But there was still the matter of writing the Contract Bridge Blue Book. Ely had not written a word. The liner SS Île de France would sail for Southampton, England, on September 5. In early August, Ely finally began dictating to three secretaries for hours at a time. “The book,” he offered, “is arranged to fit the needs of all classes of players from the veriest tyro to the super-expert.” Tense, surly, ill-tempered, gaunt from fatigue and weight loss, he worked deep into each night.
In his magazine, he turned up the hyperbole about the Buller match, which, suddenly, amounted to “the world’s championship.” Over Labor Day, with their departure for England days away, Ely and his teammates made their mandatory defense of the Asbury Park title at the Knickerbocker Whist Club, and won again, this time defeating Sims’s team-of-four by 2,840 points. Ely and Lightner played east-west in one room against Sims’s teammates Lee Langdon and Michael Gottlieb, and netted 1,635 points. Playing the same hands in the other room, Jo and the Baron von Zedtwitz finished 1,205 points ahead of Sims and Willard Karn. The New York Times praised Jo and von Zedtwitz for “the absence of errors in their defensive play.” In The Bridge World, Ely couldn’t resist the temptation to crow about his team’s second consecutive victory over the Shaggy Giant: “When a team-of-four is defeated on both North-South and East-West hands by 2,840 points the results though not ‘official’ are, to say the least, significant.”
In this same September issue, The Bridge World celebrated the completion of its first year of existence, with Ely editorializing, “Some altruistic souls accuse us, rightly, of ‘ self-promotion.’ In this we have our artistic, not commercial, temperament to blame. We love Bridge passionately and frequently cannot distinguish between Bridge and self-promotion. We have inaugurated this magazine with the object of promoting Bridge and, through service, ourselves. In a measure we have done both.”
According to a story he told later, Ely dictated the final chapter of the Contract Bridge Blue Book in a taxi en route to the ship bound for England. Then, as the SS Île de France pulled from shore and Jo waved to her toddlers Joyce and Bruce on the pier, Ely’s publisher shouted, “What about the dedication?” Without hesitation, Ely shouted back, “To my wife and favorite partner. And don’t forget to make it all caps.”
In dinner jackets and evening gowns, British society turned out for the Americans. Among those moving through the thickly carpeted card rooms at New Almack’s were Sir George Milne, chief of the Imperial General Staff, and Sir George Montague Critchett, 2nd Baronet, of Lord Chamberlain’s office, and Emmanuel Lasker, world champion of chess, covering the match for German newspapers.
At a welcome luncheon at the Ritz, Ely deadpanned that 325,000 bridge experts in America thought they should have been playing the match in his place. One British writer mentioned how fortunate the American team was that brawn and muscle would not determine the outcome since the four Americans weighed a combined 520 pounds (only a slight underestimate). The newspapers marveled at Jo’s glamour. The London Star: “She is a very beautiful woman and her photos are treasured by bridge fans in America, just as film lovers keep the pictures of their favorite ‘stars.’” The broad-shouldered Lt. Col. Buller posed for photographs with his teammates: the physician Dr. Nelson Wood-Hill, navy lieuteuant Cedric Kehoe, and the silver-haired former stage actress Mrs. Gordon Evers, who had lived for twelve years in America and toured the country with the actor and stage manager Sir Herbert Tree.
In room one, a correspondent for the London Evening Standard watched Jo and von Zedtwitz play against Buller and Mrs. Evers, a crimson cord separating spectators from the table. The correspondent noted Mrs. Evers’s quiet voice and miraculously delicate hands; the twinkle in Buller’s eyes; Jo’s youthful prettiness, her tortoiseshell eyeglasses, and her most delightful American accent; and von Zedtwitz’s thin, inscrutable face and his nervous habit of brushing away imagined dust specks from the sleeve of his black dinner jacket. Jo lit an occasional cigarette and, between hands, sat in silence. Buller smiled at a friend in the gallery. A. E. Manning-Foster, dean of British bridge writers, thought the play maddeningly slow even when bids seemed obvious. It was, he decided, all part of the methods.
