by David Jaher
The Great Houdini imitated how she rose up and tore the front off the cabinet, asserting that she had the battle scars to prove his account. “You will find the bruises where she lifted up her shoulders,” he vowed. But there was nothing torturous about the box itself. “I slept in it one afternoon. That is how easy it is. She smuggled a ruler in with her.” And when he caught her, she called him a vile name—she said his father was never married to his mother. “Culture!” Houdini snorted. He had better ethics and manners, his gesture suggested, than the upstanding Crandons.
For the finale, Houdini called again for one of his committee to come to center stage, but this time none were eager to be his sitter—one reporter pleading a sore throat, the six others declining. An audience member was thus selected to hold Houdini’s hands and firmly plant his feet on the speaker’s. With a nod to Anna Fay, Houdini proceeded with the séance. “Now, spirit fizzy fizzy. That is what I say when I ask the spirits to appear. Would you mind ringing the bell, spirits?” While the volunteer confirmed that he had control of Houdini, a bell and then a tambourine rang. The audience exploded, for they observed what the sitter could not: Houdini had withdrawn his feet, leaving the man to control his empty shoes while the escape artist clanged the instruments that were gripped in his bare toes. “This and the running patter of the séance chamber convulsed the spectators,” a reporter wrote. “They were getting their show.”
Houdini closed the program with an “open forum.” Only then was it clear that he had many critics in the house. Could he explain, one lady inquired, how the Boston medium could manifest the voice of Walter when McDougall held her lips?
“I will answer that question by asking you one. Was Carrington or Bird at that séance? If they were, they did the talking.”
Later, someone called Sir Arthur the best lecturer ever to speak on mediums and spirits in this town: “I will tell you one thing, you can’t fill a house like Conan Doyle did twice!”
Always sensitive to his credentials as a scholar and speaker, Houdini responded with a gratuitous sneer at Sir Arthur’s literary work. “Well, all right, if I am ever such a plagiarist as Conan Doyle, who pinched Edgar Allan Poe’s plumes, I will fill all houses.”
After further discussion, Houdini asked if there were any more comments concerning Margery. “Anything more you want to see?” A response from far back in the house registered the general mood in the hall.
“Do some more tricks.”
♦
The next day John Crandon entered the newsstand where his parents bought their papers and made a surprising request. The boy wished to buy all the copies of the Transcript and the Herald, as he didn’t want his mother to read about what Houdini had said about her at Symphony Hall. Yet the coverage, at least in the Herald, was not entirely unsympathetic to her. There was no doubt, a reporter affirmed, that many mediums were indeed as crooked as Houdini portrayed them, but “are there not certain men and women who have the ability to utilize natural forces at present unknown, incomprehensible, beyond their power to explain? There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of even in the philosophy of Mr. Houdini.”
Showman and Scientist
Those of us belonging to that portion of humanity which does not subscribe to belief in the existence of spooks should be grateful to Houdini, the handcuff king.
—New York Herald Tribune
He will be a wild donkey of a man, his hand against everyone and everyone’s hand against him.
—GENESIS 16:12
The Handcuff King performs alone and rarely shares the stage. Walter Prince was the only committeeman with whom Houdini felt allied—the one investigator he had not belittled in the newspapers or clashed with over the Crandon case. Yet Prince, who had objected to Bird’s heralding the Margery mediumship while it was still being investigated, was not going to abide Houdini trying the case in a concert hall. Houdini knew only that he and Prince were of the same skeptical mind. He was mortified the day after the Symphony Hall exposé when he read what his colleague had to say about it in the New York Times.
The headline announced that the other committeemen were challenging the “Houdini Story of Margery.” They wondered why the magician, if he had detected Margery in fraud, did not expose her at the Charlesgate séances rather than at Symphony Hall. And they excoriated him—in a statement signed by Prince, McDougall, and Comstock—for offering no credible proof to back his argument that Carrington and Bird were in league with Margery.
