The Devil's Tickets

by Gary M. Pomerantz

  The American Contract Bridge League today claims about 160,000 members. The typical ACBL member is older than sixty, college educated, and financially secure. A 2005 ACBL survey suggested that 25 million Americans know how to play bridge—roughly the same number Ely claimed in the early thirties, except the nation’s population was 120 million then and more than 300 million now. The Internet has been a boon to bridge players across the world, who can find a game now at almost any time. The ACBL survey indicated that 4.1 million Americans play over the Internet, with 12 percent of them playing daily. But the Internet has also depersonalized bridge, and harmed local clubs and minor tournaments, reducing attendance. Poker, a gambler’s game of bravado and bluff, which takes comparatively little time to learn, has gained wide popularity with the younger generation to a degree bridge has not. Contract bridge still has its patron saints: where once it was Vanderbilt and Schwab, now it is the billionaire bridge aficionados Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, who jointly fund a program to teach bridge to teens in schools.

  In autumn 2007, I observed the ACBL’s North American Bridge Championship in San Francisco, where more than six thousand people filled tables at a downtown hotel. I kibitzed for hours at a time, observing players, moving from table to table. I interviewed some of the game’s best players. They knew only a little about Ely and Jo, and the Knickerbocker Whist Club (which shut its doors long ago), and judged the overall quality of bidding in the age of Culbertson as wooden and simplistic. The rich history of the bridge craze era has lived on in bidding conventions known as Josephine and the Jacoby Transfer, and also in the von Zedtwitz Award, given annually to a player from the past nominated by the ACBL Hall of Fame Veterans Committee. (The remarkable Waldemar von Zedtwitz secured his bridge legend by winning the World Mixed Pairs title in 1970, when he was seventy-four years old—and legally blind.) In 1964, when America’s leading bridge writers voted for the inaugural members of the Bridge Hall of Fame, Ely topped them all, outpolling Goren and Vanderbilt. Years later he was joined in enshrinement by his “favorite partner.” Almost without exception, today’s leading players have heard about Myrtle and Jack, and many have read the supposed Fatal Hand in bridge anthologies. One insisted to me that Myrtle was acquitted only because of her beauty, which, he explained, “did not escape the judge’s notice. She got on the witness stand and cried, and showed a little leg.”

  In each interview, I asked about married couples playing as bridge partners. The subject invariably prompted raised eyebrows, smiles, and a few snickers. The real trouble, these players agreed, occurs when one spouse is a far superior player to the other; the marital power dynamics kick in and the partnership inevitably burns with irritation and frustration. I read a delightful little book, How to Play Bridge with Your Spouse.… and Survive!, regaled by author Roselyn Teukolsky’s stories about the clash of wills that have come from playing with her husband. “My feminist sensibilities bristle at his ‘ In-this-partnership-I-am-always-right’ mentality,” Teukolsky wrote in 2002. “I resent his masculine lack of self-doubt. Somehow, without saying it, he manages to convey to me this message: ‘If the little woman would only be quiet and listen occasionally, she might learn how to play bridge.’”

  We are three-quarters of a century past the night when Myrtle called Jack a bum bridge player.

  I am listening to Frank Bessing talk about married couples who play bridge as partners, one of his favorite topics. A self-professed “bridge addict” of more than forty years, and with a Ph.D. in family therapy, Bessing is animated and intense in our discussion over lunch. He says, “I actually feel like I am loaded with testosterone after a successful bridge game. I just feel”—here he growls playfully—“Arrrgggghhh! All pumped up, like I took three Viagra.” Bessing, who is divorced, says nearly all of his long-term bridge partners have been women. “Mostly they have been lovers also,” he says. “My women bridge partners tend to have a pretty highly developed masculine side. They are really competitive and they really hang in there.” Bessing shows me a callused nub at the tip of a finger. A bridge player’s finger, he calls it. During play, he bites that nub—and it hurts. “It’s a hypnotic technique,” Bessing says. “It serves as an anchor to retain in my memory what I am seeing.”

  Now Bessing says, “The very first time you play bridge with somebody may be the best game you’ll ever have together. It’s very much like a courtship period in a relationship. You live in that area people call ‘Love is Blind.’ Frequently it brings out the very best in your partner and yourself.

  “But in bridge partnerships, as is marriage,” he adds, “frequently the expectations start to get too high and then there are disappointments. In bridge, as in marriage and in relationships, some of it is, ‘How is my partner treating me?’ And as in marriage the main conflict is often, ‘Who is in charge?’”

