The Devil's Tickets

by Gary M. Pomerantz

  Broun played contract bridge at the Algonquin with writers George S. Kaufman, Alexander Woollcott, and Franklin P. Adams. He believed that experts such as Ely and Lenz were making contract bridge too confusing for the masses. Even among the legions playing the Culbertson System, Broun wrote, “we have the reformed Culbertsonians, the fundamental and the neo.” Broun sought a simpler time. “Give me then, no experts, I beg of you,” he wrote, “but people who play with celerity and who can smile when everything goes wrong.” Broun stopped by the Chatham during the match, accepting an invitation to serve as Lenz’s honorary referee. “The match, beyond argument, constitutes the overemphasis of a pastime, but from my point of view contract of this sort is more thrilling for the spectator than either college football or professional hockey,” he wrote. He had assumed that the Ely-Lenz spats as reported in the newspapers “constituted nothing more than a flair for showmanship and publicity on the part of the performers,” but now he changed his mind. “Now I am prepared to acquit all members of the troupe from that accusation. Even in the role of a deaf and dumb kibitzer I could feel the blood congeal along my arteries at all the tight points in the match,” he wrote.

  The run of cards stayed with Lenz and Jacoby, with their lead building to 7,030 points in the fourth session, though Walter Malowan of The New York Times insisted “neither side has yet demonstrated anything like conclusive superiority either in bidding or in play.” Once, Ely flipped a card, saying, “I always lead this way for no trump.” Sidney Lenz’s expression brightened. He reminded Ely that this was a suit contract, and added gleefully, “That’s the second time you have done that.” Lenz smiled and said grandly, “Send it to the press.” Ely tried to explain, but Lenz wagged his finger and said, “It was a boner.” At another moment, Jo felt the eyes of kibitzers peeking between the screens. “I can’t stand them any longer,” she snapped, and the room was cleared.

  From the outset, Ely believed that Jacoby and Lenz were an ill fit, like merging “an express-train and a hansom cab.” At the table, Lenz never varied: always the lean-faced brooder as he examined his cards, with nary a twitch or tremor, always sober and pragmatic. Jacoby preferred aggressive, imaginative bidding. He sometimes used “psychic bids,” bluffs that were, by definition, anti-system and designed to mislead opponents about the strength and distribution of his hand. However, such psychic bids could also mislead a partner, and undermine partnership confidence. Jacoby had entered Columbia University at fifteen, aspiring to become a mathematics professor. Instead, he became at twenty-one the youngest ever to pass the Society of Actuaries examination, and went to work for Metropolitan Life. He accepted Lenz’s invitation even though they had played as partners only once. Studying Lenz’s game, Ely noted his preoccupation with achieving perfection and a refusal to take risks. Though a highly skilled auction player, Ely believed that Lenz was a weak bidder in contract. Lenz would make his brilliant technical plays, but he would make few, if any, penalty doubles. And Lenz would underbid—that would be his undoing.

  As his early deficit mounted, Ely told reporters the Culbertson luck would turn—and it did. In the sixth session, he and Jo won 6 of 8 rubbers, wiped out a 4, 840-point lead, and moved into the lead by 745 points. Before the next deal, Ely scribbled a note and passed it to his favorite partner. Jo read it in silence: “Darling, you are wonderful, but à la guerre, comme à la guerre—do not be demoralized by success.”

  As Jo’s fatigue deepened (one writer thought she looked on the brink of illness), Ted Lightner, Ely’s appointed first substitute, bit his fingernails in the press room, impatiently waiting for his call. By the match’s stipulated rules, Jo had to play at least 75 rubbers, half the match. At 2:00 A.M. on December 16, having finished the forty-eighth rubber, the Culbertsons stood 410 points ahead. C. C. Nicolet, the World-Telegram’s bridge writer, assessed: “At the conventional suburban tenth-of-a-cent this margin of superiority amounts to just forty-one pennies.”

