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THE DEVIL’S TICKETS

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A l s o b y G a ry M . P o m e r a n t z

Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn:

A Saga of Race and Family

Nine Minutes, Twenty Seconds:

A True Story of Tragedy and Triumph

Wilt, 1962:
The Night of 100 Points and the Dawn of a New Era
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ThD e v i l
’s
T
TI C K E T S
A Nigh
t of B
ridge,
a Fata
l Hand
and a ,
New A
merica
n Age
GAR
Y M
. PO
ME RAN
TZ

crown publishers | new york

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Copyright © 2009 by Gary M. Pomerantz

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of
the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

CROWN and the Crown colophon are

registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pomerantz, Gary M.
The devil’s tickets / Gary M. Pomerantz. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Bennett, Myrtle, d. 1992. 2. Reed, James A. (James Alexander), 1861–1944.
3. Culbertson, Ely, 1891–1955. 4. Murder— Missouri— Kansas City— Case studies.
5. Man-woman relationships— Missouri— Kansas City— Case studies. 6. Contract
bridge— Social aspects— Missouri— Kansas City— History— 20th century. 7. Bennett,
Myrtle, d. 1992— Trials, litigation, etc. 8. Trials (Murder)— Missouri— Kansas City.
9. Kansas City (Mo.)— Biography. 10. United States— Social life and customs—
1918–1945. I. Title.

HV6534.K2P66 2008
364.152'3092— dc22

2008051185

ISBN 978-1-4000-5162-5

Printed in the United States

Design by Leonard W. Henderson

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

First Edition

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The Devil’s Tickets 
visit one of these online retailers: 
 
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For Mom

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“Don’t forget that man is a vain creature. Let him sus-

pect that it is he that rules the roost. Manage him
without letting him suspect it.”
—Josephine Culbertson

“We played perfectly—except Jo.”

—Ely Culbertson
about his bridge-partner/wife

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CONTENTS

Author’s Note.................................................................................xi
Introduction..................................................................................xiii
PART I: THE BRIDGE STORM 1929–1932
One: Ely and Jo .........................................................................................3
Two: Myrtle and Jack ..............................................................................24
Three: Ely’s Grand Scheme.....................................................................41
Four: Four Spades She Bid......................................................................51
Five: Myrtle’s Blur...................................................................................65
Six: Senator Reed Comes Home...............................................................70
Seven: Ely and Jo: Stars on the Rise........................................................82
Eight: The Senator and Mrs. Donnelly ..................................................94
Nine: Myrtle’s Murder Trial, Part 1 ......................................................101
Ten: Ely in the Crucible .........................................................................120
Eleven: Myrtle’s Murder Trial, Part 2..................................................134
Twelve: Bridge Battle of the Century....................................................155
Thirteen: Myrtle’s Murder Trial, Part 3..............................................175

Part 2: THE SEARCH

Fourteen: Miami................................................................................193
Fifteen: Kansas City............................................................................199
Sixteen: New York ..............................................................................211
Seventeen: San Francisco ...................................................................230
Eighteen: Little Rock .........................................................................235
Nineteen: Santa Rosa, California .......................................................241

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x Contents

Contract Bridge in Brief .....................................................247

A Contract Bridge Glossary ............................................250
Notes..................................................................................................253
Bibliography................................................................................. 282
Acknowledgments.....................................................................291
Index...................................................................................................294

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author’s note

Bridge mavens who enter here, I beg your indulgence. For while this
is a story about the great game, it is not the great game’s story. As you
enter a bygone era and follow the glamour and drama of the Culbert-
sons and Bennetts, you won’t need to know the finer points of bridge.
For those coming late to the game with their curiosity roused, I offer
a brief bridge primer and a glossary of terms, beginning on page 247.
I hurry to say that no such primer is called for by this story. It is a tale
of husbands and wives. You know the rules by which that game is
played.

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introduction

In the Roaring Twenties, the famous philanderers William Randolph

Hearst and Babe Ruth might have thought it, but only Henry Ford
said it out loud: Housewives of America should be patient with out-
breaks of marital infidelity. “Treat it like the measles,” the auto titan
said in 1923, the year a shapely young woman gave birth to a son
whispered to be his. “Help your husband through it,” Ford said, as if
what ailed the poor fellow could be fixed with a cool compress
against his fevered brow.
One of the period’s great thinkers, Henry L. Mencken, so favored
blondes, be they starlets or harlots, that a friend, screenwriter Anita
Loos, turned the sage’s lust into a 1925 comic novel, Gentlemen Prefer
Blondes. Loos created an archetype, the blond showgirl as gold digger,
all giggles and curves, working under a siren’s name, Lorelei Lee.
Lorelei is a stenographer in Arkansas. Occasionally, she stops by
the boss’s apartment. There they engage in extracurricular activities—
until the day Lorelei arrives to see she’s been preempted by another
working girl. For a moment, her mind goes blank. A revolver appears
in her hand. Next thing she knows, as she tells the jury at her trial for
attempted murder, her cheating boss has been shot.
The jurors and judge alike weep in sympathy for the poor, naïve,
wronged, precious young woman. When she is acquitted she rewards
each juror with a kiss on the cheek. The judge, too.
Free and on the run from Little Rock to Hollywood, to New
York and Europe, Lorelei dances with the Prince of Wales and meets
the famous Austrian psychiatrist “Dr. Froyd,” to use her spelling.
Raising temperatures everywhere, she pursues a man— or, better,
men— who will treat her the way to which she dreams of growing
accustomed, mainly awash in diamonds and afloat on yachts.
In the way that art and life are reflections, there was about

