ALSO BY GARY M. POMERANTZ
Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn:
A Saga of Race and Family
Nine Minutes, Twenty Seconds:
A True Story of Tragedy and Triumph
Wilt, 1962:
The Night of 100 Points and the Dawn of a New Era
For Mom
“Don’t forget that man is a vain creature. Let him suspect that it is he that rules the roost. Manage him without letting him suspect it.”
— JOSEPHINE CULBERTSON
“We played perfectly—except Jo.”
— ELY CULBERTSON
ABOUT HIS BRIDGE-PARTNER/WIFE
CONTENTS
AUTHOR’S NOTE
INTRODUCTION
PART I: THE BRIDGE STORM 1929-1932
ONE: Ely and Jo
TWO: Myrtle and Jack
THREE: Ely’s Grand Scheme
FOUR: Four Spades She Bid
FIVE: Myrtle’s Blur
SIX: Senator Reed Comes Home
SEVEN: Ely and Jo: Stars on the Rise
EIGHT: The Senator and Mrs. Donnelly
NINE: Myrtle’s Murder Trial, Part 1
TEN: Ely in the Crucible
ELEVEN: Myrtle’s Murder Trial, Part 2
TWELVE: Bridge Battle of the Century
THIRTEEN: Myrtle’s Murder Trial, Part 3
PART 2: THE SEARCH
FOURTEEN: Miami
FIFTEEN: Kansas City
SIXTEEN: New York
SEVENTEEN: San Francisco
EIGHTEEN: Little Rock
NINETEEN: Santa Rosa, California
CONTRACT BRIDGE IN BRIEF
A CONTRACT BRIDGE GLOSSARY
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Bridge mavens who enter here, I beg your indulgence. For while this is a story about the great game, it is not the great game’s story. As you enter a bygone era and follow the glamour and drama of the Culbertsons and Bennetts, you won’t need to know the finer points of bridge. For those coming late to the game with their curiosity roused, I offer a brief bridge primer and a glossary of terms. I hurry to say that no such primer is called for by this story. It is a tale of husbands and wives. You know the rules by which that game is played.
INTRODUCTION
In the Roaring Twenties, the famous philanderers William Randolph Hearst and Babe Ruth might have thought it, but only Henry Ford said it out loud: Housewives of America should be patient with outbreaks of marital infidelity. “Treat it like the measles,” the auto titan said in 1923, the year a shapely young woman gave birth to a son whispered to be his. “Help your husband through it,” Ford said, as if what ailed the poor fellow could be fixed with a cool compress against his fevered brow.
One of the period’s great thinkers, Henry L. Mencken, so favored blondes, be they starlets or harlots, that a friend, screenwriter Anita Loos, turned the sage’s lust into a 1925 comic novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Loos created an archetype, the blond showgirl as gold digger, all giggles and curves, working under a siren’s name, Lorelei Lee.
Lorelei is a stenographer in Arkansas. Occasionally, she stops by the boss’s apartment. There they engage in extracurricular activities—until the day Lorelei arrives to see she’s been preempted by another working girl. For a moment, her mind goes blank. A revolver appears in her hand. Next thing she knows, as she tells the jury at her trial for attempted murder, her cheating boss has been shot.
The jurors and judge alike weep in sympathy for the poor, naïve, wronged, precious young woman. When she is acquitted she rewards each juror with a kiss on the cheek. The judge, too.
Free and on the run from Little Rock to Hollywood, to New York and Europe, Lorelei dances with the Prince of Wales and meets the famous Austrian psychiatrist “Dr. Froyd,” to use her spelling. Raising temperatures everywhere, she pursues a man—or, better, men—who will treat her the way to which she dreams of growing accustomed, mainly awash in diamonds and afloat on yachts.
In the way that art and life are reflections, there was about Myrtle Adkins more than a little of Lorelei Lee. Myrtle came out of Arkansas and became a stenographer. Like Lorelei, she had the look that caused men to take another look. Though a brunette (in this case, a grand exception to the Loos rule), Myrtle stopped conversations by doing no more than entering a room. That, she knew. That, she counted on. And just as Lorelei leaves Arkansas behind, so Myrtle left behind the dusty Arkansas farmland of Tillar.
