They both wanted to have children very much, and didn’t. Houdini, I remember, inscribes a picture to a friend of his, "Bess and I have been married 15 years, and all we have is a dog." And there are pictures of them both holding up children as they visit some charity hospital or something. Not having children, they invested a lot of that kind of affection in pets, and they had a houseful of pets. I mean, they always carried a dog with them on their shows, and sometimes smuggling it across borders. But they had a big cage full of birds in their kitchen. They had pet turtles. When a dog or a pet cat dies, Houdini’s diaries go on for pages just with his anguish over the death of the pet. They might have been, you know, very affectionate parents.
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