Every message we got then—from therapists, teachers, law enforcement, our families—was that homosexuality was “deviant” behavior. It was a huge leap of faith for me to risk telling Larry about the kiss, and an enormous relief when Larry told me that he would always love me, no matter what, and that he didn’t care what happened before he was in my life, so long as I loved him.
But when I came back to Berkeley to rehab my knee in the spring of 1969, Larry and I had another heartfelt talk. Larry later said it felt like “the most poignant cry for help” I’d ever made to him. He could see I was distraught about something and asked me, “What’s wrong?”
I said, “Oh, I’m going to ruin you, Larry. I’m going to ruin you.”
“Why?”
“I’ve had some relationships in my past,” I stammered.
Then I told him for the first time that I had gotten involved with someone on the road, but it was over. And I told him that my confusion about being attracted to both women and men still existed.
“That doesn’t have anything to do with me. That won’t ruin me,” he said.
“How can you be a lawyer if somebody says I’ve had other relationships or feelings for women?”
“It won’t bother me, it won’t affect me,” he insisted. “Don’t be distraught on my account, Billie Jean.”
“I never want to hurt you, Larry, and I’m afraid I’ll ruin you,” I repeated.
I felt telling the truth was the right thing to do, but confessing that I had had an affair stung and angered Larry, and he came to believe that it gave him license to see other women—discreetly at first. I knew about some of them (Sports Illustrated printed the name of one), but I felt I had no footing to protest. I had betrayed him first. I wasn’t even sure we should still be married, but being together was the only thing either of us had known since we were seventeen and eighteen.
In a paradoxical way, our problem wasn’t that we were out of love. Far from it. We cared about each other so much that we kept straining for a way to negotiate a growing list of challenges that never felt totally in our control. Neither of us wanted to countenance the idea that those challenges doomed us as a couple. Some magical thinking set in instead. Maybe if we wait things out, our problems will somehow resolve themselves…
I kept playing and Larry finished his law degree by summertime, but it turned out to be a miserable year for both of us. I didn’t win a major in 1969 (or 1970, for that matter). We still were not getting along great by the time we went to Wimbledon in 1969, and then we foolishly agreed to allow a BBC-TV crew to follow us for two days.
When word came just before the tournament started that Maureen Connolly had succumbed to ovarian cancer at the age of thirty-four, I took a long, soul-searching walk through the streets of London, thinking about how life can be cut short at any minute, and how you have to make the most of it. Was I doing that?
Watching the BBC segment on Larry and me painfully drove home how unhappy we were. Larry said a few awkward things on camera—at one point tweaking me for not cooking for him as often as other wives—and the footage cut to me wincing at a few of his remarks. Larry claimed to be the more emotionally available person in our relationship. That irritated me because we had discussed it in an argument we had the night before the interviews started and Larry had agreed that the opposite was true: He had said he knew he wasn’t great at talking decisions through, and that he could be emotionally remote, even occasionally oblivious, traits he conceded created “a certain amount of conflict.”
The night before the first day of filming, I told Larry for the first time that I wanted a divorce.
He said no.
The tournament was in full swing. I backed down. But it was excruciating.
I was trying for my fourth consecutive title at Wimbledon, something that hadn’t been done since Helen Wills Moody accomplished it in the late 1920s. I made it to the final opposite Ann Jones, who had upset Margaret in the semifinals. Once again I was playing against both Ann and the Wimbledon crowd, which was cheering wildly for their local hero. I got cranky when some fans crossed the line and yelled “Out!” as I began to swing at balls that were in. At one point, I stopped, stared at a heckler, and then curtsied to him, which was a smart-ass thing to do. Ann told the press afterward that she was embarrassed by the fans’ stunts, but nonetheless, I had let myself get too irritable and distracted. As a pro, that’s an unacceptable excuse. I sprayed shots all over the plot. On match point I double-faulted—an inglorious end that touched off a national celebration. The Wimbledon title was the crowning achievement of Ann’s career and I was sincerely happy for my friend. She deserved it. But I was deeply unhappy with myself.
