The day after I won in Phoenix, the Philip Morris folks, always alert to a smart marketing opportunity, had me standing in a persimmon-red pantsuit for a press conference at their corporate headquarters in New York City before a crowd of print media and a bank of television cameras. There was an expectant hush as I looked at a telephone intercom onstage and the amplified sound of a call being placed crackled and buzzed. Then a woman’s voice came on the line saying, “This is a recording…”
We all laughed.
Finally, after several attempts, the familiar baritone of Richard Nixon came through the speakerphone.
“Hello?”
“Hello, Mr. President,” I said.
“Yes, yes, I just wanted to congratulate you for your great successes this year,” Nixon told me. “I’m glad to see a fellow Californian get over $100,000.”
“Thank you, Mr. President,” I said, adding that I was especially proud to be the first woman to do it.
“Well, that’s the most important thing,” Nixon replied.
It was amazing how far we had come. My dad and mom had been flown in for the occasion and they were standing nearby, flushed with pride. The president of the United States was recognizing me the same way he would a returning astronaut or a Super Bowl–winning quarterback.
I earned more in the Slims’ first season than all but five players in Major League Baseball, including the Cincinnati Reds all-star catcher Johnny Bench, who made $90,000, and the Oakland A’s outfielder Reggie Jackson, who made $45,000. Willie Mays’s $150,000 salary led baseball that year. I also outearned some of the biggest stars in the other major sports, including the National Basketball Association’s Jerry West, the National Football League’s Dick Butkus, and the National Hockey League’s Bobby Hull. When I ran into Reggie later at a luncheon, he told me he “just about fainted” when he saw what I had made. “You guys are making some serious bread,” he said.
By the time I finished playing out the year in England and New Zealand after the Slims schedule ended, I had won $117,000. Despite the relentless schedule, I took seventeen of the thirty-one singles titles I played for and had a 112–14 record. If you tossed in the twenty-two doubles titles I won, nearly all of them with Rosie, I easily played more matches that year than Johnny Bench played baseball games (149).
Most of the women on our tour sincerely congratulated me. But there was a segment of players and fans that disliked the disproportionate share of the attention I was getting. I tried to push other players out front more, often to little avail. I was making news. Still, I caught a lot of flak for being a greedy or self-centered professional. The funny thing is, I’ve genuinely never cared much about material things. The rented apartment Larry and I had in the Bay Area was laughably simple. Early in our marriage, I measured my prize money by how many Big Macs it would buy Larry and me. He and I put nearly all our money into expanding our businesses or helping causes. Ilana Kloss, my life partner of four decades, and I are the same way. As long as I’m healthy and I can take care of the people I love, I have a roof overhead and I can order whatever I want in a restaurant, maybe stretch out my short legs on an airplane headed somewhere interesting, I’m happy.
I’m not saying money isn’t important. It gives you freedom from worry, and the liberty to walk away from things. In business, money creates power and influence. Sometimes it’s a means to accomplish an end. But money has never dominated my life and never will.
I will concede that I was exhausted by the end of the year. I had played more tennis than any human being should. Then I kept overdoing it for years. It took a toll on my body and mind. Life outside of tennis seemed to blur like scenery outside a train window. One incident in particular illustrates how lamentably true that was.
* * *
—
Sometime in late 1971, Larry and I had a lunch conversation with the editors of a new magazine called Ms., which was set to launch in early 1972. The magazine was the brainchild of the women’s activist Gloria Steinem, the publisher Pat Carbine, and a group of other women writers and editors, many of whom were sick of working for male-run publications that didn’t take them or their ideas seriously.
A year earlier, one hundred women had held an eleven-hour sit-in at the Ladies’ Home Journal demanding, among other things, that the magazine replace the editor-in-chief, John Mack Carter, with a woman. He refused to resign, but he did let the women produce one section of one issue—the crumbs, not the pie.
