Martina showered attention on me, calling eight and ten times a day. Her first present to me was an electric pencil sharpener. She called from Kansas City to ask what I would like. When I told her a pencil trimmer she was surprised. Jewelry, clothing, cars—I don’t know what she expected me to request.
I still use the pencil sharpener. She gave me a good one.
She promised not to hide me. She told me she loved me. That sounded glorious although she hadn’t spent more than two hours in my company. She was making up for it on the telephone.
The lowest circle in hell is reserved for Alexander Graham Bell. I swallowed my distaste for that most intrusive invention and chatted. Finally, I agreed to meet her in Chicago.
Baby Jesus would sit in my Hunting World duffle. Explaining that she would stay in the care of a good house-sitter did not improve her mood. Even Cazenovia got crabby.
When I touched down in Chicago it was snowing. I’ve visited this midwestern city many times. Never in the summer. Chicago has the best shops, good theater, good sports while retaining a midwestern solidness that’s beguiling.
I arrived at the International Amphitheater as Martina was wrapping up a match. This was late January of 1979. I met her in the locker room afterward. She showered, then burnt the wind getting us back to her hotel.
Exhausted from the bumpy flight, mourning Fannie, wondering what I was doing, I sat down hoping to talk, relax. Martina, convinced that I was the love of her life, was not in the mood for a meeting of the minds. She wanted a meeting of bodies. Not that I was opposed to that, far from it, but I wished we would have talked a bit.
Allow me to digress about sex. I am not motivated by sex. I enjoy it. I can be passionate, even imaginative, but sex for me is on a par with hunger—it’s a physical need.
To make sex a metaphor for life, which the arts have done since the 1950s, is foolish, narrow-minded and ultimately boring. If sex were truly a metaphor for life, then the greatest novels would be written by prostitutes, the most marvelous symphonies by call boys.
Sex, especially if allied with love, enhances life. It’s the floor of the house you build.
Getting trapped in sex, asking too much of it, is as dangerous as taking drugs. Sex is by definition temporary. Art is eternal. Everything else lies in between.
Gay people are punished for sex. In many states it’s a criminal offense. In Virginia a homosexual is considered a felon. It stands to reason that sex will be out of kilter in a gay person’s life even more than in a straight person’s. The danger of falling into the sex-as-a-metaphor-for-life trap is extreme, and for some poor sods, sex is their life. The shallowness of it borders on both the absurd and the tragic, but then deforming people is absurd and tragic. Such people develop strange ways to survive the daily dose of badgering and occasional outright danger.
Lesbians are beyond sex. Their neurosis dovetails into being women. Some people imagine that lesbians are imitation men. Wrong. They are women to the second power. Love. Everything is about personal love. Sexual attraction has to be love. It can’t be an animal attraction. They want to live as magical couples shutting out the world that has so successfully shut them out. No relationship can carry that weight, and many lesbian relationships implode. But once a lesbian matures to the point of realizing she can’t escape the world and that her partner isn’t Cinderella, she stands a strong chance of building a lifetime relationship, even in the face of unrelenting hostility.
I respect lesbians enormously for this and I hasten to add that I am not one of them on this issue. I am fundamentally a lone wolf.
I wanted a relationship with Fannie but accepted less. The lack of commitment didn’t wear me down as much as her homophobia, and again, at the risk of repeating myself, it was homophobia rooted in reality.
I traveled, gave speeches, wrote political articles alone. I live my ordinary, everyday life alone. It suits me.
Martina is a love junkie. Not that I knew that at the time. I wrote off much of her enthusiasm to her youth. She’s in her forties now, so youth is no longer a sufficient excuse.
I believed that I was the great love of her life, that she would cherish me and honor me and vice versa. She repeated these protestations until they became a liturgy. There’s comfort in the liturgy.
As for sex that first time, I have often been tempted to write on standardized forms where they request your age then sex, “once in Chicago.”
Practice makes perfect. We improved.