Larry and I settled back into our patterns. I threw myself into the circuit. Larry returned to his law firm in Hawaii and building TennisAmerica, the small but growing empire of tennis camps and clinics, tournaments, and pro shops we started with our friend Dennis Van der Meer, a well-respected teaching pro. We still had Tennis for Everyone. It wasn’t long before Larry was called to serve occasionally with the Army Reserve, sometimes on the mainland. We still loved kicking around ideas, dreaming of where things could go. That never, ever changed. But most of the time we were living apart, maintaining appearances, pretending to others that nothing was wrong.
Larry bought a condo in the Kalani Valley, a nice neighborhood east of Honolulu. When I was in town, Larry was expected to bring me to his law firm dinner parties and I dutifully went, the same as the other wives. We were often invited to the home of Daniel H. Case, one of the firm’s partners. One of Daniel’s sons, Steve Case, was later among the founders of America Online. I might’ve enjoyed having an extended conversation with Daniel or others after dinner, but while the men retired to the living room to talk business and politics I was expected to trundle off with the women to talk about whatever it was women were supposed to talk about. They were very nice, but we had little in common. This was not what I had in mind for the rest of my life.
* * *
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It’s interesting for me to look back at how I came to the women’s movement gradually. What began as a struggle for equal opportunities and pay equity for women had mushroomed by the late 1960s into a full-blown fight over other important issues, especially access to birth control and legal abortion.
The idea that women wanted control over their bodies, their reproductive rights, their careers, and their definition of fair treatment, with the freedom to make those decisions without men’s approval, were controversial concepts when I came of age. Married couples didn’t even have the “right” to use birth control until a 1965 Supreme Court ruling, Griswold v. Connecticut, said the choice was protected under the Constitution as a right to privacy. Still, that decision was no help to unmarried women, who remained denied full access to contraceptives by twenty-six states. It took another seven years before the Court legalized birth control for everyone, irrespective of their marital status, in 1972.
Roe v. Wade, the case that legalized abortion, was decided in 1973. But women could still be fired from their jobs for getting pregnant until the 1978 passage of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act. Spousal rape—being coerced or forcibly compelled to have unwanted sex with your partner—wasn’t criminalized in all fifty states until 1993. That’s still hard for me to believe. The first time any court in America recognized sexual harassment as grounds for legal action wasn’t until 1977. But many workplaces, as well as college and university admissions offices, were slow to end discriminatory practices. Many Ivy League colleges were still only open to men and operating on admission quotas deep into the 1970s.
Rosie thought the women’s protest movement was great and she was ready to have women’s tennis hop on the bandwagon. I thought we had to be more strategic. I wanted to speak out in a way that was strong, but I also wanted people to listen, not tune us out. To me, that meant being disciplined
about everything: my tone of voice, the words I used, the pragmatism of our goals. I was always asking myself, How can we win? How can we open a dialogue, and then keep it going? While I strongly supported the women’s movement, it was not in a wholesale way early on. Parts of the early feminist movement felt too extremist or elitist to me, too devoid of women of color.
The movement was initially unfriendly to lesbians as well. The phrase “Lavender Menace” was first used in 1969 by Betty Friedan to describe the threat she said lesbians posed to the emerging movement. Friedan, who had become the president of the National Organization for Women by then, even alleged in a New York Times essay that lesbians were among a handful of “infiltrator” groups that were “trained by the FBI and CIA” to hijack women’s liberation. The distancing didn’t save feminists from being called lesbians or man-haters anyway. The straight women acted as if being associated with lesbians infringed on heterosexuals’ rights, rather than seeing how their behavior was adding to the stigmatization of gays.
