Men routinely took the liberty of sharply remarking on women’s appearances then. I think what Frank was trying to say, in his clumsy way, was that because I was pudgy and wore thick glasses I wouldn’t have to deal with boys wanting to date me. It was untrue even then, but that didn’t lessen the sting. I got past the remark after I got to know Frank better. And anyway, I had more towns to see and bigger battles to fight.
* * *
—
I was a happy vagabond that summer. In addition to Philadelphia and South Orange, the eastern grass court circuit took us to events in Haverford, Pennsylvania, Wilmington, Delaware, then back to the Philly area for the U.S. National Lawn Tennis Association girls’ eighteen-and-under championships, then on to the U.S. National Championships at Forest Hills. We had so much fun being on our own and traveling together. I was the youngest of the group, yet I somehow became everyone’s confidante. Minor spats, boyfriend trouble, tennis dreams—I knew all, revealed nothing.
We spent one week at the Delaware estate of Willie and Margaret Osborne du Pont. She was a veteran member of our Wightman Cup team who was still winning matches into her forties, and she taught Carole and me how to use utensils properly at a formal dinner table. Willie, born in England, was a tiny, eccentric man who dressed in old-fashioned britches and puffed on a Sherlock Holmes–style pipe. He was one of the richest men in America, but he liked to smoke his own hams in an outbuilding on his enormous estate and rise at the crack of dawn to personally check on his thoroughbred racehorses. He would give me tours of the grounds in his old Chevy with a stick shift. One night I was startled to see him fall asleep at dinner midsentence. “Oh, that happens all the time,” Margaret told us with a wave of her hand, carrying on as if nothing were amiss.
We stayed another week at the Oyster Bay, New York, estate of Rosalind P. Walter, the Squibb pharmaceutical heiress. The Broadway songwriters Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb wrote the popular “Rosie the Riveter” song for Rosalind after she went to work at an aircraft plant in Connecticut during the war effort.
At one point that summer, the U.S. Lawn Tennis Association invited the great Maureen Connolly and England’s Mary Hardwick to Philadelphia for a series of clinics with the junior girls. I had never met either woman, but I had been reading about them for years. I was beyond excited when I got to hit one-on-one with Maureen one day. As she walked ahead of me to the court I could see the deep scar on her right calf where the muscle had been gashed in her career-ending horseback-riding accident at nineteen. What made the timing of her injury more tragic was that she had swept the four Grand Slam singles titles in 1953, the year before she was hurt. She had tried desperately to make a comeback and failed. But her strokes were still exquisitely clean, crisp, and consistent when we practiced.
When Maureen invited me to dinner that night, I was ecstatic. As soon as we took our seats in the restaurant I started pelting her with questions. She was high-spirited, and I remember how her eyes flashed as she spoke. I wanted to know everything about her life, how she made it to No. 1, what she could tell me about how I could get better. At least she waited for dessert to deliver the blow. I was devastated when she said, “I don’t think you have what it takes to be a champion. You’re too self-centered, too undisciplined, and too egotistical to make it to the top.”
I think I just went blank at that point. I sat there motionless. What made my unexpected dressing down all the more painful and surprising was that I’d heard that Maureen was usually such a kind person. I swallowed hard, but I didn’t cry. I may have even thanked her for her observations on my dazed walk out the door. I got up the next morning and tried to play it off as if nothing had happened, but her words haunted me. I pulled out of it mostly by reminding myself that she didn’t really know me. I told myself nobody could stop me but me.
A few years later, a friend of Maureen’s approached me at Forest Hills with a story that he wanted to share. He told me he had been standing with Maureen at an event that same summer of 1959, discussing which of the girls might become great players. Maureen pointed at me and told him to watch for me, and only me. I looked at the man in disbelief. I had heard tales about how Maureen’s coach, Eleanor “Teach” Tennant, goaded her players into better performance. Had Maureen been using the same reverse psychology on me? Maybe she thought praise would go to my head. She may have sensed my independent streak and figured, correctly, that I would react by trying to show her how wrong she was about me. But I’ll never know for sure.
