In Praise of Difficult Women

by Karen Karbo

  As Billie Jean blossomed, so did the women’s movement. If Gloria Steinem (see Chapter 3) was the voice of the feminist revolution, Billie Jean King was the body. The female body in motion: running, jumping, swinging, thwacking, and holding that giant Wimbledon serving platter–trophy thing over her head.*4

  Before Billie Jean, most people believed the whole point of “professional” women’s tennis was providing spectators with the sight of comely women prancing around gracefully in very short skirts. When they fluidly reached up to tap the ball, and the skirts got even shorter, the sport of women’s tennis got even better. But Billie Jean was a competitor. She wasn’t there to provide a floor show. She was quick, and cultivated a wicked net game. She wasn’t afraid to get in her opponent’s face. She was outspoken, and back-talked when she received a lousy call from the line judge. The fact that Billie Jean took her game seriously and was there to win made her, in the minds of sports commentators of the time, extremely difficult.

  She really had no sense of humor when it came to unfair awarding of prize money. In 1968, she won the Ladies’ Singles at Wimbledon and earned £750, while Rod Laver, the men’s champ, took home £2,000. At the 1970 Italian Open, men’s winner Ilie Năstase won $3,500, while Billie Jean won $600. As the seasons passed, and as tennis became more popular, male winners won increasingly bigger pots, while female champs were paid less and less. At one point the ratio of prize money was 12:1, for no good reason other than the United States Lawn Tennis Association (USLTA), the governing body of professional tennis, simply wasn’t interested in equity, and the male players had no interest in sharing the pot.

  Together with eight other female players, Billie Jean quit the USLTA in protest. The Original Nine, as they were dubbed, signed on to the Virginia Slims Circuit for a token dollar bill.*5 They hustled like crazy, selling tickets, doing interviews, playing at whatever venue could guarantee an audience. Eventually, Virginia Slims would become the Women’s Tennis Association, today the primary organizing body of women’s tennis, founded by Billie Jean. At the time, however, male players—as well as the women players who stuck with the safety (and discrimination) of the USLTA—thought the Nine were nuts to risk their careers. But sometimes, you have to choose nutty. Sometimes, you have to walk away and risk everything. It would have been impossible for Billie Jean to continue to tolerate the inequity, and she had no choice but to make the leap.

  In 1973, onetime U.S. men’s champion and self-proclaimed male chauvinist pig Bobby Riggs challenged Billie Jean to a “Battle of the Sexes.”*6 Riggs was hoping to make a buck, while also stemming the tide of so-called “women’s libbers” blasting “I Am Woman” on their car radios and refusing to be ordered around by their husbands like the family dog. That he was 55 and Billie Jean was 29 mattered not to him. He was a huckster and hustler, crude and rude, a proto-troll in the era before the Internet, and he targeted Billie Jean because of her feminist activism. He would tell whoever would listen that women should stay in the bedroom and the kitchen—and that he could handily beat any woman because females lacked emotional stability.

  Billie Jean declined the challenge, fearful that the cause of women’s equality—and her fledgling women’s tour—would be endangered if she lost. But things were changing for women, and they were changing fast. In February 1972, the U.S. government began accepting the honorific Ms. on official documents. In June 1972, the Supreme Court passed Title IX.*7 On January 22, 1973, women were granted the right to choose whether to terminate a pregnancy. When Australian Margaret Court accepted Riggs’s challenge on Mother’s Day, 1973, and was thoroughly trounced, Billie Jean felt she had no choice but to play Riggs when he challenged her for a second time.

  On September 20, 1973, 30,000 spectators at the Houston Astrodome and 90 million viewers around the world watched as Riggs entered the stadium surrounded by a gaggle of cheerleaders he called “Bobby’s Bosom Buddies.” When King entered, carried by the Rice University men’s track team on a litter like Cleopatra, the announcer opined that King was “…a very attractive young lady, if she would ever let her hair grow.” (For the record, she wore her hair in a stylish shag.)