The gay liberation movement started the same year Friedan made her “menace” remark with an uprising outside the Stonewall Inn in Manhattan’s West Village. The gay club was raided by police in the wee hours of June 28 and, as usual, there was some roughhousing and arrests. But this time it touched off two days of rioting to protest the cops’ routine harassment and brutality against the LGBTQ+ community. (The New York Police Department officially apologized in 2019, on the fiftieth anniversary of Stonewall.)
I was so homophobic myself then, I didn’t say the word lesbian even in private company. I thought a lot about uttering words like “I’m a feminist” or “feminism” in my public interviews because I knew the words alienated many people, especially in the early days of the movement. Many people then thought that feminists advocated female supremacy or special treatment. I’ve always defined feminism as advocating equal rights and equal opportunity for everybody. For a long time, I thought you could argue for equal opportunity without having to use a charged word like feminism and, if your reasons were sound, you could still prevail. Semantics are so powerful. One word can alter everything.
Often, if I did discuss feminism, I took great pains to make sure my definition of the term wasn’t misconstrued. My goal was to win hearts and minds. My intent was to make transformational, long-lasting change. To do that, I knew we had to bring men along with us to help us, not drive them away. Sometimes I’d turn my post-match press conferences into consciousness-raising sessions with sportswriters if they mentioned feminism. I’d say, “Before I answer your questions, I want to go around the room and have all of you tell me first what feminism means to you.”
I’d tell them I had actually looked up the term feminist, and they were often surprised when I’d continue, “Do you know the word was created in 1837 by a man, the French philosopher Charles Fourier?” I’d explain that Fourier believed all important jobs should be open to women on the basis of skill and aptitude rather than closed on account of gender. He also wrote about how society was ordered in ways that could potentially hurt women’s rights as human beings. “Who here is okay with that?” I’d ask, looking around the press room. “I think people misinterpret the women’s movement, in that they think we want to dominate or advocate separatism. In my mind, it’s really to create equal opportunity, to share. There’s a big difference in those two words—dominate, versus share.”
* * *
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Putting feminism aside, it’s important to remember that the politicization of sports and the role of the athlete-activist like Muhammad Ali was new, and there had never been a female athlete-activist by then who was advocating for women athletes as a group. Sports superstardom was the near-exclusive domain of men.
Sure, there had been a few sportswomen who became sensations—Suzanne Lenglen, Alice Marble, Althea Gibson, and Maureen Connolly in tennis; the golfers Patty Berg, Mickey Wright, and Kathy Whitworth; the figure skater Peggy Fleming; the sprinter Wilma Rudolph; and the all-around athlete Babe Didrikson Zaharias. But none of them was overtly political except Alice, through her advocacy for Althea’s inclusion. Alice was a feminist too. She used to talk at length about how every woman athlete owes a debt to the women before her. Althea was enormously inspiring, but she didn’t seek the spotlight. She let her performance speak for her.
I knew, of course, that I was treading on new ground. Today it’s often hilarious to me when I see old videos of myself talking in soft, measured tones, or imperturbably fielding provocative questions when I must have been growling inside. I have to laugh, too, when I see more recent sportswomen/activists such as Megan Rapinoe, the U.S. soccer star and out lesbian, sprinkle a few f-bombs into their conversations when they’re publicly making their points. It’s a sign of the wonderful freedom they feel and the surer footing we’ve gained. But in my time, I would’ve been a pariah. Even feminism was an f-word for many back then.
As it was, I was called radical anyway, even if not in the bra-burning sense of the word, because of my outspokenness. Whatever I did it was magnified, dissected. Things were constantly shifting and I felt I couldn’t ignore them. I felt an urgency, even a certain sense of alarm, that we could drop off the face of the tennis world because so many men didn’t want to work with us. It took a personal toll. Once I began to pipe up more, there were a lot of days when I’d act in public as if the criticism or cold treatment didn’t bother me, but it stung.
Looking back, I was probably too naive and idealistic in thinking we could persuade men at the time to willingly share their power and privilege, especially when they had never known anything else. Frederick Douglass knew what he was talking about when he wrote, “Power cedes nothing without a demand.”
