Through a Glass, Darkly by Stefan Bechtel

Author:Stefan Bechtel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Conan Doyle and Houdini were respectful friends in private and bitter enemies in public. Their quarrel: whether spiritualism was genuine or fraudulent.

CHRONICLE / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

CHAPTER NINE

The Strangest Friendship in History

If there had been any doubt about where Sir Arthur stood on the subject of the supernatural, by the time of the Cottingley Fairies incident it was clear to the world whose side he was on. By the early 1920s—in addition to his fast-growing literary fame as the creator of a certain brilliant detective—he had become the world’s most famous defender of spiritualism. He was its high priest, its most earnest advocate, its most charming and congenial convert.

“If ever there was a whole-hearted believer, he was one,” an acquaintance later wrote of him.

But as Sir Arthur strutted across the world’s stage, with his droopy walrus mustache, his tweed coats, and his compelling convictions, there was another man in the popular press whose fame had begun to exceed Conan Doyle’s. He was hardly bigger than a boy—five feet five in his stocking feet—a diminutive Hungarian with a huge head, a mop of bushy, center-parted hair, and pale, laser-focused sea-blue eyes. Erich Weisz, one of seven children of a poor rabbi, had emigrated from Budapest to the United States with his family when he was four years old. From a very young age—for some reason—he seemed inexorably drawn to the limelight. He performed publicly for the first time as a nine-year-old trapeze artist calling himself “Erich, the Prince of the Air.” Later, he did card tricks and escape acts at circuses and sideshows and briefly ran a Punch-and-Judy show.

When he was twelve, he hopped a freight car and ran away from home but returned a year later and with his brother Theo began to develop magic acts. He was still a teenager when he took on the stage name that would make him famous, after his idol, the nineteenth-century French illusionist Jean Robert-Houdin.

Harry Houdini, or sometimes Harry “Handcuff” Houdini, soon developed an almost supernatural ability to slip free from almost any entanglement. Eventually, at the urging of a promoter, he decided to give up his conjuring and card tricks and focus on his amazing ability to escape from handcuffs, chains, padlocks, straitjackets, and anything else that attempted to bind him. His antics spawned a new word: “escapologist.” He began challenging police departments to lock him up in a jail cell, bound by chains or whatever else they could find. Inevitably, incredibly, he would escape. In 1906, J. H. Harris, the warden of the United States Gaol in Washington, D.C., signed the following statement:

This is to certify that Mr. Harry Houdini, at the United States Gaol to-day, was stripped stark naked, thoroughly searched, and locked up in Cell No. 2 of the South Wing—the cell in which Charles J. Guiteau, the assassinator of President Garfield, was confined during his incarceration.… Mr. Houdini, in about two minutes, managed to escape from that cell, and then broke into the cell in which his clothing was locked up.

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