by Susan Ware
The organization of Team Tennis seems a self-evident concept now, but King reminds us that it involved “a lot more thought than people realize.” In turn she thinks that if people put their minds to it, many other sports could be truly gender neutral. Why not basketball teams made up of two women and three men or mixed relay teams in track? “Try it at the intramural level,” she challenges us, “and see what happens.” She sees the bottom line as rewards not just for sports but for society as a whole. “The more research that’s done, the more we’re finding out that segregating boys and girls is not good. I’ve known that my whole life, but now people are starting to verify it.”70
At the same time Billie Jean King encourages us to think about sports in less gender-specific terms, she and many others recognize the importance of all-female settings for the discovery and enrichment of sport experience. She strongly endorses research conducted by the women's Sports Foundation that has demonstrated that if adolescent girls are not given a supportive and friendly atmosphere in which to develop athletic skills and interests, they drop out of sports quickly. These benefits are not limited to young girls. Generations of adult women have also experienced the joy of competing on women's teams, a process that allows them to build self-esteem and friendships while playing a game.71 Not all separatism is bad.72
Again we return to the dilemma of modern feminism: how to recognize and embrace difference while also seeking formal equality. One of the major tenets of second-wave feminism was freedom of choice: women should be free to pursue any life courses they chose, unencumbered by stereotypes or traditional gender expectations. In terms of sports opportunities, many women will continue voluntarily to participate on women's teams for all the benefits they confer. But they should have a choice; those female spaces should not be the only options.
And so we come back to the question that has animated this chapter: can separate ever be equal when it comes to sports? When men’s and women's programs are placed side by side, and intangible factors such as societal support and respect are measured alongside tangible ones such as money, coaching, and travel, would any male team willingly trade places with its female equivalent? Not likely, confirming how the current setup has failed to provide true gender equity despite the huge increase in participation opportunities for women since the 1970s. Separate programs undercut the chance to think about athletics as a whole, instead setting up an “us versus them” polarization where men’s and women's teams become direct competitors for an increasingly limited pool of resources. Finally, separate programs are unfair to the talented female athlete who can compete at the highest level if given a chance. As that sympathetic Ohio judge said back in 1978, “Babe Didrikson could have made anybody’s team.”73
One of the main reasons why it is so important to encourage those female athletes to aim high and not be held back by assumptions that they can never be as good as men is that seeing any woman perform at a high level will help to undermine the lingering notions of male physical superiority that have been the underpinnings of sport for most of its recorded history. As Ann Crittenden Scott predicted in Ms. back in 1974, “By developing her powers to the fullest, any woman, from Olympic star to the weekend tennis player, can be a match for any man she chooses to take on. More importantly, she will inherit the essential source of woman self-confidence—pride and control over a finely tuned body. That alone would be a revolution.” When women compete and hold their own against men, it threatens and undermines the binary opposition that insists that the sexes are fundamentally different, and by extension, that women are the second sex, the other. Until women compete with men, the mystique of male superiority will be not challenged.74
Those barriers have fallen in almost every aspect of modern life—except sports. Seeing a woman being sent into the game as a field goal kicker for the New England Patriots, playing second base for the Chicago Cubs, or making the cut at the Masters could be a national consciousness-raising moment similar to the one that Billie Jean King provided when she trounced Bobby Riggs in 1973. Until Riggs netted that final backhand volley to end the match, many traditionalists still clung to the belief that men were naturally women's athletic superiors. King’s convincing victory demolished that myth. Moments like these, past and future, shatter old stereotypes and open our eyes to previously unimagined possibilities of female athleticism and equality.
The National Organization for Women was ahead of its time in 1974 when it called for gender integration in the world of sports, but the idea looks significantly less radical today. More than thirty-five years of Title IX have shown what the female body is capable of—pretty much anything that the male’s is. Ironically, Title IX has also made it significantly harder to envision such a brave new athletic world precisely because the sports revolution it sparked unfolded in an athletic system so rigidly divided by gender. Reconciling these dual legacies—the unleashing of women's athletic potential versus the inadvertent (or perhaps not so inadvertent) reinforcement of sex segregation in sports—will be a major challenge as the women's sports revolution continues to evolve.