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xiv Introduction

Myrtle Adkins more than a little of Lorelei Lee. Myrtle came out of
Arkansas and became a stenographer. Like Lorelei, she had the look
that caused men to take another look. Though a brunette (in this
case, a grand exception to the Loos rule), Myrtle stopped conversa-
tions by doing no more than entering a room. That, she knew. That,
she counted on. And just as Lorelei leaves Arkansas behind, so
Myrtle left behind the dusty Arkansas farmland of Tillar.
Unlike Lorelei, Myrtle needed only one man. She even knew the
man she wanted. When she spotted him, she moved quickly. With Jack
Bennett she would create a life of relative luxury in Kansas City— until
one night, as Lorelei does, Myrtle raised a gun against her man.
It happened around a bridge table in 1929, and to this day it is a
flashpoint in the history of the card game that in the late twenties
became— along with flagpole sitting, marathon dancing, transconti-
nental foot racing, and swimming pool endurance floating— yet
another of America’s national crazes.
Of all the mad games that cheered Americans between the world
wars, the least likely must have been contract bridge. Descended from
whist, the game of English origins that had captivated Napoleon, Tal-
leyrand, and Thomas Jefferson, bridge was as much an intellectual
exercise as a game, its language a rigid code that conveyed informa-
tion to a partner about the 13 cards in his hand, one arrangement of
the 635,013,559,600 possibilities.
How quaint that sounds today: bridge as a phenomenon. When
Shipwreck Kelly sat atop flagpoles for days, America cheered the
sheer lunacy of it. But bridge? Genteel, civil bridge? Four people at a
table for hours? Whose idea of fun was that?
It was Ely Culbertson’s. An elegant showman, he created on a
large scale the milieu in which the Bennetts came to the table on that
last night. Born in Romania and raised in Russia, the son of an Ameri-
can father and Cossack mother, Culbertson presented himself as suave
and debonair, a tuxedoed boulevardier. He used mystique, brilliance,
and a certain madness to transform bridge from a friendly social activ-
ity to a national cultural movement that made him rich and famous.

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Introduction xv

Culbertson sold bridge to anyone who would buy, but especially

to housebound wives and mothers. Somehow, as if by some phantas-
magorical hypnosis, he persuaded Americans that bridge was— in
ways spoken and in ways dared not spoken— about sex.
The intimacy of couples seated together at a small table for
hours, the competitive juices afire, the inevitable flirtations, the stim-
ulus of friendly wagers, and the customary defiance of Prohibition
were among the game’s seductive charms. Millions of American house-
wives just like Myrtle Bennett would give themselves to Ely Culbert-
son, and his game.
On his arm as his wife and across the table as his bridge partner
was a beautiful American, Josephine, who shared his fame in the
sparkle of New York and London. Culbertson knew that when hus-
bands and wives played as bridge partners, the cards were on the
table, and so was the marriage. Most couples played bridge together
happily, but marriages under stress at home might reach spontaneous
combustion when their quirks and eccentricities were exposed at the
table. Then gentility might give way to competition, and to the blood-
lust feared by Puritans in the New World.
The Puritans were hardly alone in their fear of cards. From the
very start— the beginning of playing cards dates to China in or before
the thirteenth century— cards and their games have titillated and
haunted the imagination. Legend holds that Christopher Columbus’s
sailors, inveterate gamblers on the high seas, encountered such fear-
some weather that they threw their playing cards overboard in hopes
of placating the storm gods. Once safe on terra firma, they regretted
their rash act, and fashioned new cards. The New England Puritans,
always on the lookout for evil, abhorred playing cards, considering
them Satanic seeds of laziness, vice, and corruption. They called them
the devil’s tickets.

Bridge can stir devilish passions. It is a game of partnerships, two

against two, seated at a table opposite each other. Communication and
cooperation, and no small amount of forbearance, are paramount,

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xvi Introduction

because, ideally, partners will act as one, thinking alike and waging an
intellectual battle totally without ego.
But the ideal can break down with the smallest of misinterpreta-
tions of a partner’s bids, and the opportunity for error is always there.
In a single bridge hand, the number of significant decisions a player
makes can reach well into double digits. In poker, a player’s failure is
his alone (though, naturally, he usually passes it on to the fall of the
cards). But bridge is unique in that it gives a player another way to
explain his defeat. He can lay blame across the table.
That is petty of him, of course, because whatever glory or despair
comes to the partnership is equal property of both. Points, after all,
are scored not by individuals, but by the partnerships. Yet missteps,
real or perceived, can break a partnership’s concentration, egos can
rise to the fore, and a sense of betrayal can blow like an icy north
wind flowing to the south.
The best partners are personally compatible and roughly equals
in ability. A mismatched nonspousal partnership can end with a sim-
ple word of regret, but a married partnership is more problematic.
Generally, a husband and wife keep slogging through the tribulations,
carried along by their personal compatibility. Not every marriage can
stand up to the passions of an intense competition, though. Trouble
arrives, and is doubled, when partners mismatched at bridge bring to
the table the flaws of their married life. Culbertson knew this, and
feasted upon it, even as he extolled the game’s magnificent virtues.