Gloria and the others wanted Ms. to become the voice of the women’s movement. That sounded great to me. Later, I used to swing by their office and watch them sit in a circle on the floor and discuss the makeup of their next issue. Sometime after our first get-together, an envelope from the magazine arrived at the apartment that Larry and I had in California. It was in a stack of mail that Larry handed me after I got home, and he told me I would probably want to support the petition inside the envelope because, he said, “It will help legalize abortion.” The Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling was almost two years off.
I said okay, that I would take a look. But it was Larry who actually signed my name on the petition and sent it back without telling me he had done so—or me knowing that the petition allowed Ms. to publish my name along with a list of other prominent women signees under the headline “We Have Had Abortions.” The fifty-three others included Steinem, the playwright Lillian Hellman, the historian Barbara Tuchman, the singer Judy Collins, and the writers Anaïs Nin, Susan Sontag, and Grace Paley. I was blindsided when the list was printed.
I supported the pro-choice abortion movement wholeheartedly, and I’m glad I was on the list. It was important. As the companion article noted, at the time women could get therapeutic abortions in just two states; the rest of the time they had to seek illegal procedures that were often unsafe. Legalizing abortion was a cause that I believed in strongly. But it is my body, my privacy, my decision, and the choice to make my abortion public should have been mine, not Larry’s. I couldn’t even prepare my parents for the news.
I know it’s hard to imagine in this age of Twitter and the 24/7 news cycle, but it took a few weeks before Bud got wind of the petition and devoted a few lines to my abortion in his column for The Boston Globe. In late February, Mark Asher, a sports reporter for The Washington Post, asked me about it while I was promoting a tournament in Maryland. I told him how I truthfully felt: “If every woman who had an abortion would come out and say so, then it wouldn’t be such a social stigma.” I also asked him not to make the story about my procedure. He did. The article was picked up all over the country, including in the Los Angeles Times, the newspaper that slapped down on my parents’ doorstep each day. The headline was “Billie Jean King Defends Her Abortion—and Women’s Rights.”
I got tons of hate mail. But the worst part was that I still hadn’t told my parents about my abortion. It was another one of the many times where my inhibitions about not wanting to hurt them left me shrinking from emotional conflict. Even Randy suffered. He told me only recently that angry people sent letters to him at Candlestick Park, where he pitched for the San Francisco Giants, calling me a “baby-killer,” a “murderer,” and more. One package that arrived was filled with plastic fetuses.
A month went by, then two. The Ms. story never came up in my weekly call with my parents, and I didn’t have the stomach to mention it myself. By the time I went home for Mother’s Day, of all days, Dad was working at the firehouse, so it was just Mom and me at dinner, chatting about a lot of things but not the elephant in the room. Then we settled in to watch 60 Minutes because they were running a segment about me that night.
In addition to saying plenty of good things about me, the show included the usual footage of my antics on the court. I laughed when I was shown getting ready to serve in a match in San Juan, Puerto Rico, as the chair umpire admonished the raucous crowd, “Quiet, please”—only to have me stop bounci
ng the ball, look up, and say, “Awww, I like the noise.” The crowd laughed.
The correspondent Morley Safer made a lot of the fact that I was twenty-eight years old and suggested that I was entering my twilight as an athlete. I smiled, because I felt I had a lot of miles left. Then the mood changed when Safer caught up with Larry on camera at a TennisAmerica camp in California and asked, “What about children, Larry?” Larry said, “Not until our lives become more stable. It would be too selfish to have children now, and not be able to give them the proper amount of time and attention. Billie Jean is a perfectionist on more than the tennis court. If she couldn’t be a good mother, I don’t think she’d want to be one.” I looked over and saw that tears were puddling in my mother’s eyes.
I was shown next sitting with Morley at an outdoor table in a Florida country club three thousand miles from my husband, and Safer said, “Was the decision to have an abortion that clear-cut? It’s no family now, it’s tennis now?”
