The Secret Life of Houdini (80 page)

Houdini poses with two famous mediums and a bevy of Congressmen before all hell breaks loose at the fortune-telling bill hearings in Washington, D.C.
From the collection of Roger Dreyer

Mackenberg began to recount her experiences of the previous day at the two mediums’ houses, Houdini prompting her as if he were a prosecuting attorney. Rose had just testified that Mrs. Coates had told her that “most of the senators did consult astrologers,” when the medium inched a little closer to the investigator.

“I insist that Mrs. Coates keep away from the witness,” Houdini said. “What did she tell you about the White House and séances being there?”

“I object!” Coates screamed. “You are talking about me. Mr. Chairman, I demand the right to answer this.”

The gallery erupted into cheers.

“You will have an opportunity to be heard,” Congressman McLeod said.

“I suggest we finish with Madame Marcia first,” Congressman Houston said, trying to keep some logical thread to the testimony.

“I am ill and I have something to say,” Coates insisted.

“Madam Marcia told me her charge and I asked her if she would not accept less than $10. She said $10 or nothing; in fact, $15 for a written horoscope and $10 for the other. She said a number of Senators were coming to her for readings; in fact, almost all the people in the White House believed in spiritualism, and that she was very much chagrined to think that I was trying to reduce her fee from what she asked,” Mackenberg testified.

Bedlam broke out. Mediums were shrieking, Spiritualists had jumped to their feet, arguing with the smaller number of Houdini partisans.

Representative Hammer, a gentleman from North Carolina, looked perturbed as he banged his gavel and pleaded for order. The crowd finally quieted down.

“While I was at Madam Coates’s place she said Houdini was up against a stone wall. She said, ‘Why try to fight spiritualism, when most of the Senators are interested in the subject? I have a number of Senators who visit me here, and I know for a fact that there have been spiritual séances held at the White House with President Coolidge and his family, which proves that intercommunication with the dead is established.’ Then she mentioned the name of Senator Capper, saying his wife had died recently, and that he attended spiritualistic séances. She also mentioned Senator Watson, Senator Dill, and Senator Fletcher, whose wife is a medium….”

With each name, the clamor increased.

“Liar!” “Faker!” “Traducer!” the audience shouted.

Finally, there was too much commotion for Mackenberg to continue. The two mediums looked like they wanted to pounce on the undercover operative and began to advance menacingly toward her. Representative Hammer made them sit down.

Meanwhile, John Ferguson, a fishmonger from Dayton, Ohio, advanced on Houdini, who had earlier made disparaging remarks about his medium wife.

“I’ll break your nose,” he threatened, and was about to throw a punch just as Representative Hammer threw himself between the two men.

“Gentlemen,
if
you are gentlemen, must act as gentlemen,” Hammer said.

On the verge of tears, Hammer then called in the police, who finally restored order.

Yet on the last day of the hearings, Hammer engaged Houdini in a bizarre line of questioning.

“The original Houdini was a Hindu, was he not?” the congressman asked.

“No,” Houdini replied.

“You are Houdini the second?”

“No.”

“You are the original Houdini?”

“No, the original Houdini was a French clock maker.”

“I thought he lived in Allahabab,” Hammer said.

“Are you joking?”

“No, I am in earnest…. You said the other day that you were president of the Magicians Association of America.”

“Society of American Magicians,” Houdini corrected him.

“Is it a secret organization?”

“No, only regarding our exploits.”

“Have you branches in foreign countries? In Russia?”

“Not in Russia,” Houdini said.

“Have you ever been in British India?”

“Never in my life, no sir.”

“Were both of your parents Hebrews?”

“Yes, sir…”

“Is your father living?”

“No, sir. Has this anything to do with this bill?”

“No, but—”

“I know that you are asking spiritualistic questions and I want to let you know that I know it,” Houdini flared.

