The Puzzle King (27 page)

So long as Flora Phelps could go shopping downtown, she claimed she would never have to go to Paris. At least that’s how she would rationalize it to Simon after one of her shopping sprees. When he came home from work, she would have already laid out on their bed the extravagances she had hunted down on that day’s foray into the city. Then, one by one, she’d try them on for him: dresses in lurid colors and clinging styles that accentuated her bosom and made no secret of the rest of her. He would lie on the bed, his hands folded beneath his head, and watch as she whirled and posed in front of him, the way the models did in
Vogue
and
Harper’s Bazaar
. They would talk about the colors that complemented her skin tone or which skirt lengths flattered her legs. She got a kick out of the surprising matches he’d make between her dresses and hats and how he’d follow her with his eyes and say things like, “How is it that you are more beautiful than ever?”

Flora relished this ritual because it made her feel young and sexy. It was also one of the few times she could bring Simon into
her world. If he judged her to be superficial or girlish or, heaven help her, too much like Seema, he never said so. Sometimes, he would pretend to scold her: “That one must have cost a pretty penny. At least when we go bankrupt,
you’ll
go out in style.” To which she would say, “It could be worse. What if I wanted to go to Paris every season for the latest couture? This way we only have to pay for me to go to Fifth Avenue and back.”

She missed Seema. She missed talking about the latest fashions with her and their occasional shopping sprees. She even missed how Seema would chide her and say, “Don’t buy that dress. It makes you look like a frumpy matron. Honestly, you can’t be trusted on your own.” It was just the two of them now, and for the first time in her life, Flora shared Simon’s longing to have her family in one place.

I
N LATE
O
CTOBER
1929, the stock market had crashed, and nearly everyone in the country had gone bankrupt. By December of the following year, more than half the stores downtown had been shuttered; their window displays faded and their mannequins developed a cover of dust. The mannequins that were still dressed wore the wool jackets and pumps of a season that seemed an eternity ago. On the streets where Flora’s beloved millinery shops were tucked away, men and women, wedged together so tightly that no one could break in, waited in the interminable bread lines that snaked around the blocks. Many of the men in line dressed in their business suits, pretending for their neighbors—and sometimes their wives—that they were heading off to work in the morning. Even so, their clothes hung on them as heavily as their desperation.

A few lucky ones, like Flora and Simon, didn’t lose everything
because they had stashed money away in places other than the stock market. In Simon’s case, he’d remembered how J. P. Morgan brought together financiers and banks to bail out the ailing market in 1907. Ever since then, Simon had always kept his money in J. P. Morgan’s bank.

Old habits die hard, and despite the dire economic situation, Flora continued her trips downtown, taking care to hide the magnitude of her purchases. Someone would tell her about a milliner on the fifth floor of a walk-up around the corner from Macy’s, where she’d find a perfect hat with a large silk rose. Or she’d go uptown to Bergdorf Goodman and buy a pair of blue-and-white spectator shoes or a jacket with a mink collar and mink cuffs to match. Instead of carrying her goods in the fancy wrappings and hatboxes they came in, she would bring with her a string bag and other unmarked bags, so she wouldn’t call attention to her luxuries.

But she and Simon also bought for others, a fact that helped assuage her guilt. Through the Beth David sisterhood, they gave clothes and money to Jewish families who had nothing. And that Christmas, Simon donated enough books, toys, and games to the Yonkers schools so that each child was guaranteed a present.

Because people still craved cigarettes and found money for soap and razor blades, Phelps and Adler stayed in business and even managed to remain solvent for the next two years. By now, they had earned a reputation for being modern and innovative and at times even a bit crackpot with their use of invisible ink and mechanized window displays. Anyone looking to bend the rules and rewrite the language of advertising was likely to find his way to Bond Street. So it was that Earl Lambert came to call on Simon in the spring of 1932. A man of considerable wealth but
few words, Lambert had inherited the Lambert Pharmacal Company from his father. A tall New Englander with a spoon-shaped face and brown eyes, Lambert sat across from Simon’s desk in a wooden chair that was too small for him, and for the entirety of their twenty-minute meeting, he never stopped fussing. He used the pinky of his right hand to rummage in his right ear. He swayed his foot back and forth, hitting the leg of the chair each time. He bit the inside of his lip and blew air inside his cheeks until they looked like balloons. When Simon told Flora about him later, he referred to him as “Mr. Fidget.”