“No, that wasn’t the reason,” I said, managing to stay poker-faced. “The main reason I had an abortion was that we didn’t want a child at this time…Even if I wasn’t playing tennis, I still would have had the abortion.” I didn’t tell Safer that my shaky marriage was the determining factor.
After the segment ended, my mother and I sat in silence in the living room. Finally, she said, “I cried for three days when I heard.” All I could do was stare at the floor and let her talk. I felt terrible shame—not for the abortion, but for the way she found out. I could only imagine the pain she was feeling. “Don’t you love children?” my mother asked me. “Don’t you love Larry?”
I apologized for being gutless. I told her I did love children and I still loved Larry, but it was not the right time. She shook her head. “I still can’t understand,” she said, her voice trailing off.
Neither my mom nor my dad ever sat in judgment of my decision. Growing up in the Great Depression taught them some hard realities. Sometimes people’s reasons for getting an abortion have zero to do with not wanting to have children. My mother was pro-choice, though she didn’t express it then. The point, for me, was that I had let my family down and they were dragged into my public controversy. I was haunted by that later when I began to grapple with other secrets of mine that I feared might emotionally tear us apart.
Chapter 15
I spent much of 1972 feeling like a hamster in a spinning wheel. Often I would catch a morning flight from a tournament city, spend the whole day in business meetings, then catch a flight back and get to the court just in time to change and play without warming up. We were so determined to keep the tour growing that I was saying yes to every request, finding less privacy away from the court, and not practicing or training properly. My tennis suffered. In early February, I played Chrissie again in Fort Lauderdale, her hometown, and won only one game. Bud cracked in print that it was like the playboy quarterback Joe Namath going all the way to Sweden and getting kissed only once despite all the beautiful women there.
It wasn’t funny to me. It was one of the worst matches of my life. I actually wondered if I should quit. I even told Larry that one day when I was back in California. I was so exhausted I had decided to take a couple of weeks away from the circuit. The phone never stopped ringing. When I finally dragged myself back to a court near our place to hit with Larry and prepare to come back, I changed my mind with every stroke I smacked. I can’t quit. Thwack. I’m finished. Thwack. But what about the tour? Thwack. I can’t do it anymore.
I called Larry over and said, “I’m retiring. Let’s go home and make some calls.”
He said, “Okay. But are you sure?”
I was supposed to catch a flight the next day to play in Dallas. By the time we reached our front door I had changed my mind again and said, “What am I talking about? I’m turning this around!” I think merely reminding myself that I did have a choice to play or quit helped me refocus on what I loved about the game rather than the grinding work it sometimes took to compete plus juggle everything else.
Chrissie again beat me in straight sets the next time we played, this time in St. Petersburg. God, she was already great, and getting better all the time. Larry and I visited Chrissie’s dad, Jimmy, several times, hoping to get her to join the Virginia Slims circuit. The first time I walked into their house in Fort Lauderdale it felt like home. Jimmy was a strict disciplinarian, the same as my dad. Colette, Chrissie’s mom, was a cheerful, leavening influence. All of the Evert kids played tennis at Holiday Park, the public courts where Jimmy was the teaching pro, as soon as they could hold a racket. They were all rock-solid people who put family first.
Jimmy was a USLTA loyalist and did not let Chrissie join our circuit until she was eighteen, but we respected each other and became friends. Jimmy and Chrissie even agreed to help me when I decided to focus on winning Roland-Garros for the first time and Chrissie decided to skip the 1972 tournament because of school. (Thank God for proms, right?) I was tired of hearing that to be considered truly great, I had to win at least one Roland-Garros singles title because it was the only major held on clay. I had about a month to get ready, and I spent nearly a week with the Everts in May. Their help was invaluable. We hit for four, sometimes six hours every day, and the preparation contributed greatly to my success once I got to Paris. Chrissie was amazing. She would ask me, “What do you want?” and deliver every shot I asked for, the full repertoire.
