by David Jaher
Houdini had empathy for those seeking consolation from the séance. Though he had lost no one close to him during the War, he still grieved for his mother, and his yearnings were in accord with the general mood of bereavement in England. But his grief was hidden. Like a shaman he turned his darkness into something magically cathartic.
Of all his stage escapes, Houdini believed the Chinese Water Torture Cell to be his greatest, and he declared it the culmination of his research and labors. It had taken him more than three years to develop and rehearse the aquatic escape, and when he had first introduced it to prewar audiences in Europe in 1912, the Titanic sinking had just incited a general dread of death by drowning. Often Houdini seemed able to channel a prevailing urge or fear into his performances; yet an English expert on physical mediumship, James Hewat McKenzie, insisted his liberation from the Water Torture Cell could only be effected by real sorcery.
As Houdini made his escape at the Grand Theatre in London, McKenzie had experienced “a great loss of physical energy…such as is usually felt by sitters in materializing séances.” The magician’s body was dematerialized, McKenzie determined, enabling him to pass through the tank in which he had been incarcerated. What McKenzie had called “a startling manifestation of one of nature’s profoundest miracles” still awed the crowds who thought they were merely watching a ripping stunt on vaudeville.
What was it like to drown this way? One had to wonder. Presently, at the Portsmouth Hippodrome, Houdini’s attendants held their axes at the ready. If something went wrong, they were to smash the glass and rescue him. The orchestra took up “Asleep in the Deep” while all eyes regarded Houdini restrained upside down to a stock inside the tank. His face was bloated, his body clammy white under the wash of stage lights. He looked like a corpse resting in some bizarre Atlantean casket. For a few tense moments the audience was allowed to watch through the glass panels as the top of the enclosure was soundly padlocked and bolted. Overflowing water drenched the rubber tarp on the stage and splashed the gumboots of the black-clad crewmen. A yellow canopy was drawn around the Torture Cell to preserve the mystery. Two minutes passed. A woman gasped, though the theater was otherwise unnaturally silent. Then came the moment of materialization. The curtain parted and there stood Houdini by the water chamber—liberated, smiling widely, his body glistening, his hair inexplicably dry. The audience rose ecstatically. None cheering louder than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
♦
Such displays of the impossible would soon convince Doyle, as they had McKenzie, that Houdini was himself a great medium—the very thing he claimed to be searching for. In their correspondence that winter and spring of 1920, Houdini said that he was willing to believe in spirit communication, if only he could find a single genuine medium—one who would not resort to tricks when her psychic powers failed. Ever since his mother died, Houdini had been trying to find a clairvoyant who could reach her, and he regretted to say that his own séances thus far had been, without exception, a waste of effort. He had never found the same solace in the darkened room as Sir Arthur.
Over the years Houdini had made compacts with seven friends: telltale messages had been established, and it was agreed that whoever was the first to die would endeavor from the World Beyond to communicate through the séance. All of these other men were now deceased, yet no medium had produced the agreed-upon words. And so Houdini’s doubts persisted.
After all of his own experiences on both sides of the spirit cabinet, as both spook-show medium and séance sitter, he was an expert, he told Doyle, on the tricks of phony psychics. He had personally sat with Bert Reiss, one of the most uncanny mentalists in America—the one clairvoyant even Thomas Edison believed authentic. Professor Reiss, as he called himself, was a grizzled German Jew who could answer written questions that were recorded out of his sight and then concealed in a drawer. No one had been able to ascertain whether he could read minds, had X-ray vision, or had the gift of psychometry, or divination via objects.
Houdini had unmasked him as a flimflam artist.
He caught Reiss red-handed in a lightning-quick deception, and according to his account, Reiss told him that he was the first to ever spot the method. The professor had used sleight of hand to work his marvels, and was as good in that regard as any magician Houdini ever saw on vaudeville.
Houdini suggested, in his letters to Sir Arthur, that the history of spiritism was one long tale of charlatanism.
“I see that you know a great deal about the negative side of Spiritualism,” answered Sir Arthur, “I hope more on the positive side will come your way.” But he warned Houdini that his attitude would have to soften if he expected séance results. “It wants to be approached not in the spirit of a detective approaching a suspect,” he admonished.