While Houdini had expected such opposition from McDougall and Comstock, Prince’s slap surprised him, since he had only said and demonstrated onstage what he and the old sleuth conjectured privately. It was plain as day, and Houdini thought his friend saw the truth as clearly: Margery had hoodwinked a jury enamored of her class, bewitching charm, and beauty. To convince them she used sleight of hand more befitting a dime museum than the halls of MIT and Harvard. If Prince had been there when he gave his exposé, rather than relying on the stories of yellow journalists and Malcolm Bird, Houdini was sure the chairman would see there was more truth in his stage exhibition than any scientific report on Margery.
The row between Houdini and Prince began to mirror the falling-out between him and Sir Arthur—this time with Houdini the petulant child and Prince the exasperated father. “You have been banging everybody connected with the case all over the country,” the senior investigator chided him. “If you will reconsider all that has occurred I think that you will understand why I find it a little amusing that you resent a little pat at the same time that you are walloping right and left.”
No one, however, was going to keep Houdini from performing what he considered his magnum opus as both a psychic detective and entertainer. His brother Bill had just died of tuberculosis and once again the magician had failed in his attempt to make contact with the spirit of a loved one. He was impassioned when he presented his Margery exhibition to packed halls in Brooklyn and Manhattan. “Houdini is the greatest showman in vaudeville today, and a tremendous draw,” Variety marveled. “His latest act surpasses anything he has ever attempted before on account of the world-wide interest in spiritualism.”
It was the same show Houdini had presented at Symphony Hall, with a few new flourishes and disclosures, such as his announcement that Malcolm Bird’s relationship with Margery had just cost him his job as managing editor of the Scientific American. Later, though, from his office in the Woolworth tower, Orson Munn refuted everything Houdini had said about Bird at the Hippodrome. Bird had resigned, Munn attested, to attend to his “own personal business.” The editor had left for a tour to promote his new book, My Psychic Adventures.
When the psychic challenge was first proposed by the Scientific American staff, Orson Munn had anticipated a popular and important inquiry; now he feared that the contest bearing the name of his journal might forever tarnish it. The investigation had turned into a Frankenstein’s monster. Conceived in Munn’s offices by journalists and scientists, the monster was running amok when it was never meant to leave the Scientific American library. In large part Prince blamed Houdini for sensationalizing the investigation. He recommended that Munn remove him from the committee while it still had some semblance of credibility.
But Houdini was now the publicly accepted voice of reason on this subject—the expert in discerning the nebulous boundary between magic and psychic manifestations. Besides, for all Houdini’s self-aggrandizing antics, Munn suspected he was right, overall, about Margery. Thus he wrote the wizard a reprimand, not a pink slip. “I am not very favorable to all this controversial newspaper notoriety that is being given to this case,” Munn told him. It was time for Houdini to behave, the publisher warned, like he was a member of a “truly scientific investigating body.”
Rebuked by Munn, Houdini was praised in other places. Reporters noted that roles had a way of becoming reversed when magicians, professors, and mediums mixed. Houdini was now the critic, the deductive thinker, while Doyle, and even some scienti
sts, were promoters of magic and wonder. The Herald Tribune called Houdini a showman with a scientist’s devotion to the truth. “The dragon with which he is engaged dwells in the slough of human ignorance,” observed the newspaper that shared his disdain for “the jugglery of Margery.”
With Houdini heeding no more calls for restraint—he had just called Margery a “very cheap fraud”—Sir Arthur took up “the defense of the honor of a most estimable lady.” Like a commander behind the lines, he had been kept apprised, by Roy, on each test séance for the committee. And in late January, he delivered to the Boston Herald an explosive article that he hoped would set the record straight on who the crook was.
Sir Arthur described in detail what Bird and the Crandons had never explicitly told the newspapers: how they believed Houdini had tried to sabotage the Charlesgate séances and frame the medium, and how he had cowered before the spirit who revealed his perfidy. In presenting the Crandons’ version of the story, he also appealed to racial prejudices when he criticized this committee of “American gentlemen” for allowing “a man with entirely different standards to make this outrageous attack.”