The Brits assumed a lead of 960 points after the first afternoon session. That night, though, just past midnight, as the twenty-eighth hand was dealt, with England leading by 595 points, the referee announced the final hand of the evening. In room one, Buller faced a bid of four hearts. He held six clubs to the ace and nine, and his partner, Mrs. Evers, had twice passed. Buller bid five clubs. Von Zedtwitz, holding five clubs to the king, queen, and jack, confidently doubled. Buller failed to make his contract, set four tricks. An unmitigated disaster, the hand cost his team 1,400 points. In room two, playing the identical hand, Ely faced the same decision as Buller: whether to overcall a four-hearts bid with five clubs. Ely considered his options for three minutes and more, and then passed. Kehoe played the hand at four hearts and failed by one trick. The Brits lost only 100 points in the proposition. Even so, the Brits’ combined loss on the hand of 1,500 points sent the Americans into a lead they would never relinquish.
Some in the British press referred to the session as “Black Tuesday.” Buller bristled from criticism that “when in difficulties, he sucks his thumb.” He said he never was in difficulties and never sucked his thumb.
Two days later, when the Americans’ lead exceeded four thousand points, Hubert Peters of The Manchester Guardian noted how the Culbertson team’s “machine-guns were working with deadly precision, and Buller’s storm troops were mown down as they advanced.” Peters added, “ ‘Card sense,’ on which Colonel Buller relies, is an admirable foundation for match play, but in itself is not enough. It must be supplemented by method.…. The ‘forcing’ system is justifying all that is claimed for it. It is a logical system, void of artificial conventions, and it is a sheer delight to the spectators to see it in action.”
The onslaught of criticism from the British press infuriated Buller. “Disloyalty,” he called it. “In the middle of this match everything that can be done to dishearten the players has been done in a section of the British press.”
Ely’s team-of-four won by 4,845 points. To prove the value of the Culbertson forcing system, the Americans rotated partners throughout the seven-day match. (The Brits did not.) Buller said he would make no excuses. Later, though, he prattled on, reminding readers that, after early match breakdowns, his team won the last five days of competition. Further, since his team had now gained experience playing under duplicate conditions, he felt certain that, were his team-of-four to meet the Americans again, it would win “hands down.”
No one in Britain was listening.
In the London Evening Standard, Frank England doubted that any British team-of-four could defeat Culbertson’s four, whose bidding was “more informative, more certain and more exact. Their bidding is standardized, each player knowing within certain clearly defined limits what any particular bid means.”
During a closing banquet at New Almack’s, the British audience rose to its feet and serenaded the Americans with “For they are jolly good fellows.” Jo, who had trembled over the very idea of the Buller match, beamed.
Two more British challenges came, from Crockford’s, an elite bridge club in London. Ely accepted both, and his team-of-four won the first by nearly five thousand points, and the second by six thousand. The consensus among the British press was that the Americans had triumphed because of superior teamwork and their scientific system of bidding, the Culbertson System. It was enough to prompt A. E. Manning-Foster to write, “The matches at Almack’s and Crock-fords have taught us all a lot. Those who have not learnt from them or taken the lessons to heart are unteachable.”
Ely basked in his newfound glory. His fame was spreading, across the Atlantic and across America. The first printing of the Contract Bridge Blue Book (six thousand copies) had sold out, and so had the second and third printings. By November, The
Bridge World was calling Ely’s book “The New Best Seller of All Bridge Books… 4th Edition Now Ready.” The advertisement boasted, “Now you may have for your own use the ideas and methods of the Culbertson System, which today is synonymous with Winning Contract.… Learn at first hand—direct from the master player himself. With the Culbertson System you will win regardless of the system used by partner or opponents.” His book would soon be published in London, as well.
