Thanks, mate.
We were used to hearing Margaret pander to the male tennis establishment, but what surprised me was her attempt to put us down as money grubbers. She had happily taken Bob Mitchell’s largesse in Melbourne. We all knew she was making a bundle playing tournaments for high appearance fees. Her stance was regrettable. Again, we moved on without her.
At the beginning of the Slims tour I found an extra gear I didn’t know I had. I was playing really well again, with no knee pain for the first time in three years. It made a huge difference that I wasn’t playing just for myself. We all felt like we were carrying the future of women’s tennis onto the court each night. In my case, that sense of mission that I had had since I was a child now had a concrete focus, and it brought out the best in me.
We racked up fourteen tournaments in the first three and a half months of 1971 alone, almost one a week. I won the first five, beating Rosie each time in the final. The pace was grueling, but it helped Rosie and me to have had the MacCall tour experience. Our Slims events were played everywhere from college gyms and rec centers to Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, which felt like the big-time even though sand came blowing off the desert onto our outdoor court. For the first time, a lot of women players were making real money, and we were determined to keep it going.
We picked up a lot of support from women who wanted to promote our tournaments. Two months after we got our start in Houston, Dorothy Chewning, a longtime tennis fixture in Richmond, Virginia, welcomed the Slims players to her tournament, the Westwood Racquet Club Invitational. By early 1971, Nancy Jeffett organized the Maureen Connolly Brinker Invitational in Dallas. Cindy Trabue and Sandy Lecklider of the Junior League of Birmingham, Michigan, convinced the Kresge Foundation to foot the prize money for what became the K-Mart International, and persevered when our portable court went missing until the last minute while in transit by train. Joyce Turley ran our stop in Oklahoma City, and personally recruited one hundred sponsors herself for $100 apiece. “I’d start out in the morning and I wouldn’t go home until I had three sponsors,” Joyce told the historian Donn Gobbie.
Everybody pitched in enormously. As our top-ranked player, I was most often cast as the main spokeswoman, the standard setter, the biggest agitator. It was always, “Billie, over here…Billie, what do you think?” By the time I had won seven of our first nine singles titles, the demands were constant. I would wake up before dawn to be interviewed on the morning TV and radio shows, and I’d sometimes lie on my hotel bed and dial up reporters until midnight or later to promote the next stop on our schedule.
My friends said I was too intense. Larry said I paid a big price, often to the point of getting sick. But I couldn’t relax. Practically overnight, we were trying to change a tennis structure that had existed for a hundred years and buck chauvinism at the same time. When things didn’t happen as fast as I felt they should, I was driven to find out why.
I so badly wanted us to be a locked-down, airtight, professional-looking operation. I would take the balls and show the ball boys and ball girls the correct way to throw them to the other side of the court. One night I stood in the lobby before playing my final and counted the fans coming in. At every stop, I wanted to know if the promoter was doing enough, if the publicist was effective, if the fans were happy. The tour came first, and everything had to be exactly right. When it wasn’t, I admit I often got pretty impatient.
Jeanie Brinkman, whom Philip Morris hired to do public relations for the tour in 1973, later said of those years, “Billie Jean was a magnet, attracting and repelling with equally strong force. The tour used to fluctuate with her. If Billie was on a rampage, tension was high. If she was happy, everyone was. It was never tranquil with Billie around, but that’s what it took to make the sport…These women are professional tennis players, and it’s not a release from the tension—it is the tension.”
Sometimes we had good advance sales, but other times, when sales were lagging, our players would visit high school assemblies, or stand in the street outside our venues the day of the matches and hand out tickets to random motorists or pedestrians passing by. We were taking world-class tennis to brand-new places and sometimes the uninitiated crowds would applaud during points. But I loved that too. When Rosie was asked once if the noise was a distraction after the sepulchral atmosphere we were used to, Rosie joked, “I could care less if they got stoned.”
