Word Freak : Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players (9780547524313)

by Fatsis, Stefan

  He was tired of making the pieces, hunting for boxes in five-and-dimes, mimeographing the rules. So he just gave up. If an interested partner approached him, fine. In 1947, someone did. He was James Brunot, who worked for a New York State welfare agency and had served as executive director of the President’s War Relief Control Board in Washington. Brunot was living in Newtown, Connecticut, not far from Danbury, and getting tired of his two-hour commute to New York City. He wanted to start a small business that could keep him at home, where he and his wife, Helen, raised Dorset sheep.

  Brunot later said he was given a copy of Criss-Cross Words by a New York social worker who was one of Butts’s guinea pigs, and he played the game with his wife when they lived in Washington. When Brunot returned to New York, he learned that no one was manufacturing it. He contacted Butts, who figured he had nothing to lose. No one else wanted his game. Why not let this guy have a shot?

  Brunot hired a lawyer who said they could manufacture the game without infringing on any patent. Brunot played down the potential of the business. “It seems apparent that ... there is no marketable proprietary interest” in Criss-Cross Words, he wrote Butts. But “we do consider that it would be reasonable and fair in view of all the circumstances to have at least an informal understanding.” He offered Butts a small royalty on sales, which Butts accepted.

  Brunot made two significant changes to the board, turning the center star into a double-word-score square and eliminating four double-letter-score squares near it. He also made some minor cosmetic changes, altering the colors and design of the premium squares, which became pastel pink (double-word), baby blue (double-letter), indigo (triple-letter), and bright red (triple-word); the starburst-ridged sides came later. Brunot also conceived the 50-point bonus for using all seven tiles.

  And he changed the name. Brunot later said he never could remember where the word “Scrabble” came from, or whether he or his wife thought of it. “We made up a list of names we liked and we sent them to our lawyers in Washington, and when they wrote back that nobody had ever used Scrabble as a trademark, we used that,” Brunot said. The name wasn’t chosen so much for its sense as its sound. It means “to scrawl or scribble, or to scratch or grope around clumsily or frantically,” which can describe the act of searching for words on a rack, or grabbing tiles in the bag, but the aural link to scramble was what Brunot was after.

  In 1948, Brunot trademarked the name and obtained a copyright on the board design. Production started that summer. Brunot bought a supply of birch plywood that had been advertised as scrap lumber in The New York Times. He hired a few local woodworkers who sawed into tiles the long strips of wood onto which letters and point values had been silk-screened. Brunot wasn’t equipped to make boards, so he ordered a few hundred from Selchow & Righter. After assembling the component parts in his kitchen, Brunot sent copies to Alfred’s former customers, including an order form in each set.

  Alfred had little to do with the game. “Thank you for the set of ‘Scrabble,’” he wrote to Brunot in December 1948. “It looks pretty good to me, though I haven’t had time to do much more than glance at it. We are having a terrible rush of work, working nights until January 1. I would like to get two more sets to use as Christmas presents. Not knowing whether I can get it wholesale, I will wait until you let me know how big a check I should send you.” Brunot sent along the two sets, presumably at no charge.

  The newly christened game didn’t set the toy industry on fire. In 1949, Brunot sold 2,413 sets of Scrabble. Butts earned royalties of $149.27. In 1950, sales fell to 1,632 sets, and while Butts received royalties of $101.23, Scrabble lost $450. The next year was only marginally better: 4,853 sets and royalties of $135.43 for Butts. Brunot was still losing money.

  Brunot had named his venture Production & Marketing Company. At least the first part was appropriate. Unlike Butts, Brunot had the wherewithal, and capital, to produce the game in bulk; like Butts, though, he relied mostly on word of mouth to sell it. Promotion was limited to a few small ads in Saturday Review and in college publications like the Smith College Alumnae Quarterly

  Nonetheless, by the summer of 1952, sales had increased to about two hundred sets a week. Customers wrote asking for replacement tiles and complaining that their dogs were attracted to a chemical coating on the wood. But still Brunot considered folding the business if it didn’t do better soon. Then he and his wife went on vacation to Kentucky in search of a breeding ram for their sheep farm, expecting another two hundred orders on their return. Instead, they found orders for twenty-five hundred sets. The next week, they received another three thousand orders. And more the week after that.

