Five traits usually characterize the classical tragic hero, according to the experts. He (or she) is born into humble circumstances; he early performs great feats of strength; he rapidly rises to the heights of fame; he is abruptly brought down through hubris, or excessive pride; and, however briefly, he returns from the dead. Harry Houdini, who lived from 1874 to 1926—and who was arguably the greatest escape artist of all time—seemed in his day to embody all five of these characteristics. Born in Budapest and brought to Appleton, Wisconsin, by Jewish-Hungarian parents when he was four, he was of poverty-stricken origin. Like King Arthur or Davie Crockett, he early demonstrated great strength, leaving home at 12, taking up the trade of a vaudeville/circus showman in his teens, and becoming famous as an escape artist in Europe in his early twenties. He rose to the pinnacle of fame in his thirties, electrifying the U.S. public with feats like being lowered into the East River in mid-winter bolted into a coffin and emerging an hour later, or regularly escaping from straitjackets while suspended upside-down from tall buildings.
The final two classic traits of the tragic hero did not fail to raise their somber faces before this snub-nosed bullet of a man who, at 5 ft. 4 in. and 150 lbs., was a wiry mass of exquisitely trained muscle. The first of these was his sudden and unexpected death at the age of 52. To some extent, this death stemmed from Houdini’s hubris, or overreaching pride—the same flaw that felled Achilles or Oedipus. The great escape artist had challenged anyone in the world to test his claim that his abdominal muscles were so powerfully developed they could take any punch without his being injured. As Houdini sat relaxing in his dressing room on Oct. 22, 1926, after a standing room-only performance at the Princess Theater, in Montreal, Canada, a 22-year-old McGill University student took him up on his challenge, almost without warning delivering a volley of blows to Houdini’s stomach. The showman immediately got up, thanked the student for coming, and walked him to the door. But, as he left his dressing room that night, Houdini was already in pain. The next night, in Detroit, Michigan, it was hubris as much as courage that kept him going through his performance even though his temperature was 104 and he was in excruciating pain. He was rushed to the hospital after the show was over; doctors operated and removed a ruptured appendix and, probably, a ruptured pancreas. They saw that virulent peritonitis was spreading fast. Antibiotics did not exist then; eight days later, on October 31, 1926, after a heroic and moving struggle, the great escape artist had failed to escape the jaws of death.
Yet one more time would Houdini seem to show himself a hero in the classical mold. This fierce debunker of mediumship had sworn to his wife, Bess, that he would somehow send her an encoded message from the spirit world after his death. Bess offered a $10,000 reward to the medium who could deliver Houdini’s message. More than two years after Houdini’s death—at the end of three months of seances—celebrated psychic Arthur Ford transmitted the decoded words “ROSABELLE BELIEVE” to an exultant Bess. Houdini’s wife vowed that this was the agreed-upon message. All around the world, the media trumpeted the news of the great escape artist’s ultimate escape; for one brief moment, Houdini was as famous dead as he had been alive. Then, skepticism set in, even on the part of Bess, who took back her avowal; still, such was the post-life charisma of Houdini that there were many who continued to believe.
Even during his lifetime, particularly among his fellow professionals, Houdini was known to be somewhat less than a saint. There were those who claimed he owed his fame to his prodigious powers of self-promotion. His espousal of certain social causes was seen to be merely an expression of his rabid publicity-seeking. Houdini spent much of his time exposing phony mediums, even attending their seances incognito and re-enacting their hoaxes onstage. These activities—which included his testifying before Congress in favor of a bill banning mediumship, fortune telling, and other occult acts in Washington, D.C. (which bill sank into oblivion amid derision)—were considered by many stage professionals to be the height of hypocrisy. Houdini had, after all, been a fake medium himself in his early years. He had frequented seances after his mother had died. Bitterness over not receiving a posthumous message from her was thought to be the only other motive—aside from self-promotion—behind his obsessive and vicious medium-bashing.
