The Devil's Tickets

by Gary M. Pomerantz

  That patrolman, G. R. Woodman, testified to seeing blood smeared on the Bennetts’ front door, four feet up from the floor. Woodman said he examined the apartment and discovered two bullet holes in the bathroom. On cross-examination, the patrolman said he saw Myrtle holding her dead husband and saying to him, “Jack, why did you do it? Jack, why did you do it?”

  Policewoman Frances Trowbridge testified that she spoke with Myrtle at police headquarters, hours after the killing. She said Myrtle admitted to shooting Jack, telling Trowbridge, “I went into the den and he was packing his grip. He said he was going to leave me. I shot him.” Jim Reed approached the witness stand and, on cross-examination, asked Trowbridge about Myrtle’s condition at the time of that admission. “Wasn’t she hysterical?” Reed inquired.

  “She was crying,” Trowbridge answered.

  Reed: “Wasn’t she distracted?”

  Trowbridge: “She was very nervous.”

  Reed: “Did the doctor give her a hypodermic?”

  Trowbridge: “I don’t know.”

  A deputy coroner, Stanley Hall, testified about Jack’s bullet wounds. Page introduced Jack’s bloodied polo shirt and handed it to his witness. (Seeing the shirt, Myrtle broke into sobs that shook her body.) Hall identified the bullet holes for jurors. He said either wound alone would have killed Jack. The one in his upper back, he explained, came from a bullet entering beside the second dorsal vertebra, passing so close it nearly struck that vertebra, and exited two or three inches higher through the center of his throat. The second wound, in the left armpit, came from a bullet that ranged downward and lodged in the tenth dorsal vertebra, near Jack’s waistline. Each bullet hole in Jack’s shirt was at the center of a large brown bloodstain, which jurors examined.

  In his cross-examination of Hall, Reed called for O’Sullivan. Once again, the two defense attorneys playacted the killing as they insisted it happened, with O’Sullivan (Jack) seizing the right wrist of the senator (Myrtle), the pistol under O’Sullivan’s arm. “Dr. Hall,” Reed asked, “with the pistol in this position would it have been possible for the wound under the left arm to have been inflicted?”

  Hall thought for a moment. “I suppose so,” he said. Just then, a newspaper photographer’s flashbulb exploded. With the muzzle of Jack’s pistol still held against O’Sullivan’s ribs, the explosion startled Reed and O’Sullivan. The two men reacted with a jolt. Spectators laughed, and the bailiff rapped for order. The defense attorneys changed position again, and Hall said he couldn’t be certain if the second wound had been inflicted at that range, too.

  Jim Page next called a surprise witness, Annie Jane Rice, Jack Bennett’s half-sister. Reed objected to her introduction. She had not been mentioned on the prosecutor’s witness list, and he had not been permitted to question her before the trial. Out of earshot of the jury, Page argued that he had learned of Rice’s connection to the case only two days before. Latshaw, reserving judgment, allowed her to testify.

  Under questioning from Page, Rice said she had visited Myrtle at her apartment on November 10, 1929, six weeks after the killing. So close was their friendship in earlier years that Myrtle called Annie Jane “Sis Jane.” Now Annie Jane Rice testified, “I said to her, ‘Myrtle, you told Brother Tom [Bennett, Jack’s brother] when he went to see you that you didn’t know why you did it. But you do know why.’ ”

  Page: “What did Mrs. Bennett say?”

  Rice: “She said, ‘Nobody but me and my God know why I did it. But I’ll tell you, Annie, when this is all over. Then you won’t feel so bitter about it.”

  Here was the most damaging testimony yet introduced by the state. Reed sought to undo it, at once. On cross-examination, he stood ten feet from Sis Jane.

  “How close was she to you when she said that?” Reed asked, nearly shouting, the volume of his voice exaggerated for effect. Rice didn’t understand the question and did not reply. “Did you hear my question?” Reed bellowed.

  Rice looked at him. “I beg your pardon,” she said.

  Reed repeated, louder still, “Did you hear my question?”

  She said she did not. Rice asked him to repeat it. He did, and Rice replied, “She was as close to me as this gentleman,” and nodded to the stenographer at her left elbow.

  With apologies, Rice told Reed, “I am a little more deaf than normally. I have a cold.”

  Jim Reed smiled. He said he had no further questions.

