The Devil's Tickets

by Gary M. Pomerantz

  While O’Connell was serving an army stint in Korea in 1952-53, he said he received a box of cookies from The Carlyle’s housekeeping department with an attached note from Myrtle Bennett. She wrote about the latest doings at The Carlyle, and added, “We miss you! Hurry back!”

  Upon his return, Myrtle asked, “Michael, did you meet any Geisha girls?” He kidded, “No, but I was thinking of you when I was over there.” She said, “Boy, you must have kissed the blarney stone!” O’Connell told her, “I wish you were younger,” and she laughed and said, “I wish I was younger, too.”

  There were limits to her conversation, though, as made clear when I asked O’Connell what Myrtle had told him about her background. “Nobody knew anything about her life,” O’Connell said.

  It made sense that Myrtle would seek a new life far from Kansas City, though it surprised me that, after the trial, she kept the Bennett name. Reverting to her maiden name or even adopting an alias would have freed her from answering to the curious who knew the details of September 29, 1929. But hers was a simple, common name that called no attention to itself. And the media was more fragmented then and did not reach into every corner of America at all hours. So while it remained well known that a housewife had once shot her husband over a bridge game, the woman’s name faded until it became almost incidental to the story. Besides, I believe that Myrtle held on to Jack’s name as one more act of stubbornness and strength.

  As we sat together on the couch, I brought from my briefcase some clippings from Kansas City newspapers in 1929 and 1931. O’Connell read the headlines, and saw the photos of the young Mrs. Bennett. He gasped: “Oh my God!” His pallor momentarily whitened. “This is amazing.” He read in silence about Myrtle Bennett’s acquittal, his eyes tight at the corners. He shook his head, and said he never knew about any of this. “There were a lot of old Irish people working here,” he said, finally, “and if they had known this they would have told me.” I told him about Myrtle’s upbringing in Arkansas, and this triggered a memory. O’Connell recalled telling Myrtle that he had trained in the army at Camp Chaffee, Arkansas, and spent time in Little Rock. “Tell me more about Arkansas, Michael,” Mrs. Bennett said. “Did you know anyone from there?”

  He told her Irving Pratt was his barracks mate, and often took him to his home on weekends. Mrs. Bennett smiled, and said she knew the Pratts. She wanted more details about Arkansas. “Well,” O’Connell replied, “it was very clean and wide open. The people in Little Rock were very nice. Were you from there?”

  Mrs. Bennett skillfully dodged the incursion into her past. She said, cryptically, “Oh, I’ve been around there.”

  Michael O’Connell said, “I’m glad I didn’t know about all this when she was here. It’s amazing. She was so happy. I would never think—” O’Connell hesitated, and said, “Well, I guess she left it behind.”

  II

  Only fourteen blocks from The Carlyle, the international bridge celebrity Ely Culbertson lived mysteriously in a hideaway he had designed: a soundproof five-room apartment secreted behind a sliding bookcase. When a hidden button was pressed the bookcase swung backward, revealing a dimly lit room with plush rugs, a bar and kitchenette, and, behind glass bricks, a card corner. This hideaway had no telephones and no ringing doorbells, and eliminated the sounds of city life in New York. Secretaries and servants were allowed to enter only when paged by the master.

  As he floated above the Great Depression, there were signs that Ely was, in fact, a man descending into megalomania. His need for self-glorification, always there, became insatiable. He lived increasingly alone with his ideas and ambition. He had become king of a world he had created, a world strange and forbidding. All who entered his world, as Jo had, soon found no air to breathe.

  Rather than confront rising rivals at the table in 1938, Ely left contract bridge altogether. He had in mind a new game. He had a plan.

  He would save the world.

  Instead of diamonds and spades, Ely now played with Europe and Asia. As World War II raged, he thought his move from bidding bridge hands to creating a world peace plan only natural. For most of his life he had been thinking about geopolitics, and constructing systems of all kinds.

  He believed he might be the only man alive who could solve the darkest terrors of the times.

  Secreted in his hideaway, alone in his silk robe, and with his thoughts, he smoked. He pondered.

