Vulnerable in Hearts Read online

  And then the war ended. So, according to Culbertson, did this cycle that ‘had taken five miserable years to complete’. And with that – though I wonder at the simplicity of the decision – he decided to start again. He would support himself at cards, sufficient to fund his studies, and with a typical flourish he found someone with whom he could compare himself. ‘Spinoza, I reflected, worked as a glass grinder four hours daily, earning enough to devote the rest of his time to studies. Why can’t I do that with cards?’ He started with poker, at which it was relatively easy for a man of his abilities to make money. He had soon accumulated enough to ‘move over to a game of Plafond at the Café Régence’, where the future British prime minister Andrew Bonar Law used to spend his time playing chess with Russian revolutionaries. There he made a bit of money, paid his debts and moved to London ... then Berlin ... then Riga ... then Brussels.

  It is in Brussels that he came across the writings of Milton Work and made the ‘interesting’ discovery that some people in America were making good money teaching bridge. He decided to ‘be the first bridge teacher in Europe’ and placed advertisements in the papers. Strangely, the Belgian authorities took a dim view of this idea. They looked into his record, found traces of his supposedly revolutionary past and deported him.

  Culbertson stands back to consider his situation. He has, he believes, little choice but to head for home, which he has by now decided is to be New York City. His father and brother are there, and he shares their apartment. It is 1921. He is thirty years old, with no job, no income and no qualifications. He falls in love, though not seriously, with an opera singer, through whom he meets other women of means and with plenty of time for leisure. They hire him to teach them about French literature. He is as surprised as anyone. ‘The fee offered was two dollars a head – an enormous sum for me then, merely for talking about French literature. I became a teacher. I was brilliant, grave but devastatingly obscure ... I toyed with the idea of marrying for money.’

  And so on, and one detects in all Culbertson writes about himself the perfect training for the bridge player and salesman he was to become. Everything is an opportunity. Everything is possible. Wind and rain, sunshine and snow – all are the same for the bridge player, for one’s success in the game depends not on whether you win or lose, but on how you cope with what you have. You are not playing the cards, but the people. For Culbertson, teaching French literature leads to teaching bridge – except that he and his new partner, a Mrs Shelton, have no pupils. Instead, they play with each other, and he teaches her the systems that have stood him so well in the salons and cafés of London, Paris, Brussels, Berlin and Riga. In the absence of clientele, they decide to pay a visit to the Knickerbocker Whist Club for an evening of duplicate bridge. In 1921, the Knickerbocker is as good as it gets. Everybody who is anybody plays there and anybody who plays there is somebody. Culbertson is determined to be a ‘somebody’. Seeing ‘a woman with a stranger’, several regulars offer games at high stakes. Culbertson and Shelton win easily – more than a thousand dollars, so he says, and, when asked what system he plays, he says ‘the Culbertson System’. ‘It was the first time that my name was pronounced in a club. It sounded strange, hollow, absurd.’

  Or so he claims. I suspect, actually, that it sounded completely thrilling. From that moment, Culbertson’s name and his fortune were to be inseparable. His system was to be the ‘Culbertson system’; his books were to be Culbertson’s Blue Book, Culbertson’s Gold Book and so on. He was that class of tycoon for whom business and self-promotion were the same thing and it began with him saying his name as often and as loudly as possible.

  He becomes a regular of the Knickerbocker Club. After a short time, in which his winnings have reached more than one thousand dollars a month, he is invited to play ‘on the third floor’, the inner sanctum of the club where the best players congregate, amongst them Sidney Lenz and P. Hal Sims, the latter of whom Culbertson considers to be ‘the best card player I ever knew’.

