Ely electrified their mix. He was like a cup of strong Russian coffee after three decades of tepid tea. Ely talked about himself—and his bidding system—incessantly. Imagine him informing the gods of American auction bridge in the spring of 1922 about the bidding mistakes they were making and offering a new and superior system—his. To Whitey, Lenz, Liggett, and the others, Ely was an interloper, an irritant, a know-it-all. They had been playing cards since before his birth. He was, they decided, a wandering Narcissus, impertinent, peculiar, mysterious, and without money or occupation, dressed up entirely for show. Intellectual, yes, but toxic. From the first, the club’s old guard did not trust Ely Culbertson, or like him.
Even worse was his pursuit of Jo Dillon. From the inner sanctum, the experts watched their courtship blossom. Helpless to stop it, they quietly conferred over drinks, always returning to the same question: What does Jo see in him? Already she had succeeded in becoming one of the Knickerbocker boys in ways Ely never would.
From their first shared moment at a Knickerbocker bridge table (as opponents, not partners), Ely Culbertson was infatuated with Jo Dillon. He noticed small details: her lightly freckled face, the high cheekbones, her slight retroussé nose, the smallness of her voice, and the long narrow hands alive with suppressed feelings. Everything about Jo suggested calmness and restraint. She had finishing-school charm. Her presence at the table was steady, cerebral, refined.
Seeing Jo, Ely remembered a moment eight years before in Italy when he first dreamed of his Galatea, a dream so strong he placed an advertisement in a newspaper. He was looking for a wife. And not just any woman, but one whose shape, intellect, and pedigree met his specifications. He did not describe his motive that candidly in the ad. Instead, he hid behind cleverness. No one at the Knickerbocker knew this story, of course, and if they had, it would only have intensified their concern for Jo.
Ely only told the story many years later. In the summer of 1915, with Europe at war, he was twenty-three years old and living his richly entitled life on tsarist rubles while holed up, for the time being, in a Geneva hotel. Slim and elegant, he was five feet, ten inches tall and weighed not even 140 pounds. He had a handsome wardrobe and a thin face with hooded eyes that a writer later would liken to a “romantically idealized Satan.”
Better with numbers than with women, he put his scientific mind to use. If he could not find his ideal woman, he reasoned, he would, with a system, create her. He had in mind Galatea, the figure in Greek mythology carved from ivory and so beautiful that her sculptor, Pygmalion, falls in love with her. With Pygmalion’s love, and Aphrodite’s spark, Galatea springs to life. Ely was determined to find a young woman, beautiful and refined, whose personality was not yet fully formed. He would place her in an environment filled with tutors, books, plays, and ideas. They would live in a cultured setting—Paris or London, perhaps—where he would shape a superior woman, his perfect partner, his Galatea.
Beneath the youthful romanticism and naïveté of his plan was a dark dreamer’s distended thinking: Ely as Creator. He took a train to Turin, in northern Italy, where, he believed, the world’s most beautiful women lived. If he failed there, he would seek his wife in Greece or the Balkans. In Turin he placed his ad in La Stampa and other newspapers, announcing himself as an American painter in search of “an exceptional model”:
Must be between 18 and 21 years old. Between 5 feet 4 and 5 feet 6 inches tall; between 24 and 26 inches waist; between 34 and 36 inches bust; between 36 and 38 inches hips, legs perfectly shaped; eyes very large, preferably black with blonde hair, or blue with black hair; features either very symmetrical or, if not classical, of exotic attractiveness. Only truly beautiful types need apply. Undress unnecessary. Write, enclosing photograph.
Hundreds of women answered his advertisement, and he met them all at a busy central piazza, moving from one street corner to the next, their individual appointments spaced fifteen minutes apart, his identifying marker a white rose pinned to his lapel. In his derby and suit, sniffing the summer air, he moved like a Russian prince. In these candidates, he saw age, infirmity, obesity, bad teeth. “No, signorina,” he said; and to the next, with a shake of his head, “Sorry. No, signorina.” It went on like this for several days. He did not find Galatea. But now, in the brownstone at 26 West Fortieth Street, he knew he had.