“No, I have been told that your people came from British India. That is all I was trying to find out. It is contended here that you are a medium and do not know it. These people really believe that you have divine power and that you won’t admit it. That is the reason I am asking you these questions.”

“Pardon me,” Houdini said.

“Have you ever been to Allahabab?”

“No, sir.”

“You have read the
Arabian Nights
stories?”

“Yes, sir.”

“But you have never been there?”

“No, sir.”

“Where were you in 1925?”

“In America.”

“You were not out of America that year?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you do any work in Alaska at any time?”

“No, sir.”

“Did you ever know a man by the name of Hugh Weir, on
Collier’s
magazine?”

“Never heard the name before,” Houdini said.

“Did you ever know a man by the name of D’Alory Fechett, a celebrated Frenchman in Paris?” Hammer asked.

“Not that I know of.”

“Is William J. Burns a member of your association?”

Suddenly a significant question. Burns was a former Secret Service operative and Bureau of Investigation chief who had formed one of the largest private detective agencies under his name. Houdini had used his agency for his spiritualistic investigations. Burns was also, ironically, a friend of Conan Doyle’s.

“He may—” Houdini began but was interrupted by his niece Julia Sawyer, who was there to testify about her undercover operations against mediums.

“No,” she said flatly.

“She knows every member of the organization,” Houdini added.

“Have you any relation and has your association anything to do with the movie association and theatre association of America?” Hammer asked. “These questions I am asking you were not inspired by any Spiritualists.”

“You did not get those out of the air,” Houdini fumed. “Why are you asking me those peculiar, irrelevant questions? They haven’t anything to do with the bill and are not the kind of questions that a man in your position would ask. They were given to you by some rabid medium and I am surprised that you should ask me same. You did not make them up yourself. You did not get them out of your head.”

“That is all right as to where I got them, but I did not get them from any spiritualist, and I did not get them from any divine power either, because I do not claim that God makes revelations to me…. Did you have anything to do with numerology? Do you know anything about it? The figure 3, you know, as numerology says, represents a serpent.”

“I do not believe in that truck—in numerology.”

“You do not believe in that any more than you do in astrology or fortune-telling or soothsaying?”

“All in the same junk basket,” Houdini said.

“There is none of that in any of your performances? It is all really tricks and sleight of hand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I am very much obliged to you,” Hammer concluded.

At the close of the last day of hearings, Madame Marcia approached Houdini in the corridors of the House of Representatives.

“You’re a smart man, Mr. Houdini,” she began. “But perhaps I can tell you something you don’t know.”

“What’s that, Madame Marcia?” he asked genially.

“When November comes around, you won’t be here.”

“How’s that?” He grinned.

“You’ll be dead,” she said.

Mackenberg didn’t escape the ire of the Spiritualists either. During her testimony, Jane Coates suggested that she saw right through the “widow” who came for a reading. “You are doing a work that is killing you,” she told Mackenberg at their sitting. “In your heart you are sick of the whole dirty job and if you don’t stop it, you will not live 18 months.”

Rose Mackenberg’s startling testimony of séances in the White House and Spiritualism in the Senate rocked Washington. The White House didn’t deign to comment but “friends of the Coolidges” assured the press corps that “neither the president or Mrs. Coolidge is interested in spiritualism.” The following day’s
Washington Post
headlined “Houdini Expreses Regret to Coolidge—Leaves Letter Deploring Yarn About ‘Seances Held at White House.’” It was a misleading headline; it reported that Houdini personally hand-delivered a letter to Coolidge at his executive offices that expressed regret that the president’s name had been dragged into the hearings. In actuality, the article accurately noted that Houdini’s letter contained Rose Mackenberg’s affidavit of her conversations with the mediums. Houdini himself was quoted, “Believe me, it was no desire of mine to embarrass the President, but I have spent a large portion of my time and fortune in this fight against fraudulent mediums and I am accustomed to accept the facts without garnishment, no matter how unpleasant they may be.” In other words, he couldn’t sugarcoat the fact that mediums had penetrated into the upper echelons of the Washington political scene.

