Still from Pat and Mike, directed by George Cukor in 1952. Gorgeous Gussie poses with Katharine Hepburn
Gorgeous girls
HOW WAS WOMEN’S TENNIS to fit into this picture? The top women players of the 1930s, culminating with Alice Marble, Wimbledon winner in 1939, had based their games on that of the men’s. Helen Jacobs had pioneered the wearing of shorts on court. The women’s game had developed in strength and power.
World war had brought women to the fore in all areas of life. It had encouraged, indeed necessitated, a massive movement of women into the workforce and into jobs traditionally reserved for men lost to the draft. There had been an upheaval of gender roles. Women had won the war not only on the home front, but in the forces, in the munitions factories, in the aerospace industry.
In California, for example, Lockheed and other companies recruited women at such a rate that by 1943, 42 per cent of the total workforce in southern Californian aviation was female. ‘For a few brief years,’ writes historian Kevin Starr, ‘it seemed as if a major social revolution were occurring in American industry, the introduction of women into the workforce on an increasingly equal basis.’ 1 Hitherto unheard-of forms of collective provision in the shape of subsidised cafeterias, child care and flexible shifts were introduced.
Such arrangements did not long survive in peacetime. The gains made during the war in terms of economic opportunities and moves towards equal pay, not to mention collective child-care provision, were withdrawn.
Conservative currents questioned whether the female emancipation of the war had not been at the expense of family life and child development. The turmoil of war had resulted in too many illegitimate births, too many extra-marital affairs and too much deviant sexuality. There were fears of the spread of venereal disease and of juvenile delinquency. A flourishing gay culture had developed in San Francisco. After the turbulence of war, the re-establishment of traditional relationships between men and women became a priority. Homosexuality was further demonised by its association with the British Soviet spy ring, two of whose members, Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt, were gay.2 Even the more general fear of the spread of Soviet-style totalitarianism could be cast in gendered terms, so that Soviet women were commonly depicted as battleaxes deprived of lipstick and nylons.
These beliefs were often justified in terms of a crude version of Freudian theory. Heterosexual relationships in marriage were the standard for psychological maturity. Homosexuality was not merely disapproved of but often punished; male homosexuality was illegal in the United States and Britain and discouraged everywhere. That the powerful voices of conservatism were often those of medical men meant that deviant sexualities were transformed from being sinful into forms of mental illness.
Japan, which had been a tennis-playing country – for male players, at least – before the war, was overwhelmed by defeat. Prostitution became a massive growth industry; on the other hand, the constitution imposed by the Americans insisted on a new democratic equality for all, including women, at least in theory. In Germany, the many widows and unmarried women had no choice but to work, first clearing the rubble, later laying the foundations of the ‘economic miracle’ of the fifties, only to see themselves then pushed back into the home. In France, the influence of the Catholic church and fears of national decline led to the encouragement by the state of large families and although women were now granted the vote, the situation described by Simone de Beauvoir in her exhaustive investigation of the position of women, The Second Sex, was far from encouraging. In Britain, the Beveridge Report, published in 1942 and hailed as the blueprint for the new welfare state, was very clear on the position of women: ‘The attitude of the housewife to gainful employment outside the home is not and should not be the same as that of the single woman,’ wrote Beveridge. ‘She has other duties . . . In the next thirty years housewives as Mothers have vital work to do in ensuring the adequate continuance of the British Race and of British Ideals in the world.’
In the United States the postwar mood was if anything even more conservative.
The Freudian ideal nevertheless differed from prewar morality because it promoted sexual fulfilment for women as well as for men and it was popularised with contradictory effect. The very fact that sexual behaviour began to be discussed more openly revealed the existence of discontent and a widespread desire for more and better sex and began to challenge the ideal of marriage as a permanent and unalterable state.
In addition, while authorities of all kinds preached a conservative morality, the expanding entertainment industries and advertising promoted sexual daring and excitement. The display of women’s bodies played a noticeable part in the popular culture of film, music and mass fashion. Not least on the tennis court.
