Days of Grace

by Arthur Ashe

  “Are you HIV-positive, or do you have AIDS?”

  “Could be,” I replied.

  I could not lie to him. Sometimes, indirectly, I had to lie about AIDS. Now and then, I had to lie about it directly. In November 1991, when I wanted to go to South Africa, I lied on the application for my visa and said that I did not have an infectious disease. But I never lied without a sharp twinge of conscience, even in lying to the government of South Africa.

  I also told Policinski flatly that I had no intention, at that time, of confirming or denying the story. I tried to argue with him, to make him see my position.

  “Look,” I said with some force, “the public has no right to know in this case.”

  As I saw this situation, the public’s right to know really meant the newspaper’s right to print. Of course, there would be people interested in, even titillated by, the news that I had AIDS; the question was, did they have a right to know? I absolutely did not think so. The law was on the side of the newspaper, but ethically its demand was wrong, as well as unnecessary.

  “I am not a public figure anymore,” I argued. “I don’t play professional tennis anymore. I officially announced my retirement in 1980. I am not running for public office, so my health is no one’s legitimate concern except my own. I haven’t committed any crimes, so I am not fair game. And I haven’t been caught in any scandals. Why do you think differently?”

  “You are a public figure,” Policinski insisted. “And anytime a public figure is ill, it’s news. If he has a heart attack, as you did in 1979, it’s news. We have no special zone of treatment for AIDS. It’s a disease, like heart disease. It is news.”

  Match point had come, and I had lost it. All I could do now was try to control the announcement itself, to have it heard first directly from me and not as a blazing story in a national newspaper. I asked Policinski if I could have a little time, say, thirty-six hours, to call friends, talk to other journalists, and prepare a public statement. I reminded him that I had not confirmed his story, as far as I was concerned.

  Policinski was polite but firm. No, it was not his role as the managing editor of a newspaper to help me plan a news conference, and he could not in good conscience withhold a story if he considered it newsworthy and if he had proof of its accuracy. However, USA Today had certain standards and practices which it would stick by in this story as in any other. In general, it did not print stories with elaborately vague sources—information attributed to “informed sources” and the like. And the newspaper did not approve of backing crablike into a story, by reporting a rumor and then declaring that the person or persons involved had denied it. Policinski and I ended the conversation without coming to any agreement, except that I stood by my refusal to confirm the story, and he stood by his determination to continue to investigate it, as well as his right to publish it if he could find confirmation. I fully expected to see the story in the next morning’s edition.

  I like USA Today. In fact, I have the paper delivered to my home every day. In its beginning and even now, some people deride it as McPaper, a kind of fast-food approach to journalism. The truth is that it is an extremely informative newspaper, attractive and dependable, and well written. And if you travel as much as I do, it keeps you abreast of events around the country and the world. At that moment, however, I hated the paper for what it was doing, although I was also glad that it was making a conscientious effort to determine if the story were true. It had given me time, much needed time.

  I had to decide what to do next. First, I canceled my MRI. I canceled the tennis clinic, which was for my own Safe Passage Foundation, working with young people, in Newark, New Jersey. The next day, I was supposed to go to Washington, D.C., to be with my old tennis partner Stan Smith and Donald Dell, who is my lawyer and one of my closest friends, and speak to the Washington Tennis Patrons at the William G. Fitzgerald Tennis Center, where the center court is named after me. I canceled that appointment, too. Then Jeanne and I began to talk. We talked for hours that day, looking at the problem from every possible angle, trying to come up with the best plan.

  In one way or another, Jeanne and I had already had this conversation many times. From the start, we had understood that the truth would eventually come out, and that basically we had three choices about the revelation: The first was to make the announcement ourselves, when and where we wanted. The second was to wait until the rumors began to build, until the story seemed about to break, then try to preempt the announcement ourselves. The third choice, easily the worst, was to wait until the announcement was a fait accompli, until one of us turned on the television or picked up a newspaper and saw a picture of my face and the report of a rumor, or until some reporter called on the telephone to say, “Mr. Ashe, sir, Associated Press is running a wire story about you. It says you have AIDS. Any comment, sir?” Then we would have totally lost control of our lives. We had decided long before that if we could not implement pian A, then we absolutely had to execute plan B. And now it had to be done the next day.