In Chattanooga, one of our most challenging stops, the indoor facility we used was a metal-roofed hangar with lighting so dim the balls we used were fuchsia—the better to see them, I guess. To sell tickets on the day of the finals, we stopped cars by waving signs that read “Women’s Tennis Here!,” some of us wearing Davy Crockett–style coonskin caps. In the end, we packed the place with about a thousand people. When I won the tournament, they gave me a squirrel gun along with the winner’s check. When I took another title in Oklahoma City, they handed me a ten-gallon cowboy hat with $2,500 emblazoned in foil numerals on the front. At our tour stop near Birmingham, Michigan, Frankie caused a sensation at our pre-tournament cocktail party by showing up in black fake-fur hot pants. When she played, she often had her dog, Topspin, carry her racket out between its teeth.
On days like that, we would look around and blink in amazement at what we’d started. It was glorious, side-splitting, outrageously good fun. It felt like we were spinning straw into gold, or we were extras in one of those corny Judy Garland–Mickey Rooney movies where the overcaffeinated kids band together to save their hometown, telling each other, “Whaddaya say, gang? Let’s put on a show!”
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One of the most exciting things about building our women’s tour from scratch was that we were able to shape it the way we wanted. From the start, we made a conscious decision to break away from tennis’s staid image and have our events be more freewheeling and engaging. I’ve always maintained that tennis players are entertainers, and, as such, we should be paid the same regardless of how many sets we play or what our gender is. We never claimed that we were better than men. What we said was that women put on just as good a show. Now we were proving it.
Philip Morris was an absolute marketing machine, and they sent us Ellen Merlo, a public relations specialist and event planner who worked for the company’s Marlboro brand, which sponsored Indy Car races. Ellen never played tennis, but she was a brilliant strategist and she helped shape us into a polished, professional group. She set up advertising, offered media training for the players to help us with interviews, wrangled reporters to cover our events, and phoned in scores to make sure we made the local papers. Often a few people were sent ahead of us to our next tour stop to do advance promotional work. The players did everything we could to help. If the print reporters or TV stations wouldn’t send someone to us, we’d often get in a car and drive to them. If a sports editor balked at sending a writer, I’d sometimes get on the phone and say, “Well, do you have a stringer? And if they do a good job, would you consider using the story then?” They often did. We were good copy.
There were no full-time athletic trainers to help us in the early days. Nancy Richey once had a root canal in Denver in the morning, then played her match at night gargling Scotch to kill the pain. Rosie worked another match crouched by the net as a ball girl because we needed the help. To help defray costs, Ann Jones’s husband, Pip, used to roll up the Slims’ carpeted indoor court and drive it on a truck from town to town himself. When the USLTA banned its officials from working our tournaments for a while, Peachy Kellmeyer, our tour director, sometimes had to recruit people in the arenas. “One time we talked the Xerox repairman into calling the lines but he gave himself away when he yelled ‘Foul!’ instead of ‘Out!,’ ” Peachy said years later.
We added some new twists to our format. At some stops we spruced up the introductions and had our players walk out one by one from behind a curtain to spotlight us to fans. When we grew tire
d of hearing that men deserved to be paid more because they play the best-of-five sets at the majors, we made our year-end Slims Championship final the best-of-five sets from 1984 to 1998.
It was Joe Cullman who had the inspired idea to hire the dress designer and tennis historian Ted Tinling, the colorful Englishman who was banned from Wimbledon for thirty-three years for designing Gussie Moran’s lace panties in 1949. Ted stood six feet five, he was bald as a honeydew and thin as a shoelace, and he knew everyone in the sport dating back to Suzanne Lenglen. Wimbledon still hadn’t allowed Ted to return by the time he joined us, and he liked to brag, “I put the sin in tennis!” Bud called him “the Leaning Tower of Pizazz.” Ted designed our Slims players’ eye-catching outfits and treated us like show-biz celebrities. I absolutely loved him. Nobody told better stories.