“I’ll give it to you straight. Pro-phy-lac-tic, our toothbrush subsidiary, is in the soup,” said Lambert, slapping his left hand on Simon’s desk to emphasize his last three words. “Nothing I do seems to work. And when they stop buying our toothbrushes, they stop buying our toothpaste. I’m a desperate man, which is why I’m here to put myself in your hands. Come up with one of your cockamamy schemes and I’m likely to give it a try.” He pulled the finger from his ear and studied something on the tip of it. Whatever it was seemed to satisfy him, and a smile broke out on his face as he stood up and shook Simon’s hand. “It’s always been enough that a toothbrush is a toothbrush. Doesn’t seem to be so anymore. I’m sure you’ll think of something.”

“Thank you for your confidence in me,” said Simon, taking his hand. “I’ll be back to you in a week with some ideas.”

Mr. Lambert was nearly out of the office when he abruptly turned back toward Simon. “Phelps,” he said, tapping the plate on the door. “Not a common name is it?”

“No, it isn’t,” said Simon, dreading what would follow.

“I knew a Phelps in St. Louis. Andrew Phelps. Was in the foot powder business. So long now.”

That was unexpected
, thought Simon with relief. His relatives were all named Filips. This Andrew wouldn’t be one of them. Then, as he often did, he visualized the word.
Unexpected
, with its gullies and crisscrosses. And the word remained suspended in his imagination as he considered the problem before him: What could he offer a customer that would be unexpected and inexpensive and would make buying a toothbrush more appealing?

During these times, the idea of giving away something for free was an obvious one. Simon was sure he’d be able to design the thingamajig; he just had no idea what it would be. As always, he brought his problem to the person who understood consumers better than anyone he knew: Flora.

“Whatever it is,” he told her, “it has to be cheap, easy, and unexpected. And by that, I don’t mean Seema.” Simon flushed, uncomfortable with having made an off-color joke.

Flora looked startled. “Simon, you wicked man.” She smiled, but Simon could see the parentheses of strain around her mouth.

This was no time to get distracted by thoughts of Seema, thought Flora. Whenever Simon asked for her help in business matters, she tried hard to be helpful and show him that there was more in her head than pretty hats and pocketbooks. She came up with two ideas immediately: a nailbrush and a small kit with samples of Lambert toothpaste, shampoo, and soap. They talked about doing a map of the stars or a guide to all the countries in the world and their capitals. Simon thought both seemed too ambitious for a freebie. “How about a chart with all the states of the United States, their capitals, and their populations?” suggested Flora. Simon wrote it down in his notebook. “Or how about a game of sorts?” That’s when he came up with the idea for a jigsaw puzzle.

“A jigsaw puzzle makes good sense,” he said. “Right now, nobody has money to spend on movies or any other outside entertainment. A family can take days putting together a good jigsaw.” It would be a great escape, he reasoned, and best of all, finishing it would give everyone a sense of accomplishment, something that was hard to come by with the unemployment rate creeping up toward 25 percent.

After some quick research, Simon discovered that the biggest problem with puzzles is that they were made of wood and they cost a fortune to produce. Each one had to be sawed by hand and it was tricky and time-consuming to manipulate those intricate patterns. Often the saws would break and it could take hours to complete just one of them. The cost of a 1,200-piece puzzle at one cent to one and a half cents a piece added up to as much as $18 a puzzle.

There has to be a cheaper way
, he thought. For the next couple of nights, he stayed up well past midnight cutting out patterns from different thicknesses of paper and cardboard to see which would be the most pliable. When he figured out the right weight of cardboard, he found an automobile ad showing a magnificent maroon Packard whizzing around the corner beneath a snowy evening sky and a grove of cedars. He pasted the ad on the piece of cardboard and drew onto it the pattern of what would be a fifty-piece puzzle. Using an X-Acto knife, he cut out the pieces, and then fitted them back together.

