The Bell Syndicate soon placed Ely’s bridge column in 120 American newspapers with a combined circulation exceeding six million. While other magazines likened Ely to Napoleon, the Prince of Wales, Einstein, and golfer Bobby Jones, The American Magazine suggested him as “a youngish David, [who] has risen up to defy the Goliaths of hearts and spades.” In this article, writer Jerome Beatty asked members of his wife’s bridge club about Ely. “He’s grand! I heard him speak in Miami last winter. You can have Rudy Vallée. Give me Culbertson,” one woman replied. They told Beatty they played the Culbertson System because Ely described a complex game with humor and philosophy and warmth without getting bogged down in technicalities. Beatty’s wife estimated that Ely was responsible for more than a half million bridge quarrels across America. Beatty wrote, “He—virtually alone—has stirred up a nation-wide bridge war; a war so intensely exciting that normal citizens who debate calmly on politics or prohibition have been known to go berserk in discussions of Culbertson and his veteran rivals in the art of bidding.”
By October’s end, Ely’s Summary appeared at number two on the national bestseller list, and his Contract Bridge Blue Book at number eight.
Despite Sidney Lenz’s reputation as a gentleman and bridge maven, Ely badgered and belittled him. A graying, bespectacled bachelor, tall and wiry, with a prominent nose, Lenz possessed a droll sense of humor and raging competitiveness. He had been a tremendous athlete, excelling in tennis, swimming, golf, and bowling. His apartment at 240 West End Avenue held so many trophies it resembled a whist and auction bridge museum. He once was offered $1,000 for a lesson from a woman who simply wanted to be able to say that Sidney Lenz was her bridge teacher. (He declined the request.)
Lenz had learned bridge in 1911 when he traveled to India to study magic and Hindu culture. There, British army officers taught him the game, and its complexities absorbed him. He would play auction bridge in nearly every nation of the world, including once in Holland with three diplomats, each speaking a different language. He loved magic, especially sleight-of-hand tricks, some learned from his friend Harry Houdini. A master of card tricks, he could pull honors from a deck or deal himself a suit’s thirteen cards.
On October 14, Lenz told The New York Times that Ely had ignored his earlier acceptance of his challenge. Lenz bemoaned that Culbertson “lays down all the conditions, even unto the eighth dimension, going so far as to make disposition of my winnings, if any, and claiming the right of selecting his team and also mine.” The Lenz wit leavened any bitterness. “It is a bit analogous,” Lenz said, “to challenging your adversary to a duel and insisting upon giving odds of ten-to-one—the challenger taking the first ten shots, after which he graciously permits his late opponent a hundred.”
Each day, Ely and Jo spent hours at the Hotel Chatham in their silk pajamas, taking breakfast in bed; this was lounging time for Jo, maybe, but not for Ely, who jotted notes, conducted business by telephone, and kept his secretaries busy. He typically arrived at his magazine office in midafternoon and stayed late. Thanks in part to the Lenz controversy, Ely had sold several hundred thousand copies of his books with translations in German, French, and Scandinavian.
The New York Sun’s Edwin C. Hill wrote, “Would it be extravagant to assert that if these giants do face each other over the bridge table—each with a partner of his own school of thought—that at least 20,000,000 American citizens will burn with the fever of the fray?” By comparison, Hill wrote, the recent seven-game World Series between the Philadelphia Athletics and St. Louis Cardinals would have been a mild affair. He reminded readers of Italian heavyweight Primo Carnera’s recent loss in the ring to Jack Sharkey at Ebbets Field, adding, “The shock of great Carnera’s fall over in Brooklyn, a fall which gyrated the earth upon a mighty axis, was a dull and colorless incident compared to the ferocious onslaught of Culbertson upon Lenz.”
At a press conference in mid-November, Ely and Lenz agreed to a contract bridge pairs match of 150 rubbers, beginning on December 7 in the Culbertsons’ apartment suite at the Chatham, and moving to the Waldorf-Astoria. Lenz chose as his partner one of the celebrated Four Horsemen, Oswald Jacoby, a twenty-eight-year-old actuary. Rules required Jacoby to play with Lenz for at least half the match.
“Whom will I choose as my partner?” Ely asked. “Whom does a dutiful husband choose in moments of stress? My wife, Josephine, of course.” He said Jo would play at least half of the rubbers, and Lightner and von Zedtwitz each would substitute in one fourth. Ely added, “My wife is the only person, woman or man, whom I have never seen crack under the strain of the most grueling competition.”