In our ensuing years on tour, Chrissie and I would sometimes practice together and she would get impatient with me because I couldn’t maintain the precision on my groundstrokes that she could. She’d get this glare and I’d have to stop, stifle a laugh, and say, “Chrissie? Don’t you dare get mad at me, or I am out of here. I am doing the best I can, all right?” It was hysterical. I was so curious about the secret of her unshakable mindset that I asked her once what she thought about during matches. She looked at me as if to say “Duh” and deadpanned, “One more ball.”
I won Roland-Garros in 1972, beating Evonne Goolagong in the final in straight sets. It was my one and only career singles title at Roland-Garros and I didn’t drop a set the entire tournament. I defeated Evonne again in the final at Wimbledon for my fourth career title there. Scalpers were getting $100 for the $9 seats to that match, and the Wimbledon crowd was again so openly against me that Evonne said afterward, “When she hits a short shot or hits out and everybody claps, it upsets me. I just don’t think it’s fair.”
Margaret was back on tour now and playing well after a long break during which she gave birth to her first child, Danny. Her husband was traveling the circuit with them to help. It bothered me that Margaret would put down progressives or call women’s libbers “masculine and non-traditional,” while she was now the breadwinner in her family and her husband supplied the child care.
I beat Margaret at the 1972 U.S. Open in the semifinals and went on to win the tournament without dropping a set. It was my third singles win in the three 1972 majors I played, my best year ever. I was again ranked No. 1 and probably could’ve won the calendar-year Grand Slam that year, but I didn’t go to the Australian Open because I chose to remain loyal to the Slims circuit instead. The majors weren’t the end-all like they are now. A lot of us often skipped one or two of them. It was the price we were willing to pay for the tour because we wanted to be able to make a living the other forty-four weeks a year. We cared more about creating jobs. That’s why I maintain that it’s hard to compare the career Grand Slam titles of more recent champions to the stars of our era, especially someone like Rod Laver, whose total of eleven majors was suppressed because Rod was banned for five years for turning pro. That’s twenty opportunities he missed. Chrissie and Martina sacrificed a lot of chances to play in all four majors as well because they supported the women’s tour and, later, World TeamTennis.
As it was, I almost didn’t go to the 1972 U.S. Open either. The Slims players had voted to boycott the tourna
ment a month beforehand because the men’s winner’s share of $25,000 still far outstripped the $10,000 that the women’s champion received. Gladys talked us out of it, saying we should give the U.S. Open tournament director, Billy Talbert, more time to raise some extra cash. Billy was a terrific guy, even if he was unconvinced women should earn as much as men. I felt we were at another crucial moment. If we backed down completely, our push for equity across the board could fall short.
I met with Billy—just the two of us sitting on facing chairs in the small officials’ hut near the courts at Forest Hills—and told him that we would show up in 1972, but I wouldn’t play in the 1973 U.S. Open if they didn’t level the prize money, and most of the top women would walk out with me. I reminded him about the results of Ceci Martinez’s fan survey, and asked him if tournament organizers really thought that the men were bigger draws or more entertaining than Chrissie, Rosie, Evonne, Margaret, and the other great women we had.
Then I told him I had lined up a sponsor—a Bristol-Myers brand, Ban deodorant—to kick in the extra $55,000 to achieve the equal prize money we were seeking. He made the deal. As a businesswoman and an activist, I never forgot that lesson. Billy couldn’t believe that I’d brought money to the table, not just rhetoric. I had concrete proof that we added value. By the end of our talks, Billy was persuaded, maybe more strongly than we knew. In 2019 when we went combing through the minutes of the USLTA meetings to find the exact date where the equal prize money vote took place, we couldn’t find proof that it ever did. I think Billy might have just told the board, “We’re having equal prize money. Case closed.”
We agreed not to announce the arrangement until just before the 1973 tournament. And that’s how the U.S. Open became the first major to pay women and men the same.
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