North of the city nearly seven hundred acres of cornfield had been remade into an airfield from which planes rose each morning and dropped off passengers each night in Hollywood or on Broadway.
Chicago suddenly was only four hours away!
At Union Station, meanwhile, 250 trains passed each day beneath the cathedral-like mass of marble and Bedford stone. One writer took in the scene at the train station and remarked on the merging of the disparate social castes: “In a waiting room a block long, farmers with coach tickets brush against millionaires with private cars.” Suddenly, Kansas City ranked as the nation’s number two railroad center, behind only Chicago.
Civic boosters proudly rattled off the city’s nicknames, of which there was no shortage: Paris of the Plains, City of Fountains, the Most American City (its population only 6 percent foreign-born). Once a rugged Western town defined by cattle drives, gambling, and the appearances of the Clay County outlaw Jesse James, Kansas City still saw the wide-open frontier as central to its spirit.
That, and a good stiff drink. When Dr. Georges Valot, secretary of France’s Bureau for the Study of the Liquor Problem, would come to America in the early 1930s, he would judge Kansas City, above Reno and New Orleans, as America’s wettest town, comparable only, he said, to Juarez, Mexico. “I have seen the streets of Paris at their worst, or best, but they are nothing like Kansas City,” Valot would say. “If you want to have a good time, go to Kansas City.”
Famous Americans dropped in during the twenties, announcing themselves in curious ways. The novelist Sinclair Lewis, a disturber of the peace, spent six weeks in Kansas City in spring 1926 holed up downtown in an Ambassador Hotel suite, researching a “preacher novel” that became Elmer Gantry. During his visit, Lewis stood at the lectern of one local church and challenged God to strike him dead in fifteen minutes. He took off his watch and waited; he survived. In his hotel suite each Wednesday, Lewis held “Sunday school classes” over lunch for eighteen local clergy. They liked Lewis, and admired his zeal for his subject. The perpetual skeptic, he prodded them and probed deeply into theological issues, once asking, “What the hell right has the church to exist anyway?” At another turn, Lewis pointed a finger at a minister and challenged his belief in God; a Catholic priest calmed the novelist, saying, “Sit down, my son, and don’t blaspheme.” Lewis paused, and replied, “Will you have a drink, Father?” The priest said, “I will.” The local clergy should have known what was coming. The fictional Elmer Gantry proved a scoundrel and hypocrite with a lust for power. He drank alcohol to excess, engaged in sex with church secretaries and congregants, and trampled choir girls in escaping a burning tabernacle. As Gantry hit the bestseller lists, a few Kansas City ministers shouted betrayal, though others rushed to Lewis’s defense. Myrtle and Jack Bennett wouldn’t have minded the furor—they no longer spent their Sundays in church; they were on the golf course. Sinclair Lewis, meanwhile, enjoyed Kansas City. “I’ve had huge and delightful reglimpses of the Midwest and Babbittry,” he wrote to his wife. He told one local reporter, “It is a good booster town and I like it. As yet it has not become Europeanized; it still retains the American ideal which the Eastern cities have lost.”
The following winter, another luminary of the twenties showed up, the famed flagpole sitter Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelly. Small and tightly muscled, with a sun-weathered face, forever the seaman high on a ship’s mast, Kelly was nearly forty, a former navy sailor and Hollywood stunt actor, now a genuine faddist for hire. He sat on flagpoles for a living, the latest curious fad to sweep the country. In Kansas City, Shipwreck sat on an inverted motorcar brake drum high atop a flagpole fixed on the roof of the Westgate Hotel at Ninth and Main streets, more than 125 feet above downtown, for 6 days—or, to be precise, 146 consecutive hours. Crouched low, knees raised, deep in thought, he made a self-styled rendition of Rodin’s Thinker. In the falling snow and rain, Shipwreck looked utterly ridiculous. He waved at times to tiny specks on the street below, and watched individuals with upturned heads collide with each other. Hundreds gathered. A thousand.
City to city, the reaction was always the same: “How’s business?” came a shouted call. “Looking up!” Shipwreck deadpanned.
