Mrs. Houdini(71)

The studios were just being built, and Bess marveled at this vast landscape dotted with massive, skylit buildings, the warehouses filled with costumes, the miniature cities built overnight. It all seemed like a grandiose version of the playacting she had done as a child, but these actors performed with more gravity than she had, much the way Harry performed his own art onstage. The streets where the more modest moviemakers lived were lined with orange flowers and white-fenced houses. After supper people sat on their porches until the sun went down, and there was a lazy, dreamy quality to those California evenings that reminded her of the ones she had spent as a little girl in the rowhouse in Brooklyn, when one could still be anything.

Renting the house down the street from them in Laurel Canyon was another well-known couple, Jack and Charmian London. They had come to Hollywood from Sonoma to sort out contracts for screenplays of Jack’s work. Some years before, Jack had written a novel titled The Call of the Wild, which had garnered him instant fame. He’d led an adventurous life, which he liked to recount during late Friday night dinners. He had lived in Alaska during the Klondike Gold Rush, had spent time in a Japanese prison, and had tended grapes in a vineyard. He and Harry had an eerie number of things in common. Both had massive book collections; Jack’s first wife had been named Bess; and his mother had been a spiritualist performer, back when the art had first become popular.

Bess, for her part, was enamored with Charmian, who embodied the freedom of spirit Bess was still trying to achieve. She was dark-haired and voluptuous and seemed, to Bess, to be a more exciting and beautiful version of herself. What distinguished her most of all in Bess’s eyes was that Charmian was not simply her husband’s companion. She had a career of her own; she was a writer, too, and had published short stories.

“Jack’s having a bad day today,” Charmian told her, as they set up their sun umbrellas. The seagulls wheeled overhead. Bess looked at the water where the men were wading. Jack London had been sick for years with uremic poisoning, and was on and off morphine.

“Is there anything we can do?” Bess brushed the sand off her arms. “You shouldn’t feel obligated to go with us tonight, you know.”

Charmian shaded her eyes. “Darling, we wouldn’t miss it. We’ve seen those doorknob tags.”

Bess had come up with the idea to distribute thousands of tags promoting Harry’s movie; they were printed with the words This lock is not Houdini-proof. “Yes,” Bess said, “Harry’s particularly fond of those.”

Charmian laughed. “A picture that will thrill you to the marrows, I’ve read.”

“I certainly hope so. The Man from Beyond didn’t fare so well. Harry put so much into that one, too.” Bess shielded her eyes from the sun. “I feel happy here—happier than I’ve ever been in New York. And I think Harry’s found his first real friend in Jack. What Jack does, his writing, I mean—it’s like Harry’s art. His account of the San Francisco earthquake in Collier’s—I’ll never forget it. And for three days and nights this lurid tower swayed in the sky, reddening the sun, darkening the day, and filling the land with smoke. It was both beautiful and terrifying.”

“Yes, but Harry deals in secrets, not in words. That’s much more fascinating. I imagine you know many of them. His secrets, I mean.”

For a moment Bess saw herself as she imagined others must see her—glamorous and full of mystery. She wanted to be those things in California. She didn’t just want to be, for all her first-class travel and royal introductions, a middle-aged woman who’d loved the right man. As she discovered, people liked her in Hollywood. From the moment they’d arrived, several years before, the invitations had come to their house in her name, too, not just in Harry’s. And she felt useful; she enjoyed sweeping about the parties, negotiating Harry’s contracts and soliciting others. Since Harry had begun his own production company, putting him in charge of his scripts and casts, there was more than enough work to keep her in the office all afternoon.

And Harry had been infinitely more romantic since they had come to Los Angeles. On occasion he seemed so full of energy that she could see a glimmer of the old Harry. He liked to play little tricks on her. Once she had come home from a luncheon to find a note in her bathroom. Mrs. Houdini, it began, you are a modern woman of liberal ideas. You will not be angry if I keep a date this evening. I expect to meet the most beautiful lady in the world at the corner of Hollywood and Sunset Boulevards at 6:30. I shall be home very late. She had dressed herself in a blue dress and found Harry waiting where he said he’d be, with a car ready to take them to a jazz club. That night he planned their anniversary party at the Hotel Alexandria, and the long, crystal-bedecked tables they would have, filled with food and orange blossoms and hundreds of people.

“Yes,” Bess told Charmian. “I am privy to many of his secrets. But many of them are frightfully mundane.”

“Oh, I doubt that.”

Bess felt a drop of water on her cheek and looked up to see Harry standing over her, soaking wet. She squealed and threw him a towel. “You devil, don’t get me wet!”

Jack had taken a seat behind Charmian and was cradling her head in his lap, massaging her scalp. It was clear he adored her.

“Come on, Bess.” Harry held out his hand. “We should get home and dress.”



In 1919, at the premiere of The Master Mystery, Bess had stepped out of the car in front of Harry to a dizzying lineup of flashbulbs. The theater had fit only three hundred but there were five times as many as that in the crowd, pushing their way toward the red ropes in front of the entrance. Harry was used to attention, but he wasn’t used to the blinding Hollywood fame. Hands had reached out to grab him. He’d turned and looked uncomfortably at Bess.