Vulnerable in Hearts Read online

  My great-uncle Willie comes by from time to time and, when he does, they bring out the cards. He taught their father and he might as well teach them. The way Uncle Willie teaches bridge is the same way the family has been taught the Catechism over the years. The basics are learned by rote, but what you do with them is entirely up to you. Just remember, you reap as you sow. And I have no doubt that the ‘basics’ Dad laid down for us when first he taught us bridge were the same ‘basics’ he imbibed when he was taught how to play by Uncle Willie and his parents. Like many of their generation, they had grown up with auction, but were quick to shift their allegiance to the new game of contract bridge now being universally marketed under the watchful and avaricious eye of one Ely Culbertson.

  15. Man bites dog

  TWENTY-EIGHT YEARS after Dad was born, my parents met at that almost obsolete social event, the bridge evening, at the home of a mutual friend. My mother had recently returned from Europe where she had finished a year at the Sorbonne and where she had fallen ‘more or less in love’ (her words, not mine) with an American studying medicine. She planned to return soon to marry him. The details of the bridge evening are lost to time, but what I do know is that two days later my mother broke her back in a car accident. Travel to Europe was out of the question. When she awoke in hospital, swathed in a full-length body plaster cast, my grandmother told her that my father had called. He wanted to know if he could come and visit her. My mother said he could, and their courtship began. For the next fifty years, he liked to say that throughout their courtship Mum ‘was plastered’.

  Not all bridge evenings have such a happy outcome. In his Hand of Bridge, Barber spoke to the fears and experience of a vast class of people for whom bridge was a social lubricant in the era before television. His was imaginary, but some bridge stories are true. The most famous social game of bridge took place on an autumn evening in 1929. It was an uncertain time for many. Wall Street had peaked a few weeks previously, although many were either unaware or uncaring that this was the case. The stock market crash was still four weeks away. Financiers on Wall Street had yet to start defenestrating themselves.

  Our story takes place in the home of John G. and Myrtle Bennett in Kansas City, Missouri. There is a cast of four. There is the perfume salesman, John G. Bennett, who is successfully advancing his career and the fortunes of the House of Richard Hudnut whose perfumes, compacts and eaux de toilette have lent a fragrant air to large swathes of the United States. And there are his wife Myrtle and their guests Charles and Mayme Hoffman.

  Mrs Bennett – I struggle to think of her as Myrtle – was a formidable woman. She came from Arkansas and had first seen her future husband in a photograph at the house of a mutual acquaintance. Even then, and whether as a joke or not we do not know, she declared he was the one she would marry, and she made good this promise a year later by recognising him on the train, engaging him first in conversation and then in wedlock and moving with him to their newly appointed apartment in one of the finer parts of town.

  Although by 1929 the Bennetts had been married for eleven years, they had no children (whether from choice or not, we do not know), and as befits childless couples of a certain income they had spent their Sunday playing golf with their friends. Towards evening, the weather turned and the couples decided it was too inclement to go as planned to the cinema. They would instead remain at home for what was known at the time as an ‘ice-box supper’ (which I take to mean that Mrs Bennett would not be overly taxed in the preparation of it) before settling down for a few rubbers of bridge. They agreed to play for table stakes of one-tenth of a cent per hundred, modest enough one would have thought to add a little something to the game, but not too high to cause anyone embarrassment when the reckoning came. At the trial – for there was a trial – Mayme Hoffman referred to them as ‘fun stakes’.

  On the evening in question, they played couple against couple, always a heady combination, and for the first hour or two all went smoothly. Luck went against the Hoffmans, and the Bennetts cooed at each other, as couples will when they are happy, in love and several thousand points to the good. But, as the evening wore on, their fortunes turned. Little has been written of it but one imagines also that they might have been a little drunk, for it was almost midnight when the fateful hand was dealt and that icebox supper was already a distant memory. As is the way of these things, the cross-table conversation turned sour or, to put it more soberly, comments were coloured with the dye of constructive criticism. In the words of the lawyer and bridge historian, Rex Mackey, Mr Bennett himself dealt the fateful hand ‘in a deal that became as legendary as the fateful Dead Man’s Hand of Wild Bill Hickok. Neither the locale, the players nor the stakes – one-tenth of a cent per point – appeared to be laden with doom, yet so it proved.’ As dealer, Bennett opened with a bid of 1 . Mr Hoffman, to his left, overcalled 2 , and Mrs Bennett leaped to 4 . Whether she should have done so has been the subject of controversy ever since. Certainly, it was optimistic. A bid of 3 might have been wiser. But 4 was what she bid and that was the contract in which her husband had now to play the hand, for the bidding ended there.

