The lecture tour gave Ely firsthand insight into American bridge: who played, and which bidding system they used. Now Ely could play contract at the Knickerbocker and look past his cards, past New York, and see bridge as it existed in the heartland, the South, and the Far West. His teachers carried his system from the metropolises to the hinterlands. Ely would lecture to as many as 225 bridge teachers at his 1931 convention, with each teacher spending sixty dollars for three days, which meant Ely earned $13,500 for less than a week’s work. These teachers were paying for the privilege of being associated with the Culbertson name.
Ely used The Bridge World to galvanize his teachers’ network and to agitate his rivals. His boastfulness could be breathtaking. His magazine described his lecture tour as “a sensational and universal success.” It reported that the Contract Bridge Blue Book was selling “at the unheard of rate” of four thousand copies daily, “an extraordinary and still mounting tidal wave [and] news of first magnitude not only to Bridge players but to publishers and students of sociology.” The Bridge World trumpeted that eight hundred teachers taught the Culbertson System now and another four hundred had applied for their Culbertson teaching certificates, abandoning other experts. Per his plan, Ely published his second book: a pocket-size Culbertson’s Own Summary: Contract Bridge at a Glance, a concise overview of the Blue Book. That sold briskly, too.
In his magazine, Ely grew more excessive, more self-absorbed, and more egregious in the sexual suggestiveness of his writings: “This new [Culbertson] Contract system has splashes of romance in it. It is thrilling. Take Forcing bids for instance. Partner is held by the throat and willy-nilly must obey your sovereign commands. At last you can satisfy your inferiority complex through the thrill of an absolute, inexorable command over another being, thus reviving the feeling of godly omnipotence lost in the dim childhood.”
Secretly his rivals plotted. They would take back their industry—their books and lectures and syndicated columns. To do that, they joined forces and created a new blended bidding system and gave it a convincing name. They sought to destroy Culbertson—the system, and its irritating creator.
Their announcement came on June 23, 1931, in a news release prepared by Shepard Barclay, bridge writer for the New York Herald Tribune and The Saturday Evening Post. Twelve authorities, including Barclay, had united to form “Bridge Headquarters,” and were in the process of creating the “Official System” of contract bridge. According to Barclay, the avowed purpose of Bridge Headquarters was “to preserve the game of contract bridge, protect it from the advance of unsound ideas, to end the confusion of countless bidding systems and enable anyone to obtain pleasure from playing it.” Ely read the names on the Bridge Headquarters list and, except for Harold Vanderbilt, R. F. Foster, and Hal Sims, who were above such treachery, nearly all of the stars of contract bridge were there including Whitehead, Work, Lenz, Liggett, Barclay, George Reith, E. V. Shepard, and Charles True Adams. “This constitutes the first time in the history of bridge,” Barclay’s news release read, “that such an aggregation of recognized experts has ever agreed so completely on any matter of a technical nature and marks a new epoch in the history of the game.”
The Official System, while acknowledging the Culbertson Approach-Forcing System, simply added the pet devices of Lenz, Milton Work, and others to set up a “new” system to challenge Ely’s juggernaut.
Ely released his own statement, calling the new group “Elder Statesmen and Minor Luminaries.” Their new venture amounted to “a merger of ex-authorities.” He charged that Bridge Headquarters was thinly disguised altruism. It was a commercial enterprise, he announced, owned by the Embosograph Corporation, which manufactured bridge supplies. Each of the experts of Bridge Headquarters would receive Embosograph corporation stock and would participate in the profits created by “junior lecturers” trained by them. The Bridge Headquarters also intended to publish a magazine, and sell bridge supplies and accessories (lamps, tables, scorecards, pencils, duplicate boards). Ely choked out the words, “This will be Mr. Lenz’s system No. 5. In the course of the last two years he has published books on four different systems. This will also be Mr. Work’s system No. 4.”
In the days that followed, New York’s newspapers burned with bridge controversy.