NBC delivered in an important way. Each night the network would air a fifteen-minute national radio broadcast about the match. Meanwhile, as new ads in Publishers Weekly called for booksellers to enjoy “A Culbertson Christmas,” Ely pondered how best to promote the match. He remembered the 1921 Dempsey-Carpentier heavyweight title fight when ninety thousand fans jammed a wooden arena in Jersey City and a radio audience of several hundred thousand heard the world champion Dempsey win by knockout. The fight promoter Tex Rickard called it the “Battle of the Century.”
Even before the ink had dried on the agreement with Lenz, Ely spoke of the “Bridge Battle of the Century.” The newspapers ran with it.
II
On December 7, 1931, Ely walked into his drawing room and into an explosion of light. Newspaper photographers and Hollywood film cameramen rushed down the corridor of the Culbertsons’ ten-room suite, past silver cups and tournament trophies and beneath signs asking ABSOLUTE SILENCE because there are CHILDREN ASLEEP AND DREAMING. At the center of the carbon arc lamps of motion picture newsreels and the smoking bulbs of flash cameras, the incandescent Ely Culbertson, a colossus of cards, in dinner jacket, a gardenia pinned to his lapel, moved continentally. He greeted tuxedoed admirers and enemies alike. Bridge rivals smiled and wished him luck, even as they despised him. The stakes were never higher: the winners would enjoy the financial spoils of contract bridge, on which, in 1931 alone, Americans would spend an estimated $100 million on lessons, books, and supplies.
The Culbertson drawing room was brightly lit with a fireplace, mulberry velvet curtains, plush carpeting, and a wooden table covered by green felt, and with four ashtrays inlaid for the occasion. Dark leather screens were carefully positioned with slight cracks between them to allow kibitzers—card-table onlookers notorious for giving players unwarranted advice—to peek, three at a time, for up to five minutes. “The Greatest Peep Show in History,” Ely called it. (The United Press correspondent Henry McLemore deadpanned that the screens permitted him to achieve an ambition to become a “crack reporter.”) Now Ely stepped past the table to stand beside Josephine, in taffeta gown with a corsage of orchids.
In the lobby of the Chatham, a skyscraper on Vanderbilt Avenue and Forty-eighth Street, bridge fans and inebriates tried to sneak past security to see the famous foursome. Already squeezing into the drawing room were reporters, kibitzers, Western Union telegraphers, army officials, security guards, maîtres d’hôtel, radio men, famed sports columnists Ring Lardner and Grantland Rice, referees, bridge elites, social and executive secretaries, editors, book publishers, plus thirty stenographers and clerks. Telegraph would flash results across the country and to Europe. In the press room, newspapermen were well satisfied with sandwiches, chicken à la king, and alcohol, a feast that astounded the syndicated columnist Westbrook Pegler, who walked the halls asking the same question: “Who’s pickin’ up the tab?” The members of the press would receive match updates on a bulletin board, and while away time playing cards themselves. Down the hall, in The Bridge World room, clerks would record and make copies of each hand as that information arrived from the playing room by courier. Joyce and Bruce Culbertson, in their pajamas, rushed in for one last good-night embrace from Jo before a nanny took them to bed.
This was Ely’s defining hour, a moment of high-art ballyhoo he had imagined. The light of the modern techn
ological age appealed to his sense of self and theater. The four players had signed with newspaper syndicates to do nightly columns (ghostwritten, naturally). Ely and Jo shaped their story as the near-impossible struggle of a young married couple fighting a historic empire. Jo knew that housewives rooted for her while their husbands waited for the inevitable marital spats.
On this glittering night in the gathering darkness of the Depression, the Bridge Battle of the Century, with its high style and carnival excess, was a final roar of the 1920s. More than the Myrtle Bennett murder trial, a local sensation in Missouri spurring ripples of gossip and headlines across the nation, this drama was played out over five weeks in the media hub of New York, where the radio networks, wire services, a dozen and more local dailies, and many of America’s leading syndicated columnists were based. More than two million words (by Ely’s count) would be published in American newspapers on his battle against Sidney Lenz, more than had been published on Lindbergh’s historic flight across the Atlantic.
The New York World-Telegram called it “the most amazing card battle in history,” and The Sun trumped that with “the contract championship of the world, the planetary system, the milky way and the fourth dimension, according to Einstein.” Grantland Rice, in the financial doldrums as he watched his Goldman Sachs stock plummeting from $121 to $3 a share, showed up in evening attire and suggested to his readers that beyond 20 million bridge players, another 40 million kibitzers would want to watch—this, in a country with a total population of 120 million. “So, if there were room enough we might have had an attendance approaching 60,000,000,” he wrote.
