We find some cards and a scrap of paper to score on – depending on the state of rivalries in the house, it is usually enough for one person to score – and take our seats. Sometimes we cut for partners. More often, we take our usual seats, and Jackie and I fight over who is to shuffle. Dad interrupts by dealing himself.
The memories suddenly seem oppressive. Jackie watches me looking through the packs of cards.
‘A bit sticky?’ she asks with a smile.
I acknowledge the point. Dad had long, delicate hands, not surprising for someone who could play the piano. But he was clumsy too. Perhaps he was too tall or perhaps he had had too much to drink. When he had been drinking a little too much his dealing – though not his playing – would become ponderous and excessively deliberate.
‘Are these new?’ he would ask to cover himself. ‘They feel a bit sticky.’ A cold silence would hang in the room while we waited for our cards to be ready.
‘Ah-tat-tat,’ Dad would say, slapping our hands away if we reached for the cards too soon. ‘Wait.’
It was rude to grab them too soon. It was also – which was more serious – detrimental to the interests of the game. What if there had been a misdeal? If someone had looked at their cards already, it would be too late to correct it. And so we wait as he places each card in turn, slowly, painfully, with a little click as his thumb snaps it on to the table. He raises his eyebrows as he deals and presses his lips together like a man on the edge of an announcement.
Jackie and I exchange glances. We’re a little afraid to look at Mum, as though a glance will acknowledge too much. We’re relieved when it’s our turn to deal, even though Dad drums his fingers impatiently while we do it. Everybody who plays bridge deals in their own way. The first card is dealt to the person on the dealer’s left. The last card is dealt to the dealer. Mum does it easily and quickly, finishing with a trademark scoop as she picks up her cards with the final card to be dealt. The cards that only a moment before were ‘sticky’ are suddenly smooth and easy to handle. Dad acts like he does not notice the discrepancy, but we know he does. He was never comfortable with his drinking.
Early on, I learned to count as I deal. Sometimes in fours and sometimes just straight through from one to fifty-two. Jackie is the quickest and the most precise. She slips the cards on to the table. They form neat piles in front of each player. When she’s done, she sorts them quickly by suit and just as quickly she opens the bidding. ‘One spade,’ she says.
Dad doubles. Mum passes. What do I do? In bridge, this is called the ‘takeout double’. It is a 100 per cent forcing bid. Unless I have about a million spades to the ace (unlikely, given that Jackie’s opening bid has shown she has five), I cannot pass. I have to say something – but what? Dad’s bid means he has a strong hand and at least three cards in all the other suits. It also suggests he doesn’t have many spades. Most likely he is strong in hearts. What it does not do is suggest that we can defeat a contract in spades – unless I have a whole bunch of them. According to the Encyclopaedia of Bridge, the takeout double was invented ‘by Major Charles Patton in New York and Bryant McCampbell in St Louis in 1912–13’. It was originally called a ‘negative double’ and later – after it was introduced to tournament play as part of the Roth–Stone system – a ‘Sputnik Double’, apparently because the Russian satellite went into orbit at the same time.
In our family, we play the negative double. I have to say something. With a very weak hand, I choose the smallest suit bid possible. If I have a moderately weak hand, I might bid one no trump. With a strong hand I have more choices.
On this particular occasion, I have a hand worth absolutely nothing – except that I have a void in hearts. Reluctantly I bid 2 . Jackie bids 2 and Dad overcalls with 5 . Mum doubles – this is for penalties, not for takeout. She is, with some justification, expecting me not to make the contract. Everybody else passes. Since I bid the clubs first, I have to play the hand. Jackie leads the ace of spades – meaning she has the king as well – and Dad tables his hand.
We go one down. I am able to use my void in hearts and Dad’s void in spades to cross-trump eight tricks. Dad has two high diamond honours, which gives us ten tricks. There is nothing I can do about the fact that Mum has the A-K-Q of clubs.
Dad is delighted. ‘One down is good bridge,’ he says.
