We were certainly close that day. Our united stand was real. But our marriage was a front disguising the life I was really leading and blurring even this supposed moment of truth. The charade was excruciating and again I let it play out for the same reasons I always did: for the sake of my family, for all the good things I had been part of building with Larry and everyone else, and now, for Ilana. But that’s the trouble with secrets. One begets another, and another.
That press conference was the longest twenty minutes of my life. I felt like a drowning swimmer grasping at anything that might keep me afloat. When I was done with my opening statement there was total silence. It felt like a year to me before the first reporter piped up. I felt ashamed to be having this forced public conversation about my sexuality. I assumed that the world still wasn’t ready to accept me as a lesbian—and, more to the point, I was still not ready to accept it myself.
“I only hope the fans will have compassion and understanding,” I said.
I was asked how I felt about having my private life exposed because I’m a public figure, and I answered, “It may not be fair but that’s the way it is, and I’ve accepted it.”
After I had taken the last question, Larry and I and my parents stood in a line with our arms around one another as a show of solidarity. Tellingly, all of us are looking off in different directions, alone in our own worlds of hurt as the cameras recorded the moment. Once on the elevator, it wasn’t until I hugged my father that I realized he was shaking. I held on to him even tighter, hoping it would steady us both.
The deceptions only spread as Pat set up interview after interview. I don’t know what psychological mechanism kept me going, but I kept lying and kept hating myself for it. I just wanted to be left alone.
Within days, Larry and I were on the cover of People, showing off my wedding band. We sat for a sympathetic Q&A with the former editor of womenSports, our friend Cheryl McCall. The story was headlined “Larry and Billie Jean King Work to Renew Their Marriage—and Put Her Affair Behind Them.”
Bob Kain was so worried about my finances after I was outed that he called me three times a day until he talked me into writing a book. “You have to do it,” he said. Bob hoped rushing it to press would help repair my image in addition to making me some money and perhaps salvaging some endorsement contracts. Frank Deford was willing to write it. But Frank began interviewing me just three weeks after I had been outed, and everything with Marilyn remained so raw and bitter I barely gave him any time. I came off in the book as confused, which was true. All I knew was that I had hurt or let down just about everybody I knew or loved, and I still didn’t know how it would end. In all of my interviews after I was outed, I was so afraid of implicating others that I insisted that Marilyn was my first and only relationship with a woman, and that it had been over fairly quickly.
The containment strategy was yet another mind-bending part of the entire episode. Who turns being outed into a way to burrow deeper into the closet? But that’s what I did. I had been on record as in favor of gay liberation since my Playboy interview six years earlier, and I openly supported Renée Richards and transgender rights. But now I again denied and equivocated about my own sexuality, which was probably the worst part of it all. It wasn’t a personal reckoning as much as a whitewashing.
“I hate being called a homosexual because I don’t feel that way—it really upsets me,” I told People. “I particularly like working with children…Now I think [parents] are going to bag it and say, ‘I don’t want this creep around my kids’…If you have one gay experience, does that mean you’re gay? If you have one heterosexual experience, does that mean you’re straight? Life doesn’t work quite so cut and dried.”
It was a cop-out, of course. What kind of a message was I sending to others who were struggling with their sexuality? It’s “just a phase”? That being called gay or lesbian is pejorative? Not good. I handled the crisis as best I could. And I’ve had to live with those decisions. If I let myself think back to that time, the trauma feels nearly as fresh today as it did then.
The insinuation that gays and lesbians are bad people or predatory sexual creatures was something I encountered in all of my interviews, including the one with Barbara Walters, which reached the biggest audience. Pat had volunteered her own living room in Los Angeles for the set, and Larry and I held hands and sat on a couch as Barbara asked her questions, which were tough and direct.
“You know, Billie Jean, it’s now being said in various newspaper reports that in women’s golf, women’s tennis, homosexuality is rampant,” Barbara said with a concerned look on her face. “It’s also said that the younger players are often seduced by the older ones.”