  The Sun’s Edwin C. Hill, like so many other reporters, admired Jo. “She seems detached, immeasurably removed from bickering and backbiting—gentle, tolerant, forbearing, slightly superior,” he wrote. “No visitor to Ely Culbertson’s Greatest Show on Earth and Educational Exhibition can fail of that impression.” On the afternoon of December 16, with no session scheduled for the evening, Hill spoke with Jo. He noted her sallow complexion, but also her resolute spirit. She said, “Did you know, by the way, that Mr. Lenz was my teacher at bridge? It almost looks as if I were biting the hand that fed me, doesn’t it? But I’m very fond of Sidney. He’s a delightful man and has been very sweet all through this match.” Then, Jo rose and said, “Well, good afternoon. My maid is making faces at me. There’s no braving her out. The woman means business.” Hill, smitten, wrote, “Her calm composure under the strain that has cracked masculine restraint must be pleasant in the sight of the gods.”

  But Jo needed time off from the match. She was exhausted. Ely announced that she was “homesick,” ironic given that the match was being held in her home. She said she wished to be free until after Christmas to spend time with the children and finish her holiday shopping. On came the bespectacled Lightner, the Yale and Harvard Law graduate, a stockbroker by profession, pessimistic by nature, though brilliant as a bridge theoretician and player. Lightner played, Ely explained, “with an air of studied boredom.” Playfully, Jacoby asked, “If Lightner smiles, is it a signal?” No, Ely replied. “Well, Mr. Lightner never smiles,” Jacoby said, “and I just wanted to know whether a smile tonight would be a signal.”

  In the second rubber, sixth deal, of Lightner’s first session on December 17, Lenz-Jacoby suffered a catastrophic failure. In what referee Gruenther later would call “one of the most grotesque hands of the entire match,” Jacoby, as dealer, opened at one heart with a weaker hand than Lenz might have expected. Holding all four aces, Lenz could think only of no trump, and bid three no trump. Lenz’s bid sent his partnership on a race, with the two players running on opposing tracks, betraying a lack of trust. When Lenz raised to six no trump, Ely, sensing an opportunity to nail him with penalty points, doubled. In a bind, Jacoby bid seven hearts, and Ely doubled again. Jacoby failed to make his contract by one trick. After the hand, Lenz called for a recess, and held a ten-minute private conversation with Jacoby. Another psychic bid by Jacoby later on this night played at one spade, doubled, cost him 1,000 points. Ely and Lightner moved out to a lead of 4,965 points, and Lenz muttered to a reporter, “Ozzie promised me faithfully that he wouldn’t bid a vulnerable psychic tonight. And look at him.”

  Ely had seen Lenz shooting looks at Jacoby, and was gleeful. “Another session like tonight’s will show Lenz and Jacoby as the world’s worst losers. I have never seen so much petty squabbling, unknowing gestures and petty despairs as in tonight’s game,” he said.

  A day later, in the ninth session, Ely and Lightner gained nearly 3,000 points more, and their lead ballooned to 7,915 points. In one week’s time, covering 244 hands, Ely’s team had gained 14,945 points. Now Ely was calling Lightner “my other favorite partner.”

  His rivals saw the match—and their place in the bridge industry—slipping away. F. D. Courtenay, president of Bridge Headquarters, decried, “The whole thing is a publicity stunt organized by the successor of Barnum.” Courtenay said the only fair test of the bidding systems would be to deal hands face up and to permit a committee of experts to bid them, first by one system and then by the other, determining which system was better.

  Meanwhile, Lenz brushed off Ely’s criticism, saying, “I believe I may safely allow the American people to judge what constitute the tactics and actions of a gentleman, especially when he is winning at cards.”

  Waldemar von Zedtwitz, about to depart for a three-week South American tour with Hal and Dorothy Sims, played the tenth session as Ely’s partner. He held remarkable cards all night, and the Culbertson lead grew by 3,205 points, to 11,120. Jacoby deadpanned, “Baron, you played a perfect game. I ho
pe your boat doesn’t sink until you are at least three days out.”

  Lenz once questioned whether Ely’s jump raise from one to three hearts was according to his system, and Ely snapped, “Why don’t you read my Blue Book? Every sucker in the country has read it except you.”