Their courtship began over dinner, with Jo saying, “It isn’t your ideas or your so-called system that makes you win. It’s your knowledge of human nature. You’d win with any system.” She noted how Ely drew inferences and information from an opponent’s smallest hints: a hesitation, a slight change in voice inflection, an arching of the brow. He also knew how to rile opponents. He would goad or gloat at just the right moment. This was sophisticated gamesmanship, a gambler’s high art.
In conversations with Jo, Ely belittled the Knickerbocker experts who glorified their own “rules” of bidding. They would rather score two hundred points by following their own rules, he told her, than three hundred points by abandoning them. He showed Jo a “crime sheet” he’d been keeping, in which he had dissected the others’ bids and plays, and his own. He could prove they were throwing away thousands of points for no reason other than stubbornness. He showed her notebook pages covered with graphs, curves, and percentages.
He persuaded Jo to explore his ideas. Together, Ely and Jo dealt hands and bid them according to the ideas of Whitehead and Milton Work, a noted American authority on whist, scoring the results. They then bid according to Ely’s methods. For two weeks, Jo bid hands, with Ely or alone, according to the three systems. And she became a convert.
Soon she was seeing Ely every day. He would drop into her bridge teaching studio in late afternoons and, with a group of her friends, the two would share cocktails and dinners at the Beaux Arts restaurant next door, a speakeasy with Texas Guinan as its greeter. Together, Ely and Jo walked at night along Forty-second Street, past the New York Public Library, and sat on the benches in the park behind the library with Jo’s Pekingese dog, Chu Chin Chow. They talked about books, people, and life. Ely told her that he thought himself much like Spinoza, the seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher, the great rationalist, who ground lenses by day so that he could philosophize by night. Ely played bridge, he said, but his underlying ambition was to create the Modern Theory of Cards, and he intended to reap the financial rewards for it. He told Jo about Russia, hoping she would love the country, for then she might also love him. He understood that her divorce and the recent death of her former husband weighed upon her. He sensed her reluctance to marry again.
He showed her his diary, reasoning that she was entitled to know the deepest thoughts of the man about to propose marriage to her. She read the diary, and it scared her. She told him, “I need a change.” Crestfallen, Ely heard her say, “We can never be happy.”
She spoke harshly to him that night: “You could be a revolutionist, a monk or a philanderer, but you never could be a family man. You’d hate it.
“Ely, no woman could ever be happy with you,” she said. “To you, a woman will always be a companion, an assistant—not a wife. Sometimes, I’m afraid of you. You’re ruthless, Ely, because you are ruled by ideas, not by your heart.”
She went away, to Saratoga, and Ely thought that maybe she was not his Galatea, after all. A foolish American girl, he decided. They’re all spoiled. He sat alone one night at the Beaux Arts restaurant with a bottle of champagne and his despair. Guinan happened by his table and noticed Jo’s absence: “Why the gloom, Ely? Did someone misplay a hand?”
But he was determined not to give up on Jo Dillon. He went to Saratoga, put an arm around her, and kissed her. She did not resist him, but she said, “Ely, I love you, but I will not marry you.” Ely’s heart leaped: he was still in the game.
Now it was late summer, 1922. They conceived an idea to become America’s best bridge pair, and began a period of intensive training, spending hours each night fine-tuning their par
tnership. They created a mutual understanding of bids, discussed the imponderables of bridge psychology. Then they tested their theories, and their system, Thursday nights at the Knickerbocker, returning afterward to Jo’s apartment and working from memory to re-create the hands dealt and played. They made exhaustive notes, analyzed errors. It was during these times when Ely became his most ruthless. Into the wee hours, Jo’s living room filled with cigarette smoke and Ely’s savage criticisms, until finally Jo, in tears, pushed her chair from the table and shouted, “You’re a bridge monster! I’ll never play with you again!”