Can it be a mere coincidence that the senator who controlled the Senate side of the committee responsible for the fortune-telling bill, Senator Capper, was named by Mackenberg as a devotee of séances and that to this day the Senate hearings on that bill have never been published by the Government Printing Office? According to contemporary newspaper reports, the Senate hearings were just as raucous and contentious as the House ones. In August, Houdini wrote a friend to report that his bill “has not reached Congress as yet and I do not know what will happen to it, unless the Senators are interested, and I think that they are. I think they were more interested in my manifestations than they were in the mediums. I was sorry to see that, as I really am sincere about the law.” With Mackenberg naming names of prominent senators connected with the Spiritualist movement, it’s not a surprise that the bill died in committee.

Houdini had begun his campaign against mediums in the nation’s capital by pleading with President Coolidge back in January of 1926 to throw his “vast influence” with the campaign to abolish the “criminal practices” of spirit mediums, but after his own investigation he was convinced that the president and his wife were believers and that he could prove his case. They certainly fit the profile, having recently lost a son. After the hearings, Houdini wrote his friend the journalist Walter Lippmann, who had been the special assistant to the secretary of war during World War I. “Sorry to tell you that I have heard on rather good authority that they do hold séances in the White House and am looking for further proof regarding same. This is, of course, in strict confidence.”

Houdini’s campaign against fraudulent mediums was costing him more than $40,000 a year out of pocket, “rather a large sum for private individual to lay out for this subject,” he wrote Harry Price. How could he
not
wage this war, though?

“I believe the work I am doing is the greatest humanitarian achievement of my life,” he told a reporter. “I have spent many hours on the stage and public rostrum but now I am helping to alleviate the years of worry that is driving many to the brink of insanity by their inordinate desire to communicate with the dead.” Thinking ahead to retirement, he had Bess look for property on their last trip to Los Angeles. His plan was to finally build a bus that could be converted to a small stage, seating almost two hundred. Then he would “tour California taking his fight against spooks and their accomplices to the smaller towns.”

The banner year of his crusade was 1926. In January, in New York, he exposed the Reverend John Hill, who manifested Rose Mackenberg’s dead “husband,” who wept and knelt before her. Houdini was particularly proud of this catch; Hill was the “self-claimed private medium to the Vanderbilts, Harrimans, Honeywells, Huntingtons and other prominent New York families,” he boasted. In February, he canceled one of his own lectures to attend a mass meeting of Spiritualists in Philadelphia who came to hear Malcolm Bird lecture on the Margery case.

Houdini, still seething from the implication in Bird’s book that he was a bastard, leaped onto the platform and launched a shrill attack on Bird. “You liar, you contemptible liar,” he shrieked at the cowering journalist. “You lied in your book when you said my father was not married to my mother. Ladies and Gentlemen, in his book he said Houdini had his hands soiled and said that is his trouble, that my father was—now, do I look like a man like that. If a man would have said that to me I would clean the floor up with him, and so would any other man who loved and respected his mother.”

Houdini offering the $10,000.00 prize in print.
From the collection of Roger Dreyer

Houdini’s campaign peaked in Chicago during an incredible eight-week stay at the Princess Theatre. Adding Ruth Mason and Lillian Stuart to his team of spies, Houdini unmasked more than eighty local mediums, some in spectacular fashion. The Spiritualists struck back. In addition to threatening his life, they inundated him with frivolous slander suits. Before he left town, he won a victory in the first case. His greatest victory, though, was the surprise visit to his dressing room from a stocky, matronly woman named Annie Benninghofen. Before she married, she had been known as Anna Clark, the “mother medium,” the woman responsible for mentoring Cecil Cook, the trumpet medium who Houdini had unmasked in New York. Benninghofen had been so moved by Houdini’s civic campaign and her own remorse that she offered to do anything to help him to stamp out the menace.