The Witch of Lime Street

by David Jaher

  He said he had yet to meet a real necromancer.

  When Thurston the Great made a lady float in midair without suspension, or Houdini escaped the death-row cells that should have held him, or depths that should have drowned him, it was not, they made it plain, real magic. The Society of American Magicians, of which Houdini was president, considered itself a voice of reason in this “renaissance of medieval superstition.” The society threatened to ostracize any magician who claimed to possess real supernatural powers. Modern magic was “the natural enemy of spiritualism and of the occult.” And Houdini’s mandate was to expose any so-called Lady of the Darkness whose séances exploited the bereaved.

  Yet there he was, reveling with the Doyles, linking hands with Sir Arthur’s favorite mediums, and spouting occult themes in his new movie. Had he finally seen the Spiritualist light?

  After one of Sir Arthur’s lectures, Houdini escorted Lady Doyle along a side corridor in Carnegie Hall to rejoin her husband. They came to a padlocked door. Just as she turned to go back he reached out and “picked off the padlock as one picks a plum from a tree.” It looked like he had magnetized it with a magic pass of his hand. She found the feat amazing. On another occasion, while riding in a taxi, Houdini showed the Doyles how he could detach his thumb from its joint, as if it were invisibly amputated. It was an illusion that almost caused Jean Doyle to faint. Hence, the magician wondered how this couple might fare in their search for mediums in America, if they were so impressed by sleight of hand. When they stopped by his home in West Harlem, he gave Sir Arthur a biography on Ira Davenport—he of the celebrated Davenport Brothers, the magicians whose nineteenth-century spook shows had merged the arts of spiritism and conjuring.

  Houdini was doing exactly the opposite. His straitjacket demonstrations at the Times Square Theater required no dimmed light, screen, or curtain to hide his maneuvering. Instead he provided a more visceral spectacle: a torturous, contortion-like struggle. There was no pretense of harnessing occult powers. Unlike other magicians, Houdini revealed the trick and in so doing bared his spirit. Imitators had once tried to match him. So during the War, he had had another flight of masochistic fancy. He performed the straitjacket escape while suspended upside down some hundred stories in the air: “Top that!” he seemed to tell the competition.

  “The life of an escape artist,” he remarked, is “no bed of roses.” One tussle with the jacket had done irreparable damage to his kidney. Another time the winds had sent him careening into a window ledge that deeply gashed his forehead. The most frightening mishap, though, occurred in Oakland, California, where the ropes on the crane that held him aloft became entangled and they couldn’t lower him. He hung for almost twenty minutes that time, the pressure building in his skull, until a window washer tied a store of towels together and threw them to him—like a lifeline to a drowning seaman. This and other escapades were often caught on camera. For he had begun to offer in each city on his movie tour a prize to the best picture of the aerial straitjacket escape. The newspapers judging the contest received hundreds of photographs of Houdini contorting wildly in the air. And no filmy spirit beside him.

  Séance by the Sea

  In June, Doyle faced his toughest critics when Houdini made him the guest of honor at the annual gala for the Society of American Magicians. Laughing heartily while puffing on his Limehouse perfecto, Sir Arthur appeared to enjoy their tribute to spirit vaudeville. When Houdini called for him to speak, the audience expected an impassioned call for communion with the dead, the spirit pictures. Instead, Doyle displayed moving images of monstrous creatures. They were dinosaurs; feeding, playing, loving, fighting with their fearsome teeth and horns—and tails that snapped a death blow to a rival. No one had ever seen anything like this on a movie screen. Many magicians believed that they were watching actual psychic pictures of beasts from another dimension. Doyle’s “monsters of the ancient world or of the new world which he has discovered in the ether, were extraordinarily lifelike. If fakes, they were masterpieces,” the Times marveled.

  “How did you do it?” asked Houdini.

  The next day Sir Arthur wrote him that the creatures were constructed by “pure cinema but of the highest kind” and were being used in The Lost World, a movie based on his book of the same title. His purpose in exhibiting the moving pictures without any explanation “was simply to provide a little mystification to those who have so often and so successfully mystified others.”