  From behind a kibitzer screen came a quick retort: “I haven’t!” It was one of the Marx Brothers, Chico. He got the desired laugh.

  For nearly five weeks they played in a brilliantly lit cocoon, every move critiqued, as if the world were paying attention only to them. But during these thirty-three days, newsreels captured hardship, gunfire, deprivation, and strife. In West Virginia, sixty white men lynched two black men and riddled their bodies with bullets. In India, Mahatma Gandhi was arrested at his home on the eve of a new civil disobedience campaign that he predicted would plunge his nation once again into “the fires of suffering.” In New York, Governor Franklin Roosevelt criticized the Hoover administration for failing to aid business and called for new leadership that would recognize “the right of the individual to make a living out of life.” The Chicago Crime Commission declared that city’s notorious gangsters beaten, with all but five of the twenty-eight “public enemies” under wraps, including Al Capone. In Germany, Adolf Hitler promised a day of reckoning with the authors of the Treaty of Versailles and proclaimed himself the spokesman of the German people in defiance of the Bruening government. In New York, Babe Ruth insisted he would not accept a pay cut from his $80,000 annual salary, and New York Yankees owner Jacob Ruppert, reminding the press about the Depression, answered, “Who does he think he is?” The bootlegger and racketeer John “Legs” Diamond was shot to death as he slept in a lodging house in Albany, New York. Winston Churchill, in New York on a book tour, suffered head injuries and two broken ribs when struck by an automobile on Fifth Avenue.

  Consigned to bed rest, his head bandaged, the recuperating Churchill moved to the Waldorf-Astoria two days before the Bridge Battle of the Century arrived there. But for doctor’s orders, Churchill, who adored bridge, might have become a kibitzer himself. (He had been playing auction bridge at the Admiralty House in London on August 1, 1914, when a messenger arrived with a large red dispatch box. Churchill unlocked it and read its one-page message: “Germany has declared war against Russia.” He rang a servant to bring him a lounge coat and departed at once for 10 Downing Street.) As a kibitzer at the Waldorf, Churchill would have rubbed shoulders with steel magnate Charles Schwab, cartoonist Rube Goldberg, columnist Franklin P. Adams, the British golfer Cyril Tolley, the Grand Duchess Marie of Russia, Mrs. Marshall Field III, Mrs. Vincent Astor, and lawyer Henry W Taft, brother of the former American president.

  As host for the second half of the match, Lenz had arranged for a dozen rooms on the fifth floor of the Waldorf’s east wing, with luxurious accommodations for the press and telegraphs. Lenz might have hoped that the new location, one of New York’s gilded, ornate landmarks, would change his luck. But his partnership with Ozzie Jacoby was in freefall. As the Culbertson lead built after the thirteenth session to more than seventeen thousand points, Ely chirped to Lenz, “You’re going down with flying colors, Sidney, but you’re going down.”

  On December 28, Jo returned to the table just in time to witness the disintegration of the express train and hansom cab. The hand that broke the Lenz-Jacoby partnership occurred in the 102nd rubber. As the midnight hour passed, and with the Culbertsons vulnerable, Jacoby made a psychic bid to confuse the Culberstons. But his bid confused Lenz. The Culbertsons made their five no trump contract easily, and Lenz, boiling over, said to his partner, “Why do you make these rotten bids?” The kibitzers, in white shirts and ermine coats, instantly perked up. Lenz said to Jacoby, “You’re having a lot of fun. Give me a chance. I can’t tell whether you have anything or not when you bid.” It was 12:28 A.M. Under assault, Jacoby was livid, but remained silent. Match rules stipulated that no new rubber could start after 12:30 A.M. Gruenther asked the foursome about playing one more rubber. “Not with me in it,” Jacoby snapped. He agreed to remain for a final rubber, but he could not contain his anger. With the first hand in play, he glared at Lenz and said, “Sidney, in a hand in the second rubber tonight you made an absolutely stupid defensive play, and then you criticized me. I am resigning right now as your partner.”