  Also amongst them is Mrs Josephine Dillon, a bridge teacher regarded by many as ‘America’s greatest woman player’. Given her refinement, beauty, youth, brilliance and winning smile, I am not surprised to find that Culbertson is instantly in love. That she proceeds to take him to the cleaners on one particular hand in which she twice bids a suit in which she holds a void, and then proceeds to double him, only adds to her allure. He makes what is for him an uncharacteristic and possibly disingenuous admission: ‘So captivating was her charm that even if she had not been physically attractive, it would have made no difference.’ I could fall in love with that woman, he thinks, and the italics are his. Close readers of his memoir will know that all Culbertson asked before he fell in love was that the woman had a pulse and laughed at his jokes, but, in the case of ‘Jo’, it appears that the admiration was real. That she had already been married was a challenge rather than an obstacle. Her divorce, followed by her ex-husband’s untimely death, had formed a ‘cynical moat of bitter waters around her heart’, and who better to storm them than Ely? All through the winter of 1921, he lays siege to her heart. He even shows her his voluminous diaries which, unsurprisingly, persuade her that he would be a dangerous man to marry. ‘You could never be a husband,’ she says, or, rather, he reports her as saying, as she leaves for Saratoga for the season.

  But finally she succumbs. They marry, almost in secret, on 11 June 1922. He, of course, is no more employed or employable than he has ever been and their existence is precarious. Jo Culbertson teaches, Ely gambles and he continues ‘to live in that twilight of frugal luxury which is an Eleusinian mystery to economists, toilers and tax collectors’. He thinks perhaps he will become a writer, but fears that this would be unwise and might ‘jeopardise the material future’ of ‘a woman who had risked her life for me’. In an isolated attack of what one might call conscience, Culbertson decides ‘to change’. His inner voices (he counts seven of them in all) appeal against the decision. ‘So finally, after all these years, you’ve decided to become a bourgeois! Not even a rich one. Ely, listen to me; don’t be a fool. Better be a gambler, better a bum, than to sell the best of yourself for money.’ But the voice he called ‘the Business Manager’ wins this debate and a parliamentary compromise is reached. For ten years, he will devote himself exclusively to making money, to give Jo the ‘home and stability I had promised’.

  Jo is sceptical but enthusiastic. ‘Special bridge cards were printed. They read ELY CULBERTSON, Bridge Instructor.’ He planned it ‘like a military campaign’, for what he realised before anyone else was that it was not enough to be a teacher. He had to have something to teach, a system, a methodology that was recognisably his. Jo was already recognised as ‘the greatest teacher in the country’ (and not only by Ely), but she had only a few pupils and taught general principles of the game. All this is to change, though first there is work to be done. He writes articles for every publication, and he ghost-writes for every authority. He lets his name be mentioned, but no details be known. He becomes that most marketable commodity: a mystery. His name is everywhere, but nobody knows who he is or what, precisely, he does. When Jo asks him why he doesn’t write his own book, he replies that there is no point writing a bridge book until you are famous. ‘No matter how good it is, only a few thousand people will read it. It’s like shooting sparrows with a howitzer. When I write my book the stage will be set for a big show, and I’ll reach the multitudes.’

  He sets about simplifying his system and its presentation. He also needs to establish himself as one of the best, for, as Rex Mackey says, ‘Culbertson was not, by a long chalk, in the front rank of New York card players.’ He is, however, a brilliant judge of people and he manages to attract to his team of four two of the greatest players of the time, Theodore Lightner and Waldemar von Zedtwitz. One sees it in this sketch of Lightner.

  ‘He is gloomy and pessimistic, easily discouraged at first; but if things go from bad to worse he becomes a man of indomitable will, for then, having lost
all hope, he starts to fight out of sheer spite.’ It was Lightner who invented the ‘Lightner double’, the only double of a slam bid of which Skid Simon can bring himself to be approving. ‘To my mind the Lightner slam double ranks as one of the most brilliant contributions to Contract Bridge yet made. It is simple. It is practically foolproof. It prevents partners who play it from making other, idiotic, slam doubles. And it is mathematically advantageous. I’ll swap you all your Asking Bids for it, and throw in the Blackwood Four-Five no trump as well.’

  The Culbertson four quickly establish themselves as the foremost auction bridge team in the country.

  In 1926, the Culbertsons move for a time to California and set up a bridge salon at the Biltmore Hotel. They win $6,000 in a game with a casino operator who misjudges Jo’s ability to play ‘like a man’ and for the first time their money worries disappear. Jo concentrates on teaching, Ely on business development. All the while they are still playing auction bridge. It is not until 1927, at a game in Santa Barbara, California, that Culbertson finally plays contract bridge. A new game. A game without experts or patrons. A game where the playing field is, for a brief moment, level. Culbertson is quick to recognise the possibilities here. He decides to make the game his own.