  ♦

  Sir Arthur’s friendship with Houdini reached its heady apogee after the gala, when, just before sailing home, the Doyles invited him and Bess to join them for a weekend in Atlantic City. After arriving at the resort Houdini found his way to the hotel pool, where he taught Sir Arthur’s sons to dive from the high board and float on their backs. He showed how he could submerge himself underwater for an astonishing length of time; his secret residing in the powerful inhalations and exhalations he practiced before the stunt. Like them, he had to breathe or die.

  Later they joined the women by the ocean. While the children played with a beach ball and dashed in the surf, Houdini observed his Spiritualist friends. Sir Arthur was as upbeat as anyone he had known since Evatima Tardo. Lady Doyle told him that he had never uttered a cross word to her, nor to the children. The family was in almost daily communion with ghosts, yet Houdini felt a lightness in their presence; even the little ones told him they had no fear of dying. They spoke of their dead brother, Kingsley, in the Summerland—a place as real as any on Earth. Later Houdini was moved when one of the boys ran up to Jean, remarking that he was lonesome for her and wanted to give her a kiss. He did so caressingly on the mouth, then put his lips to each finger on her hand. It was as passionate a display of filial devotion as Houdini had ever seen outside his own home.

  The magician’s second day in Atlantic City was his mother’s birthday. Appropriately his mind returned to the loss that had revived his interest in spiritism. Eleven years earlier, at a reception following a performance in Copenhagen, he had received the news from which he had still not recovered. His mother had suffered a massive stroke; there was no hope, wrote his brother Leopold, a doctor. The Great Houdini had instantly fainted in front of the press and two princes of Holland. He wept openly, and could barely walk without leaning on his wife.

  In contradiction to Jewish law, Houdini had instructed his family not to bury Cecilia until he returned from Europe. After buying her the pair of woolen slippers that she had requested a few weeks prior to her death, he sailed back to say goodbye. Upon returning home he sat up all night beside her body in the parlor. That morning the Weisses buried her next to Mayer Samuel at Cypress Hills in Queens, with the slippers in her coffin. Once again his parents were together in their own world—and Houdini felt the urge to find them.

  On the Atlantic City beach, he sat next to Bess—who looked girlish in a bathing dress of taffeta. She waved to the august Brit striding toward them with good news. He told them that Jean, who practiced that epistolary form of mediumship called automatic writing, had the feeling that Houdini’s mother would come through that day. Gratefully, Houdini accepted the invitation to participate in a séance. The Doyles could not have known it was his mother’s birthday. And for once he would sit with a medium whom he trusted. Sir Arthur apologized for not including Bess, but explained that the presence of “two people who were of the same mind, either positive or negative” might influence the results.

  “Go right ahead,” Bess said. “I will leave Houdini in your charge.” Then the two men—Houdini in a frumpled white suit, Doyle in a trim dark one—walked back to the hotel while Bess awaited the outcome of the experiment. She closed her eyes to take a nap. Jean Doyle had once told her that in sleep the living may commingle with the spirits. Many a night Bess had heard her husband wake up, asking, “Mama, are you here?”

  Perhaps this afternoon she might be.

  Inside the suite, Jean was ready to begin. She asked Houdini to sit down while Sir Arthur drew curta
ins and placed writing pads and pencils on the table. Then began the intimate ritual. Sir Arthur bowed his head and said a prayer. Tenderly, he placed his hands on his wife’s to give her added power. Houdini shut his eyes and listened to the lapping of the sea. Without having to be vigilant for trickery, he had never felt more open at a séance. Quieting his doubts, he tried to accept the Doyles’ beliefs wholeheartedly. He had always been particularly fascinated with their notion of the etheric body. Often he was aware of a subtle force directing his physical movements, as though he were ahead of his body while walking the streets. At the moment he had a sense of that sort—as if he were floating. “If I ever had an astral body or soul, that soul was out of my body as far as it was possible and still live,” he wrote of the sensation, “waiting for a sign or vibrations, feeling for the presence of my dearly beloved Mother.”

