The upset made me the first unseeded player in Wimbledon’s eighty-six-year history of ladies’ tennis to beat a No. 1 seed in her opening match. My father learned that I’d won when the Los Angeles radio station KNX called him at the firehouse to get his reaction. The next day, the newspapers reported that when Margaret came to the interview room afterward, her voice was a thin whisper as she looked out at the waiting reporters and said, “This feels like a courtroom.”
As for me, I would never be the same. I had confirmed what I thought I was capable of doing.
Neither Margaret nor I knew it at the time, of course, but that Wimbledon singles showdown was the first of a thirty-four-match rivalry between us that would span thirteen years and some epic matches. We would be the top two players of our generation. But on that first day, I felt Margaret’s pain so intensely I teared up when the photographers rushed the court to take pictures of her with her face buried in her towel. Then I stuck up for her when it was my turn in the interview room, telling reporters, “Australia expects too much from Margaret. Margaret is truly a great champion and as soon as the Australian lawn tennis association and the Australian public start taking pressure off her, she’ll do better. She has a great future.”
I advanced two more rounds at Wimbledon before Ann Haydon, a familiar Wightman Cup foe, beat me in straight sets in the quarterfinals. But my pal Karen Hantze Susman, who had recently married, went on to win her first and only Grand Slam singles title that fortnight. What a thrill. Then Karen and I won the doubles for the second year in a row.
When the USLTA and the U.S. State Department asked me to represent the United States later that summer at the Moscow International Tennis Tournament, there was no chance I was going to say no. As a girl whose patriotic father signed up to fight for America, I always relished the chance to represent my country. Also, Russia would be only the second foreign country I’d ever visited, at a time when few Westerners traveled behind the Iron Curtain. The invitation deepened my belief that there were opportunities to make a global impact through tennis.
At that moment, Cold War relations between the United States and the U.S.S.R. were unbelievably tense. An American U-2 spy plane had been shot down by the Soviets in 1960. In April 1961 the U.S. had backed a botched invasion at the Bay of Pigs by some Cuban exiles hoping to reverse Fidel Castro’s Cuban revolution. Later that summer, East Germany built the Berlin Wall. By 1962, the Soviet Union was secretly sending missiles to Cuba, which would soon set off the Cuban Missile Crisis and yet another face-off with the U.S.
My parents didn’t want me to travel to Moscow, but I couldn’t wait to get there, even after our team was warned that our hotel rooms would probably be bugged. What I remember most, other than my first taste of caviar and seeing the famous brightly colored domes at St. Basil’s Cathedral, was that everything was gray. The buildings, the cars, even the skies were unrelentingly dreary. The food was terrible, and there seemed to be little of it. It was August, but the temperature never rose above 55 degrees. Late in the week, our players’ bus got stuck in traffic when two Soviet cosmonauts who had been circling the earth returned safely and were being paraded through Moscow as heroes. Thousands of fans waited two hours for us at the stadium until we arrived to play. Our last day, some of us asked if there were Sunday religious services we could attend, and we were told none were available in the atheist Soviet Union. That stuck with me.
On the flight home I couldn’t stop thinking how fortunate I was to have been born in America. When our plane touched down at Idlewild, I literally got down on my knees and kissed the tarmac.
* * *
—
My last stop before returning to college was the U.S. Nationals at Forest Hills. The crowds seemed thinner. Bill McCormick, a syndicated sports columnist, took a swipe that week at the “stodgy” tennis authorities for not opening tournaments to pros as well as amateurs. He said that since Jack Kramer’s professional promotions started siphoning off the top amateurs the “pristine pure division” of the sport had become “as colorless as skimmed milk.”
The biggest excitement was around Australia’s Rod Laver and their amateurs, led by Margaret Smith. Rod was slight and stood only five feet eight, but he could dominate anybody. He was a left-handed genius on the court, technically perfect, and—until Roger Federer came along—the best all-around tennis player I’ve ever seen. Laver had been a friendly, familiar face on the circuit for almost as long as I’d been competing. He won Forest Hills that year to become the first Australian to win a Grand Slam sweep, and the first male player to pull it off since Don Budge in 1938. Then, in another foreboding sign for amateur tennis, Laver turned pro in December.