  As for “emotional stability,” Riggs could hardly know how wrong he was. Billie Jean was holding it together like a boss. In the bathroom stall before the match, she heard women standing at the sinks talking about how they’d just placed bets against her. Not only that, but her personal life was in turmoil. After years of trying to convince herself otherwise, she was in the process of accepting that she was gay. She continued to love her husband, Larry, but she was in love with her secretary, Marilyn Barnett. They would go on to have a clandestine relationship that lasted seven years.

  Still, King steeled herself and beat Riggs like grandma’s old rug, in straight sets 6-4, 6-3, 6-3.

  Upon his defeat Riggs jumped over the net, shook her hand, and said “I underestimated you.”

  Why yes, Bobby. Because men like you always underestimate women.

  BILLIE JEAN WAS NOT ONLY an advocate for women’s equality. In April 1981, she also unwittingly became one of the first pioneers of gay rights. The love affair with Marilyn had run its course. Marilyn, apparently unhappy that she’d invested so much in Billie Jean and her career with nothing to show for it, slapped her former lover with a palimony suit, which also outed Billie Jean as gay.

  In early May, just three days after the news broke and against the advice of both her publicist and attorney, Billie Jean held a press conference and admitted to the affair. “I’ve always been aboveboard with the press, and I will talk now as I’ve always talked: from my heart,” she said. “People’s privacy is very important, but unfortunately someone didn’t respect that. I did have an affair with Marilyn, but it was over quite some time ago.”

  I wish I could say that speaking her truth set Billie Jean free—that within weeks of being outed, she was hitting the gay bars and linking arms with iconic feminist writer Andrea Dworkin. But it wasn’t that easy. In footage of the press conference, you can see that her beloved parents are stunned. Her mother is both scowling and tearful. Within 24 hours, Billie Jean lost all of her endorsements. Within five years, she and Larry were divorced, about which she felt terrible. In the movies, she would have been rewarded for her courage in confessing the truth. In the real world, she suffered for quite some time. Then she picked herself up and went on.

  WHEN I ASKED BILLIE JEAN KING what she wanted to be remembered for, she cited World Team Tennis. Founded with her ex-husband Larry in 1973—the same year she beat Bobby Riggs—WTT is the only pro tennis league where men and women, privileged and not, play on the same team, together.

  “Equal pay, equal treatment, equal respect. Equal everything, you see?” said King.

  She made it sound so easy; it was anything but. Still, it’s easier to be difficult when you know in your heart that you’re right. Billie Jean was and is, and so she continues to fight.

  *1As I grew up playing on the public courts of Whittier, California, I can assure you that they were crowded, with torn nets and faded lines and mediocre players like me on the next court, swearing loudly and hitting a nonstop stream of wild balls into the middle of her game.

  *2She shared the award with basketball great John Wooden; the award is now known as the Sports Illustrated Sportsperson of the Year Award.

  *3Not that Larry King. This one was a law student who also played tennis on Cal State L.A.’s champion men’s team.

  *4The Ladies’ Singles trophy is a salver that bears the mystifying name The Venus Rosewater Dish. If there isn’t an all-girl punk band called Venus Rosewater Dish, there should be.

  *5They were Billie Jean King, Rosemary Casals, Judy Tegart Dalton, Nancy Richey, Peaches Bartkowicz, Kristy Pigeon, Valerie Ziegenfuss, Julie Heldman, and Kerry Melville Reid.

  *6It was such a momentous historic occasion that A-listers Emma Stone (as Billie Jean) and Steve Carell (as Bobby Rigg
s) starred in the 2017 movie.

  *7No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.

  CHAPTER 16

  JANE GOODALL

  Determined

  AS A CHILD, I’d idolized her. Jane Goodall, “the girl who lived among the wild chimpanzees,” was blond and looked smart in her khaki shorts as she walked on thick jungle branches in her bare feet and play-wrestled with baby chimps. I’d seen her in National Geographic, which I would avidly page through before I could even read. We lived in the L.A. suburbs, and even though we had a swimming pool, I was aware that my life was sadly lacking in adventure. Once, inspired by Jane, I asked my mother if we might go camping. She blew smoke out of her nose and told me we weren’t the camping types.