  Before long Jean sensed a presence. Her hand began to flutter; in an awe-filled voice she said that no force like this had ever seized her. She pounded three times on the table—the sign that Houdini’s mother was the visiting spirit. She took up a pencil and with emphatic strokes put Cecilia’s messages to paper. Sir Arthur tore off a page and handed it to Houdini. “Oh my darling, thank God, thank God, at last I’m through,” the communication began. Houdini looked pale and “deeply moved” as he read on. The Doyles too were emotional; they knew what this reunion meant to the man in the white suit. “I always read my beloved son’s mind—his dear mind.”

  Here was finally proof for him!

  Five days later, in New York, Houdini told Sir Arthur that he had been “walking on air” since the séance. Sir Arthur understood the feeling. To experience authentic spirit contact was to be twice born. He wished to know, though, whether the Atlantic City sitting had changed Houdini’s estimation of his own unusual powers—because something else happened there, and it had stunned the Doyles.

  Jean had channeled fifteen pages of automatic writing, and Houdini seemed to accept every word to be as genuine as the cherished letters Cecilia once wrote him while he was on tour. Yet Houdini wanted the spirits to perform an encore. Just when Sir Arthur thought the séance in Atlantic City was over, Houdini had picked up a pencil and took a stab himself at automatic writing.

  The word “Powell” immediately came through to him.

  “Truly Saul is among the Prophets!” exclaimed Sir Arthur; for Dr. Ellis Powell, a Spiritualist friend of his, had died the previous week. Houdini had never heard of this gentleman, he later said, and was not aware that he had crossed over. He suggested that he was thinking of another Powell, an ill friend of his, a fellow illusionist.

  He conceded that it was a strange coincidence.

  In the parlor of Houdini’s brownstone, Sir Arthur told him that the Powell explanation would not do. Did he still not recognize his gift?

  Houdini smiled dubiously. The dead did not speak to him, but he had always wondered whether some invisible presence was protecting him.

  He admitted that just before a dangerous stunt he listened for a voice to tell him when to dive or leap. “You stand there, swallowing the yellow stuff that every man has in him,” he explained, “then at last you hear the voice, and you jump.” He recalled that once he trusted himself rather than his guides and almost broke his neck.

  Doyle had never heard Houdini come so close to admitting he was psychic. He sensed that his friend was on the right path now. “I brought you, Sir Arthur and my darling son together,” Cecilia had said in her message. “I felt you were the one man who might help us to pierce the veil and I was right.”

  That evening Mr. and Mrs. Houdini celebrated their twenty-eighth wedding anniversary with the Doyles. The four of them attended a glittering revue called Pinwheel. Wherever they went the stage lights followed. The show was interrupted when its impresario, Raymond Hitchcock, pleaded for Houdini to “do a little stunt.” The magician demurred even as the crowd chanted his name. Settling the matter, Sir Arthur pushed Houdini onto the stage. Cries for his famous needle mystery arose. The performance of Pinwheel had stopped. Actors, crew, and chorus gathered around the stage to watch. Houdini swallowed five packages of needles then brought them up in a flourish all tied together. There was a thunderous applause. He bowed deferentially to his British friend. The spotlight then switched to Doyle.

  The following day—their American adventure over, their last interviews given, their king snake, a gift from the Bronx Zoo, put back in its container—the Doyles gathered on the deck of the Adriatic to bid farewell to the throng of well-wishers and reporters assembled on the pier. And when the whistle sounded and the hawsers were cast off, Sir Arthur could feel satisfied about his mission. His optimism and fervor had resonated with Americans who were tired of a winter of Prohibition and humdrum politics. He had been received, wrote Horace Green of the Times, like “a breath of fresh air.” He seemed to believe that a single proven medium was all that was needed; for “even if in the entire world of evidence, only one person were found capable of mediumistic materialization,” Green observed, then the Rubicon was crossed.