  Hoffman led and Mrs Bennett, as dummy, laid her hand on the table and retired to the kitchen where she began to prepare breakfast for her husband who was going early the next morning to St Joe. She returned to find that her husband had failed to make the contract and she proceeded to opine that he was ‘a bum bridge player’ and was heard ‘to comment unfavourably on his parentage’. He for his part confined himself to suggesting that she had overbid, before slapping her at least once. At the trial, the Hoffmans proved in this and many other regards to be wholly unreliable witnesses, but we can be reasonably confident that Bennett then headed for the bathroom, perhaps to cool off, while his wife fell on the accommodating bosom of Mrs Hoffman, bewailing her misfortune and expressing the unforgettable but alarming view that ‘No one but a cur would strike a woman in front of friends.’

  It is the qualification that causes one to wonder.

  Hoffman, perhaps wisely, confined himself to totting up their winnings and therefore was in no position to interrupt Mrs Bennett when she ceased wailing and disappeared into the bedroom from which she emerged carrying a Browning 9mm pistol. Four shots rang out. The first bullet went into the bathroom wall and the second into the lintel. The third and fourth lodged themselves in Mr Bennett, who promptly died.

  The next day, the story made front-page news across the world. It became known, almost accurately, as the ‘bridge table murder’.

  Mrs Bennett was arrested, confessed and was charged with murder. But she soon recanted her confession and adopted the persona of a grieving widow and for the next months confined herself to making cryptic remarks like ‘Nobody knows but me and my God why I did it.’

  Fortunately for those who were interested in promoting the game of bridge, particularly Ely Culbertson, it took seventeen months for the case to come to trial. Its re-emergence on the front pages coincided with Culbertson’s attempts to sell his new Blue Book on bridge. He was asked to participate in the trial as an expert witness and, having concocted a plausible hand for the occasion (for no actual records exist; those present were in no state to recollect exactly the distribution of the cards), he showed that the contract could have been made, and concluded that Bennett was, undoubtedly, ‘a bum bridge player’.

  This may or may not have helped Myrtle Bennett’s cause. There are many bum bridge players in the world who do not necessarily deserve to be executed.

  These were the hands, as subsequently put together by Culbertson:

  If these were the cards, I have some sympathy with Mrs Bennett’s view that her husband had bid a little optimistically, or ‘opened light’, as the more polite phrase puts it. To ‘open light’ is to start the bidding with a hand that is little more than average. And yet, as Culbertson pointed out at the trial, the contract could be made. ‘Mr Bennett had overbid his hand. Of that there can be no doubt, but even with this, so kind we
re the gods of distribution that he might have saved his life had he played his cards a little better.’

  In any case, Mrs Bennett, advised by her ebullient defence counsel, Senator James A. Reed, was playing down ‘the bridge angle’ for all she was worth. Weeping copiously on the witness stand, she told how her only intention had been to pack the gun for Mr Bennett to take with him when he headed off for St Joe in the morning. Missouri appears to have been the kind of place where perfume salesmen routinely travelled armed and dangerous. According to Mrs Bennett, she had returned to the sitting room where she stumbled inadvertently over a misplaced chair, thus firing the first two shots. Mr Bennett, not unreasonably, misread her ‘intentions’ and thought she was trying to shoot him, either for being a ‘bum player’ or for hitting her like ‘a cur’. He came out of the bathroom and tried to take the gun from her, in the course of which struggle she fired two more shots and fatally wounded her husband.

