by Nora Ephron
As she recalls in her memoir, “I was filled with an uncontrollable desire to shock—to say or do anything that would raise voices and eyebrows or boredom’s threshold. I had a natural ability to alienate people I found dull. I would rudely cut short any matron lady who dwelled too long on her wonderful children, her indispensable housekeeper, or her husband’s unheralded political abilities. I once interrupted a woman deep into her monologue about the great Lone Star State with, ‘If I hear one more exaggeration about Texas, I’m going to throw up on the Alamo.’ I became incautious in my description of Texas habits, asking one gentleman sporting a hammered-silver belt studded with ersatz stones: ‘Did you make it at summer camp?’ And to a Dallas lady in reference to the Tex-Mex delicacy she had proudly served for dinner: ‘Did you get this recipe off the back of a Fritos bag?’ ”
I liked Laughing All the Way—it happens to be far more charming than what I just quoted would indicate; it also happens to be fun to read. But I was surprised to find it as fascinating as I did, because what Barbara Howar has written, and I don’t think it was unintentional, is almost a case study of a kind of woman and a kind of misdirected energy. And while I’m not sure any lesson or moral can be drawn from it—or if it can, I’m not about to do it—her floundering attempts to make a life and identity for herself are genuinely, and surprisingly, moving.
Barbara Howar came to Washington just out of finishing school and the South and went to work on Capitol Hill. She was pretty and blond and energetic and, as we used to say in high school, popular. As she writes, “I never wearied of flying on private planes to the Kentucky Derby with groups that included Aly Khan, of first nights of Broadway musicals.… But the tedium of clerical work dulled the excitement of my social life. I started doing bizarre things—my personal indicator of unrest—painting mailboxes shocking pink, leaping fully clothed into the Supreme Court fountain. One day I woke up disposed to do the only thing I had not yet tried: marriage.” She married very well: her husband was a builder, heir to an Arab fortune, and she entered into the life of being his wife, working at charities, being photographed at luncheons, having parties and a family. Then 1964 came along, and because it was the thing to do that year, she went to work for the campaign of President Johnson.
It is altogether possible that had Barbara Howar married someone she was more capable of being an appendage of, none of what followed would have happened. Or it would have happened much later. In any event, she went off as Lady Bird Johnson’s hairdresser on the campaign swing of the South, met a Johnson aide with whom she had an affair, and charmed the President to the point that he was soon holding her hand (and falling asleep) during White House movie screenings and whirling her about the dance floor at State functions. “I was that woman dancing with the President …,” Mrs. Howar recalls. “It never occurred to me that I could distinguish myself in more admirable fashion.” Women’s Wear Daily began to follow her everywhere, Life magazine profiled her, and Maxine Cheshire watched as she danced on a tabletop in a white dress with gold chains she said “cut into my tender young flesh … just a little number the Marquis de Sade whipped up for me.…
“There simply was no shutting me up. I had to tell every newspaper and magazine that Mrs. Johnson, a lady who spent every waking minute planting trees in ghettos and sprinkling tulip bulbs around settlement houses that had no plumbing, was ‘off base’ with her Beautification Program, that it was ‘like buying a wig when your teeth are rotting.’ I had to say in print that Mrs. Johnson’s rich New York friends ‘would be better advised to donate their money to countless endeavors like fighting street crime, and that to celebrate their philanthropy I would gladly wear a bronze plaque saying: TODAY I WAS NOT RAPED OR MUGGED THROUGH THE KIND GENEROSITY OF THE LASKER/LOEB FOUNDATIONS.’ ”
The affair with the Johnson aide continued and became a full-fledged Washington scandal; she left her husband and went off with her lover for a week in Jamaica. “In the sultry, alien surroundings of the Caribbean,” she writes, in one of the more melodramatic sections of the book, “harsh reality became larger than my fantasy of finding peace by changing marriages. I became morbidly depressed for the first time in my life. I missed the children, my home, everything familiar and comfortable. I was melancholy and homesick, maudlin in my confusion, I wanted something to make me happy, something to give me reason not to care that half my life was over and that I had no real zest for finishing out the rest. Guilty and restless as before, I saw the future now as even more menacing. I wanted it all and I wanted out. It was the woman’s primal feeling of being trapped, unable to live without marriage because it was all I knew, but incapable of projecting myself happily into more of the same. My anxieties grew. I had doubts about who I was and what I wanted to be. Why was I even in Jamaica?” At about this moment, Mrs. Howar’s reveries were interrupted by a group of detectives, who burst in on her and the Johnson aide, ripped the strap on her nightgown, and took pictures. Mrs. Howar returned to Washington, reconciled for a time with her husband, and was promptly dropped by the Johnsons.