While catching rogues and phonies was a sport Houdini relished, he did not want to appear eager to entrap or intimidate those sincere non-professional mediums whom Sir Arthur admired. He professed to be an open-minded investigator, and hoped, with Doyle’s help, to gain access to any clairvoyant who might bring a single authentic word from his mother, silent these seven years beyond the veil.
Doyle said that he had spoken face-to-face with his dead son, twice with his brother, and once with his nephew—“all beyond doubt in their own voices and on private matters.”
“It must be a wonderful feeling,” Houdini responded, “to be able to converse with your son, or in fact, with anyone whom you loved in your heart of hearts. I don’t mind telling you that your very seriousness makes me doubly interested to find the Truth, or solve the problem.”
Seek and Ye Shall Find
As the Great Houdini alighted from a motorcar in his gray duster on April 14, he appeared to Doyle more like one of those rugged German officers he had once raced in the Prince Henry Motor Exhibition, just before the War erupted, than a stage wizard in a top hat. The author of The Sign of the Four anticipated no such hostilities with his guest, who seemed through his actions and letters to be friendly and honorable. He had performed and bought shoes for hundreds of orphans in Doyle’s hometown of Edinburgh; and the novelist’s own children had never been more excited to welcome a visitor to their home at Crowborough.
Approaching the large estate with red tiles and five gables, Houdini was greeted by a page who escorted him to a sunny parlor where five Doyles—Arthur, Jean, and their three children—awaited his arrival. After accepting Houdini’s apologies for his wife Bess’s absence, the Doyles led him across a mahogany floor while the children gazed in awe at the man who walked through walls and caused an elephant to vanish. Sensing their excitement, Houdini plucked gold coins from the air and handed one to each of them—Denis, Adrian, and Jean Lena, whom they called Billy. It was a wartime trick called Money for Nothing, he told them, that he used to perform as his way of providing gifts to the doughboys.
The Doyles applauded the impromptu sleight of hand while Houdini, in turn, delighted in the place they called Windlesham. The immense hall where they stood was used by the family for billiards and music recitals, and also, said Jean, as a dance floor where 150 couples once waltzed at an Edwardian gala. The walls were decorated with portraits of English boxers, an original Van Dyck, and a stag’s head covered with bandolier cartridges. What especially caught Houdini’s eye, though, were the fantastic paintings of witches, ghouls, and faerie creatures—the work of an obscure Victorian artist, said Arthur; his late father, Charles.
Then, as always, they made a striking pair: the burly Scotch-Irish knight, Sir Arthur, speaking of his father the painter and Celtic faerie lore; and the short and stout Jew, Houdini, eagerly responding in an accent Sir Arthur thought was distinctive to the New York ghetto. What bound them was their mutual fascination with the outcome of death and, also, something nearly as sacred.
Charles Doyle had been unable to find a market for his occult portraits. The family had struggled and Sir Arthur grew up experiencing, as had Houdini, the humiliation of poverty. Both had wanted to redeem their f
allen families and uplift their martyred mothers. As a boy, Sir Arthur had promised his mam that “when you are old, you shall have a velvet dress and gold glasses and sit in comfort by the fire.” As a man, Houdini fulfilled a similar childhood vow when, after insisting that he be paid in gold coins for his performances at Hammerstein’s Roof Garden, he happily deposited the treasure in the apron of his mother. Once he had even purchased and given her a silk dress made for Queen Victoria. When Houdini spoke of Cecilia Weiss, Jean had the impression that for all his bluster, he was like a lost boy looking for his mother. Despite some disappointing séances in the past, he now sought that reunion in England.
Other men whom Doyle knew and admired were not as open, he felt, to the practice of Spiritualism. While eating a half grapefruit, Sir Arthur brought up the recent death of Teddy Roosevelt—the most grievous loss to America, he said, since Lincoln was assassinated. Sir Arthur believed that Colonel Roosevelt had essentially died of a broken heart he need not have suffered after his son, Quentin, an aviator, was shot down by the Huns. Another friend of his, Rudyard Kipling, was traipsing through every cemetery in Loos, seeking the desolate comfort of knowing where his own son was buried. My God, lamented Sir Arthur, if they only knew—if they could only know!