Teddy Tinling had enjoyed a special place in the tennis world since the 1920s. He was tall, good-looking and a talented player himself, often described as ‘flamboyant’. A close friend of Suzanne Lenglen, who often asked him to umpire at her matches, he acted as a kind of go-between, a communicator or ‘call boy’ between the players and the officials and administrators at the various Riviera tournaments and Wimbledon. In 1937 Wimbledon offered him ‘what was really an apprenticeship as the future secretary of Wimbledon’, but by now he was a successful Mayfair dress designer. In spite of the social – and tennis-related – attractions of the Wimbledon post, it offered little money. Tinling declined and felt that from that moment his ‘previously cordial relationship’ with the Wimbledon hierarchy began ‘an irrevocable slide toward mutual antagonism’.3
After the war Tinling turned his attention to women’s sportswear. He blamed Alice Marble for the ‘masculine’ dress style of the new generation of American women players, Margaret Osborne duPont, Louise Brough, Pauline Betz and Pat Todd. They wore knee-length pleated shorts and short-sleeved shirt-blouses. This style was consistent with the military fashions of the war years, but in stark contrast to the nostalgic style introduced by Christian Dior in 1947.
Popularly named the New Look, this style was widely held to represent, as Teddy Tinling expressed it, ‘an international hunger for a return to femininity and sexual attraction’. Tinling was determined to bring femininity back to the court and believed this was an advance for the women players. ‘I felt that by looking like modern-day Amazons, the sports girls were renouncing their birthright.’ 4
He first attempted to flout the all-white tradition (which, he says, was not then an absolute rule) by designing a tennis dress with a coloured hem for the British player Joy Gannon (afterwards wife of British number one, Tony Mottram) for her first Wimbledon appearance. The following year Hazel Wightman, Wightman Cup captain, had any hint of colour banned from the matches to be played between the American and British teams. Hazel Wightman and Tinling, were, however, in agreement that women players should wear dresses, not shorts.
Tinling’s campaign reached a climax with the notorious incident of Gussie Moran’s lace knickers. Moran had played in the exhibition matches organised by Bill Tilden during the war, but had retained her amateur status and in 1949 was set to play at Wimbledon. Good-looking and, as Tinling puts it, ‘curvaceous’, she asked him to design her tennis wear. She would have liked a touch of colour, but, since this was now banned, Tinling conjured up a dress in a new fabric, knitted rayon, trimmed with satin. To go with this dress, he added a pair of lace-edged knickers.
The storm created by the knickers provided a foretaste of a 1950s popular culture of prurience and voyeurism. Gussie first wore them to a warm-up exhibition at the grand Hurlingham Club, the day before Wimbledon began. Men lay flat on their stomachs to catch a glimpse of the undergarment; photographers appeared from nowhere demanding that Gussy smash, serve, and stoop for volleys so that they could produce shots of the vital underwear. This continued at the Wimbledon championships. Gussie became too embarrassed to bend down to pick up balls. She was continually besieged off court as well as on. She managed to get to the women’s doubles finals, partnered by Pat Todd, but her feminine outfit hardly helped her play and the reigning top pair, Louise Brough and Margaret duPont, won easily. The scandal and tabloid coverage horrified the amateur officials at Wimbledon and Teddy Tinling was effectively banned from the sacred portals.5
Jack Kramer signed Gorgeous Gussie shortly afterwards to play in an exhibition event in Cleveland, Ohio. It was a failure, because Gussie was the big name, but for the wrong reasons. Her game was not fully developed when she became notorious for her underwear and the uproar stalled improvement. Also, although Gussie had a good figure, she was not, after all, exceptionally beautiful, but audiences expected a film star when what she wanted to be was a tennis champion. So whether or not Tinling had struck a blow for women’s tennis, he had fatally damaged Gussie Moran’s chances of becoming a tennis star.
The panties remained front-page news in newspapers and magazines on both sides of the Atlantic for weeks. Indeed, they became so famous that Alice Marble wrote in disgust a year later of the way in which on the lecture tours she gave throughout the country, the question she was most frequently expected to answer was what she thought of Gussie’s panties.
Tinling’s design was a symbolic moment in the recasting of gender in the sport after the war. If the male tennis player was now to be a he-man, freed at last from the taint of effeminacy by Kramer’s power game, correspondingly women tennis players were to emphasise their femininity. This was entirely consistent with the conservative ethos of the post-war ‘free world’.
Tinling claimed he was striking a blow for women and against the ‘stuffiness’ of the Wimbledon hierarchy, and that Gussie’s lace panties – and the ‘peekaboo’ broderie anglais-trimmed shorts he made for her the following year – had ‘unleashed a tide of fashion progress’. He claimed that the controversy had greatly increased the popularity of tennis as a spectator sport. By sexing it up he’d done tennis a service.