One of the factors that made me and even our most reluctant female tennis peers willing to ramp up our protests was the realization that our status didn’t improve by sitting out the gender or cultural wars, or by refraining from calling out sexism. We all encountered discrimination, lousy experiences, and remarks, regardless of our individual differences.
Even the concept of woman breadwinners was still new to people then. Jeanie Brinkman, a publicist and marketing director who worked in the tennis world, says she’d get strange looks on airplanes simply because she carried a briefcase. Rosie said, “People ask us all the time, ‘Why aren’t you in the kitchen? Why aren’t you getting married?, We’d say, ‘Why should we?’ ”
The press coverage of the day was routinely centered on our looks—the “splendidly conformed” Gail Chanfreau, “the pretty, well-meaning” Ceci Martinez—or descriptions of Margaret’s “near-virile” serve, Nancy Richey Gunter’s “tomboy style,” my “manful” resolve. A New York magazine writer wrote that Ken Gunter spoke of his wife, Nancy, “like a Western hero who prefers his women, like his horses, to display a little spirit.” Seriously? Other writers spent a few paragraphs asserting that I made being flat-chested “sexy” or that my wardrobe choices trended toward “last year’s conventions.”
The attacks on our femininity were a constant. When the Sports Illustrated writer Edwin “Bud” Shrake visited the women’s tour a couple of years after we launched, he wrote, “The players were an amazingly good-looking group of people, especially when one thought of the stereotype of the woman athlete. Nobody had a beard…Nobody waddled. Not a lumberjack in the group.”
Jim Murray, the Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist at the Los Angeles Times, called me “Little Miss Popoff” and wrote about my alleged bitterness at not being born a boy: “King has never forgiven Nature for the dirty trick it played on her in preventing her from being a free safety for the Green Bay Packers…Around Long Beach, they say her father got her into tennis so she wouldn’t be a lady wrestler.” The idea that women simply wanted to see what we could be seemed incomprehensible to some people.
Grace Lichtenstein, one of the few women who covered sports at the time, expertly captured just how ingrain
ed such attitudes were when she wrote, “These women were defying all the false tenets of femininity that had plagued me and so many other girls. As a kid growing up in the 1950s, I accepted the concept of women athletes as freaks. I had been taught that to want to become an athlete of any kind was unacceptable. Girls were passive, non-competitive, dependent. The notion of a sexy woman athlete was a contradiction.”
Ingrid Löfdahl-Bentzer, our top Swedish player, was an accomplished woman who spoke seven languages and served as one of our first players’ association officers. On a trip to Italy once, Ingrid used a rolled-up magazine to swat away the numerous men who catcalled her or tried to pinch her rear end as she walked down the street. She was a formidable woman. And yet, when Ingrid reminisced about her tour experiences decades later, she told an American writer, “Back then, so many things could prick you. The most stupid things would come up. I always remember my first husband had a girlfriend before me with skin like porcelain. She always smelled like perfume. And here I was, I smelled of Ben-Gay liniment and I had calluses on my hands. I thought, ‘Ahhh, Bentzer—you’re a jock.’ As a woman, you’d get put into these funny, funny positions. Nowadays it’s easy to look back and say, ‘Well, that treatment was crap!’ But at the time…”
I had been taking questions about when I was going to stop being a tennis bum since I was a sixteen-year-old marooned at those tournament country club mixers. From the mid-1970s to this day, I can’t tell you how many women have approached me somewhere to tell me they admire my game or my activism—and then introduce themselves as “Mrs. Joe Smith” or say, “I’m just his wife,” and point to a man across the room.
I look at them and say, “That’s great, but who are you?”
* * *
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Now that there was open tennis, so much more was theoretically in play for women players. Yet the resistance we were encountering was getting stiffer. Larry’s prophecy that the men would try to push us out of the game was coming true.
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