He was a spectacle, a human fly, an artifact of the age, a self-promoter of the highest caliber. He told newspapermen he had walked barefoot in Siberia, climbed the smokestack of the SS Leviathan, fasted twenty-six days and nights atop flagpoles in five cities, fur-traded in Russia, handled more than one hundred thousand wounded or dead soldiers on European battlefields without contracting illness, manned the first American transport to run through the German submarine blockade, doubled as a stunt man for twenty-one Hollywood film stars, escaped seven severe diseases and epidemics, survived shipwrecks (ergo, his nickname), and could whip any man in the world, including heavyweight Jack Dempsey. And the newspapers wrote it up just like he said it. So it must have been true. Now there were flagpole sitters everywhere. Shipwreck traveled the country sitting on flagpoles, trolling for dough.
In Kansas City he earned $1,100 for his act, sponsored by Orbit chewing gum. He had perfected a way to make certain he never fell asleep. He placed his thumbs inside holes in the flagpole’s shaft—about the same size as finger holes in a bowling ball. If he dozed and began to sway, the twinge of pain in his thumbs would awaken him, keeping him from a fatal mistake. Staring through the windows of Kansas City’s office buildings, Shipwreck said he saw men in one room who looked high powered as they conferred in earnest. In another office he saw a bootlegger deliver four bottles to a man. Through another window he saw a young woman slap a man’s face. Watching the entrance to a nearby cabaret one night, he saw five fights among patrons, and patrolmen raiding the place for illegal alcohol. He said he saw life in Kansas City as it was.
Tom (T.J.) Pendergast did not have the time or patience to look skyward at Shipwreck’s silliness. He was too immersed in conducting the business of invisible government. Soon Pendergast would move into the two-story yellow brick storefront at 1908 Main Street. There, in his upstairs office, sitting behind his rolltop desk, a powerful man, bulbous and jowly, with a massive head seemingly cut from a quarry, he would rule as boss of the city’s municipal machine. As lord of the so-called Goat faction of the Democratic Party, he was a mighty man in Kansas City, self-satisfied, and a good husband and father (or so his ward captains said). As a sign of his growing prosperity, he and his wife would move with their three children into a newly built mansion in the Country Club District, choosing as an interior motif the French gilt and glitter of the Louis XV period.
Pendergast’s office at the Jackson County Democratic Club on Main Street had the ambience of a fraternal lodge: spare, wooden, with creaky floors and two photos, one of U.S. senator James A. Reed of Missouri, oratorical star of the Pendergast machine, the other of former president Woodrow Wilson. (The Reed-Wilson match was odd given that they hated each other.) There was also a painting of the Boss, Pendergast, and a framed cartoon from The Kansas City Star showing his late brother, Jim, with a ballot box in his hands.
Boss Pendergast moved through political shadows in Kansas City. But three mornings a week, locals lined up outside his office in the predawn hours for an opportunity to see him, if only for a few moments. They waited in a line that extended from an anteroom, down the stairs, and out to the sidewalk in front of the Southwest Linen Company, and waited to be called by the Boss’s secretary, an old steamboat pilot named Captain Elijah Matheus. In these brief meetings, the Boss’s language, rough-hewn and ungrammatical, came straight from his working-class origins in the West Bottoms; his sentences often began “They was” or “I seen.” Over the years, a steady parade of mayors and senators, aldermen, down-and-outers, and wives with deadbeat husbands arrived to see Pendergast. Much as in the fictional Oz, where the Cowardly Lion and Tin Man go to the Wizard to ask for courage and a heart, Kansas Citians went to the Boss in search of patronage and hope. More often than not, he delivered.<
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One day, sitting at his desk pushing papers, the Boss ripped into a steak sandwich—two steaks, actually, no bone or fat, no salt or pepper, dry as could be—and opened another letter from Senator Reed in Washington, whom he had known for more than thirty years. Reed sought a job for a local man named Cromwell, who had lost employment after thirty-three years in the Waterworks Department. “When we had the controversy with Longwell it was Mr. Cromwell who gave us the inside facts. I have never forgotten that service,” Reed wrote. “He is old and must have some kind of employment.” The Boss admired Reed, whom he had first launched as prosecutor in 1898, and then as Kansas City’s mayor. He vowed privately to make Jim Reed the next president of the United States. “Please do what you can for Mr. Cromwell, and I know you will. Cordially Yours, Jas. A. Reed.” Chomping on his sandwich, shreds of beef sticking between his teeth, the Boss put Mr. Cromwell on his to-do list.
Pendergast’s enemies charged that he bought loyalty for elections with such dealings, but the Boss had a ready answer: “What’s government for if it isn’t to help people?”
