Winchell was an indefatigable, ink-stained gadfly who, as a columnist first for the Evening Graphic (a lowbrow daily ridiculed by competitors as the “Pornographic”) and then for Hearst’s Daily Mirror, seized upon gossip and turned it into his own high art of ballyhoo. Like the tabloids that launched him, Winchell was abrupt, catty, and always hustling. A night owl, he wrote about Broadway personalities and turned his flashlight upon their tangled, often secretive romances. He challenged the traditional standards of journalistic good taste, maddening competing newspapers and his own editors, who were often unsure whether to publish his latest unverified piece of gossip. Winchell finessed his way around potential libel suits by creating his own “slanguage,” a vernacular of the streets, breezy and colloquial. He wrote of secret lovebirds who were “Adam-and-Eveing it” and of a man who felt “that way” about a woman as they awaited “the blessed event.” A mention in Winchell’s column was greatly coveted, and feared. The column had a chatty cadence, a rapid song-and-dance-man’s beat. He dropped names, often of celebrity writers, when possible: “At the opening of a play recently Baird Leonard turned to Dorothy Parker and said, ‘Are you Dorothy Parker?’ and Dorothy replied, ‘Yes—do you mind?’ “Winchell reacted physically to gossip, and one observer noted that he “seemed to purr with delight when he had a particularly juicy item… He was as fascinated and unself-conscious as a four-year-old making mud-pies.” Ben Hecht thought Winchell wrote “like a man honking in a traffic jam.” There were other gossip artists at work in New York, but none so widely read, or so intensely despised. The actress Ethel Barrymore, who feuded with Winchell, would say, “It is a sad commentary on American manhood that Walter Winchell is allowed to exist.”
Amid this cacophony was the Knickerbocker Whist Club, a noiseless oasis at 26 West Fortieth Street. Here the self-satisfied elites of American auction bridge, the reigning card game of the era, built and burnished their reputations. By requirement, the Knickerbocker’s more than 250 members exhibited good temper and a strict adherence to an honor code of card play nearly two centuries old, as attendants, moving with stealth, placed fresh glasses of water at their elbows every half hour or so. Some of the club’s older members had been wearing their eyeshades and stroking their chins, deep in thought, since the Cleveland and McKinley administrations. Women were not allowed as members—as bridge players, they were considered conservative and easily intimidated—though club rules permitted them in Thursday night games.
By 1915, auction bridge had forged two world capitals, London and New York, and the most prestigious gentlemen’s bridge clubs in both became like fortresses, where wealthy members in evening attire shared stiff drinks with men of their own stature, and tried to take their money at cards. The Portland Club in London was the recognized rule maker of British bridge, a role held in America by the Whist Club of New York, at 38 East Thirty-ninth Street, with its small, exclusive membership (well heeled enough to play auction bridge at fifty cents a point), which included sportsman Harold S. Vanderbilt and club president Charles Schwab, the steel titan who was once Andrew Carnegie’s right-hand man.
But for most of the East’s leading players, the Knickerbocker was the bridge club of choice. Typically, its members were moneyed men of leisure who, if not natives, had migrated to the city from the Midwest, the South, and Europe. They shared intellectual gifts, competitive intensity, and an unswerving devotion to bridge. Founded in 1891 by twenty enthusiasts of whist, the Knickerbocker started at the Broadway Central Hotel. It led a nomadic existence over the next three decades, migrating from whist to auction bridge, and moving, after the war, for the seventh time, to the brownstone on West Fortieth. When the New York dailies first devoted columns to card games after the turn of the century, Knickerbocker members became regular contributors, spreading the good name of the club: Robert F. Foster in The Sun, George Kling in The Tribune, and E. T. Baker in The Evening Mail. The club’s top players wrote bridge books for posterity and one another, and sought to prove their cognitive superiority at the table. Between games, they gossiped about other members and boasted of success in business and with mistresses.
On the brownstone’s fourth floor lived perhaps New York’s most influential bridge authority, the Knickerbocker’s president, Wilbur Whitehead. One floor below was the inner sanctum of the club’s best players, entered by invitation only.