After their lunch, Doyle brought his guest to the second-floor study. There Houdini saw a bust of Sherlock Holmes, and another of Charles Doyle’s macabre paintings—a faerie shielding a butterfly from the talons of a monstrous raven. On the desk was a magnifying glass lying on a blotter, and to the left a mantelpiece holding pictures of soldiers arranged in order of when each had fallen. It looked to Houdini like a kind of shrine, draped with decorations the men had received for heroism.
Sir Arthur pointed out photographs of Kingsley and Innes Doyle, both of whom he said had been heard from recently. He then identified the first of the dead boys to come through at a séance—Jean’s brother, Malcolm, who had been killed at Mons. His contact, through the mediumship of Lily Loder-Symonds, had been the first breakthrough for the Doyles.
Sir Arthur had once been dubious of Lily’s powers, he confessed. She had said something at their first sitting, however, that had sent a chill down his spine. She claimed to see a soldier waving a gold coin and asking to speak to him. It was Malcolm. And that was the first time, Sir Arthur said, that he communicated with a dead man.
Lily could not have known, he explained, that he always carried on his keychain a prized gift from Malcolm—an antique guinea piece that he now took out to show Houdini. Dexterously, the magician rotated the gold coin between his fingers, and for a moment Sir Arthur wondered if he might cause it to disappear, like the sleight of hand he had displayed on his arrival. But he was only admiring the token of their reunion. A guinea, Houdini thought, was a small price to pay for a miracle.
♦
“Seek and ye shall find,” Doyle exhorted. And seek Houdini did; his wary investigation of Spiritualism would intensify into an obsessive pursuit that would monopolize the remainder of his time in England. While Houdini had a promoter’s knack for exaggeration, by his estimation he attended, on average, a séance a day during his six-month stay in Britain. Yet even the best of Doyle’s mediums, Anna Brittain and Etta Wriedt, only came through with gushing whispers that relayed meaningless information from the Other Side. “This is ridiculous stuff,” Houdini recorded in his diary.
Doyle attributed Houdini’s inability to make contact with his loved ones to his own turbulent vibrations, which he was sure intimidated these sensitive ladies. Nonetheless, Doyle was confident that his friend was making progress in his search. As directed, Houdini sat with nonprofessional mediums, thereby avoiding the lechers who, according to Sir Arthur, were less prevalent in England than the United States, but just as devious. “Glad you are trying the Spiritualist churches,” he encouraged Houdini, “because sooner or later you will happen on some good clairvoyant.” He only advised that in his efforts to find her, the magician should “persevere and get it out of your mind that you should follow it as a terrier follows a rat.”
Houdini appeared to heed him. Though Mrs. Wriedt had warned that the showman was “out to make trouble,” most of the other psychics he visited reported that he was well-behaved, a perfect sitter. Indeed, one medium in particular was pleased to perform for him. Before Houdini departed, he managed to participate in the British SPR investigation of the French enchantress known as Eva C, the so-called Queen of Ectoplasm. As her phenomena were purely physical, Eva was not the sort of medium Sir Arthur supported. She brought no uplifting messages from the next world—spirit communication was not in her repertoire. Rather, she was known for manifesting clouds of ectoplasm that took the form of spectral limbs and faces. For such ghoulish displays Eva C was the medium of the hour.
Few psychics in Europe were as thoroughly and intimately tested as she. The German researcher Albert von Schrenck-Notzing had probed her vagina before and after sittings to assure no fake ectoplasm was stashed there. Houdini was often searched as invasively before his jail escapes, to ensure that he concealed no pick or key inside the recesses of his body. No one, though, had ever restrained him inside the device in which the research officer of the SPR, Eric Dingwall, was the leading expert. Dingwall was an author of a history of the chastity belt and the curator of ancient erotica at the British Museum. Regardless, Houdini did not feel the expert had adequately restrained Eva C.
The phenomena she produced came over a number of evenings while Houdini and the others chanted “Donnez! Donnez!” There was a glowing secretion from her nostrils, an ectoplasmic rod that projected from above her eye, a filmy object that emanated from her mouth and then vanished like magic, and once—the misty face of a phantom.
