Alice Marble still played tennis. Her classic flat strokes remained fluid and powerful. When Alice reentered my life she was in her seventies.
Like Aunt Mimi, her grasp of her own age appeared slippery. Sometimes she’d be seventy, other times seventy-three. I knew better than to be too specific.
Our meeting had been arranged by an official of Procter and Gamble, Jack Wishard. The company was going to sponsor a television series on American women, each show a biography formatted as a movie of the week. I’d been picked to write Alice’s story. We met at a fancy restaurant tucked away near the corner of Santa Monica and Wilshire in Beverly Hills.
Of course I remembered her. She didn’t remember me, but she did remember coming to the Holiday Park tennis courts and she loved Jimmy Evert. Everybody loved Jimmy.
Alice regaled the assembled with stories of Clark Gable, Carole Lombard, William Randolph Hearst, Joan Crawford and other luminaries of the golden era of talkies. Alice’s stories were liberally spiced with innuendo. She was funny. She also had a hollow leg. The girl could drink.
I spent time with her in Palm Desert, where she had a cute little house bought for her by one of her admirers. Will Dupont.
The show was to be about Alice’s spy work during the war and how she was nearly killed. She had scars on her back from being shot. The script was good but it was never shot because we couldn’t substantiate Alice’s recruitment by the OSS (the precursor to the CIA). That’s not so strange because Wild Bill Donovan, head of the OSS during World War II, wasn’t noted for his filing habits.
By this time I knew that Alice had a million stories, few of them true. But the one about her work for the OSS may well have been fact. Procter and Gamble wouldn’t take the chance, which is a pity, because it was a good show and with a star like Cybill Shepherd the ratings would have been great.
The producers, Marcy Gross and Ann Weston, struggled, as did I, to substantiate the facts. As most of the people were dead, we couldn’t. I’d worked with Marcy and Ann before, delighting in their company and razor-sharp television instincts.
We were distraught that the show wasn’t going to make it, but none more so than Alice.
My riding buddy Dale Leatherman, a newspaperwoman, wanted to write a book. I introduced her to Alice. The wonderful result is called Courting Danger, published by St. Martin’s Press in 1991.
Alice died December 12, 1990. She gloried in being the center of attention. She was missing her curtain call.
Before she died I would visit her about once a year and I wrote or spoke to her two or three times a month. I loved Alice despite her drinking. I should note here I am not remotely tolerant of alcohol and drug abuse, and if you’re loaded, I will excuse myself. I simply can’t stand it.
But I could stand it in Alice because I saw in her fragility, vanity and glory. Eroded as her body was by the booze and by her various afflictions, she could still hit a tennis ball with precision and power.
And she knew tennis. I enjoy another sports fan and I especially enjoy learning from someone as great as Alice, who changed the women’s game forever. She upped the aggression level with her net play and she introduced glamour. She won the national singles championship four times, 1936, 1938, 1939, 1940, the same years she won doubles or mixed doubles or both at Forest Hills. She won Wimbledon in 1939, also winning doubles and mixed doubles there that year. Alice could play on any surface. She won the national clay court singles and doubles in 1940.
There wasn’t much Alice couldn’t do except make sense of her life. She reminded me a lot of Martina except, of course, for the drinking. Both had strong performer personalities. Remove the limelight and they wander about.
While Martina may yet find a fulfilling purpose to the second half of her life, it was painfully obvious all Alice could do was relive past glory. But what a glory it was. As beautiful as a movie star in her high days, she attracted male and female alike. She frolicked with them, too.
In me she found new ears, yet someone who also had known her at the end of her career. I hadn’t seen her at her peak, but when I did see her, in the early 1960s, she was damned impressive. She still blew me off the court in her seventies.
She’d throw her arms around me and say, “Brownie, if only I could have coached you when you were a kid.” Naturally, I felt like a million bucks. Then we’d trot back out there and she’d kill me again. I never short-shotted her. That would have been dirty pool. I stayed in the backcourt, where she’d destroy me with glee.
I think I made Alice feel young again. As she recounted her amours, I’d laugh and that would egg her on.
I felt so sorry for her sometimes, sitting alone in her Palm Desert house. She had golfing buddies but people could only take Alice in short doses, and it was better to see her in the morning before the drinks began.
She gave me a silver cup inscribed in her own handwriting, which says, “Love Forever, Alice Marble.” I’m staring at it as I write this. I see it each day I work and it reminds me of how fleeting and cruel fame can be, most especially for an athlete. If you’re young, the names Paul Hornung, Billy Cannon, Big Daddy Lipscomb mean nothing unless you are a football historian. To my generation those were the gods, as was Alice a sports goddess to her generation.
Even a starlet has a better chance at a future than a jock. Alice, by refusing to marry Will Dupont, essentially screwed herself. He continued to provide for her but he did eventually marry another tennis player, Margaret Osborne. Margaret supplanted Alice. Alice liked her but was ambivalent even though she approved of the match.
Her best friend was Mary K. Brown, a tennis great from the generation before Alice’s, but Mary K. seems to have had a better grip on reality than Alice. When Mary K. Brown died, Alice was up shit creek.
She’d tell me how she loved women as well as men. How she hid it. How she hated herself for hiding it.
I think Alice wanted me to absolve her. It’s not in my power to do that for anyone but I would say, “You did what you thought was best. It was a different time.”
The last time I saw Alice she was floating in her pool, drink in hand, regaling me with a tale about Spencer Tracy making a pass at her and saying, “Kate and I have an understanding.”
No doubt they did. He understood that if Kate found out, he’d better duck. I can’t imagine the willful Miss Hepburn putting up with much of that crap.
The dry heat kept Alice’s bones moving; she was happy that day, for I was a rapt audience and her mind was happiest back in the 1930s and 1940s.
Maybe, too, in drawing close to Alice I was again in the company of someone of Mother’s generation. Both women needed to be stars, although the comparison stops there, for Julia Buckingham was a grounded person. She had a wealth of common sense, and Alice hadn’t a hint of it.
As I headed for the door Alice waved and yelled out, “Angels keep.” I think of that phrase often. It’s a kind of blessing, and I pray that wherever she is now, it’s a happier place than her last decades on earth.
Angels keep, Alice.