Ely stood for the ovation. He addressed the great hall. “Your Highness, ladies and gentlemen: I am most deeply touched …”
“Applesauce!” The voice, small and tinny, from the head table, was Jo’s.
Ely kept on: “… by this undeserved welcome to me and …”
“Quite undeserved.” Again, it was Jo, mocking him.
Ely smiled at her: “… and my wife.” The audience applauded, Ely continued, until he heard Jo say, “Don’t believe a word of it!”
Ely smiled at her still, as if their repartee had been planned.
“… when we lost the match,” he said.
Jo chimed in: “When you lost the match.”
“When we lost the match,” Ely restated.
“You lost the match,” Jo said, this time louder.
“… when I lost the match,” Ely agreed.
It had come to this, a public demise of the most celebrated bridge marriage of all. No Bennett-like slapping or gunshots, not even a bridge table, only a wife’s frustrations from fourteen years of Ely.
Ely switched to speaking in French, hoping Jo would not understand most of what he said, but he heard her mutter loudly enough for the Archduke to hear, “C’est terrible!” Ely closed in English, saying, “Hungary is a little country. But it has a big heart…”
“Which is more than you have,” Jo said.
Ely finished with glass raised in a toast to his wife. “Mrs. Culbertson is not only my partner in life but in bridge as well. And I’m sure I won’t be violating the bounds of good taste if I propose a toast to the person to whom I am more indebted than anyone else on this earth; whose patience, kindness, and love made my work possible; the greatest woman bridge player and my favorite partner. To my Jo!”
Everyone in the hall stood and applauded, save for Jo, who remained silent and seated. For Ely, this closing proved a masterstroke, at least for the moment. The First Couple of Bridge would never again play together in a competitive tournament.
The structure and chronology of Ely’s life as depicted in his memoirs (that is, his birthplace, parentage, and his arrival in the United States in 1921 on the SS Brookline) were factually accurate. But the intricately nuanced anecdotes he told provided circumstantial evidence of a master salesman creating product. Ely admitted fictionalizing aspects of his personality to make himself more memorable and marketable. It would be only a small step for a man who did that to also fictionalize aspects of his biography. “The basic technique in influencing the mass mind is sincerity,” Ely once said. “The crowd mind is suspicious and, while it admits exaggerations, there must be a kernel of truth.” The life story he told was built on the smallest of such kernels. His depiction of his education suggests as much. Despite his claims otherwise, he never attended Yale (his brother Eugene did), and though Ely spent a semester at the University of Geneva in the fall of 1914, school records indicate that he merely audited courses and opted out of final examinations. Exaggerations abounded. In 1931, he told a newspaper feature writer that once, down to his last 100 francs in wartime Paris, he put 20 francs on a baccarat table and by glorious luck it grew to 20,000. Now, in his memoirs, he suggested his baccarat winnings that day grew to 40,960 francs. I wondered: did he embellish all of his stories in this way, doubling the truth, or worse?
The carefully constructed mythology of Ely Culbertson’s life became so strong it overwhelmed the facts. Besides, as he well knew, Americans liked mythology more than facts.
Ely’s world peace plan was his gift to humanity, and he spent nearly all his time and money to sell it. He met with congressmen and senators, sent telegrams to Harry Truman in the White House. He would seek world peace with another Galatea as his second wife, Dorothy Baehne, a blonde out of Vassar, so young even her mother was a dozen years younger than Ely. Expenses at Ridgefield caused him to give up the estate. His intensity pushed him more deeply into secrecy and solitude, and ultimately to the fringe of madness. Dorothy left him, too, and blamed his mental cruelty. Contract bridge’s incandescent man had been reduced to a fringe figure, irrelevant and alone.