I fell out of Forest Hills in the first round. I won my first set but had to retire after I became dizzy and fell behind 0–5 in the second against Victoria Palmer, a seventeen-year-old American who had beaten me the year before in the final of the junior nationals grass court championships in Philadelphia. She went all the way to the Forest Hills semis, her best Grand Slam finish ever. Her other claim to fame? Bud Collins and the fellow historian Ted Tinling christened Vicky tennis’s first female grunter. She’s had many imitators since.
Once back at L.A. State, I spent a lot of hours sitting alone again in the library, ignoring my textbooks as I reread Maltz and some others I discovered. At this point, I was a two-time Wimbledon doubles champion, a Wightman Cup winner, an athlete who had represented my country overseas and beaten or nearly beaten the top women in the world. And yet I was headed back to being a part-timer who didn’t compete for weeks at a time and worked menial jobs to pay for my living expenses. Was this all there was?
I would sit at that library desk for hours rolling a tennis ball back and forth on the table, thinking about the future of my sport. How were we going to grow women’s tennis into a major professional undertaking? What could I do? I was already beginning to sense that tennis players needed to unite to stand up to the USLTA and other officials who ran the local sections like personal fiefdoms. I was envisioning a day when tennis could be played with men and women competing together on equal footing rather than only practicing together the way we did at L.A. State.
Nothing about my sport had significantly improved—especially for women—since I’d had my epiphany at the Los Angeles Tennis Club seven years earlier. The clothes were still white, the balls and most of the players were white, and so were the spectators.
Althea quit amateur tennis in 1959 at the pinnacle of her career after having swept the singles titles at Wimbledon and Forest Hills in back-to-back years. As she memorably explained it, “You can’t eat trophies.” I would sometimes repeat her line later. Althea went on to break the color line in women’s golf, too, and chase the small purses on the fledgling LPGA tour. To make a living, she even played tennis as the opening act at Harlem Globetrotters’ games, a sight that was as painful to me as Jesse Owens racing a horse for money late in his career, or a broke Joe Louis—another African American icon—working as a casino greeter in Vegas.
The men who ran tennis back then thought you had to have attractive babes to draw fans to women’s events, so they paired Althea for those 1959 Globetrotter exhibitions with Karol Fageros, a Floridian whose biggest claim to fame was wearing gold lamé underpants when she played the 1958 French Championships. That earned Karol a ban from Wimbledon a few weeks later until she promised to wear white panties instead. “I didn’t think it would create such a sensation,” Karol said, “but every time I hit a shot in Paris, flashbulbs went off.” Photographers laid on their backs to take photos up her skirt. Though Karol was once ranked as high as No. 5 in the world, Althea beat her 114 of the 118 matches they played.
In short, the formula in tennis hadn’t changed much from a decade earlier when Bobby Riggs was the last promoter who tried to launch a women’s tour. Riggs’s sexed-up matches between “Gorgeous” Gussie Moran and Pauline Betz didn’t attract e
nough fans. They weren’t competitive, either. Betz was a strawberry blonde who had once dated Spencer Tracy. She won five majors and was still a much stronger player than Gussie, who had scandalized Wimbledon herself by wearing Ted Tinling–designed lace panties ten years before Karol Fageros arrived. Gussie reprised her outfit on Riggs’s tour and Pauline wore leopard-print shorts when they played. The laundry didn’t matter. Fans yawned and stayed away.
If Jack Kramer, the top promoter of my day, had offered me a professional contract with a legitimate tour at any point in my amateur career, I would have signed in a heartbeat. But he never asked a single woman to tour. That’s why 99.9 percent of us were amateurs when Althea or even I came along. To Kramer and the rest of the men in charge of tennis, we were invisible.