If Ely’s intellect amazed Jo, his intensity frightened her. The memory of such explosive bridge table experiences would melt away, but they would help Ely define early on the imperative of partnership cooperation: “This question of morale is automatically solved for those who realize that partnership is simply a sporting proposition,” he wrote. “We are drawn together for better or worse and therefore like true pals should stand by cheerfully and courageously.” He also created a standing rule: “Never reproach your partner if there be the slightest thing for which you can reproach yourself.” At the table he began to treat Jo with deference, and their courtship deepened.
As time passed, Jo came to believe that, among married couples playing as bridge partners, there were three types: (1) those who quarreled everywhere, including at bridge; (2) those who quarreled nowhere, except at bridge; and (3) those who quarreled everywhere, but never at bridge. She and Ely therefore agreed never to discuss a hand while sitting at the bridge table.
They married the following June. The experts in the Knickerbocker’s third-floor inner sanctum were aghast, especially Whitey. (Two years later, he founded the Cavendish Club in New York City and invited Jo to join—as long as she promised to keep her husband out.) On the signed affidavit for a wedding license, Ely, too ashamed to define his occupation as “gambler at cards,” instead scrawled, “oil business,” borrowing from his father’s former profession. Jo cited her occupation as “bridge expert.” He was thirty-two, she twenty-five. On the affidavit, Jo also cited her divorce in March 1921. Of her first husband, she wrote simply, “dead 1922.” Perhaps to protect her own good name, she added a single word, crammed into the tight space above her signature: Plaintiff. Jo wanted it known that she, not her first husband, had filed the divorce papers.
The Culbertsons married at the Holy Cross Church in New York City, with Father Duffy presiding. Jo’s mother, Sarah McCarthy Murphy, served as maid of honor, and Ely’s father, Almon, as best man. Ely bought a thin platinum wedding ring with tiny diamonds, on the installment plan, and promised Jo an enormous square-cut solitaire. The longer she waited, he assured her, the larger the diamond. (He would deliver an impressive solitaire ten years later.) He also gave Jo a small jewel box. It was empty, of course, but one day he promised it would hold a beautiful honeymoon on the isle of Capri, a lovely country home, an engagement ring, sables, minks, and diamonds. They honeymooned at a motel in nearby Long Beach, an inexpensive seashore resort. They drank champagne and walked along the beach. She encouraged him—as a bridge player, as a writer, as a man: “You’re better than you think you are.”
“Jo-Jotte, I’ll make you the happiest woman in the world,” Ilya Culbertson promised his Galatea on their honeymoon. And then he amended, “At least in spots.”
By the mid-1920s, auction bridge had solidly established itself as an American parlor game, particularly among the intellectual and the well-to-do. The game even found its way into popular literature. In a 1926 short story for Red Book magazine, “The Rich Boy,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote of a young Yale man playing a casual game with friends at the Everglades Club in Palm Beach; the same year, Hemingway’s Jake Barnes, in The Sun Also Rises, plays three-handed bridge with friends in Spain en route to watch the bulls run at Pamplona.
As late as 1925, contract bridge was hardly known, and played only experimentally. Its evolution dated back more than two centuries to whist, which rose in Britain during the first half of the eighteenth century from relative obscurity, and from earlier games known as triumph, ruff and honours, and whisk and swabbers. Played at the outset in servants’ quarters, or “below stairs,” the game soon gained popularity among elites. In 1742, the London barrister turned whist instructor Edmond Hoyle (of the phrase “according to Hoyle”) published his seminal A Short Treatise on the Game of Whist, Containing the Laws of the Game, and Also Some Rules Whereby a Beginner May, with Due Attention to Them, Attain to the Playing It Well.
In the United States and Europe, auction bridge appealed to Anglophiles and other cosmopolites who might have imagined themselves as knights and ladies keeping alive the grand tradition of a whist-based game; in 1912, four such devotees, passengers aboard the Titanic, were playing auction bridge when the ship struck ice.
