by David Jaher
Oh Houdini won’t talk no more, no more.
He ain’t goin’ to talk no more.
What in the hell will the newspapers do,
When Houdini won’t talk no more.
In Houdini’s parlor a dark-haired woman with a long Mediterranean nose—who might have been a salesclerk or usher at the Hippodrome—closed her eyes as he directed. Moments later she heard an eerie clicking noise pervading the room, sometimes close to her then receding. Houdini had only been tapping two coins together next to her ear, and never moved them, he later told her. He wanted to simulate the conditions of the séance and demonstrate how a sitter’s imagination shaped the phenomena. So began Rose Mackenberg’s training as a detective in what he called “my own secret service”—the small but ubiquitous force he led against the spook racket.
Houdini won’t write no more, no more,
Houdini won’t write no more.
He writ’ so much that his arm got sore,
Houdini won’t write no more.
“Sometimes I wonder,” Houdini told a Jewish magazine, “whether I am truly a reincarnation of some old magician because magic never did seem a mystery to me.” Just as Sir Arthur had decided his true calling was religion rather than detective fiction, so Houdini had the nagging sense that his legacy would be connected to his campaign against false mediumship. And the newspapers and magazines that were his weathervane seemed to support his ambitions. “It may be indeed that Houdini has appeared at a crucial moment in the history of spiritualism and that he is destined to play an important role,” wrote Edmund Wilson in the New Republic; for “in a committee of scientists on which Houdini sits, it is Houdini who is the scientist.”
It was astounding how much authority was bestowed on a magician. When the Great Houdini presented his medium-debunking routine daily at two New York theaters, he was escorted—from the Albee in Brooklyn to the Hippodrome in Manhattan—by a convoy of motorcycle policemen that stopped and diverted traffic, as if he were a dignitary delivering an important message to the masses rather than, as his rivals said, using the Margery controversy for his own profit and self-aggrandizement. Not only psychics begrudged him these privileges. “Every magacian [sic] in this country would like to see Houdini BEAT in the Scientific American Psychic Prize,” wrote Robert Gysel, an Ohio conjurer and medium baiter. His downfall was assured if the spirits had any say in it—“The waters are black for Houdini,” wailed a disembodied voice through the trumpet. “Houdini is doomed, doomed, doomed,” warned the spirit whom Jean Doyle channeled.
Oh Houdini won’t talk no more, no more,
Oh what will Pop McDougall do
If Houdini won’t talk no more.
Technically the Scientific American contest remained active. The search for a new candidate found Harry Houdini in Philadelphia, interviewing a woman named Sarah Mourer—who wore her white hair in a bob, seemed “fairly intelligent,” and talked incessantly before demonstrating the powers she thought prize-worthy. She claimed to make clocks stop, but displayed none of Margery’s flair or mystery. The medium simply grabbed a clock from the mantel then shook it violently until it stopped ticking. She had another gift, she boasted, for foreseeing the outcome of fishing expeditions—“You are going to catch three fish and one is a flounder,” she told the magician who had no plans to fish for anything. Then she put her hands on his head and claimed to cure him instantly of nearsightedness he didn’t have. “There is something gone wrong with the lady,” Houdini reported to Orson Munn. As it turned out, she was the last clairvoyant he investigated for the Scientific American.
Oh Houdini won’t talk no more, no more.
He ain’t goin’ to talk no more.
What in the hell will the newspapers do,
When Houdini won’t talk no more.
Anyone who dabbled long enough with the spirits might have hallucinations, Houdini attested. While in his study late at night he half-joked that he saw forms go by and heard voices. Immersed in the study of witchcraft and psychics, all roads for him led to Endor. By this time he had stopped making movies: his last cinematic effort was an attempt to import the Swedish film The Witch to America. He wrote now on only one subject. “Am busy on a pamphlet against the spiritualists making use of the Bible and am showing the Witch of Endor in modern light,” he notified his friends and colleagues.