  Herein lies the rub, Bessing says: “When there is a conflict at the bridge table where you think your partner has violated an agreement you have, try as you might, you feel kind of like you just got betrayed. When your identity and sense of self is caught up with being successful and being good at what you do and then your partner ruins this for you because they don’t follow your agreements, you feel attacked on a very primitive level.

  “I think it pushes the button where you get this big shot of adrenaline. You are ready for this fight or flight. You really can’t get up and run from the table, although I have seen others do it more than once.

  “But in one way or another you are physiologically responding as if there is an enemy across the table from you.”

  In some instances, the enemy across the table would apply to the person you married.

  Myrtle Bennett (aka “Auntie Mame”) was eighty-seven years old in 1982 when she visited with her cousin Carolyn Scruggs (at right). Personal files of Carolyn Scruggs

  EIGHTEEN

  Little Rock

  My search for what became of Myrtle seemed at times like an archaeological dig to find a dark truth long buried. But at other moments, shafts of light and gaiety broke through, such as when Carolyn Scruggs, the only living beneficiary of Myrtle’s who knew her, said, “I really loved Auntie Mame.” That was Scruggs’s nickname for Myrtle, coined after she saw the 1958 movie that starred Rosalind Russell as a madcap New York party girl, circa 1929, who drank martinis, smoked from long cigarette holders, and hosted ribald parties where her adolescent nephew learned words such as libido, Blotto, narcissistic, and Cubism, and served cocktails to guests with a smile, promising, “I’ll make it like I do for Mister Woollcott!”

  Scruggs adored Myrtle, and once asked, “How am I related to you, Auntie Mame?” Myrtle answered, “Oh, I don’t know,” and they laughed. They agreed they were cousins, sharing a great-aunt, Maude, cotton fields, and Briar’s Point, Mississippi. Myrtle signed letters and cards to Scruggs, “Auntie Mayme,” once explaining the misspelling by saying that she had an old friend by that name (Mayme Hofman, undoubtedly). She called Scruggs Caroline, not her name, but it was all part of their relationship, their silly fun. Auntie Mame phoned her late at night to ask, “How’s your love life?” “Not good, Auntie Mame,” replied Scruggs, who never married.

  I sit in Scruggs’s neatly appointed home in Little Rock, listening to a southern storyteller’s richly textured stories. Scruggs was two months old in 1929 when Myrtle shot Jack. She heard nothing about the killing during her formative years, even as Cousin Myrtle visited Little Rock and sent Christmas cards from New York accompanied by photos of her lively bridge parties. Scruggs knew only that Cousin Myrtle was tall, funny, well dressed, and that her parents invited friends over to meet her.

  En route to Europe in the summer of 1951, Scruggs and college classmates gathered in New York, where Scruggs spent a few nights with Myrtle at The Carlyle. They shopped and saw a Broadway show. Myrtle issued a safety precaution to the young woman: “The taxi driver may not drive you through Central Park. He must drive you around it, even if it costs more.
” Scruggs saw Myrtle’s regular bridge group, women holding similar positions at The Pierre and other elite New York hotels. The women arrived on Sunday morning and drank gin fizzes into the night as they played cutthroat bridge. Myrtle’s pet peeve: inferior players. When Scruggs and her classmates boarded their ship in New York Harbor, Myrtle saw them off with a celebratory bottle of champagne.

  The following year, when Scruggs was a twenty-three-year-old airline stewardess, she learned the unspoken truth. She went on a date arranged by Myrtle with a military flyer named Al Ebert, whose mother, Elmena, was an old bridge friend of Myrtle’s from San Antonio. That night, Elmena Ebert told Scruggs, “We so love Myrtle! She was one of our dearest friends. We were all just so sad about that dreadful episode.” Scruggs had no idea that Mrs. Ebert had been a character witness at Myrtle’s trial or even that there had been a trial. Neither did she know that Elmena Ebert had told her son Al, “Jack Bennett really did Myrtle wrong.” Scruggs only nodded, as if she knew all about that dreadful episode. Later Scruggs phoned home, recounted the exchange, and said, “Mother, there’s something about Auntie Mame that I don’t know, isn’t there?” Scruggs’s mother said she had never intended for Carolyn to hear the story about “that unfortunate chapter in Myrtle’s life.” (Scruggs smiled and told me, “It was a scandal, and Southerners are, well, you know, we tend to make life work out the way we want it to… We shade the truth a little.”) Her mother told her that Cousin Myrtle always had a temper, especially as a spoiled young girl in Memphis, and that Myrtle had learned, perhaps even that night in September 1929, that Jack was having an affair with a woman in St. Joe. So the shooting was not really about that bridge game but about Jack’s terrible behavior, and when Jack fell dead, it was an unfortunate chapter.

