All In

by Billie Jean King

  I was so upset and weary by then, I decided to go into hiding. I didn’t enter the U.S. Open. I was in New York during the tournament, but I stayed away. I was apprehensive about going out in public. I was accustomed to people looking at me but now I thought they were judging me.

  Just when it seemed like this was going to be my new normal, word came that I had been chosen as one of the twenty-five most influential women in the United States in a poll conducted by World Almanac. I finished the voting tied with the Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, the woman who greenlighted the newspaper’s landmark Watergate investigation. The honor meant a lot to me and was the most emphatic sign yet that maybe I wouldn’t have to live as a pariah after all.

  After some deliberation, I went to the Women’s Sports Foundation’s year-end awards gala a few weeks later. There had been some discussion at a board meeting about whether to disinvite me. Sure enough, heads turned when I walked in. I felt the same old familiar sense of dread—until everyone put down their drinks and napkins, pushed back their chairs, and rose to give me a standing ovation. It still chokes me up to think about it. It meant so much because those people were my own.

  By December, my anxiety level was through the roof again. The first lawsuit against Marilyn was going to trial, and I knew both she and I would have to testify.

  Our lawyers tried to get cameras banned from the courtroom during the trial, but judges had a habit of allowing them in celebrity-driven Los Angeles. From the moment Marilyn had filed her lawsuit, the case had been a public spectacle—a reality show before reality TV shows were common. Now this one would be acted out on live television.

  Our unlawful detainer suit—a legal term for eviction—would be tried first, before Marilyn’s galimony case began. Because it was a property dispute, it would be decided by a judge without a jury.

  When the trial began on December 9, 1981, Larry and I had to wade through a small sea of reporters and gawkers just to get to the courthouse in downtown Los Angeles. Marilyn looked fragile and gaunt as she struggled to her seat. Her back and legs were in braces, and she used a cane to walk. In spite of all the pain she had caused me and so many other people in my life, I had to fight the urge to feel sorry for her.

  For the trial, Henry Holmes represented Larry, and Dennis Wasser represented me. We all sat together at the plaintiff’s table while Dennis made a straightforward presentation of our case. I testified that Larry and I bought and owned the house together. Larry produced the deed. We said we wanted to sell the property, Marilyn had no lease and was uncooperative, and we wanted to evict her. We noted that there was no evidence of the claim filed by Marilyn that I had bought the house for her, and no evidence that there was a verbal agreement between her and me to give her the house and take care of her financially. Larry was drawn into the mess because the house was community property. Since Larry’s name was on the deed, she was going after his assets as well as mine.

  Now Ladin presented Marilyn’s case. When he called her as his first witness, I stared at the desk where I was seated. Privately, Larry and our lawyers had been telling me for weeks that Marilyn’s case was untenable, motivated more by spite and a craving for publicity than any sound legal claims. But it felt like a nightmare all the same. Once you’re in a courtroom, you never know.

  Marilyn testified that she had given up “her career, her identity, her pride, and her home,” to accompany me on tour in 1973. She said it was because I had promised “to take care of her financially.” She alleged that I had also told her to “go out and buy herself a beach house” because I knew how much she loved the beach. She admitted that she had told people the house was hers, though it was not.

  Her attorney asked why.

  “Because in 1974 gay people were not accepted, and because of who Billie was at the time, I tried to protect her,” she said. “Whatever the situation warranted is what I said to protect Billie.”

  “In essence you lied?”

  “Yes, I did lie.”

  When Dennis rose to cross-examine Marilyn, he asked her if she remembered that what I actually told her was “If you like the beach, why don’t you buy yourself a home on the beach?” She said she didn’t. She conceded that she never asked to have her name put on the title of the Malibu house. Asked about sacrificing her career for me, she admitted that she had gone back to work in 1974 and I sent her new clients to try to help her.

  Dennis asked her why she had kept all the letters I sent her.

  “For sentimental reasons,” Marilyn said.

  To anyone who didn’t know Marilyn’s troubled backstory, she might’ve come across on the stand that day as reasonable, mild-mannered, even harmless or sympathetic. But everyone on our team knew that I had feared her dark side ever since she reacted so extremely to my first request for her to move out of the house, and then again as she kept up her outbursts and hurt herself.

  I actually got to the point where I feared that Marilyn was capable of physical violence toward me, too, and I told people that. I had visions of her showing up at a World TeamTennis match or somewhere else one day with a handgun and shooting me. And that was before The Miami News wrote about Marilyn’s family just as our trial began. Much of it was news to me. Marilyn’s biological father, Melvin McRae, had been a career criminal who was in and out of jail. Her mother, Kathryn (Kay) McRae, divorced him and remarried a Hollywood press agent named Bev Barnett after Marilyn and her younger brother, Randall, were born. Bev died suddenly fourteen months after the wedding, and Marilyn’s mother, Kay, died in 1969 under circumstances that Kay’s sister, Irene Hensen, considered suspicious.