“I don’t feel it’s true at all,” I said.
Questions like that were a nightmare. Tabloid reporters were indeed flooding the women’s tour now, looking for evidence of “rampant” lesbianism. The New York Post printed a lurid story about “the scandal shaking women’s tennis,” and claimed that Tracy Austin’s mother, Jeanne, was among those who had hired locker room “shower guards” to protect their daughters. Jeanne vehemently denied it. Chrissie Evert denounced the report. Pam Shriver, Andrea Jaeger, and other young players said they had to fend off reporters. The National Enquirer was offering bounties ranging from $5,000 for dirt on lesbians on tour to $25,000 for anyone who produced my letters to Marilyn. That appalled me. “If they [the media] want to bother me, fine, if they want to hurt me, or try to hurt me, fine,” I told the Los Angeles Times, “but please, leave the others alone.”
Nancy Lopez, the most popular golfer on the LPGA Tour, admitted that “a lot of people who are straight are scared” about being tarred by innuendo. And Nancy was married.
It meant the world to me that other players stood with me. Chrissie was among those who spoke out strongly on my behalf, writing an editorial for Tennis magazine titled “In Defense of Billie Jean.” Rosie was on the phone all the time with me, offering support. Martina publicly decried “the gay witch hunt” that was going on. The WTA board voted ten to five to keep me as president rather than accept my resignation, and Jerry Diamond publicly brushed off the “sexual McCarthyism” that was swirling around us and said our tour would survive.
Gloria Steinem wrote me a touching letter that read, in part, “It breaks my heart to see you suffering or penalized in any way for living in a still unenlightened time, but please know your troubles have probably hastened a better understanding for everyone.” I wasn’t sure. I do believe that acknowledging my affair with Marilyn opened a lot of conversations.
Larry Kramer, the gay activist and author, always maintained that the most important thing LGBTQ+ people have ever done is come out, because it allows other people to see that we’re relatable, real. I agree. Overnight, I had just become one of the first (perhaps only) lesbians that many people thought they knew. Maybe people who admired me or just knew my name realized it wasn’t fair to keep labeling gays and lesbians as degenerates or psychiatric cases. We were their neighbors, teachers, friends, even sports heroes.
I told the press, “No matter what happens now, I’ll still have my titles, my wins…I may lose my endorsements, but I still have me, my self-esteem. And I’ll start over.”
Our media blitz did ease the immediate crisis somewhat. Most of the coverage was on my side, if only because Marilyn had done a spiteful thing and I had “come clean.” Larry was enormously supportive too, even when Barbara asked if he understood why I had the affair.
“Certainly—and I felt I contributed to it,” Larry answered.
“How?”
“By not fulfilling her need to have me there,” he continued. “I wanted to do my own thing. I was running seventeen tennis camps around the country, and starting World TeamTennis, and starting womenSports magazine. It was rather selfish.”
The fact that Larry and I didn’t immediately file for divorce after I was outed
made our marriage even more curious to people than before. There was conjecture that Larry had to be gay, which he laughed off by saying, “It’s not contagious. I didn’t catch it.” When I look back at that time today, some of the remarks he and I made in those moments of duress still stand as the most clarifying statements either of us has ever given about how we made sense of our relationship, and how we viewed what love is, come what may.
“You have to look at the personalities involved,” Larry said. “Most people have some glimpse of Billie Jean as a high-charged, emotional person with a high level of personal contact. She’s very compelling and draining. She has a need for total attention. I’m different. I don’t…You resolve these [differences] in any relationship by either making certain tolerances or breaking up the relationship…I’m a very stubborn person. That reflects on my relationship with Billie Jean. There is a high degree of loyalty.