In that inner sanctum, in early 1922, Josephine Dillon made her startling breakthrough. Only twenty-three years old, tall and slender with bright Irish eyes, her reddish gold hair carefully marcelled, her eyebrows expertly penciled, “Jo,” as she was known, played bridge with a growing confidence and tenacity. Her table presence and subtle movements were elegant and ladylike, her long, supple fingers dropping the cards softly, her cigarette holder cutting broad arcs, her voice, small as a hummingbird’s, passing heartfelt compliments: “Nicely played, Whitey,” and “That was magnificent, Sidney.” Her women friends called her the Duchess for her regal coolness. Jo Dillon let no one close to her. She shielded her deepest thoughts and feelings. The men liked her immensely, and sought her attention with suggestive comments and furtive glances. Since the war years, she had been a part of their group on Thursday nights. Jo bullied no one at the table. She credited their brilliance, and the experts liked that, too.
Raised in the Bronx, the young Josephine Murphy was graduated from Morris High School (where she played the adolescent game of basketball in steel cages) and later served briefly as secretary to an executive in baseball’s Federal League, Pat Powers, who turned to promoting six-day bicycle races. Then she worked as a stenographer for Whitehead. Whitey adored Jo (there were whispers that she had been his mistress) and offered her indoctrination in bridge. Jo admitted to him that she barely knew a heart from a spade, but while working for him she developed a keen interest in auction bridge. Since Whitey was club president, if he wanted Jo on the Knickerbocker’s third floor, no one dared challenge him. There, Jo discovered bridge experts pitiless in applying the principles of scientific and practical accuracy in their bidding. They hoped their systems were much like the club’s brownstone: built methodically, and solidly, to stand the test of time.
Jo proved a quick study and soon found herself among America’s great players: Whitehead, Sidney Lenz, Winfield Liggett, P. Hal Sims, Waldemar von Zedtwitz. Here was a Murderer’s Row of American bridge, an eclectic mix of sportsmen and Renaissance men: an amateur magician from Chicago (Lenz); an old soldier/Virginian (Liggett); a banker from Selma, Alabama, who once tried to irrigate the Congo (Sims); and a lexicographer who fought as a baron in the Kaiser’s army and whose maternal great-grandfather ran for president of the United States against Abraham Lincoln (von Zedtwitz).
What these men shared was card-playing brilliance.
To them New York City was the center of bridge, the Knickerbocker its pantheon, and they were its gods. They wrote newspaper columns and books about bridge (with modest sales), and believed that every meaningful bridge-bidding system and convention had been conceived in New York. The mention of London would invariably cause one of them to harrumph, “Irrelevant, behind the times!”
These experts saw themselves as a master race, and knew each other by agreed-upon nicknames—Whitey, the Shaggy Giant, Commander, the Baron—monikers earned by amiability, appearance, military service, and birthright.
Of course, the game had long had similarly memorable and celebrated characters, dating to contract’s forerunner, whist, and the colorful British writer Henry Jones (whose pen name in his whist writings of the late ninteenth century was Cavendish) and, even earlier, to the famed French gamesman and whist champion Guillaume le Breton Deschapelles. A brilliant light of his age, and a genius and braggart of the first order, Deschapelles possessed, according to a contemporary, “a brain of so perfect an organization for the acquirement of games of skill, that it may be fairly said, the world never, in this respect, saw his equal.” Born to prosperity in 1780, his father gentleman
of the bedchamber to Louis XVI, Deschapelles as a young man volunteered to march with the spirited youth of Paris in battle against the Prussians. Trampled by a horse, his skull laid bare by a saber, another gash traversing his face on a diagonal from brow to chin, his right hand slashed off at the wrist, Deschapelles, left for dead, rose. He mastered chess in four days, he boasted (which led to cynical comparisons to the seven days of Moses), and then turned to whist. He played one-handed, holding and sweeping up his cards with dexterous elegance. A bold and daring player, he saw his fame overtake the card clubs of Europe. It was said that backers agreed to deposit a quarter million francs to support any whist match Deschapelles undertook. To the Knickerbocker experts, he was remembered for the Deschapelles Coup, a stratagem of playing the king, or other high card at the head of a suit, to force out the ace or other high card held by an opponent, thereby making good a lower card in his partnership’s possession.
Ambling through the Knickerbocker corridors, Wilbur Whitehead usually had a protégé or secretary by his side. Whitey, a hale fellow with a gray mustache, was former president of the Simplex Automobile Company. A giant of auction bridge, he had invented conventions of bidding and play: the quick trick table of card values, the Whitehead system of requirements for original bids and responses. When he wasn’t lecturing (occasionally on the vaudeville stage) or writing about bridge, Whitey was playing it, or analyzing his most recent hand. By his fiftieth birthday, in the world of bridge at least, he had done it all.