Chapter Six The Perils of Celebrity and Sexuality
THE OUTING OF BILLIE JEAN KING
Americans have grown distressingly familiar with this scene: a male public figure, usually an elected political leader or prominent government official, calls a press conference to take responsibility for a scandal, usually involving sex, while his wife, looking like she has been run over by a truck, stands stoically at his side, offering her silent support. While attention focuses on the contrite statement of the perpetrator for whatever behavior hurt his family and probably will cost him his job, the real curiosity is about what is going through the wife’s mind as she faces this most public form of humiliation. Why is it always the wife who stands by her man, commentators ask? What would it look like if the tables were turned?1
Larry King knows what it’s like. In 1981 he stood loyally by the side of his superstar wife as she admitted that she had an affair with her former secretary, Marilyn Barnett. When her former lover sued the tennis star, the American public suddenly knew what had been an open secret for years in the tennis world: Billie Jean King was a lesbian. King admitted the affair but distanced herself from any outright affirmation of her sexual orientation, then and for many years afterward. Despite her illustrious athletic career, she hated the thought that she would be remembered and categorized solely for what she called a “very private and inconsequential episode.”2
The outing of Billie Jean King by her former lover was more than just a private affair, and it was hardly inconsequential. The undercurrent of homophobia in women's sports is the backdrop for understanding why the revelations that Billie Jean King engaged in a lesbian affair, as opposed to admitting a drinking, drug, or gambling problem or some other socially unacceptable behavior, had the potential to be so explosive and destructive. The issue of lesbianism in sports—” a silence so loud it screams”—was the proverbial elephant in the room that nobody wanted to talk about. When the cover of a respected athlete such as Billie Jean King was blown, it sent tremors through the carefully constructed public artifice that was women's sports. As golfer Carol Mann Hardy said at the time, “If I were a lesbian, I’d be scared stiff.” Even today the number of openly gay athletes, male or female, is tiny, suggesting that “locker-room closets” are perhaps the most difficult to escape of all.3
Billie Jean King’s outing occurred at a transitional moment for gay history and the media’s infatuation with the private lives of public figures. Without Marilyn Barnett’s suit, it is likely that King would have been able to continue to lead her closeted existence indefinitely. The controversial phenomenon of outing public figures dates to the 1990s, long after her playing days were over. Until then, there was certainly plenty of gossip about suspected Hollywood figures, politicians, and athletes, but everyone seemed to act within a set of informal, unwritten rules that can be summed up in the phrase “don't ask, don't tell.” In other words,
there was a zone of privacy—often called “inning” to distinguish it from “outing”—that allowed gay public figures to lead discrete lives without fear that their names would end up in the gossip columns the next day.4
At the same time a competing phenomenon was picking up steam: the emergence of a media-driven celebrity culture that threatened to obliterate the blurry lines between public and private. The rise of infotainment, twenty-four-hour cable channels, gossip networks, and the like broke down the older reticence that, for example, dictated that Franklin Roosevelt was never photographed in a wheelchair, allowed Hollywood film stars such as Cary Grant and Rock Hudson to stay safely in the closet, and looked the other way at tales of John Kennedy’s womanizing. Such private behavior was simply not seen as newsworthy as late as the 1960s. By the time Billie Jean King was outed, however, this new celebrity-obsessed culture was well established. The tennis star accepted the fact that her personal life was a public issue: “It may not be fair, but that’s the way it is. Anyone who’s in the limelight accepts it.” And yet she was totally blindsided by the emotional and financial repercussions of her former lover’s suit.5
The public disclosure of Billie Jean King’s homosexuality came at a scary moment for the fledgling women's sports revolution. After the great leaps forward earlier in the 1970s, progress had slowed at decade’s end as women's sports reached the equivalent of its glass sneaker. The feminist movement, stung by the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment and the shifting national mood symbolized by Ronald Reagan’s election, was also vulnerable to a conservative backlash. While women's professional tennis was on a reasonably sound basis, the tour still worried about the public relations impact of a scandal involving its best-known (if not always best-liked) star. Personally, Billie Jean King feared that her endorsement and promotional opportunities would evaporate just as her playing days were ending. What a way to end my career, she must have thought, and possibly take the whole women's sports revolution down with me.
In the 1960s and 1970s Billie Jean King served as a trailblazer for the professionalization of tennis and as a symbol of the new roles of athletic women, Title IX, and feminism in general. By contrast, she wasn't ready yet to take on the mantle of gay rights, certainly not in 1981 after being so violently and publicly outed. When she finally tentatively started to publicly identify herself as a lesbian in the late 1990s, she did so within a much-changed social climate that offered increased visibility and acceptance for gay men and lesbians, young and old alike. “I can tell you that in the 70s, there was this huge fear about coming out,” she recalled about those earlier times, but now she embraced gay pride with gusto. When Billie Jean King was named a recipient of the 2009 Presidential Medal of Freedom at a White House ceremony hosted by President Barack Obama, she was honored not just for her activism for gender equity in sports but for her role as “one of the first openly lesbian major sports figures in America.” What a distance she—and American society—had traveled since 1981.6
MARILYN BARNETT first entered Billie Jean King’s life in 1972, an incredibly busy and complicated time in the life of the tennis superstar and her husband. “Those couple years were so intense,” King recalled in 1982. “Making women's sports acceptable, and making women's tennis, particularly, into a legitimate big-league game was a crusade for me, and I threw my whole self into it in ways that exhausted me emotionally as much as they did physically.” Larry too remembered it as probably the most hectic time in both their lives, but not necessarily the most productive for their marriage. He was busy with his myriad business ventures and soon embarked on a fairly public affair with Australian tennis player Janet Young. Connected through tennis, their lives were increasingly disconnected everywhere else.7