At this point, Barbara Howar’s story became a morality tale. Her son gets spinal meningitis and almost dies. She finally leaves her husband. She develops a social conscience through a relationship with Bobby Darin, the singer, and becomes a star on a local television news show, where her standard operating procedure was to fling her newly acquired set of facts on life in the slums at her guests. “It was a long while,” she writes, “before I learned that if there was anything worse than a bigoted keeper of the status quo, it was a recycled socialite with a newly aroused public conscience.” Mrs. Howar complains, in what are straight women’s movement terms, that her remarks on the air were not taken seriously because she was a woman. “If my male counterparts made strong critical statements, they were ‘blunt’ or ‘forceful’; similar candor from television women is ‘cutting,’ ‘catty,’ and ‘bitchy.’ ” She is right about the problems—though probably not in her own case. A typical moment in Mrs. Howar’s television career was this remark, made as a criticism of the space program’s all-white personnel: “If N.A.S.A. can train a monkey to operate the controls of a rocket, they can train a black man.”
Laughing All the Way ends with a description of Mrs. Howar’s disastrous and final experience in television, co-hosting a show with Mrs. David Susskind, and a marvelous chapter on her mother’s death. “I am enormously saddened to understand that I would not be on my way to real peace if my mother were still alive,” she writes. I don’t know whether she is on her way to real peace—I would like to have heard a little more about that—but she has written a pretty good book about Barbara Howar. Which is more than I can say about her friend Willie Morris, who has also written a book about Barbara Howar this year, a novel called The Last of the Southern Girls. There is a point to be made here about borrowing material, and there is another point to be made about fact and fiction and the difference between them, but I don’t want to get into that. I do want to say that I read Morris’s book when I was almost finished with this column, and I note that we make some of the same points about Washington and women. I also note that he has the quote right. Washington is a city of men and the women they married when they were young. That’s how it goes.
August, 1973
The Pig
Every so often, you turn a corner and Life, or the times, or the public-relations mechanism that makes the world go round throws out a hero you have to live with for a while. The point here is not about heroes but heroines. And long before the Bobby Riggs–Margaret Court tennis match took place near San Diego in May, 1973, it was clear to me that Margaret Court, the heroine who had been thrown not just my way but at the entire female population of the world, was going to leave something to be desired. The symbolism of the match was haywire enough to begin with—Riggs has always played a woman’s game, Court a man’s—and it was to get even more muddled before the actual confrontation. But beyond that, it seemed quite likely that of all the big women players now on
the circuit, Margaret Court would be the one least likely to come through. I’m not just talking about winning the match—although God knows that would have helped. But there were the nerves. Margaret had nerves. Muscle spasms under pressure. She, of course, insisted they were simply magnesium deficiencies and potassium deficiencies; everyone else insisted they were nerves. Just like a woman. And then there was her style. I suppose it’s not really fair to bring up style; style has nothing to do with tennis, nothing to do with anything really, but it mattered to me. I mean, here is Bobby Riggs, the Lip, the hustler, saucy Bobby Riggs with his dyed red hair and his never-ending monologue and his relentless promotions (the copper-bracelet promotion, the Head tennis-clothes promotion, the 415-vitamin-pills-a-day promotion, the land-development-that-sponsored-the-match promotion, the building-project-where-Bobby-lived promotion); here is Bobby Riggs, clown prince of the Old Boy tennis circuit, great copy, and he is standing on the court of the San Vicente Country Club in San Diego Country Estates posing for photographs with Margaret Court. It is Friday afternoon, two days before the Mother’s Day match, and he is whispering to Margaret, taunting her about the weight of the tennis balls and the question of her nerves and the despicable quality of women’s tennis and the pressure of having all the women counting on her on Sunday. And here is Margaret. Nervous. Smiling uneasily. Occasionally offering a demure reply to Bobby or the press. “I like a challenge,” she is saying. “I love the game. It’s been very good to me.” Like that. I didn’t want that. I wanted some lip. I wanted some aggression. I wanted some fight. I wanted satisfaction. And what I got, what all of us got instead, was a lady.
