The Death of Cash and The Legendary Diners Club Supper That Never Happened

(C) Jeffrey Robinson 2020

Matty Simmons died at the end of April in Los Angeles.

And while Hollywood insiders knew his name - among other achievements, he gave the world the movie “Animal House” - his minor role in the history of money laundering is, to say the least, obscure.

I knew him casually, having spoken to him several times while researching The New Laundrymen. Conversations with him were fun because he was a very amusing man and we had several mutual friends in show business. He loved to talk about how he created the magazine National Lampoon, to tell Animal House stories, and was filled with tales about his regular weekly lunches with our mutual friends. But I found him at his good-humored best when he opened up to me about what has to be the “big bang moment” in what will someday be known as “the death of cash.”

Matty Simmons was the last living witness to that singular event which, without any doubt, changed the world forever.

It was the legendary supper in 1949, at 33 West 33rd Street in New York City, that never actually happened.

The story starts with 54 year old bon vivant and world traveler named Compson Satz, who entitled himself to the rank of Major, owned a 30-year old basement restaurant with a log cabin-like doorway and a solid ebony 600 year old statue of Buddha at the bottom of the stairs. The place was called Major’s Cabin Grill.

Thirty three steps along the same sidewalk, inside the Empire State Building and up 68 floors, a man named Francis X. McNamara ran the Hamilton Credit Corporation. In his early 30s, with dark hair and a thin black mustache which made him look like a young Walt Disney, he loaned money to clients wanting to buy a new car or some household goods.

The two men knew each other extremely well because McNamara ate lunch every day at Major’s.

But McNamara never ate supper there. And especially not that legendary supper on that particular night.

The story of the supper that never happened went like this: McNamara was dining there with his lawyer, and his friend Alfred Bloomingdale, of department store fame. When the bill came, McNamara reached for his wallet and, much to his embarrassment, realized that he’d left it home. He had to summon his wife from Long Island to bring enough cash to pay for dinner. Vowing never to be embarrassed like that again, the very next day he set out to change the world.

That version of this event - an event which never took place - made the papers and, having been so often reprinted ever since, it is today accepted as the Gospel truth.

Except, it isn’t true. It is absolute fiction. And that’s thanks to a 22 year old Matty Simmons.

Struggling to earn his living in those days as a Broadway press agent, his job was to get blurbs about shows, actors and actresses into the gossip columns. He invented the story of the supper that never was because McNamara was his friend, and an occasional client, and they both thought it had the ring of a good tale.

So Simmons hawked the dinner-that-never-happened to editors all over town in a press release and they bought the fable, hook, line and sinker.

At the same time, hedging his bet in case that version didn’t work, Simmons had a few variations at the ready. The best of them placed McNamara in his car, driving home one night, when he had an epiphany, channeling the words of Edward Bellamy, the 19th century author of the futurist novel “Looking Backward.” McNamara could hear Bellamy claiming that the day would come when “cash would be no more.”

It is, therefore, entirely thanks to Matty Simmons’ imagination that the long-forgotten Francis X. McNamara is the first man in modern times to sound the death knell on cash.

The truth, however, is actually a better story.

That begins in mid-January 1950. McNamara had been thinking that, for businessmen like himself, it would be really convenient if, instead of paying for each meal every day, he could run a tab and pay for all his meals together at the end of the month.

Obviously, Satz would let him do it because Satz was his friend and McNamara was possibly Satz’s best client. But McNamara was thinking, what if there was a way to get a whole bunch of other restauranteurs to agree?

His answer was to form a company that could provide a charge account for clients all over New York. And his first employee was Matty Simmons.

Store credit accounts had been around for more than 20 years. So, too, credit accounts at local gas stations. If you were a regular, and the store or gas station trusted you, they’d give you a small metal plaque - it looked like a military dog tag - with raised letters that bore your name, address and account number.

After you bought something, you slipped the metal plaque into a special machine that pressed down on three copies of your bill, each page separated by carbon paper. You signed at the bottom, kept one copy, gave the store two and, at the end of the month, you received a bill in the mail for the previous 30-day’s worth of purchases.

These “charge plates” didn’t cost anything and most people had several, because they needed several. A Macy’s department store charge plate wasn’t accepted at Gimbels department store, on the other side of Herald Square. An ESSO gasoline charge plate didn’t work at the Sunoco gas station on the opposite corner. Essentially, charge plates represented a convenience that each business offered, independently of any other business, to its own clients.

To make McNamara’s dream happen - one charge account that covered many businesses - he and Simmons pitched restaurant owners all over New York City. They spent months pounding the pavements, going from restaurant to restaurant, making their pitch, looking to sign up clients, giving their spiel to hundreds of restaurant owners.

Not even one of them was interested.

After all, if a restaurant owner trusted a customer enough to allow him to run a tab, that was one thing. Allowing two guys they didn’t know to open a tabs for customers they didn’t know, was something else.

The restaurant owners were even less enamored with the scheme when McNamara and Simmons explained that, for their services, they would skim a 7% fee off the top. Margins were already thin enough in the restaurant business but paying a 7% fee for the privilege of perhaps never getting paid?

The only taker was Major Satz who, in all likelihood, didn’t have much of a choice. But that’s how, on Wednesday, February 8, 1950, in Major’s Cabin Grill, the supper that never happened turned into the lunch that most definitely did.

McNamara was at his usual table and, having finished his usual lunch, called for the bill. When it arrived, he reached into his wallet and pulled out a pocket-sized cardboard rectangle. It had his name on it, and a number across the face of it. The waiter looked at it, and had no idea what it was. He turned to see Satz, who nodded that it was okay, and the lunch bill was charged to McNamara’s fledgling company for payment back to Satz - minus 7% - in 30 days.

At that singular moment in history, Major's Cabin Grill was the only place on the planet where “a credit card” was accepted in lieu of cash.

The cardboard rectangle bore a printed logo “The Diners Club.”

Matty Simmons was 91.

(c) Jeffrey Robinson 2020

If you enjoyed this, there’s plenty more where it came from. I'm always looking to connect with good people out there fighting the good fight. Please send an invite, and also follow along. I'd welcome your company. Cheers/ Jeffrey