  Although she later told me that I was wrong, quite wrong, I was sure Jeanne was relieved that the truth was finally going to come out. I suppose that I have a deeper commitment to keeping things to myself, bottling them up, suppressing them. I tend to be more on guard. But we both knew that our lives would be changed forever by the announcement, even if we didn’t know exactly how and to what extent. I could see, too, that we were part of a larger pattern concerning AIDS and publicity, that our announcement could not be cleanly divorced from similar announcements by other persons of some celebrity. Although light needed to be shed on AIDS, very few people were willing to admit to being infected with the HIV virus, much less the disease itself.

  Before Magic Johnson went public the previous November about his HIV infection, no prominent heterosexual had admitted publicly to being HIV-positive, or to having AIDS, unless he or she were on his or her deathbed. One could argue that Magic did not have much of a choice in making his announcement, in that he would have had to explain why he was retiring as a basketball player at the height of his game, apparently without an injury. He could not have feigned a career-threatening injury even if he had wanted to, because the integrity of his physicians would have been on the line. Rock Hudson admitted his infection only near the very end. Only after the death of Brad Davis, who starred in the movie Midnight Express, did anyone admit that he had died of AIDS. Willi Smith, the gifted black clothing designer, died without admitting he had AIDS. The entertainer Peter Allen died after my announcement but never came forward before his death to tell the world that he was infected. Rudolf Nureyev forced his doctor into the position of initially denying, after the dancer’s death, that he had died of AIDS.

  Public attitudes have changed and become more enlightened, and still AIDS patients who are public figures tremble at announcing their infection. Cancer, once almost as unspeakable, is one thing, but AIDS is quite another. One can be sure that there are many famous people who are HIV-positive, or who have full-blown AIDS, and are keeping it a secret. As for myself, I never worried as much about being a social outcast as I did about not being able to maintain my life’s schedule. On visa applications, on job applications, in seeking medical treatment or insurance, and in myriad other ways, AIDS is enough in many cases to result in a blunt rejection. Brad Davis’s wife confessed that Davis had kept his illness a secret so that he could continue to take whatever acting jobs came his way.

  I love to travel, and I have to do so for business—such as going to Wimbledon as a television commentator. But several countries will not admit someone who discloses having AIDS, or even to being merely HIV-positive but without full-blown AIDS. The United States is one of those countries. One can get a temporary dispensation, but usually only if one is attending a conference about AIDS or the like. The infected person would then be accorded the same status as Soviet diplomats used to have in the United States during the Cold War, with severe limits placed on his or her travel. The major international co
nference on AIDS in 1992 was forced to move from Boston to Amsterdam in the Netherlands because of these restrictions. Because Great Britain also has restrictions connected to HIV and AIDS, I wondered if I would ever see Wimbledon again. I wondered about my commercial connections, my consultantships and other jobs in television, in the manufacture and sale of sports equipment and clothing, and in coaching. All of these connections went back a long way, and represented a tremendous human investment on my part as well as on the part of those companies. Would these connections survive the news?

  For the news conference, Jeanne and I decided to appeal to Home Box Office (HBO), for whom I had worked regularly as a television commentator at Wimbledon. The president of Paramount Sports there is Seth Abraham, a close friend. He agreed at once to do it. We set the announcement for 3:30 the following afternoon. With HBO undertaking to notify the sports press, two major tasks remained. The first was to prepare a statement to be read at the conference, before I took questions from any reporters who showed up. The second, at least as difficult for me, was to call a number of people and break the news to them. To a few already in the know, I would be telling them only that I was going public; others would be hearing about my AIDS infection for the first time.