  Lenz’s face sagged. He said, “Well—well, sir, well, sir, all right, sir!” Jacoby continued, “The play you made was absolutely stupid and there was no excuse for it.” Lenz waved his cards and shut down his young partner. “Why talk about it?” the old master said.

  Minutes later, at session’s end, Jacoby rushed out of the drawing room. He told reporters he was finished with Lenz. “I was criticized merely to cover up his own bad plays,” Jacoby said. He would go on to a brilliant bridge career lasting more than fifty years, by which point the disintegration of his partnership with Lenz no longer obscured the fact that Jacoby had been the best and most adaptable contract player among the luminous four at the table. That night, pale and visibly affected by the breakup, Lenz walked through the corridors, hounded by reporters, telling them, “I have nothing to say.”

  Commander Winfield Liggett, Jr., veteran of the bridge table and the high seas, replaced Jacoby for the final forty-seven rubbers. Playing with old friend “Lig,” Lenz seemed calmer, happier. Liggett was a steady player from the old school—also a member of Bridge Headquarters—and had ghostwritten Wilbur Whitehead books. Inseparable as partners for years in whist and auction tournaments, Lenz and Liggett might have played as partners from the start but for a misunderstanding. Lenz had believed, incorrectly, that Liggett preferred a new partnership. Liggett waited for Lenz to ask him to play against the Culbertsons. Their pride came between them. Neither made an overture to the other, and Lenz chose Jacoby. Now partners again, they whittled away at the Culbertsons’ lead. Still, to Liggett, convoying soldiers to Europe on the USS Montana during the war must have seemed an easier task than eradicating a seventeen-thousand-point deficit in only six bridge sessions. Ely played with two new partners, Michael Gottlieb and Howard Schenken, rising bridge stars. Then Jo came back for the Culbertson coronation.

  The newsreel and newspaper cameras returned en masse on January 8 for the final session at the Waldorf. The photographers asked Ely and Sid to shake hands before the twentieth session. Posing, Ely asked Lenz why he wouldn’t smile. “Looking at you, how can I?” Lenz replied. Then he grinned and offered a firm handshake.

  Jo won the final hand of the 150th rubber, making her five-diamond contract. Gruenther leaned forward, checked the scoring, announced the completion of the match, and said the Culbertsons had won by 8,980 points. Lenz thrust his hand across the table. “Congratulations, Ely. Congratulations, Jo,” he said. Liggett extended his hand as well. Well-wishers rushed in, including Oswald Jacoby, who congratulated Ely and then approached Lenz. They shook hands, but said nothing. Jacoby checked the score sheet: Liggett had advanced the Lenz cause by 7,860 points during the final six sessions. “Looks like I’m the goat of the match,” Jacoby said. Jo hurried through the crowd as gentlemen kissed her cheek. It was nearly one o’clock in the morning. Jo wanted to go to the children, but Ely said, “We have newsreels and radio and supper and all kinds of things yet.” Jo sighed, and ducked into a private room to freshen up.

  Bridge analysts made much of the match statistics: during the 879 hands in the match, Ely’s side held 1,745 aces and 1,775 kings, and Lenz’s held 1,771 aces and 1,741 kings. But Lenz said, “Aces and kings don’t mean a thing. It’s distribution that counts… The cards speak for themselves. When the players are about equal, system means little.”

  The Chicago Tribune highlighted the fallibility of both bidding systems, and believed that the only point proven was “that Lenz is just as apt to bid two tricks too few as Culbertson is apt to bid two tricks too many.” The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, meanwhile, clucked that Ely “is to contract what John D. Rockefeller was to oil.… Culbertson is the greatest
exploiter of contract that the world has ever seen, and Lenz in his own way is not far behind.” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle believed the match proved nothing about the superiority of one system or the other, but saw a dramatic watershed in the bridge movement: “More citizens than ever are now talking bridge and playing bridge and buying bridge cards and taking bridge lessons and reading books on bridge.” And Collier’s magazine playfully chimed in, “No such excitement had been felt in the United States since the experiment with yeast an’ raisins.… It stands proved that a husband an’ wife can play together without the development of those homicidal tendencies that have done so much to make Contract a Dark an’ Bloody Ground.”