“Now, other people may not see it as loyalty, but I love Billie Jean. I’ve never stopped loving her, and that translates not into possession, but into trying to do whatever makes her the happiest. Most people look at love as an ability to possess people. I look at it as sharing with them, loving them, and wanting the best for them. I love Billie Jean and I’ll always love Billie Jean. That doesn’t mean that she might not be happier, because of her capacity and needs for attention, with some other person…That may be too philosophical or too detached for most people, but that’s how I feel. It’s not about owning her or possessing her time, necessarily.”
“Larry and I have been through so much together,” I said. “And that in itself can bind you.”
Chapter 26
In the first two months after Marilyn’s suit was filed, I lost at least $500,000 in endorsements and marketing deals. In the long run, I lost millions. The ad agency for E. R. Squibb & Sons immediately stopped running a television commercial for Theragran-M vitamins that featured me and my mother. They made a point of publicly dropping me as their spokesperson. A virtually completed $500,000 deal to bring out a Billie Jean King clothing line under the Wimbledon brand was canceled abruptly. I also lost a $300,000 contract with Murjani Jeans, a $90,000 Japanese clothing contract, and $45,000 from Charleston Hosiery, whose chief executive called me a “slut” in a letter when he fired me. I received a lot of hate mail.
Within a year I was the only major tennis player in the world without a sportswear contract. I owned thirty-nine Grand Slam titles, and I was playing in clothing bought straight off the rack for the first time since I was a kid. Yonex, whose rackets I had been using, said they were behind me—they just didn’t renew my contract when the time came. Nike said they were “impressed by my candor” and stood by me at first—then later proposed drastically reducing my fee; I walked away from them. My relationship with Nike founder Phil Knight was never repaired.
Larry was still trying to raise money to revive World TeamTennis, and we lost about $150,000 in sponsorship commitments after the Marilyn story broke. We were still able to come up with the capital for a limited summer season. All told, Larry suffered business losses of at least $400,000, plus he was incurring heavy legal fees.
Avon, the chief sponsor of the women’s tour at more than $3 million a year, denied that it was pulling out. They were gone within a year.
I was deeply worried about how Randy’s San Francisco Giants teammates would react to the news about me and Marilyn. Randy told me the day the story broke he was hunched down in his seat on the team bus after a game, avoiding eye contact because he didn’t want to fight anybody who made a snide remark about his sister. It was Darrell Evans, a respected veteran on the team, who broke the ice first. “Tough day, huh, Moffitt?” Randy looked up at him and nodded. “Don’t worry, man,” Evans said, clapping Randy on the shoulder. Then Randy’s other teammates came by one by one to slap him on the shoulder and tell him it would be okay, too.
I cried when Randy told me that.
The collateral damage caused by having to live a public life has always been hard for me. Though I knowingly signed up for it, not everyone around me did. Shielding them sometimes consumed me. Despite all my regrets, I’m not sorry about lying to protect Ilana, for example, by going out of my way to continue to shoot down rumors that we were a couple. I insisted to Neil Amdur of The New York Times that Ilana was a longtime family friend as well as a tennis partner, nothing more. “But if being around me is going to jeopardize Ilana,” I said, “I don’t want her around.”
Poor Ilana. What could she be thinking if she was reading any of this in South Africa? After she spent nearly a month in exile, we were reunited at Hilton Head, where we had decided to practice to prepare for Roland-Garros. It was highly emotional. We had missed each other terribly and needed to be together. She told me that while we were apart she had no idea whether I still wanted to stay with her, and she was scared to death of being outed while back in Johannesburg. Homosexuality was still a crime in South Africa. Her parents had asked her about me when the news finally traveled there, and she told them, “I don’t know anything about it.”
We cautiously resumed our relationship, which essentially meant a return to doing what people in the closet do—never betraying a hint of affection in public, editing our every word, avoiding anything close to a lingering glance that might cause people to wonder. You submerge your true self. You make swaths of yourself invisible. Ilana told me never to mention her. We were both so scalded by what had just happened, we continued to behave that way for years.