  Between roughly 3:15 on Tuesday afternoon and 2:45 the following morning, I made between thirty and thirty-five telephone calls. I called several members of my family, including my brother in North Carolina, who is a retired Marine Corps captain, and my stepmother, stepsister, and stepbrother in Virginia; and I called many friends. Hearing the news that I had AIDS, two or three people burst into tears. I hastened to tell them, and others, that I was fine, that my spirits were up, that they should not worry about me. I called my lawyer Donald Dell, and he let me know at once that he would be present at the press conference. I called the chief of staff in the office of Dr. Louis Sullivan, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, in Washington, D.C. I asked him to inform Dr. Sullivan, and I wanted Dr. Sullivan himself to pass the news to Barbara Bush at the White House. I had been favorably impressed by Mrs. Bush’s steadfast interest in AIDS and the generosity of her response to its victims when she visited children’s hospitals. From the president of the National Commission on AIDS, I secured its list of medical reporters who might be interested in what I had to say. They, too, would be invited to the press conference.

  Several of the people I called had either answering services or answering machines, but I was extremely cautious in leaving messages. I was guarded even in talking to certain spouses. Some I knew I could trust; others were less reliable.

  To help me draft the text of my statement, I called my old friend Frank Deford, a veteran sports journalist and television personality and now a senior writer at Newsweek magazine. Deford is the spitting image of the handsome riverboat gambler, rakish mustache and all, but there is nothing hit-or-miss about his literary style or his common sense. Co-author with me of Arthur Ashe: Portrait in Motion, which is an account of a year in my life on the professional tennis circuit, he had traveled with me to a number of places, including sub-Saharan Africa and South Africa. Together we had gone to Soweto, the most famous, or infamous, black township in South Africa. Although I would write a statement myself, I trusted Deford’s judgment on what I should say at this particular time.

  As I worked at my computer, the telephone rang steadily as word began to spread. Instead of Barbara Bush, President Bush himself called to express his sympathy and to wish us well. Another caller was Douglas Wilder, an old friend who had become the governor of the state where I was born, Virginia. I also heard from Andrew Young, the former mayor of Atlanta; Young, an ordained minister, had married Jeanne and me in 1977. I heard from my good friend David Dinkins, the mayor of New York and an avid tennis fan. I took every call, even those that had nothing to do with my announcement. I needed to feel that the world was still turning normally on its axis. Someone called about changing the bylaws of an organization of which I am a member; I listened patiently and talked the matter through as intelligently as I could.

  As I talked and wrote, I was aware above all of one person’s presence in the apartment: my five-year-old daughter, Camera. I could hardly look at her without thinking of how innocent she was of the import of this coming event, and how in one way or another she was bound to suffer for it. She is a beautiful child, if I say so myself. She was wearing yellow and pink barrettes in her hair and her smile went right to my heart. She had been tested and does not carry the virus. We had not told her about my AIDS, but now we had to do so, and soon—perhaps that night. We had to tell her before someone, most likely some other child, taunted her with the fact that her father has AIDS. In the apartment, where the phone was ringing more than ever and there were visitors in the middle of the morning, she knew that something was happening but didn’t know what.

  “Daddy,” she said, and hugged me about my knees. She held out her right hand, which was closed. When she opened it, there was a chocolate kiss, in its bright silver wrapper. I kissed her on the cheek, and went back to my statement.

  When I was finished I read the statement to Jeanne and Frank, and they approved of it. There was enough time for a quick lunch, and then I changed into a blue suit and red tie—just right for television, if anyone showed up from television. Jeanne, too, was dressed in a blue suit, with a white blouse and a blue velvet headband, as we went with Deford to the HBO office on the corner of Forty-seventh Street and the Avenue of the Americas.

  We arrived just before the scheduled start of the conference at 3:30 p.m. Ross Levinsohn, who handles publicity for HBO, greeted us in the lobby.