  Hensen, who lived in Florida, told The Miami News that Kay was found dead in bed with a three-to-four-inch gash on her left temple. Hensen said that when she arrived in L.A. for the funeral she visited the scene of her sister’s death and found dried blood everywhere, “on the walls, on the ceiling, on the carpet.” Henson said Marilyn, then twenty-one, and her younger brother gave her different stories about exactly how Kay died. The Miami News reported that the Los Angeles Coroner’s report attributed Kay’s death to alcoholism, but Hensen repeatedly asked police for an investigation. She was denied.

  The whole episode was still gnawing at Hensen twelve years later when she spoke to The Miami News after Marilyn’s lawsuit became public. She also contacted our legal team, so Henry Holmes knew Hensen’s claims when Marilyn approached him one day to chat outside the courthouse during a break. “I know you’re on the other side,” Marilyn told Henry, “but I hear you’re a nice person.” She knew that Henry had celebrity clients, the same as she did, and so they talked about that a bit. During another break in the proceedings shortly afterward, Marilyn was walking out with her attorney and she turned and said, “Henry! Look this way!” Henry saw something metal in her hand and dove to the floor. He thought she had a gun. When he looked up, Marilyn was pointing a small camera at him and said, “What? I just want to take your picture.”

  * * *

  —

  The trial lasted three days, and Larry, Jim Jorgensen, and I were called back to the stand by Ladin and cross-examined extensively about every aspect of the Malibu house arrangements. During Marilyn’s time on the stand, Henry asked her about her motives for including Larry in her suit.

  “You did not like Mr. King, did you?”

  “That is true,” she said.

  “You were jealous of Mr. King, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  Anyone hoping for more salacious details about our affair beyond that was disappointed. The few times our sexual relationship was brought up in testimony, Judge Julius M. Title ruled it to be irrelevant. By December 11, 1981, the third day of the trial, the judge delivered his verdict: Marilyn had to move out of the Malibu house within thirty days. Judge Title ruled that Larry and I never intended to give Marilyn the house, and that Marilyn “did not have clean hands” when she
came to court. The judge said Marilyn was using the secret stack of love letters as leverage over me by “threatening adverse publicity” unless she was paid her escalating series of demands. “If that isn’t attempted extortion, it certainly comes close to it,” Judge Title said.

  The verdict was a complete victory for us. But there was no joy in winning the case, only relief. The damage was already done, and there was still the galimony suit left to fight. Thankfully, after Judge Title’s decision, the other case unraveled as well. Nearly a year later, on November 19, 1982, another superior court judge dismissed the suit, ruling that Marilyn had no grounds to sue us. Dennis Wasser called me in Australia, where I was playing, to give me the news. It was a welcome thirty-ninth-birthday present, and a total relief to not have to go back to court.

  About seven months after the galimony suit was dismissed, that Malibu house that caused so much grief was destroyed during a violent Pacific storm before Larry and I could sell it. We ended up selling the cleared lot instead. Marilyn dropped out of sight after the trial, and I never saw or heard from her again. I later found out that she moved into an apartment at the Beverly Hills home of a friend, and some of her wealthy clients helped her with expenses. She was eventually diagnosed with cancer, and the actors Jill St. John and her husband, Robert Wagner, paid her medical bills. After several surgeries, Marilyn apparently gave up hope. She tried to commit suicide again in 1997, and this time she succeeded. She was forty-nine. Jill and a few other friends scattered her ashes in the surf off Malibu.

  Chapter 27

  I never dreamed of, nor wanted to, still be playing on tour at the age of thirty-eight and thirty-nine, but there I was. Ilana and I were playing doubles again together, and I even had a mini renaissance in singles now and then. In Boston, I beat nineteen-year-old Pam Shriver. At the 1982 Italian Open in May, I saved six match points in the third set against Patricia Medrado of Brazil to win. The crowd went crazy for me, chanting, “Forza, Guglielomo, dai, dai!” I knew that dai means “Come on!” in Italian. Someone had to tell me Guglielomo means “Little Bill,” a term of endearment. How much did I love that? Then I won the singles title in Birmingham, England, my last tune-up tournament before Wimbledon.

  Once back at the All England Club, I rallied after losing the first set to upset nineteen-year-old Tracy Austin and advance out of the Wimbledon quarterfinals for the first time in seven years. Arthur Ashe, a developing friend, made a point later to tell me that the guys in the men’s locker room stopped to watch the match on TV and applauded as I clawed my way back against Tracy, a two-time U.S. Open champion by then and former world No. 1 who was nineteen years my junior. Arthur said it was only the third time he’d ever seen that locker room show of respect in his nineteen years of coming to Wimbledon. It was so sweet of him to share that with me.

  My 1982 run ended with a loss to Chrissie in the semis, but I roared back to the Wimbledon semis again in 1983 at the age of thirty-nine, making me the oldest woman to advance that far in sixty-three years. Now that I was back to being the underdog I was again a crowd favorite at the All England Club.

  At times like that, or when I was back out on the road elsewhere, I felt like an aging gunslinger in the Old West. The young players wanted a shot at me so they could say they had beaten Billie Jean King. I didn’t blame them. Every older player has to put up with that, as well as the negative feedback from the media at post-match press conferences: When are you going to retire…Is this it for you? If you linger too long on those questions, doubt can overtake you. I needed the money, so I always responded with optimism no matter how I felt. As I told Bud Collins after I beat Pam in Boston, “I’m not going to believe the people who tell me I’m too old to play.” But when I played that 1982 Wimbledon semifinal against Chrissie that I lost in three sets, I knew that to win I had to really believe, deep in the core of me, that I still had it. I realized I no longer had that conviction.

