Coach and pupil: ‘Teach’ Tennant and Little Mo in 1952
Three women
BILL TILDEN AND ELEANOR TENNANT may or may not have met, but she, like him, was familiar with the Hollywood courts and stars. Her background was different, for her family had fallen on hard times. Her father had found wealth in the gold rush and had become a hotel owner, but then got involved in local San Francisco politics and lost his money. Eleanor’s parents were estranged. They lived in the same house but never spoke to each other, as Mrs Tennant tried to make ends meet.1
Tennis was Eleanor’s escape from the unhappy household, and like the pre-First World War champion Maurice McCloughlin, she learned to play on the public courts in the Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. There was a girls’ tennis club there, run by a Mrs Fletcher, who noticed Eleanor’s talent and invited her to join.
Like so many others, Eleanor was madly in love with tennis. She soon stopped attending school and spent all her time improving her game. By the time her mother found out that she’d simply abandoned her education, it was too late to send her back, but she was made to train as a secretary.
She was an exceptionally independent and resourceful young woman. Secretarial work did not suit her and in 1917 she became the only woman commercial traveller for Standard Oil. With the money she saved she took a two-week holiday to Los Angeles. On her arrival she again showed initiative – not to say cheek – in introducing herself to Maurice McCloughlin and asking him where she could get a game of tennis. She must have been persuasive and attractive, because McCloughlin (who was America’s top player at the time) at once asked her to join him in a foursome that afternoon. The other players were Willy de Mille, brother of Cecil B. de Mille, and Admiral Winslow.
Admiral Winslow and his family had rented the whole top floor of the Beverly Hills Hotel – the ‘blue bloods’ from Newport, Rhode Island staying at the best hotel in southern California. So everyone noticed when they took up Eleanor Tennant. The hotel manager noticed too and employed her as the hotel tennis coach. Her tremendous initiative soon had the guests playing all the sports available, including pony trekking up into the hills. She even organised the older residents into bridge tournaments.
As California was a more relaxed society than post-Edwardian London, Eleanor did not experience the rigid class distinctions that kept Dan Maskell in his place, but she was still a hard-up young woman trying to make her way in the world. She was also learning as she coached, observing her own game in order to understand how to teach others – including the film stars who began to hear of her and come to her for lessons. Before long she was known all over southern California as ‘Miss Beverly Hills Hotel’ and had effectively become the hotel’s unpaid PR person at the age of only twenty-two.
She got along really well with show business people. Like Fred Perry, she believed there was a great deal in common between tennis and show business. ‘Tennis has all the high lights and all the coloured things . . . and their footlights were our tournaments.’
A pattern of highs and lows was to develop in her life. Each employer liked and valued her to begin with, but eventually there was usually a falling-out. After a period of being feted by wealthy families in Cleveland and the East Coast, when she was able to play tennis as an amateur, she tried a career in the catering business and then was briefly married, but neither experiment was a success. She went back west and became a tennis pro in La Jolla. There she coached at a girls’ school and invented the idea of the ‘tennis clinic’ at which she taught up to 100 pupils at a time – in some ways prefiguring the tennis academies that were to develop after 1970. She also earned money through her association with Wilson sporting goods.
She took up with the Hollywood crowd again. Elizabeth Ryan invited her out to Randolph Hearst’s fantasy castle at San Simeon, and she became a close friend of his mistress, Marion Davies. Like Tilden, she played tennis with Clifton Webb, Charlie Chaplin, Marlene Dietrich – and Carole Lombard, another top Hollywood film star and Clark Gable’s lover and future wife. Lombard became a close friend and gave her a nickname: ‘Teach’. Henceforth she was known everywhere as ‘Teach Tennant’.
This was a pleasant life, but not quite enough for a woman as ambitious, energetic and determined as Eleanor Tennant. There may have been an inner dissatisfaction that her own tennis talent was subordinated to the lesser talent of the rich, for she herself had to work hard to earn her living. She sent money to her mother. Her sister was sick – and eventually came to live with her as a chronic invalid. So when a young woman player began to make a name for herself, Teach noticed and grabbed her opportunity.