We never spoke about that conversation or, for that matter, about Maureen’s quote in World Tennis magazine a few months after I met her saying that I could stand to lose twenty pounds, my groundstrokes needed improvement, and I took too many shortcuts. Maureen was correct about the first two—I could barely fit into my tennis dress after all the Bassetts Ice Cream and other goodies I ate on that first trip away from home, and the continental grip we were taught in California had disadvantages that affected our strokes. But shortcuts? I never took a tennis shortcut in my life.
I saw Maureen occasionally when I played the tour full-time. She was always friendly. She spent most of her time by then in Texas with her two children and her husband, Norman Brinker, the founder of restaurant chains including Steak & Ale, who was also credited with popularizing the salad bar. I think Maureen and I could have been good friends if we’d gotten to know each other, but she died of ovarian cancer in 1969. She was only thirty-four.
* * *
—
Our Southern California Junior Wightman Cup team marked our return to Philadelphia by rolling to the National Junior Girls Intersectionals title at the Germantown Cricket Club. We went undefeated in the twenty-one matches we played that week, a record that still stands. Our next and last stop of the summer was New York City to play the U.S. National Championships at the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills. This was my first visit to one of the four majors, so it was a very big deal. I think we were all amazed, even occasionally overwhelmed, by the huge skyscrapers, the crowds thronging the Manhattan sidewalks, the taxis, the horns, the bustle and noise.
Our team was staying at the Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown. There were six of us sardined into one room with no air conditioning. At least the hotel was conveniently located just a few blocks from the subway we took to Queens. Once we disembarked there, I loved walking through the Tudor-style section of Forest Hills to get to the club. I knew that Alfred Hitchcock had filmed some of the scenes there for Strangers on a Train, one of my favorite movies, so being there myself now felt somehow familiar.
The clubhouse at the West Side Tennis Club had a stucco exterior, gabled roofs, and half-timber beams. The dark-paneled interior walls were lined with photos of past champions, and I studied them all. I loved sitting on the terrace overlooking the courts, sipping orange juice or a soda and watching the sun set behind the beautiful horseshoe-shaped main stadium. At the time there was also a fifteen-foot-high billboard of the tournament draws, and a person on a ladder would fill in the results as matches were played.
I was paired in the first round with one of the strongest girls, Justina Bricka, a cagey sixteen-year-old lefthander from Missouri. I remember being up a set and ahead 5–4 in the second; I even had her at match point, 30–40. I lost anyway. Eliminated on day one.
Summer was over, and our Wightman Cup gang was breaking up. It was time to go back to school. We had all grown so close, parting felt bittersweet.
I flew from New York’s Idlewild Airport (now JFK) back to Los Angeles nonstop. The flight was on a jet this time and took only five and a half hours, not eleven. As I peered out the window as the plane banked away from the airport I felt years older—even more sophisticated—than when I had left home.
As special as my first summer circuit trip was, my parents and I rarely talked with each other all those weeks because long-distance calls were so expensive. I was excited to land in sunny Los Angeles and scan
the crowd in the arrivals hall for Mom and Dad. But somehow, we walked right past each other. When I turned around to see if I’d missed them, I finally heard my mother say, “Billie Jean…is that you?” El Chubbo had gained so much weight that my parents didn’t recognize their own daughter. My mother wasn’t thrilled, but neither she nor Dad said anything. During the drive south to Long Beach, I told them about how great our junior girls did, about my first look at Manhattan and Forest Hills, about the magnificent homes we stayed in elsewhere. But Mom and Dad, God bless them, really only wanted to know one thing: “Are you still loving tennis and having fun?”
I was loving it, all right. More than ever.
