In the summer of 1928, Ely and Jo spent time at Hal and Dorothy Sims’s ten-acre estate, a lush, wide-open space with bridges and lakes, in Deal, New Jersey, about sixty miles from Manhattan. The Sims place had become like a sleepaway camp for the Knickerbocker Whist Club’s best players. The big house, with its porches, slept about forty, though hardly anyone there seemed to sleep. Bridge-playing guests showed up at all hours, ready to cut into the two-cent, five-cent, and ten-cent tables. Games lasted through the night. If a player left for a train or to go to bed, another would appear. One night a thunderstorm struck with fury: windows burst open, lamps and knickknacks crashed onto card tables, electricity failed, and rooms went dark. Dorothy Sims rose in terror from her bed and raced downstairs. There, she found her husband and young Johnny Rau of Columbia University playing against von Zedtwitz and Vanderbilt, plodding players who abhorred snap judgments. In the darkness, someone lit a match at the table, and Vanderbilt, barely illuminated, turned from his cards and said, “Whose bid is it?”
Some guests stayed a day; others stayed weeks, prompting the wise-cracking Dorothy Sims to place an ancestral coat of arms above the front door that read GUESTS AND FISH STINK AFTER THE THIRD DAY. The Simses held tournaments every few days. Once, Hal Sims came to the table an hour early, saying he hoped to “get in a little cards” before the tournament began. Sunday nights were especially popular because fried chicken was delivered by a neighboring farmer, typically at the last minute, when twenty bridge-playing guests showed up without warning. “Bridge sharks multiply like rabbits. I prefer rabbits,” Dorothy Sims would write. “They’re less choosy. They’re less sensitive.”
TWO
Myrtle and Jack
I.
Even before the war, the boys of Memphis made their way to Myrtle Adkins. Her young cousins would wait on the front porch of her house to bear witness, making their presence a nuisance in hopes that one of the suitors lined up there as if for a formal review, would pay them a nickel to leave so he might speak with Myrtle alone in the moonlight. As a young woman, already Myrtle was a statuesque beauty. She liked to dance and enjoyed good times. She kept a few beaus, though each soon learned about her temper. Her relatives wondered if Myrtle’s flashes of anger were simply the impetuosity of youth or a determined young woman’s attempt to take control of a life that had begun with such hardship.
Myrtle knew the man she wanted, but feared he didn’t exist in Memphis. Her ideal was her father, Henry Franklin Adkins, whom she knew only from a tintype photograph and a handwritten letter, her mother’s mementos from a nine-year marriage. Henry Adkins had run a small sawmill in Tillar, Arkansas, near McGehee, in Desha County. He died young, just thirty-six, in the last year of the nineteenth century, when Myrtle was a toddler. He lived on in her mind, though, through the tintype image taken in a Memphis studio. With a thick walrus mustache and close-cropped hair parted in the middle, he resembled a young Theodore Roosevelt. Myrtle inherited her father’s resolute chin and lustrous, almond-shaped eyes. Alice Adkins, Myrtle’s mother, had kept a letter her husband wrote to her in the summer of 1889, four months after their wedding. She had returned home to Catfish Point, Mississippi, to visit relatives, and he wrote to her at night, in purple ink, with flourish and devotion, professing his love, bemoaning her absence, and calling for her immediate return. He also wrote that he was layering himself with cotton lye to combat pesky mosquitoes. If his spelling and punctuation were lacking, his expression of fidelity was not. Henry Adkins wrote: “i was glad to hear that you enjoyed your trip on the boat and that you was feeling so well and that you stood the trip so well. I felt uneasy about you and so so lonsom so lonsom i can’t hardley stand it.… It is 5 minuts after 8 and I haft to go to Birks to male this leter to night.… May God Bless you and Save you. to get home Safe is my Desir. Yours of a Loving Husband. H. F. Adkins.” And then, at page bottom, he added a husband’s plaintive cry: “Come home Dear Wife, Come home.”
