The Secret Life of Houdini (90 page)

Ford’s first ploy was to target Daisy White, Houdini’s alleged mistress. Soon, Daisy had full-out converted to Spiritualism, joined Ford’s church, and was lecturing on Spiritualism and magic.

On February 8, in trance, Fletcher brought Houdini’s mother through and received the
forgive
message. That night, Francis Fast, using what he called Bentley’s code, sent Doyle a cable in cypher informing him of the night’s activities. Doyle immediately wrote Crandon. “I had a mysterious cable from N York in cypher. It seemed to mean that our people had discovered the Houdini cypher and that the widow admits it. I await particulars.”

Doyle got his particulars in days. Ford sent him clippings from the newspapers and Fast fired off a letter. “The news itself, I felt was of such importance that I cabled the gist of it to you…. The message translated read:
HAVE RECEIVED THROUGH ARTHUR FORD—OUR CIRCLE—HOUDINI CODE WIDOW ADMITS TRUTH PUBLICLY TODAY PLEASE ADVISE HORACE LEAF
.” (Leaf was an English medium and friend of Ford’s.) Fast gave Doyle some fascinating details of the aftermath. “The frank and honest manner in which Mrs. Houdini accepted the whole thing was quite a revelation. First the publicity was of her own volition and she wrote Arthur Ford in her own hand a letter almost of gratitude…. I learned privately, last evening, from one who is friendly to Mrs. H. that when she received it, the strength and veracity of the message stirred her to tears, and now she awaits eagerly with reason to hope that the way may be made clear for the message from her husband.”

Ford would make her wait. In March he returned to England for three months, and then, with Doyle’s blessing, toured Sweden, Denmark, and Germany. By the time that Houdini’s mother began to transmit Houdini’s code to Fletcher in October, Ford already had the entire code. Daisy White would admit that she told Ford the code itself, but the actual content of the message could only have come from Bess. It’s not hard to imagine that Bess would do anything for Ford because by the time of the séance at her home, she had been hopelessly in love with the charming, effete medium for well over a year.

“Dine at Village Grove—home early no drink or weed.”

—BESS HOUDINI DIARY ENTRY, OCTOBER
19, 1927

Bess had been drinking heavily on the last tour, even before Houdini’s death. A year later, as the October 19 and other entries show, she was making an effort to curtail her input of drink and drugs, including marijuana. It was a losing battle. Meeting Arthur Ford didn’t help. Ford himself was a raging, and sometimes very public, alcoholic. One clever way he dealt with the problem of other people knowing about his habit was to have his “spirit control” Fletcher threaten to never come to another séance unless Ford stopped drinking. This is as silly and as brilliant as Margery and Walter arguing over a manifestation.

By the time of the confirmation Houdini séance at her house in January 1929, Bess was literally on her last legs. On New Year’s Eve, she had attended an all-night party with Arthur Ford. Too drunk to stand, she fell and struck the back of her head on the floor, rendering her unconscious. When she came to, she was taken home and confined to bed. She was on heavy painkillers to induce sleep.

On January 4, the day before the final Ford sitting where Houdini’s code came through in its entirety, Bernard Ernst, Houdini’s longtime lawyer and confidant, was summoned to Bess’s house. It was late at night and when he got there, Bess was unconscious after a suicide attempt. She had written him a letter early that day, which was handed to Ernst as soon as he arrived. In it, Bess told him about the many debts she had incurred, and the fact that she had to pawn her jewelry to pay them off. And she told him she had done a terrible thing. “I’m so ill—I want to go to Harry—he always shielded me from pain. There are some things I want you to attend to after I go. I am very weary. I thank you dear Mr. Ernst, you were a true friend to Houdini and his unhappy wife.”