  TEN

  Ely in the Crucible

  Hard Times and Bridge: When money is scarce for the theaters or talkies, then the joys of Bridge—even though at times tinged with bitterness—are fully realized.

  —ADVERTISEMENT

  in The Bridge World, January 1931

  Ely slept late and rose to his first cigarette at midday. He took long hot baths until his alabaster skin turned steamy pink. As governesses and tutors tended to the children, he walked about the apartment suite in pajamas and slippers, or in a thin silk robe, wearing nothing underneath. The tutors, he decreed, would emphasize character, intelligence, physique. They would teach Joyce and Bruce to speak German, French, and English, and to write weekly letters to their parents. Jo wanted no such educational experiments, only happy children. But Ely wanted leaders, perfectionists. He decided his son would become a scientist, his daughter an actress. Jo pleaded against such heavy-handed parenting. But Ely only shook his head and waved her off. He hired a manicurist to buff his fingernails. His clothes hung neatly in a closet, his suits in a row, each garment (socks, handkerchiefs) expensive and European made. He told newspapermen he was a linguist, a scientist, a chemist, a mathematician. He shared autobiographical stories with reporters about defying death, including once after being struck by a Cossack’s saber. He liked his coffee ink black, and he carried a special percolator for it on trips. He preferred frozen meats, four or five days old, rare and oozing blood.

  As the Depression deepened, Americans had more worries. Contract bridge, a palliative, trickled down from the elites to become a social fad played in homes, hotels, and private clubs, and on ships. Contract bridge columns appeared regularly in hundreds of newspapers and magazines. It arrived on the big screen in the Marx Brothers’ 1930 comedy Animal Crackers, with Harpo and Chico as cheaters in a game against two women. When Harpo impishly sits in one woman’s lap, Chico explains, “He thought it was contact bridge!” On radio, the United States Playing Card Company sponsored weekly instruction by the old guard authorities, Work and Whitehead. Visiting America, Britain’s Winston Churchill played a few rubbers in a New York home. First Lady Lou Hoover played socially in the nation’s capital. In Independence, Missouri, the future First Lady, Bess Truman, played every other Thursday, alternating homes with friends. In Hollywood, movie moguls Samuel Goldwyn, Irving Thalberg, and Louis B. Mayer played for big money. At the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan, Round Table writers Alexander Woollcott and playwright George S. Kaufman were inveterate players. (Kaufman’s bridge partner once excused himself to go to the men’s room, and Kaufman famously deadpanned, “That’s the only time this afternoon I’ve known what he’s got in his hand.”) Syndicated columnists Grant-land Rice and Ring Lardner and their wives played contract bridge in their side-by-side homes in the Hamptons. New York Yankees first baseman Lou Gehrig regularly partnered with sports columnist Rice. Babe Ruth played, too, though not competently, usually in his hotel room with sportswriters. Could there have been a less likely bridge player than the brutish Babe, once described by sportswriter Paul Gallico as “kneaded, rough thumbed out of earth, a golem, a figurine that might have been made by a savage”? Ruth interrupted one bridge game with sportswriters when a woman named Mildred called on him. The Babe excused himself and took Mildred into an adjacent room, where he made like the famous man he was. They reemerged in due course, with the Babe telling Mildred, “So long, kid.” She left, the Babe returned to the table, and bidding resumed.

  The Saturday Evening Post in 1930
suggested that Americans spent more time on bridge “than on any other activity except working, eating, sleeping, traveling, reading and the different methods of expressing affection.”

  In Babe Ruth’s case, there was overlap.

  A bridge evangelist, Ely crossed the country by train and automobile, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, with stops along the Gulf Coast. With his derby, walking cane, and quirky mannerisms, he was a persnickety show unto himself. His Contract Bridge Blue Book hit number six on the Publishers Weekly national bestseller list. He presented his lectures in crowded hotel ballrooms, fraternal lodges, and furniture store showrooms. Nothing would stop Ely, not even when a car he was driving swerved, flipped, and landed upside-down in a roadside ditch near Columbus, Georgia. Ely, another man, and two women bridge instructors suffered bruises, but escaped serious injury. At the lectern that night, unable to stand, Ely quipped, “Ladies and gentlemen, I am sorry to announce that I am a little vulnerable. That is, I have a leg up.” He would deliver sixty lectures in two months, sometimes several in a day, losing weight, battling ulcers, yet pleased by the attention. He mastered the art of self-deprecating humor (“I’m half Russian and entirely American. That makes me a trick and a half.”), and praised Jo as his favorite partner.