Henry Adkins’s death left his widow and daughter destitute. The lawyer Abner McGehee, Jr., whose father founded the town that bore their name, hired Alice as his housekeeper, and brought her to Little Rock, where she and Myrtle lived in his home during the girl’s formative years. Myrtle and her mother clung to each other, survivors of a family shipwreck. In 1909 they moved to Memphis, where Myrtle quit school at fifteen to work as a telephone operator. By late 1917, she was a twenty-two-year-old stenographer for a Memphis attorney, living at home with her mother and attending night school. With a friend, she visited St. Louis and there, in a private home, she noticed a photograph of a young man. His likeness impressed her: striking eyes, wavy hair, a boyish smile, and a physique that filled out his soldier’s uniform in a way that would make any army infantryman proud. Who was he? His name was Jack Bennett, and he came from God-fearing, church-going people steeped in the Illinois rural tradition. (Illinois? Henry Adkins’s home state!) Myrtle laughed that day in St. Louis and, staring at the photograph, promised herself, “That’s the man I’m going to marry.” It was the sort of promise most women can’t keep.
She approached him on a train.
In a club car on the Illinois Central, bound from Memphis to Chicago during wartime in 1918, Myrtle spotted a young, handsome man in an army uniform. She knew him, but how? Then she remembered: the photograph in St. Louis! Across the train car, she saw that photograph brought to life. The man in uniform was, in fact, the man in the photograph, John G. “Jack” Bennett.
She introduced herself with an extended hand: “Miss Myrtle Adkins, how d’ya do?” She mentioned St. Louis and the coincidence of the photograph.
The attraction was immediate, and mutual. At twenty-five, Bennett was a charmer, well spoken, with high energy. His photograph had failed to convey his swagger, which Myrtle found especially becoming. Bennett told her he had just completed his infantry work at the Fourth Officers’ Training School at Camp Grant, in Rockford, Illinois. A pharmacist attached to a medical division, he would be commissioned as a second lieutenant in the 342nd Infantry. The war news from Europe was increasingly favorable. A large number of German troops shipped from the Eastern Front to the Western Front were deserting transport trains. The Allied counteroffensives on the Somme had the German army in retreat.
Jack hailed from a big farm family in southeastern Illinois, near the Indiana border. But there would be no more plowshares for rural-born Jack Bennett, no more dirt beneath his fingernails. Before the war, he had worked as a clerk at the W. A. Ball drugstore in downtown Carmi. Then he spent time in Chicago, and reveled in its big-city thrum. He heard the hullabaloo about Sandburg’s just-released poem about Chicago: “a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities”—that was how Jack saw himself matched against other men—“… under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs… Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs the heart of the people.” Chicago and Jack Bennett had much in common.
Only recently H. L. Mencken, master debunker and critic of manners and morals in America, had published a series of ironic essays, In Defense of Women. Mencken might have been thinking of Myrtle and Jack, rather than of generic courtship, when he wrote:
[A woman] searches out his weaknesses with the utmost delicacy and accuracy, and plays upon them with all her superior resources. He carries a handicap from the start. His sentimental and unintelligent belief in theories that she knows quite well are not true—e.g. the theory that she shrinks from him, and is modestly appalled by the banal carnalities of marriage itself—gives her a weapon against him which she drives home with instinctive and compelling art.… The moment his oafish smirks and eyerollings signify that he has achieved the intellectual disaster that is called falling in love—he is hers to do with as she will. Save for acts of God, he is forthwith as good as married.
The courtship was as brief and intense as Mencken could have imagined. Jack Bennett was going places, and Myrtle was going with him. So
long, Tillar! So long, Memphis! They talked of a shared future. After the war was won, Jack would be discharged, they would marry, start a family, and live in a beautiful home—and of course Jack would thrive in business. They became engaged after only three dates.
They married in a Memphis church on Armistice Day, Jack in Uncle Sam’s uniform. Friends and family would say the selection of their wedding date must have been the work of angels. Nothing else could explain how at eleven o’clock on the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918—their wedding day—Germany and the Allies signed an armistice, ending Woodrow Wilson’s “war to end all wars.” An Associated Press telegraph operator first received the armistice news in the Memphis News-Scimitar editorial room: “FLASH: The Armistice Has Been Signed. OFFICIAL.” The News-Scimitar’s extra editions hit the streets, with newsboys hawking the headlines: “HUNS MADE POWERLESS. Yank Big Guns Crash Out End of War.” Celebration moved across most of the Western world. In Memphis, automobile horns blared, strangers kissed, and the streets were filled with the Shrine Band, the Boy Scout Drum Corps, the Ladies of the American Red Cross, and a rolling tank known as a “Hun Crusher.” That day the Roaring Twenties began in spirit, and in the Memphis church, everyone agreed that this harmonious convergence of events was surely a sign of blessing on the marriage of Myrtle Adkins and Jack Bennett.