Chapter 7
After I returned for my sophomore year, Marcos Carriedo, my friend and mixed-doubles partner at L.A. State, kept telling me about this guy I had to meet, a freshman named Larry King with whom he played bridge in the school cafeteria. “You two are perfect for each other,” Marcos said. “Larry doesn’t drink or smoke either, and he’s going to come out for the tennis team.” I wasn’t interested in blind dating, so I kept putting Marcos off. Then one day he and I ran into each other just as I was stepping out of the library elevator to leave and he was coming in.
“Billie Jean! Get back in! He’s here! You’ve got to come meet Larry.”
“Marcos, come on.”
“I’m serious, Billie. You’ll like him. He’s a great guy.”
“What is with you, Marcos? I’m busy. And I’m not interested.”
“Get in,” Marcos insisted as he held open the elevator door, tugging at my arm.
We went to the fourth floor, and as we were walking across the room I noticed a blond guy sitting at one of the library tables and reading a book with his feet propped up on the chair next to him. He had his shoes off and was wearing loud red socks. Wow, if only that were him—he is gorgeous, I thought. I was surprised when he looked up as Marcos and I approached and Marcos said, “Larry, this is Billie Jean, the girl I’ve been telling you about.”
Well, hell-looooo, I thought, amused about my reluctance before. We shook hands and chatted a bit, but honestly, when I saw that face, that smile, that was it. Larry was seventeen, a year younger than I was. Other than how young and handsome he looked, I remember being struck by how sincere and friendly he was.
I don’t remember exactly what we talked about that day, just that we hit it off right away and I wanted to know more about him. Larry was smart, and I love smart. He told me later that he did a double take at me, too, because he didn’t expect me to look like I did, either. He had first heard about me over the summer when his father was reading the newspaper and remarked out loud, “Huh. A local girl won the doubles title at Wimbledon.” When Larry looked at the article, the photo showed my face contorted as I lunged for a shot. Not the kind of picture you’d send in for your screen test.
After that first hello, Larry and I would see each other around campus—“It was hard work to always ‘accidentally’ bump into her,” he joked later—and we began spending time together. We really were straight arrows, and we had an old-fashioned courtship. Larry often wrote me letters daily when I was traveling for tennis, and I tried to write back as best I could. Before we went out dancing for our first date, I took him to my house to meet my parents over dinner. Mom and Dad and Randy tried to act casually when we arrived, but Larry was the first boy I had ever brought home from college so they knew this must be significant.
As was often the case when Dad was involved, the conversation was memorable. As he fired up the outdoor grill, Larry tried to make small talk with him. He was admiring the beautiful roses my dad had planted for my mother and said, “What’s the pH of the soil, Mr. Moffitt?”
“What?”
“Well, roses need acidic soil—”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Dad cut him off, looking up now from what he was doing.
I tried not to laugh. I said, “Daddy, it’s not a big deal. Larry is a biochemistry major.”
Things got awkward again once we sat down to eat. Dad had splurged for steaks for dinner. Larry loved steak but disliked charbroiled anything. Mom had made a salad, and Larry didn’t eat salad, either. As the dinner conversation bumped and lurched along, Dad accidentally called Larry “Barry”—as in my ex-boyfriend. There was a long silence after that one. But honestly, Larry didn’t care.
Later, when Larry wasn’t around, Dad said, “What’s with this guy with his ‘Ps’ and ‘Hs’? What kind of dippity-do asks a guy that kind of question in his own backyard?”
It was almost as funny as the time Dad and I were watching Elvis on The Ed Sullivan Show and my father huffed, “He’ll never make it.”
Dad and Mom ended up liking Larry pretty quickly, even if Dad sometimes thought Larry was flaky. And Marcos was right: Larry and I were perfect for each other. He had a steady, easygoing charm. We used to spend hours sitting in the library at L.A. State talking about my dreams for tennis and his ideas for how to make them happen. We fell in love quickly and became inseparable even though we’re very different people. I can be a hot-tempered perfectionist, but nothing seems to faze Larry. I was someone who gushed emotion; Larry constantly showed me he loved me but it was often hard for him to talk about what he was feeling inside. His upbringing had been as unsettled as mine was orderly.