The Buller match became the rock that triggered the Culbertson avalanche. Back home, Ely announced a nationwide lecture tour. On tour, he would talk about the Buller victory, the Bennett murder trial, and the Culbertson System. Jo planned to write two bridge books of her own. The first Culbertson Teachers’ Convention (sixty dollars per person covering three days of instruction) would be held in New York in November. More quickly than Ely imagined, he had created a phenomenon in his name. His enemies insisted that nearly every theory in his book had been stolen. Their personal attacks only spurred sales. C. C. Nicolet, bridge writer for the New York World-Telegram, would write, “Nowhere else in the modern world, except possibly backstage at the Metropolitan Opera House, can one find so many persons so anxious to shout scandal and accusations at so many colleagues. Few bridge experts have kind words for any others. They criticize even their favorite partners bitterly.” In February 1931, the twenty-fourth edition of the Blue Book rolled off the presses.
EIGHT
The Senator and Mrs. Donnelly
At home on Cherry Street, the senator was a man of habit and creature comforts. After dinner, a smoker’s hour, he reminded his elderly wife, Lura, that he didn’t want his cigar to bother her, so he would slip outside. Then, disappearing into the evening darkness and his cloud of smoke, Jim Reed would stroll across his lawn toward the neighbors’ mansion. He told friends the two houses shared a dog run, which was true, but the connection ran deeper, especially after nightfall, when the man of the house next door was out on Boss Pendergast’s town. Reed had arranged for the prominent couple to live next door, and sometimes, at his instruction, after dinner, their back door was unlocked. Unnoticed, the senator would snuff out his cigar and step inside. Then he’d climb the back stairs to the master bedroom and walk into the arms of Mrs. Nell Donnelly.
When they first met, the attraction between the senator and Nell was immediate, mutual, and seemingly inevitable. They were two of the biggest celebrities in Kansas City, and in their own marriages, emotional and physical needs were going unmet. Reed was handsome, dashing, and charismatic. Even in his seventh decade, he remained vibrant and virile, and he carried big ambitions: the White House, for one. Nell was perhaps the most successful businesswoman in America, richer than even the senator. She was stylish, determined, and twenty-eight years younger than he—and nearly half a century younger than his wife. A brunette, small, with glittering eyes, Nell dressed with elegance and carried herself in style. She was impressive and imposing, and every bit as unlikely to take a subservient role as the man she loved. Nell had asked her garment company’s attorney, James Taylor, if he might introduce her to his famous law partner, James A. Reed. So Taylor escorted her down the hall on the nineteenth floor of the Telephone Building and made the introduction. When Nell sued to protect patent rights on the Handy-Dandy Apron—a suit critically important to her company’s future—she hired Reed. In 1927, he won the case.
If the senator had built his legend on words, Nell had built hers on house frocks and aprons. In 1916, Peck’s Dry Goods Store in Kansas City sold its original order of more than two hundred of Nell’s pink gingham-check frocks in the blink of an eye, and demanded more. By 1929, the Donnelly Garment Company was employing a thousand workers, nearly all women, and producing five thousand signature “Nelly Don” dresses daily. Nell was steaming to Paris and Vienna to study the latest dress styles of the Continent.
The differences between Lura and Nell were striking. Born in 1844, the year James Polk became president, Lura Reed was now eighty-six years old. Decades before she had settled into a traditional wife’s quiet life at home. She participated in charity work, joined a garden club, played in a weekly bridge game with friends. When her husband was first elected senator, Lura told friends, before leaving for the nation’s capital, “Honestly, I would be happier here in Kansas City with my dogs, cats and horses.” In Washington she counted President Taft and his wife, Helen, as friends, but mostly the capital’s social scene left her cold. No woman should want her husband in politics, Lura once said. The wife, she said, never sees him, and added, “The game is not worth the candle.”
Nell Quinlan Donnelly, for her part, was a modern-age woman, barely forty, energized by national politics and an assertive business engine of the twenties. Nell once told a national magazine, “People often express surprise that this company of which my husband is the head was founded on one of my ideas. What surprised me is that more husbands’ businesses are not the outgrowth, at least in some measure, of their wives’ ideas. It takes two to make a marriage, and both are endowed with brains. Why should only one of the contracting parties put his brains to use, considering that the profit is mutual?”
What Nell did not say to the magazine—but in private moments told the senator—was that her marriage was in ruins.