Houdini’s response was to threaten to sue his old friend for slander. Sir Arthur had suggested that Houdini was bribed to ruin Margery, and as supporting evidence he quoted what Walter had said at the Charlesgate: “Houdini, how much are they paying you to stop the phenomena?” While Houdini claimed to present proof in his unmasking of Margery, Sir Arthur offered the statement of a phantom! The magician was further irked by how Doyle persisted in exaggerating Mrs. Crandon’s refinement. “The truth of the whole matter,” Houdini retorted, “is that Margery, in my belief, is a social climber.”
As always there were two stories, both well publicized, of the same incidents between Houdini and Margery. There were also two grand auditoriums in Boston—Symphony Hall had featured Houdini, while the other, Jordan Hall, was reserved by the Crandons.
A Living Demonstration
It is a truth that spirits commune with one another while one is in the body and the other in the higher sphere…and this truth will ere long present itself in the form of a living demonstration.
—ANDREW JACKSON DAVIS, Divine Revelations (1847)
MARGERY WILL GIVE PUBLIC EXHIBITION
Noted Boston Medium Hopes Test Will Silence Critics Who Doubt Her Power
—New York Evening Journal (1925)
A few days after Houdini’s Symphony Hall exposé, the very foundations of Boston were shaken by a subterranean force that sent people rushing “madly into the streets.” Houses in Beacon Hill and other districts swayed and shuddered. Jolted by the convulsions, men preparing for work cut themselves shaving. Clocks stopped. Fire alarms went off, though there were no fires. Pictures fell in the homes hit by the tremors. Parlor furniture rocked back and forth. Windows shattered.
It was an earthquake, Roy had immediately realized, and though 10 Lime Street would not cave in like some flimsy spirit cabinet, he had never heard of the phenomenon occurring in New England. While causing little significant damage, the quake seemed weird and foreboding—particularly since Sir Arthur had warned the Crandons of a cataclysm in 1925. “Much has to be swept away with the rubbish of humanity,” Jean’s spirit control had told him. “Earthquake!” Walter was known to call out just before Margery’s cabinet began to tremble. Many Spiritualists believed—if not necessarily in the apocalyptic sense—that something earthshaking was about to happen.
The Doyles anticipated a mediumistic demonstration that would draw the world to Spiritualism. And while mass displays were more Houdini’s game, Margery seemed ready to present her work on a larger stage. In response to his exposé in Boston, the Crandons had rented out the elegant 1,000-seat Jordan Hall, one block from Symphony Hall, for the purpose of giving a public exhibition of her work. As a Boston newspaper announced, “Margery, the most talked of medium in America, has accepted the challenge of Harry Houdini, king of magic, for calling her a fraud.”
♦
While traveling years earlier in Germany, Houdini wrote a Boston friend that he noticed how whenever a wrestler came along who “could actually throw the champion, someone else would step up in the employ of the champion and a great big controversy would be started.” What he meant was that Margery, the prizeworthy medium, was dodging him in favor of Eric Dingwall, a lesser challenge, and the instigator of her public forum.
With the Scientific American committee in disarray, two British investigators, Dingwall and McDougall, began testing Margery together in early 1925. But Houdini feared that the SPR agent was already in her corner. In a letter to his Brahmin friend Robert Gould Shaw, he claimed that Dingwall was being subsidized by Dr. Crandon. He noted that when the SPR financed Dingwall’s visits to America, he ate cheap meals and worked out of shoddy hotel rooms. This trip he had stayed at the Algonquin when arriving in New York, and so Houdini smelled bribery. He was certain that money, rather than magic, harnessed the forces of nature at 10 Lime Street.
Margery herself saw something direct, not venal, in her new English guest. “The first thing he told me was to take off my clothes,” she admitted later. No clothing meant no impediment to the secretion of ectoplasm and, proudly uninhibited, she felt that any séance nudity was all for science. When Dingwall had sat with her in London two years earlier, she dazzled him with table effects but produced no visual manifestations. As with any developing medium her program was changing.