  Scruggs delighted in Myrtle’s company even after knowing that Auntie Mame had chased Jack with a gun in her hand and shot him dead. She handed me two old photos of Myrtle. In the first, from 1938, Myrtle smiled broadly—her teeth white, perfect—and her face considerably heavier in the seven years since the trial. The second, from 1982, with Scruggs at her side, showed Myrtle at eighty-seven years old, wearing pearls and silver earrings, her hair white, her posture still erect and impressive. When Scruggs’s mother died in 1979, Auntie Mame phoned to say, “Well, babe, it looks like it’s just the two of us. Don’t you worry, your old Auntie Mame is going to take good care of you.” Scruggs says Auntie Mame once had a boyfriend—she wore a gorgeous ring with emeralds and diamonds—but he drank too much, or so the story went, and they broke up. She said after Auntie Mame left The Carlyle, she worked during the 1960s for a hotel chain, setting up interior design and housekeeping in new hotels in Europe and Asia. Along the way, she met women at the bridge table, and a few became lifelong friends. She played bridge always, on cruise ships and, once, on a houseboat in Kashmir.

  Scruggs joined Auntie Mame in Wiesbaden, Germany, in 1964. There, at a hotel front desk, Scruggs overheard a military man say he was from Arkansas. Scruggs introduced herself—she and this colonel had common friends in Little Rock, naturally—and that night she and Auntie Mame dined at an old German castle with the colonel and another officer. By night’s end, the colonel had given Myrtle a kiss on the cheek. “Well, Auntie Mame’s my kissin’ cousin now,” he boasted, and Myrtle blushed. A few days later, Scruggs saw Myrtle leave with the colonel in a military plane for Paris.

  Bridge, vitality, world travels, and gin fizzes carried Myrtle to her ninetieth birthday and beyond. In an undated handwritten letter (likely from the early 1980s) to Ada Mae and Eddie Simpson, Oklahoma cousins who had cared for Alice Adkins until her death in 1936, Myrtle’s freewheeling nature and keen attention to her personal finances emerge.

  “July 11—Under the Dryer getting a Perm,” she wrote from Florida. She added:

  Hi Folks, Well, I had to get a Perm. Wish I could be at your house. It wouldn’t be half as expensive, says I.

  Eddie, I have changed all my Securities to your address there. Have also made some switches in Securities & Bank accounts. Have bought some bonds, both tax free & otherwise. As soon as I get them all in, will send you a list of each & all as you should have all this information on your files.

  I have no plans at the moment to go any place—is too Hot to travel tho you can never tell about me. May drive up to your door at any time. Are you expecting the kids from Calif. at any time.

  Don’t work too hard. Let me hear from you folks & love to all.

  Aunt Myrtle

  Inevitably, her health began to fail. She suffered mini-strokes, with their resulting slurred speech, and a fall that broke her leg. Her Oklahoma cousins came to get Auntie Mame.

  At ninety-one, imprisoned by physical limitations, her personality darkened. She became cantankerous. From Florida to Oklahoma, Eddie and Ada Mae Simpson drove their station wagon and pulled a trailer filled with Myrtle’s belongings. Eddie’s younger brother Walter drove Myrtle in her Olds ‘98. Myrtle asked Walter to stop in Memphis. She said she wanted to see the church where she and Jack were married. But Walter missed the Memphis turnoff, and Myrtle exploded with rage, until he pulled over and said, “Eddie, you can take this car and I’ll take the station wagon.”

  She spent four years with the Simpsons, and by their account made them miserable in their own home. Finally, at wit’s end, they put her in a nearby nursing home. Myrtle never forgave them for it, and took immediate corrective action.

  In the summer of 1990, Bill Armshaw’s phone rang. Secretly, using a medical taxi, the resourceful Myrtle had left the Oklahoma nursing home and returned to Florida. She told her stockbroker she had checked into a nearby home. Armshaw told her, “Don’t sign a thing, I’ll be right over.” Amazed, he rushed to see his ninety-five-year-old client and friend. She seemed of sound mind, and determined to return to her North Miami Beach apartment.

  Then Armshaw’s phone rang a second time. Ada Mae Simpson was calling from Oklahoma. Myrtle was gone, she said, and no one knew where. Armshaw heard genuine worry in Ada Mae’s voice. “She’s here,” Armshaw told her.