  After the Lenz match, Ely and Jo lived in material splendor. Commercial opportunities poured in. Ely endorsed Wrigley’s chewing gum. Inside three million packs of its cigarettes, Chesterfield distributed free booklets about contract bridge authored by Ely. In 1932, RKO Pictures paid him $270,000 to write, direct, and star in a series of film shorts about bridge. In one, Murder at the Bridge Table, a thinly veiled story about the Bennetts, in which a wife shoots and kills her husband in a social game after he botches a contract of four spades, Ely appears as an expert witness called to testify at the wife’s murder trial. Using large playing cards on a blackboard, Ely demonstrates for jurors how the husband should have made the contract. Jo appears only briefly in the twenty-one-minute film. She is shown walking into the courtroom with Ely and, in a closeup, watching the trial. In Hollywood, Ely fired scenario writers, directors, and supervisors. RKO found him difficult, obstreperous, impossible. The studio had contracted for a dozen film shorts, but Ely made only six. RKO paid him in full, anyway, happy to be done with him.

  Ely and Jo were among America’s most conspicuous consumers. At a time when radio was playing the soup-line song “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” Ely was spending seven dollars a day on cigarettes. With his tea came caviar. He bought gold watches and gold cigarette cases. “Success in life,” Ely said in a speech at the American Club in Paris in July 1933, “depends entirely on whether you know how to handle your own publicity. You have got to sell yourself, your wife, and your children to the world.” George Reith of Bridge Headquarters snickered in 1933, saying of Ely, “The greatest showman in the bridge business told me one time that truth was a matter of opinion, and that anyhow the public does not want the truth. They want something that pleases them.”

  In bridge, Ely remained the center of attention. He made friends with the vanquished Bridge Headquarters (which later dissolved), bullied and underpaid his magazine staffers, became embroiled in lawsuits, and founded his own Crockford’s bridge club in New York City, filling it with Flemish tapestries and Louis XVI chairs beside a wide, curving staircase. (The club ultimately failed.) He visited Herbert Hoover in the White House. With the help of ghost writers, he wrote other contract bridge books. His bridge writings were ponderous, at times oppressive. Other bridge stars—Sidney Lenz, for one—wrote about the game in a simpler, more effective style. In 1932, though, Ely outpaced novelist Pearl Buck as America’s bestselling author, no doubt a tribute to his marketing and his celebrity, not his skill as a writer. He continued to run from matches against bridge players he knew were his superior. He made a mint from his investment in a company that sold new, longer-lasting plastic playing cards. His publicity machine whirred on: The Bridge World’s Sam Fry busily writing fourteen syndicated bridge columns each week, seven under Ely’s name and seven under Jo’s. Ely and Jo paid $125,000 in December 1934 for an eighty-six-acre estate in Ridgefield, Connecticut, that featured a forty-five-room mansion with detached cottages, a glass-domed swimming pool, gardens, greenhouses bursting with tangerines and grapes, a lake, and miles of paved roads.

  In 1935, Ely walked into A. Sulka and Company, the fine haberdashery on Fifth Avenue, and spent $5,000 on pajamas, ties, shirts, and accessories. Hearing him boast of such purchases at The Bridge World office, writer Alfred Sheinwold, working for twenty-five dollars weekly, asked, “Then how about a raise to thirty-five dollars per week, Mister Culbertson?” In a fury, Ely fired him (for the second or third time), though Sheinwold soon returned to the staff, only to be fired anew. Ely later wrote that the Scotsman in him saved
five cents of every dollar, but the Russian in him spent the remaining ninety-five cents.

  In March 1935, he stage-managed one more bridge match following the release of the Contract Bridge Red Book on Play. This time, the battle pitted couple versus couple: the Culbertsons against Hal and Dorothy Sims in 150 rubbers at Crockford’s. Just as he had hand-selected Buller and Lenz, Ely chose this match for its natural appeal to married couples, and because he knew that Dorothy Sims was little more than an adequate player. The Simses played into the hyperbole, setting up a training camp at Red Bank, New Jersey, where heavyweight Max Baer had trained for the Primo Carnera fight. Hal, Dorothy, and Duke, their Great Dane, wore white turtleneck sweaters, each with a scarlet S, as they jogged for cameras along the roadside. Crockford’s brought in an oversize table to accommodate the oversize Hal Sims. During the match, Sims playfully called Ely “Professor,” and Ely called him “Petronius.” After one lost hand, a frustrated Sims chided his wife, “How many times have I told you not to think? Just do what I tell you!” Back to his old tricks, Ely arrived to sessions late, and ate spaghetti and spinach at the table. The Culbertsons kept their cool throughout the match, and won by more than sixteen thousand points.