Anyone intrigued by the intersection of Culbertson’s game and the

Bennetts’ story of passion gone wrong is drawn into the life of Kansas
City. Only by understanding that great Midwestern city in the time of
Prohibition and the Pendergast political machine is it possible to
understand what happened at Myrtle Bennett’s trial for murder. Her
defense lawyer was James A. Reed, a man who twice campaigned for
the presidency, a firebrand orator, former U.S. senator, friend of H. L.
Mencken, and discreet practitioner of extramarital romance himself.
The times defined events. At this exhilarating moment in Amer-

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Introduction xvii

ica’s media history, talkies were new, radio was in its infancy, and
newspapers competed fiercely for an audience. With all this came an
insatiable hunger for story, the more sensational the better. Because
(as P. T. Barnum once said) no one ever went broke underestimating
the taste of the American public, the marketing pitches of the day
were skewed toward the breathless and hyperbolic, as seen through
the prism of the ruling sex, the male.
Once, the famous movie producer Irving Thalberg told Anita
Loos how to write about women in her Hollywood scenarios: “When
you write a love scene, think of your heroine as a little puppy dog,
cuddling up to her master, wagging an imaginary tail, and gazing at
him as if he were God.” Thalberg was talking to the wrong woman, of
course. From her own marriage, Loos had learned which sex was truly
stronger. Once, she found, in her husband’s wardrobe drawer, secreted
behind socks, a woman’s love letter. When her husband tearfully con-
fessed to the affair, Loos allowed him to stay with her.
In those times, Amelia Earhart became “Lady Lindy,” Marlene
Dietrich dressed in top hat and tails, and Dorothy Parker traded
barbs with the men at the Algonquin hotel’s “Round Table.” All were
women of achievement, icons by virtue of their rarity, and yet their
work was nearly always judged from a male viewpoint. No matter
how individualistic and daring Earhart was in the sky, reporters
pigeonholed her as merely a female version of Charles Lindbergh.
Beautiful and sultry, even in her men’s formal wear, Dietrich played a
scene in Morocco in which she kisses a woman. The acerbic poet
Parker sat with writers Heywood Broun, Alexander Woollcott,
Robert Benchley, and George S. Kaufman, tossing off witticisms every
bit as cutting as theirs, such as her line on coeds at the Yale prom: “If
all the girls in attendance were laid end to end . . . I wouldn’t be at all
surprised.” For such boldness, male critics disparaged Dietrich and
Parker as unseemly and scandalous.
For women at home, those housewives whose achievements went
unnoticed, a sociable game of bridge offered a place at the table
where, by dint of their intelligence and skill, they could prove they

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xviii Introduction

were the equals of men, if not their superiors. But many husbands
were not ready to follow their wives’ lead or to view them in anything
but a subordinate role. Culbertson’s marketing genius was that he
positioned his game as a challenge to women, a dare, really. If a
woman truly wanted equality, she had only to buy a deck of cards—
and, of course, his books of bridge instruction.
Perhaps as an unintended consequence, though just as likely
the shrewdest part of his marketing, Culbertson took advantage of the
tension in marriage that is eternal. How much more interesting, he
thought, if the game became a war of the sexes.
Myrtle Bennett would be North to Jack’s South. The Culbert-
sons, Ely and Jo, would be the game’s king and queen. Spouses,
lovers, enemies— these four were all those as the raucous twenties
dissolved into the silence of the Depression. Their lives and the game
they played became a single story beginning in 1929.
This is that story.

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PA R T 1

The Bridge Storm

1929–1932

Before the Culbertsons made their challenge, the titans of bridge stood
shoulder to shoulder on a New York rooftop in 1928 (from left to right):
Milton Work, R. F. Foster, E. V. Shepard, Sidney Lenz, Wilbur White-
head, Gratz Scott. American Contract Bridge League, Memphis, TN

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one

Ely and Jo

I.