Bridge had a new celebrated star, Charles Goren, a Philadelphia lawyer once Milton Work’s ghostwriter. Goren had accepted Ely’s open challenge to all comers in 1936, but Ely withdrew his offer. By the mid-1940s, even with the emergence of gin rummy as a rival game, the Association of American Playing Card Manufacturers reported that contract bridge was played in 44 percent of American homes. More Americans were playing bridge than ever before. In April 1946, First Lady Bess Truman brought her bridge club from Jackson County, Missouri, to the White House, amid great fanfare. Lucy, Mary G., Adelaide, Mag, and Linda came from Independence to share a bridge cruise on the Potomac River on the presidential yacht, the Williamsburg. By this time, Goren’s syndicated column appeared in more American newspapers than Ely’s. Goren created his own bidding system, and would sell millions of books. His seminal Point Count Bidding in Contract Bridge in 1949 obliterated Ely’s honor tricks and, with them, the Culbertson System. Goren put Ely into total eclipse. Now social players asked, “Do you play Goren?”
Ely’s World Federation Plan of 1940, one of several such plans floated as the League of Nations withered, was designed to prohibit war. He subdivided the globe into eleven federations, each with its own constitution and government, and proposed armed forces supplied by each and a police force from smaller nations to confront hot spots. He used his bestselling clout in 1943 to publish Total Peace, a book outlining the plan. Then he lobbied journalists and politicians. Ely knew that many in Washington did not regard him seriously. He wrote, “I succeeded much too well, and became a victim of my own technique of publicity. Later, because I was ‘typed,’ like a Hollywood actor, it would be difficult to convince some people that a bridge authority could also be passionately and intelligently interested in the destiny of the country that showered him with fame and wealth far beyond his humble origins.”
As the United Nations charter was drafted in San Francisco in spring 1945, Ely holed up in that city at the Palace Hotel, desperate to be involved. He mailed five copies of Total Peace to President Truman and suggested to the president’s secretary, Charles Ross, that Truman devote two hours to consider his plan. “Though Native American,” Ely wrote to Ross, he reminded him that he was “brought up in Russia, knew intimately Russian revolutionists, and knows Russia as well as his own country. In urging President Truman to read this booklet now, I am only moved by conviction that I hold the practical solutions to some of the terrifying problems we are now facing.”
His plan went nowhere, though, in July 1945, he appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to discuss his views on the UN Charter. In December, with writer Dorothy Thompson, he met with Truman at the White House. By early 1948, Ely had created a revised peace plan. He spent five months in a Washington hotel lobbying members of Congress. Spending more than $400,000 (his estimate), he gained some support from politicians, but his plan, like many others, died on committee shelves.
In 1946 Ely had delivered a speech in Chicago on “Tomorrow’s World Today,” and when young Dorothy Baehne approached him afterward, he might have been forgiven for thinking she had answered his advertisement in an Italian newspaper more than thirty years before, seeking Galatea. Baehne was blond and beautiful, only twenty and refined, having studied in Germany and China.
The starstruck Dorothy saw wisdom and greatness in Culbertson. She heard him speak of world peace, and of the role she might play in helping him achieve it. She married Ely, then fifty-five years old, in January 1947.
Unknowingly, she had entered a family nightmare. Ely still looked after Jo. Following their divorce, Jo made only the occasional celebrity stop at a bridge tournament. She lived alone, in poor health and sadness, drinking too much. Their daughter, Joyce, replaced now in her father’s eyes by a wife roughly her age, had rebelled against Ely by engaging in an affair with an older man. She became pregna
nt, married the man, and was divorced soon after. She would need psychiatric help, and her young son, Steve, moved in to live with Ely and Dorothy. Ely’s son, Bruce, meanwhile, had engaged in teenage high jinks that cost him a spot at Harvard. Ely and Dorothy would have a son, Peter (who died by drowning), and then a second son, Alex.
