Born Lucky

THE STRANGE LIVES OF ONE MAN--f/y Culberhon--Winsfon ($3).

According to Ely Culbertson, more words were printed about the Culbertson-Lenz bridge battle in 1931 than about Lindbergh's flight to Paris or any murder except the Hall-Mills case; and his Contract Bridge Blue Book and its Summary (written by Mrs. Culbertson) are, next to the Bible, the all-time non-fiction bestsellers (1,300,000 copies). Thanks to an incredible talent for cards and for self-publicizing, Ely Culbertson became the most curiously famous man of the '30s.

But strangely little was known of him.

In this 693-page autobiography Mr. Culbertson tells all. He tells all in such a grand-slam way and with such all-conquering tricks that many readers may doubt their eyes. Salient Who's Who items:

Ely (Illya) Culbertson. Born Rumania 1891 of a Cossack mother and a Scotch-Pennsylvanian mining engineer. Born partially covered with a caul, was marked from early childhood as a man of luck and destiny. Lived most of youth in Russia.

At 15 had intense ambition to become world's greatest saint. Spring ferment set up a crossruff resulting in terror, self-mortification, pneumonia. A kind Jewish doctor relieved him at once of his guilt and of his God.

After some dandyism, cafe girls and card-playing, rediscovered God in The Masses. Active in 1905-07 Revolution. Jailed three months with seven revolutionists condemned to death; learned much. In Dostoevskian-Marxian appetite for poverty lived among the lowliest in Odessa.

To Yale at 20. Bored there. Became a Bowery bum. Lived a while with a hophead and his wife. Recalled to New Haven where his mother, dying, toasted in champagne her sons, her "wonderful life," smashed the glass.

Organizer of Ukrainian labor on railroad construction in Canadian Rockies. Anarchist in Spain at time of plot against life of Alfonso XIII. Student in Paris of Marx, statistics, literature, the Mass Mind.

In search of The Ideal Woman, posed as artist, advertised for model in Turin papers. Several hundred candidates. Asked to leave town under suspicion of white slavery.

Spent World War I years in Paris among the more subtle of those who made a lifework of pleasure. Stilled anxiety with alcohol; cracked under the alcohol. Broke a baccarat bank for 40,960 francs.

Of its 693 pages, the whole Culbertson bridge career absorbs scarcely 100. Culbertson built up the game and himself as its expert to monstrous proportions, tired of it at last. A vacation, reading and thinking alone in Paris, made it all the more clear that Ely the "Philosopher," the "Epicurean," the "Idealist," must dethrone the "Family Man," the "Business Manager," the "Celebrity," the "Child." His story ends on the eve of an amicable divorce. An Appendix on the Mass Mind contains the most crackpot writing, the most valuable observations, in the book.

Altogether the volume is an uncommonly interesting psychological document: touching, somehow admirable case history of an international vagabond, a semi-Dostoevskian, a naive sophisticate and speculative researcher. It is also a huge chunk of undercured, surprisingly palatable ham. The author is nobody's fool, except perhaps (as he freely grants) his own.

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