by Susan Ware
Billie Jean’s first coach was Clyde Walker of the Long Beach Recreation Department, who quickly realized that she had enormous promise. Soon she was showing up after school for free lessons at whatever Long Beach neighborhood park he was scheduled to coach at that day. She never forgot that she got her start on public courts rather than at a fancy country club. When the United States Tennis Association renamed its facility in Flushing Meadows the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in 2006, a delighted and grateful King repeatedly drew attention to the fact that these courts were public courts too, just like the ones she learned to play on.25
In the fall of 1959, a Wilson Sporting Goods representative arranged for the sixteen-year-old rising star to have private lessons with former Wimbledon great Alice Marble, who lived up the coast in the Tarzana district of Los Angeles. Alice Marble was part of the first generation of women to play power tennis—an attacking, serve-and-volley game that she had honed under the legendary teacher Eleanor (“Teach”) Tennant, who also coached Bobby Riggs.26 Each Saturday Betty or Bill Moffitt would drive their daughter up to Los Angeles for her weekend sessions and then pick her up on Sunday. Besides the technical help Billie Jean received, the young player began to see herself as part of the larger history of the game through her association with Marble: “For the first time in my life, I sensed some kind of legacy that I was part of.” Largely as a result of Alice Marble’s tutelage, her national ranking rose from number nineteen in 1959 to number four in 1960.27
Yet this relationship with Marble came to an abrupt end, perhaps, Billie Jean speculated, because Marble was not comfortable with the young player’s determination to succeed Marble and become the best player of all time. (Marble remembered it differently: when she came down with pleurisy and pneumonia, she thought her young charge cared more about her missed lesson than her coach’s well-being, and Marble terminated the relationship.) The rising tennis star also had a fraught encounter around this time with top-ranked Maureen (Mo) Connolly, who bluntly told her she would never make a champion because she was too self-centered and egotistical. Not surprisingly, many of the traits that made Billie Jean so good at tennis, such as her fierce ambition and large ego, often rubbed people the wrong way. Still, as she later recalled, “to have two ex-champions as great as Alice and Maureen blast you when you’re still in your teens is pretty tough. Those two incidents left a mark on me, and I still remember them vividly.”28
In June 1961 Billie Jean Moffitt graduated from the Long Beach Polytech-nical High School. She certainly was an acceptable student, but not a brain. “Not everyone is meant to be an A student,” she told Seventeen in 1974. “Everyone can't be a great athlete, either.” Billie Jean never apologized for her single-minded devotion to tennis and never questioned the sacrifices she made to reach her goals: “Sure tennis is demanding and it creates some tunnel vision. But I’m not really a believer in the well-rounded individual; it often means that a person has no particular distinction.”29
She proved where her distinction lay several weeks after graduation when she and partner Karen Hantze teamed up at Wimbledon to win the women's doubles title, the youngest—and the first unseeded—pair to do so. She was seventeen years old. The doubles partners were too broke to go to the traditional Wimbledon ball, but were delighted when a young Boston sportswriter named Bud Collins offered to take them out for a celebratory spaghetti dinner. After her return to the states, Sports Illustrated selected Billie Jean Moffitt for its Faces in the Crowd feature, a tantalizing taste of the public celebrity that she craved for herself and her sport. In retrospect Billie Jean regretted that she had never set definite targets to shoot for, other than wanting to be “the best.” “I never planned it very well—not in a long-term, overall way. I never sat down and said, I want to do this, I want to aim for that, I'll set that goal. I’m sure I could have won more than twenty Wimbledon titles if I’d plotted things better.”30
With no clear career path before her, Billie Jean entered Los Angeles State College (later California State University, Los Angeles) in the fall of 1961 as a commuter student; the following fall she took an apartment near campus. As a nationally ranked tennis player (number three in 1961), one would have thought she would qualify for an athletic scholarship, but in pre-Title IX days such scholarships for women were nonexistent. Because of tight finances, she took odd jobs to pay for school, got by on $90 a month, and basically limited her competitive tennis playing to the summer, which, she quickly realized, was no way to get closer to her ambition to be the top player in the world. And yet she was getting noticed. In her return to Wimbledon in 1962, she beat reigning champion Margaret Smith (later Court) in the first round, an enormous upset, and then made it as far as the quarterfinals; she and Karen Hantze repeated their doubles victory. In 1963, she made it to the Wimbledon singles final, where she met top-seeded Smith again. This time, Smith handily dispatched her unseeded challenger 6-3, 6-4.31