  The couple return to New York where Culbertson’s father is very ill. His father apologises to Culbertson that he has left him no fortune. His dying wish is that Ely, when he has a moment, should return to the Caucasus to prospect for oil. He had discovered what is, he is sure, a very rich oilfield, but until this moment he has told no one about it. He hands Ely a letter. The envelope is inscribed: For Ely. ‘You will find all the instructions inside,’ his father whispers. ‘There is also a rough map.’

  Culbertson completes the story, and with it that period of his life: ‘We laid him to rest next to Mother. And we placed no tablet on his grave. As Jo and I rode from the cemetery, I felt a bulge in my coat pocket. It was Father’s letter, containing the map. I had forgotten all about it. But in my heart he left an imperishable map revealing the secret treasures of human kindness and love – the map of his beautiful life.’

  17. The square yard of freedom

  DAD LEFT ME no parting gifts. Just a quick ‘my regards to the kids’ and ‘the rest they will get from you’. Walking through our house of memories, I wonder what has happened to our card table. Mum has gone to sleep and it is too late to ask her, but David finds it tucked behind a door in the study. It is covered in burgundy felt, although I remember that, when we were learning, the felt was green. It is a standard table, made from mahogany, with four legs that fold out and a frame into which the felt-covered tabletop fits. It is a perfect space. Dad calls it his ‘square yard of freedom’. It is a place where he can be free from the many claims that life makes on his attentions. It is his arena for excellence.

  Bridge can, of course, be played without a table, but it’s nice to have one. It lends an air of formality to proceedings. Morton Sobell, the third accused in the Rosenberg espionage trial of 1951, was sentenced to thirty years’ imprisonment. He describes how he and other inmates played bridge in Alcatraz prison in San Francisco Bay. On his very first day on Alcatraz, Sobell was invited to ‘make a fourth’, and it soon became a regular way to fill the hours. Playing cards was forbidden in many prisons, including the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, from which Sobell had been moved to Alcatraz. But on ‘the Rock’ it, ‘was the only card game. We used a special deck of dominoes, rather than cards. They came in four colours to denote suits and the values were denoted by the number of dots: jack was 11 etc. And we had a wooden ledge for holding the dominoes so they could not be seen by others.’ Not just a wooden ledge, but a card table too. The table was a ‘blanket-covered folding-leg bridge table cut down to about 20 inches in height. We sat on hassocks.’ Unfortunately, the bridge games had to share the yard with baseball games and the like, and ‘on frequent occasions a softball would land in the middle of the table’.

  But what impresses most about Sobell’s recollection of the game on Alcatraz is its extraordinary capacity to pass the time. To commit to a game was to commit ‘for the whole day’ or ‘frequently for the whole weekend’. ‘With a population of 250 men it was not unusual to have 20 games going on weekends. It was a sight to behold: The men all bent over in their thin pea coats in the foggy drizzly cold playing all weekend long, about five or six hours each day. Usually the men arranged the game Friday night for a 25,000 or 50,000 point series. Whoever reached the figure first won. The bets were usually the moth-eaten stale Wings cigarettes which were distributed, three packs a week, to each man.’

  Sobell was one of only a handful of ‘political prisoners’ on the island. Most were criminals with a history of escaping from other prisons. Most had never played bridge until they came to Alcatraz. But what impressed Sobell most was that ‘each night, on returning to the cellhouse, many of the men would replay each of the hands from memory, discussing the bidding and the play.’

  The ability to remember hands comes with experience, as well as with aptitude. Just as counting trumps is ‘automatic’ for experienced players, so is remembering the lie of the cards and the key decisions, like what to lead, when to lead it. Each hand of bridge is a story. Character and plot are determined in advance. Cutting for partners determines who will play the hand. The deal decides with what. But the narrative unfolds only as each card is played, and, as we saw in Barber’s operetta, the story is both physical and psychological.

