I think the real story behind the request for Harry’s bones to be dug up is a 2004 book by Don Bell called “The Man Who Killed Houdini”. One wonders whether there would have even been a book called “The Secret Life of Houdini” had it not been for Bell’s remarkable tale.
By most accounts “The Man Who Killed Houdini” is extraordinary not so much for what it reveals as the effort that went into it: a tenacious two-decade search for Jocelyn Gordon Whitehead, the man who threw the infamous punches that landed the illusionist in hospital. The pursuit that Bell embarked on was rife with personal psychosis that many readers have found far more gripping than the eventual outcome, not that there was an outcome in the true sense — the shadow hiding Whitehead is lightened, but he remains an enigma.
What the book did stunningly reveal was that Harry was punched by not one but several men while in Montreal in October 1926. Bell, a Montrealer who died of emphysema the year before the book came out (his son honoured a deathbed promise to get it published), tracked down witnesses to all of these “attacks” — or at least “tests” of Houdini’s legendary toughness. Bell offered little information about the other punches — supposedly one man walloped Harry while he was calmly reading a newspaper in the lobby of Montreal’s Prince of Wales Hotel — and instead concentrates on JG Whitehead. It fell to Sloman and Kalush to extrapolate on the rest in “Secret Life”.
Ultimately Bell hypothesised that Whitehead may have been a paid enforcer for the Spiritualists. But to try and find out, he had to go looking for a man who’d vanished as soon as Houdini died. Whitehead disappeared in a cloud of false or dubious leads, prompting some extreme cynics to wonder whether he even existed at all. (He nevertheless earned so much notoriety over Houdini’s death that he even warrants an entry on Wikipedia.)
The newspapers identified him as a McGill University divinity student, but in fact he had only briefly attended the Montreal college, and at the time of the incident hadn’t even been in Montreal for long, although he came back later in life and was buried there in June 1954, Bell eventually finding his grave in Hawthorn-Dale Cemetery (or Mount Royal Cemetery, depending on the source). The cause of death, curious enough in itself, was malnutrition. Bell surmised that he could have been a drug addict or an alcoholic.
Don Bell had built his writing career on profiles of some of Montreal’s more eccentric street characters, and Whitehead fit the pattern, a dedicated loner and drifter who lived in odd places with little else in them but newspapers stacked to the ceiling. Bell’s marathon investigation took him across Canada, and the hunt for the phantom was often mired in dead ends, not to mention strong indications of Bell’s own eccentricities, as when, at one point, he was sure he was being followed.
The Toronto Star’s review of the book chracterised it as “a maddeningly leisurely journey in which he follows up every clue and byway even when it leads nowhere”. Bell found Whitehead’s siblings to Vancouver, as well as one of his former lovers, and in Montreal two women who’d lived in the same building as Whitehead before his death.
Bell also twisted elbows at the New York Life Insurance Co and was finally granted its Houdini file, containing the doctors’ and witnesses’ affidavits that had until then been denied all researchers. In 1927 the firm had insisted on getting sworn statements from all concerned before it would pay Bess the $105,000 due her under Harry’s double-indemnity policy clause. Not that there was much to the documents, but Bell did get Whitehead’s signature and took it to a graphologist for analysis.
And he did manage to locate the two long-forgotten witnesses to the “sucker punches” that Whitehead delivered to Houdini backstage at the Princess Theatre. The showman, said Jack Price and Sam Smiley — as they had said in a formal hearing convened by the insurance company in 1927 — was reclining on his stomach on a couch dressing room, going over some paperwork or letters.
Price and Smiley were bona fide McGill students who had attended Harry’s lecture on spiritualism at the school a few days earlier, at which he castigated mediums in general and Lady Conan Doyle in particular. After the lecture, Price presented Houdini with a sketch he’d done of him and was invited to the theatre for the show and a visit backstage.
While they were there Whitehead entered the dressing room. They knew him slightly from school but his actions over the next few minutes merely reassured them that he was an anti-social crackpot. Whitehead, long described as an amateur boxer, though this may have been a red herring, raised the matter of Houdini’s supposed ability to withstand any punch to the midsection and asked if he could try. Harry agreed, but was only just rising from the couch to prepare himself (presumably by bracing his abdominal muscles and controlling his breath) when Whitehead unleashed a flurry of hard blows.
Houdini told him to stop, and Price and Smiley, embarrassed for him, quickly excused themselves. They did point out, however, that they had the impression Houdini was already in some discomfort before any of this happened, and that’s why he was lying on the couch, occasionally touching his stomach. Harry had indeed been complaining of abdominal pain earlier, and supposedly a doctor diagnosed food poisoning, which was why Kalush and Sloman went sniffing for deliberate, malicious poisoning, though they ended up wondering about the doctors in Detroit.
Whitehead’s battering was almost immediately dismissed as a cause of Houdini’s death, although to this day every other retelling of Harry’s story you encounter stands by the myth. Poor Jocelyn. Harry’s appendix was by then probably already ripe for bursting, and at least one medical expert said this occurred on his train ride to Detroit, possibly in Windsor, Ontario, just shy of the American border, and the fatal toxins quickly spread. But doubt does linger over whether Whitehead was just a reckless jock alighting on the Great Houdinis’ celebrity glow — or a man on a mission.
“My father never did feel that he really ‘completed’ the quest,” Bell’s son Daniel told the Toronto Star, “because he thought more relevant information might yet turn up.” The way Harry’s story continues to unfold, there’s no reason to believe Bell was wrong.
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Reviewing Kalush and Sloman’s biography for the London Sunday Times in July 2006, Tony Barrell was in touch with magician Dorothy Dietrich, co-owner of the Houdini Museum in Scranton, Pennsylvania (see the post about it here), and she had this to say: “I have a feeling that that student could have been a believer in spiritualism who wanted to punish Houdini, teach him a lesson, and maybe even do him in.” It’s clearly a widely held suspicion.
Dietrich also notes that the spiritualists who filed numerous lawsuits against Harry knew they couldn’t win, “because how do you get a ghost to come to court?” Instead, she suggests, they were only trying to “tie up his money and keep him busy”.
“I get letters from ardent believers in spiritualism,” Houdini supposedly told a Chicago newspaper late in life, “who prophesy I am going to meet a violent death soon as a fitting punishment for my nefarious work.”
The Houdini Magical Hall of Fame, once the repository of many of the illusionist’s famous tricks and props, including the supposedly original Water Torture Cell, was on Clifton Hill in Niagara Falls, Ontario — I’d been past it more than once, but I don’t recall ever going in; there was always too much to do in the Falls. The museum was razed by fire in 1995 and, believe it or not, Ripley’s Entertainment opened a cinema on the site. The photos here, from 1973 and 1985, are from Tom Interval’s HoudiniMuseum.com.
Flames had tried to stop Henry Muller and Vince Delorenzo from opening the museum from the outset, in a string of bad luck that some attributed to Houdini’s wrath from beyond the grave. He had wanted his memorabilia burned rather than sold for profit, but his brother Theo — also a professional musician under the name Hardeen — finally sold the collection to Muller in 1967. The museum that Muller built was chased by freak accidents to its eventual location in the century-old Victoria Park train station.