Money was tight in the Bennetts’ early years, and they moved often. South Dakota came first, with Jack working in Sioux Falls for the pharmaceutical company Parke-Davis. In 1920, with a nice bump in salary, Jack took Myrtle to Houston and then to San Antonio as a salesman for Richard Hudnut, Inc., maker of French-style perfumes and cosmetics. Jack Bennett was, in the business term of the day, “a producer.”
During these years, Myrtle worked as a stenographer for a tire company, a doctor, and the Katy Railroad. The jobs gave her the satisfaction that their marriage was a true partnership.
When Jack invited Myrtle’s mother, Alice, to live with them in San Antonio in 1924, it thrilled Myrtle. Jack was earning $6,000 a year. He could afford a larger place, and besides, Myrtle’s mother was getting older. Jack treated her with kindness and called her “Mother.” He knew Alice Adkins had lived a hard life, raised in poverty on the Mississippi Delta, widowed as a young mother. She sewed as well as any woman Jack had ever met, stitching his trousers and lounging pajamas, and she didn’t offer her opinion unless asked for it. She also provided companionship for Myrtle when Jack was away.
Occasionally, Myrtle traveled with Jack on long drives through the open spaces of the Southwest. They stopped in small towns for Jack’s business calls, now and then diverting to rivers and lakes. Myrtle had loved fishing since her pigtail days in Arkansas. On the riverbank, she talked about having children, and Jack beamed. The family life was for him. A youthful bliss carried Myrtle through every day as Jack just went on being Jack, his smile bedazzling, his conversations running on about business. He told Myrtle that, yes, business was good, and he emphasized that business was about to get much better.
II.
We see them now in the gloaming of an affluent age, late summer 1929, Jack and Myrtle Bennett, a handsome couple, married nearly eleven years, a hard-driving perfume salesman and his glamorous wife, on the rise in Kansas City socially and financially, their marriage marked by the trappings of the nouveau riche and the sweet attar of perfume. By all appearances deeply in love, they displayed affection, holding hands, embracing, with Myrtle laughing girlishly as Jack conveyed a playful animal heat that made other women in the room blush. Jack was a snappy dresser, handkerchief neatly folded in his breast pocket, his cheeks smacked shiny with cologne, the consummate traveling salesman. He drove from town to town across the Southwest with his car trunk full of accounting ledgers, order forms, and perfume samples. Across his territory, a crew of perfume salesmen answered to him as he answered only to New York.
Jack took in $18,000 a year, nearly eightfold what the average American made in 1929, and his earning potential, like his confidence, seemed limitless. In rural Carmi, the hometown folks thought Jack Bennett was unassailable, and virtually a Vanderbilt. He and Myrtle were now country-clubbers. They lived the American Dream in a city calling itself the Heart of America. They attended parties and hosted their own, at home and at their clubs. The glossy magazine advertisements of New York admen pictured couples who looked just like the Bennetts. Theirs was a buoyant look that celebrated youth, determination, triumph, and the prosperity of the Coolidge years—(“The business of America is business!”)—a winning look that sold soap and dishwashers and lawnmowers and automobiles. Kicking up clouds of dust beneath an azure sky, we see Jack and Myrtle motoring—a fashionable hobby for showoffs—through the open verdant space north of Kansas City, in Clay County, in their Hupmobile Cabriolet Roadster, a handsome convertible with a rumble seat (“A brook that babbles and a pretty girl who doesn’t.…and a Hupp on the river bank… try that some sunny Sunday!”). In a halcyon age of high speeds and good times, Jack sat tall in the driver’s seat as Myrtle’s chestnut hair blew wildly.
A New York adman might have put them in a bigger car, a four-seat sedan, with a freckle-faced boy and his lil’ sis in the backseat, finishing the perfect American family portrait. But Jack and Myrtle, now thirty-six and thirty-four, had no children. Myrtle had twice lost babies through miscarriage in the mid-1920s, defeats from which she had not recovered. Jack tried to ease her pain, buying her diamonds, trinkets, expensive new dresses in New York, a LaSalle, the latest modern appliances. But certain things about a woman—the melancholia, the sobbing spells—a busy man like Jack Bennett could not understand.