Though wary of a theological fight, Houdini was certain he had Scripture and the clerics of a Christian nation on his side. Like Saul in the Bible, he was trying to rid a land of heretical necromancers while still seeking that one genuine medium—his own Witch of Endor—to do the very thing he was condemning. For all the bad blood between him and the Spiritualists, he still considered himself a sincere seeker of spirit contact. “Well, Mama, I have not heard,” he would say at his mother’s graveside after yet another phony séance.
He writ’ so much that his arm got sore,
Houdini won’t write no more.
Even if no city was truly plagued by spirit crime, Houdini channeled a wider impulse to purge the republic of something insidious. Whether the villains were members of political or superstitious cults—the country threatened by Anarchists or occultists in the red-light districts—many feared that a movement hatched in clandestine dens was encroaching on Main Street. HOUDINI’S WITCH HUNT, the headline blared, BRINGS OUT THE FAITHFUL.
While he saw vile felonies in what the law called misdemeanors—taking money on false pretenses—he had successfully provoked a crackdown on the spirit racket. Cloaked in the myriad disguises he used to infiltrate séances, Houdini was to the spook crooks a shape-shifting bogeyman—all it took were rumors that he was in town to send them undercover. At the New York Police Academy, he taught cadet detectives “How to Catch Fake Spiritualists.” The slickest of them all, he told them, was Margery, who would have made $5 million had he not unmasked her. He went to incredible lengths to obstruct her and other notorious psychics, and even went as far as petitioning President Coolidge to support a bill that would outlaw fortune-telling and mediumship for hire. He had obtained the business records of an old Spiritualist journal, Banner of Light, to inspect its legal papers, IRS forms, bank deposits, and lists of benefactors. He wanted to know how his enemies operated. Though he found no signs of malfeasance at the defunct magazine, no stone was left unturned. He acquired all manner of other, darker material, including a copy of the spook racket’s infamous “sucker list,” which provided detailed information on those who frequented séances. In reaction, his enemies called him a drunkard, a drug addict, a keeper of harems, an agent of the pope, the Antichrist; “they are panning the hell out of me,” he noted. To American mediums he was the barbarian at the gates, seizing spiritist plunder—and if Summerland were razed, only the tombstones would be left standing.
“Getting ready for my forthcoming season and battle with the spiritualists,” Houdini wrote a friend. His strategy was to send a member of his attractive corps of investigators—that included his young niece, Julia Sawyer, and showgirls from his magic ensemble—to the vicinity he toured. There they posed as easy marks for the swindlers to prey on. Houdini’s most effective agent, Rose Mackenberg, would devote twenty years of her life to running fake mediums out of US cities. Even before he had trained her, Rose was an experienced private investigator who had worked on gambling, blackmail, and murder cases. But she came to find spooks who suckered the bereaved “the most vicious criminals in America.” Camouflaging her sharp eyes behind Buster Keaton–esque shell-rim glasses, she called herself Francis Raud (F. Raud) while posing as a jealous wife, nervous schoolteacher, factory girl, naïve servant, or small-town widow. For Houdini, she would investigate over three hundred mediums, each time calling in the wizard to lay the trap once she determined that they were crooked.
So convincing was his favorite disguise—a feeble and bereaved husband or father—that no psychic suspected the harmless old mark might be their nemesis. Posing as the “old man’s” fellow sitters were the reporters an
d detectives or county prosecutors who performed their respective duties after he revealed the frauds cheating their customers. The attendant publicity led to the purges that Houdini wanted. Twenty-two spooks were arrested in a crackdown in Cleveland after one of his séance capers. EXPOSÉ IS DRIVING MEDIUMS TO COVER, ran the typical headline.
What in the hell will the newspapers do,
When Houdini won’t talk no more.
The scourge of crooked mediums did not use all of the ammunition that Mackenberg supplied him. For all the “sex attacks” she repulsed in the séance parlors and the advances Houdini claimed to rebuff from Margery, he did not like to publicly discuss the lewdness some saw in the Shadowland. “One of the tenets to which they are drawn is free love,” declared one Boston pastor. “The only safe thing for Christians to say of Spiritualism is get thee behind me, Satan.”