  Imperturbable as bridge partners, Ely and Jo were coming undone at home. Jo argued against Ely’s micromanagement of their children’s lives. Ely applied an eccentric science of conditioning to inure his children against sudden frights. To inure them against common childhood fears, he fed them during storms, forced them to sleep with the lights on and in complete darkness. He demanded they handle crawling creatures, such as lizards and snakes.

  Jo had always liked an occasional drink, but now her more frequent drinking worried Ely. As the marriage foundered, Ely turned to other women who found him charming and charismatic. During a train ride to Chicago in 1935, he boasted to magazine staffer Sam Fry about sex, and how as a young man in Paris he had lacked confidence, but through reading erotic literature he had improved his techniques. Sex, Ely said, was the world’s best indoor sport.

  Ely planned a memoir. It would be candid, personal, dramatic, and revolutionary. He would write about his early romances, his deflowering in a Russian whorehouse; and of course, he would write about Jo. She asked, “Ely, how could you?”

  His answer: their children must know what not to do, and besides, his public deserved the full truth, not a bit less. Jo could bear him no more.

  On December 1, 1937, their divorce became public. The lead in The New York Times read, “The end of a bridge romance was revealed yesterday,” rumbling like a major earthquake through the bridge community. Jo obtained the divorce in Reno, citing Ely’s “ultra-temperamental moods” and his insistence “on publishing a brutally frank story of his life.” Ely deferred to her as his superior in marriage as in bridge, saying in a formal statement, “This is not a case of ‘another woman’ or ‘another man.’ Jo has always been my grand romance in life and always will be. Unfortunately I am a married man with bachelor’s instincts. Complete solitude is often my most precious and most necessary requirement. In those moments I am a solitary animal, and if disturbed I become unbearable. Any woman who marries a really unsocial man of my type, with his solitary yearnings and attacks of abstract meditation, will sooner or later find her marriage on the rocks. The wonder to me is not that Jo is divorcing me now, but that she was able to stand my temperamental outbursts all these years. Well, anyway, Jo is still my favorite bridge partner.” Ely and Jo announced they would retain their business partnership, sharing all assets and future bridge incomes, and maintain equal custody of the children.

  Jo and the children remained in the two adjoining fifth-floor apartments on East Sixty-second Street. Ely moved downstairs, to the fourth floor, directly below the children’s bedrooms. There, he designed his hideaway, acting as if it were a perfectly normal thing to do.

  He published his memoirs in 1940, The Strange Lives of One Man. Ely’s self-admiration extended 693 pages. Memoir can be unreliable even when the author attempts to tell the truth, let alone when he is burnishing his reputation. For large parts of 1938 and 1939, Ely sat in the Ridgefield mansion and dictated his life story to a secretary taking shorthand, sometimes for as many as eleven hours a day. He believed he wrote at his rhythmic best not with pen or typewriter, but through dictation. He did not review the typed manuscript and left the grammar and fact-checking to editors. Facts mattered little to him, anyway.

  Most of the story was beyond independent corroboration. He portrayed himself as an outcast intellectual. It seems never to have occurred to him that he was dysfunctional, especially in his personal life, because he was so skilled in the high arts of bridge and ballyhoo. A man out of touch with reality, he believed that only he understood who he was and what he was doing. Every page swelled with grandiosity. The reader might imagine Ely as Charlie Chaplin, holding the globe in his hands, caressing and spinning it, tossing it into the air with a dictator’s malevolent glee.

  He envisioned his memoirs as the capstone of his career, a historic chronicle of his triumphs. Instead, in page after page he unwittingly unmasks himself as a liar, psychological bully, and narcissist extraordinaire.

  Self-promoters of the age, such as Shipwreck Kelly, shaped their biographies to amaze audiences. But Shipwreck did not pretend to Ely’s aura of legitimacy. A sailor on a flagpole is a long remove from a master of a reputable game played by elites. Still, no less a self-promoter than Shipwreck, Ely told stories about his life that stretched credibility.

  All that was known of Ely’s early life came from Ely himself. His story sparkled with adventure, romance, and drama, and seemed to compress the lives of at least ten brilliant, brave men all into one. He crossed continents, joined revolutions, stared down death. He was jailed as an anarchist in Russia. In Spain a bomb planted by his revolutionist friends failed to kill King Alfonso. He found himself on a rooftop in Mexico with Zapata’s revolutionaries, cartridge belts slung over his back and a rifle in his hands. Instead of shooting at government soldiers, he ran, and then boarded a boat to Cuba.

