Bridge to everwhere;

              By Richard L. Frcy
"Ridiculous!" I would have answered
the most revered of 1925's seers had he
ventured to predict that my not-too-distant
future would include sitting
down to play bridge with Harold S.
Vanderbilt. He had not yet skippered
the three great yachts that successfully
defended the America's Cup. I was not
aware that he had just invented con­tract
bridge. But even I knew that
Vanderbilt was a multimillionaire, the
bachelor catch of society's Four Hun­dred
and a scion of the tough old
Commodore who had got his start by
plying his own private ferry to Staten
Island and wound up owning the New
York Central Railroad.
I was 20, a social nobody, having a
lot of fun and a modest financial suc­cess
eking out an extra $5 a week or so
playing auction bridge at home or at
the homes of friends. I don't mean that
I ever became Mike Vanderbilt's pal;
we just played bridge together a few
times and once he sat beside me for a
couple of hours, acting the part of the
most silent and attentive kibitzer I
ever enjoyed. My contemporary, Sam
Fry, Jr.—an early Life Master like me
and with the same highly non-social
background—was on much friendlier
terms with Mr. V. In fact, Vanderbilt
loved a good bridge game so much that
he once sent his private plane clear
across Florida to bring Sam to Palm
Beach for a game. Knowing that Van­derbilt
hated to lose, Junior has never
been quite sure whether he should con­sider
this a friendly gesture or a kind of
Las Vegas free plane ride to welcome
an expected sucker. Since neither of us
owned a yacht, my point is that nothing
but bridge could have brought either of
us into the orbit of a Vanderbilt.
I know I have made more friends,
been to more places and earned more
recognition because I became a good
bridge player than ever I could have
by becoming a great advertising man—
my original line of work. Actually, I've
made my living as a writer, but it never
hurt that some of my editors also liked
to play bridge. Not long ago, for ex­ample,
I went on a nine-day Caribbean
cruise as maitre de bridge aboard the
plush steamship Nieuw Amsterdam. At
the first luncheon, seating was catch-as-
catch-can so my wife and I intro­duced
ourselves to two other couples at
our table. One of the husbands replied,
"Our name is Jacoby—but we don't play
bridge. And our friends here are Mr.
and Mrs. Sulzberger."
In my usual facetious fashion, I said,
"Of The New York Times, I presume."
Mrs. Sulzberger nodded, "Yes," and
there I was with egg on my chin. But it
was a pleasant luncheon and when my
wife encountered Arthur Ochs Sulz­berger
at one of our island shopping
stops a few days later, she asked, "How
are you doing?" He smiled and said,
"Running out of money." Her offer of
a loan was genially refused.
As did most everyone at the Caven­dish
Bridge Club in New York, I called
Wall Street genius Jack Dreyfus "Baby-face."
I might even have become one
of that club's Polaroid "millionaires"
except that I didn't happen to be
around at the time that Jack was ex­pressing
his confidence in that then
brand-new stock. I was one of the first
to call Alfred M. Gruenther, "General,"
because that was how we all greeted
the young lieutenant who moonlighted
from his duties as math instructor at
West Point in order to direct the most
important eastern bridge tournaments.
Later, of course, he did become a four-star
general. I never got to play with
Al's most famous bridge partner, Ike
Eisenhower, but I met him when he
dropped in at the National Champion­ships
in Washington and spent not less
than two hours as a fascinated kibitzer.
Name dropping? Of course I am.
Nor could I have expected these things
to happen to me if I hadn't happened
to be a pretty good bridge player. But
if you play any kind of bridge, you can
find friends fast, no matter where you
go in this world. A bridge deck is like
52 calling cards.
There are really two games of con­tract
bridge: the tournament game,
where they know you are an amateur
if you introduce yourself when you
come to a new table, and the social
game, where you can find a bridge
game to your liking and people you like
and who will like you in any city you
may visit or move to. You don't have to
go to the bridge club, or the country
club or the athletic club. If you are
married, you and your wife will meet
dozens of other couples who enjoy an
evening of home bridge.
I am not going to pretend that
husband-and-wife bridge battles are
unknown. But, if Ely Culbertson's
theory is psychologically sound, neither
are such fights unwholesome. Ely used
to say that since a certain number of
marital quarrels are natural and inev­itable,
it is better to fight about bridge
than about more important matters.
Whether or not he was right, so far
as I know there is only one confirmed
case of homicide as the result of a
bridge argument. That was way back
in 1931 when John Bennett of Kansas
City, after losing a hand with his wife
as partner, learned too late that the
locked door of his bathroom was neither
rageproof nor bulletproof. Mrs. Bennett
fired several shots through the door
and, in the ensuing postmortem, the
late Mr. Bennett was, for once, in no
position to explain why he had bid and
played the hand as he did.
I do not maintain that husband-and-wife
bridge spells inevitable bank­ruptcy
for the professional marriage
counselor. A doctor friend whose bridge
skill had helped pay his way through
med school played bridge with his wife
only once. After a couple of deals, she
asked, "How can you take bridge so
seriously? After all, it's only a game."
Wisely, and promptly, he gave up play­ing
bridge with her as his partner, and
eventually gave up the game com­pletely.
Then there was the time my wife
and I played a friendly game against
another expert and his still-almost-new
spouse. We had lost a little — never