18. The game goes global
ELY AND JO Culbertson are planning a family and he realises that he can no longer rely on gambling for his living. He needs something a little more reliable. He needs a plan. Typically, he has one.
‘You see, Jo dearest,’ he says to her, ‘if we are to make fifty thousand dollars a year as the leading authorities in contract bridge, we must be known to millions. That will take us about ten years. Of course, if we’re lucky, we may do it in five or six, but we’ll have to be mighty lucky. We’re handicapped by lack of money. However, that’s unimportant, since my plan is absolutely scientific.’
It actually took less than three years for Culbertson to become both famous and rich – and it had much less to do with luck and everything to do with Culbertson’s extraordinary abilities, the least of which was at the bridge table. His plan was outrageous and simple: by engaging in every area in which he might attract public attention, he would turn himself into a celebrity – into an ‘American Idol’, as he put it, seventy-five years before the television programme of the same name. And he would then use his celebrity to sell anything and everything that can be associated with bridge. But even he struggled to keep up with the spread of contract bridge. ‘The Winter months raced by. Contract bridge, begun by half a dozen players in 1926, had grown to a stream by 1927, a river in 1928, a torrent in 1929 and until now, in early 1930 it looked like a tidal wave.’
Among his many talents is an ability to keep a metaphor going, even if he is prone to sweeping exaggerations: ‘Daily, at least ten thousand players changed from auction to contract, and all of them learning our name and our system.’
And he knows that all of them need an authoritative voice to keep them abreast of developments in the game. After a series of unsatisfactory negotiations with publishers, he decides to publish his own magazine. He launches The Bridge World, which remains the leading bridge magazine today, and hires a staff. From time to time, he is unable to meet the payroll, but he persists – and his staff remain loyal. He gets into the cruise business, supplying ‘accredited’ teachers to The French Line shipping company. And, crucially, he resists all pressure to publish a book. They must wait, he insists every time someone suggests he write it. They must wait.
But what he really means is ‘We must wait’ – wait until ‘we’ are famous, until our names are known by millions. He continues with his preparations. ‘I gave free lessons ... I broadcast on the radio – free of charge. I gave free lectures. I buttonholed everyone I could meet ... In every letter and every speech I told them of my forthcoming work – the Blue Book.’
And then he is twice lucky. First, the great bridge murder comes to trial and he appears as an expert witness. The lachrymose Mrs Bennett is front-page news for weeks, and Culbertson is happy to join her there. But – more importantly – he receives a challenge from a Lt Colonel Buller of England who claims that a good English bridge team will beat any American one. Culbertson accepts the challenge and a date is set for the match to take place in London. In the heady days before leaving for London, he finally dictates the Blue Book. He – perhaps not surprisingly – gets stomach ulcers from the stress. At one stage, he is rushed to hospital. After surgery, he continues a punishing regime of dictating to a relay of secretaries for eighteen hours a day. Fortunately, he has Jo to do the difficult work. She checks the proofs and supervises production. The last chapter is dictated in the taxi to the New York harbour. He boards the ship and from the dockside his publisher, Lewis Copeland, shouts out a question: ‘How about a dedication?’
‘To my wife and favourite partner,’ Culbertson replies.
Sales are phenomenal. Th
e first print run is 6,000, of which 4,000 have been bought in advance by subscribers to The Bridge World. On his arrival in London, a cable from New York greets Culbertson:
BLUE BOOK OUT STOP FIRST EDITION SOLD OUT TWENTY-FOUR HOURS STOP SECOND THIRD EDITIONS NOW PRINTING ALSO SOLD OUT SUCCESS ENORMOUS STOP YOU ARE RICH
But still he and Jo could not relax. Defeat at the hands of Colonel Buller and his team could kill the sales of the Blue Book. To succeed, his system had to be seen to be working. Fortunately, the Buller methods were inferior to the Americans’, although, as many analysts have since pointed out, both systems left much to be desired. Rex Mackey quotes one hand in which Jo Culbertson drags her English opponents into a cast-iron game of 4 , ‘which neither wishes to bid. Then, to add a bonus to her generosity, she doubles them. And this was the match that made Culbertson famous!’
