All About Jewish Theatre - Who made Harry Houdini disappear?

Harry Houdini's death will forever be associated with Halloween. Halloween revellers have been known to try to channel his spirit.

Born Erich Weiss, the great magician and legendary escape artist died in Detroit 78 years ago tomorrow from peritonitis, a result of a punch to the stomach he had suffered in Montreal eight days earlier after a performance at the Princess Theatre. A sometime McGill student named J. Gordon Whitehead had visited his dressing room and, to test his fabled abs, punched him in the stomach while Houdini, already suffering from a broken ankle, was reclining on a couch. He had had no chance to prepare himself to absorb the blow.

The life and death of Houdini have haunted many writers. The magician appears in E.L. Doctorow's novel Ragtime as a man overly dependent on his mother. After her death in the novel he begins to conduct research on the afterlife and contact with the dead, although in real life he energetically debunked the spiritualists who claimed to be able to do this. One theory even holds that a cabal of spiritualists were behind Houdini's death.

The catalogue of the Toronto Public Library lists a dozen novels, three dramas, five children's books, a book of poems and 70 biographical or other items on the Houdini theme. Most of the books about him end by stating that the puncher was never brought to trial and disappeared from view - as if by magic.

That was not good enough for Don Bell, a writer, book collector and owner of a bookstore in Sutton, Que. Bell spent more than two decades in obsessive pursuit of the mysterious Whitehead's story - who was he and what became of him?

Bell was the author of the essay collection Saturday Night At The Bagel Factory, which won the 1973 Leacock prize for humour. His new book, The Man Who Killed Houdini, is published posthumously today by Vehicule Press in Montreal. Bell died last year, leaving his son Daniel to put the finishing touches on his eccentric work.

"As my father was dying, I began to read the manuscript - which was very long, over 500 pages - and he recognized that it needed to be pared down and he asked for my advice," explained Daniel Bell, an Oxford graduate and a university professor living in Beijing, in an e-mail.

"He wanted to be consulted before any changes were made, but unfortunately he left this world before that was possible."

In The Man Who Killed Houdini the elder Bell takes us on a maddeningly leisurely journey in which he follows up every clue and byway even when it leads nowhere.

He locates Whitehead's grave in Mount Royal Cemetery and finds a photo of him standing in a bookstore. He traces Whitehead's younger siblings to Vancouver where he also meets an overwrought woman named Mabel Jackson, who had once loved him. He talks to the two other students, Jack Price and Sam Smiley, who had been in Houdini's dressing room on Oct. 22. They're both aged, of course, but lucid.

He finds two women in Montreal who as children lived in the same building as Whitehead before he died in 1954 and remember once entering his shabby newspaper-stuffed apartment. He finds the widow of the young Detroit doctor Danny Cohn, who had ministered to the magician in his last hours and who had brought Houdini his final meal from the local deli "Farmer's Chop Suey," a Jewish-style dish of raw vegetables and sour cream.
Then on page 219, Bell hits paydirt when he describes the arrival at his local post office of "a thick brown manila envelope" - the envelope of his dreams. He had at last persuaded the New York Life Insurance Co. to go into their archives and release the file on Harry Houdini. Houdini's wife Bess collected $105,000 under the double indemnity clause of his policy but first the insurance company demanded sworn affidavits from his doctors and from all witnesses to the punch.

Others writers on Houdini had been aware of the existence of these affidavits, but failed to locate them. "I sat down on the terrace of the village restaurant, ordered a coffee and started to pore over documents that apparently nobody other than officers of the insurance company had ever seen," Bell writes.

The affidavits (Whitehead's is evasive) confirm the already known story and provide Bell with a sample of Whitehead's signature, which he submits to a graphologist for analysis.

The puncher emerges from Bell's investigation as a Dostoyevskian character, a tormented failure with no visible means of support besides living off women, a shoplifter of books, a secretive and sickly man (he died of malnutrition) and possibly a drug addict or alcoholic.

"I do not know the precise origin of my father's interest in Houdini's death," says Daniel Bell, "but I think it was aroused when he found out that Houdini had likely been killed by punches thrown by a McGill student. My father was a Montrealer and a graduate of McGill, and it must have seemed like an interesting story to follow up. My father was a journalist (frequent contributor to Weekend Magazine) and he had an ear for such stories."

Bell Sr. began working on the book in the early '80s and found leads by advertising in Montreal papers. He kept adding chapters as information trickled in. "My father never did feel that he really 'completed' the quest, because he thought more relevant information might yet turn up," Daniel says.

The research kept him alive. "My father's health deteriorated over this same 20-year period. He had a mysterious lung ailment that slowed the quest; on the other hand, the quest also slowed the ailment."

Source: The Toronto Star