Not only had Dingwall arrived auspiciously by challenging her rival before a hall of thousands, he had personally inspired this new phase in her mediumship. “I rejoice that you are now in charge of the Crandon phenomena,” Lodge wrote Dingwall. “I am very glad that they are now in reasonable and expert hands…The development is evidently going to be of importance in the whole history of the subject.”
Being that he preferred the English investigators, Dr. Crandon was just as hopeful. He felt that Dingwall, who had spent eight years at Cambridge, was the perfect alternative to Houdini. As McDougall pointed out, Dingwall, “no mere academic scientist,” was a member of the English Inner Magic Circle that was “the most select of its kind perhaps in the world.” This investigator knew a ghost from a costume of fluorescent cheesecloth: he had discovered and edited Revelations of a Spirit Medium, the definitive guide to a false medium’s methods.
And it was clear that Dingwall enjoyed working with Margery. “She is a highly intelligent and charming young woman,” he would write in his SPR report, “exceedingly good natured and possessed of a fund of humour and courage which make her an ideal subject for investigation.” The ease with which they got along made him feel that he, one year younger than she and married, was also pleasing to her. He believed that he was smart enough to be careful—everyone knew what Houdini said about her relations with Bird and Carrington. But the tests carried out by Dingwall, McDougall, and Reverend Worcester were intensive and intimate. Often the circle consisted only of the three investigators, Dr. Crandon, and the scantily clad medium. Dingwall had wanted her to wear the black tights that he said prevented fraudulent mediums from manifesting sham substances from their most accessible storehouses. Roy objected that they would also stanch the flow of real ectoplasm. Their compromise had Margery wearing only her robe and silk stockings, along with the luminous bands Dingwall attached to her wrists, ankles, and forehead as well as Roy’s cuffs, so that the investigators could spot any suspicious movements in the dark room.
The new program suited the Crandons. “We still keep our fingers crossed but Dingwall seems to be alright,” Roy wrote Sir Arthur. It was refreshing to them that Dingwall operated by the hypothesis that Margery’s work was genuine until proven otherwise, for open minds were the generators that powered Margery’s effects. As always, she was at her best when the circle was sympathetic. On the heels of Houdini’s exposé, the Crandons felt redeemed. Encouraged by Dingwall’s enthusiasm for the “marvelous crescendo” that Walter produced, Roy speculated that the ghost might “be
the means of bringing together the spiritualists and the S.P.R.”
Margery appeared ill and peculiarly depressed, though, when the investigators gathered on January 1 to begin the new series of test séances. Having never seen her so dispirited, Dingwall was sure a blank sitting was in order. To his surprise, she produced the same striking table manifestations that he had witnessed the previous winter in London. At the demonstration the following evening (Dingwall would sit with Margery virtually every night for the next six weeks), a ukulele rose from the table and twanged in the air; and what the Crandons called “the Houdini handkerchief”—a black cloth with a grotesque face luminously painted on it—fluttered magically across the table that tipped then levitated. The following evening, Dingwall sat with Margery at the home of two of the most respected members of her circle: the Harvard benefactor Augustus Hemenway and his wife, Harriet—notable protector of birds and their habitats. This time the SPR officer was allowed to grasp a floating tambourine, which Walter then pulled and twisted in any direction the scientist requested. Dingwall said he’d wanted to try this experiment “in many places all over the world,” and so he had, in Harriet’s Audubon sanctuary.
But Dingwall was not content to study effects that Margery had produced before. While he had brought his own bell-box device, which she rang convincingly, his ambition lay in observing the ectoplasm that caused these things to happen. Dingwall wanted to see the spectral hands with which Walter played the tambourine and pulled the hair of sitters. He needed to touch the fleeting matter that formed into the psychic terminals thought to hold tables aloft and obliterate cabinets. It was the “appearance of living, mobile substance emerging from the body of the medium,” and the spectral limbs and forms manifesting from that secretion, that he wished to study. The mechanism behind the psychic effects was, in his view, the key to the mystery. As accommodating a medium as she was a hostess, Margery therefore changed her program. And that first month of 1925 she began to show Dingwall, and then the world, her first proofs of ectoplasm.