Houdini was both skeptical and captivated. He noted that Eva had been searched by female members of the committee, albeit in another chamber, and her orifices had not been checked in the way he deemed essential. He told Dingwall that in his dime-museum days he had been taught by a Japanese acrobat to swallow and regurgitate a billiard ball. He had known a freak who did the same with frogs, snakes, and other clammy animals. He suspected that Eva had concealed in her gullet, then expelled some time later, a slimy piece of ghost-white plaster. He was not yet convinced there was such a thing as ectoplasm. “Well, we had success at the séance last night, as far as productions were concerned,” he reported to Doyle, “but I am not prepared to say that they were supernormal.”
Sir Arthur had no similar reservations when it came to Houdini’s own productions—his eerie escapes from supposedly foolproof restraints on stages throughout England. “My dear chap,” wrote Doyle, “why go around the world seeking a demonstration of the occult when you are giving one all the time…My reason tells me that you have this wonderful power, for there is no alternative.”
Aware of the artifice that he brought to his own performances, Houdini was not ready to pronounce any psychic genuine. Crossing back to the United States on the Imperator, he was still as skeptical of Doyle’s messages as when he had arrived at Windlesham. Sir Arthur’s wife, Jean, was convinced she had somehow been passed the gift of second sight from Lily Loder-Symonds, and Doyle made no major decision without consulting their dead loved ones. The Doyles, Houdini said, were utterly sincere in their beliefs. He doubted that Sir Arthur had gone soft in the mind, as the scoffers asserted. For he knew that even bright and worldly men were easily caught up in spiritistic mysteries. Once, during a séance aboard this very ship, Houdini had seen Teddy Roosevelt’s shrewd eyes widen in bewilderment. But the sea does not give up its dead, he reflected; except by magic.
A Séance for Teddy
It was on the Imperator, just before the Great War started, that Houdini met Teddy while sailing from England to America. Though men of different worlds, there was a tacit kinship between the Rough Rider and the escape artist: each had the curiosity and impulsive moods of a child; and each pursued his goals with relentless energy—what H. L. Mencken said of Roosevelt could just as easily
describe Houdini, that he was “almost pathological in his appetite for activity.”
Hoping to give the Colonel a thrill, Houdini wanted to leap handcuffed into the North Atlantic and free himself. The ship’s captain forbade the antic, but while walking the deck with Houdini and discussing Spiritualism, Teddy suggested a different sort of exhibition: “Give us a little séance,” he requested.
All his life Teddy held more with the Biblical miracles. He was an honorary member of the American SPR, though, and increasingly aware of his own precarious mortality. His recent ill-conceived expedition to the River of Doubt had been too much for him. Two of his party had died in the jungle, and he, delirious with a spreading infection and a 105-degree malarial fever, came within a whisker of being the third to be buried there. His health would never recover from the adventure.
Though Houdini rarely conducted spiritist sittings anymore, he was happy to oblige the ailing colonel. On the appointed evening, he requested that the lights be turned up for the séance to follow; he was not the kind of medium, he said, who prepared his manifestations behind a veil or in a spirit cabinet. Turning to Teddy, Houdini asked if he wished to put a question to the spirits. Eagerly complying, Roosevelt wrote it on a piece of paper shielded from the magician, and then folded and sealed it in an envelope. Houdini held up two “spirit slates,” which looked like small chalkboards. Upon revealing them to be blank, he asked the guest of honor to insert his envelope between them. As instructed, Teddy told the audience his question: “Where was I last Christmas?”
Instantly Houdini untied the slates, revealing a multicolored map of the River of Doubt, the remote Brazilian estuary that Roosevelt had been navigating over the holiday. The Colonel roared in amazement. He had only just thought of his question; there would have been no time for such an elaborate ruse. “By George, that proves it!” he bellowed. Another wave of excitement hit when it was discovered that the message was signed by the late English journalist W. T. Stead, whose ghost was held responsible for the phenomena. A medium in his own right, Stead had sailed to America at the behest of the spirits, but unfortunately had booked passage on the Titanic and met a frigid end in the North Atlantic. Tonight he had evidently come through from Summerland; a friend of Stead’s declared the signature authentic.