By the start of the Slims’ second season, all of us had personally fitted, hand-sewn Tinling originals. Ted would set coordinated color schemes for us each season, and Margaret Goatson Kirgin, Ted’s seamstress and longtime assistant, carried out the labor-intensive details of each garment’s final design; Rose Stevens contributed too. Frankie Dürr told Ted she wanted her décolletage to look good. Rosie’s sequined dresses usually weighed about ten pounds. I used to argue with Ted to give me more sparkle. “More, more, more—you’re not giving me enough, Teddy!” I’d say.
Ted’s affectionate nickname for me became “Madame Superstar.” Considering his many witticisms about other players, I got off easy. During Martina Navratilova’s career, Ted memorably said, “She swings from arrogance to panic with nothing in between.” Ted said Gabriela Sabatini, the rangy Argentine beauty, “looks like Marilyn Monroe, walks like John Wayne.”
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The rise of the Virginia Slims Tour touched off a flurry of other ventures or firsts that Larry and I soon undertook together. Sometimes it was hard to keep up with all there was to do. Larry had given notice to his law firm in Hawaii when he finished his Army Reserve obligations in June 1970. He felt better suited to be an entrepreneur, and he threw himself into expanding the TennisAmerica franchise as well as building what would soon become King Enterprises. He enjoyed the action so much that Rosie nicknamed him “the Kingfish.”
By then, I had had deals with Keds and Adidas sneakers, and a clothing line with Head sportswear. We always had ideas percolating. It felt like a new world was bursting open at the seams, and sometimes all we had to do was say the word and a first was spoken into existence. How about a team tennis league? Okay! Me: Why doesn’t Sports Illustrated cover us more? Larry: “Women deserve their own sports magazine.” Done! How about a players’ association for women so we can fend for ourselves, and speak with one voice? It came to be in 1973. I wanted to do everything and Larry wanted to help make it happen.
While my marriage with Larry was still listing, he and I were becoming more entangled in business than ever. It gave me pause, but our latest rationalization to keep powering ahead was that we had to ensure that the Virginia Slims Circuit succeeded. It was still a challenge, especially with the USLTA adding tournaments to its competing set of women’s events featuring stars like Margaret and Chrissie.
Larry and I kept our condo in Hawaii but took an apartment in the Bay Area as well, a sparsely furnished one-bedroom in Emeryville. That was the closest thing we had to a base. We were literally living out of suitcases in different cities and different hotels. We hardly saw each other. Other people were beginning to wonder about it, and reporters even asked us directly about our “unconventional” marriage. Rumors that we might split had started surfacing in print as early as 1970, and we always denied it.
At one point, Larry sat for an interview with British television that later appeared in a BBC documentary about me called Rogue Champion (a title that tells you a lot about how the media regarded me then). The commentator asked Larry how we arrived at our “unusual” arrangement, and Larry said, “She’s put fourteen years into her career. I can’t tell her, ‘Stop your career. You’re married. I’m ready to settle down.’ It wouldn’t hardly be fair, I don’t think.”
“I don’t quite understand that,” the male interviewer said.
“You don’t understand that?” Larry repeated patiently. He paused. Then he tried again: “I don’t let a preference override what I think is her destiny.”
That was Larry. The hardest thing was that we had pictured being with each other forever, and it was heartbreaking to consider that it might not work out. Even when our relationship was rocky, even once I realized I was conflicted about my sexuality, Larry and I could still spend hours talking about anything. Larry’s mind always fascinated me. People with a legal or scientific mind, like he has, tend to work through things systematically, relying on logic and facts. I was more of a big-picture thinker. In so many ways, our relationship was symbiotic. We always enjoyed pitching ideas or discussing the state of the world. I’d talk about my dreams and he’d come back with how to make it happen. We still had a strong connection in life, in values, and, sometimes, in bed. When we finally did end up in the same city for a night or two, our time together could still be sweet. That’s how I got pregnant six weeks into the Virginia Slims tour after Larry and I spent a night together during our tour stop near Boston.