Unlike Lorelei, Myrtle needed only one man. She even knew the man she wanted. When she spotted him, she moved quickly. With Jack Bennett she would create a life of relative luxury in Kansas City—until one night, as Lorelei does, Myrtle raised a gun against her man.
It happened around a bridge table in 1929, and to this day it is a flashpoint in the history of the card game that in the late twenties became—along with flagpole sitting, marathon dancing, transcontinental foot racing, and swimming pool endurance floating—yet another of America’s national crazes.
Of all the mad games that cheered Americans between the world wars, the least likely must have been contract bridge. Descended from whist, the game of English origins that had captivated Napoleon, Talleyrand, and Thomas Jefferson, bridge was as much an intellectual exercise as a game, its language a rigid code that conveyed information to a partner about the 13 cards in his hand, one arrangement of the 635,013,559,600 possibilities.
How quaint that sounds today: bridge as a phenomenon. When Shipwreck Kelly sat atop flagpoles for days, America cheered the sheer lunacy of it. But bridge? Genteel, civil bridge? Four people at a table for hours? Whose idea of fun was that?
It was Ely Culbertson’s. An elegant showman, he created on a large scale the milieu in which the Bennetts came to the table on that last night. Born in Romania and raised in Russia, the son of an American father and Cossack mother, Culbertson presented himself as suave and debonair, a tuxedoed boulevardier. He used mystique, brilliance, and a certain madness to transform bridge from a friendly social activity to a national cultural movement that made him rich and famous.
Culbertson sold bridge to anyone who would buy, but especially to housebound wives and mothers. Somehow, as if by some phantasmagorical hypnosis, he persuaded Americans that bridge was—in ways spoken and in ways dared not spoken—about sex.
The intimacy of couples seated together at a small table for hours, the competitive juices afire, the inevitable flirtations, the stimulus of friendly wagers, and the customary defiance of Prohibition were among the game’s seductive charms. Millions of American housewives just like Myrtle Bennett would give themselves to Ely Culbertson, and his game.
On his arm as his wife and across the table as his bridge partner was a beautiful American, Josephine, who shared his fame in the sparkle of New York and London. Culbertson knew that when husbands and wives played as bridge partners, the cards were on the table, and so was the marriage. Most couples played bridge together happily, but marriages under stress at home might reach spontaneous combustion when their quirks and eccentricities were exposed at the table. Then gentility might give way to competition, and to the bloodlust feared by Puritans in the New World.
The Puritans were hardly alone in their fear of cards. From the very start—the beginning of playing cards dates to China in or before the thirteenth century—cards and their games have titillated and haunted the imagination. Legend holds that Christopher Columbus’s sailors, inveterate gamblers on the high seas, encountered such fearsome weather that they threw their playing cards overboard in hopes of placat
ing the storm gods. Once safe on terra firma, they regretted their rash act, and fashioned new cards. The New England Puritans, always on the lookout for evil, abhorred playing cards, considering them Satanic seeds of laziness, vice, and corruption. They called them the devil’s tickets.
Bridge can stir devilish passions. It is a game of partnerships, two against two, seated at a table opposite each other. Communication and cooperation, and no small amount of forbearance, are paramount, because, ideally, partners will act as one, thinking alike and waging an intellectual battle totally without ego.
But the ideal can break down with the smallest of misinterpretations of a partner’s bids, and the opportunity for error is always there. In a single bridge hand, the number of significant decisions a player makes can reach well into double digits. In poker, a player’s failure is his alone (though, naturally, he usually passes it on to the fall of the cards). But bridge is unique in that it gives a player another way to explain his defeat. He can lay blame across the table.