  He claimed to have been in a church with monks and in a brothel with whores. Despite his professed awkwardness with women, he wrote of lovers who satisfied his physical impulses: a governess, a French actress, and a Russian revolutionary named Nadya, who was murdered by the Black Hundred. Ely said he carried a revolver then and was slashed in the back by a Cossack’s saber. He faced an angry mob of social revolutionists in 1907 in Russia, announcing his shame that he was a son of an American capitalist. Such stories: He played poker, plafond, ecarte, and auction bridge in clubs, cafés, and in jail. In jail with seven Russian revolutionaries in Sochi, he joined their card game of vint. At each dawn, another cellmate was taken away, to a firing squad, and one said, “Good-by, Illiusha. There is no sense in these revolutions. Concentrate on vint!” He said he had attended fine universities across the globe, including the University of Geneva, Yale, and the Sorbonne. As a besotted bohemian in Paris during the war, he said he consumed oysters and snails, tripe à la mode de Caen, a nightly bottle of old Burgundy, and three or four glasses of Armagnac, and played cards with sophisticated friends in clubs, their group surrounded by women who wanted to be just like them. But these women were constantly replaced, “like the water in a well-kept swimming pool.” Ely wrote, “We looked upon women not as mates or allies—that was bourgeois romanticism—but as amusing or fascinating, though lower, forms of life.” Later, he became a hobo on New York’s Bowery, hawked newspapers, befriended a dope fiend, and then stowed away on trains out west. He worked as a common laborer building railroads near Edmonton, washed dishes and planted corn in Oregon, picked fruit near Fresno, and then—what a traveler!—he was back in Paris in 1914 when the Archduke was shot, then left for Germany and then Geneva. He idealized his Russian mother, and struggled to meet the perfection demanded by his American father. In his idle moments, he read Balzac, Flaubert, Shelley, Keats, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, Lermo
ntov, Gogol, Turgenev, Gorky, Volga, Twain, Poe, Goethe, Schiller, Heine. And when he arrived in Hoboken, a thief stole his bag of books.

  All this—he claimed—before the age of twenty-five.

  Four decades later, Alfred Sheinwold, a grand old man of bridge as an author, card theorist, and the Los Angeles Times’s syndicated columnist, laughed at Ely’s autobiography. “It’s a good book of fiction,” Sheinwold told the British author John Clay. “Typical autobiography is written with some pretense of giving a truthful narrative,” Sheinwold said. “But I think in Culbertson’s case he consciously set out to write fiction in which he was the central character.”

  Book reviewers raised a brow, perhaps to stifle laughter.

  “It seems, indeed, that [Culbertson] has done and been almost everything there is to do and be except to turn murderer and kill somebody. In point of fact, as a youth he had even that idea in mind,” a reviewer wrote in The New York Times. “Certain of the chapters appear to be exceedingly shrewd; others might have been extracted from almost any true-confessions magazine; others yet, if cast in wax, should appeal to the heirs of Mme. Tussaud. Card players will be interested in it naturally. Also psychiatrists, psychologists and both amateurs and experts in the art of kidding the public along.”

  The New York World-Telegram wrote that Ely “has managed in 48 crowded years to make Casanova look like a piker.… For some unfortunate reason his demon makes him tell the world a lot of things about himself that had been better left unsaid.”

  As I read Ely’s memoirs, I imagined poor Jo. He trampled with cruel insensitivity upon her wishes for privacy, writing in detail about the failure of their marriage. The breaking point, he wrote, came in Budapest in June 1937, at the first World Championship of bridge. As nerves and stomach ulcers tore at his insides, he had no stomach for bridge, or for Jo. They played miserably and lost to a team of Austrians, at which point Ely turned to his favorite partner and said, “It was your fault.” At that night’s closing banquet, Jo sat beside Archduke Frederick, honorary president of the Hungarian Bridge League. Champagne was “at flood tide,” Ely wrote, and Jo carried an air of “wild resolve.” There was a respectful introduction of the Culbertsons as “the king and queen of bridge, to whom millions of players owe an unforgettable debt of gratitude.”