In 1925, though, the millionaire yachtsman Harold S. Vanderbilt, great-grandson of the famed Commodore, decided on revolution at the bridge table. Enough of auction. Its predictability was second only to its bidding dullness. On a cruise ship voyage through the Panama Canal, Vanderbilt, with time to tinker, smoking his pipe and wearing his pince-nez, energized the scoring table and came up with a sophisticated plan for the evolving game of contract bridge that, in his mind, would cause a competitor’s heart to beat faster even as a thinker’s mind created solutions to problems never before faced at the table.
Here was the essential difference between auction and contract: In contract bridge, only the tricks bid for, and made, were counted toward winning an all-important game. To earn full rewards, sides now would have to take risks by bidding for higher contracts. In auction bridge, a partnership was rewarded for a grand slam by taking all thirteen tricks even if it had bid only to take eight. Some critics said that, in terms of bidding, auction bridge rewarded conservatism, even cowardice. Contract changed that. Vanderbilt also added “vulnerability” to a side that had won one game in the best-of-three-game rubber, increasing the size of their penalties for failing to make contracts and their rewards for making them. A more complex game than auction, contract bridge moved the focus from the play of the cards to the bidding. It called for superior coordination between partners—and cried out for a bidding system. It would make the expert suddenly indispensable to living-room players across the nation. Vanderbilt prevailed upon his friends in Long Island, Palm Beach, and Newport to try the new game. In 1927, New York’s gentlemen’s-only whist clubs bought in to it and adopted its official laws. Thus modern contract bridge was born.
Short on cash, Ely took a train west to Los Angeles in the summer of 1927, and set himself up in the Biltmore Hotel. There he taught an auction bridge class with twenty students, predominantly women from Pasadena and Los Angeles. Jo joined him in California, and during a visit to Santa Barbara they heard for the first time about contract bridge, the new rage of New York.
In Santa Barbara, Ely and Jo played Vanderbilt’s contract for the first time, and the game’s faster pace and enhanced scoring thrilled Ely. “Contract will sweep the country,” he told Jo.
He returned to New York convinced that if he could develop a set of rules that would enable a novice to learn an otherwise complex game in a matter of a few weeks, then he could make contract bridge, and its adherents, entirely, and profitably, his. He decided that about 70 percent of his established rules for auction bridge would apply to contract. He would study the rest, and apply his science.
Back in New York, Ely and Jo organized a regular contract bridge game at their apartment on East Sixty-third Street. They sought to sell the game to men of the Knickerbocker inner sanctum, knowing they were hidebound and resistant to any game but auction, their safe haven. At first the men didn’t come to the Culbertson apartment. Contract, they insisted, was only a fad, and would be dead in a matter of months. But then von Zedtwitz came, and so did Ted Lightner, one of Knickerbocker’s young bright lights. Both became converts. Finally, Ely corralled Sims and another top player, George Reit
h, and they, too, saw the merits of contract.
Ely had begun to develop his “Approach-Forcing” bidding system. Bridge bidding systems are like Sunday church sermons: derivative and oftentimes merely a careful integration of pieces drawn from other systems and turned slightly in a new direction. In essence, Ely’s Approach-Forcing system meant that bidding should be advanced slowly, never recklessly, and that certain bids and responses would force a partner to bid once more, and in some instances to continue bidding until the possibility of making game, or one hundred points, was reached.
Ely still lived a gambler’s life, his earnings unsteady. On New Year’s Eve 1928, alone in their apartment, he gave a champagne toast to Jo: “Here’s to the most wonderful wife on earth!” Two weeks later, Jo delivered their first child, a daughter, Joyce Nadya.
At the Knickerbocker, the auction bridge gods remained secure and complacent. They could not know the magnitude of the coming contract bridge craze. Ely knew, and aimed to crush them. First he would steal their reputations and transform himself into the nation’s leading bridge authority. Then he would steal their book sales, their lecture tours, and their radio appearances. Battle lines were drawn.
The Devil's Tickets Page 3