And famous he was. An international celebrity ready and willing to cash in on his fame. The old guard – those like Whitehead and Work, Sidney Lenz and Albert Reith, who had made their names before contract bridge was created – realised they had to respond. They formed the ‘Official Group’ and published ‘The Official System of Contract Bridge’ under the aegis of the ‘Advisory Council of Bridge Headquarters Inc.’ But Culbertson was ready to take them on. Before and after a whirlwind tour of Europe he issued a series of challenges to the Official Group. He was prepared to play them ‘anywhere, any time for any stakes they chose’. After much goading by Culbertson, Lenz reluctantly accepted the challenge.
Culbertson knew that ‘if the Buller contest was the foundation of his fortunes, defeat this time would be their ruination’, but in choosing Lenz he chose well, for Sidney Horatio Lenz was no less a character than himself. He made his millions in the timber industry and retired when he was thirty-five. He joined the Magic Circle, was US draughts and table-tennis champion for many years and played tennis and golf competitively with the very best. Lenz did not particularly want this ‘battle’ with Culbertson. He had nothing to gain from it; his fortune did not depend on bridge. But what he had not calculated was that Culbertson had everything to lose. And so the stage was set. The ‘bridge battle of the century’ would take place in New York City in December 1931 and everyone in the world would know about it – if only because Culbertson took the unusual but highly effective step of giving bridge lessons to a group of media moguls, including the then President of the Bell Newspaper syndicate. He made sure they understood the story – that he and Jo were the young innocents struggling to free themselves from the oppressive old guard represented by Lenz. Lenz had chosen Oswald Jacoby as his partner. The stage was set for Culbertson’s greatest triumph – or his greatest defeat. Even the New York Times called it the ‘sports event of the year’ and, looking back through the newspapers of the time, it seems that only two important events occurred in the United States that month. There was a presidential election, won by one Frank Delano Roosevelt, and there was a bridge game at the Chatham Hotel.
But for the moment Ely had to concentrate on the play and not on the extraordinary spectacle of bank presidents and actresses, bishops and publishers queuing to glimpse for a moment the great Culbertson at play. The America Mercury gives a good feeling of the mood in the hotel:
After minutes of unbearable suspense, the first messenger burst forth, panting and breathless with the world-shaking communiqué: Mr Lenz wins the cut and sits down in the North seat. The first words of the match were spoken by Mrs Culbertson. They are, ‘Where do you wish to sit, Ely?’ Telegraph instruments start flashing this piece of news to the farthest outposts of civilisation. Copyists, scribbling frantically, distributed copies of the hands to the throngs milling about in the corridors and lobby. In the room set aside for the working press, reporters phoned in the news. Hot upon the heels of the first message came another: Mr Lenz and Mr Jacoby get the contract on the first hand at three no trumps. Flash! Lenz and Mr Jacoby win the first rubber amid some of the most terrible bridge ever played by experts.
Culbertson called it ‘the greatest peep show in history’. His team won a total of 122,925 points and seventy-seven rubbers compared to Lenz who won 113,945 points and seventy-three rubbers. It was very close, but the scale of the victory mattered to Culbertson not one jot. His point was made and his fortune would be secure. He had millions of converts around the world. That the Official System was actually better was neither here nor there. As Alan Truscott notes, ‘With hindsight, the Official System theorists were generally right and the Culbertson was generally wrong, but Culbertson had the ear of the public ... in two important areas, valuation and the opening bid with game-going hands, the verdict of history has favoured Culbertson’s rivals. But nobody read their book.’