Sidney Lenz, a wiry, athletic Chicagoan, was also part of the auction old guard. Lenz would soon become The New York Times’s first bridge writer. His wry sense of humor revealed itself at the table, and in his columns for Judge, a humor magazine. The evolution, beginning in the 1890s, from whist to bridge-whist to auction bridge had hardly troubled Sid Lenz, as the hundreds of auction trophies in his showcase testified. He made his money in the timber business, and retired in 1910 at the age of thirty-seven to devote his life to hobbies and games. A man of many interests, he pursued his hobbies aggressively. He once bowled an average of 240 across 20 consecutive games (a long-standing record), played chess with the famed Cuban champion José Capablanca, and spent a year in India studying magic, becoming a member of the Society of Amateur Magicians, a genius at sleight of hand befriended by Harry Houdini.
P. Hal Sims, from Selma, once represented U.S. banks in foreign nations, and possessed the ultimate bridge table presence. With a thick shock of perpetually mussed-up brown hair, the Shaggy Giant was six foot four and three hundred pounds, the Babe Ruth of bridge, the Knickerbocker’s most feared player. Playfully, friends called him Nero. Occasionally Sims brought the Knickerbocker’s top players back to his own place so he could play bridge in comfort, wearing his favorite blue bathrobe while settling into a wide armchair.
The jowly Commander, Winfield Liggett, Jr., who limped noticeably from a leg injury suffered during a 1908 baseball game at the Boston Navy Yard, had been an officer on the USS Montana during the war, convoying American soldiers to France. A noted carouser who liked his women and drink, “Lig” was known to cavort late at night, sometimes with the irascible New York Giants baseball manager John (Muggsy) McGraw.
Among the Knickerbocker giants, none had a more colorful biography than the soft-spoken Baron Waldemar Konrad Ernst Anton Wilhelm Ferdinand von Zedtwitz, a man of seven names who spoke eight languages. His father, a German baron with estates in Saxony, had died in a yachting accident during the Royal Albert Regatta in 1896 and his title was transferred to his infant son. The boy’s mother, Mary Eliza Breckinridge Caldwell, was a Kentuckian and a granddaughter of John Breckinridge, vice president of the United States under James Buchanan, and a presidential candidate in the 1860 campaign won by Lincoln. When Waldemar’s mother died in 1910, the Baron came under the guardianship of an uncle in Berlin, who later enlisted him during the war in the Imperial Prussian Army. Von Zedtwitz served as a lieutenant in the cavalry and was awarded the Iron Cross, second class. After the war, he came to New York and began a ten-year battle to claim his late mother’s substantial American inheritance, which had been confiscated by the U.S. government during the war on the grounds that von Zedtwitz was an enemy alien. (He later would reach a settlement, agreeing to renounce his German citizenship and title and allow the U.S. government to take a percentage of his mother’s estate, which included properties in Kentucky, Newport, and New York, and reportedly was valued at $4 million.) Living at the Plaza Hotel, von Zedtwitz, a bachelor, small and cerebral, his manner every bit the nobleman’s, worked by day as a lexicographer, a tedious labor of love that produced dictionaries in Spanish, Russian, and English. At the Knickerbocker, he was known as the slowest bridge player of all, and for nervously twirling thin locks of hair behind his ears as he contemplated his cards. (He had pulled on his earlobes until a physician convinced him to stop.) So deep was his level of concentration that when a waiter once approached the bridge table and spilled water on von Zedtwitz, he didn’t look up. He simply said, “Please don’t do that again,” and continued studying his cards.
To these Knickerbocker elites, bridge was a way of life. As von Zedtwitz explained about the game, “Intellectually, and almost emotionally, it is possible to go through every type of thrill without having to take the risks involved getting the same thrills from life.” These elites remembered with precise detail bridge hands played long ago much the way many men remembered long-ago lovers. Their postmortems on bridge hands—and their debates about the merits of the bidding in those hands—lasted deep into the night, fueled by their convictions regarding intensely held strategies and beliefs. A member might arrive from out of town for a game at the club on a Friday night, intending to catch a train Saturday morning, but become so consumed by the bridge that he would not leave until Tuesday.