  Back in her high-rise apartment overlooking the water, living with a caretaker, Myrtle soon had visitors from California. They were reminders of her past life, relatives of her late husband. Jack Bennett’s nieces, Mary and Helen, had visited Myrtle in the late 1970s. Now Mary came with her husband, Walter Jacobs. During their visit, Myrtle’s vitality surged, if only briefly. She took Mary and Walter to a duplicate bridge tournament, where the couple finished second.

  Meanwhile, still furious with her Oklahoma cousins, Myrtle rewrote her will in August 1990. She removed Eddie and Ada Mae Simpson, punishment, no doubt, for having sentenced her to a nursing home.

  Yet her declining health left few options. In November 1991, she returned to a Miami nursing home. The Arkansas cousin Scruggs, visiting her, once spoke with Auntie Mame’s attorney as they stood together near her bed. As Myrtle slept, the attorney told Scruggs to persuade Myrtle to sign a power of attorney giving Scruggs decision-making authority over Myrtle’s care. Both the attorney and Scruggs believed Myrtle needed the nursing home’s twenty-four-hour care. Scruggs did not think Myrtle would sign any such document, but she would ask.

  Myrtle opened her eyes. The attorney advised her to sign the paperwork. “Just leave it here,” Myrtle said.

  When Scruggs and the attorney left her room, Myrtle phoned Armshaw and said, “I’m furious.”

  Armshaw laughed. He asked, “What are you furious about now?”

  She told him what her attorney and Scruggs had said while she was feigning sleep. Myrtle thought they cared about her, but now she knew the real truth: they cared only about her money.

  “Get me a new lawyer,” Myrtle said. “I want to draw up a new will.”

  On December 3, 1991, she created her third will in a five-year period. This time she added her caretaker (“my trusted companion”) and reduced Scruggs’s share to a nominal amount of Oklahoma G
as and Electric Company stock.

  NINETEEN

  Santa Rosa, California

  On the day Myrtle Bennett died, her caretaker, newly named in her will, phoned the emergency contact posted on Myrtle’s refrigerator—no longer Carolyn Scruggs, but Mary Jacobs, in Northern California.

  Later that day, Jacobs called Armshaw. In the decade and a half that he had known Myrtle, the stockbroker had heard her mention Mary Jacobs only once—when redrawing her will in 1990. He thought Jacobs’s phone call was more mercenary than familial. She “didn’t talk about Myrtle, she talked about the money, and how fast she was going to get it, and how much she was going to get,” Armshaw said. “There was some ambiguity in the will on the Putnam Funds and [Mary] Jacobs threatened to sue unless she got all the Putnam Funds.”

  Myrtle’s estate was valued at $1,062,144, mostly in bonds and securities. After taxes and legal fees, the payout to beneficiaries was $840,203. According to federal tax returns filed by accountants for Myrtle’s estate, Jack Bennett’s niece, Mary Jacobs, received stocks and bonds valued at $656,000, and another niece, Jacobs’s sister, Helen Fugina, got stock worth $16,000.

  A longtime bridge friend who had helped Myrtle escape the Oklahoma nursing home received securities worth nearly $89,000. Armshaw’s three children received a combined total of stock worth $65,000. Myrtle gave her caretaker bonds worth $9,000, and Scruggs’s stock was valued at $3,400.

  At her instruction, Myrtle was cremated and her remains were sent to Eddie and Ada Mae Simpson in Miami, Oklahoma. There, per her wishes, the Simpsons buried her ashes in an urn beside Alice Adkins in the Grand Army of the Republic Cemetery. The Simpsons were reimbursed for burial costs—$276.13—the only money they received from Myrtle’s estate. Eddie and Ada Mae have since died, but I spoke by phone with their son, Leroy Simpson, who later sent me an e-mail from Colorado saying he had found an envelope with papers that Myrtle had left in a weather-battered trunk during her stay with his parents in Oklahoma. Ten days later a large envelope arrived on my desk, and out tumbled Jack Bennett’s official World War I service record, a Jackson County court filing from Myrtle’s murder trial, checks signed by Jack and Myrtle in 1919 and 1920 from banks in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and San Antonio, Texas. The contents also included a 1992 letter from a woman in Florida named Marion Randall, an old friend of Myrtle’s, who several weeks after Myrtle’s death wrote to Ada Mae Simpson, “I’m so happy and thankful to you for arranging a funeral for Myrtle, which she really didn’t deserve. It was such a shame that Myrtle had words with you because I think she had all intentions of leaving everything to you and Eddie.… After 72 years, Myrtle didn’t even leave me a pleasant smile.”