Myrtle Bennett was a devout Democrat, and once worked in Texas for the local Democratic Committee. She never saw a Republican worthy of her vote. She had heard of T J. Pendergast, of course—was there anyone in Jackson County who hadn’t?—as well as the whispers of his illegal operations. But there had been a time in her own young life, in Arkansas, when a local man of political instinct, later elected judge, had rescued her and her mother, offering nothing more than kindness. That man was Abner McGehee, Jr., a Democrat. Myrtle understood Pendergast. There was nothing wrong with helping people in need.
But Pendergast’s legions of critics called Kansas City “Tom’s Town,” and the statehouse, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” The Boss had placed his machine men in all the right political places: his man Reed in the U.S. Senate; his man Henry McElroy, under the reworked municipal government charter, as Kansas City’s new city manager; his man Jim Page as Jackson County prosecutor; his man from Independence, Harry S. Truman, as a Jackson County administrative judge; plus enough Kansas City aldermen to keep his ward loyalists happy. The city’s police force also answered to the Boss’s touch. His organization profited from bawdy houses and liquor and gambling interests, bought votes, stuffed ballot boxes, and stole elections. For the Boss, it was all in a day’s work. In such prosperous times, he wore felt hats and new three-piece suits with a gold watch dangling from the vest pockets. In Kansas City, T. J. Pendergast was above everything, and above nothing.
This was Jack and Myrtle’s Kansas City in the twenties: liquor flowed. Ministers sparred. Trains rumbled. The Boss ruled. Swine squealed in bloody slaughterhouses. Bluesmen swung deep into the night. Civic boosters called out to tourists, “Come to Kansas City!”
In 1927, Jack and Myrtle found their way to the city’s handsome new residential section known as the Country Club District. Developer J. C. Nichols’s vision of upscale living had become a locus for Kansas City’s well-to-do, with fine homes, elegant new apartment buildings, parks, fountains, babbling brooks, and a stylish shopping area of Spanish architecture known as The Plaza. Sinclair Lewis, for one, called it an “incomparable development.”
When Jack Bennett bought into Park Manor, a four-story Italianate brick structure with red-tile roof at 902 Ward Parkway in the district, neither he nor Myrtle had ever lived anywhere so elegant. Their first-floor apartment had six rooms, polished wood floors, archways, two luxury bathrooms with built-in tubs and pedestal lavatories, a place for Murphy rollaway beds, and all the modern conveniences, including incinerators and mechanical Frigidaire refrigeration. The building’s interior hallways and front foyer set a stylish tone with wrought-iron stairrails and ornate rope molding with gold lace. The basement, light and airy, had ample space for six lockers, a Kewanee steam heating plant, laundry tubs, and separate rooms that would serve as living quarters for the black help.
Out front, Brush Creek whispered its way through a park of cottonwoods, pines, and gnarled oaks along Ward Parkway.
“It gives you the comfort and convenience of apartment life, makes you an owner instead of a tenant and you acquire definite property value,” a Park Manor advertisement explained. “Those buyers who have the courage to buy good property in the right location on today’s low market will surely realize a great benefit in the future, for Kansas City will have a program of expansion and rapid growth in the next few years which will not be exceeded by any of her sister cities that compete with her now.”
Jack Bennett put down $4,890, agreed to a monthly cooperative payment of $117.36, and began introducing himself to his new neighbors, the William Reids, the Stuart Boyntons, the James Mayalls, and up on the fourth floor, the Hofmans. His neighbors worked as managers for companies that sold telephones, clay products, life insurance, and automobile radios. He liked nearly everything about Park Manor; unfortunately, so did petty thieves and prowlers. When the neighborhood suffered a spate of break-ins and robberies, Jack reacted honorably. Typically he brought his .32 Colt automatic pistol on business trips; but now, when Myrtle accompanied him, he left the gun with her mother. Alice Adkins thanked him, hid it in her bedroom, and hoped never to use it.
Jack might’ve aspired to become a great man of business in Kansas City, the next Armour or Kemper. But he had his eyes on a bigger town, New York. Once there, he would advance up the Hudnut perfume company ladder and then, who knew? Maybe Paris?
For now, a Kansas City social climber, Jack joined the Chamber of Commerce, and the Indian Hills Country Club, where he golfed with friends and business associates, and sometimes played with Myrtle, dressed in her smart two-piece sport dress. Jack joined the downtown Kansas City Athletic Club, too, just the place to defuse a traveling salesman’s tensions. The athletic club featured a gymnasium, handball courts, swimming pool, a cigar stand, card rooms, a barber shop, steam room and heat cabinet, and a Turkish bath department with salt rubs and oil rubs. On summer evenings, Jack and Myrtle took to the club’s rooftop garden for supper and dancing. Together they stood at the open casement, serenaded by an orchestra, staring out at the twinkling lights of Kansas City.