Most elites did not take women seriously as players. The swaggering Sims advised women playing as his partner in Thursday night games to bid only the unrewarding minor suits, diamonds and clubs, to ensure they would become dummy, and he would play the hand for their partnership.
But Jo Dillon, the cool Duchess, played against the Knickerbocker’s best, including Sims, and held her own. Some of the experts felt protective of her. Lenz, a lifelong bachelor, was one of her first instructors. Jo played a shrewd game of bridge, exhibiting flexibility and toughness, and soon became one of New York’s leading bridge instructors.
All the while she kept her personal life hidden from the club’s experts. Jo and bridge instructor Madeleine Kerwin became inseparable friends during this period, playing bridge, dining out, and attending dance parties in New York. The men of the inner sanctum knew that Jo had married only when she announced herself one day as no longer Jo Murphy, but Mrs. Josephine Dillon. They heard the young couple had eloped, and that her husband was a Princeton boy, a bit on the wild side. Then, in the spring of 1921, Jo no longer was married; she had filed for divorce, and many months later rumors surfaced that her former husband was dead, perhaps by suicide. In the inner sanctum, the experts whispered about this, wishing for more details and noticing how sad and quiet and lonely Jo seemed.
And then one day the Russian showed up.
II.
From the foreign sound of Ely Culbertson’s high-pitched voice, his expensive look (European suit, derby hat, wooden cane), and his air of intellectual superiority, the Knickerbocker denizens sized him up quickly: a dandified Russian gambler. Before he arrived among them he had been drifting between the card haunts of Greenwich Village, searching for bigger stakes. He first showed up at the Knickerbocker for a Thursday evening game in spring 1922, accompanied by Mrs. Lucella Shelton, a local bridge teacher. A Russian stranger cloaked in obscurity, partnered with a woman, amounted to easy pickings; several players spotted the two, and offered bets. That night, Ely and Mrs. Shelton won top score, and pocketed their wagered winnings. Ely joined the club a week later and quickly ascended from its penny tables to its five-cent tables. He dazzled membe
rs with his sophisticated, if odd, bidding and repartee. Within a few months, his reputation sizzling, he was playing regularly against the club’s masters on the third floor.
In the inner sanctum, the experts agreed: such an unusual man, this Culbertson. He was thin, pale, and oddly frenetic. Between deals, he pulled from his coat pocket a gold cigarette case, and tapped it twice. In a moment, swirling smoke from a Melachrino Egyptianstyle cigarette clouded his face, obscuring his half-grin, half-smirk. He held thirteen cards in his left hand, the Melachrino in his right, between his index and middle finger, a cosmopolite with a gold ring on his right pinky. His receding hairline and slumping shoulders made him look older than thirty-one, his stated age. He said he avoided physical exercise scrupulously: rather than walk three New York City blocks, he would hail a taxi. At the table, the experts noticed how Culbertson would develop red splotches on his cheeks, how his thinning hair mussed and his eyes shone with excitement.
They knew this Russian only by what he told them about himself. His name, he said, was not pronounced “E-lye,” but “E-lee,” short for Ilya. He said he had played cards in the clubs of Paris and London, and in other capitals on the Continent. He said his younger brother, Sasha Culbertson, was the noted concert violinist who owned the famed 1732 Guarneri del Gesù violin once played by Paganini and said to be worth more than $50,000. The bridge experts could not be certain about Ely’s occupation—once, he mentioned oil. He told them the October Revolution in Russia had cost his family everything: $4 million. The Bolsheviks had brought down the Romanov empire, he said, and the Culbertson empire, too. He had been to Washington to put in a claim for that lost fortune. All that was left from the spoils of his American father’s mining of the oil-rich Caucasus, Ely said, was Sasha’s violin and worthless Russian imperial gold bonds. He said he was glad his Cossack mother, Xenia Rogovnaia, an uncompromising tsarist, had not lived to see the day. Of course, he did not mention to the bridge experts that Almon Culbertson, his proud father, despised cards, considering them a waste of his intellect and time. But the family fortunes were gone, and when Ely told his father that he could earn a good living by gambling at cards, Almon reluctantly agreed, and Ely raised his glass and said, “Well, then, let’s drink a toast to the Devil’s tickets!” In the inner sanctum, Ely talked about bridge scientifically. He was full of bidding ideas and theories—some of them, the experts admitted, intriguing.
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