The world of women’s tennis is traveling in purdah. Velocity is confused with achievement. Every week they pack their bags and move on to the next city, serve the next American twist, return the next crosscourt backhand and so on. Then there’s all the time spent practicing.
There they are, a handful of athletically gifted kids, shuttling from city to city and seeing only tennis courts. No British Museum. No Louvre. No Metropolitan Museum of Art. Most of them aren’t inclined that way, perhaps, but they do occasionally hit the expensive shops where, by virtue of being young, they have no sense of value. The wild spending made my head spin.
Martina’s like a raven, she can’t resist anything shiny.
She had more gadgets, more junk than I’d ever seen, plus a few very expensive handguns, which I asked her not to keep in the house. She was generous with her stuff and never minded sharing or giving it to friends. It was a good thing, because I didn’t want any of it.
But I learned to want her. The ferocity of her passion dazzled me. I was the center of her attention. Everything I said was witty and brilliant. She threw out her entire wardrobe because she wanted to dress the way I did. Although she’s taller than I am, 5′8″ to my 5′4″, my shoulders are broader than hers, so we could wear the same shirts. I tactfully suggested she might enjoy creating her own look, but she ordered tons of the Turnbull and Asser shirts I have made to my pattern. I can’t wear off-the-rack shirts because of my shoulders and the size of my biceps. I can’t buy boots either. Muscles, today, are in vogue. I wish they had been when I was young. It would have saved me a lot of ridicule.
Everything I did fascinated her.
I learned to love her. She needed me. I felt important and useful. She heaped gifts on me along with physical affection.
She told me the usual things people say to one another but it was either the first time I’d heard them or the first time I’d listened. She said I’d given her the best sex she’d ever had in her life. I was the most exciting human being she’d ever known. I was the most honest person she’d ever known. I was beautiful. (I knew she was lying then, but I liked the way it sounded.) I was the only person she would ever love. We’d be together until death us do part. Etc.
Even when I heard these uplifting sentiments I didn’t believe them on an intellectual level, yet I believed them on an emotional level. I was torn, but I loved being loved and I loved her.
As to loving professional women’s tennis, never. The duplicity of the Women’s Tennis Association at that time was ludicrous. The game exists to make money. That’s why it’s a professional sport. But to make money for whom? For the players? For the coaches? If you believe that, you still believe in the tooth fairy. Because a few players at the top pull down millions, the public is misguided. Ask how much the middle-ranked players earn. If it’s six figures, take out a pad and pencil and figure in hotel costs, food and those expensive airline tickets. They pay their way.
Promoters rake in the chips. Well, they bear a disproportionate part of the risk. As a capitalist, I understand that. And they go to sleep at night knowing that their sport isn’t destroying bodies the way boxing or football does, although I hasten to add that Mom made a genuine boxing nut out of me, and Sugar Ray Robinson did the rest. He was the best ever.
The moral turpitude of women’s tennis came about in a distressing fashion. It continues to this day. The public face of the sport is that there is a sprinkling of lesbians. However, no one “knows” who they are—everybody just wishes they would go away. Speaking honestly about one’s personal life is actively discouraged. Billie Jean King, a woman out of charm’s reach, had no trouble ’fessing up to an abortion, but denied being a lesbian until called on the carpet by an irate former lover.
Does the WTA believe that the public is that stupid? They actually think that if the lesbians finally come out of the closet, no one will watch women’s tennis. For Christ’s sake, the public has always known and watches the game because it’s damned good tennis.
That’s not the worst of it. The slime award goes to the association for ignoring the abuse within their midst. When a male coach sleeps with an underage girl, this should be called what it is—statutory rape. When the girl is eighteen, no longer jail bait, it’s still an issue that might be addressed because the power imbalance is so extreme. And what about two infamous father/coaches who have publicly beaten their daughters at practice sessions over the last two decades? I wasn’t the only person to see it. Silence.