That is petty of him, of course, because whatever glory or despair comes to the partnership is equal property of both. Points, after all, are scored not by individuals, but by the partnerships. Yet missteps, real or perceived, can break a partnership’s concentration, egos can rise to the fore, and a sense of betrayal can blow like an icy north wind flowing to the south.
The best partners are personally compatible and roughly equals in ability. A mismatched nonspousal partnership can end with a simple word of regret, but a married partnership is more problematic. Generally, a husband and wife keep slogging through the tribulations, carried along by their personal compatibility. Not every marriage can stand up to the passions of an intense competition, though. Trouble arrives, and is doubled, when partners mismatched at bridge bring to the table the flaws of their married life. Culbertson knew this, and feasted upon it, even as he extolled the game’s magnificent virtues.
Anyone intrigued by the intersection of Culbertson’s game and the Bennetts’ story of passion gone wrong is drawn into the life of Kansas City. Only by understanding that great Midwestern city in the time of Prohibition and the Pendergast political machine is it possible to understand what happened at Myrtle Bennett’s trial for murder. Her defense lawyer was James A. Reed, a man who twice campaigned for the presidency, a firebrand orator, former U.S. senator, friend of H. L. Mencken, and discreet practitioner of extramarital romance himself.
The times defined events. At this exhilarating moment in America’s media history, talkies were new, radio was in its infancy, and newspapers competed fiercely for an audience. With all this came an insatiable hunger for story, the more sensational the better. Because (as P. T. Barnum once said) no one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public, the marketing pitches of the day were skewed toward the breathless and hyperbolic, as seen through the prism of the ruling sex, the male.
Once, the famous movie producer Irving Thalberg told Anita Loos how to write about women in her Hollywood scenarios: “When you write a love scene, think of your heroine as a little puppy dog, cuddling up to her master, wagging an imaginary tail, and gazing at him as if he were God.” Thalberg was talking to the wrong woman, of course. From her own marriage, Loos had learned which sex was truly stronger. Once, she found, in her husband’s wardrobe drawer, secreted behind socks, a woman’s love letter. When her husband tearfully confessed to the affair, Loos allowed him to stay with her.
In those times, Amelia Earhart became “Lady Lindy,” Marlene Dietrich dressed in top hat and tails, and Dorothy Parker traded barbs with the men at the Algonquin hotel’s “Round Table.” All were women of achievement, icons by virtue of their rarity, and yet their work was nearly always judged from a male viewpoint. No matter how individualistic and daring Earhart was in the sky, reporters pigeonholed her as merely a female version of Charles Lindbergh. Beautiful and sultry, even in her men’s formal wear, Dietrich played a scene in Morocco in which she kisses a woman. The acerbic poet Parker sat with writers Heywood Broun, Alexander Woollcott, Robert Benchley, and George S. Kaufman, tossing off witticisms every bit as cutting as theirs, such as her line on coeds at the Yale prom: “If all the girls in attendance were laid end to end … I wouldn’t be at all surprised.” For such boldness, male critics disparaged Dietrich and Parker as unseemly and scandalous.
For women at home, those housewives whose achievements went unnoticed, a sociable game of bridge offered a place at the table where, by dint of their intelligence and skill, they could prove they were the equals of men, if not their superiors. But many husbands were not ready to follow their wives’ lead or to view them in anything but a subordinate role. Culbertson’s marketing genius was that he positioned his game as a challenge to women, a dare, really. If a woman truly wanted equality, she had only to buy a deck of cards—and, of course, his books of bridge instruction.
Perhaps as an unintended consequence, though just as likely the shrewdest part of his marketing, Culbertson took advantage of the tension in marriage that is eternal. How much more interesting, he thought, if the game became a war of the sexes.
Myrtle Bennett would be North to Jack’s South. The Culbertsons, Ely and Jo, would be the game’s king and queen. Spouses, lovers, enemies—these four were all those as the raucous twenties dissolved into the silence of the Depression. Their lives and the game they played became a single story beginning in 1929.
This is that story.
