Backgammon Man
My Dad was a handsome, silver-tongued devil, one of the most charming and least reliable men who ever tap-danced his way through life. For Father’s Day, which falls this month, I’m posting a piece about him that was published in Terry Ross’s Black Lamb some years back. I’ve added more to the text and otherwise fiddled with it, but I think it’s a fair enough tribute to the dapper rogue. My brother Mike and I loved him, but never really trusted him. Our mother divorced him for his chronic infidelity, but confessed even after she had remarried that she’d never truly regretted devoting ten years of her life to him. Our grandfather, who cheated regularly on our grandmother, but got away with it because he loved her in his own selfish way, and kept her in high, luxurious style, told his son once, “Tommy, you don’t have to marry them!”
But Dad always did. He had a basic sense of honor, and he was also a romantic. I think he was more in love with love than with any of the women he captivated, but he always did the decent thing, according to the WASP mores of the mid-20th century. So as we grew up, Mike and I passed through three stepmothers and several stepsiblings, before Dad met a fourth lady who liked him but turned him down because of his two big, bad habits.
Dad was a compulsive gambler and an alcoholic, failings which almost always occur together and reinforce each other. He bet on anything involving the element of chance, and when he was drinking, his betting addiction only increased. In his high-flying days, when he made a lot of money working for a big Manhattan real estate developer (the guy was a gambler himself, given the iffy nature of that racket), Dad used to spend part of his vacations in Las Vegas, which was then totally controlled by the Mafia. He took his losses at the poker table graciously, never complaining. At the time, Frank Sinatra and his Rat Pack – Joey Bishop, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Peter Lawford – were the Mob’s court jesters and minstrels, and Sinatra (called “The Chairman of the Board” by his buddies) ruled The Sands Hotel where Dad stayed when he was on a gambling and boozing binge. Dad adored Sinatra, and Ol’ Blue Eyes must have found Dad good company, because he once invited him to the top floor suite where he and the Rat Pack stayed when they were in town. Shelley Winters was part of what might be called the Rat Pack’s Ladies’ Auxiliary, and Dad always insisted that he slept with her that night. I never doubted him. Shelley Winters was an even bigger drunk than he was, and when she was loaded, she slept with anyone who was reasonably attractive.
But Dad was a lousy poker player when he was drinking, and although he remained canny enough to avoid the slot machines, he did get seduced by the spins of the roulette tables and the rolls of the dice at craps. After one weekend in which he lost all the money he’d brought with him, and had run up large debts in the form of markers, Meyer Lansky, the mobster who owned The Sands, threatened to submit him to grievous bodily harm if he didn’t pay up. Sinatra interceded on Dad’s behalf, paid his debts, and even bought him a plane ticket home. It’s no wonder that Dad always sang Sinatra songs in the shower when I was a kid.
There was one game, however, at which Dad excelled, and if The Sands had offered it, he would have taken his opponents to the cleaners. But in backgammon, you bet against your opponent, not the house, so casinos can’t make money with it.
When I was ten years old my father took me to a bank in New York City and withdrew a little over five thousand dollars in cash. He let me hold the thick bank envelope all the way home and he said that the money was mine. Yow! Ten years old, and rich! It was the maturity payout of a War Bond Dad had bought when I was born in 1942, and it was intended to go toward my college education.
“But we’re pretty flush now,” he told me, “and you don’t have to worry about your education. So I just need that money for awhile, OK?”
“I don’t get to keep it?”
“Well, of course I’ll pay it back. But your old Dad is a little strapped, so I have to sort of borrow it for awhile.”
“But I want to keep it!”
“You can’t. It’s complicated, Tobe. I’ll explain when you’re older.”
It took me about twenty years to figure out that Dad had been in trouble with a bookie when we walked into that grand marble bank on Fifth Avenue and I got to hold the money until the taxi got home. He gambled on everything, and that particular crisis involved the ponies. Dad should have known better than to pick long-shots at the track, because his own father was then President of the New York Racing Commission, and Dad had grown up with inside information about the corruption which reigned throughout the Sport of Kings.
Of course I never saw the money again. Dad was a brown-eyed handsome man with the gift of gab, a pretty smart cookie, irresistible to the ladies, a high-roller, and a man about town. My auburn-haired mother caught him in bed with a blonde woman, and divorced him. He married the blonde, and she caught him in bed with a brunette, and divorced him. And so it went through two more wives and a final girlfriend. Dad never could resist running a lucky streak, no matter what disasters it left in its wake.