I traced Alex to Florida. We spoke several times by phone, and he seemed excited to learn more about Ely. Later, on vacation with his wife in Northern California, Alex came to see me. Just three years old when his father died in 1955, Alex has Ely’s smooth facial features, high hairline, and expressive eyes. Modest and self-effacing, and a windsurfing outdoorsman in his spare time, he is a professor of psychology at a junior college in Florida, where he teaches a course on abnormal psychology. Over lunch, he told me he had first read Ely’s memoirs when he was fourteen, sneaking the book from the shelf of his grandmother, who despised Ely. He thrilled to his father’s exploits as a teenage revolutionary, but wondered about the character flaws beneath the words. Alex asked himself, “Have I caught this? Am I also completely self-absorbed?”
Our meeting prompted Alex to reread Ely’s memoirs. I also showed him a 1933 RKO film short, Three Knaves and a Queen, capturing Ely at the height of his powers. Ely’s Russian accent was less pronounced than his son had imagined, his voice higher pitched, his presence less intimidating. He thanked me for the “great gift” of the film and said he felt newly proud to be Ely’s son. Still, he said, “He fits all the clinical criteria for a narcissistic personality disorder.” Later he sent me the link to a website that defined the disorder as “a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), a need for attention, and a lack of empathy.” He said that Ely had lived in abstractions, and had had difficulty connecting with people on an intimate level. He wondered if, in Ely’s attempt to save the world, he sounded to politicians, as he must have sounded at times to some in the bridge world, stark raving bonkers. “It all ties in to megalomania,” Alex said. He expressed horror in the way Ely shattered the lives of Jo and their two children, and gratitude for his own “narrow escape.”
He asked, “What if I had been brought up by the man?”
He showed me letters exchanged between his parents that revealed the magnitude of Ely’s dysfunction and despair near the end of his life. Alex’s grandmother, Hildegarde Baehne, had given him the letters so that he would know Ely’s true nature. She included a letter from Dorothy’s attorney, who described Ely as “a man of great intellect, very domineering,” and Jo, his ex-wife, as “an alcoholic and sometime resident of mental institutions.”
In the spring of 1954, Dorothy told Ely by phone that she wanted a divorce. He asked, “Why?”
“You’ll see it in a letter,” Dorothy said.
“Is it another man?”
“Of course not. You know me better than that.”
“Is it sex?”
“No.”
“But why, then?”
In her letter Dorothy explained that she wanted her own identity:
I, your Galatea, have thought, despaired, wept, and come to know that my own salvation lies in making my life apart from yours. This is not a frivolous decision, nor is it entirely new.… Do you remember once our talking about the meaning of love? I said that I wasn’t sure what it was, but that I believed I must love you because I feared to displease you. That was a wrong definition, Illiusha, as you must have known. Somehow, the fear is gone now, but the affection and tenderness remain. I hope that, similarly, you will not cease to have regard and affection for me.
In a small handwritten scrawl filling six pages, Ely wrote back, professing shock over her letter: “Your demand was a thunder clap in the blue sky.” He accepted her decision and promised to provide financially for her and Alex. He made the same offer he had made to Jo: if, after a year of living alone, Dorothy wanted to reunite with him, he would remarry her. He said he was ashamed by their divorce.
Then his venom and ego poured forth. “You write to me: ‘Your Galatea has grown, my dear, and is searching within herself to find her own purposes, goals, ideals, values, and strivings.’ And what are these, your own ideals that you search [for] within yourself, my dear?” He added:
You are married to a man who holds the key to the solutions of the most terrifying problems of our time; or, at least, the man who is nearer to these solutions than anyone else; or, at least, a man with an altogether extraordinary and valuable political mind. He is your Teacher. You saw that man attack, advance, retreat and advance again in the greatest battle of all time. You linked with his hopes and frustrations and you shared his small victories and bitter defeats. And now when the greatest crisis of humanity is rapidly approaching you decide to leave him—for what?.… No, my dear, that is not my Galatea. I wanted a modern Jeanne d’Arc, not some dark Jeanne. If this man were a drunkard, a wife beater and filled the cup with the gall of life, my Galatea would stand by to serve in all humility—for the man she is serving is of the very few whose ideals might save the world. Even a small part of his creative work (for so much is at stake) would be worth a hundred great paintings or symphonies. And what did you do? You abandoned me when you could be of the greatest help to me, in the name of what?