  What happened? One theory, suggested by Life magazine in a lengthy profile of Brunot and the game, held that distribution had reached a critical mass by that summer and hit a tipping point among the smart set, who came home from their vacations and tried to purchase the game in stores. A more plausible story was that Macy’s chairman Jack Straus played Scrabble during his vacation on Long Island and was irate when he returned to New York to discover that the store didn’t stock it. Macy’s placed a big order, which triggered orders from other retailers.

  For whatever reason, sales shot up to more than five hundred sets a week in the third quarter of 1952 and two thousand a week in the fourth quarter. Brunot recruited his wife and friends to assemble the sets, which spilled out of the kitchen and into the living room. Brunot bought more machinery, began ordering tiles from a factory in Germany (which made them of Bavarian maple from the Black Forest), and rented an old schoolhouse. Orders kept increasing, and Brunot had to move into a converted woodworking shop, a small white building in the Connecticut hills next to a stream filled with trout and surrounded by woods and cornfields.

  By early 1953, Brunot had thirty-five employees working in two shifts producing six thousand sets a week. Which was terrific, except that orders were arriving by the tens of thousands, so fast that “they couldn’t even add them up, much less fill them,” The New Yorker magazine reported. Brunot licensed a cheaper version of the game, with cardboard letters and a board that was part of the box, to be made by Cadaco-Ellis Co. in Chicago and renamed “Skip-a-Cross”; it sold for $2. Finally, in March, he licensed the production and marketing to Selchow & Righter. And he converted the machinery in his Connecticut factory to manufacture the first deluxe version of Scrabble, a $10 item in a red imitation-leather case with white plastic tiles and plastic racks that included a built-in scoring device.

  In 1953, nearly eight hundred thousand standard sets, three hundred thousand cardboard ones, and thirty thousand deluxe versions of Scrabble were sold. In the span of two years, sales had increased more than two hundred times. In the history of the toy industry, no game had ever taken off so rapidly and unexpectedly. And it didn’t slow down.

  As I pore through Butts’s papers, the story of the game as a game—not as an obsessive, strategic, mathematical exercise—begins to make cultural sense. The country’s shimmering, suburban, stay-at-home, postwar prosperity was fertile soil for the sudden rise of Scrabble. What better way to demonstrate the American know-how and ingenuity that had just saved the world than with a game that tested one’s knowledge and creativity? What better way to luxuriate in the greatest prosperity the nation had ever known than by relaxing over a board game that, unlike Monopoly (Depression-era wealth fantasies) or Life (turn-of-the-century moralism), had no intentional social overtones? Leisure time was a concept just taking root, and what could be more leisurely, if not decadent, than Scrabble? It was a game of the mind that often took hours to play. America finally could devote itself to trivial pastimes. The country was infused with prosperity and suddenly enamored of education. Scrabble fit.

  Saturday Review said “the new word game has practically routed canasta among the upper I.Q.’s of the nation.” Time reported that Scrabble clubs “have convened all over the country” and that “hostesses serve a Scrabble board with the after-dinner coffee, and shiny markers wit
h A1 and Z10 inscribed are popping up on rural porches and in transcontinental trains.” The Life article said that “in intellectual circles the game is played in French or Latin; in Hollywood, games of dirty-word Scrabble are in constant progress; in New York, the Guys-and-Dolls set has converted Scrabble into the hottest gambling game since gin rummy.” The composer Igor Stravinsky and his wife, Vera, were photographed for The New York Times Magazine playing Scrabble at their Hollywood home.

  A newspaper ad for summer clothing at the Lord & Taylor department store showed three girls lounging around a Scrabble board with tiles floating around the page: “Some girls have more fun than anybody!” The queen mother apparently was one of them. While shopping in New York, she bought a Betty Crocker baking set from F.A.O. Schwarz, bejeweled sweaters from Saks Fifth Avenue, and bar gadgets and a Scrabble set on a revolving table from Hammacher Schlemmer. “I am just learning to play Scrabble,” she told the salesgirl. “Before 1953 departs,” the Herald Tribune wrote in an article summarizing the passing year, “it can point to any number of notable events, from the inauguration of a Republican president to the growth of Scrabble.”