Before the Culbertsons made their challenge, the titans of bridge stood shoulder to shoulder on a New York rooftop in 1928 (from left to right): Milton Work, R. F. Foster, E. V. Shepard, Sidney Lenz, Wilbur Whitehead, Gratz Scott. American Contract Bridge League, Memphis, TN
ONE
Ely and Jo
I.
New York City in the twenties was a melting pot of seven million, full of show, big and brawling, an industrial behemoth with enough smokestacks and skyscrapers to fill the skylines of a dozen cities. F. Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote of young love and glittery tea dances, as the twenties dawned, suggested New York City had “all the iridescence of the beginning of the world.” Its streets swelled with noises of the Old World mixing with the New: gramophones, gangster gunfire, European accents, tinkling champagne glasses, backfiring Model Ts, and tabloid newsboys hawking the sensational. In these high times, New Yorkers could rush to Broadway to see Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor—known to their Eastern European parents as Asa Yoelson and Israel Iskowitz—or thrill to the last acts of the amazing Harry Houdini, born in Hungary as Erik Weisz. They could read a dozen and more local dailies, choose from among thirty thousand speakeasies, marvel as the big-bellied Babe Ruth launched home runs at Yankee Stadium, and see their Democratic governor, the derbyhatted Al Smith, passing through the five boroughs on his way (he hoped) to the White House. Alive and thrumming at street level, the city teemed with gangsters, ad agency pitchmen (selling sex, Sex, SEX!), Wall Street fat cats, socialists and garment district workers, café society personalities and cynical, self-absorbed writers sitting at the Algonquin Round Table thinking up laugh lines. A constellation of celebrities brightened the Prohibition-era night, from the brassy hostess Texas Guinan, who with her pancake makeup and jangling jewelry, greeted nightclub guests with “Hello, sucker!;” to the waiters at Small’s Paradise in Harlem, who roller-skated the Charleston across the dance floor with trays overhead; to Jimmy (Beau James) Walker, the dapper mayor of the Tammany Hall machine, who so frequently courted his showgirl all over town that many New Yorkers—not including, of course, Walker’s wife—assumed the two were married. In the spirit of the times, Walker later divorced his wife and married the showgirl.
In 1923 Ben Hecht, the writer and playwright, arrived in New York from Chicago and discovered an adventurous city running from the dark memory of war and hedonistically giving itself to the pleasures of the hour, including, he wrote, “the pleasure of not giving a damn.” “It was a bold town,” Hecht wrote, “indeed, sharp
-tongued, and individualistic. Its credo had it that New Yorkers were a master race.”
We busied ourselves putting up the only show possible against doom, which is to seize all the fun there is. Thus people sang louder, drank deeper, danced longer and squandered themselves in every direction.… Its finest ladies, including happily married ones, engaged in promiscuous sex as if they were college boys on a spree.… New York insisted all its idols wear a grin. It regarded all foreign events, including the first World War, as entertainment. It believed that any war could be won by writing the right songs for it, and not losing your sense of humor. Its patriotism consisted of admiring itself ardently.
In the daily frenzy of New York City, twin journalistic revolutions thundered like elephants down Forty-second Street: the tabloids and Walter Winchell. The New York Daily News, America’s first tabloid, or half sheet, wailed into existence like a colicky infant in June 1919 with bold headlines and an eye-catching array of photos and illustrations. Within five years, it claimed a readership of nearly one million, easily the largest circulation in the nation. Its success begat another tabloid, the Daily Mirror, which arrived in 1922 promising “90 percent entertainment, 10 percent information;” a few years later came the next, the New York Evening Graphic. These tabloids took the bygone yellow journalism of Hearst and Pulitzer, Spanish-American War vintage, circa 1898, and ripened it. New York pulsed with a thousand wars in miniature—social, cultural, legal, and, best of all, marital—and the tabloids used them all to their advantage. They reveled in stories of debauchery, extramarital affairs, abortions, murders, union battles along the Bowery, mob violence, heroism, hedonism, mayhem, threats, controversies, and dynamic courtroom trials.
The Devil's Tickets Page 1