Looking back on those years, King often uses phrases like “lost soul,” “going through hell,” or “a mess” to describe her emotional state. Confused and ashamed of her sexual feelings for women, she failed to take responsibility for her actions because she feared what the disclosure might mean to women's tennis and her life as a sports celebrity. When she once haltingly tried to talk to her mother about her sexuality, she couldn't find the words, not that her mother would have been willing to have this conversation. Nor was Larry, who conveniently managed to deflect his wife’s pleas to get out of the marriage by ingratiating himself even more deeply into her business and personal life. Her dissembling about her sexuality was symptomatic of a larger personality trait: her lifelong desire to be all things to all people. At base she wanted to be loved by her friends and family, as well as by all her fans, an impossible standard. Miserable and trapped in a web of lies, she remembered, “My whole world was in flux.”8
Into this vortex stepped a twenty-three-year-old hairdresser named Marilyn Barnett. She first met the twenty-eight-year-old tennis star in May of 1972 when she styled her hair at a well-known Beverly Hills salon. Several months later they ran into each other at a party and renewed their acquaintance. Friendship drifted fairly quickly into a sexual relationship, not Billie Jean King’s first. “I had very soft boundaries when it came to sexuality,” she later admitted when thinking back about her twenties. “When you’re playing tennis and you’re busy every day, it’s a great way to put everything on the back burner.” Barnett begged King to let her quit her job as a hairdresser and accompany her on the tour, and by the spring of 1973 Marilyn was on the King payroll at $600 a month, serving as a combination travel agent, companion, and advisor. “She was a bad choice for me,” King later told journalist Selena Roberts, “but I was very vulnerable at the time we met. She was dangerous. I was screwed up.”9
Far from hidden, Barnett was especially prominent around the time of the Bobby Riggs match in September 1973, usually identified as King’s traveling secretary. The night of the match she was prominently seated at courtside, along with King’s coach, Dennis Van der Meer, and her husband, Larry, even though it was highly unusual for “friends” to be on the court during a match. If members of the press knew or suspected King’s irregular lifestyle, no one said so in print, or at least not directly.10
In this light it is interesting to revisit Grace Lichtenstein’s A Long Way, Baby (1974) for what she does—and does not—say about the relationship. The year the journalist spent following the women's professional tennis tour coincided with the height of the affair, and Lichtenstein found it impossible to write about Billie Jean King without including Marilyn Barnett in the story. Calling Marilyn a “high priestess of the Billie Jean sect of worshipful admirers,” she characterized her as “a wispy flower-child of a woman with streaky blonde hair who favored print halter-dresses” and knew next to nothing about tennis. Noting that Billie Jean spent far more time with Marilyn than her husband, she called them “a strange, totally contradictory, but apparently very compatible pair.” She did note, however, that the relationship could take “ominous shades,” such as the time Marilyn dropped some autographed cards and Billie Jean ordered her to pick them up “in a scene right out of The Killing of Sister George” a not-so-subtle reference to a 1968 movie about three lesbians. Later in the narrative Lichtenstein made a clear reference to the gossip about the relationship and Billie Jean’s “disinclination to spend time with her husband,” although in the epilogue she noted that Billie Jean and Larry seemed more together as a couple than they had for quite a while. For her candor Grace Lichtenstein found herself persona non grata on the women's tour.11
In fact, Billie Jean King had long been dogged by rumors about her sexuality, even being asked pointblank whether she was a lesbian. While this is a common journalistic practice today, it was quite unusual in the 1970s. For example, when discussing the question of lesbianism in tennis, she was asked by an interviewer for Playboy magazine in 1975, “You’re not a lesbian yourself, then?” to which she replied: “My sex life is no one’s business, but if I don't answer your question, people will think I have something to hide, so I’m in a bind. I’m damned if I answer your question and damned if I don't, but I'll gi
ve you the answer: no, I’m not a lesbian. That’s not even in the ball park for me.” Frank Deford’s profile of King in Sports Illustrated later that year, titled somewhat incongruously “Mrs. Billie Jean King,” noted that interest in her private life “borders on raw inquisition.” And yet she still held on to her heterosexual privilege, thanks to a complicit spouse and a less intrusive media.12
In 1974 Marilyn convinced Larry and Billie Jean to buy a $135,000 beach house in Malibu, which she used extensively, even after her duties as a traveling secretary were phased out. By the end of that year Barnett had gone back to work at the Jon Peters Beauty Salon in Beverly Hills and was no longer inseparable from the tennis star, although in her March 1975 Playboy interview King still called Marilyn her best friend. According to King, their relationship ended in 1975 or 1976, but Billie Jean and Larry let her continue to live rent-free in the Malibu house, all expenses paid by the Kings’ business manager.13
By 1979 they had had enough and formally asked Barnett to leave the house, which had now appreciated in value to $550,000, but she refused to budge. Emboldened by letters from the tennis star at the height of their relationship as well as credit card receipts and paid bills that she had kept, Barnett threatened to go public if they continued to try to evict her. When her blackmail attempts failed, in May of 1981 she sued for title to the Malibu house and half of King’s income from 1973 to 1979, which was estimated at more than $1 million. If King hadn't been a public figure with a large disposable income and celebrity profile, there likely never would have been a lawsuit. Nor would legions of reporters have shown up at the obligatory press conference announced by Barnett and her lawyers to spread the inflammatory story all over the media. The gossip-and scandal-driven celebrity culture quickly moved into high gear.14