  Shortages were epidemic. “Buying a Scrabble set in New York today is something akin to nabbing a prime rib roast at ceiling price during World War II,” the World-Telegram reported. Some customers placed their names on waiting lists, while others simply stood for hours inside stores until the next shipment arrived. A toy store on Manhattan’s Third Avenue posted a sign in its window: WE HAVE SCRABBLES. A New Yorker cartoon showed wedding guests rushing out of a church, leaving the bride to explain to the priest, “Somebody made an announcement that the store next door has Scrabble!” There were a half-dozen or more knockoffs, with names like Score-a-Word, Jaymar Crosswords, and Cabu, sending Brunot’s lawyers into action and prompting Selchow & Righter to take out ads urging customers to wait for the real thing.

  Devotees sheared off the tops of lazy Susans to make the board revolve, argued over what was and wasn’t a word, and discovered that surreptitiously feeling the tiles could yield the blanks (a form of cheating that came to be known as “brailling”). Brunot was flooded with proposals for innovations, to which he responded with a form letter. “If your idea relates to a turntable, a timing device, a box or bag to hold the letter tiles, or a device for turning the tiles over, we wish to discourage you from submitting it because such devices already have been submitted by a considerable number of persons.”

  Time, Look, Business Week, Cue, Pageant, Reader’s Digest, Family Weekly. When major media called, Brunot fielded the calls and was profiled. And Butts achieved minor celebrity as the quirky out-ofwork architect who invented the game as a way to scrape together a few bucks during the Depression. He appeared on NBC’s The Today Show, on WOR radio, on the Faye Emerson and Skitch Henderson TV talk show on NBC. When he was included in Current Biography for 1954, Butts was so delighted that he ordered twelve copies.

  Brunot didn’t appreciate, or understand, the depth or the passion Scrabble was inspiring. Disputes arose early over the use of words like MA and PA, and the musical notes RE, MI, FA, LA, and TI. “Brunot’s feeling is that if players want to use such words, they can,” Life wrote. “He personally does not give a damn.” Asked about players frustrated by the slow nature of the game, Brunot said, “Let them go out and buy an egg timer. It doesn’t have to have ‘Scrabble’ printed on it.” Approached by publishers to endorse one dictionary or another, Brunot was miffed that Scrabble was being taken so seriously. “It’s only a game,” he said. “It’s something you’re supposed to enjoy.”

  If Butts was hurt by Brunot’s dismissive comments, he didn’t show it. He simply answered every question he received—about where to purchase sets and whether colloquial words were acceptable and what to do if an opponent is stuck with the Q and can’t make a play. And he counted his money.

  An astounding 3,798,555 units of Scrabble were sold in 1954, one of the greatest performances in toy industry history. That included more than 2.5 million of the standard sets, 1 million cardboard ones, 82,000 deluxe, and, for the first time, 100,000 in foreign languages. Production of a braille edition began.

  Scrabble was the nation’s leading board game. Once the publicity abated, Butts had little to do with the game but sit back and await his royalty checks, which he tracked meticulously, in pencil, on block graph paper and yellow legal pads, in his neat architect’s handwriting. “The worst feature of all this is the tough time I have trying to convince people I am not a millionaire,” Butts wrote to an old college friend. “However, I will admit it is a pleasant change to stop worrying about income and begin worrying about income tax.”

  On each set of the standard game, which accounted for roughly three-quarters of all unit sales, Brunot received about 12 cents per set to 2.5 cents for Butts. Butts received no compensation from any other products using the Scrabble license. As bargains go, Brunot and Selchow got a great one. But Butts never complained, at least not publicly. “I never heard him speak ill of Brunot,” Bob Butts tells me during one of several pilgrimages I make to the Archives. “I kind of got the impression that it was his decision to go forward with the deal with Brunot and it was okay with him and that he just didn’t want to play hardball.”