New York City in the twenties was a melting pot of seven million, full
of show, big and brawling, an industrial behemoth with enough smoke-
stacks and skyscrapers to fill the skylines of a dozen cities. F. Scott
Fitzgerald, who wrote of young love and glittery tea dances, as the
twenties dawned, suggested New York City had “all the iridescence
of the beginning of the world.” Its streets swelled with noises of the
Old World mixing with the New: gramophones, gangster gunfire,
European accents, tinkling champagne glasses, backfiring Model
Ts, and tabloid newsboys hawking the sensational. In these high
times, New Yorkers could rush to Broadway to see Al Jolson and
Eddie Cantor— known to their Eastern European parents as Asa
Yoelson and Israel Iskowitz— or thrill to the last acts of the amazing
Harry Houdini, born in Hungary as Erik Weisz. They could read a
dozen and more local dailies, choose from among thirty thousand
speakeasies, marvel as the big-bellied Babe Ruth launched home runs
at Yankee Stadium, and see their Democratic governor, the derby-
hatted Al Smith, passing through the five boroughs on his way (he
hoped) to the White House. Alive and thrumming at street level, the
city teemed with gangsters, ad agency pitchmen (selling sex, Sex,
SEX!), Wall Street fat cats, socialists and garment district workers,
café society personalities and cynical, self-absorbed writers sitting at
the Algonquin Round Table thinking up laugh lines. A constellation
of celebrities brightened the Prohibition-era night, from the brassy
hostess Texas Guinan, who with her pancake makeup and jangling

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4 The Devil’s Tickets

jewelry, greeted nightclub guests with “Hello, sucker!”; to the waiters

at Small’s Paradise in Harlem, who roller-skated the Charleston
across the dance floor with trays overhead; to Jimmy (Beau James)
Walker, the dapper mayor of the Tammany Hall machine, who so fre-
quently courted his showgirl all over town that many New Yorkers—
not including, of course, Walker’s wife— assumed the two were
married. In the spirit of the times, Walker later divorced his wife and
married the showgirl.
In 1923 Ben Hecht, the writer and playwright, arrived in New
York from Chicago and discovered an adventurous city running from
the dark memory of war and hedonistically giving itself to the
pleasures of the hour, including, he wrote, “the pleasure of not giving
a damn.” “It was a bold town,” Hecht wrote, “indeed, sharp-tongued,
and individualistic. Its credo had it that New Yorkers were a master
race.”

We busied ourselves putting up the only show possible

against doom, which is to seize all the fun there is. Thus
people sang louder, drank deeper, danced longer and
squandered themselves in every direction. . . . Its finest
ladies, including happily married ones, engaged in promis-
cuous sex as if they were college boys on a spree. . . . New
York insisted all its idols wear a grin. It regarded all foreign
events, including the first World War, as entertainment. It
believed that any war could be won by writing the right
songs for it, and not losing your sense of humor. Its patriot-
ism consisted of admiring itself ardently.

In the daily frenzy of New York City, twin journalistic revolu-

tions thundered like elephants down Forty-second Street: the tabloids
and Walter Winchell. The New York Daily News, America’s first
tabloid, or half sheet, wailed into existence like a colicky infant in
June 1919 with bold headlines and an eye-catching array of photos
and illustrations. Within five years, it claimed a readership of nearly
one million, easily the largest circulation in the nation. Its success

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Ely and Jo 5

begat another tabloid, the Daily Mirror, which arrived in 1922 prom-
ising “90 percent entertainment, 10 percent information”; a few
years later came the next, the New York Evening Graphic. These
tabloids took the bygone yellow journalism of Hearst and Pulitzer,
Spanish-American War vintage, circa 1898, and ripened it. New York
pulsed with a thousand wars in miniature— social, cultural, legal,
and, best of all, marital— and the tabloids used them all to their
advantage. They reveled in stories of debauchery, extramarital affairs,
abortions, murders, union battles along the Bowery, mob violence,
heroism, hedonism, mayhem, threats, controversies, and dynamic
courtroom trials.
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 Mir-
ror, seized upon gossip and turned it into his own high art of bally-
hoo. Like the tabloids that launched him, Winchell was abrupt, catty,
and always hustling. A night owl, he wrote about Broadway person-
alities 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

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6 The Devil’s Tickets

traffic jam.” There were other gossip artists at work in New York, but
none so widely read, or so intensely despised. The actress Ethel Barry-
more, 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 Amer-
ican auction bridge, the reigning card game of the era, built and bur-
nished 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 conser-
vative 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 recog-
nized 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 Mid-
west, the South, and Europe. They shared intellectual gifts, competi-
tive intensity, and an unswerving devotion to bridge. Founded in
1891 by twenty enthusiasts of whist, the Knickerbocker started at the

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Ely and Jo 7

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 Forti-
eth. 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 sub-
tle 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 Dil-
lon let no one close to her. She shielded her deepest thoughts and feel-
ings. 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 gradu-
ated 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

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8 The Devil’s Tickets

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 admit-
ted to him that she barely knew a heart from a spade, but while work-
ing 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 ama-
teur 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 Knicker-
bocker 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 invari-
ably 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, Com-
mander, the Baron— monikers earned by amiability, appearance, mil-
itary service, and birthright.
Of course, the game had long had similarly memorable and cele-
brated characters, dating to contract’s forerunner, whist, and the col-
orful British writer Henry Jones (whose pen name in his whist
writings of the late ninteenth century was Cavendish) and, even ear-

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Ely and Jo 9

lier, 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 acquire-
ment 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 White-
head usually had a protégé or secretary by his side. Whitey, a hale fel-
low 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 auc-
tion 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

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10 The Devil’s Tickets

in his columns for Judge, a humor magazine. The evolution, begin-

ning 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 aggres-
sively. 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 notice-
ably 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 man-
ager John (Muggsy) McGraw.
Among the Knickerbocker giants, none had a more colorful biog-
raphy 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 grand-
daughter of John Breckinridge, vice president of the United States