Ely’s unraveling was complete. Alex told me, “Normal people don’t speak about wives as if they are formless lumps of clay. It makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck.”
Dorothy divorced Ely in 1954, after more than seven years of marriage, and took custody of Alex, then a toddler. (Dorothy later remarried, but died tragically in 1963, at thirty-eight, from complications following childbirth. Alex was adopted by her second husband, John Marvin, and today uses the name Alex Marvin.)
In the final year of his life, Ely worked on a second memoir, designed to cover the last decade and a half. He dictated several hundred disjointed pages, but did not finish. The manuscript, which is held at the American Contract Bridge League library in Memphis, includes Ely’s notes at the bottom of some pages. Mostly, he wrote about women and sex. After his divorce from Jo, he returned to brothels and generally engaged in “big-game hunting of unusual women.” One woman, he wrote, became pregnant by him. She had set him up as part of her plan to seek a “superior individual”—Ely, naturally—to father her child.
What was his purpose in writing this? Was all of it true? Was any of it true? On one page, Ely wrote a note to himself: “Maybe the above description is too good for Margot and should be kept for Sophia.” This suggests conflation or fabrication. Is this what Ely did in writing The Strange Lives of One Man?
Through Alex I found Steve Culbertson, the son of Ely and Jo’s daughter, Joyce. In a bit of serendipity, he lived not far from me. We met in a coffeehouse in the North Beach district of San Francisco. Steve spoke softly, his eyes downcast. At sixty, tall and blond, he seemed uneasy and nervous talking about Ely. “I have a lot of anger—had a lot of anger,” he said, self-correcting—“against my grandfather for what he did to my uncle and my mother.” Ely’s grand experiment to shape the lives of his children failed miserably. Steve says his mother, Joyce, “ended up going to a mental institution. I would see her on holidays—just Christmas, really.” His uncle Bruce, meanwhile, worked for a technology company, married and divorced, and was throughout his adult life “a functional alcoholic. He was very neurotic.” Steve said that Joyce and Bruce rebelled against their parents. Of Jo, he remembered his grandmother as “elegant, noble, cool, reserved, aloof… sort of distant, sad. Being a grandmother was sort of a duty.”
He retained a young boy’s memories—and fears—of Ely as a stern and stooped old man. “Very dark eyes,” Steve Culbertson recalled. “I always remember him as a frightening character. Yeah, I was scared of him. He was not somebody a child felt comfortable with. He was very imperious and autocratic.” He said Ely forbade him from playing cowboys and Indians with cap guns. “He thought that way he would coerce world peace,” Steve said, rolling his eyes.
Our conversation seemed for him not cathartic, but painful, an old wound reopened. Steve Culbertson does not play contract bridge, and he said, “That is intentional.”
On December 27, 1955, Ely died at sixty-four in Brattleboro, his lungs desiccated from more than forty years of Turkish tobacco. Eighty-seven days later, Jo died in New York City, apparently of a stroke. She was fifty-eight.
Contract bridge went on, if less colorfully, without them.
SEVENTEEN
San Francisco
I sought to immerse myself in bridge today, to measure the game’s changes during the past three quarters of a century, and to see if human nature at the table had changed.
Over time, the Culbertson craze, like Culbertson himself, faded. Following the war, America returned to high prosperity, and while contract bridge was widely played (a Gallup poll in 1947 named bridge America’s favorite card game), young people with money sought new distractions. Automobiles put them on the road, their families more mobile than ever before. Goren’s reign was long and prosperous, and from 1959 to 1964 he hosted a popular television program on bridge. But television steepened bridge’s decline. The computer age dawned, American culture became faster, more hectic and impersonal, and for the younger generation, bridge, a game requiring study and patience, dried up like an old riverbed.
The Devil's Tickets Page 25
