He was born Alvin Clarence Thomas in 1892 (“Thompson” was a mistake made by journalists years later).
His father left when he was only weeks old and his mother remarried a Baptist pig farmer. As a result young Alvin grew up in a three-room cabin in the backwoods of Arkansas.
Whenever possible he avoided school. He preferred tossing coins or playing cards to book learning or Baptist beatitudes and by the time he left home at 16 he was still unable to read.
With no apparent ill-effects it was a skill he never mastered. Instead he embarked on a lifelong career as a gambler which earned him in one estimate “at least ten million dollars”. Only once did he return to that wood cabin in Ozark Forest. On that occasion he bought his mother a house.
He gave the bank two days’ notice of his intention to withdraw the necessary funds. At 26 Titanic already had more money than the bank itself.
Titanic became the inspiration for Sky Masterson in Guys And Dolls, the musical based on short stories by Damon Runyon. His extraordinary life has an appropriately fictional quality.
He murdered five men, each time escaping without punishment despite his known guilt.
Once the sheriff waived punishment in exchange for the deeds to a boat Titanic had recently won. Another time the
St Louis chief of police told him he had done the city a favour by shooting two of the most wanted criminals in the country.
He also married five times. Each of his brides was under 18. Jo Ann Raney was 15 years old when she became the third Mrs Thompson. Jeannette Bennett was only 11 when Titanic told her: “When you’re older I’m goingto marry you.” It was one of the few promises he ever made a woman and kept. Along the way he notched up a bevy of casual affairs. In Hollywood his conquests included actresses Myrna Loy and Jean Harlow.
Three of his wives were foolish enough to have babies. Titanic divorced them on the spot. He was not an emotional man and at no point in his life did he show any need for the company of another person full-time. The one recorded instant of him crying happened in his 70s watching The Wizard Of Oz.
Titanic was a natural gambler. He needed the thrill of betting and schooled himself through long practice to excel at cards and golf. He had no scruples about cheating.
His philosophy was detached if cynical: “Nobody ever got hustled who didn’t ask for it one way or another.”
He bet on everything from the probability of two people sharing the same birthday to the number of watermelons in a farmer’s truck. He also had a talent for unlikely but impressive stunts, such as slicing the head off a daffodil from 10 paces using playing cards.
By the time he died aged 82 Titanic had run out of money and was in a nursing home. It’s unlikely he felt any regrets. Kevin Cook tells his life story as a sporting biography, offering card-by-card and stroke-bystroke accounts of his greatest heists.
Perhaps it’s a pity the author feels no need to analyse his hero’s motives or explore what it was that made him the man he was. He takes a first-rate story and runs with it.
Titanic would have approved.
THE MAN WHO BET ON EVERYTHING
by Kevin Cook