I knew it almost immediately. I had stopped taking birth control pills after Larry showed me a magazine article that said it was dangerous to stay on them for more than five years. Maybe it was just more magical thinking on my part, if I was thinking at all. After our rare night together, I played two more tournaments and nearly threw up on the court at the second one, in New York City. That’s when I called Larry and flew back to California to take a pregnancy test. It came back positive. Oh, dear God, I thought. Now what do I do?
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When the whole world learned nearly a year later that I’d had an abortion, I was accused of sacrificing motherhood for the sake of my career. I can honestly say that tennis had little to do with my decision. A few women had temporarily stopped playing after childbirth and returned to competition. Margaret did it twice.
I’d always wanted to have children and still did—but not then. Our marriage was too shaky, and our lives were so complicated and unpredictable. Also, I now realized my attraction to women wasn’t going away. I didn’t know what I wanted, and I didn’t know what Larry and I were doing. We discussed my pregnancy for days. It was a deeply personal conversation as well as a moral and political one. Larry and I agreed that a woman had the right to decide if and when she wanted to be pregnant, and the government had no right to interfere. He ultimately left the decision to me, and when I told him my choice to have an abortion, he said he supported me. In the end, I couldn’t imagine bringing up a child in such chaos.
I took ten days off, skipping a tournament in Puerto Rico in late March. We told the press I was recovering from the flu. I had begged Larry not to tell anybody what was really going on, but he told Gladys, “We’re a little bit pregnant.” He might as well have used a megaphone, because it soon felt like everybody on the tour knew. But like so many other secrets within the tennis world, nobody said a word to the press at the time.
When I see hard-won reproductive rights being reargued and rolled back today—during the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, it took a 2020 federal court ruling to stop some states from seizing the chance to try to limit legal abortions—it makes me wonder if people remember how difficult things were before, even when a woman’s pregnancy was caused by rape or incest. How short our memories are.
When I became pregnant in 1971, abortion was still a felony in most states and it would continue to be until the Roe v. Wade decision two years later. California was one of a handful of states that had legalized the procedure before then, as long as it was a “therapeutic” abortion performed by a doctor in a hospital. But any woman wanting an abortion had to go before a medical committee first an
d explain why she believed that her pregnancy would “gravely impair” her “physical or mental health.” So that’s what I had to do. Explaining to a panel of ten or fifteen strangers why I qualified for an abortion was probably the most degrading thing I’ve ever experienced. When Larry and I walked into the room and saw them looking back at us, Larry said to me under his breath, “This is ridiculous.”
The fee for the procedure was nearly $580, an enormous sum back then. I could afford it, but what about a poor woman stuck in a desperate situation who wanted an abortion? She would still have to rely on a dangerous back-alley abortion mill—if she could find one.
When the morning arrived, I spent most of my time in the waiting room trying to comfort a terrified fifteen-year-old girl from Alabama, where abortion was illegal. We sat there for a while.
“How are you doing?” I asked.
“Not good,” she said quietly. I was five weeks pregnant. She was farther along because it had taken her months to get to California for the procedure, and it had been a nightmare. She had one relative in Oakland who had taken her in and made the appointment for her.
Before my procedure there was one more indignity. Because I was married, Larry had to sign the consent form before we could proceed. Whether it was access to financing, credit cards, or the right to govern my own body, men were still in charge.
The abortion procedure itself was quick. When I woke up in the recovery room, Larry was there to take me home. I felt a sense of relief, but also a sense of emptiness and sadness over losing a dream that we once held as a couple. I also felt sorrow for my parents, who wanted a grandchild so badly. They didn’t know about my pregnancy or my decision. I was afraid my choice to end my pregnancy would gut them.
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