It all began a little over two years ago, when former Wimbledon champion Bobby Riggs made a few derogatory comments about women’s tennis in Sports Illustrated and issued a challenge to Billie Jean King: “You insist that top women players provide a brand of tennis comparable to men’s. I challenge you to prove it. I contend that you not only cannot beat a top male player but that you can’t beat me, a tired old man.” As it happens, Billie Jean King did not say precisely that; what she did say was that women’s tennis was more entertaining than men’s, and that women deserved equal prize money. “Women play about twenty-five percent as good as men,” Riggs countered, “so they should get about twenty-five percent of the money men receive.” Nothing much came of Riggs’s initial challenge, but this year Tony Trabert, the pro at San Diego Country Estates, prodded Riggs to try again, and after Mrs. King turned him down, he sent telegrams challenging six other top women players and offering $5,000 of his own money and $5,000 put up by the land-development corporation to the winner. Margaret Court was first to respond. “I’d still rather play Billie Jean,” Riggs said later, “because she’s really the ringleader of the liberation movement. She’s the revolutionary. Margaret Court is such a nice person—I don’t want to say by contrast.” Margaret Court, thirty years old, Australian, mother of a fourteen-month-old boy, is such a nice person by contrast that she doesn’t even think women deserve the same prize money as men. “I don’t feel there’s a depth in the women’s game,” she said. “There are so many good men. There are only six or eight good women. If you have a thirty-two-draw tournament, you’re going to give some youngster a thousand dollars to lose in the first round, and she doesn’t deserve it. I don’t think it’s good for the game. The money will come. The depth will come. At the moment, we’re rushing it a little.”
Margaret Court trained for the match in Berkeley, working out quietly with her coach, a South African named Dennis Van der Meer. Occasionally reporters would come to the court for an interview and she would reluctantly grant one. Her answers were short and genteel; she was visibly uncomfortable with the press. “Margaret really doesn’t enjoy this,” her husband, Barry, would explain. Meanwhile, every day, Riggs played five sets, jogged two miles, swallowed 415 vitamin pills, and gave out interviews. Hundreds of interviews. Any reporter who called or showed up got more than he came for. “This is so much fun,” Riggs said during one interview, “that I wish it were postponed so we could go on like this another six weeks.”
By the weekend of the match, Riggs had worked his remarks into a finely honed performance, with set lines that varied only slightly from press conference to press conference. “This,” he would announce, in a wonderfully unsyntactical sentence, “is the match of the century between the battle of the sexes.” When even that description seemed inadequate, he would shout, “This is the most important match ever played in tennis!” After the match, he concluded at the top of his lungs that he had just played the most significant sporting event of all time. He would stand, or sit, surrounded by sports reporters, and spin a simple question into a thirty-minute monologue, inserting rhetorical questions to stretch it out, waving his copper bracelet in the air for a plug or dropping in a remark about “beautiful San Diego Country Estates.” The delivery would begin slowly, usually with his old-person routine (“I’m a fifty-five-year-old man with one foot in the grave”), heavily studded with a series of impotence jokes (“The flesh won’t do what the mind tells it to,” and “Why shouldn’t they let me into the women’s tournaments—everyone knows there’s no sex after fifty-five”). Then Riggs would build, gradually, ignore interrupting questions, pitch his high voice even higher, and suddenly he would be speaking so quickly that no one could quite get it down or get a word in. A typical Riggs monologue, this one recorded in the Los Angeles Times, went like this:
“It’s pretty fantastic to think I am playing the match of the century and the battle of the sexes. This match is going to be more important than the Wimbledon, Forest Hills, or a fifty-thousand-dollar match between Laver and Rosewall. Why? Because Margaret Court is carrying the banner for women all over the world and I’m carrying the banner for all the old guys who have always felt superior to women, and they’ll want to see an old guy win because then they’ll feel superior, too, and I’ll be doing a very good thing for all the men all over the world and they won’t give in to the women’s lib quite so easily. She’s got twenty-five years on me. She’s bigger, stronger, more agile. She’s got better shots. Does everything better on a tennis court. She’s the best woman player in the world. What’s she going to do if she can’t even beat a fifty-five-year-old guy with one foot in the grave? What are people going to think of women’s tennis after that? She’s going to have a lot of pressure on her. I love tension. Not that there will be that much on me. I thrive—I have always played my best under tension. Whereas just the opposite is true with her. We’re going to be playing in front of the biggest audience ever to see a tennis match, right here at San Diego Country Estates.”
