Early on a Sunday morning, September 29, 1929, a familiar knock at the Bennetts’ front door: Charles Hofman, their fourth-floor neighbor, a portly, practical man, had arrived at the appointed hour, dressed for the links. Well rested from vacation, Hofman had come for Jack. Together they drove to the Indian Hills golf course, exemplars of the modern Kansas City gentry. They left their wives and spent the next four hours on the rolling green space of Mission Hills, Kansas. They knew many of their fellow club members, chatted and slapped backs with them in the clubhouse, gathered two boy caddies and two friends, and played a leisurely round.
They returned to the Bennetts’ apartment in early afternoon famished. Their wives whipped up supper. Mayme Hofman, just twenty-eight, a decade younger than her husband, was among Myrtle’s closest friends, and a part of her regular bridge circle. No one would mistake Mayme Hofman for middle class. On a night out she put on her airs and her big-city look, swaddled in mink or ermine, with long evening gloves, each piece of her ensemble well considered. Finishing supper now, Myrtle and Mayme said they wanted to golf, too. The couples had played the day before, a happy affair on a brisk afternoon that ended with Jack strutting off the course with his arm around Myrtle. The husbands needed little convincing to play again, and the timing was right: club rules allowed women to play only late in the day.
And so at midafternoon they drove back to Indian Hills, soaking in the last of an autumn Sunday. Myrtle looked smashing in her two-piece gray woolen sport suit with vest and skirt. Jack, in a clean, classic look, wore slacks and a long-sleeve white polo shirt. The Bennetts and Hofmans played twelve holes before dusk intervened. At the finish Jack phoned his aunt Nellie to beg off their scheduled dinner. He and Myrtle would spend the evening with the Hofmans. The four shared a round of drinks. On a cool night, alcohol warmed their spirits, and once back at the Bennett apartment, their spirits would get warmer still.
Since the Hofmans had given their maid the night off, Myrtle invited Mayme and Charles to join her and Jack for icebox leftovers. The couples made sandwiches, and as the wives cleared the dishes, the husbands took to the living room.
Myrtle and Mayme joined them, while Alice Adkins sat on the davenport sewing. The girls suggested a night out, a moving picture perhaps. But thirty holes of golf had left their husbands fatigued. They didn’t want to shower and change; too much bother. Besides, it had started to rain, and Jack planned to rise early for a two-day business trip to St. Joseph and Atchison. Yes, yes, Jack reassured Myrtle, he would be back in time for the Tuesday night party they would host at the athletic club. But then he would leave again, for ten days out west, riding in his Hupp, selling the sensual smells of Paris. Myrtle planned to take advantage of his absence by redecorating their apartment.
The night was fast getting away from the couples. Sitting in the living room, they discussed the latest dispatches in The Kansas City Star. It seemed the girls at Wellesley were abandoning their short bobs, with more than half wearing their tresses long again. Kansas City’s police chief insisted that at no time since Prohibition began, in 1920, had the city been freer from bootleg joints and commercial gambling than now—(Ha! Not that the Bennetts or Hofmans believed any of that.) The former senator Jim Reed had addressed the state bar, colorfully, as always. In New York, the stock market quaked: sensational fluctuations, selling flurries causing hundreds of millions of dollars in value to disappear. Jack watched his stocks quiver. Even the usual bedrock, the so-called Morgan stocks (United States Steel common, Johns-Manville, New York Central), revealed startling weakness. The decline of radio stocks worried Charles Hofman, a sales representative for six concerns, automobile radios among them. The industry buzz centered on the soon-to-be released “Roamio” automobile radio from Crosley and the Galvin Corporation’s “Motorola” model 5T71. Optimists on Wall Street urged calm. October 1929, they said, would be much better for the stock market.
Myrtle suggested a game of contract bridge. Sometime after 9:30 P.M., Jack brought out the square fold-up card table. They would play Vanderbilt’s game at one tenth of a cent per point. Still wearing their golf clothes, and teamed as couples, it was the Bennetts versus the Hofmans. Myrtle sat directly across from Jack, and Mayme faced her husband. Jack, with his cavalier approach to bridge, looked at Mayme, an inviting smile in his eyes. Alice Adkins watched the game with sleepy eyes from the davenport.