Ely took the offensive. He returned to a tactic that feuding Americans and Europeans had used for centuries: a duel. It had worked for him against Buller, and he would do it again, this time on American soil. Using New York’s newspapers, he challenged any two members of Bridge Headquarters to a match. He said he would wager $5,000 against $1,000 that he and a teammate, preferably Jo, playing the Culbertson System, would win, thereby proving the superiority of their system. Ely proposed that proceeds from the match go to charity.
Even as Jo privately urged caution, Ely vowed to bring his rivals to their knees. He would challenge them all by challenging one, but which one? Milton Work would not play in a challenge match. Whitey was in declining health. What about Sidney Lenz? Jo’s bridge teacher from a dozen years earlier was now fifty-eight. Lenz had won fourteen national titles, though that was many years before, and in whist and auction bridge, none in contract. “If we can pull down Lenz,” Ely told Jo, “we’ll pull down the whole bazaar.” Ely revisited Lenz’s books and bridge columns, and studied the hands bid and played by Lenz. He believed Lenz won through his card play, not his bidding system. Ely’s eyes brightened. Sid Lenz would be their target.
Privately Ely admitted to fears that he and Jo might be nothing more than “ephemeral little bridge gods.” But he concealed these fears behind bravado in announcing to the New York newspapers his challenge of Lenz to a bridge contest of two hundred rubbers. Ely or Jo, or both, would play Lenz and a partner of his choosing in a battle of bidding systems: the Culbertson System versus the Official System. Ely said he would wait patiently for Lenz to respond, and emphasized that his challenge was “good until the cows come home. The place? Bridge Headquarters, Inc., if they want it,” he said. But F. D. Courtenay, president of Bridge Headquarters, declined Ely’s offer, saying he preferred a nationwide match that pitted twenty couples playing the Culbertson System against twenty couples playing the Official System. Ely laughed. “Very silly,” he said.
He appeared on radio station WJZ and the NBC Blue Network and again challenged Lenz. “My lady listeners will not be displeased to hear that this is the first time in the history of whist and bridge that a woman is challenging an international expert and even, in addition, offers extraordinary odds,” he said. “Now this challenge is not made out of the spirit of braggadocio, but because I am sincerely convinced that to advise hundreds of thousands how they should bid or play, is a serious responsibility and any well-known authority must be sure of his technical grounds, and be prepared to defend his methods by playing himself rather than having others play for him.”
For Ely, the stakes against Lenz would be huge. To lose would be catastrophic. The Culbertson empire was growing at an astonishing rate. Ely’s daily and Sunday column (ghostwritten by magazine staffers) was syndicated now in sixty American news-papers, including The Washington Post, The Atlanta Constitution, The New York Sun, The Boston Globe, The Seattle Times, and The Chicago Daily News. He was about to begin a weekly column in Life magazine. Two books bearing his name were selling in huge numbers. And no more dilapidated offices for The Bridge World: his eighteen-member magazine staff moved into the swanky new fifty-story General Electric Building on Lexington Avenue and Fifty-first Street.
Ely and Jo, meanwhile, rented an enormous apartment suite at the Hotel Chatham, where their servants sometimes served lunch or dinner to fifteen guests and more. (Like Jack Bennett, Ely was every bit the flamboyant host.) The Culbertsons’ few friends also lived in privilege, on Park Avenue and in the Hamptons. At a time when the nation’s unemployment rate had reached 16 percent, Ely reportedly was earning $200,000 a year. He and Jo became conspicuous consumers. They dined, dressed, and enter
tained as if the Depression wasn’t happening. It was part of their celebrity image: cool, elegant, happily married. They played only tournament bridge now, except for an occasional social game at Harold Vanderbilt’s home.
Though no reply had come from Lenz, Ely was not worried on June 30 when he and Jo, with Joyce and Bruce in tow, boarded the SS Bremen. They would spend the next seven weeks in Europe, making a lengthy tour of Russia.
On the high seas, as smoke from his Melachrinos blew in the stiff ocean breezes, Ely could only imagine what Lenz would say when he laid his eyes on the next issue of The Bridge World.