Having been ordained many times as a Spiritualist minister, Rose had endured “purification healings,” which involved a male psychic getting “the proper vibrations,” by the laying of his hands upon her breasts and thighs. Houdini urged her to carry a gun into the séance. It wasn’t safe for a woman there, echoed Robert Gysel, who had even worse things to say about what went on in spiritistic rituals. In Chicago a male medium—who for $25 was offering to help women and young girls develop their psychic abilities—conducted a ceremony where the girl took his penis into her mouth and drew the semen from it, so that she could absorb the “wonderful power,” Gysel reported. The spirit fakers, he wrote, were “positively worse than animals.”
Most of the grifters Houdini encountered were more interested in fleecing than violating their victims, yet none seemed capable of the ingenuity that he attributed to Margery. At one sitting a well-known professional medium channeled a sitter’s drowned relative, who was heard to scream “Help!” as the sea choked him. Shining his trusted flashlight at that moment, Houdini unveiled the psychic blowing a straw into a bowl of water.
In the disguise Houdini favored of white whiskers and hump, tousled hair, and a hand raised to his ear whenever the mediums spoke, he looked the part of the half-demented fogey any spook could fool six ways from Sunday. After the lights were dimmed for a Cleveland séance led by George Renner—a medium of forty years’ good standing—the “old man” crawled around on the floor smearing with lampblack the instruments the spirits were supposed to enchant. When discarnate voices were later heard through the trumpet and the guitar began to levitate, Houdini shone his pocket flashlight to reveal the medium tarred with the soot he had planted. “Mr. Renner,” he declared, “you are a fraud.”
In every city he toured Houdini proved it was the ghost talkers, not the spirits, who spoke through megaphones, and it was the medium’s hands, rather than spectral force, that manipulated the floating instruments. At a Harlem séance, his flashlight caught the popular Mrs. Cecil Cook with her mouth on the trumpet, rather than the lips of her spirit controls—Snowdrop, Chief, and Bright Eyes. “What is that?! What is that?!” cried Mrs. Cook. “Why that is the old man,” her minions warned. “I’m killed! I’m killed!” wailed the medium who had been struck down, her sitters feared, by the sudden violence to her ectoplasm.
“I am Houdini,” announced the geriatric, raising his cane as the Spiritualists rushed him. They were stopped by the undercover policemen who dragged Mrs. Cook to her arraignment. When testifying in court against occultists like Mrs. Cook, Houdini chimed, “I had ready in my pocket all the allusions in the Bible against witches, familiar spirits and when the defendant’s lawyer pulled a pro I replied with an anti.” He sounded increasingly like a wizard on a religious crusade. On a Worcester stage he unfurled a long, bound-together scroll of various fake church charters Rose Mackenberg had obtained from false spiritists. “I drove out the fakes in California,” he promised, “and I intend to drive them out of Massachusetts.”
The Blooded Reporter
Oh there is a great medium named Marge,
Who will give you a show without charge,
There is no need to pay,
Excepting to say:
“You’re the wonderf’lest medium at large.”
Her man is a sawyer of bones,
And cuts a swell figure, he owns:
But his work with the knife
Has infected his life,
For he’s “cutting up” lots besides bones.
—PUSSYFOOT, A PSEUDONYMOUS PSYCHIC INVESTIGATOR
Tasteful as the dinners were at 10 Lime Street, something unsavory was being served up before the red lights in Roy’s den were dimmed, one well-placed reporter believed. Stewart Griscom was there when the doctor passed around photographs of ectoplasm emerging from his wife’s vagina while probing hands reached between her thighs. Later he couldn’t help but feel there was more than science to this affair—“A morbid or abnormal strain of sexuality which pervades the case is one of its salient, and perhaps its most significant, features,” he wrote the ASPR.