Everybody read Ely’s book. They read Blue Book in its many editions and, when the Gold Book supplanted it, they read that too. And, while they were at it, they read his magazine and Jo’s books. They read the little booklets he prepared for Chesterfield cigarettes and which the tobacco company distributed ‘free’ with every pack of cigarettes sold, and they read the wrappers on Wrigley’s Chewing Gum, on which were printed extracts from the Culbertson systems. They watched his movies – he made a quick run of six films for RKO Studios – and they listened to his teachers who now numbered more than 10,000. The RKO features, Mackey notes, may not have ‘made cinema history, but they made money’. It could easily not have been the case. By Culbertson’s account, ‘they sent a director, a scenarist [sic] and a gag-man from Hollywood to help me prepare the scripts. The gag-man decided to reverse the usual order in dealing and bidding. His theory was that what we needed in the pictures was the unusual, and that this would be funny. The director wanted a scene in which three southern ladies, looking for a ‘fourth’, pounced on a Negro butler. I wanted them all to go back to California ...’
Culbertson’s articles were syndicated to more than 150 American and foreign newspapers. Jo’s were in all the papers belonging to the Hearst Corporation. With typical panache, Culbertson gives this view of the aftermath of the ‘bridge battle of the century’: ‘The show was over. We won millions of new friends. We were world famous. And we were ruined! We had barely enough money for a one-week trip to Havana and back.’
The italics are his, but I can’t help thinking that, if he was ‘ruined’, it was a form of ruination devoutly to be wished. While paying for the ‘lobster-Newburg-lines of society people that I fed in the long corridor of the Chatham’ may have created a temporary cash-flow problem, his fortune was secure. The Blue Book and the Culbertson’s Summary of Contract Bridge sold in vast numbers and many languages. A Braille edition was produced. ‘They found their way into lumber camps, hospitals, and, appropriately, asylums. It is a fact that there was a near riot in Sing-Sing between two student groups who disagreed as to the correct system bid.’ All over America, and all over the world, the people read his books. They may have learned lousy bridge, but they loved it.
Not least in the southern streets of Edinburgh where the Blue Book and its wisdom were fed, piecemeal and then wholesale, to my father and his brothers. By the winter of 1939, bridge had taken a firm grip on the routines of the family where its many virtues are extolled weekly. My grandparents, like many of their generation, took it to be self-evident that bridge represented all that is wholesome. They would without question have echoed the views of Somerset Maugham who was, as we have seen, a fanatical bridge player. The successful player, he wrote, will be ‘truthful, clear-headed, considerate and prudent; these are also the essentials for the more important game of Life.’ And while it may be sad, as Rex Mackey put it, ‘to see the master of cynicism dipping his pen in golden syrup’, the idea that bridge somehow represented something good had taken hold. Nor did it appear to matter, as Mackey commented, that the enduring popularity of bridge could be ‘largely ascribed to its appeal to practically everyone [sic] of the baser human instincts’.
Mackey justifies this extravagant view by examining some of the motivations that ‘impel i
ts devotees to play, think, talk and live duplicate bridge year in and year out ...’ Perhaps, he begins, neither St Augustine nor St Thomas had bridge in mind when they placed Pride at the top of the list of Seven Deadly Sins, but they should have. For ‘no other product of human ingenuity has given the ordinary man greater opportunities to indulge in a vanity he is otherwise compelled to disguise.’ Well, indeed. But the theology of the Balfour household takes a benign view of pride. Effortless superiority is the ideal, but mere superiority will do and one should be proud of it. And this particular form of pride comes cheap. Even to play in the clubs will cost only half a crown or so, and at home it is free. Not even the deal in which Culbertson sold Kem, his playing-card company, to a group of German investors made it expensive to play the game. Of all the deals he did, and there were many, this is the one that he most liked to boast about. After a year of ‘psychological manoeuvres and counter-manoeuvres’, the investors offered to buy the company (then trading at a loss) for three hundred thousand dollars. This was 1937 and Culbertson was going through one of his lean periods. ‘Take the money and run,’ said all those around him. ‘Not a chance,’ said Culbertson. More fencing followed and more time passed. Culbertson turned down four hundred thousand and then half a million dollars. Eventually he agreed a price: six hundred thousand and ...
Vulnerable in Hearts Page 13