Table Talk

Milton Berle: Do you remember how Ernie Kovacs used to carry a deck of cards around with him? Always wanted to play table-stakes poker. He was hooked on the game. It must have been 18 years ago that we were all at Dino's house—Tony Curtis, Dean Martin, the regular group. I wasn't playing; I was just kibitzing. The game began about eight P.M. and continued all through the night. The curtains were blacked out so there would be no distractions. Must have been 7:30 the next morning—they were still playing table stakes—when the phone rang. Before picking it up, Ernie said that great line: "I wonder who the hell could be calling me at this hour of the morning." Ernie didn't play very well. He lost a lot of money.

Jack Lemmon: I hung around games like that for a while before I realized I was in over my head. My speed is more like what happened on the set of The Front Page, which Walter and I made last summer. Just out of camera range, there was a poker table that was filled between takes with gaffers, sound men, stagehands and especially actors. Billy Wilder, the director, realized that he'd be getting a bunch of actors who didn't know one another, so he set up a game to loosen things up. Walter and I would pull up a chair now and then if they didn't have enough players. The game was draw, stud or high-low. And the stakes weren't peanuts, either. It was one-dollar, two-dollar, three-dollar. You could win $300 or $400 a hand.

Walter Matthau: You call that poker? That wasn't a real game. That was killing time waiting for the director to say, "OK, we're ready for a take." It was too automatic. Put the money in, the best hand takes the money out. Throw it in, take it out, throw it in.

Lemmon: So what's real poker?

Matthau: Any game where the loss of money can hurt you. Real poker is being able to bet a certain amount of money that would make most people leave the game unless they had a very strong hand. You can't deceive anybody with a dollar bet. It really has to hurt your wallet for the game to matter. The game has got to have financial meaning, or else it's not poker.

Elliott Gould: I used to play table stakes regularly at Harry Belafonte's house in New York. Pot limit. You could win a couple of grand on a good evening. It wasn't my idea, but we played a lot of offbeat games, like baseball....

Lemmon: That reminds me of my cockamamie partner, the guy who produced Save the Tiger. He enjoys playing poker with his odometer, if you can believe that. Even if he's alone in his car, he's looking at his dashboard and doing mind bets on combinations of numbers. I think the kid's gone bananas. I'll tell you one thing: I ain't gonna be in the car in front of him while he's watching that last number change, going for an inside straight.

Gould: Anyhow, we were playing baseball and a lot of wild games at the Belafontes'. Harry and his wife, Julie, usually didn't do too well. It seemed like they were always both losing in the big pots. Sidney Poitier frequently played in that game. He's cute. He does a lot of jiving at the table, a lot of obvious reading of his opponents. He takes a lot of time to get a "tell." My friend Joey Walsh—he's the guy who wrote my last picture, California Split, and a terrific poker player—is very much into tells. He says you should pay special attention to the table talk between hands and file what you hear for later reference. And look out for idiosyncratic gestures, which can tell you a lot about an opponent. Not only must you know how to play the cards but you've gotta know how to play people.

Telly Savalas: I know what you mean. That's what I call the vig, or the edge. My vig is the ability to read people. Poker is one of the few games where I've managed to sublimate my own personality, because I know it could be a tip-off on the (continued on page 203)Table Talk(continued from page 111) kind of game that I play. The greatest acting jobs in the world are done at poker tables. Show me a great poker player and I'll show you a great actor. As soon as a man makes a phony move or a nervous gesture, I read that as an edge. If you play with someone long enough, you pick up certain telltale physical habits. Like if a guy gets three sevens and his nose twitches. One guy I used to play serious poker with would always cough when he thought he had the winning hand, let's say four cards in when he would raise. And it would cost him a fortune. When that happened, I always folded. Fortunately, nobody ever told him about his coughing. My mother is the same way, but much more obvious. She lets out with a scream when she catches a pair. We usually play on New Year's Eve—

Berle: My mother was a poker player.

Lemmon: Let him finish, Milton.

Savalas: It's a Greek custom to play poker on New Year's Eve. The game usually includes my mother, my father and whatever first cousins happen to be around. It's the conventional five-card stud, both draw and open. None of the yo-yo games like seven-card stud, baseball, highball or lowball. The stakes are nickels, dimes, quarters. There's a buffet of food that includes a Greek bread that is baked with a silver coin inside. You cut a slice for everyone who's playing poker. Whoever gets the slice with the coin will have good luck for the whole year.