The tectonic shifts in bridge stirred even the deep waters of the Atlantic. On the very week of the Bridge Headquarters’ announcement, Wilbur Whitehead, aboard the SS Île de France with his granddaughter, collapsed and died at sixty-five. He was en route to Paris, where his wife and daughter lived. That Whitey had signed on as a member of Bridge Headquarters did not keep Ely from showing proper respect. The Bridge World office closed in honor of Whitey’s memorial service at a New York City chapel. Though Ely and Jo were in Europe, the rest of the magazine staff attended. “An irreparable loss to bridge,” Ely wrote in his appreciation of Whitey. He cited Whitehead as the first to develop simple yardsticks for auction bidding, a system of valuation, and a quick-tricks table. “Bridge players owe to him countless hours of enjoyment,” Ely wrote. “Writers and teachers owe to him ideas and much of their success.
“I, more than anyone else.”
As he looked at the cover of The Bridge World, Sidney Lenz understood, more clearly than before, the magnitude of Ely Culbertson’s ambition. There, two words exploded in boldface capital letters: A CHALLENGE.
Beneath, Editor Culbertson cited his conditions:
Mr. or Mrs. Ely Culbertson challenge Mr. Sidney Lenz to a refereed match of two hundred rubbers at Contract Bridge. Mr. Lenz may select his own partner and play any published system. He may change partners at will but he must play throughout. He may choose a partner for Mr. or Mrs. Culbertson from a list of six players to be named by Mr. Culbertson.
According to Ely, the match would be played at the Hotel Chatham, where Ely and Jo lived and lectured. Ely would put up $5,000 to Lenz’s $1,000 and the winnings would be donated to the New York Infirmary for Women and Children. Ely allowed that if Lenz preferred a team-of-four duplicate match, both men would choose their own three teammates (Ely would take Jo, Lightner, and von Zedtwitz), with the stakes rising to $10,000 for Ely and $1,000 for Lenz.
This Challenge by Ely Culbertson offers to Sidney Lenz a golden opportunity for a show down. Doubtless, Bridge players throughout the world will greatly benefit from the elimination of theories and methods which fail to stand up under the acid test of competitive play.
Ely filled the issue with mud-slinging, name-calling, and petty derision. “Our reaction to the combination of gentlemen formerly regarded as authorities is a mixture of sorrow, tinged with a little shame,” he wrote. “We respect honest views, however mistaken they may be.” He called his rivals a “paradoxical attraction of opposites.” He wrote, “The whole thing can be fixed, for those who are interested in definite historical data, as beginning about the day when sales of the Blue Book began to take on best-seller proportions.… Authors are sensitive souls. Their nervous systems are curiously polarized in royalty checks … Players of ‘chaotic’ systems have found that there is no ‘Royal road to Learning’ Bridge. They seem to be at the point of discovering, however, that there is a ‘Royalty’ path to Stupidity.
“Personally,” Ely added, “I am sorry that my colleagues, instead of getting together on a system which is already ‘official’ are trying to stir up even more confusion and uncertainty, and all to annoy that fellow Culbertson. Really, he is not worth it.”
Finally Lenz agreed to Ely’s challenge. He posted a certified check for $1,000 with his publisher, Simon & Schuster. “And if Mr. Culbertson means business and this challenge is not just another bluff, let him also post a certified check,” Lenz told The New York Sun. “Now he has got to put up or shut up.” Lenz said he would choose “any of several hundred bridge players who already have expressed a willingness to play.” He said, “I would select Mrs. Culbertson as one opponent. Her husband calls her the greatest woman bridge player in the world; certainly she is a much better player than he and… much more pleasant to play with.”
Ely’s reaction to Lenz’s acceptance was a vintage piece of showmanship—no reaction at all. He acted as if Lenz still had not answered him. The challenge was generating so much publicity Ely would keep it going for as long as possible.
How startled Sidney Lenz must have been four weeks later when he saw on the cover of the next issue of The Bridge World the same two-word challenge as before. To Lenz, it was a rogue’s act, ungentle-manly. Just plain rude.