Frank Sedgman might also have had his outfits designed by Teddy Tinling, but masculinity was the unquestioned norm from which women unfortunately, although necessarily, deviated. So while men’s shirts and shorts – by now the norm – went unremarked, women players were always intensely scrutinised. Not everyone agreed that Teddy Tinling’s push for femininity at all costs was a victory for women. In 1953 Laurie Pignon of the Daily Sketch wrote: ‘The more I see of women’s tennis at this year’s Wimbledon, the more convinced I am that it is not now a crowd-drawing spectacle. The dancing and pirouetting around the baseline, the bits of lace and pieces of satin all look very attractive but . . . assuming it was tennis the customers wanted, it was the men who gave it to them.’ It seemed more like a seedy example of male prurience and its exploitation by the popular press than a triumph for women’s tennis.
Across the world the tennis hierarchies were exclusively dominated by men. For the moment, however, there were no more lace-frilled knickers. Maureen Connolly interested audiences solely for her tennis. It seemed as if Gorgeous Gussie had been a brief aberration.
Yet a haunting unease beneath the placid surface of post-war tennis was reflected in three films, all made in the early post-war period. These directly confronted some of the underlying problems that disturbed the game and its promoters.
Ida Lupino’s 1951 feature, Hard, Fast and Beautiful, addresses the fraught relationship between the amateur status of the player and the commercial pressures that had been bearing down ever more heavily on ordinary Americans since before the recently ended war. The story concerns a young woman player and the moral contradictions involved as she tries to work her way up through the game. A part of this is the exploitation of the woman player as sexual spectacle, a long-established ambiguity in the game, and which the Gorgeous Gussie incident highlighted. Also at issue is the relationship between the promising player and an over-ambitious parent, in this case a mother, but, most powerfully, the film exposes the absence of economic opportunity for women at that period other than through the exploitation of their sexuality, as Mandy Merck has insightfully analysed. 6
A second film to question women’s status in sport is Pat and Mike made in 1952. In this, Katharine Hepburn reprises her madcap tomboy persona as a player of tennis and golf, who seeks to escape the overbearing influence of her patronising boyfriend. In an early scene, for example, he objects to her wearing trousers when playing golf with some important business friends. Later there are scenes of her playing on the professional circuit (recast as an amateur tournament) with Gussie Moran. (There is a rather sad moment when Gussie does what has evidently become a standard move at the beginning of a match, giving a little twirl to show off her knickers.) The film, which features ‘Babe’ Zaharias in the golfing sections, ends happily when Mike, the heroine’s coach, has built her confidence and convinced her she can win – somewhat undercutting the feminist message of the film, since she still relies on the support and encouragement of a man.
In Strangers on a Train (1951), based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith, Alfred Hitchcock slyly exploits the other secret in tennis, darker than ‘shamateurism’ or the sexual peekaboo of women players. The film opens as the camera follows two pairs of feet crossing a station and boarding a train. Once on board, they meet under a table – accidentally . . . perhaps. The camera moves up to show Guy Haines, a tennis star, and Bruno Anthony. Bruno is excessively friendly and over the course of their shared train journey, he sets out the plot that is to entangle the innocent sportsman: they are to exchange murders. At first the improbably good-looking Guy treats this as a joke, but he rapidly becomes entangled in a nightmare when Bruno strangles Guy’s estranged wife, who is refusing to divorce him.
Still from Pat and Mike, directed by George Cukor in 1952. Gorgeous Gussie poses with Katharine Hepburn
Guy, is of course, unwilling to honour his side of the ‘bargain’. Yet he does actually want his wife out of the way so that he can remarry and this secret desire leads him to behave so suspiciously that the police become convinced of his guilt.
The plot thus functions as a metaphor for the shameful secret of unacknowledged homosexuality. Guy’s guilty feelings and his behaviour symbolise the guilt of the closeted homosexual. The mesmerising performance of Robert Walker as Bruno transforms the psychopath into a living embodiment of homosexual panic and paranoia as he creepily insinuates himself into the tennis player’s life as his friend, only to pursue him vindictively when Guy refuses to murder Bruno’s father. Bruno’s theatrical manner and his relationship with his indulgent mother hint at his queerness and it was probably no accident that Hitchcock chose to make Guy a player of the ‘sissy’ game. Ironically, Farley Granger, playing the hero, was bisexual and had had at least one sexual relationship with a man, about which he is quite open and unashamed in his autobiography, saying that it seemed like the most natural thing in the world.7
It was to be some years before issues concerning gender became front-line tennis news. Meanwhile, the problem of money was rapidly becoming intractable.