His real money game was backgammon, and he probably should have stuck to it, because he was a master. My cousins and my brother and I learned to play backgammon as soon as we were old enough to shake the dice cup and move the men around the board. A serious backgammon game never plays out. The doubling-cube is the equivalent of raises and bluffs in poker, and an expert player knows the odds and either redoubles or folds when challenged, depending on the configuration of the board. My fiercest ambition when I was a kid was to beat my father. I never did. Dad always insisted on playing for money, to teach me serious backgammon, and he generally did me out of my allowance. He’d always give me back my chump change with a sardonic grin. “You should have doubled me two throws ago, when I still had a blot in your home board.”
While I was away in Germany during my Army service, I was engaged to a lovely aspiring actress, and she was lonely and broke. Dad invited her to lunch at the Yale Club in New York. He’d been in the Class of 1941, and he was a devoted Old Eli. Back in 1966 the Yale Club, like the University, was men-only, and women were allowed into only one dining-room. The club had a ladies’ waiting-room just off the lobby, where women were sequestered with frilly furniture and back issues of the Ladies’ Home Journal to wait for their companions. Dad – he was still in his late forties then, and temporarily between wives – sloped in exactly on time, looking devastatingly dashing in his camel’s hair coat, scarf, and bespoke dark suit. I got this information from a letter my fiancée wrote me after the encounter. It wasn’t a letter I enjoyed reading.
Dad told her that lunch was still on, but he had to take care of something first. He suggested that she order a drink, and he promised he’d be back inside half an hour. My fiancée, no dummy, asked, “Is there a problem?”
“Nothing to worry about. Liquid assets, kind of thing.”
“You don’t have any money?”
“Relax, dear. I just have to visit the usual suckers on the fourth floor.”
The fourth floor of the Yale Club was where Old Elis played serious backgammon. There were some nationally-ranked players who showed up from time to time, but official tournaments prohibited gambling: the winners got a small purse, but the players couldn’t bet as they played. Dad despised the tournaments, and never played in them, because backgammon is purely designed for betting. Each roll of the dice can turn a game upside down. Backgammon was invented by the Persians, probably before 600 BCE, and kingdoms have been lost and won by a turn of the doubling cube.
Dad returned to my fiancée within half an hour, and told her, “OK, my dear, everything’s copacetic. Let’s eat.” In her letter she wrote that he was showing off a huge wad of bills. Dad never carried his money in a wallet. He liked a big roll, and he secured it with a silver Tiffany money-clip engraved with his initials.
I don’t think Dad ever slept with my fiancée; if he did, neither of them told me. But she was mightily impressed by his dash, his amiable energy, and his complete confidence that a half-hour playing backgammon would get him enough money, and then some, to buy her a lovely lunch. And, according to her letter, the lunch was lovely, up in the Yale Club’s Grill Room, where women were admitted. She wrote me that she’d never seen so many powerful, well-dressed men and women in one place before.
We did get married, briefly, but during the time I’d been in the Army she’d already started landing well-paying jobs on soap operas. I kept trying to persuade her that if she came out to the regional theaters where I had started working in plays by Shakespeare and Ibsen and Chekhov and Tennessee Williams, we could become modern avatars of the Lunts. She told me just to look at the money, and she said it was something she had learned from my Dad that day at the Yale Club.
We divorced, amicably, in 1970, when I was playing leading roles in “classic” plays at a remote theater in Michigan, for $400 a week, and she was making five times that amount playing a woman with a split personality on the hottest daytime show on TV.
She must have learned from Dad how to use the doubling cube.
Dad should have lived a long and happy life. But I haven’t mentioned that he was a hopeless alcoholic, a binge-drinker. Serious gamblers often have equally serious booze habits, which is why most of them wind up broke. I had to go back to the Yale Club one night many years later to haul Dad out of his room. The management had forbidden him to play backgammon for money on the fourth floor, and he hadn’t paid his rent for two weeks. He was hungover and very sick, and I took him to a hospital to dry out. The doctors discharged him within forty-eight hours, and when I came to pick him up he was gone. I think he stole somebody’s car.
He wound up on a rehabilitation ranch in Arizona. He was enormously popular there, giving wry advice to the young druggies who made up most of the residents, and helping the manager raise and train the three or four Thoroughbred horses the ranch maintained for competition on the California tracks. He taught the kids to ride, and he made sure they put down a few bucks on the ranch’s horses whenever they raced. He also stole the ranch’s truck from time to time, aided by the kids, to go into the nearby city and buy booze. And he made them learn how to play backgammon. Of course he played for money, and always stripped them of their chump change. But they never got angry at him.
After he died (of kidney failure, partially brought on by his years of drinking), I went out to the ranch with my brother Mike to attend a memorial service for him. It was informal, not in a church: just a gathering, like all the AA meetings the residents did routinely, outdoors in a courtyard of the complex under the big Arizona sky. People testified about Dad with great honesty and affection. Mike and I read our prepared eulogies, which mostly bored the residents. But finally I asked if Dad had ever taught them anything. One young man said, “Sure. Never double if you still have an blot in the other guy’s home board,”