While aware that a spy was in their midst, the Crandons never suspected that the Boston Herald reporter was Houdini’s eyes and ears. It was Griscom who told him that Margery would be a no-show at Jordan Hall. And whenever she performed at home, Houdini seemed to be watching—he was mimicking on vaudeville many of her latest ectoplasmic feats. The Crandons also didn’t realize, as the Herald pieces often carried no byline, how involved Griscom had been in unearthing Mina’s past. Blind to his intentions, the Lime Street hostess liked and trusted him; for he was a gentleman reporter, like John Flynn, who did not appear to have a taste for salacious stories and contraband drinks. He gave Margery reason to feel he was sympathetic to her—even her friend. Maybe that was why Walter liked having him in the séance room. “If you don’t come back, I won’t,” the voice whispered in Griscom’s ear.
In his reporting Griscom seemed as enamored of the ghost. Walter’s invisible presence, he wrote, “is vivid, sharply defined and unforgettable. His moods are swift and evanescent. By turns he is gay, impudent, ironic, ribald, but always witty, with a gamin-like ability for a quick retort or a cutting phrase.” But the newsman wished to acquaint himself with the lady more than her spirit control, as that was the key, he believed, to understanding what was going on in her house. Though Margery fleeced no superstitious widows or grieving financiers of their savings or stocks, and was of a social rank that set her apart from the mediums who advertised sketchily in newspapers and led séances in a subterranean church, there was an unseemly side, Griscom felt, to these martyrs to psychical research. The talk of wild parties, the bacchanals at Lime Street, he thought was largely myth. Nevertheless, he was wary of Margery’s friends, whom he found less credible than McDougall, Houdini, and Prince—the prudes who drank less of Roy’s wine and never slept under his roof.
His sense was that Margery’s gaiety gave a false impression—10 Lime Street was not really a happy place. According to an investigator in the new Harvard group, Dr. Crandon—characterized as a libertine who ultimately tired of and disposed of his wives—had given the present Mrs. Crandon reason to feel “that her position is none too safe. She has gone up the ladder in marrying him and may be really in love with him.” Yet when her phenomena ended, so would her marriage, the source conjectured; for at the end of the day, the Crandons were “two oversexed people matched together with little else in common.”
Griscom never stayed overnight at Lime Street, but he suspected that more than the ghosts there went bump in the night. Again, though, he didn’t believe every whisper and innuendo. A few of the bookish investigators appeared to take pride in being linked romantically to the glamorous medium—in being perceived as the Don Juans they were not. For her part, Margery seemed to delight in her aphrodisiacal power over the scientists—these supposedly incorruptible professionals—and she was the source for some of the rumors surrounding her love life.
One of the new Harvard investigators, Grant Code, was smitten with the clairvoyant practically as soon as he entered her house. Like others who had studi
ed her, Code was both an intellectual—an English professor at Harvard—and amateur conjurer, and again like many psychic investigators, he had a troubled personal life. He was a free-lover, Margery learned, whose wife had tested the arrangement by running off with his psychotherapist. Perhaps accordingly, Code had a tendency to give confessionals—to Margery and Griscom—while also eliciting them from others familiar with the case. Bird confided to Code that relations were so strained between Margery and Roy during the later stages of the psychic contest that “Crandon would only be decent to her after a good séance.” Disconsolate, the medium would then seek attention elsewhere and “was making advances to every man in sight”—beginning, Bird hinted, with himself.
Undoubtedly Bird did not have to be coaxed. At one sitting Walter got him to admit that touching Margery’s ectoplasm was like “feeling a woman’s breast.” At a séance the previous July, Houdini said he caught Bird groping underneath her dress. In fact, he told Code that his detectives had provided him with photographic evidence of Margery’s trysts, including her affair with Carrington. Most of the committeemen felt she made flagrant advances: Houdini said she tried to vamp him in and out of the séance room; McDougall suggested she’d done more than bat her catlike eyes his way; even Prince, whom the Crandons regarded as a crotchety old puritan, believed she had offered her lithe body to him—as if she were the sacred prostitute who could rekindle both his libido and faith. When he showed no interest, she cried, “O you are a wooden man,” or so he claimed. While none of this was publicly stated, the seduction factor was central to Houdini’s campaign. “Read between the lines,” he told a friend, “and you will see I accused Margery of using sex charm and it has been authenticated”—as in a scathing pamphlet he published anonymously, where Bird and Carrington help her cheat in return for hooch, sweets, and a warm bed.
