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Charlie Goren was a very bright boy. He stayed at or near the top of his class all through school, earned pocket money in high school by tutoring less brainy kids in Latin and Greek. "We all thought he was going to be famous," a high school classmate recalls. "We figured he'd be a great lawyer or politician." After high school, Charlie worked as a department-store furniture salesman until a prosperous older cousin, living in Montreal, insisted that gifted Goren go to college. Charlie moved in with the cousin, enrolled at McGill University law school. After finishing up the regular three-year course, stayed on for a postgraduate year before going back to Philadelphia and bluffing his way through the Pennsylvania bar exam. "I had to bluff," he says. "I didn't know anything about Pennsylvania law." A fellow lawyer of the 1920s recalls Goren as "brilliant," but no one could prove it by Lawyer Goren himself. In his 13 years of practice, he never made more than $5,000 a year. "I didn't give up the law," says Goren. "It gave me up." What the law gave up, bridge took.
The Last Laugh. They laughed when he first sat down to play. Goren acutely recalls a day at McGill when a girl friend asked him if he played bridge. "I knew that girls play bridge in the afternoon," says Goren, "and I didn't see why I couldn't. I sat down to play and made a complete ass out of myself." Goren's girl laughed at him—and thin-skinned Charlie Goren, late of Philadelphia's slums, was no man to be laughed at. "It was like putting a knife through me," he says, "and I took an oath that I was never going to sit down at a card table until I knew how to play bridge." Goren returned to Philadelphia, bought a copy of Expert Milton Work's book on auction bridge, and studied it daily for nearly eight months. "If they had destroyed the plates of that book," he says, "I could have reconstructed it from memory."
Goren never played bridge again with his old girl friend—but the next time he did sit down at a bridge table, nobody laughed. He was soon winning local tournaments and rounding out his skimpy law income with bridge winnings. But as soon as he could afford to, Goren gave up playing for money. He saw that the road to bridgedom's peak lay in teaching and writing—and that a gambler's reputation could be harmful. Today he plays for money only when he feels it would be rude to refuse, and the most he has ever played for was 9¢ a point (with Aly Khan on the Riviera last year).
The Point Count. By the early 1930s, having switched to contract along with everybody else, Goren ghosted for ex-Mentor Milton Work's syndicated column. Work got about $20,000 a year out of the column, paid Goren $35 a week—a disparity that Goren still resents. A talented and proud writer with a flair for gently whimsical humor, Goren vividly recalls that Boss Work would invariably "edit out the brightness."