Once Ilana and I arrived in Paris to play Roland-Garros, I was still so stressed about being outed, having her around and trying to avoid the assembled world press, that when I looked in the hotel mirror one morning I saw blotches all over my face. “Ilana! Did you see this?” I called out. Overnight I had developed vitiligo, an autoimmune disease of the skin that’s sometimes caused by stress. The cells that produce pigment die off, leaving white patches. It was literally as if I’d seen a ghost.
My carefully laid plans for retirement were now up in smoke. I had lost most of my future income and I had more than half a million dollars in legal fees to pay. I was nearly thirty-eight years old, I had been playing tennis for twenty-five years, and I’d already had five knee operations, plus multiple foot, sinus, and heel surgeries. Once again, retirement would have to wait. I had to keep playing—or risk going broke.
* * *
—
I tried to soldier on after I was outed but played only six tournament singles matches the rest of 1981. I lost five of them. A few weeks after Roland-Garros, I returned to Wimbledon. I had kept my promise to not enter as a player. NBC had kept its commitment to have me work as a color analyst, although once I arrived, the NBC executive producer Don Ohlmeyer told me some of the network executives were spooked by the Marilyn scandal, and they wanted to cut back my airtime to just a few of the women’s matches. He convinced them to still let me be in the booth to call part of the men’s final—“I want you to be the first woman broadcaster ever to do that,” he said—and so I was there with Dick Enberg and Bud Collins for the start of the unforgettable Borg-McEnroe title match. Then NBC yanked me after the first set. I was deeply grateful that Don fought for me.
Early in that same Wimbledon fortnight, Martina had approached me for advice. She had given a long interview to Steve Goldstein, a New York Daily News reporter, after I was outed. She told him she was bisexual (which is how she identified then) but asked him not to print the story because she was finally close to getting her U.S. citizenship. Admitting homosexuality could be a disqualifier at the time.
Martina’s attorneys were concerned enough about it to have her file for citizenship in the more liberal state of California rather than Texas, which was now her adopted home. In her private interview with the Immigration and Naturalization Service agent, which is conducted under oath, a question about her sexual preference did come up.
“Bisexual,” Martina answered.
The agent moved on to the next question without looking up, to Martina’s enormous relief.
It was an open secret by then that Martina had been with the writer Rita Mae Brown, whose best-selling memoir, Rubyfruit Jungle, established her as a leading voice for gay and lesbian rights in the 1970s. She and Martina had bought a house together in Charlottesville, Virginia, and lived openly as a couple until the spring of 1981, when Martina left Rita Mae and started training with the basketball star and coach Nancy Lieberman. Now, Martina was concerned that Nancy would be implicated as a lesbian.
When Martina and I met to talk, we sat by a window looking out at the courts. “This reporter is going to out me, Billie,” Martina said. “What do you think I should do?”
“Well, if you’re comfortable enough in your own skin, I think you should come out immediately on your own so you can control the message.”
“Really?”
“It’s up to you,” I stressed, “but I’m telling you, from my experience, nothing is worse than having to react and play defense. You’re doomed anyway. So ’fess up and get it done.”
Martina was still deliberating what to do when her photo appeared on the front page of the Daily News on July 30, 1981, with a story about how she was worried that being bisexual would affect the women’s tour. The next day, she confirmed that she was bisexual in The Dallas Morning News, but she insisted that Nancy was just a friend and “shouldn’t have to suffer.” Women’s tennis had now had two stars outed in three months.
I made a World TeamTennis swing through California with mixed results. At a match near Oakland, a heckler was riding me so badly I finally wheeled and gave him the finger and barked at him, daring him to tell me his name. The press jumped on the story, and the photos of me losing it made the newspapers. At The Forum in Los Angeles, our next stop, the crowd of nearly three thousand spectators gave me a standing ovation when my name was announced, and I thought, Maybe things might be okay someday after all. Then we held a press conference to announce that World TeamTennis would be back the next year with twice as many teams, and that I was going to serve as commissioner—a first for women in any pro league. Some reporters used the opportunity to ask questions about the Marilyn case instead.
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