The press didn't quite know what to make of the player they couldn't resist calling “Little Miss Moffitt.” Except she wasn't exactly little, the result of her life-long struggle with her weight. Here is how Sports Illustrated described her in 1963: “Billie Jean, the daughter of a fireman in Long Beach, Calif., stands 5 feet 6 inches tall, has brown hair, light blue eyes, a small impertinent nose and a weight problem.” The year before Time had called her “the chunky, bespectacled little Californian,” drawing attention to how unusual it was, then or now, to have a tennis champion who wore glasses. (Her career offers a fashion Rorschach for eyewear from the 1950s to the present. She changed her glasses more often than she did her hairstyle.) The press was just as interested in her spunky personality as her appearance. The New York Times noted after her 1963 Wimbledon run, “The bespectacled tomboy from Southern California is the liveliest personality to hit the international circuit in years. She has courage and she has color, a combination rarely found in tennis today.”32
Driven, focused, and single-minded in her determination to get to the top, even from a young age Billie Jean Moffitt fit the personality type likely to succeed at tennis. “I expect to win every time I step on a tennis court and I’m truly surprised when I don'tOn my very best days I have this fantastic, utterly unselfconscious feeling of invincibility.” She claimed she could always tell when she was going to play a great match “because I woke up in the morning feeling everything. I was so alert. I could feel the water in my hair in the shower.” Tennis mentor Frank Brennan, who first got to know the tennis player in the early 1960s when she stayed in his New Jersey home during a tournament, enumerated further traits King possessed that were key to her success: “Singlemindedness. A pride that drove her to succeed at all costs, and a stubborn will not to be humiliated, especially in front of a crowd.” He added tellingly, “She’s a ham. The more people watching, the better Billie Jean becomes.”33
Billie Jean Moffitt was an indifferent student at Cal State and growing increasingly frustrated about her prospects in tennis. In the fall of 1964 she made the dramatic decision to drop out of school and head for Australia to work with noted coach Mervyn Rose, her expenses paid by an Australian benefactor. This was a real commitment to her career; no more dilettantism. Even though at times she felt like she was starting over from scratch, the improvements from Rose’s tutelage were soon evident. She worked hard on her forehand, always the weakest part of her game, and retooled her serve. She also focused more on playing percentage tennis—that is, choosing the best shot to use in a given situation, like hitting approach shots down the line, but going crosscourt to put shots away. Determined to master full-court play so she would not be limited to a single style, she nevertheless gravitated toward the aggressive serve-and-volley game that suited her personality so well. When she returned from Australia, the fundamentals of her trademark game were firmly in place.34
The decision to take off for Australia was made much harder because it separated her from Larry King, the man she would marry the following year. They met in the
fall of 1962 at Los Angeles State, introduced by a mutual friend who thought they would hit it off. Larry, too, was a tennis player, on scholarship, but he had no aspirations of a professional career. Their first date wasn't for another six months, but pretty soon they realized they were getting serious. His initial introduction to her parents had not been auspicious (a biochemistry major, he had asked her dad about the pH of the soil in their backyard lawn, which Bill Moffitt found pretentious), but the Mof-fitts soon came around. In retrospect, they could not have asked for a more loyal—perhaps too loyal—son-in-law.35
Larry and Billie Jean got engaged in October 1964 just before she left for Australia and were married the following year on September 17, 1965. The wedding photos show a beaming Billie Jean (without her glasses) and a handsome Larry in a white dinner jacket, both looking very young, which they were: her twenty-one to his twenty. Explaining the problems that were evident in the marriage from the very start, King often pointed to their youth when they got married, publicly wondering whether they should have married at all. But living together was not an option in those conservative times, especially with parents like Bill and Betty Moffitt. “I married him so I could be an honest woman,” she joked, “and then he was the one person who gave me the courage to go back to being a [tennis] bum.”36