As the power of Houdini’s charisma to deflect criticism has faded over the years, more and more of his contemporaries and near-contemporaries have come forward to enumerate the warts on this complex and contradictory figure. William V. Rauscher is a researcher into psychic phenomena who is also a clergyman and a professional magician. He knew many of these witnesses to the dark side of Houdini. In The Houdini Code Mystery: A Spirit Secret Solved (intended primarily for professional magicians) he assembles their testimony. A sad conclusion emerges: Houdini, for all his unquestioned courage, persistence, and skills, was not really a hero in the classical mold, but only as much of a hero as our present tawdry modern era can allow—if that. The sometimes harsh glare of Mr. Rauscher’s analysis throws light from a new angle on that most mysterious of all the Houdini conundrums: whether or not he really spoke from the afterworld.
Central to Houdini’s character, Mr. Rauscher suggests, was a mother fixation so severe that “even as a grown man he liked to sit on her knee, his head resting on her breast, listening to her heart.” Receiving in the midst of a Copenhagen press conference the cable informing him of her death, “he crumpled to the floor in a dead faint.” In obedience to his written instructions, a bundle of his mother’s letters tied with a red ribbon was placed under his head in his coffin and buried with him. Bound up with his mother fixation was the fact of Houdini’s being “literally frozen” in the presence of any other woman except for his wife Bess, says Rauscher. This mute terror, along with an absence of acting ability, scuttled his brief career as a film star; he was completely unable to play up to his leading lady. Author Rauscher concludes that the Great Houdini was at the very least infertile (he and Bess never had children), and at the very most impotent.
Out of this brew of impotence and Oedipal rage arose the harsh negative elements which helped drive Harry Houdini to success. Many were his sins, Mr. Rauscher’s informants testify: he stole acts from other performers and sometimes sabotaged their performances; he bribed people to swear he had performed feats which he hadn’t, such as his alleged escape from a Chicago police station in 1901; his assistants attempted to maim one of his competitors (the German escape artist “Minerva”) by putting acid in her water barrel. These detractors assert that Houdini routinely lied about his past and was regularly mean, violent and brutish—not incapable of generosity, but always unpredictable. The portrait of the great escape artist that emerges from Mr. Rauscher’s book is one that makes it not hard to believe that he could have, well before his death, arranged his triumphal return from the dead.
That is not at all, however, the drift of Mr. Rauscher’s argument. Rather, the author shifts our attention from the somewhat shabby Houdini to his somewhat shabby contemporaries, notably the celebrated psychic Arthur Ford. Rauscher says that Ford was a close friend of the author for 15 years until his death in 1972. He explains that “Ford, an urbane, educated, emotionally up-and-down personality, often reminisced wryly and sometimes wistfully (but never, to me, cynically) about ‘the good old days.’ Curiously, he would never, except on the rarest exceptions, discuss the Houdini Message episode. However, he could reflect on a vast mass of former ‘sitters’ (as a medium’s clients are called) ranging from movie stars and the intelligentsia to royalty. He had a rare gift (along with less admirable traits, such as episodic alcoholism, a touch of fraud, and a confused sexual identity) of not taking himself seriously—in private at least.”
Whatever his reservations about Ford’s character, Mr. Rauscher also declares: “If you ask me, ‘Do you really believe that Ford sometimes—not always, not perhaps regularly, but sometimes—talked with the dead,’ the evidence of my own experience compels me to answer: YES!”
The ‘Houdini’s Code Message’ was allegedly delivered to Ford through his spirit guide, “Fletcher,” over the course of nine long and tortuous seances conducted from Nov. 28, 1928, to Jan. 5, 1929. Little more than a word or phrase was produced each session, to finally render up the encoded message: “ROSABELLE… ANSWER… TELL… PRAYANSWER… LOOK-TELL… ANSWER.”
Despite Bess’s immediate insistence that “Rosabelle believe” was indeed the agreed-upon message, accusations of fraud surfaced within two days. On Jan. 9, Rea Jaure of the New York Graphic—one of the reporters who had been present at the final séance—declared that the message was a hoax engineered by Ford and Bess with the connivance of none other than Rea Jaure herself. This cynical claim, advanced to sell newspapers, had to be quashed in the courts, even though not a shred of evidence had been forthcoming from the start, and Ford and Bess had issued stout denials.
