Titanic Thompson

Titanic Thompson: The Man Who Bet on Everything, by Kevin Cook, Picador, RRP£12.99, 256 pages

Alongside the gangster and the salesman, those all-American characters of the early 20th-century, there was the gambler. And of all the great gamblers, Alvin Clarence Thomas was king.

In Death of a Salesman (1949), Arthur Miller wrote of his tragic hero Willy Loman: “He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back – that’s an earthquake …A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.” The same was true of Thomas. He, too, was a salesman of sorts, dreaming of ever larger gambles.

While the outlaw – men such as Butch Cassidy or Jesse James – was slipping into history, the gangster was in the ascendant running illicit gambling dens and bootlegging operations in America’s cities. There was money to be had and just enough gullibility (and lawlessness) for a man like Thomas to take it.

Kevin Cook’s whirlwind biography of Thomas – or “Titanic Thompson” as he was known because “he sinks everybody” – matches its subject in energy and an ability to go the distance. And it’s some distance.

Born in 1892, Titanic left home at 16 with 50 cents in his pocket and set about making a fortune that he would lose, then win back, then lose again. “Putting some money away – a squirrel’s approach – wouldn’t work for such men because then the hunt wouldn’t matter,” writes Cook. “To matter it has to get your nostrils flaring if you win and hurt if you don’t. So they bet until they were broke and then started over.”

Damon Runyon, the great chronicler of the seamier side of Prohibition-era America, immortalised Titanic in the Guys and Dolls character Sky Masterson – when Titanic bet, the “sky’s the limit.”

Everything Thompson did was on a grand scale. He married five times. He shot and killed five men during bungled attempts to rob him of his bank-roll. He bedded Jean Harlow, hustled Al Capone and Howard Hughes, and set up the ill-fated poker game that led to the murder of underworld kingpin Arnold Rothstein.

Although a cheat who would set up bets weighted in his favour, Titanic had a certain genius. He practised for hours until he could toss 52 playing cards, one after the other, across a room into his hat; until he could chip and putt – left- or right-handed – on any golf course in America, playing for hundreds of thousands of dollars a shot. He could mark cards and calculate the odds on any bet in a flash.

“He liked having people around, but all he needed was people to gamble with,” said his fifth wife Jeannette. “And then it wasn’t for the company or even the money. It was for the sport – to show another gambler who was smarter.”

As Sky Masterson asks in Guys and Dolls, “Is it wrong to gamble, or only to lose?” For Titanic, until America changed, the odds were always in his favour.