Larry King’s background was similar to that of both of Billie Jean’s parents. He was born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1944, but his family, which was originally from Finland, moved to Los Angeles just after the war. After losing his mother at an early age, he grew up in a blended family of two siblings, two stepsiblings, and a half-brother after his father remarried. He had been working since he was twelve and was always happiest when he had a job to do or a problem to solve; he coupled a lifelong tendency to keep his feelings bottled up inside him with a fierce determination to make something of his life. Larry was also blond and cute in a California kind of way, and quite a catch. Although they didn't know it at first, both their careers would be totally tied up in Billie Jean’s success in the world of tennis.37
Larry King played a critical role in the development of his wife’s career. In the 1960s he helped to plant the seeds of her feminism by pointing out how unfair it was that a second-rate player like him, the seventh player on a six-person team, had a tennis scholarship while she did not, even though she was a far superior competitor.38 He also supported and nurtured her tennis aspirations: “Billie Jean, I just don't see how you can give up something where you have the potential to be best in the world—the best of all.” In 1964 he prodded her to give up her listless pursuit of a college degree to go to Australia to work on her game; after their marriage he continued to press her to keep on with tennis. “We felt Billie Jean’s potential was as a tennis player. There was no point in her becoming just another housewife. She was immensely talented. I didn't feel her talent should be wasted.” Already the promoter, Larry recognized Billie Jean as his star product. As he once quipped with perhaps more truth than he intended, “I’m more of a business agent than a husband.”39
From the very beginning the marriage was haunted by Billie Jean’s uncertainty about her sexuality, or as Larry later called it, her “identity problems.” Long before Marilyn Barnett came on the scene in 1972–73, Billie Jean had been exploring her sexual feelings for other women, yet in those pre-Stonewall times she lacked the political or social context to come to grips with herself as lesbian or bisexual, words she never remembered hearing when she was growing up. Mainly, she recalled, “We didn't talk about that stuff then.”40
When people did start talking about “that stuff” in the 1970s, she always held back because she feared that any revelations about her sexuality would irrevocably damage the fledging women's tour. In addition, she was deeply afraid, rightly so, of the impact any kind of declaration about her sexual identity would have on her conservative parents.41 Even though her relationships with women were something of an open secret on the tour, in those days sports coverage still respected a strict line in not reporting about athletes’ private lives, so the rumors never made it into print. And other tennis players, concerned about public fears of rampant lesbianism within women's sports, certainly had plenty of incentives to keep mum. So Billie Jean King managed to avoid publicly dealing with the issue when it first surfaced and, it turned out, for years afterward.42
The early years of Billie Jean and Larry’s marriage found two very young and very ambitious people trying to muddle through a minefield of challenges: the wife’s confusion about her sexuality; the husband’s attempts to build the kind of successful business career he had always wanted, which depended on his wife’s public visibility and popularity; her fears of upsetting and alienating her parents and potential sponsors if word of her bi-sexuality leaked out; the monumental changes that were about to reconfigure the sport of tennis. Even without the uncertainty about her sexual orientation, both of them sensed that a conventional marriage would never have worked for them. Larry called it a conscious trade-off in an article cloyingly titled “My wife, Billie Jean by her husband” in the Ladies’ Home Journal in 1974: “If a couple wants to achieve a great deal, and if they want independent careers, they can't live a typical life. If they’d rather be typical they have to settle for achieving less. Billie Jean and I both like to achieve.” They proudly presented themselves as a team—“ the all-American boy-girl couple,” in Grace Lichtenstein’s somewhat catty phrase—and basically said that the exact dimensions of their marriage were nobody’s business but their own 43