  Women, especially housewives, packed his lecture halls, carrying their copies of the Contract Bridge Blue Book. At Boston’s Copley Plaza, a crowd of 800 filled the main ballroom for one lecture, and, according to The Boston Evening Transcript, 748 were women. Nearly 3,000 showed up for Ely’s lecture in Oakland, California. On the podium, his manner was formal and precise, his purpose always the same: to sell his bidding system, and his book. Speaking without notes, he began lectures typically by explaining the Culbertson System. Other bidding measures used “quick tricks” or “sure tricks,” but he used “honor tricks” and though his system did not differ fundamentally from the others, it was, Ely said, more accurate and practical. At the end of lectures, women stampeded to the rostrum to shake his hand and to ask him to autograph their books. They posed questions about bridge strategies. He warmed them with his patience, intellect, and charm.

  From New England to Atlanta to Cincinnati to Dallas, and west to San Diego and Los Angeles, and north to San Francisco and Vancouver, Ely, with single-minded focus, spread his name, instilled confidence in Culbertson System teachers, and conducted newspaper interviews to emphasize that twenty million Americans—nearly one in four Americans older than the age of fourteen—now played bridge. He could not prove that number was accurate, but the more he said it, the more accurate it became.

  Whenever possible, Ely told the story of Myrtle and Jack. It became the star moment of his interviews, writings, and lectures. He would exploit the Bennetts in every way possible, ratcheting up the drama in his telling of the murder at the bridge table. Never mind that Myrtle, to date, had not been convicted. Murder better served Ely’s needs. The killing of Jack Bennett was a national news story about contract bridge, and Ely seized it for what it was: a fine marketing tool. He was a master of marketing and so it would have been unbelievable had he not used the story to his own advantage. Myrtle’s trial had rekindled conversation among players about the vagaries of husbands and wives at the table. And never mind that neither Myrtle nor the Hofmans remembered their cards from that final hand. During lectures, Ely diagrammed on blackboards the so-called Fatal Hand, pure fabrication though it was, first drawn up in his magazine by Sidney Lenz.

  In Los Angeles, at a lecture hosted by the Home Economics section of the Los Angeles Evening Express, women in the audience listened spellbound as Ely analyzed the Fatal Hand. “His bid was one spade. That was his first mistake,” he said of Jack Bennett. About Myrtle, he said, “She raised the bid to four, which was quite proper.” He pointed to the blackboard with one hand, his other hand in the pocket of his double-breasted suit. “In playing the hand he [Jack] failed to finesse for the queen of spades. That was his second mistake.” Jack failed by one trick, Ely reminded his listeners—“and it caused his death.” In truth, Jack failed by two tricks, but the idea of one trick increased the drama and made for a better story. It heightened the importance of a bidding system: one misplay at bridge was the difference between life and death. In each new city, on radio and in lectures, Ely cited the story of Jack’s demise because it was simply too good not to use. He wrote an article in his magazine, “The Lessons from the Bennett Murder Trial,” and surmised, “We have heard of lives depending on the play of a card. It is not often that we find that figure of speech literally true. Here is a case in point. Mr. Bennett had overbid his hand. Of that there can be no doubt, but even with this, so kind were the gods of distribution that he might have saved his life had he played his cards a little better.” Analyzing the fictitious Fatal Hand, Ely wrote that when Charles Hofman led the jack of clubs, Jack took the trick with the king, “and started in to pull the adverse trumps. Here again,” Ely wrote of Jack Bennett, “he flirted with death as people so frequently do when they fail to have a plan either in the game of Bridge or the game of life.”

  At nearly every stop along his lecture tour, Ely spoke with reporters, always with a quip at the ready. He told them about his childhood in Russia, and said he could not speak English until he was sixteen. He boasted that he remembered the distribution of cards in bridge hands he had played eight years before. Slyly, he said he refused to be photographed with a pretty woman because it might be “dangerous.” Being a bridge expert, he said with a playful sigh, was a dog’s life. At the stately Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco, he told a local newspaperman, immodestly, that if bridge players alone voted in America, “I’d be president by an electoral grand slam.” He emphasized the battle of the sexes at the bridge table. At bridge, he said, “Women trust less to intuition and place their reliance upon concentration and thought. Men fancy themselves to be possessed of an inner capacity for playing and will not study.” Wiping shaving lather from his face, and then slipping out of his bathrobe and into a blue suit and derby at the Sutter Club in Sacramento, Ely told a reporter, “I’m all for bridge fights between married couples. It’s a fine way to blow off steam and get rid of the millions of little differences and big differences which dam up in both parties and are the real reason for bridge fights.” He milked Myrtle and Jack’s story for all it was worth. On the day he would deliver two lectures at the Scottish Rite Auditorium in San Francisco, the front-page headline in the San Francisco Call-Bulletin blared, “BRIDGE EXPERT EXPLAINS CARD PLAY KILLING: Had Husband Been Good Player He Would Be Alive Today, Says Culbertson.”