  In his battle to persuade the jury that the whole thing was nothing more than a terrible accident, Senator Reed was aided by the fact that the story Mrs Bennett had told at the time of the incident, which differed markedly from the story she told at the trial, was excluded on technical grounds. Whether persuaded by her tears or by their grasp of the enormity of her husband’s sin in not making the contract, we shall never know, but the jury went on to record a verdict of accidental death and Mrs Bennett went free. Perhaps their thinking was guided more by the mores of the times than by any consideration of forensic evidence or testimony. For, as one juror explained, ‘She was only a woman, unused to guns. We reckoned that, if she’d really been trying to hit him, she would have missed.’

  Quite what my father would have made of this story, I do not know. He would have wanted, of course, to know more about the hand, for the sin in his view would not have been to fail unnecessarily, but to have failed without style. Certainly, he would have had some sympathy with the assessment of Rex Mackey that it was not the Bennetts who were at fault on the hand, but the Hoffmans, who should have made a sacrifice bid of 5 , thereby saving Bennett from his unfortunate demise. But what would undoubtedly have tickled him pink was that the jury verdict that Mr Bennett’s death was an unfortunate accident meant the insurance policy taken to guard against his untimely demise was valid and Mrs Bennett, as sole beneficiary, was entitled to a cheque for $30,000 from a disbelieving insurance company.

  The conclusion to the story is perhaps best told in the words of the great newspaper columnist Alexander Woolcott, for it is possibly apocryphal. Writing about the case in 1933 – it is to him that we owe many of the details of the aftermath – Woolcott says that Myrtle Bennett has not ‘allowed her bridge to grow rusty, even though she occasionally encounters an inexplicable difficulty in finding a partner. Recently she took on one unacquainted with her story. Having made an impulsive bid, he put his hand down with some diffidence. “Partner,” he said, “I’m afraid you’ll want to shoot me for this.”

  ‘Mrs Bennett had the good taste to faint.’

  16. The man who made contract bridge

  THE EXTRAORDINARY THING is that the game the Bennetts played was less than four years old. That this murder should have been world news – that the game was world news – is largely due to the efforts of one man. Ely Culbertson, the ‘Man who Made Contract Bridge’, as his biographer John Clay calls him, came relatively late to the game. But, once he got there, he made it his own.

  By his own account, Ely Culbertson first played auction bridge (though only briefly) in New York in 1912, but it would be some years before he decided it was the game through which he would make his fortune. He had first to live a life of extraordinary dissipation. He was born in Romania on 22 July 1891, the son of an American oil prospector and a woman whom he describes as ‘a Cossack general’s daughter’. ‘My father’s people were as American as the cigar-store Indian. My mother’s people were as Russian as the giant and toothsome sturgeon that rush from the cold north down the many-mouthed Volga to lay their caviare in the great Caspian Lake.’

  They lived in some luxury in the Chechen city of Grozny. Culbertson’s formative years included a number of interludes that must have caused his parents some concern. He was, he says, at one time in danger of being executed as a revolutionary. Early love for a woman called Nadya – after whom he later named his daughter – drew him into the early proletarian struggles of the southern Caucasus. At sixteen, he was arrested and spent some months in prison with a number of revolutionary leaders who had been sentenced to death. It was one of these – a man named Ureniev who ‘was my hero, my saint, my Socrates’ – who taught him how to play chess and, more importantly, the finer points of Vint, one of the early forms of bridge.

  The young Ely was wholly taken with his revolutionary mentor. He already considered himself to be a master of Vint, but Ureniev ‘taught me principles I had never suspected’, just as ‘In life, he fired my imagination. He taught me how to translate the innocuous word “economics” into blood and thunder; how to distil reviving hope from black despair. He taught me how to think.’

  Useful skills, no doubt, but it was his parents’ interventions and the fact that he had an American passport that secured his release from prison. Ureniev was not so fortunate and, shortly before Culbertson’s release, he was shot at dawn.