In retrospect Billie Jean and Larry King were bound together in ways so deep and conflicted that they defy conventional understandings. As Larry put it in the early 1970s, “We’ve loved each other for a long time even though we’re not really husband and wife.” Billie Jean welcomed the respectability of being married, in effect, using Larry as her beard; Larry watched his career ambitions flourish as the public partner of his superstar wife. In their own version of an open marriage, he looked the other way when she had relationships with women, and she did the same when he had affairs. A divorce would have meant severing myriad business relationships—what Billie Jean called the “two big intersecting circles” of their lives—as well as the complicated personal ones. In the end both concluded that on balance there were benefits to their public charade, even as their personal lives diverged.44
And they remained committed to their own idiosyncratic definition of what love and marriage should entail. As Larry later told journalist Selena Roberts, “I was young and naive, but I was her husband, good, bad, or indifferent, you know, I’d help her with her problems. The bottom line was, I didn't see any reason to get divorced because Billie Jean had identity problems. I felt that even when it all got sorted out, if Billie Jean was going to grow old and gray, she would be much better off growing old and gray with me than with any other person on the planet.” Larry clung to that view, and Billie Jean went along, all through the tennis boom of the 1970s, through the public glare of Marilyn Barnett’s palimony suit in the early 1980s, until the couple finally divorced in 1987.45
WHEN LARRY AND BILLIE JEAN got married in 1965, he still had one more year of school. His senior year he worked nights in an ice cream factory to support his new wife and pay for their expenses, proving to a doubting Bill Moffitt that he was capable of taking care of his daughter. Not having much money seemed perfectly normal to both of them: “When Larry and I were in college and didn't have a dime between us, we used to just sit and talk about our dreams for tennis.” Determined to be a good wife, Billie Jean stayed home that fall and winter, but instead of just putting her tennis racket away during the school year, as she had been doing in high school and college, she played tennis every day, thanks to the hospitable southern California climate. While Larry made plans to enroll in law school at Berkeley after his graduation (“Mrs. King will swap racket for recipes,” predicted the Washington Post), she set her sights on Wimbledon.46
Wimbledon always held a special place in the heart
of Billie Jean King. As she joked in 1982 when she got to the semifinals at age thirty-eight before losing to Chris Evert, “I'll think about winning Wimbledon when I’m 100.” She loved the traditions, the setting, the knowledgeable patrons, the respect and care for the players, but especially she loved the history: “Every time I walk onto the Centre Court at Wimbledon, I think of all those people who came before me—Suzanne Lenglen, Alice Marble, Helen Wills Moody, Althea Gibson, Maureen Connolly—all those players left me something. I wouldn't play the way I play without them.” Continuing the legacy she began in 1961 with her doubles victory, in 1966 Mrs. L. W. King (as she was known at stodgy Wimbledon) beat Brazilian Maria Bueno in three sets to win the singles crown, her first Grand Slam singles title. Finally the coveted number one ranking was hers. The next year she swept all three titles—singles, doubles, and mixed doubles. Larry accompanied her to Wimbledon in 1966 but was miserable, “hanging around like a puppy dog.” From then on, he rarely traveled with her to tournaments.47
Yet the thrill of those Wimbledon victories was tempered by a lingering sense that it could have been bigger, much bigger. “I played some of my greatest matches in 1966, 1967,” King recalled ruefully. “Maybe 1,000 people saw them.” Or as she said in 1975, “When I really wanted attention, it wasn't there. When I came back after winning Wimbledon in ‘66, nobody cared. To be appreciated in my own country was all I wanted, and I got nothing.”48
It is not totally accurate to say that she got no press coverage: sports reporters continued to file stories about her with the bemused, often belittling stereotypes so prevalent when describing women athletes at the time. For example, in 1966 Sports Illustrated called the twenty-three-year-old player who had just won Wimbledon “a bouncy little girl.” Especially galling to King were reporters’ questions about when she planned to retire, which started when she was in her early twenties. “I finally had won Wimbledon a couple of times, and I’m looking at them like, jeez!” A subtext of the retirement questions was when the “bouncy, 23-year-old Long Beach, Calif. housewife” would settle down and have kids. “Why don't you go ask Rod Laver why he isn't at home?” she would huff in reply, even as she would offer the obligatory statement that of course she and Larry wanted children, but just not now.49