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Ely and Jo 11

under James Buchanan, and a presidential candidate in the 1860 cam-

paign 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 Ameri-
can 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 percent-
age 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 cere-
bral, his manner every bit the nobleman’s, worked by day as a lexi-
cographer, 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 emo-
tionally, 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

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12 The Devil’s Tickets

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 swag-
gering 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 Knicker-
bocker’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 notic-
ing 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

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Ely and Jo 13

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; sev-
eral 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 members with his sophisti-
cated, if odd, bidding and repartee. Within a few months, his reputa-
tion 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 Egyptian-
style 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 him-
self. 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

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14 The Devil’s Tickets

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 Rogov-
naia, an uncompromising tsarist, had not lived to see the day. Of
course, he did not mention to the bridge experts that Almon Culbert-
son, 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.
Ely electrified their mix. He was like a cup of strong Russian cof-
fee after three decades of tepid tea. Ely talked about himself— and his
bidding system— incessantly. Imagine him informing the gods of
American auction bridge in the spring of 1922 about the bidding mis-
takes they were making and offering a new and superior system— his.
To Whitey, Lenz, Liggett, and the others, Ely was an interloper, an
irritant, a know-it-all. They had been playing cards since before his
birth. He was, they decided, a wandering Narcissus, impertinent,
peculiar, mysterious, and without money or occupation, dressed up
entirely for show. Intellectual, yes, but toxic. From the first, the club’s
old guard did not trust Ely Culbertson, or like him.
Even worse was his pursuit of Jo Dillon. From the inner sanctum,
the experts watched their courtship blossom. Helpless to stop it, they
quietly conferred over drinks, always returning to the same question:
What does Jo see in him? Already she had succeeded in becoming one
of the Knickerbocker boys in ways Ely never would.
From their first shared moment at a Knickerbocker bridge table
(as opponents, not partners), Ely Culbertson was infatuated with Jo
Dillon. He noticed small details: her lightly freckled face, the high
cheekbones, her slight retroussé nose, the smallness of her voice, and
the long narrow hands alive with suppressed feelings. Everything

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Ely and Jo 15

about Jo suggested calmness and restraint. She had finishing-school

charm. Her presence at the table was steady, cerebral, refined.
Seeing Jo, Ely remembered a moment eight years before in Italy
when he first dreamed of his Galatea, a dream so strong he placed an
advertisement in a newspaper. He was looking for a wife. And not
just any woman, but one whose shape, intellect, and pedigree met his
specifications. He did not describe his motive that candidly in the ad.
Instead, he hid behind cleverness. No one at the Knickerbocker knew
this story, of course, and if they had, it would only have intensified
their concern for Jo.
Ely only told the story many years later. In the summer of 1915,
with Europe at war, he was twenty-three years old and living his
richly entitled life on tsarist rubles while holed up, for the time being,
in a Geneva hotel. Slim and elegant, he was five feet, ten inches tall
and weighed not even 140 pounds. He had a handsome wardrobe
and a thin face with hooded eyes that a writer later would liken to a
“romantically idealized Satan.”
Better with numbers than with women, he put his scientific mind
to use. If he could not find his ideal woman, he reasoned, he would,
with a system, create her. He had in mind Galatea, the figure in Greek
mythology carved from ivory and so beautiful that her sculptor, Pyg-
malion, falls in love with her. With Pygmalion’s love, and Aphrodite’s
spark, Galatea springs to life. Ely was determined to find a young
woman, beautiful and refined, whose personality was not yet fully
formed. He would place her in an environment filled with tutors,
books, plays, and ideas. They would live in a cultured setting— Paris
or London, perhaps— where he would shape a superior woman, his
perfect partner, his Galatea.
Beneath the youthful romanticism and naïveté of his plan was a
dark dreamer’s distended thinking: Ely as Creator. He took a train to
Turin, in northern Italy, where, he believed, the world’s most beauti-
ful women lived. If he failed there, he would seek his wife in Greece
or the Balkans. In Turin he placed his ad in La Stampa and other
newspapers, announcing himself as an American painter in search of
“an exceptional model”:

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16 The Devil’s Tickets

Must be between 18 and 21 years old. Between 5 feet 4 and

5 feet 6 inches tall; between 24 and 26 inches waist;
between 34 and 36 inches bust; between 36 and 38 inches
hips, legs perfectly shaped; eyes very large, preferably black
with blonde hair, or blue with black hair; features either
very symmetrical or, if not classical, of exotic attractive-
ness. Only truly beautiful types need apply. Undress unnec-
essary. Write, enclosing photograph.