Paul Donnelly once threw an ashtray at Nell at dinner—a symptom of a deeper problem: intense depression. At forty-six Paul had seen his hair turn prematurely white, his physique soft. His wife’s growing fame made him feel diminished. He sought comfort in alcohol and women. He often showed up late to the office, hung over. Only blocks from the bawdy houses that lined Twelfth and Fourteenth streets, he tried to sweat out his late-night carousing in the steam baths at the Kansas City Club. He warned Nell repeatedly that he did not want children. He swore that if she ever became pregnant he would kill himself. To show he meant business, he pulled a pistol from his desk drawer and held it to his head. His dramatic performances initially terrified Nell, but over time grew pathetic. Typically, Nell would wait until Paul had left for lunch before sneaking into his office to remove his pistol. Then she would walk to the top of their offices in the Coca-Cola building, and drop the gun down an elevator shaft, the distant clank putting her at ease. Years later she would estimate that she dropped thirty of Paul’s guns down that shaft.
And to think, Paul Donnelly had once been her emotional ballast. Raised on a farm in Parsons in southeastern Kansas, the twelfth child in the family, Nell had escaped her father’s stern rule in 1905, at the age of sixteen, when she moved to a Kansas City boarding house. At seventeen she shocked her family by marrying a man in the boarding house across the street, Paul Donnelly, who was twenty-three. Though born poor, Nell said she did not intend to remain poor. Paul put up the money to fund his young wife’s schooling in domestic science at Lindenwood College in St. Charles, and later paid for her initial order of pink gingham-check frocks. Nell showed a flair for design and production technique. Upon returning from war in 1919, Paul became the president of the newly formed Donnelly Garment Company.
But his fondness for night life intensified during the twenties, and he was hardly discreet. There was little that could be done about his philandering, Nell would say later. She just did not want to see it.
Then, one night, she did. She arrived home to find Paul sharing intimacies with a woman. It was not right, Nell said, for another woman to be in her bed with her husband, but she emphasized how it was especially wrong for this woman to be wearing her pajamas.
At that moment, Nell determined to find a replacement—for her pajamas, and her husband.
There was a public Reed and a private Reed. In 1925, the former senator reflected on the social changes in the five years since the passage of the woman suffrage amendment, writing in The American Mercury magazine, “The dresses are a little shorter, the flapper is a little flappier, the hair-bobber becomes more opulent, and the cigarette vendor enjoys a boom. These fortuitous conditions may be the result of the new freedom,
or mere coincidence. I venture not to say.”
But privately, with Nell—no lion, this Reed—he explained his opposition to woman suffrage with a caveat: “That was before I met you, Nell.”
Few in Kansas City knew that Reed’s romance with Lura had started with an extramarital affair, or that Lura informed him in the early years of their marriage that she no longer was interested in having sex. At least that was the story Reed told Nell, and the same story that, upon his arrival in the nation’s capital in 1911, he had told Roy Roberts, Washington correspondent for The Kansas City Star. Privately, Reed explained to Roberts that he had married Lura in 1887 to make her a respectable woman again. But Lura no longer wanted to bother with sex, and so it was understood between husband and wife that Reed would seek his physical comforts elsewhere. The senator told all of this to Roberts, and insisted he could not serve the people of Missouri effectively if the Kansas City newspapers, or any other newspaper, pried into his personal affairs. His conversation with Roberts was risky, given the contempt Reed held for the journalist’s newspaper, and vice versa. The Star’s publisher, William Rockhill Nelson, a Republican stalwart, had opposed Reed in every election. Reed, in turn, had attacked The Star, no matter the issue. One writer even surmised that “if Nelson ever supported James A. Reed, the support would’ve ruined Reed’s career.” Reed once cracked, “Down at Eleventh and Grand there is a newspaper that calls itself the Star. Old Bill Nelson is its mammy, Old Bill Nelson is its pappy, and Old Bill Nelson is its wet nurse. God created the heavens and the earth, and from the ooze of the earth He created the slimy reptiles that crawl the face of the earth, and from the residue thereof He created Old Bill Nelson.” Despite such vitriol, an understanding with Roberts was reached, and Reed roamed free.
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