  For the time being, Sir Arthur took pride in the fact that it was not just Gold Star Mothers responding to his lectures; he had garnered respect from many of the reporters who he had feared would mock his work. There were indeed some who scoffed, and embarrassments and missteps had occurred, but overall he considered his tour a success. He had set lecture-hall records in New York, spread his message in presentations from the Eastern Seaboard to the Midwest, tested numerous American mediums, and hoped that he had won some new adherents to Spiritualism—most importantly, the magician he felt had been on the fence until Atlantic City. And really, it was generous for his friend to see him off. There was Houdini, waving briskly from the wharf.

  The Prize

  “In those days life was like the race in Alice in Wonderland,” said F. Scott Fitzgerald, “there was a prize for everyone.” Whether the award was for brains, grit, or grace, it didn’t matter. There were prizes for transatlantic flight: Soon it seemed that every ex–Army pilot and Air Mail captain had eyes for European shores. Aviators and their flying machines were streaking across the front pages. Orson Desaix Munn’s publication, the popular Scientific American magazine, had once sponsored contests for flight. It was the tabloids, however, that exploited the public’s hunger for carnivalesque thrills. There were prizes for endurance: The dance marathon craze had begun. Americans were collapsing into one another’s arms. The country was plunging toward hell in a handcart, the moralists warned. There were prizes for beauty: Sweethearts in wool swimming dresses graced the rotogravure pages of William Randolph Hearst’s dailies.

  From his offices in New York’s Woolworth Building, Orson Munn ran a more respected press. He had nothing to do with the gaudier contests. Neither, though, was he among those offended by the first national beauty pageant—where teenage girls paraded past a maestro called King Neptune and his entourage of Nubian slaves. Before a crowd of 100,000 excited spectators assembled on the boardwalk of Atlantic City, the first Miss America was crowned—a beaming sixteen-year-old from Washington, DC. Seeing her face in the newspaper, Munn felt she bore a strong resemblance to the star Mary Pickford, whom he had met years earlier at a benefit during the War. Munn was himself married to a stage actress. A prominent New York socialite, he attended gala affairs. His work involved discussing and reading about subjects like Marconi’s radio waves, the firepower of the latest battleship, and the twelve-cylinder car. Yet he had a flair for the rumba and spent his nights on the town. A tall, gangly, silver-haired man, he was ubiquitous in both scientific and entertainment circles. Two of his friends were Thomas Edison and Harry Houdini. He spoke fluently the language of both of their worlds.

  ♦

  There were prizes for science. Even the lofty new discoveries in physics were brought down to earth when James Malcolm Bird, an ambitious Scientific American editor, presided over a competition in 1920 to find the individual who could best explain to the country just what Albe
rt Einstein had discovered and what it all meant. It had not promised to be a major event. But with strong public interest in the latest scientific trends, Bird’s contest caught on. A purse of $5,000 was put up—a sizable sum for the day; more prize money than had ever been offered toward science outside of the Nobel Prize.

  Two years later, Bird was intrigued by that most controversial field of science—psychic research. A former mathematics professor at Columbia University, Bird had an intense, critical air. With his cloth cap, lean physique, and beaklike nose, he resembled Sherlock Holmes, and his observant eye noted the large splash made by the two crusading Englishmen, Lodge and Doyle. The paradox was tantalizing. During a period of a great surge in technology, spooks were in vogue. “The atmosphere of America contains more electricity than that of any other country and therefore more spirits,” Sir Arthur had declared in Washington. He claimed that spirits were drawn to voltaic fields.

  There was a prize for ghosts. Houdini’s friend Joseph Rinn, a wealthy produce merchant and fierce debunker of mediums, had put up a large cash award if Sir Oliver Lodge could produce in his presence a convincing visit from Raymond or any other spirit. He later made the same challenge to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. But the occult knights would not be drawn into a demeaning contest. The spirits, they made it clear, could not be summoned by coin. In an editorial, the Boston Globe concurred with Doyle and Lodge. “If there is a spirit realm accessible to the inhabitants of earth, the door to it will not be opened by a key of gold, for the simple reason that it could not possibly be that kind of door.” Orson Munn felt otherwise. In the present environment he was certain that the golden key fit all doors.