  Jane Goodall is best known for her 26-year study of the chimpanzees in Gombe Stream National Park, located on the eastern shores of Lake Tanganyika in Tanzania. In 1960, while visiting a friend in Kenya, she met celebrated anthropologist Louis Leakey, who obtained a grant for her to collect data on chimps in the wild to study their similarities to humans. There, she made several groundbreaking discoveries that secured her position as one of the greatest field scientists of the 20th century. She was 26 years old.

  In 1962, Dutch wildlife photographer Baron Hugo van Lawick filmed Miss Goodall and the Wild Chimpanzees. It was the first documentary produced by the National Geographic Society, and it made Jane Goodall a star. Also, a wife, and then, mother. She married van Lawick, and in 1967 gave birth to a son, Hugo Eric Louis, known as Grub. She is the author of dozens of books on chimp and animal behavior, as well as on the critical role of conservation. In 1977, she founded the Jane Goodall Institute, a nongovernmental organization devoted to protecting the rapidly disappearing chimp habitat. In 1995 she was made a Commander of the British Empire, and became Dame Jane Morris-Goodall, DBE.

  BORN VALERIE JANE MORRIS-GOODALL in London in 1934, her father, Mortimer, was a businessman; her mother, Myfanwe (Vanne) Morris Goodall, was a novelist and looked after her family. The expectations for Jane were standard issue for the time: a marriage to a nice, responsible man, followed by a few children. To her credit, her mother never discouraged her interests: animals, the natural world, and above all, the wildlife of Africa. Once Vanne discovered that little Jane had brought a handful of earthworms to bed; rather than shrieking, she explained that her new little friends needed the soil to live, and together, they took them back to the garden.

  Jane was a quiet girl, a bookworm who adored Doctor Dolittle and devoured the Tarzan novels. Reading did its usual stealthy, life-changing thing: Jane developed a deep love of animals and a longing to go to Africa and live among the wild animals. But World War II was raging, and her family had little money. Instead of university, Jane enrolled in secretarial college, graduating in 1952.

  Meanwhile, one of Jane’s school friends had moved to Kenya and invited her to come for a visit. Jane was working in London selecting music for advertising films at the time. In a move that seems so very right now, she moved home and worked as a waitress to finance the trip. When she had saved enough, she quit her job and off she went.

  By which I mean she took an exciting, month-long journey from England, around the Cape of Good Hope, to Mombasa, eventually making her way to Nairobi. There she met Dr. Louis Leakey, the great archaeologist and paleoanthropologist who traced our human origins to Africa.*1 Leakey was charismatic, influential, and, at the time, a curator at Nairobi’s natural history museum. He offered Jane a job there, then invited her to come along on a dig at Olduvai Gorge. She spent three glorious months immersed in painstaking tasks: removing dirt from a fossil with a dental pick no bigger than your pinkie finger, or digging gently with a hunting knife. Leakey saw in her a person who was patient and thorough: one who could survive long stretches of isolation, who could sit and watch and learn. In sum, she was the perfect candidate for his latest project—observing primates in the wild—and when he asked whether she would be interested in setting up camp at Gombe Stream on the shores of remote Lake Tanganyika, she didn’t hesitate for a moment.*2

  Since women have entered the workforce, it’s been noted that we tend to apply only for positions for which we possess the correct qualifications. If a job description lists the ability to juggle an egg, a flaming torch, and a chain saw, and we can only juggle oranges, we don’t bother applying. Men, on the other hand, feel confident applying for jobs they believe they can do, regardless of their education or previous experience. They send in their résumé, figuring they’ll delegate the juggling once they’re hired.

  Jane’s credentials were: I love animals. What’s ethology? Still, she didn’t care. She was focused on her improbable life goal, and presumed herself to be qualified and capable of doing things that the world insisted she had no business doing. She gave herself over to learning what needed to be done.

  JANE ARRIVED AT Gombe Stream Game Reserve on July 14, 1960. Lake Tanganyika is a vast inland sea, the longest and second deepest deepwater lake in the world. It borders Tanzania (then called Tanganyika), the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zambia, and Burundi. Leakey would not be joining her on the expedition, and the government, worried about a young white woman camping in the bush by herself, ordered Jane to bring a companion. Her mother volunteered, which was probably not what the government had in mind. The two women had a used army tent, some tin plates and cups, and the services of an African cook named Dominic.