When Jack drove off on another trip, Myrtle became, like her father in 1889, “so so lonsom so lonsom i can’t hardley stand it.” Jack was essential to her daily life. When he was gone, she worried about him, missed him. She spent days and nights alone, or with her mother, wondering where Jack was at that moment.
It created a housewife’s lonely discontent. A survey in a Midwestern city found that 85 percent of housewives were, like Myrtle, unhappy. The writer Doris Blake chastised them: “They simply let themselves be clouded mentally by the fictitious glamour of work outside the home. That glamour, so far as the great percentage of working women is concerned, is just plain apple-sauce.” But this was not Myrtle’s problem. She had worked during the early years of her marriage and she had no desire to work again. Another story on the women’s page of The Kansas City Star in autumn 1929 came closer to addressing Myrtle’s problem: “We have the vote, we have all the liberty that it is possible to obtain, and yet, the great majority of the well-to-do young women of our time are restless, frantic almost in their search for self-expression.”
For Myrtle, and for many American housewives, bridge increasingly filled that void, creating an outlet for their self-expression. The game exercised their intellect, and their emotions. The intensity of each hand, the ego of players, and the expectations between partners stirred their competitive impulses. Twice a week, Myrtle played with other women at club luncheons; she also arranged games at her apartment. She read about bridge in The Blue Diamond, the monthly newsletter from the Kansas City Athletic Club, and there were always new books on instruction, the most popular by New York experts such as Milton Work, Wilbur Whitehead, and Sidney Lenz.
Jack did not study bridge; no time for that. He played cards the way he conducted his business, with bravado and a glint in his eye. On the golf course
and at parties, Jack showed his affection for Myrtle, freely and often, reaching for her hand or throwing his arm around her waist. It was his way, showy and physical, an alpha male establishing his territory. For her part, Myrtle gave up bridge at night when Jack was in town. She wanted to be home for him.
THREE
Ely’s Grand Scheme
Every human being floats, so to speak, in an invisible sea of mental complexes—be they that of inferiority or superiority. An inferiority complex is like a delicate wound that never heals completely, and at the Bridge table, it is especially apt to be irritated because other social beings are present.
—ELY CULBERTSON
in Contract Bridge Blue Book
Ely was consumed by contract bridge. To refine his bidding system, he reconsidered the game’s mathematical probabilities and created rules: “Whenever a hand contains a biddable suit (be it even a four-card minor) the suit and not the no-trump should be preferred.” In the Culbertson System, a player would value high-card combinations in his hand as “honor tricks” (an ace was one honor trick, an ace-queen combination one and a half honor tricks, an ace-king two, etc.) and then bid according to established rules based on that number and the length of the suits. In his system, all opening bids would require at least two and a half honor tricks. Ely read the old guard’s newest books (How’s Your Bridge? by Sidney Lenz; Contract Bridge: Bidding and the Club Convention by Harold Vanderbilt). He had a keen sense of the inner rhythms of cards, and a fine-tuned radar for cheating. He had observed cheaters using secret signals: long puffs on a cigarette demanded a lead in spades, and two short puffs to suggest strength elsewhere. Ely saw hidden meanings in the way a cheating player held his cards, separating his fingers, and in the time that player took to make a play or bid. Even so, his gambler’s bank account was virtually depleted, and now, with the birth of a son, Bruce, in spring 1929, he had to provide for a family with two small children. Jo urged him to write his bridge book, but Ely shook his head, tapped his gold cigarette case twice, removed a Melachrino, and, through its smoke, replied, “Not yet.” He said no one would buy a book written by a bridge unknown. But he would spread his name by creating his own bridge magazine. Then he and Jo would win key tournaments. His bidding system would carry his name: The Culbertson System. He would use sex—suggestively—through terminology (” Approach-Forcing”) and expressions (“Going to bed with the king,” and “You’ve got strength but you haven’t got length,” and “Lay down, let’s see what you’ve got”), and in the way he described the husband-wife bridge union, as if peeping through a bedroom keyhole. His attack would be multifaceted, and he would pursue it relentlessly. Like a pirate about to board a ship, Ely plotted his takeover of the bridge industry. It would happen. It was only a matter of how soon.
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