Soon, the Bennett apartment would become the most widely discussed living quarters in Kansas City. Its interior layout, the dimensions of each room, its pricey accoutrements, would be fodder for conversation all over town. A diagram used as a courtroom exhibit would feature childlike scribbling with arrows and dotted lines to denote the movements of Myrtle and Charles Hofman beside boldly drawn identifications: MOTHER’S CHAMBER and MR. AND MRS. BENNETT’S BED ROOM. The diagram made the apartment seem small and misshapen, though one attorney would all but announce that the Bennett place was as big as a prairie.
The fold-up bridge table sat in the center of a living room that measured eleven by eighteen feet, and only a few strides from the arched front door. The table was surrounded by four armchairs, and two small side tables. Near it, an overstuffed davenport was pushed against the front wall. Across the way, a table.
The second bedroom, for Myrtle’s mother, was at the far end of the apartment, farthest from the bridge table. To get there, one passed through another archway, down a hall, past the dining room and kitchen: roughly forty-five feet from the bridge table.
Behind the living room was an enclosed porch, perfect on late summer nights, and a few feet away, a door led to a master bedroom that measured fifteen by eleven feet. Next to Jack’s dresser was a small master bathroom, eight by five, offset one on either side by two doors. The far door led to a small den with a desk and chair.
Atop Jack’s dresser stood two photographs in frames: Jack dressed for the evening, in a felt hat with a black band, bow tie, and overcoat, his expression suggesting self-assurance; and Myrtle, her hair bobbed, eyes almond-shaped and alive, wearing lipstick and a fur collar, her expression intense.
Bridge was the day’s rage all across Kansas City. Card parties were held at country clubs, at the Ladies’ Altar Society of St. Peter’s Catholic Church, and at Lodge No. 26 of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks. The Kansas City Athletic Club’s newsletter reported, “The club is proud of the way its members are showing their interest in the bridge lessons, and it congratulates itself on the choice of a teacher. Mrs. Ann Wesson, who is teaching the classes, is an expert player as well as a splendid teacher. Not a person who started with the class has dropped out. This speaks wonders for the teacher and for the interest she has developed among her ‘pupils.’” In The Kansas City Star, bridge games illuminated the week’s social calendar: “Monday: Mrs. William Henry McLaughlin, bridge tea. Tuesday: Bridge luncheon at the Kansas City Country Club. Wednesday: Miss M. B. McDonald, bridge tea; Women of Meadow Lake Country Club, luncheon and bridge party. Friday: Miss Margaret Burke, bridge supper. Saturday: Wood Hill Country Club, dinner bridge; Mrs. Ralph Christie, bridge luncheon; Mrs. Karl Koerner, bridge luncheon.”
The Bennetts’ living room blazed with light, floor lamps brightly illuminated, additional light thrown in from the bedroom, the bathroom, through the hall archway. The light danced on Myrtle’s diamond wedding ring and her gold necklace.
Outside, a cool breeze blew through the cottonwoods and gnarled oaks along Brush Creek. At the card table, the bidding began, time passed quickly. Done with her needlework, Alice Adkins turned in for the night.
II
In the mid-1920s, Jack Bennett, with his can-do spirit, blew into the towns of his western territory, his roadster at high roar. He carried sample cases of the Richard Hudnut company’s elegant perfumes. To St. Joseph and Atchison, Joplin and Hot Springs, he brought the mystique of Gay Paree, and its illusive odeurs. To Main Streets in Hannibal, Topeka, and Springfield, he brought perfumes fashioned as the four “
loveliest of feminine moods”—Romance, Gaiety, Sophistication and Adventure—each in a colored flacon suggestive of a mood particuliére. His arrival in smaller towns produced a mixture of curiosity and awe. He was a well-heeled, big-city man with stories about his far-flung travels, like an explorer arrived from a distant land. He came in a fine suit, New York-bought, his white shirt stiffly starched, handkerchief folded neatly in his lapel pocket, his wavy light brown hair slicked down beneath a stylish felt hat, its brim turned up slightly. Just in case, he typically kept his .32 Colt automatic pistol in his car’s glove box. With perfumes and suggestions of money, he drew the attention of women along the way.
No mere peddler, he was an essential cog in the wheel of modern American business, the commercial traveler. He sold directly to store managers. He studied his target sales numbers, and nearly always exceeded them. His view of himself was neatly encapsulated by Sinclair Lewis’s fictional real estate man George Babbitt, who in a civic speech says, “Here’s the new generation of Americans: fellows with hair on their chests and smiles in their eyes and adding machines in their offices. We’re not doing any boasting, but we like ourselves first-rate, and if you don’t like us, look out—better get under cover before the cyclone hits town!”
