dangled a slab of raw meat just beyond his reach. For other ensembles or on their own, they had played the parishes of Nova Scotia, the curio stage in dime museums from New York to Chicago, and variety halls in the heart of Dixie. They added a comedy gig to their repertoire, and took a stab at burlesque and melodrama. Nothing seemed to capture the attention of the newspapers or vaudeville managers.

  Bess grew despondent and was breaking down physically. When even the dime-museum stints began drying up, Houdini wrote the two great magicians of the Gilded Age, Alexander Herrmann and Harry Kellar, to request work as an assistant. They didn’t need him. He approached four of the major New York newspapers and offered to sell to them, for the mere sum of $20, all of his prized secrets. There were no takers. He attempted to market by mail the special equipment he used for his conjuring routine. There were no orders. He opened a magic school. With the exception of an elderly Chicago businessman, he had no students.