This wouldn’t have been Bess’s first suicide attempt. She had made other previous attempts to take her life. Three nights later, Bess called Ernst to her home. She told him exactly what was going to happen at the next night’s séance with Ford. When Ernst accused her of giving Ford the code, she didn’t deny it, she just said she had no recollection of it. She told him that the code was in the safe deposit box of the Houdini Estate at Manufacturers Safe Deposit Company. When the lawyer informed her that he had inventoried what was in the box and that there was no sealed code from Houdini, Bess neglected to tell him that she had placed the code in the box in November, using, it was later discovered, an envelope that had been manufactured
after
Houdini had died. She also lied in telling Ernst that she hadn’t seen or communicated with Ford for several years, when in fact she was dating him for over a year and exchanging letters with him when he was in England.

Bess told another version of how Ford got the code to a mutual friend of theirs named Jay Abbott. According to him, Bess said that she was washing her hands one day and her wedding band fell off. Ford quickly retrieved it. Engraved inside the ring, Bess maintained, were the words to “Rosabelle, sweet Rosabelle.” How the rest of the words of the code came through went unexplained.

At best, Bess was a dupe, at worst, an architect and coconspirator in pretending to bring Houdini back from the grave. This begs the question, Why? Was it just that she wanted coverage in the press? No, she wanted once and for all to claim her rightful place. She needed Houdini to come back to
her
, not to Milla Barry, or to Charmian London, or to Daisy White. Not to Leopold or to Dash. She needed him to come back to her, just as he had after his indiscretions. But her ruse didn’t work. She fooled no one.

After the séance, Bess fell into a deep depression. She derived no joy from having heard from her loved one. On January 27, she wrote Ernst. “I am so ill that when anyone speaks to me I want to scream, and if I anyone who knows me I’m almost as bad…the case against me about the message looks bad. Don’t you see I’m mixed up in a sordid affair? I cannot talk yet. This is why I tried to do what I did January 4…Having my friends believe me of deliberately betraying Houdini hurts—and it really hurts me sorely.”

In the meantime, Ernst had confirmed from multiple sources, including Daisy White, that Ford had made many purchases of gauze, phosphorescent paint, and mediumistic effects from magic dealers. He had also consulted some magicians in an attempt to learn tricks. Ernst also learned from Bess that she had attended many wild parties with Ford, including some which were held at a “speakeasy” alleged to have been run by Daisy White. It was rumored that both Bess and Daisy ran the “speakeasy,” which was also a brothel. At any rate, Daisy White’s petite fingerprints were also all over the transmission of the code to the leader of her church, and when some of Houdini’s friends threatened to expose Daisy White’s involvement, she threatened to go public with her sexual relationship with Houdini and she had “one or more witnesses” ready to vouch for her story.

Increasingly despondent, drugged, drunk, and delirious, Bess was admitted to the West Hill Sanitarium in the Bronx. She spent over a month there. “Spiritualism was a forbidden subject” there, she told Ernst. She was being deprogrammed and dried out.

Sir Arthur’s response to the Houdini message backfiring was classic Doyle. He wrote a twelve-page article where he once again flogged Houdini for framing Margery, excoriated him for snubbing Lady Doyle’s message, and gave a glorious account of Ford’s transmission of the message. And in the end, he waxed poetic. “If these loving hands can meet through the veil, then ours also can do so…. Is that a sad or an irreligious thought?…As Houdini is today, you and I will be tomorrow. Is it then a message to be slurred over or obscured, that Death does
not
disconnect us or break our natural feelings, and that an all-wise Providence is giving this much-needed knowledge to a generation which has had much to endure? In this case a deliberate test was proposed. If it had not been fulfilled it would have been counted a strong argument against survival. But it was fulfilled. Surely it cannot be dismissed as if it never occurred.” After the Ford-Bess scandal broke, Conan Doyle made two corrections to his final draft. He added “apparently” after the “But” in the next to last sentence. And then he tacked on two sentences at the end: “It is true that in the last resort we are dependent upon the veracity and honesty of Mrs. Houdini. But I, for one, am not cynical enough to question it.”