Berle: There's a great story that really happened to my mother, which I told to Jule Styne when he was preparing Funny Girl for Broadway. And he put the story into the show. My mother was a fanatic poker player but not a good one. I'd give her an allowance on Friday, she'd blow it playing poker over the weekend, and by Monday she'd be asking to borrow $20. People liked to be booked on the bill with me on the Orpheum circuit out of Chicago, knowing that my mother was a sucker and they were bound to make extra money playing with her. In Atlantic City, back in the early Thirties, I was on a vaudeville bill with Sophie Tucker. One night, after the show, Sophie and my mother were looking for a game, but they couldn't find anybody else. Just for the action, they wound up playing two-handed poker, at a quarter and a half. Midway through the game, there was a hand where they were raising each other like it was going out of style. Finally, my mother said, "I'll see you, what have you got?" "I got an ace, a six, a jack, a five and a four," Sophie replied. "Take it," my mother said. "I thought you were bluffing." That became one of the big laughs in Funny Girl, in a scene between Jean Stepleton and Kay Medford.

Matthau: Bluffing—the act of deception—is what poker is all about. You're free to deceive your fellow man and, in turn, you're supposed to be deceived by him. The game exemplifies the worst aspects of capitalism that have made our country so great. The other key to winning poker is competent money management. It's the only game where you can hold bad cards all night and win money by managing your capital correctly. In a good game, you can win the pot simply by betting the right amount of money. You don't have to have the best hand to win. For example, let's say you have 4-5-6-7 of spades, all right? And somebody opens the pot with $50. One guy calls. Another guy raises $I50. You call $200 and you raise $700. Two guys call you. You go for your flush and you miss with a deuce of diamonds. So you have nothing in your hand, right? OK, everybody checks to you. You bet $3000 and drive everybody out. You've won the hand, but you haven't had any good cards. You have a busted hand and yet you win money. Deceiving your fellow man is against the Judaeo-Christian ethic, but that's how you play this game.

Gould: You can also get burned by bluffing. When I was a $125-a-week chorus boy in Broadway musicals in my early 20s, I used to play backstage in the dressing rooms and grind out my expenses, $80 a week, $I00 a week, sometimes $200 a week. I learned a good lesson the first time I got involved in a game outside the theater, at the Bryant Hotel. I was playing short. I had only $40 to my name, two 20s. In one of the early hands, I bluffed. The guys I was playing against deliberated for maybe four minutes before calling my bluff, and suddenly I was out on my ass, just like that. The loss wasn't as bad as the embarrassment of having a bluff called. When I resumed playing backstage, at the Alvin and ANTA theaters, I became a consistent winner because instead of playing it very tight—as if the money meant a lot to me—I stayed loose. I was no longer pressing.

Lemmon: Did you play backstage during the Texaco Star Theater days, Milton?

Berle: Who had the time? We had enough to do, putting on a live show every week. The only thing that happened in those dressing rooms was fucking. But when I was in my 20s, I used to play table-stakes poker with Arnold Rothstein—the famous gambler—at the Park Central Hotel in New York: $2000 and $4000 last card. I stopped playing in my 30s because I lost too much. I was quite loose with my money. You can read all about that in my book, Berle: An Autobiography, which was published last month. One Rothstein game I missed at the Park Central was the night he was killed after an argument over one of the hands. I was working a B'nai B'rith benefit out in Brooklyn.

Lemmon: For a while, I was putting myself through college on poker, playing at the Hasty Pudding Club at Harvard. I was a silly-assed kid of 19 or 20 in the wartime Navy V-12 program, getting paid like 38 bucks a month. We played pennies, nickels and dimes; mostly seven-card stud. A dime bet was a big thing. I picked up ten bucks a month playing two or three times a week. That was a helluva lot of money then—25 percent of what I was getting paid, anyhow. After I began to make a decent living years later and got into 50-cent, one-dollar games, I never was particularly successful. Fortunately, it quickly dawned on me that maybe the guys I was beating in college weren't that good and that I wasn't a particularly skilled poker player.

Matthau: I never was a good poker player. My low point came when I was 19, working in a CCC camp in Belton, Montana, the time I went to a gambling house in Butte on a holiday and lost all my money. I was stranded. So I walked over to the railroad yards and hopped a freight train going north to get back to Belton. I was on that train for about 36 hours and I hadn't eaten anything. Suddenly, I saw a mouse. Or a rat, I think it was. A rat. I killed that rat and I cooked it and I ate it. Tasted lousy.

Gould: I never had it that bad. When I was in my early teens, we played poker on the stoops of Brooklyn brownstones for baseball trading cards—instead of betting money. You'd ante a Johnny Pesky or a Gene Hermanski or an Ernie Lombardi. But you'd save Joe Di-Maggios. Stars were the last thing you'd bet. Anybody who bet 25 baseball cards on the last card was really considered daring, because 25 cards was the equivalent of an entire team. I was wiped out on a big bet like that more than once.