Festivities started downstairs at the Chatham with an eight-course meal for fifty guests and a national radio hookup on NBC. Sidney Lenz humbly predicted over the airwaves that the match would prove that experts could drop tricks as easily as any beginner. Jo’s voice trembled as she said she aimed to prove that a woman could play as well as any man. Ely praised Lenz and Jacoby, saying they could win the match “in spite of the handicap of the so-called ‘Official Bidding System.’ “He also told listeners he would spend more time with his family in the future and that “win, lose or draw this is my last big match.”
One discordant voice was heard. In his syndicated column, Milton Work reminded readers that the British writer Cavendish once had asserted that luck would not equalize itself in cards in less than ten years of play, and that Ely and Lenz would be playing less than one hundred hours. Of course, Cavendish was writing about whist, which, with no bidding or dummy, had a greater element of luck than bridge. Ely estimated the luck factor in the match at 8 percent, but Work suggested it was more like 80 percent. “The chances are that the respective bidding systems will have little to do with the victory or the size of it,” Work wrote. But this view, at least for the moment, was lost in the melody of bubbling champagne.
Photographs and more photographs were taken of the four players. “Ay,” a drawing room cynic said, “now I know why it’s called the Battle of the Century.” At long last, the head referee, army lieutenant Alfred M. Gruenther, in his formal West Point dress with gold epaulets, cleared the card area. In the mid-1950s Gruenther would serve as Supreme Commander of NATO forces in Europe and sometimes play as President Dwight Eisenhower’s partner in the regular Saturday afternoon bridge game at the White House. Now just thirty-two years old, Gruenther had as his primary responsibilities overseeing the record-keeping of this bridge battle and adjudicating any written protests filed by the players.
At 10:07 P.M., the match began. Its 150 rubbers, spanning 20 sessions, would be front-page news in the morning and would remain so for nearly five weeks.
The first news announcement of the Bridge Battle of the Century came before the first hand was played, with an official emissary rushing into the press room and calling the gathering of reporters to rapt attention. “Gentlemen of the press!” he reported. “The contest has started. I have the first words spoken in this historic match.” With all pens and notebooks at the ready, the royal courier added, “The first words were spoken by Jo—I mean Mrs. Culbertson. She said, ‘Where do you wish to sit, Ely?’ ”
Initially nerves trembled. During the first rubber, Lenz made a beginner’s blunder by forgetting the contract. He contracted for game at no trump (and could even have made a slam, though not having been bid, no slam bonus was available), but played the cards thinking that diamonds were trump. As a result he was set two tricks, an embarrassment he later blamed on the distraction of Ely taking six minutes and twenty-six seconds to make a bid. “I’m sorry, Jo,” Lenz said, so flustered after the hand that he apologized to an opponent. Three times on this night Lenz and Jacoby lost large bonuses by making slams they failed to bid. (In auction bridge, Lenz’s true game, players need not have worried about bidding and would have scored these slams, anyway.) The results spread quickly. After each deal, Capt. Ernest Brown, head of the hotel service, whispered to a waiter, who reported to the nearest bellhop, who told the elevator boy, and within minutes word had reached the Chatham’s lobby. Even with the miscues, Lenz-Jacoby led by 1,715 points at the end of a session in which, experts agreed, Jo, with a jeweled cigarette holder in hand, had been the calmest and most competent player.
Ring Lardner, a master humorist, had reported too many sporting events to be fooled by hyperbole. “According to the diffident Mr. Culbertson, this event is more important to the world at large,” Lardner wrote in his syndicated column, “than the signing of the Armistice on Nov. 11, 1918.” He evoked Jack “Legs” Diamond, the gangster and former lieutenant to gambler Arnold Rothstein. “As I left the gay party,” Lardner wrote after the first session at the Chatham, “I heard a rumor that some of those secretaries were really Capone gunmen brought on from Chicago to keep the peace. They certainly flopped if that be true. It was said that Mr. Culbertson wanted Jack Diamond as a bodyguard, but Mrs. Culbertson doesn’t like minor suits.”