Hundreds of women answered his advertisement, and he met

them all at a busy central piazza, moving from one street corner to
the next, their individual appointments spaced fifteen minutes apart,
his identifying marker a white rose pinned to his lapel. In his derby
and suit, sniffing the summer air, he moved like a Russian prince. In
these candidates, he saw age, infirmity, obesity, bad teeth. “No, sig-
norina,” he said; and to the next, with a shake of his head, “Sorry.
No, signorina.” It went on like this for several days. He did not find
Galatea. But now, in the brownstone at 26 West Fortieth Street, he
knew he had.
Their courtship began over dinner, with Jo saying, “It isn’t your
ideas or your so-called system that makes you win. It’s your knowl-
edge of human nature. You’d win with any system.” She noted how
Ely drew inferences and information from an opponent’s smallest
hints: a hesitation, a slight change in voice inflection, an arching of
the brow. He also knew how to rile opponents. He would goad or
gloat at just the right moment. This was sophisticated gamesmanship,
a gambler’s high art.
In conversations with Jo, Ely belittled the Knickerbocker experts
who glorified their own “rules” of bidding. They would rather score
two hundred points by following their own rules, he told her, than
three hundred points by abandoning them. He showed Jo a “crime
sheet” he’d been keeping, in which he had dissected the others’ bids
and plays, and his own. He could prove they were throwing away
thousands of points for no reason other than stubbornness. He showed
her notebook pages covered with graphs, curves, and percentages.

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Ely and Jo 17

He persuaded Jo to explore his ideas. Together, Ely and Jo dealt

hands and bid them according to the ideas of Whitehead and Milton
Work, a noted American authority on whist, scoring the results. They
then bid according to Ely’s methods. For two weeks, Jo bid hands,
with Ely or alone, according to the three systems. And she became a
convert.
Soon she was seeing Ely every day. He would drop into her
bridge teaching studio in late afternoons and, with a group of her
friends, the two would share cocktails and dinners at the Beaux Arts
restaurant next door, a speakeasy with Texas Guinan as its greeter.
Together, Ely and Jo walked at night along Forty-second Street, past
the New York Public Library, and sat on the benches in the park
behind the library with Jo’s Pekingese dog, Chu Chin Chow. They
talked about books, people, and life. Ely told her that he thought
himself much like Spinoza, the seventeenth-century Dutch philoso-
pher, the great rationalist, who ground lenses by day so that he could
philosophize by night. Ely played bridge, he said, but his underlying
ambition was to create the Modern Theory of Cards, and he intended
to reap the financial rewards for it. He told Jo about Russia, hoping
she would love the country, for then she might also love him. He
understood that her divorce and the recent death of her former hus-
band weighed upon her. He sensed her reluctance to marry again.
He showed her his diary, reasoning that she was entitled to know
the deepest thoughts of the man about to propose marriage to her.
She read the diary, and it scared her. She told him, “I need a change.”
Crestfallen, Ely heard her say, “We can never be happy.”
She spoke harshly to him that night: “You could be a revolution-
ist, a monk or a philanderer, but you never could be a family man.
You’d hate it.
“Ely, no woman could ever be happy with you,” she said. “To
you, a woman will always be a companion, an assistant— not a wife.
Sometimes, I’m afraid of you. You’re ruthless, Ely, because you are
ruled by ideas, not by your heart.”
She went away, to Saratoga, and Ely thought that maybe she was
not his Galatea, after all. A foolish American girl, he decided. They’re

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18 The Devil’s Tickets

all spoiled. He sat alone one night at the Beaux Arts restaurant with a
bottle of champagne and his despair. Guinan happened by his table
and noticed Jo’s absence: “Why the gloom, Ely? Did someone mis-
play a hand?”
But he was determined not to give up on Jo Dillon. He went to
Saratoga, put an arm around her, and kissed her. She did not resist
him, but she said, “Ely, I love you, but I will not marry you.” Ely’s
heart leaped: he was still in the game.
Now it was late summer, 1922. They conceived an idea to
become America’s best bridge pair, and began a period of intensive
training, spending hours each night fine-tuning their partnership.
They created a mutual understanding of bids, discussed the impon-
derables of bridge psychology. Then they tested their theories, and
their system, Thursday nights at the Knickerbocker, returning after-
ward to Jo’s apartment and working from memory to re-create the
hands dealt and played. They made exhaustive notes, analyzed errors.
It was during these times when Ely became his most ruthless. Into the
wee hours, Jo’s living room filled with cigarette smoke and Ely’s sav-
age criticisms, until finally Jo, in tears, pushed her chair from the
table and shouted, “You’re a bridge monster! I’ll never play with you
again!”
If Ely’s intellect amazed Jo, his intensity frightened her. The mem-
ory of such explosive bridge table experiences would melt away, but
they would help Ely define early on the imperative of partnership
cooperation: “This question of morale is automatically solved for
those who realize that partnership is simply a sporting proposition,”
he wrote. “We are drawn together for better or worse and therefore
like true pals should stand by cheerfully and courageously.” He also
created a standing rule: “Never reproach your partner if there be the
slightest thing for which you can reproach yourself.” At the table he
began to treat Jo with deference, and their courtship deepened.
As time passed, Jo came to believe that, among married couples
playing as bridge partners, there were three types: (1) those who
quarreled everywhere, including at bridge; (2) those who quarreled
nowhere, except at bridge; and (3) those who quarreled everywhere,