Whereas Ely and Jo lived in an uncertain house of cards, struggling to pay the monthly rent, Myrtle and Jack rocketed upward in the belief that a true salesman’s luck never turned. Ely and Jack shared certain traits, however; each was an outsize dreamer with an inner conceit, a gift of gab, and an unshakable trust in his finely tuned intuition. Ely, the card sharp at the table, knew how to read men and their tendencies. Jack, the salesman on the road, knew how to read women and their vulnerabilities.
With Jack on the road, Myrtle had plenty of free time and, increasingly, contract bridge filled it.
Bridge in the summertime conjured one magazine’s grand images of the game played at “broad-verandahed country places, remote mountain lodges… luxurious Dude ranches,” perhaps with a Fourth of July motif, invitations placed inside of hollow miniature firecrackers and pictures of famous Americans cut from magazines or rotogravures and mounted on red, white, and blue art paper for patriotic place cards. Each guest might be required to sing verses of “The Star Spangled Banner,” with bonus points given for singing the correct lyrics.
Vanderbilt’s modern game seduced millions of American women, among them Myrtle Bennett. Much like marriage, contract bridge required a partnership based on understanding and trust. Myrtle studied bridge, read about it in newspapers, and played it with friends in homes and clubs several afternoons a week. Sometimes they gambled a tenth of a cent per point, just to spice things up. Still, Myrtle played with a competitive edge because that was her nature.
Jack loved to see his home swell with guests and laughter, and he and Myrtle frequently hosted small dinner parties and bridge games, inviting other couples—the attorney J. Francis O’Sullivan and his wife, or perhaps their upstairs neighbors, Charles and Mayme Hofman—with Jack hoping to be perceived as a lavish host. Jack had spent a fortune on home furnishings and did not mind if his friends gossiped about them. The conversation at the Bennetts’ bridge table, set up in the center of the living room, was breezy, the play relaxed, though Myrtle typically sat at the edge of her chair, an indication of her intensity and level of engagement, a bridge-playing posture more common to men.
During breaks in the game, music poured from the Bennetts’ radio, filling the room with the sounds of an orchestra, or Rudy Vallée crooning “Vagabond Lover,” or, from local station KMBC, broadcasting live from the El
Torreon Ballroom, the jazz of Bennie Moten and his Kansas City Orchestra, a powerhouse on the black side of town, recently joined by a Harlem pianist, William Basie, soon to be known as Count.
As soon as the bidding recommenced, though, the music was turned off.
The noted New York bridge teacher Madeleine Kerwin believed that women lacked imagination at bridge, but studied harder than men to improve their game. Kerwin wrote: “Men have more psychology, both in bidding and in play. As they make better poker players, so they apply their knowledge of human nature in sizing up the weak points of an adversary’s game. Intelligent women players accept constructive criticism and are pathetically eager to perfect their game. They do not attempt to dominate every situation and they consider their partner’s judgment both in bidding and play.
“The weakness of the average man’s game,” Kerwin added, “lies in his colossal conceit.”
In 1925, Jack and Myrtle arrived near the great bend where the muddy Missouri accepts the waters of the Kaw. Only five years before, the Kansas poet C. L. Edson had put to verse Kansas City’s epic rise:
Ships made Carthage, gold made Nome, Grain built Babylon, the wars built Rome; Hogs made Chicago with their dying squeal, Up popped Pittsburgh at the birth of steel. Come Kansas City, make your story brief: Here stands a city built o’ bread and beef
Caught up in the hurly-burly of the modern, mechanized nation, Kansas City in the 1920s thrived as a Middle American crossroads where the products of the East met the produce of the West. Automobiles filled its newly paved streets. Its downtown skyline took impressive shape with some of Missouri’s tallest buildings, twenty-five stories and more. Up went shopping districts, movie palaces (the Midland, the Plaza, and the Pantages), and Muehlebach Field, where the minor league baseball champion Kansas City Blues held sway. (Segregation aside, the more talented local baseball team was the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro League, with stars such as Wilber “Bullet Joe” Rogan and Dobie “Black Cat” Moore.) Kansas City’s industries multiplied and diversified. Now, beyond the famed stockyards and packing houses and a continuing dominance as a regional grain market, the city developed as a communications leader, forged iron, milled flour, turned corn into sugar, refined and stored oil from the Southwest, assembled motorcars, and built plows and harvesters.
The Devil's Tickets Page 4