  While Ely was on lecture tour, Dorothy Dix, syndicated women’s columnist, pondered the stress points of marriage: “All married people, whether they realize it or not, keep a running account with each other in which they charge up against each other the hurts to their hearts, the wounds to their pride, all the hateful little things that each has done to the other that has taken the joy out of life for them… The moral of all of which is that in matrimony as in finance, if we look after the pennies, the dollars will look after themselves. If we avoid the little quarrels there will never be any big ones.”

  American bridge had never known such a personality. In an earlier age, and on a smaller scale, there was Joseph Elwell. A star of the early auction years, Elwell authored handsome bridge books, with gold leaf and illustrative hands printed in red and black. He insinuated himself into the elite circles of Newport, New York City, Palm Beach, and Lexington, Kentucky, gaining celebrity as an instructor of the stars. Women found him smart, wry, and playful. He taught bridge to the young Harold Vanderbilt, and they played often as partners. He also taught the game to many young, beautiful, married women. Some waited for their husbands to leave for work before rushing to Elwell’s New York brownstone for private sessions at his breakfast table and in his bed. A few kept nighttime garments (a pink silk night robe, a boudoir cap, slippers) in his bedroom closet. Then, one morning in 1920, about a year before Ely arrived in Amer
ica, while Joe Elwell sat alone at a desk in his study, reading mail, someone put a bullet through his head. His maid found him there, slumped in his chair. Without his toupee or dentures, she did not recognize him at first. Elwell made an odd gurgling sound, and the maid ran into the street screaming for help. He died the next day. The tabloids had a big time with the story, trumpeting Elwell as a gambler and rampant womanizer and possibly a bootlegger, and his wife, from whom he was estranged, confirmed that he was all of that and worse. Police never apprehended the killer.

  After Elwell, Milton Work, Wilbur Whitehead, Sidney Lenz, and other bridge authorities gained notice through writings and lectures. But times were changing. Now personalities could be shaped three-dimensionally, and packaged to a mass audience. By 1930, more than 40 percent of American households had a radio, and the writer E. B. White commented, “I live in a strictly rural community and people here speak of ‘The Radio’ in the large sense, with an over-meaning. When they say ‘The Radio’ they don’t mean a cabinet, an electrical phenomenon, or a man in a studio, they refer to a pervading and somewhat godlike presence which has come into their lives and homes.” Talkies had arrived in Hollywood, and newsreels, too.

  Ely’s bridge rivals did not understand him or his publicity methods. They were self-satisfied nineteenth-century men, trapped in the sepia-tone past. They wrote bridge books for posterity and their egos and one another. But Ely was fast becoming a star of the modern multimedia age. He appeared regularly on radio, and had his eye on Hollywood, too. He amazed newspaper feature writers with stories about his life. He said he had been a radical, arrested in Russia, and jailed in Canada. He said that during the war German air raids on Paris were so amateurish that even as Big Bertha bombs exploded in the streets every twenty minutes, he continued playing auction bridge in clubs as if the Germans didn’t exist. Down to his last one hundred francs in wartime Paris, he said he put twenty francs on a baccarat table, whereupon a bystander stepped on his toe. They argued, went outside and brawled. When Ely returned to the baccarat table with a swollen eye, the croupier announced that his twenty francs had grown to more than twenty thousand. Ely’s mythology grew. He had a compelling if high-pitched voice, an Eastern European sound, plus charm and mystery—and even more than that, he had the elegant Jo. The writer Edwin C. Hill of The New York Sun wrote of Ely: “He had the gray matter. He had the personality. And he had his red-haired lady. And the greatest of these was his red-haired lady.” Ely’s phrase “my favorite partner” amounted to an advertising campaign that sold not only bridge but prestige, and sex appeal. Housewives adored him.