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Ely and Jo 19

but never at bridge. She and Ely therefore agreed never to discuss a
hand while sitting at the bridge table.
They married the following June. The experts in the Knicker-
bocker’s third-floor inner sanctum were aghast, especially Whitey.
(Two years later, he founded the Cavendish Club in New York City
and invited Jo to join— as long as she promised to keep her husband
out.) On the signed affidavit for a wedding license, Ely, too ashamed
to define his occupation as “gambler at cards,” instead scrawled, “oil
business,” borrowing from his father’s former profession. Jo cited her
occupation as “bridge expert.” He was thirty-two, she twenty-five.
On the affidavit, Jo also cited her divorce in March 1921. Of her first
husband, she wrote simply, “dead 1922.” Perhaps to protect her own
good name, she added a single word, crammed into the tight space
above her signature: Plaintiff. Jo wanted it known that she, not her
first husband, had filed the divorce papers.
The Culbertsons married at the Holy Cross Church in New York
City, with Father Duffy presiding. Jo’s mother, Sarah McCarthy Mur-
phy, served as maid of honor, and Ely’s father, Almon, as best man.
Ely bought a thin platinum wedding ring with tiny diamonds, on the
installment plan, and promised Jo an enormous square-cut solitaire.
The longer she waited, he assured her, the larger the diamond. (He
would deliver an impressive solitaire ten years later.) He also gave Jo
a small jewel box. It was empty, of course, but one day he promised it
would hold a beautiful honeymoon on the isle of Capri, a lovely
country home, an engagement ring, sables, minks, and diamonds.
They honeymooned at a motel in nearby Long Beach, an inexpensive
seashore resort. They drank champagne and walked along the beach.
She encouraged him— as a bridge player, as a writer, as a man:
“You’re better than you think you are.”
“Jo-Jotte, I’ll make you the happiest woman in the world,” Ilya
Culbertson promised his Galatea on their honeymoon. And then he
amended, “At least in spots.”

By the mid-1920s, auction bridge had solidly established itself as an

American parlor game, particularly among the intellectual and the

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20 The Devil’s Tickets

well-to-do. The game even found its way into popular literature. In a
1926 short story for Red Book magazine, “The Rich Boy,” F. Scott
Fitzgerald wrote of a young Yale man playing a casual game with
friends at the Everglades Club in Palm Beach; the same year, Heming-
way’s Jake Barnes, in The Sun Also Rises, plays three-handed bridge
with friends in Spain en route to watch the bulls run at Pamplona.
As late as 1925, contract bridge was hardly known, and played
only experimentally. Its evolution dated back more than two cen-
turies to whist, which rose in Britain during the first half of the eigh-
teenth century from relative obscurity, and from earlier games known
as triumph, ruff and honours, and whisk and swabbers. Played at the
outset in servants’ quarters, or “below stairs,” the game soon gained
popularity among elites. In 1742, the London barrister turned whist
instructor Edmond Hoyle (of the phrase “according to Hoyle”) pub-
lished his seminal A Short Treatise on the Game of Whist, Containing
the Laws of the Game, and Also Some Rules Whereby a Beginner
May, with Due Attention to Them, Attain to the Playing It Well.
In the United States and Europe, auction bridge appealed to
Anglophiles and other cosmopolites who might have imagined them-
selves as knights and ladies keeping alive the grand tradition of a
whist-based game; in 1912, four such devotees, passengers aboard
the Titanic, were playing auction bridge when the ship struck ice.
In 1925, though, the millionaire yachtsman Harold S. Vander-
bilt, great-grandson of the famed Commodore, decided on revolution
at the bridge table. Enough of auction. Its predictability was second
only to its bidding dullness. On a cruise ship voyage through the
Panama Canal, Vanderbilt, with time to tinker, smoking his pipe and
wearing his pince-nez, energized the scoring table and came up with a
sophisticated plan for the evolving game of contract bridge that, in his
mind, would cause a competitor’s heart to beat faster even as a thinker’s
mind created solutions to problems never before faced at the table.
Here was the essential difference between auction and contract:
In contract bridge, only the tricks bid for, and made, were counted
toward winning an all-important game. To earn full rewards, sides
now would have to take risks by bidding for higher contracts. In auc-

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Ely and Jo 21

tion bridge, a partnership was rewarded for a grand slam by taking

all thirteen tricks even if it had bid only to take eight. Some critics
said that, in terms of bidding, auction bridge rewarded conservatism,
even cowardice. Contract changed that. Vanderbilt also added “vulner-
ability” to a side that had won one game in the best-of-three-game
rubber, increasing the size of their penalties for failing to make con-
tracts and their rewards for making them. A more complex game
than auction, contract bridge moved the focus from the play of the
cards to the bidding. It called for superior coordination between part-
ners— and cried out for a bidding system. It would make the expert
suddenly indispensable to living-room players across the nation. Van-
derbilt prevailed upon his friends in Long Island, Palm Beach, and
Newport to try the new game. In 1927, New York’s gentlemen’s-only
whist clubs bought in to it and adopted its official laws. Thus modern
contract bridge was born.