When Lambert returned the following week, he again sat across from Simon in the too-small wooden chair. “So what have you got?” he asked, twirling his sideburn. Simon stood up in front of an easel and presented him with drawings he’d made of the nailbrush, the kit with the Lambert products, and the map
with all of the capitals on it. Then he showed him the puzzle. “If we can figure out a way to stamp out hundreds of these at a time, rather than hand cutting them one by one,” he said, absentmindedly running his fingers along the Packard’s radiator, “this is the one that would cost the least to produce.” Lambert bit his nail, then massaged the back of his neck with both hands. Simon wondered if he’d heard anything he said, and continued: “There you have it. I’m happy to answer any questions you might have.”

“No questions,” said Lambert, lifting himself out of the chair. He clasped his hands in front of him and cracked his knuckles. “You’ve got yourself a deal, Mr. Phelps. Just don’t break the bank. I’ll take a million of those puzzles.”

T
HE FIRST THING
Simon did was to commission a water-color from Frances Tipton Hunter, an illustrator known for her endearing pictures of children. Her painting of a Rockwellian little boy brushing a startled bull terrier’s teeth with a Pro-phylac-tic toothbrush painted in solid blocks and distinct images was perfectly suited to be chopped up into fifty pieces and put back together again. Simon brought the painting to the machinist at his shop. “All we have to do is figure out how to make a million of these at a time, and we’re sitting pretty,” he said. The machinist laughed out loud. But for the next few months, everyone at Phelps and Adler concentrated on little else. First, they photographed the Hunter painting and reduced its size. They lithographed the photo onto a single sheet of paper and pasted the paper by machine onto a thin piece of cardboard. The machinist devised something called a stamping machine. Instead of hand cutting the puzzle one piece at a time by saw, the machine pressed a steel die down onto the sheet, quickly cutting it into
pieces. Because of that, the cardboard had to be exactly the right thickness and weight. Much as Simon had done at home, they experimented for weeks before finding the perfect cardboard. There would be workers, “cutters,” they’d call them, who would figure out patterns in which to cut the pictures and then use electrically propelled but hand-guided jigsaws to do so. From those pieces, the steel dies were made. If everything went as planned, they figured they’d be able to punch out fifty thousand to sixty thousand puzzles of the same design in a single shift.

T
HE
F
RIDAY RIGHT
before Labor Day, they were finally ready to try out the new equipment. That evening, everyone at Phelps and Adler stood around the pressroom waiting to see how it would work. After a run of about twenty sheets, the press jammed, and they had to shut it down in order to retrieve inky balls of paper. Then steel rules got too dull or broke. By now it was well past five p.m., when everyone would normally grab their bags and head out for the weekend. Nobody stirred. They stood silently, some with fingers pressed to their lips, others with arms folded, as once again the presses whirred and the stamping machine trembled and the first one hundred puzzles were born. The cutters did their job, and when Simon tried to fit the odd-shaped pieces together, the nubs and zigs and crescent-moon shapes locked in as smoothly as if they had never been parted. “Keep ’em rolling,” shouted Simon, and a cheer went up as the first of what would eventually be a million puzzles rolled out.

What happened next made history. Mr. Fidget’s sales skyrocketed 400 percent by December, and Simon got orders from big companies all around the country. The cardboard puzzles were so popular that Simon started the Every Week Jigsaw Puzzle,
a line of cardboard puzzles that cost fifteen cents and were intricate and complicated enough to appeal to adults. Then came Radio Stars puzzles that, for only twenty-five cents, allowed customers to piece together the faces of people like Eddie Cantor, Rudy Vallee, or Kate Smith and get a brochure that told their life stories. In February 1933, the
New Yorker
ran a “Talk of the Town” column all about Simon’s modernized factory that said the company had taken on between three and four hundred additional workers to turn out the puzzles. “It’s a cheering sight in these times to visit the factory,” the anonymous author wrote.

Everyone seemed to be pleased by Simon’s success except for Simon. The long hours and constant pressure wore him out. He walked more slowly, talked less, and was so preoccupied that he’d often not hear what people were saying to him. But worse was his disappointment in himself. “It’s unseemly to me that I am earning a fortune making puzzles when I can’t even solve the real one in my own life,” he’d say to Flora.