Chapter 4
My summer results were strong enough to convince me to enter the main draw of the Pacific Southwest Championships that were held at the Los Angeles Tennis Club a month after I returned home, in addition to playing again in the junior division. I was fifteen, and moving up to the women’s competition was a milestone moment. I advanced to the third round before I lost to twenty-year-old Ann Haydon in a brutally tough match. She barely held on 7–5 in the third. People noticed. When I came off the court, a Long Beach real estate investor named Harold Guiver jogged up to congratulate me and said, “I love the way you play, Billie Jean. I want to send you to Wimbledon. You’re really good.”
Harold was a terrific club player who stood only five feet four but he used to outwit nearly all his opponents, even Pancho Gonzalez when they were teenagers and playing for quarters on the public courts of Los Angeles. Harold was also a brilliant businessman and a world-class contract bridge player. He cared deeply about kids. I had no doubt he could raise the money to pay my expenses for a shot at Wimbledon. My dream of all dreams.
“Thanks, Mr. Guiver, but I’m not good enough yet.”
He looked shocked and said, “Wait—you don’t want to go?”
“Oh, I want to go terribly,” I assured him. “But I haven’t earned it. I don’t deserve it yet.”
He smiled and nodded. “When you’re ready, we’ll do it,” he promised. “And I’ll get some other Long Beach people to help you.”
How many kids do you think would turn down that kind of offer? But I had absorbed my parents’ ethics. Also, I had seen Althea play by now and I had practiced with Darlene Hard and I didn’t think I was ready for Wimbledon. I knew I was still developing my game.
As if to prove it, I lost the Pacific Southwest junior title that week to Karen Hantze, my Junior Wightman Cup teammate from San Diego. I had only beaten Karen once before, and I really thought I could do it this time. I even dominated her in the first set. But it was another match that slipped away from me. She won, 2–6, 9–7, 9–7. I couldn’t finish her off. I was stuck. Then I had a wonderful piece of luck.
When I was younger, everyone—including Clyde Walker—compared me to the great Alice Marble because she was very aggressive and she had a terrific volley. I researched her and read that between 1936 and 1940 Alice had won eighteen Grand Slam titles—five in singles, six in women’s doubles, and seven in mixed doubles. So I was very aware of who Alice was when Joe Bixler, the same big-hearted Wilson rep who had interceded for me at my first tournament after I arrived late, approached me one day at the Los Angeles Tennis Club. Joe told me Alice had seen me play in the Pacific Southwest women’s draw and thought I showed great promise. “I’ve talked to her,” Joe added, “and she’ll teach you, if you want.”
If I want? I couldn’t believe it. I asked Clyde if it was okay to work with Alice—I didn’t want him to feel I was deserting him—and he gave me his blessing immediately. “Are you kidding?” he said. “You get to learn from a former No. 1 player in the world like Alice Marble? I’ve taught you as much as I can, Billie Jean. It’s time for you to learn from a champion.”
Alice lived alone in a yellow-and-white bungalow in the working-class town of Tarzana out in the San Fernando Valley. Her living room was filled with memorabilia from her days as a triple-crown winner at Wimbledon, a five-time Grand Slam singles champion, and the top-ranked player in the world. During the week, Alice worked as a receptionist at a doctor’s office. On weekends she gave tennis instruction on a neighbor’s court. When I started training with her, she was forty-six years old with one functioning lung and a pack-a-day cigarette habit. Yet nothing dampened her fire.
Every Saturday morning when I didn’t have a tournament my mom or dad drove me the forty-three miles from Long Beach to Tarzana. I would work all afternoon with Alice and stay overnight in her spare room. We worked all day Sunday until one of my parents picked me up and we made the long drive back.
The first time Alice put me through a drill we stood across from each other in the front court and she pounded balls at me over the net. Some of the blasts could have knocked me flat. Her rationale for it was not unlike a similar drill that Jimmy Connors’s mother, Gloria, a former player herself, put Jimmy through as a boy, slamming balls at him while exhorting, “Get your tiger juices flowing, Jimmy! Tiger juices! If your own mother will do this to you, imagine what those other players will do!”