Berle: As early as the age of ten, I was doing manipulation and magic tricks with cards. In later years, when I sat down at a table, most people who knew that wouldn't let me deal. In the picture Doyle Against the House, I dealt seconds, thirds and bottoms with my own hands. One reason I don't play much poker anymore is that I'm quite adept at mechanics and people are suspicious.

Matthau: So you're one of those guys, huh? Years ago, there was an actor I knew on the East Coast who put together a game that included a renowned card mechanic he'd hired to sit in. That was something we found out much later, after I lost several thousand dollars. I couldn't figure out why I wasn't getting any cards in that game. The actor, I assume, split the winnings with the mechanic. That was the final straw. That so sickened me that I just never played the game again for big money.

Berle: My last big poker game was in the Sherman House in Chicago. I must have lost about $18,000 or $20,000 that night and my mother bawled me out afterward. I didn't mind it so much, because I was making plenty of money. It's all in my autobiography. What bothered me most was that, just like Walter was saying, I wasn't getting the cards, either.

Lemmon: What also hurts is what happened to me in 1956, on location in Trinidad for a picture called Fire Down Below. Bob Mitchum, Rita Hayworth and yours truly, America's aging juvenile. Shooting was shut down during a rainstorm and we were playing 25-50. Son of a bitch if I didn't come up with a royal straight flush. I couldn't believe it. A natural royal straight flush! Three cards were hidden in seven-card. Shit! I'd never even seen one before, much less played such a hand. Wouldn't you know it, everybody at the table dropped. They all went out. It was devastating. I made about a dollar and a half on the pot.

Matthau: I don't know how the rest of you feel, but I don't particularly like to take money away from other people, especially from my friends. That bothers me a lot. I'm a cardiac. The experiences of losing and winning from my friends both make me feel as though I'm going to have another heart attack. Looking back on the 27 years I played poker for big money, I've come to feel the whole affair was disgusting. When I won, the other guys were hurt. When I lost, I was hurt. Unfortunately, the essence of poker is hitting the other guy over the head and taking his money away.

Gould: I don't like to see anybody lose, either. I just like to have a good time. So I play, but I rarely gamble heavily. I don't like to beat anybody, which I guess is a form of identification—because I hate to be beaten. We played some poker between takes of California Split. Some of the participants were guys like Amarillo Slim and Sailor Roberts, professional gamblers who play in the big Vegas tournament every year and happened to have parts in the film. I lost $800 the first time I sat down. The second time, I came out even. But some of the guys at the table were playing with very short bread. So it was a little uncomfortable.

Savalas: As I've become more proficient at playing cards, I find that I like playing with friends less and less, because—for the most part—the percentages are with me. I always feel guilty when I beat my friends in any kind of gambling game. Most of my poker action has been in casinos, because I enjoy buckin' heads with the house.

Lemmon: Every now and then, I've been in a game where a fellow is a couple of hundred dollars down and I'm squirming because I know he can't afford it. I don't like that feeling. That's when I'll get all the cards and can't help winning. Occasionally, I've been caught folding good hands in such situations because I didn't want to win too much. I think there's a fine line that divides whether you're enjoying poker or are only there to win. I could be in a lot of the big games around town, but I wouldn't enjoy it. I like playing with the broads—like my wife and Milton's wife at the Berles'. We play a dollar. Nobody gets killed. At times, I've gone four hours without winning one hand. The most I can lose in an evening is a hundred and something. But I can afford that. In relation to what I can afford, I'm not hurt.

Savalas: What's the table talk like when you're playing with Berle?

Lemmon: Jesus Christ, have you ever seen his act? Sooner or later, all the one-line nifties are floating across the table as thick as cigar smoke. Since everybody knows all his jokes, sometimes he just throws out tag lines. For variety, he does double talk while he's dealing the cards. I think the son of a bitch tries out material on us, too. And if it doesn't work at the card table, he doesn't use it in his act. When he says he's going to the john, I really think he's going to his joke files. Because, usually, he comes back with four more rippers in the next three minutes.

Berle: That reminds me of the time I was playing with a guy who said, "I'll play you for your act." I said, "That's fine by me. If you win, you'll only be getting Bob Hope's old material, anyway." But, seriously, I don't gamble much anymore—mainly because I've already lost too much gambling, between $3,500,000 and $4,000,000. If you want to take the time, you can read about it in my autobiography.

Lemmon: Enough with the book, Milton. Shut up and deal.