I’m not naming names. Let’s give the WTA a chance to clean house. If they know that we know, maybe they’ll do something. If they do nothing, then I strongly advise those women once abused by their father/coaches to come forward. Force women’s tennis to be responsible to the players.
Watching Andrea Jaeger wear out before she was seventeen was painful. Watching Bettina Bunge walk away from the game exhausted was infuriating. Watching Rene Blount battle racism as well as lobs was sickening. She, too, couldn’t stand it any longer. Zina Garrison Jackson hung in there longer, but I can guarantee that the black players kept to themselves. Was it self-censorship, or had the unthinking racism become just too damn much?
Martina can’t handle conflict. She looked the other way. Everyone around her, from other tennis people to director Milos Forman, a friend because he is a fellow Czech, to her parents, beseeched her to think of nothing but tennis. She did and she didn’t.
My purpose in her life was to open the door. Those people whose economic well-being depended on her were terrified. My God, what if she dropped in the rankings? What if the endorsements dried up? They pretended to care about her. The good thing about her agents, IMG, was that they only cared about the money and they were up front about it.
I didn’t just open the door for her to see the abuse around her. I opened the door to the world. Did I not love her tennis? Of course I loved her tennis, she was the greatest tennis player in the world, but I loved her more. She could have thrown her rackets down a well. I was making money. If she had invested some of her money, we’d have been fine.
If she wanted to be the best in the world, bestride the game like a colossus, that was fine, too. Only she could make that decision.
As it became clear to the hypocrites in the WTA and the parasites on her own back that she really was in love with me, they struck back.
Hell, it was nothing compared to what the women’s movement had dished out.
Billie Jean advised her that having me around wouldn’t be good for her career. People would know she was a lesbian. Coming from Billie Jean, a woman Martina had worshipped, this was sad and yet funny.
Martina came back to the hotel one day and asked if I intended to organize women’s tennis into a feminist group. God knows what they’d said to her.
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. You can’t organize children. The last time that was done was in the Children’s Crusades in 1212 and virtually all of them died.
Most athletes are by definition apolitical children. They are kept in adolescence an unnaturally long time. I certainly wouldn’t have minded if the tennis players had organized for their own self-interest, but since Billie Jean was running the show, forget that. Her interest was their interest.
As I said, Martina can’t take pressure. She can on the court. One of the reasons she was such a great player was that the court was her refuge and her excuse. The more her friends attacked me, the closer she drew to me, but she would never face them off. She was afraid of Billie and she was right to be. Martina has no political sense. She can’t maneuver, build alliances, create a plan. Why should she? It’s not her talent.
Billie Jean and Gladys Helman created professional women’s tennis. Billie had enough energy to organize and be the best player of her day. Her drive coupled with Gladys’s brains and business acumen carried the day.
Billie could have eaten Martina for lunch.
But on the court, Martina sliced and diced her. Not in the beginning, not when she was still a teenager awed by Billie. Billie’s pain—one of many pains, for she’s a woman with tremendous inner conflict—is that she will not be remembered as a great player. One of the best of her generation but not one of the all-time greats. But she will always be remembered for what she built.
Martina will be remembered by tennis aficionados as one of the greats, along with Helen Wills Moody, Suzanne Lenglen, Alice Marble, Mo Connolly and Steffi Graf, who may yet tower over all of them.
Luckily, I suffered no illusions about being welcome in women’s tennis. Why would that world be different from any other American institution, even though a high percentage of the players and even the administration was gay? As usual, they were more frightened of me than the straight people were.
We were isolated. I noticed right away, but Martina didn’t. She was on top of the world, and all that attention distracted her. Her first clue was being nominated for the presidency of the WTA and not getting it. Hurt and angry, she tearfully came back to our hotel room in New York and lashed out at everybody and everything. Fortunately, only I was there to hear it. But she was right. They screwed her not because she was gay, but because she didn’t bother to deny it. She didn’t say that she was, she didn’t say that she wasn’t: the closet with the open door. However, given the libel laws of the country, no one could write that she was a lesbian. They could write that I was.