ELEVEN
Myrtle’s Murder Trial, Part 2
Snow came to Kansas City, and so did Albert Einstein. He stepped from a train at smoky Union Station wearing a black slouch hat, overcoat, and trousers several inches too short. As Einstein strolled with his wife, Elsa, through the station plaza, awed newspapermen, tipped off to his intermediate stop in Kansas City, took down his every word. “What is this you say, that only twelve men in the world understand my theories? Dummheit! Idiocy. It is not so. Everybody who understands mathematics understands my theories,” Einstein said. En route from Pasadena, California, to New York, Einstein would arrive in Chicago the next day and read a speech, from the back of the train, advocating resistance to military service. Then, in New York, he would examine a test tube containing what was said to be the first example of artificially created life (calves’ brains, dried and separated chemically, the cells broken down into proteins, fats, and ash; these substances, when placed in ether, re-formed and showed characteristics of living cells). But now, bundled up against the Missouri cold, Einstein strolled past the newsstands where the headlines called out: “A Bennett Climax” and “Tragedy by Steps” and “The Bridge Quarrel Again.” The physicist had spent his third visit to America conducting research at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena—a wonderful city, he said, with lovely Spanish moss. In Hollywood he had met Chaplin, a charming man. Now the winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics shivered in the chill. “What time does the train go?” he said. “These trains: I never remember the time.” Einstein considered Kansas City, if only for an instant. “What a sober town,” he said, looking off into the distance. “How very sober.” Had he stopped at the Criminal Courts Building, he would have had a different view.
As the trial moved into its third day, the crowd grew in size and impatience, once surging against the padlocked front gate until it buckled inward. Some spectators sneaked through a side door. One tried to climb through a window. Another hid beneath the overcoat of a reporter. Denied admittance, one man demanded to know “who Mrs. Myrtle Bennett was” for the court to transform her trial into a society event. The man said he had attended the 1910 Hyde murder trial. “And,” he insisted, “surely the principals in that were as important socially as Mr. Bennett.” Women came to the musty old courtroom to hear about bridge, to experience a real murder trial, to watch the famous Senator Reed in his final courtroom drama, and especially to hear Mrs. Bennett tell her story. Women seemed more interested than men in the testimony of a maid, one reporter wrote: “For what woman has not at some time cross-examined her own maid if it were over no greater matter than how much butter she put in the cake?… ‘What testimony would my maid give?’ every woman asked herself and wondered.” One woman explained why she was attending: “I suppose I might have a tiny interest in finding out how far one might go in punishing one’s husband for failing to make a bridge bid.”
Harry S. Truman, Jackson County’s administrative judge, a courthouse post in Independence, had little time for the travails of Myrtle and Jack. With Myrtle’s trial under way, Truman held a press conference to show local newspapermen a sket
ch of the proposed new county courthouse. His report went mostly unnoticed during the Bennett circus.
Jim Page’s wife attended the trial every day. She dreamed one night she was delivering the closing argument, telling jurors she was neither a judge nor a distinguished senator, only a prosecutor armed with the truth. It was, she said, a nightmare.
Each day, it happened the same way: at the morning opening and the late-afternoon adjournment, Myrtle walked down the courtroom aisle past Jack’s brothers and sisters. For a decade and more, they had shared visits, stories, laughs. Now Myrtle caught the eye of Jack’s brother Tom Bennett and nodded slightly. He returned the nod, but his expression was stern.
On Saturday morning, the prosecution rested, sooner than expected. Jim Page chose not to call either Alice Adkins or Mayme Hofman. Charles Hofman had been troublesome enough, answering many of Page’s questions with “I don’t remember” and “I can’t say exactly.” If Page could not cross-examine his own witnesses, he would let Jim Reed call Adkins and Mayme Hofman, as surely he would, and then Page would go to work on cross. Page’s case thus far was built on compelling circumstantial evidence: a wife slapped by her husband at a bridge table, a pistol in the wife’s hand, and her expression and movement sinister enough to prompt a friend to ask, “My, God, Myrtle, what are you going to do?;” her admission in jail that she had shot her husband; evidence supporting a chase, namely two bullets fired into the bathroom door and doorjamb, and two others striking the victim’s back and armpit.
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