It was difficult to distinguish how much of Riggs’s remarks were put on, how much mere hysteria, and how much utterly sincere babble, but I finally concluded after hearing the routine some two dozen times that underneath all that surface male chauvinism was heartfelt male chauvinism, heightened, in this case, by Riggs’s bitterness toward open tennis.
All the older men tennis players are dismayed that open tennis, with its huge prize money, came too late for them to take advantage of it. That women are playing open tennis, too, and in some cities even beginning to outdraw the men’s tour, that a player like Margaret Court can earn $100,000 a year—this is almost more than a man like Riggs can bear. Instead of playing in high-stakes tournaments, Riggs has been forced in the past twenty-five years to play the kind of tennis he really prefers, hustling opponents with poodles tied to his legs, umbrellas and suitcases in hand, top hat on his head.
Stories of Riggs’s hustling have been legendary in the sports world, and the press managed to dredge most of them up again for this match. What few in the press realized, though, was that they were being conned at least as cleverly as Mrs. Court. Eighteen of the twenty-four reporters covering the match picked Margaret Court to win, most of them in straight sets. Explanations of sentimentality and sheer stupidity aside, the reason for all this faulty judgment had mainly to do with the amazing total perfor
mance Riggs put on the week before the match. Whenever the press watched him practice, he played well under his game. Whenever he was interviewed, he discoursed at length on his failing strength. He spent days fighting for a lightweight ball, lost in a flip he referred to as “the flip of the century,” and spent days sulking about how the weight of the balls would permanently cripple his game. After the match, of course, he confessed he had wanted the heavy-duty balls all along and had just made the fuss to throw Mrs. Court off.
The scene over the weight of the balls was just one of several incidents that served to cloud the already murky male-female issues. Most men would have wanted to flip for heavy-duty balls, while women prefer lightweight ones; Riggs uses the lighter aluminum racket while Court plays with wood; Riggs’s game is all lobs and slices and spins and twists, while Court plays the serve-and-volley technique favored by strong male players. What happened as a result was that the press covering the match, all of whom were male except for me, became far more interested and threatened by the women’s liberation implications of the relationship between Margaret Court and her husband than by the totally confusing implications of the match itself.
“Look at that,” one reporter said to me, pointing to Barry Court, who was carrying the Courts’ young son Danny. “He always carries the baby. Margaret never carries the baby.” In fact, Mrs. Court carried the baby as often as her husband did when she was off court; this was never registered by the press, who persisted in referring to Barry Court, a tall Australian who manages his wife’s career, as “the baby-sitter.” Sunday night, after Mrs. Court had been trounced by Riggs, I was walking back to my room and bumped into Brent Musberger of CBS. “Do you know who the real winner of today’s match was?” he asked. Yes, I thought, I know exactly who the real winner was. Bobby Riggs. That, however, was obviously not the answer Musberger was going for. “Who?” I asked. “Barry Court,” he replied. “What are you talking about?” I asked. “It’s simple,” he explained. “Now she’ll really need him. Now she’ll really have to depend on him.” The notion that Mrs. Court’s defeat by a male would somehow alter her relationship with her husband—who has been married to her for six years and presumably came to terms with the bargain at least that long ago—seemed a peculiarly male fantasy. On the other hand, it may be my peculiarly feminist fantasy to believe that Barry Court is happy in his life.