Alice Marble wanted to be a baseball player. 2 She was mascot to the San Francisco Seals and attended their practice sessions, acting as ball girl. But baseball was a man’s game; and when she was fifteen Alice’s brother Dan spoke to her about it. He bought her a tennis racquet and told her she had to stop being a tomboy. She was to play the more ladylike tennis, which she could enjoy for the rest of her life.
Alice was furiously resentful, heartbroken and humiliated. Because she was well known locally as the ‘queen of swat’, the girl who practised with the Seals, the boys at school jeered at her demotion to the sissy game. But she gritted her teeth, learned to play and worked her way up the juniors until she was beaten by one of Teach’s pupils. Noting the superiority of the girl’s ground strokes to her own, Alice wrote to Teach to ask her if she might become her pupil too.
Thus began one of those Svengali relationships that tennis seemed particularly to favour. The close bond between coach and player can reach the intensity of a parent–child relationship (and often is, literally) or become something more than a love affair. Such affinities are not exclusive to tennis. In the 1960s the dancers Rudolph Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn created just such a relationship. In the modern age erotic fulfilment tends to be presented as the touchstone of intensity and ecstasy. Sports stars and other physical performers, in trying to express the experience of some pinnacle of performance, sometimes described their triumph as ‘better than sex’; as if it went to some ecstasy beyond the erotic. Fonteyn’s biographer suggests that the dancers may once have spent the night together, but that, even if true, is irrelevant to their art, which transfigured and transcended sexual attraction. In like manner the skating partnership of Torvill and Dean in the 1980s was an all-consuming bond, lifting sublimated eroticism to an almost abstract sphere.
These, though, were equal partnerships. The contract between coach and player is different, and doubly unequal in that the coach may always be tempted to live vicariously through the triumphs of the player, while at the same time dominating through his or her status as the teacher; and there is the further ambiguity that the coach is employed by the player.
Teach Tennant’s relationship with Alice Marble was different in that the coach supported the pupil economically. Alice moved in with Teach and in return for coaching she helped Teach with her school pupils and did secretarial work for her. Her tennis blossomed.
In July 1933 Alice won the California women’s singles title, rising to third in the women’s national rankings, and travelled east alone to play in a series of four tournaments, the results of which would decide whether or not she was chosen for the Wightman Cup team. She did well in the first three tournaments, winning two of them. She lost in the final at the third, but with her partner won the doubles, defeating the national doubles champions. When she arrived at the fourth and last, at East Hampton, she was greeted with the news that she was to play in the doubles with no less a partner than Helen Wills Moody.
The smart East Hampton tournament was run by a committee chaired by Julian Myrick, he who had persecuted Bill Tilden a decade earlier. Myrick was a member of the well-connected amateur establishment that controlled the tennis circuit. He was also chairman of the Wightman Cup. He decreed that Alice was not even to be considered for inclusion in the Cup team unless she played in all the East Hampton events. As a result Alice played 108 games over nine hours in 104° F heat and collapsed with sunstroke and anaemia. This unfair and arbitrary treatment exemplified the autocratic and arbitrary power of the establishment network.
There followed a series of setbacks due to ill health. Nominated for the Wightman Cup and sponsored by the USLTA to travel to Europe, she collapsed at Roland Garros and returned to America diagnosed with tuberculosis. Julian Myrick and the USLTA washed their hands of her. That would have been the end of Alice Marble’s career as a tennis player had it not been for Teach. Teach guided her gradually back to health and by 1937 they were ready to set out again to conquer the world. At first the USLTA refused even to invite Alice to play in any tournaments, but eventually she was admitted. Triumph followed, for she beat Helen Jacobs in the final of the US National, 4–6, 6–3, 6–2.
She also won the mixed doubles at Wimbledon with Don Budge. In 1938 they successfully defended their title and Alice also won the women’s doubles. In 1939 she won all three trophies at the last Wimbledon before the war and won all three titles at Forest Hills as well.