Alice was a tough woman. It became clear pretty quickly that she thought I was too soft. She could be encouraging but intense at the same time, and her demanding approach was just what I needed. I was in awe of her. The framed photographs on her walls were a reflection of her rich and varied life: diving for a volley at Forest Hills; posing between Clark Gable and Cesar Romero; dancing at the Wimbledon Ball with her mixed-doubles partner Bobby Riggs after each of them had swept all three titles at the 1939 championships. She pulled off the same sweep at the U.S. Nationals.
A promoter paid Alice $50,000 to turn pro after those triumphs. She toured for a year with Don Budge, Bill Tilden, and Mary Hardwick, dominating Mary 72–3 in their head-to-head series. She helped entertain troops during the war. My father saw Alice play an exhibition in Norfolk, Virginia, and remembered how impressive she was.
I spent hours sitting on Alice’s overstuffed living room chair with her cat curling around my ankles as I thumbed through her scrapbooks. Sometimes she’d play the guitar and sing to me in the evenings in English and Spanish. Often, she would tell me stories.
Alice grew up in a blue-collar family in San Francisco and loved sports, particularly baseball, which her two older brothers played. The San Francisco Seals, a minor league team, adopted Alice as its mascot when she was thirteen, and she entertained fans by shagging fly balls during pre-game warmups. She sometimes played catch with the Seals’ up-and-coming star Joe DiMaggio, who was also from San Francisco. DiMaggio later told a reporter, “She had a pretty good throwing arm.”
When Alice’s brother gave her a tennis racket at fifteen she learned to serve and volley on the public courts of Golden Gate Park because she realized she couldn’t play baseball for a living. During the peak of her career between the two world wars she played the kind of attacking, power tennis that had been the exclusive domain of male stars like Don Budge. She stood five feet seven, often preferred to play in shorts rather than a skirt, and had the strongest serve anyone had ever seen by a woman. She charged the net and hit deep, penetrating drives that kept her opponents pinned in the backcourt. The press adored her independent streak and blond good looks as well as her game.
It didn’t hurt that large swaths of Alice’s life seemed lifted from a Hollywood movie. In 1934, when she was twenty-one, Alice collapsed during a match in Paris and was diagnosed with tuberculosis and pleurisy. She was told she would never compete again. As she fought her way back, Alice pursued a sideline career as a professional singer and made her debut at the Waldorf Astoria in New York in 1937, the same year she won a doubles title at the U.S. Championships.
Alice told me and anyone else who would listen that she had secretly worked with Army intelligence during World War II. She wrote in her memoir, Courting Danger, published just before her death in 1990, that she was shot in the back while escaping
a Nazi double agent during a mission in Switzerland. Her friends in the tennis world were skeptical. But who’s to say it didn’t happen?
Alice was a civil rights activist as well as an early feminist. She talked about a day when women and girls wouldn’t be censured for loving sports. As a writer for DC Comics, she oversaw the “Wonder Women of History” series about real-life role models such as Florence Nightingale, Susan B. Anthony, and Marie Curie.
One of her proudest accomplishments was helping Althea Gibson break the color barrier in tennis. By the end of the 1940s, Althea was the top woman in the all-Black American Tennis Association, but she still couldn’t compete at the U.S. Lawn Tennis Association tournaments because she was African American. Alice wrote a famous editorial in the July 1950 issue of American Lawn Tennis magazine that made a case for integrating amateur tennis. “If tennis is a game for ladies and gentlemen,” she wrote, “it’s also time we acted a little more like gentlepeople and less like sanctimonious hypocrites…If Althea Gibson represents a challenge to the present crop of women players, it’s only fair that they should meet the challenge on the courts.” Alice added that if Althea was barred from the upcoming U.S. Championships at Forest Hills there would be “an ineradicable mark against a game to which I have devoted most of my life, and I would be bitterly ashamed.”
The USLTA relented. There is a photo of Alice walking next to Althea down a gravel path at Forest Hills as Althea arrived to play one of her historic first matches. Althea and Alice are beaming and there are throngs of people jammed along the chain link fence, some of them applauding.
All In Page 7