  By early 1983, I was still competing in singles and doubles but running on little more than fumes, my fierce sense of survival and the energy of the crowds. In Boston in March, the fans chanted, “Billie! Billie! Billie!” before, during, and after I beat Kathy Jordan, the defending champ. It was wonderful, even a bit overwhelming, to be around long enough to feel such adoration and appreciation.

  When I got to Wimbledon in 1983, I was just five months shy of forty. I was playing well until I ran into Andrea Jaeger, now a rosy-cheeked Chicago girl of eighteen. She had so much confidence, backed up by that same stinging two-fisted backhand she had when we played doubles together when she was fifteen.

  It was Andrea’s first match on Centre Court. As we turned the last corner to walk out, she confessed that she wasn’t sure when to curtsy for the Royal Box, so I was giving her a quick lesson on how to count to three as we stopped and dipped in unison. I was pointing out other features of the stadium to her, the way you might give a guest a tour of your house. But once the match began, she didn’t play like a newcomer. It was the most lopsided loss of my Wimbledon singles career, 6–1, 6–1.

  As we made our way back to the locker room I felt sick with disappointment. We again had to pass below the Royal Box, and Andrea and I counted to three and bobbed in unison one more time, just as Karen Hantze and I had done on my first visit to Wimbledon in 1961. Then I looked back over my shoulder—something I never do—and took it all in one more time: the perfect symmetry of the place, the powder-blue sky above, the velvet green carpet of grass, and the beautiful round clock ticking away the minutes until the next champions were crowned on Centre Court. Wimbledon was still the home of my heart and I would be back, but never again as a singles player.

  * * *

  —

  After 850 tour singles matches, countless miles, and twenty-seven years of competitive tennis, I decided to stop playing in December 1983. I’ll never know how much more I could’ve won if amassing titles was my obsession, but like a lot of us then, building the women’s tour was my priority. My career ledger still read thirty-nine Grand Slam singles and doubles championships, including my record twenty titles at Wimbledon. From 1971 through 1975, I won seven of the ten Grand Slam singles tournaments I played, and I took six of those seven titles in straight sets. I ended with a major finals singles record of 12–6, and four of those six losses were to Margaret Court, the other best player of my generation. Overall, I won 126 singles titles, 36 women’s doubles titles, and 3 WTT championships. I owned the year-end world No. 1 ranking seven of the ten years from 1966 through 1975. Any epitaph about me should also read this: I got to live my dreams. I’ve had an amazing life.

  But to say I “retired” isn’t right. I transitioned. The day after I quit, I continued my work as World TeamTennis commissioner. I started working for HBO as a commentator during the network’s coverage of Wimbledon. One of my colleagues there was Arthur Ashe, and our friendship grew even more.

  Now that I was done playing I still had one more major transition to make that I had been putting off much of my adult life. World TeamTennis was based in Chicago when I became commissioner. Larry, our longtime business partner Bill Schoen, and I were co-owners of the Chicago Fyre franchise, which Ilana coached to the World TeamTennis title in 1983. I had my apartment near Lincoln Center in New York City, and at first, Ilana and I traveled between New York and Chicago as needed. We made Chicago our main residence three years later since World TeamTennis was our main business. Ilana, needing a U.S. base, had bought her own apartment in Chicago, which she shared with a South African friend. Keeping the league alive was a constant battle. I again started overeating and my weight soared. In addition to the daily operations, there were always sponsors to chase, commitments to keep, owners to please. One owner, with whom I usually got along great, was so angry when his team lost a player eligibility issue he phoned me and ranted for three hours. At one point, I put the phone down on the bed and picked it up now and then when I heard him pause to say, “Yes, I understand�
�” He just had to get it off his chest.

  By the summer of 1987, Ilana had grown tired of the fact that I was still married to Larry. He and I had separate lives and separate finances, and our shared business interests were whittled down to relatively few enterprises. Ilana and I had played surrogate moms to Larry’s nephew Shane between 1984 and 1986 when Shane was studying in New York. Shane lived with Ilana and me at our place near Lincoln Center, and it was a sweet time for all of us. But now Ilana told me I had to make a decision: Did I want to be with her, or stay married to Larry? She was right. It wasn’t fair to her, or to Larry, who still clung to his married-for-life stance.

  I finally filed for divorce.

  When we signed the divorce papers in Henry Holmes’s office, it was painful. I remember Larry fiddling with his wedding band, then taking it off and setting it on the table. And that was it. Twenty-two years, over. I found myself replaying parts of our life, and it was very sad. Yet I also had a new beginning with Ilana. For the first time, we had a cleared path, a clean break.

  In the settlement, Larry and I split everything down the middle. He got the Hawaii house and property; I knew how much he loved it. Some pain and bitterness lingered for a while. But we navigated the emotions over time and became friends again.