  Culbertson’s father had by this time made a considerable fortune in the oil fields of the Caucasus and increasingly devoted his time to promoting the musical career of Ely’s younger brother, Sacha. Ely was left pretty much to his own devices, and started to travel. He read voraciously and he supported himself and a succession of lovers by gambling. By the beginning of the Great War, he was largely unemployable and largely self-educated and ‘the erudition for which he was admired can principally be attributed to a self-imposed and invariable regime of reading a book designed to improve his knowledge for at least one hour before going to sleep each night. In this he was aided by an aptitude for languages. He conversed fluently in Russian, English, French, German, Czech, Spanish and Italian and had a reading knowledge of several others, including Latin and Classical Greek.’

  In 1913, he decided to settle ‘in the West’ of the United States, and that en route he might as well ‘get a few glimpses of Canada’. It was on this journey that he met the four playing ‘a stupid game’. Soon after arriving in the United States, he left New York, heading for Canada. He spent time in the lumber camps until he was thrown out for being Bolshie. He made his way to California where he spent some time with the Mexican fruit pickers. In Fresno, he met a man named Johnson, an intellectual and stalwart of the Industrial Workers of the World, the so-called Wobblies. ‘Johnson, a tender, kindly man was a bitter enemy of the tyranny of the state, and feared all forms of dictatorship. He believed in individualism, conceived and executed in freedom. He opposed the struggle of the survival of the fittest, and proposed free association of individuals in the spirit of co-operation. I was captivated by the essential sweetness of the anarchist doctrine. It may be the system that will save humanity, I said to myself, very much impressed by its sweep, depth of imagination and Christlike nobility.’ These are the sorts of words with which he later speaks about bridge.

  Such innocence! Such charm! Think what the world might look like now if he had chosen this form of politics rather than cards as the rock on which to build his considerable (but wildly varying) fortune. Culbertson was swept along on a wave of revolutionary fervour. But he was conscious that he lacked a theoretical base. In search of one, he ‘dandified himself’ and enrolled at Boone Preparatory School in Berkeley with a view to getting enough credits to enable him to enter Stanford University. There he was ‘buried in books’. He learned ‘Proudhon, Bakunin and Kropotkin by heart’. He was about to fall in love with a nightclub ‘hostess’ when both he and she were saved by the arrival on the international scene of Emiliano Zapata. Culbertson decided ‘to leave immediately for Mexico, to study revolution in the flesh, so to speak, and help wherever I could’.
Following what was by now a well-established pattern, he fell in love and was thrown in prison. The two were not necessarily connected.

  But the Mexican revolution was confusing. Too many ‘revolutionary saviours’ appeared, each swearing that they and they alone would deliver the Promised Land. But as ‘a “veteran” in the organisation of conspiracies’, Culbertson was horrified by the ‘lack of discipline, or system, and by the sloppy inefficiency of these “revolutionaries”’. And so he sailed for Havana, then Cadiz.

  To read Culbertson’s account of his youth is a strange and compelling experience. He was a natural storyteller, given to sweeping statements about others which were curiously revealing about himself. All the Mexicans wanted, apparently, was ‘to get something to eat, to make love and to avoid back-breaking work’, a charge which, I think, accurately describes the path of his own life up to this point.

  Culbertson had ‘a bad war’. When the United States ‘entered’ the war in 1916, Culbertson volunteered. He was too ill for active service and offered instead to act as an interpreter. It was ‘the least he could do’, and he was mortified when the US Army rejected him. He was perfectly fluent in many languages and had passed his examinations in all of them with distinction ... except English. ‘It seemed my English lacked idiomatic flexibility, and betrayed a bizarre mixture of hobo and intellectual terms.’ As a substitute, perhaps, for military service, he drank copiously, gambled wildly, read voluminously and fell recklessly in love. He started to hang out with the wrong crowd. ‘I began to frequent certain Parisian cafés,’ he writes, ‘and private homes where I found small circles of people like myself – the disillusioned and the snobbishly egoistic.’ These were people for whom the Marquis de Sade is a hero, and for whom no bookshelf was complete without a copy of de Quincy’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater, and amongst such people Culbertson found temporary ‘solace in a world of artificial lights and shadows’.