Don Budge claimed that Alice was the first woman to play ‘like a man’, using serve, volley and smash instead of playing a predominantly baseline game. That made Alice special, he claimed. Budge may well have been correct to say that Alice Marble took the game forward by serving and volleying like a man. Yet it is also true that the outstanding women players from Lottie Dod to Helen Wills had always practised with men and aimed to play a man’s game in the sense of power and speed of stroke. Lottie Dod was also known for her volleying. Until the 1950s, however, it was probably only the outstanding women players whose game rose above the ground-stroke play with which most women were content.
Eleanor Teach Tennant had relieved Alice of all financial worries, and nursed her through serious illness. She made Alice into an international tennis champion. She introduced Alice to the celebrity world and to the exclusive social life that could open to the big tennis stars. But there was a cost. They were not lovers, although Teach was a lesbian; but the powerful coach demanded control over every aspect of her pupil’s life. Under Teach’s iron discipline Alice reworked her strokes and developed the orderliness and discipline that had been lacking. Teach described Alice as a Pygmalion – completely remoulded by her teacher. She stuck to a rigid regime of early bedtime, continual practice and no boy friends.
Carole Lombard and Alice became close friends and in 1938 the actress urged Alice to develop her singing voice. She became the vocalist for Emil Coleman’s band for a short season at the Waldorf Astoria in New York. Some of her fans, however, didn’t approve, as a life of night clubs and decadence didn’t sit well with the wholesome image of a sportswoman. It also interfered with her tennis. Most important of all, Teach didn’t like it.
Alice complied, but eventually the relationship became too combustible. The pair quarrelled and separated. Alice married and had a miscarriage; her husband died on active service. Carole Lombard was killed in an air crash. Meanwhile Alice turned professional and had a small part in Pat and Mike. She never remarried.
Teach moved to Palm Springs and became coach at the Racquet Club which was managed by two former pupils who were also film actors. Once more she was coaching the stars. She had also coached Bobby Riggs and she was now looking for a new budding champion. She found one in Pauline Betz, who won Wimbledon in 1946, and then in Maureen ‘Little Mo’ Connolly.
Little Mo’s confidence was in no way dented by her short stature and lack of conventional good looks and she was no Pygmalion. She came up to Teach at the age of twelve and asked – or rather demanded – that she become her coach. At the age of seventeen she won Wimbledon. En route to that triumph she confronted Teddy Tinling and told him that he must make her court outfits. ‘She has always known where she was going,’ said Teach. It was an understatement.
The budding champion came from the municipal courts, like Marble and Betz before her, but she was so promising that she was soon being sponsored by the Southern California Tennis Association. Born left-handed, she had switched to the right hand to play tennis, for at the time it was believed that no lefthander could become a top-flight star (and there was still a general stigma attached to left-handedness). The change of hands had hampered her serve. For this reason and because Maureen was not yet fully grown, Teach concentrated on training her to be a baseline player. This was controversial in the age of the serve-and-volley game as played by Alice Marble, but was a winning strategy because most of the serve-volley players had weaknesses in their ground strokes. Teach maintained that although Maureen did not have a cannon-ball type of serve, hers was accurate and her placement exceptional, but the player was always to be seen as having a weak serve. Even without an obviously killer serve, the precocious star was able to defeat her opponents by the power and speed of her strokes and above all because she had the ability to breathe correctly, something that Eleanor believed was very rare.
Like Alice Marble before her, Little Mo rebelled against her mentor after she won Wimbledon for the first time. There was an acrimonious split in London, much reported by the British tabloid press. Two women, each with such willpower, were sure to clash eventually.
Little Mo won Wimbledon three years running and in 1953 became the first woman ever to hold all four major titles at the same time. During her brief career she absolutely dominated the women’s game and was considered one of the most devastating players in the history of tennis. But her triumphs were cut short at the age of twenty. Riding was her second passion and in 1954 a serious riding accident ended her tennis career. She married and had two children, but died of ovarian cancer at the age of thirty-four.
Teach Tennant’s career bridged the glamorous Hollywood years and the slow transition to professionalism after the Second World War. But essentially she was a figure of the future. She carried a flag for the prospects of independent women in the sport. She was also a prototype of the key role of the coach in future years.