The world-famous “mentalist” William Dunninger entered the fray almost as quickly, declaring that fraud had been committed by a 28-year-old “fish handler at the Fulton Market” named Joseph Bantano and a curvaceous onetime stage assistant to Houdini named Daisy White. Again, not a shred of evidence was brought forward; when Daisy White threatened to sue for libel, Dunninger dropped the charges.
Arthur Ford had been fairly well-known as a medium at the time; with his role in the Houdini Code Message, his career took off. This was in no way altered by Bess’s changing her mind, at least publicly, in 1938, and declaring that “Rosabelle believe” was not the posthumous message agreed upon by her and Houdini. Those who wished to keep believing could find many good psychological and practical reasons for Bess’s denial, and the legend has lived on, with its detractors and supporters, right up to our day.
The new piece of evidence which Mr. Rauscher offers comes from one Jay Abbott, a New York Spiritualist and intimate long-time friend of both Ford and Bess, who spoke to Rauscher in April, 1973—just three months before Abbott’s own death in July.
Abbott told Rauscher that Ford and Bess frequently dated before the final Houdini séance, that Bess had been in love with Ford, and that one day while in her apartment with Ford her ring had fallen off as she was washing her hands and Ford had momentarily retrieved it. That was how, asserted Abbott, Ford had become the only other person in the world besides Bess and the dead Houdini to know the words inscribed inside the ring. Ford had used this knowledge in the final séance.
Abbott insisted that Bess had known nothing about this deceit. But, for author William Rauscher, the New York Spiritualist’s belated declaration is final proof of something which the author had suspected for many years, namely, that, “…Arthur Ford and Bess Houdini were in full cahoots. It was a mutually agreed-upon grand and glorious hoax. Both were full partners. It was like Ragtime and the Roaring Twenties all rolled into one!”
Mr. Rauscher’s contention has engendered some controversy. A story appearing in The New York Times for June 5, 2000, on New York’s Parapsychology Foundation, mentioned a talk on The Houdini Code Message given by Rauscher at the Foundation a few days earlier. A Times reporter asked eminent scientific investigator of the paranormal Hans Holzer, present at the talk, what he thought of Rauscher’s lecture. The Times quotes Holzer’s reply: “It was a waste of time; it had nothing to do with parapsychology. Let me put it this way: I never trust a magician fully. Magicians believe firmly that psychic phenomena are all fake.”
Steve Metcalfe, a long-time parapsychologist living in Flagstaff, Arizona, asserts that Rauscher, in assuming a total hoax, finds himself caught up in a fundamental contradiction. “On the one hand, he says Arthur Ford actually did sometimes communicate with the dead. But if he says this, he has to accept that Ford’s ‘control spirit,’ Fletcher—or whatever energies Fletcher represents—had some sort of objective reality bound up with the control spirit’s connection to an ‘afterworld.’”
What role then, asks Metcalfe, would Fletcher have played in the ten seances which culminated in “Fletcher’s” delivering the fake final two-word message to Bess? Was Ford so easily able to persuade Fletcher to go along with the conspiracy? Was he so easily able to put his spirit control aside and make everything up himself?
Metcalfe contends that if Ford was able to do these things so easily, then “he wasn’t really psychic, and he never really communicated with the dead.” But, says Metcalfe, Rauscher asserts that Ford did sometimes communicate with the dead: “Then, I think, he has to deal with the problem of what role Fletcher played in this conspiracy. I think the presence of a real Fletcher, with all the unpredictability you get in channeling phenomena, would have made it very difficult for Ford to pull off a hoax in any sort of a systematic way.”
If the characters of Ford and Bess are slightly questionable, so too is that of Jay Abbott; Mr. Rauscher’s quotes suggest that Abbott was speaking from a less-than-perfect memory, and/or that he might have had an ax of his own to grind regarding some long-ago, vaguely defined triangular relationship stemming from the confused sexual identity not only of Arthur Ford, but perhaps also of Jay Abbott. The real truth behind the Houdini Code Message seances may be so complex and elusive as even to be, to a small but significant extent, in the minds of the various beholders. Mr. Rauscher may have clearly stated one part of the truth; the whole truth may also partake of shifting worlds well beyond our own, and impenetrable even to the wily presence of a Harry Houdini.