  “How’s the turnout?” I asked him nervously. “Anybody here yet?”

  “Anybody here?” he echoed. “The place is packed. It’s been packed for an hour now.”

  I asked about the room. “You’ve probably seen it on television,” Levinsohn assured me. “It’s where we hold some of our biggest fight announcements. Evander Holyfield, George Foreman, Mike Tyson, they’ve all been in there, talking about their coming fights.”

  Oh great, I thought. Just great.

  Almost exactly at 3:30 I entered the conference room on the fifteenth floor of the building. The room, warm and humid, was indeed jammed with reporters; the podium groaned with microphones. Like Holyfield, Foreman, and Tyson, I made my entrance with an entourage: my cardiologist, Dr. Stephen Scheidt, and my AIDS physician, Dr. Henry F. Murray, of New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center; Edgar Mandeville, a close friend of mine who is also a physician; Donald Dell; Mayor Dinkins; and Jeanne. I half expected to hear the bell sound for Round One.

  When I moved to the podium to explain why I had called the conference, I started with a joke. “George Steinbrenner has asked me to manage the Yankees,” I said. (In the tumultuous reign of Steinbrenner as principal owner of the Yankees baseball team, so many managers had been hired and fired that it was hard to keep count.) “But I graciously declined.”

  Nobody laughed, which not infrequently happens with my jokes. Then I told my story. “Rumors and half-truths have been floating about, concerning my medical condition since my heart attack on July 31, 1979,” I began. “I had my first heart bypass operation six months later on December 13, 1979, and a second in June 1983. But beginning with my admittance to New York Hospital for brain surgery in September 1988, some of you heard that I had tested positive for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. That is indeed the case.”

  The virus had been transmitted through a blood transfusion during one of my open-heart surgeries, almost certainly the second in 1983. Testing for HIV in donated blood did not begin until two years later, in 1985. In 1988, after I underwent brain surgery, it was confirmed that I have AIDS. After my right hand had lost all motor function, a biopsy of brain tissue detected the presence of toxoplasmosis, which is one of the opportunistic infections that mark the presence of AIDS. Blood tests had proved positive for HIV.

  Why hadn’t I gone public in 1988?

  “The answer is si
mple: Any admission of HIV infection at that time would have seriously, permanently, and—my wife and I believed—unnecessarily infringed upon our family’s right to privacy. Just as I am sure that everybody in this room has some personal matter he or she would like to keep private, so did we. There was certainly no compelling medical or physical necessity to go public with my medical condition. I have had it on good authority that my status was common knowledge in the medical community, and I am truly grateful to all of you—medical and otherwise—who knew but either didn’t even ask me or never made it public. What I actually came to feel about a year ago was that there was a silent and generous conspiracy to assist me in maintaining my privacy. That has meant a great deal to me and Jeanne and Camera.”

  Once I started to talk about my family, I could feel my emotions bubbling and surging to the surface, and especially so when I thought of Camera. I tried to continue reading, but her beautiful brown face swam before me and I felt the tears flooding my eyes, and my throat simply would not open to let out the words. I waited and waited but I am not sure I would ever have been able to continue. I then asked Jeanne to step to the microphones and read the words for me. “This has meant a great deal to me and Jeanne and Camera,” she read. “She does already know that perfect strangers come up to Daddy on the street and say ‘Hi.’ Even though we’ve begun preparing Camera for this news, beginning tonight, Jeanne and I must teach her how to react to new, different, and sometimes cruel comments that have little to do with her reality.”

  I did not want to be hard on USA Today, but I had to talk about what had caused me to break my silence. The newspaper had “put me in the unenviable position of having to lie if I wanted to protect our privacy. No one should have to make that choice. I am sorry that I have been forced to make this revelation now.” I then revealed that Jeanne and Camera were in excellent health. Both had been tested and both were HIV-negative.