Jack Bennett was such a cyclone. He closed deals, winked at salesladies, filed reports to the home office in New York, and blew off for the next town. He carried loose-leaf binders, advertising circulars, and expense account reports. He embraced the modern principles of scientific salesmanship and efficient management. He trained new salesmen, showing them the tricks of the trade, and pushing them hard, because their success was his success.
He counted Kansas City as part of his territory. But Jack’s hard-sell manner did not work at the downtown National Bella Hess Company. General manager E. L. Olrich refused to purchase Hudnut perfumes because Jack insisted they be sold at prices Olrich thought inflated. More than once, Jack left in a huff, after slamming his briefcase shut on the general manager’s desk.
To make amends, Jack often invited Olrich to lunch. Once, they played golf at Indian Hills. There, he intended to build a relationship that might open Bella Hess’s doors to his perfumes. But at the thirteenth hole, Jack’s sweet talk ended. He drove two balls into a lake, and in anger heaved his golf bag, clubs and all, over a fence. He stalked off to the clubhouse, alone.
Olrich had witnessed tantrums on a golf course before, but never anything approaching this. He retrieved Jack’s bag and carried it, and his own, to the clubhouse in what he considered an act of friendship. It was only later that Olrich decided Jack Bennett had expected him to fetch the bag.
In Death of a Salesman, playwright Arthur Miller writes of traveling men who “lived like artists, like actors whose product is first of all themselves, forever imagining triumphs in a world that either ignores them or denies them altogether.” Miller’s salesman, Willy Loman, is “way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine.”
Jack Bennett would be neither ignored nor denied. His employer, Richard Hudnut, Inc., was a success story nearly half a century old. In 1880, in a small drugstore at the corner of Broadway and Ann Street in New York City, Alexander Hudnut established the nation’s first beauty salon. His son Richard, fresh from Princeton University, noticed the more fashionable women buying the few simple facial preparations the store offered. He developed the concept of compounding toilet preparations, and sailed to Paris to learn more about it. A half century later, living in retirement in a French château near Nice, Hudnut watched as the cosmetics industry blossomed in ways he could not have imagined as a young man. Elsie McCormick, women’s page columnist of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, noting the cosmetics industry’s rapid expansion during the late twenties, wrote, “Many a woman has looked at the long array of bottles on her dresser and wished that she was back in the Middle Ages again. All a lady did then for her complexion was to wash it in dew on May Day every year… The cold cream era was followed by an age of specialization. The face was suddenly divided into as many areas as the Western front, with special preparations for each sector.”
In its advertisements, the Hudnut company evoked a Paris of silver, crystal, and lace, and tantalizing fragrances. One ad showed Hudnut’s new salon at 20 Rue de la Paix in Paris, a baroque setting with chandeliers, mirrors, elaborate ornamentation, and “an almost fairy-like loveliness.” About its face powder Poudre le Debut, Hudnut proclaimed, “The moment you take the cover off the box (it is one of the most strikingly modern boxes you’ve ever seen on a dressing table), you’ll know its subtle fragrance could be nothing but Parisian.” Hudnut sold face powders of Pearl, Pearl With Glow, Naturelle, and Sun-Tint, and lipstick in “gay little compactes, topped with genuine cloisonné enamel, that come in the four colors of the mode—blue, black, jade green, ivory white—and are as valuable to the ensemble as a bit of costume jewelry.”
By the late twenties, advertising in America had reached a zenith, with $1.5 billion spent in 1927 alone. Near the top of the profession was Bruce Barton of the New York advertising agency Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborne. Facile with words, Barton brought General Electric to familiarity, writing the first ad that carried GE’s logo, two letters within a curlicue circle—“The initials of a friend.” In 1926, Barton’s award-winning GE advertisement in The Saturday Evening Post called out to housewives, “Any woman who does anything which a little electric motor can do is working for three cents an hour.” In his 1925 bestseller, The Man Nobody Knows, Barton went so far as to portray Jesus Christ as a manly businessman who “picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks of business and forged them into an organization that conquered the world.” Barton’s astonishing success occasionally put him on the defensive about advertising. He would liken admen to surgeons, teachers, architects, and ministers, since all were called to their high-minded professions. Barton said, “We build of imperishable materials, we who work with words.” To make his point, he emphasized that the words of the Gettysburg Address would last long after the Lincoln Memorial had crumbled.