Short on cash, Ely took a train west to Los Angeles in the summer of
1927, and set himself up in the Biltmore Hotel. There he taught an
auction bridge class with twenty students, predominantly women
from Pasadena and Los Angeles. Jo joined him in California, and dur-
ing a visit to Santa Barbara they heard for the first time about con-
tract bridge, the new rage of New York.
In Santa Barbara, Ely and Jo played Vanderbilt’s contract for the
first time, and the game’s faster pace and enhanced scoring thrilled
Ely. “Contract will sweep the country,” he told Jo.
He returned to New York convinced that if he could develop a
set of rules that would enable a novice to learn an otherwise complex
game in a matter of a few weeks, then he could make contract bridge,
and its adherents, entirely, and profitably, his. He decided that about
70 percent of his established rules for auction bridge would apply to
contract. He would study the rest, and apply his science.
Back in New York, Ely and Jo organized a regular contract
bridge game at their apartment on East Sixty-third Street. They sought
to sell the game to men of the Knickerbocker inner sanctum, knowing
they were hidebound and resistant to any game but auction, their safe

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22 The Devil’s Tickets

haven. At first the men didn’t come to the Culbertson apartment.

Contract, they insisted, was only a fad, and would be dead in a mat-
ter of months. But then von Zedtwitz came, and so did Ted Lightner,
one of Knickerbocker’s young bright lights. Both became converts.
Finally, Ely corralled Sims and another top player, George Reith, and
they, too, saw the merits of contract.
Ely had begun to develop his “Approach-Forcing” bidding sys-
tem. Bridge bidding systems are like Sunday church sermons: deriva-
tive and oftentimes merely a careful integration of pieces drawn from
other systems and turned slightly in a new direction. In essence, Ely’s
Approach-Forcing system meant that bidding should be advanced
slowly, never recklessly, and that certain bids and responses would
force a partner to bid once more, and in some instances to continue
bidding until the possibility of making game, or one hundred points,
was reached.
Ely still lived a gambler’s life, his earnings unsteady. On New
Year’s Eve 1928, alone in their apartment, he gave a champagne toast
to Jo: “Here’s to the most wonderful wife on earth!” Two weeks later,
Jo delivered their first child, a daughter, Joyce Nadya.
At the Knickerbocker, the auction bridge gods remained secure
and complacent. They could not know the magnitude of the coming
contract bridge craze. Ely knew, and aimed to crush them. First he
would steal their reputations and transform himself into the nation’s
leading bridge authority. Then he would steal their book sales, their
lecture tours, and their radio appearances. Battle lines were drawn.

In the summer of 1928, Ely and Jo spent time at Hal and Dorothy
Sims’s ten-acre estate, a lush, wide-open space with bridges and lakes,
in Deal, New Jersey, about sixty miles from Manhattan. The Sims
place had become like a sleepaway camp for the Knickerbocker Whist
Club’s best players. The big house, with its porches, slept about forty,
though hardly anyone there seemed to sleep. Bridge-playing guests
showed up at all hours, ready to cut into the two-cent, five-cent, and
ten-cent tables. Games lasted through the night. If a player left for a
train or to go to bed, another would appear. One night a thunder-

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Ely and Jo 23

storm struck with fury: windows burst open, lamps and knickknacks
crashed onto card tables, electricity failed, and rooms went dark.
Dorothy Sims rose in terror from her bed and raced downstairs.
There, she found her husband and young Johnny Rau of Columbia
University playing against von Zedtwitz and Vanderbilt, plodding
players who abhorred snap judgments. In the darkness, someone lit a
match at the table, and Vanderbilt, barely illuminated, turned from
his cards and said, “Whose bid is it?”
Some guests stayed a day; others stayed weeks, prompting the
wise-cracking Dorothy Sims to place an ancestral coat of arms above
the front door that read guests and fish stink after the third
day. The Simses held tournaments every few days. Once, Hal Sims
came to the table an hour early, saying he hoped to “get in a little
cards” before the tournament began. Sunday nights were especially
popular because fried chicken was delivered by a neighboring farmer,
typically at the last minute, when twenty bridge-playing guests
showed up without warning. “Bridge sharks multiply like rabbits. I
prefer rabbits,” Dorothy Sims would write. “They’re less choosy.
They’re less sensitive.”

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about the author

GARY M. POMERANTZ is an author, journalist, and visiting

lecturer in the Department of Communication at Stanford Uni-
versity. His first book, Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn,
was named a 1996 Notable Book of the Year by the New York
Times. The Times named his third and most recent book, Wilt,
1962, a narrative about race, celebrity, and Wilt Chamberlain’s
legendary 100-point game, a 2005 editors’ choice selection. A
graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, Pomerantz
worked for nearly two decades as a daily journalist, on staff for
the Washington Post and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, ini-
tially as a sportswriter and then writing columns, editorials, and
special projects. He later served for two years as Distinguished
Visiting Professor of Journalism at Emory University in Atlanta.
His second book, Nine Minutes, Twenty Seconds (2001), about
an air crash, has been published in China, England, and Ger-
many and was termed by The London Evening Standard “a
masterpiece of nonfiction storytelling.” He lives in the San Fran-
cisco Bay Area with his wife and their three children. Visit his
website at www.garympomerantz.com.

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The Devil’s Tickets 
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