  At first, Jane hiked around and looked. Really, it was days and days of marching through the rain forest with a pair of second-hand binoculars. The only thing she saw, at first, was a flash of dark against the greens and golds of the forest: the back of a chimp, running away from her. They could not get away from her fast enough.

  In case you think this is even remotely romantic, I’m here to tell you it wasn’t. When I was 18 and a sophomore in college, I spent a few weeks in East Africa, part of a student study abroad program.

  Tanzania and Kenya are as spectacular as they look in the documentaries. But one thing you don’t see is the lung-squeezing, brain-boiling, itchy, rash-inducing heat—nor the stupendous bugs and insects, pretty much all of which can be described as “the size of your fist.” Picture it: moths, spiders, roaches, beetles, and millipedes—all the size of your fist. Common dung beetles are smaller than your fist—but they are all over the place, and the giant balls of dung they roll, eat, breed in, and live on are the size of your fist. Possibly larger.

  I’m not particularly high maintenance (a form of difficulty, as we know), and I’m not unnerved by rats, mice, or snakes. But the dung beetles—the males have horns!—were too much for me. Every time I see a picture of Jane squatting in the dust next to chimps,*3 I always worry that a dung beetle was seconds away from rolling a manure ball over her foot, or a giant centipede was on the verge of crawling up her shorts.

  Then there are the diseases. Before my trip, I was required to be vaccinated for cholera, typhoid, smallpox, and yellow fever. None of this prevented me from getting sick; like Jane, I came down with malaria (though my case was considerably milder than hers).

  “The more I thought of the task I had set myself, the more despondent I became,” Jane wrote in her first book, In the Shadow of Man. “Nevertheless, those weeks did serve to acquaint me with the rugged terrain. My skin became hardened to the rough grasses of the valleys and my blood immune to the poison of the tsetse fly, so that I no longer swelled hugely each time I was bitten.” (See?)

  Note, please, that she didn’t say, “What in the hell am I doing here? I’m a fraud. I don’t have the proper training. Leakey never should have sent me.” She didn’t question her competence just because her mission sometimes seemed bloody impossible.

  CHIMPANZEES—Pan troglodytes—are our closest evolutionary
relatives. We share about 98 percent of our DNA with them.*4 Genetically, we are more like chimps than mice are like rats. Their similarity to humans was Leakey’s primary interest. But Jane studied them for the sake of studying them, fascinated with their family and clan relationships. She let her intuition guide her.

  For two months, the chimps fled when they heard her coming. Then, one day, a huge male sauntered into camp, climbed a palm tree, and ate a few nuts. A while later, he came into camp and stole a banana off a table. Eventually, he allowed Jane to offer him one. She called him David Greybeard, for his jaunty white goatee.

  Naming animals was scoffed at among the scientific community as being amateurish and silly. Serious scientists, “real” scientists, assigned the subjects numbers. But David Greybeard signaled to the rest of the community that Jane was not as scary as they had thought. Consequently, she became acquainted with (and named) Goliath, Humphrey, Rodolf, Leakey, and Mike. There was Mr. McGregor, a cranky old male. There was the alpha female Flo, and her offspring, Faben, Figan, and Fifi. She observed them kiss, embrace, pat each other on the back, shake their fists at each other. She watched them act pretty dang human.

  One day, moving quietly through the jungle in search of the chimpanzees, Jane came upon a large termite mound. David Greybeard sat beside it. She watched as, over and over again, he poked long, sturdy blades of grass into a hole, withdrew them, and plucked off the termites with his lips. After he was finished with his meal, Jane inspected the mound, and the grass blades he’d left behind. She poked one in the hole and withdrew it. A dozen or more termites clung to the stem. Yum. A few weeks later, she would watch the chimps make tools, breaking off small leafy twigs from trees and stripping the leaves, before poking them in the termite mound holes.