Even as Jack Bennett blazed his Roadster through the back roads of Missouri, Kansas, Arkansas, and Oklahoma during times of high prosperity, his profession was becoming anachronistic. Advertising was altering the business paradigm. It reduced the need for face-to-face selling and, with it, the importance of the commercial traveler. Sears and Montgomery Ward sold by mail order, eradicating the need for middlemen. In his study of traveling salesmen in American culture, 100 Years on the Road, Timothy B. Spears noted that such “drummers” became a part of an irretrievable past: “As influential factors in the creation of consumer desire, their glory days were over.”
Jack was too busy making fistfuls of money to worry about the future. That wasn’t his nature. Besides, he was an optimist. Neither did he worry about the sorry reputation of traveling salesmen. When Henry James returned to America in 1904 after an absence of two decades, he bemoaned how traveling salesmen “loomed” in dining cars and hotels with their “primal rawness of speech” and “air of commercial truculence.” James pitied them as “victims and martyrs, creatures touchingly, tragically doomed.” Such salesmen were famous for their loud suits, smutty jokes, and sexual indiscretions. The humor magazine Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang, in 1921 published “A Drummer’s Prayer,” in which the supplicant asked God to “curb our tendency to flirt with the married women; the single ones don’t count, and they expect it.”
Myrtle understood the essential loneliness of the commercial traveler’s existence—alone in motel rooms, in a different town each night. She knew the design of Jack’s life on the road. After all, she had seen it firsthand during their many trips together. She knew Jack worked hard, and often late at night. She knew some of his salesmen, and liked them.
But she also knew Jack. She noticed the way young women looked at him, and the way he looked at them. He had his charms, as all great salesmen did. Jack also had a short fuse, even with Myrtle, especiall
y with Myrtle, who had a short fuse of her own.
Every time she opened their bedroom closet, Myrtle saw and smelled the Hudnut perfumes. In each colored flacon she saw Jack. In each of those seductive Hudnut ads she heard Jack’s voice: “Today, romance may beckon. Tomorrow, adventure. The afternoon may bring a blithe mood of gaiety and evening find you, indeed, la belle femme sophisticate.”
It was all about sex. That’s what Hudnut sold. That’s what Jack sold.
Inevitably, when Jack was on the road, Myrtle wondered if he slept alone.
Living in the basement, the maids at Park Manor gathered during off-hours by the lockers and laundry tubs to swap stories about their employers. Naughty gossip is what it was, mocking the Boss Man and his wily wife. The maids whispered about intimate scenes, loud arguments, secrets they knew. They laughed about the curious ways of their white employers in the fancy apartments. But the Bennetts’ maid had an admission to make: Myrtle and Jack were genuine lovebirds. “They coo and bill around,” she said, “like a couple of doves.”
But the maid had not seen a lover’s letters to Jack.
Soon after their 1925 arrival in Kansas City, even before the move to Park Manor, a deep fissure had formed in Myrtle and Jack’s marriage. In a moment unseen by their maid, Myrtle discovered letters in the pockets of Jack’s trousers. In the letters a woman in St. Joseph, fifty-five miles upriver from Kansas City, professed her devotion to Jack, and luxuriated in the affections they had shared.
It was happening all over America. A 1928 survey revealed that one quarter of married American men and women had engaged in at least one affair. Sex became a national topic of conversation, and a release, physically and intellectually, from the war years and the Victorians. Hollywood censors limited an on-screen kiss to seven seconds, and ministers across the nation decried the crumbling social mores as the devil’s advance. In 1927, two million rubber condoms were used daily, with a failure rate of 50 percent. To please their lovers, some young flappers shaved their pubic hair in the shape of a heart or a derby hat, the emblem of Democrat Al Smith. Dorothy Dix, the noted advice columnist, worried about these modern young women who thought nothing at all “of kissing every Tom, Dick and Harry who comes along and in indulging in petting parties and ‘necking.’” Advertisers shaped their pitches seductively (“CAMAY: For the fresh natural skin men admire”), and newspapers, too. Silas Bent, assessing the salesmanship and showmanship of American newspapers during the late twenties, wrote, “Psychologists assert that sex should occupy the centre of attention only during adolescence. If that is so, the preoccupation of the American newspaper with this topic accounts in part for a sort of perpetual adolescence found characteristic of its readers.”
The Devil's Tickets Page 7