Herculean efforts by IMG and the WTA kept that story off the page in America. Not so when we arrived in London for Wimbledon. Their libel laws are vastly different, and their gutter press makes the National Enquirer look like a daily prayer book.
Hounded at every turn, I worried that Martina wouldn’t be able to concentrate. I stayed inside at the rented apartment in Belgravia. The reporters camped at the door. When we were short of groceries, I climbed to the roof, went down the fire escape and hurried to a market. No sooner had I turned an aisle in the store than there they were, flashbulbs in hand. I was represented as a lesbian wife.
I sent the garbage that appeared in the tabloids to Mom with the note, “The only time I will be accused of being a wife.”
For an American accustomed to thinking the best of England, it’s jarring to see the worst of England. Perhaps being jammed so close together there, they must keep a surface politeness, much like the Japanese. Their tabloid press releases the hostility and tension. We released a lot for them.
Later that year in Brighton, hundreds of girls waited outside the building where we were playing matches. They cheered when we emerged, and they apologized for their press. I saw one match at Wimbledon itself, hiding in the locker room, watching on TV. The rest of the time I was literally trapped in the apartment with reporters banging on the door. I guess they paid the super to get into the building.
Martina lost in the semifinal, 4–6, 6–4, 6–2, to Chris Evert, that pretty little girl from my Florida days. I don’t know how Martina stood the ordeal. Neither of us complained to the other, though. We made jokes about it.
Of all the strange pressures we endured, sometimes unwittingly, that Wimbledon of 1980 made me proudest of her, all the more so since Billie blamed the ordeal on me: If I weren’t in Martina’s life, all would be well, none of this would happen. She brought it on herself.
Blaming the victim temporarily soothes people. When a woman is raped, people want to know what she was wearing and what hour it took place and in what part of town. If she wore attractive clothes and it was late at night, then it was her fault. It’s a systemic problem but no one wants to look at that. For one thing, it’s so big. For another thing, we must each take responsibility for tacitly supporting a system where women get raped, children starve amidst wealth, and a corporate executive can take drugs while street bums get busted.
Martina was the victim then. She, not homophobic attitudes, was responsible for the mess. Get rid of me, they told her, and everything will be okay.
I should have taken the gloves off. I didn’t. It was Martina’s world and I didn’t want to interfere. I was wrong. I should have fought like hell for the woman I loved and for our relationship. I didn’t know how badly the furor affected Martina. She can’t express discontent directly. She can tell X, hoping X will tell Y, but she herself will give you no direct emotional information.
I thought we were okay. On the surface we were.
We worked well together. She enthusiastically supported my writing and promised that when her career was over, she’d organize my days as I had organized hers. I believe she would have tried, although by the time she retired she’d become jaded. Small wonder.
I could make her laugh. She followed me like a puppy dog, so I felt adored. If I said, “We’ve got to clean out the damn kitchen,” she’d do it. She wanted to be relieved of daily decisions.
In a strange way, Martina wanted me to live her life for her. That added a burden to my writing but she said many times over that her career was short-lived while mine would last until I died.
She tried to read the books I gave her but invariably I’d have to tell her about them. She’s not dumb, but she has no intellectual discipline. The time she put into her body I put into my mind.
I was a good enough athlete to hold her interest on that level and she was intelligent enough to keep me from brain death. She has a quick mind, but she’s like a magpie—she has bits and pieces of stuff but nothing’s pulled together. Alice Marble was like that, too.
My discipline had to grate on her. She subsequently said of our relationship that she was “just” the tennis player whereas I was the writer. I have often been so sorry she felt that way, because I didn’t.
But life has taught me it doesn’t matter what you felt, it doesn’t matter what you meant; if the other person feels differently, that’s her reality.
We were both displaced persons. She was stateless at the time, having fled Czechoslovakia. I was an outcast in my own country. Together we made a new country. I give us credit for trying.