Damon Runyon did not appear at the Chatham, but from Broadway his presence was felt between deals. Writing for The New York American, Runyon issued a challenge to Ely and Lenz. Runyon said his team of four of Broadwayfarers—players named “Reno,” Mike Cohen, Artie Adelman, and Louis Mart—would play any team of four offered by Ely or Lenz, and for big stakes, five dollars per point. “You can see my proposition runs into money,” Runyon wrote. Run-yon said his team played “practical bridge,” and didn’t know “book bridge,” and that his men played in a room on West Forty-fifth Street, “where Gilda Gray had her night club years ago and used to shake a mean shimmy.” No lady, including Josephine Culbertson, could play in this proposed challenge match, Runyon wrote, since one of his players, when exasperated, often said, “Oh, pshaw!” Runyon feared that, in the presence of a lady, “my man might be sorely exasperated.” Runyon’s colorful challenge brought smiles, but only one reply from the Chatham. Jacoby said the Four Horsemen would play anyone, anytime.
Ely kept the newspapers busy. He said he might play a session with Harold Vanderbilt as his partner, or perhaps Mrs. Emily Smith Warner, daughter of former New York governor Al Smith. At another moment, Ely proposed a session be held in an auditorium with an electronic scoreboard and broadcasters, the four players inside a soundproof glass case, with all revenues to benefit the unemployed. His idea gained the support of Mrs. David Sarnoff, wife of the president of Radio Corporation of America (RCA), but Lenz said the scenario was beneath the dignity of bridge. In the press room, Ely offered quotes pithy, ironic, conceited, and cutting. He reveled in the noise he generated.
Now more than ever Ely needed the press and, therefore, he needed the press to be happy. McLemore of the United Press surely was that, writing of opening night:
I wish you’d have been there. I like to died. This mighty duel between Messrs. Sidney Lenz and Ely Culbertson opened amidst more hoopla, hullabaloo and fol-de-rol than you’ll find at an ice cream sociable, a gangster’s funeral, or the Broadway premiere of a Chaplin picture…. I never enjoyed an a
ssignment so much as I enjoyed this Culbertson-Lenz thing. All you need to do is slap your feet upon a desk, aim your eye at the big bulletin board and wait. And the nice part of it is, nothing ever shows up on that bulletin board…. All you got to do is sit down and wonder, “When is that guy going to bring around some more cocktails?” The press boys have a huge room and before the battle started the pressers had a stud poker party, a crap game, two games of checkers… going full blast.
Even the Culbertsons’ butler, Charles (William) Natcet, “with special permission from his employers,” wrote a story for the newspaper syndicate. “Mr. Culbertson is by far and away the best card player. I’d say that even if I wasn’t the Culbertson butler,” Natcet wrote, “and I’d only say it a little more discreetly if I was the Lenz butler.”
Ely knew how to get into Sidney Lenz’s head, irritating and disrupting, his manner distinctly anti-Hoyle. During the second session, he ordered a rare broiled porterhouse steak and ate it at the table. “Ely, we’re playing cards, you know,” Jo said. Ely’s knife and fork squealed against the plate. He smacked his lips. Lenz howled, “My God, Ely, you’re getting grease all over the cards. Why don’t you eat at the proper time like the rest of us?” Ely dabbed a napkin at the corners of his mouth, and said, “My vast public won’t let me, Sidney.” Each night, before the first hand was dealt, Ely asked his opponents, “Have you changed your system yet?” Finally, Jo scolded him: “Ely, that’s getting awfully monotonous.” He showed up late for nearly every session. He hung a large wishbone for good luck near the card table. He brought a toy Scottish terrier and posed it atop a bridge lamp. Each time he laid down his hand as dummy, he left the table to visit the press room. “Doggone, Ely,” Lenz would say, waiting to deal the next hand. Or, to referee Gruenther, biting off each syllable, Lenz would howl, “Page E-lee!” Lenz charged Ely was deviating from his bidding system. (He was.) Ely counter-charged that Lenz and Jacoby were deviating from the rules of Lenz’s 1-2-3 system, the cornerstone of the “Official System.” (They were.) Once, Jacoby alleged Ely and Jo had both broken the rules of their system, at which point Ely pulled from his jacket a copy of his Summary, showed Jacoby the relevant paragraphs, and gave him the book. He also offered to autograph it. Again and again, Ely delayed his play—five minutes, six, seven—prompting Lenz once to plead to Gruenther, “He’s been sitting there for 10 minutes without moving—acting like he was studying when it’s plain there’s only one play he can make.” Ely snarled that Lenz ought not be allowed to protest during play. “It’s just like letting out a yell at a golfer just as he starts to swing,” Ely said. Lenz could not bear the tedium of such delays, and once stormed from the room. Small wonder that, after the third session, one writer thought Lenz had aged ten years. Heywood Broun, the World-Telegram’s crusading columnist, admitted that studying a hand for five minutes was excessive: “Hamlet required a shorter interval to argue the problem of ‘to be or not to be.’ ”
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