  Of course, some hands are hard to forget, because of the cards and the setting, or for the people who played them. I remember a story, for example, of a South African, Derrick Hirsch, who spent a large part of the Second World War in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps and who kept extensive records of the hands played. He was a passionate bridge player, referred to often as ‘the driving force behind the amazing bridge organisation in one of the most festering camps in Siam’. Early on in the war, prisoners had to create packs of cards from anything that came to hand, just as Sobell and others did with dominoes on Alcatraz a decade later. But, as the war wore on, the Red Cross came to realise the popularity of bridge, and cards, scoring pads and even bridge books soon became a regular feature of Red Cross parcels. In an article in the Contract Bridge Journal in September 1947, J.G. Jordan described how bridge helped prisoners of war to stay sane. ‘No other game could have assisted us so well,’ he wrote. ‘See that Colonel there? Couldn’t play at all three years ago; watch him now with fierce intensity planning a pseudo-squeeze ... In a word, bridge has become the principal means of keeping occupied the minds of half the camp, occupied against the ever-present menace of boredom which, behind the wire, is the forerunner of mental instability.’

  Nowadays, we have computers for that sort of thing. Any duplicate bridge club will produce ‘sheet hands’ at the end of the evening so that one’s hands are recorded for posterity. Perhaps this is helpful, if only to remind us that, while bridge may be a game of purposeful ambiguity, a game of bluff and double bluff, it is also a game of memory, tactics and probability. The mathematics of it are similar to poker, but a professional would rather play poker, because bridge is more risky – which is to say, more susceptible to chance. In part, this is because it involves playing with a partner. But bridge is also more technical. It requires mastery not only of probability and distribution, but also of the complex permutations of sequences of play. There are after all a little over 635 billion possible individual hands and 53,644,737,765,488,792,839,237,440,000 or 53 octillion possible full deals. And then there are several trillion more ways to bid them.

  And yet individual hands remain in the memory. In his camp in the Far East, Derrick Hirsch suffered for his passion. One guard knocked out four of Hirsch’s teeth with his rifle butt as punishment for playing bridge when he had been instructed not to. Despite this, a ‘high point’ of the year in camp was the ‘international’ match between Dutch PoWs and British PoWs. Coming from an ordinary shuffle was a deal so unlikely that even the
guards were interested:

  This was ‘tournament bridge’ and so the hand was played twice. In one ‘room’, the Dutch held the East-West cards. In the other, the British held them. The Dutch quickly bid their cards to 7 and made all thirteen tricks. But the British pair had a misunderstanding in the bidding and ended up in a contract of 7NT. It was impossible for them ever to get the lead and the Dutch again won all thirteen tricks. As Andrew Ward points out in his guide to Bridge’s Strangest Hands, ‘North-South had the minors and East-West had the majors. And who knows, they may even have had a major playing for them.’

  Our bridge table carries with it a flood of memories. I realise I have probably never seen the legs in use. It was only ever the detachable top that came into play. It’s to do with the geography of the rooms in our house. The dining room, with its huge old stinkwood table and upright riempie chairs, is a dark and Spartan place, dominated by a large Welsh dresser and hung with copper pots of varying vintage. The sitting room, by contrast, is bright and modern. It looks out on two sides to the lawn, the flat crown tree and beyond it what I invariably (though no doubt inaccurately) remember as a silver moon rising over the distant sea. The sitting room is a better place to play bridge, but it is a huge room. Around its edges are arrayed eight or nine chairs of differing degrees of comfort. My father, with his stool, his pipe, ‘his’ bookshelf with its ever-changing collection of pulp fiction culled weekly from the local library, his chair (and in later years the television remote) sits north-east. My mother (knitting, letters, crossword, books) sits south-west. The children move about the remaining chairs. When we play bridge, a small rosewood table is called into action. It opens up to reveal a surface that is marginally smaller in all dimensions than the playing surface of the bridge table. Unlike the bridge table, it is exactly the right height to play on while seated in an armchair. When we are about to play bridge then, the only question is whether to ‘set up’ in the north-east or south-west corner of the room. In either case, the bridge top is placed on the rosewood table and three other chairs are drawn around.