  Alfred wasn’t a businessman. He was an unassuming and competent architect, content to live peaceably with his wife in his rental apartment and his ancestor’s house in the country and pass the time with his modest-man’s hobbies like collecting postcards and crafting wooden jigsaw puzzles. He and Nina had no children. He designed and helped start a local library. He organized his Poughkeepsie High School Class of 1917 reunions. The Scrabble royalties were more than enough for the couple to live the quiet, comfortable life they desired.

  It wasn’t chump change. Alfred’s royalties peaked at $81,376.37 in 1955. “I didn’t expect anything as big as that,” he told Brunot. “Scrabble should improve the vocabulary and I can claim I have played Scrabble longer than anyone else, but now I am running out of words. What comes after ‘fantastic’?”

  Much to everyone’s astonishment, the game’s popularity held strong. As expected, after the boom, sales did drop, to 2.3 million in 1955 and to just over 1 million the next year. In one of their infrequent meetings, Brunot told Butts that he figured sales would level off at about 300,000, and that “S&R believes same.” But it wouldn’t happen during Selchow & Righter’s stewardship. The company introduced magnetic travel sets, nonmagnetic travel sets, junior sets, “Waffle-Grid Revolving Board” sets. Sales ranged between 1.1 million and 1.6 million a year through 1970, and Butts’s royalties kept rolling in.

  In the late sixties, Brunot wanted to retire and have Selchow & Righter buy out his business. Butts balked, but eventually agreed. In his papers is a manila envelope, on it written in the shaky handwriting of a seventy-year-old man the words FINAL SCRABBLE AGREEMENT. Butts would receive $75,000 on January 1, 1971, and $38,000 a year for the next five years. A total of $265,000, plus interest. Brunot would get about five times that amount, or $1.325 million.

  Their business relationship over, the two men responsible for Scrabble dropped out of contact. They were never really friends; for the first five years of their relationship, they referred to each other as Mr. Butts and Mr. Brunot. When Butts once was asked to pass on regards to Brunot, he replied, “I have not seen or heard from Jim Brunot in a long, long time. After his wife died and he sold out all the rights to Scrabble, I believe he moved to North Carolina. But now I don’t even know whether he is still living.” A month later, in October 1984, James Brunot would die at the age of eighty-two.

  As I read the papers, I want to fight for Alfred. It was his game, his brilliant, enduring game, of which more than twenty-six million sets were sold by Production & Marketing and Selchow & Righter in the twenty-two years he was involved. Certainly that was worth more than $265,000. Not even all the money Alfred received over the years seems just. (And he calculated it to the penny: $848,046.28 through 1971, p
lus the remaining buyout and interest, for a grand total of $1,066,500.) Alfred may have been content, but I see him as another exploited inventor.

  I think of the hundred million or so Scrabble sets sold worldwide over the last half century, and the hundreds of millions of dollars reaped by the game’s three big corporate owners, Selchow, Coleco, and Hasbro. And I think that no marketplace can adequately compensate genius, and this one certainly didn’t.

  Nina Butts died of cancer in 1979, leaving Alfred alone in the Stanfordville house, where the couple had moved a year earlier after thirty-five years in Queens. To pass the time, Butts, in fine health at age eighty, once again started designing games, usually involving letters and numbers, which he would share with family members. “They were usually pretty tedious,” Bob Butts says.

  He sent one, though, to Selchow & Righter with a note. “The Scrabble Players Handbook shows my name as the inventor in the story ‘as American as apple pie,’” Butts wrote. “I have always been grateful for that recognition. However, I have never met anyone at Selchow & Righter since all of my dealings were with James Brunot and the Production and Marketing Co.”

  Indeed, Alfred had vanished into games history; some company executives didn’t even recognize his name. But they invited him down to New York, and learned that 1981 was the fiftieth anniversary of his conception of Lexiko, and the company trotted Alfred around the country on a media tour. Alfred got a kick out of it (and a $350 per diem), preparing for radio and television appearances with copious handwritten notes summarizing his life and his game. He liked the attention, particularly from young, female publicists who accompanied him on his rounds. When Selchow manufactured his new word game—which it named, oddly, Alfred’s Other Game—for the box cover photograph it posed the octogenarian in a tuxedo and seated him in a leather chair next to a buxom model in a black cocktail dress. He made guest appearances at a few Scrabble tournaments.