Perhaps Doyle qualified his essay after receiving two long handwritten letters from Bernard Ernst that detailed much of the sordid information presented above. Ernst was careful to point out that he had handwritten the letters so that even his own secretary wouldn’t see the sad details of Bess’s descent into madness and despair. He then asked that Doyle keep the letters in confidence. Doyle’s response to that was also true to form. He immediately wrote his friend Dr. Crandon. “Now about this Houdini test. There is a dangerous snag there and Walter must not run up against it…. Houdini’s lawyer tells me that Mrs. Houdini has taken to drink, drugs, and the Lord knows what, and is thoroughly unreliable. He says there never was a letter in the strong box containing a code….” Crandon immediately typed the letter up and forwarded it to two members of his own circle.

Library of Congress

H
ARRY HOUDINI WAS DEAD BUT HOUDINI
the myth was young and vital. Ehrich Weiss had been born into poverty and cast into the world with an inadequate education and a great burden. This flawed mortal struggled, schemed, and persevered, transforming himself into America’s first international sensation by creating the idea that he could beat any possible restraint. This idea was so powerful that he broke into the language and became mythic, a popular legend, an embodiment of Nietzsche’s Übermensch, a superman who would submit to no human authority. We all enjoy a level of pride in being human that comes in his reflected glory.

Inspired by Sarah Bernhardt’s advocacy for the Russian Jews, the superman morphed into a superhero. Using his unprecedented fame like a fire hose, he cleaned the streets of the ruthless frauds who were preying upon the bereaved, the most vulnerable among us. He had transformed himself again, now into a public defender.

Yet he didn’t believe his own myth. He told his wife that the greater world wasn’t interested in his story and, on his deathbed, he confessed to a stunned doctor that he was a fake. The great irony is that while we can see his successes so clearly in hindsight, Houdini couldn’t see them in the moment. He was the most popular entertainer of his age. No one has yet filled his shoes as a magician. Fifty years after his death his name was added to the Oxford English Dictionary, and it’s being used every day.

Houdini has become truly immortal.

The last years of his life were not kind to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. His finances were drained by the losses of a psychic bookstore that he opened in the shadows of Westminster Abbey. On his evangelical trip to South Africa in 1929, he presented a slide show during his lectures that featured several interesting examples of spirit photography. In Nairobi, after showing one slide where the spirit looked truly lifelike, a man named Spencer Palmer got up in the audience and announced that he was in fact the spirit, and the photo had been an obvious hoax taken by his brother at a “ghost hunting” party in England. As soon as Doyle returned to London, he tried to shore up the veracity of the photo by writing an article about it, claiming that the negative of the photo had been sent to him by a F. R. Melton. To bolster his claim, he sent the negative to a Nairobi newspaper,
The East African Standard
, and issued a $1,000 challenge to Palmer if he could prove that it wasn’t the original negative of the photo. Palmer had inadvertently destroyed the negative, but an analysis of Doyle’s photo showed it to be a negative derived from a print of the photo. In fact, Palmer’s print was a more complete representation of the scene. When Palmer accepted Doyle’s challenge and the expert testimony had labeled Sir Arthur’s negative a fraud, Doyle sent a letter to the newspaper claiming that his source, Mr. Melton, “has made a sudden and mysterious disappearance from his residence and suicide is feared.”

Doyle was having trouble within the Spiritualist movement too. A controversy over a book review that criticized one of Doyle’s Spiritualist friends as being too lax in his control of mediums caused Sir Arthur to submit his resignation to the SPR, a group of which he had been a member for thirty-six years. On top of this, he was having problems with Pheneas. Doyle had been expecting the end of the world for several years now and was frustrated by Pheneas’s laxity when it came to timetables. If he pressed Pheneas on this issue, his spirit control would mock him as a
“whale,”
always hungry for information. In October of 1929, though sick, Doyle set out on a tour of Scandinavia, against Pheneas’s wishes. While he was there, Pheneas came and chastised him for
“breaking his traces,”
telling him
“you must work with me and not get out of hand.”