Larry grew up in Eagle Rock, a Los Angeles suburb nestled between Glendale and Pasadena. His father, James, was a tool-and-die maker from Dayton, Ohio, who was stationed in Pasadena during World War II. He sent for his wife and two sons to join him in California when he was discharged. Larry was still just a very young boy when his mother passed away there after giving birth to his baby sister, Mary Ellen. When I met Larry fifteen years later, the loss was still difficult for him to talk about. “I was two. She died,” is all he said.
Larry’s family struggled after that. His dad married a woman with two daughters, and they had a son together. Their blended family now had eight mouths to feed and money was a problem. Larry’s stepmother, Bunny, worked in a pottery factory and as a waitress. His dad started a cleaning business, and everyone was expected to pitch in. The older boys worked with their father washing windows and screens in houses and dormitories. There were hundreds of towels that also had to be washed, dried, and folded every night. But Larry was fine with all of it. He rolled with just about anything that came at him.
“The way I look at it, you can’t control what happens to you, but I think you can control how you react,” he said. “So why not make the best of every day?”
The six King children often had to fend for themselves because their parents were so busy. Larry became used to spending hours and hours reading as a child. He’d often sit near his dad and read every section of the newspaper as James dropped the pages to the floor after reading them first. Once he was in school, studying always came easy to Larry. He excelled at math. He had a photographic memory. He was a strong conceptual thinker. Exams were never a problem for him. But by his own admission, Larry could get sidetracked pretty easily too. An example: Larry was in line for a full academic scholarship to the University of Southern California, but he missed the deadline to send in the paperwork.
A family friend helped Larry land a $50 academic grant to attend L.A. State instead. Until we met, Larry intended to stay only a year and then head to USC. Our lives could’ve missed crossing paths. Larry played for L.A. State’s tennis team as a sophomore, and he was a good player. But he was always self-deprecating about his talent, telling people, “If you really analyze it, I was more of an equipment manager. I was a serve-and-volleyer without a serve.”
Larry had a strong self-image, but his ego wasn’t out of control, which I loved about him. He was an unthreatened man. He didn’t begrudge other people’s successes or act as if their achieve
ments came at his expense. Larry’s father came from a socially conscious Quaker background, and Larry always said he was deeply affected by that side of his dad. One summer, James drove their family to the Sierra mountains for an eagerly anticipated family reunion. As they neared the front gate of the campground where they intended to stay, James spotted a sign that read “Whites Only. No Colored Allowed” and he stopped the car.
“We’re not going in there,” James said, and he turned the car around. Some of the kids began to cry. Larry, who had been looking forward to the trip for months, was as upset as anyone to go home. But he never forgot that lesson, either. What it said to him was that everyone deserves to be treated like a human being, and you shouldn’t just say it, you need to live it.
One day after we began dating, we were walking hand in hand past the tennis courts at L.A. State and I was grousing about something I thought was unfair. Larry stopped and turned to me and said, “You realize you’re treated like a second-class citizen because you’re a girl, right?”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“I’m the seventh man on a six-man tennis team and I’m treated better than you are. You’re the best athlete at this school. You should be getting special treatment, not me. And yet you get zero.”
No other guy had ever spoken so bluntly to me about sexism, let alone added that he had a problem with it as well. I’ve always said it was Larry King who first made me a feminist, and it started that day.
The word feminism was just starting to creep into popular usage by the spring of 1963 when we had that talk. Betty Friedan’s runaway best seller, The Feminine Mystique, had been published only a few months earlier, in February. Friedan’s book is still considered one of the landmark opening salvos in the second wave of the women’s liberation movement. (The first wave started in the mid-nineteenth century and moved from fighting for equal property rights for women and opposing domination of married women by their husbands to fighting for women’s right to vote, which was granted when the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified in August 1920. While the law helped white women, nonwhite women were routinely discouraged or prevented from voting until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination on the basis of sex, race, color, religion, and national origin.)
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