Tennis star. Tennis innovative. Celebrity of his time who appeared on the cover of LIFE magazine. A woman who also sang professionally, designed clothes, worked as a sports columnist, rubbed shoulders with movie stars and rebuilt her tennis career after a debilitating illness threatened to end it.
But Madeleine Blais, in her latest book, says Alice Marble is largely forgotten today, even though she campaigned for greater equal pay and treatment for female athletes and helped break the barrier of color in tennis in the early 1950s.
“Queen of the Court: The Many Lives of Alice Marble” aims to bring the former Wimbledon and US Open winner back into the spotlight. This in-depth biography offers an illuminating look at a major star of her era, but it also paints a portrait of a woman whose later life was increasingly marked by loneliness, economic hardship, and perhaps a degree of delusion .
Blais, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer who teaches journalism at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, says an editor suggested several years ago that Marble, the 1939 Wimbledon and U.S. Open women’s champion, might be a good subject for a book.
In a recent phone interview, Blais said she knew Marble’s name quite well; her late mother, born the same year (1913) as Marble, sometimes spoke of her. But that was about the extent of his knowledge, Blais noted.
Once she started looking into Marble’s story, “I was hooked,” she said. “The more I learned, the more interesting it was. »
Marble’s life, Blais notes, “is truly the story of the 20th century.”
For starters, she came from a working-class background to excel in a sport that “mainly catered to the elite,” as Blais puts it, and she became a household name during the dark days of the Great Depression, when people turned to sports for distraction and some positive news.
Journalists loved Marble’s athleticism and sunny California look, employing plenty of comically sexist copy in their articles, such as one that called her “the blonde, green-eyed queen of American tennis…an eye-sore athlete” .
Marble’s career was largely derailed by the greatest conflict in history, as World War II interrupted competitive tennis for several years, although she had reached the peak of her game; she played exhibition matches, often for American troops, during the war.
And after the war, although she worked successfully as a lecturer, tennis columnist, and clothing designer, Marble was ultimately forced to take more routine work—including a position as a bartender—to make ends meet. , at least in part because of limited employment opportunities for women.
“She didn’t have a lot of resources to fall back on,” Blais said. “She was single and she was a woman, and that just made it more difficult.”
However, Marble would distinguish herself in other ways, including through an open letter she wrote in 1950 to a tennis publication in which she called for a promising African-American player, Althea Neale Gibson, to be authorized to participate in the US Open. which had never included black players. (Gibson won several major tennis titles and was named Associated Press female athlete of the year in 1957 and 1958.)
Marble also revolutionized women’s tennis, pioneering an aggressive serve-and-volley style of play that made her, as one newspaper wrote in 1939, “the first woman to play tennis as a man “.
Years later, she would coach a teenage Billie Jean King, who remembered Marble as a big influence on her own style. “Alice Marble was the picture of unbridled athleticism,” King said.
“Queen of the Court” also offers a fascinating look at tennis in the early 20th century – a time when there were no prize money for winning tournaments – with mini-portraits of players like Bill Tilden, a young Bobby Riggs and Marble’s main competitors. like Helen Jacobs.
But at its heart is Alice Marble, a charismatic figure who, in her later years, told stories about her past that seemed to raise questions about its veracity, perhaps because, as Blais notes, she was trying to cling to the vestiges of his celebrity, or deflect questions about his sexuality.
“She lived many different lives and many contradictions,” Blais said. “She was strong and resilient in many ways, but she also had a lot of fragility. »
Marble, born in rural California in 1913 but raised primarily in San Francisco, had some tough times growing up. Her father died when she was six, leaving her and three of her siblings raised by her mother and her older brother, Dan, who left school at 13 to support the family.
Marble, a tomboy, excelled at sports, first in baseball, then in tennis after Dan convinced him that playing tennis would be more feminine. She quickly stood out as a talented but sometimes headstrong and undisciplined regional player.
That changed after meeting tennis coach Eleanor “Teach” Tennant when she was around 17. Tennant took on Marble as a sort of personal project, vastly improving his game but also strictly controlling his life, almost like a chaperone.
Since Tennant also gave tennis lessons to well-known movie actors, the young Marble was introduced to stars such as Carole Lombard, who became a good friend (Marble also had a screen test in Hollywood ). Yet his social development may have been hampered by his celebrity but tightly controlled life, Blais notes.
“I could never decide whether Teach was ultimately a good or bad influence on Alice,” she said. (Marble would part ways with Tennant in the mid-1940s, later writing that she told her coach “I am a person, not a trophy to show off.”)
Yet some of these accounts, many of which were published in a 1991 memoir, “Courting Danger,” written by Marble with journalist Dale Leatherman, leave questions unanswered. (Marble died in 1990, shortly before the book was published.)
For one thing, Marble said she had been engaged or married to a man identified only as Joe, a U.S. Army intelligence officer who Marble said had died in Europe at the end of World War II . In some of her accounts, she also said that she suffered a miscarriage during their time together, or that a child they adopted died in early adulthood.
Marble also claimed that she served as a spy for the United States in Europe at the end of the war, investigating Nazi looting that allegedly passed through Switzerland. The former tennis star said she was shot in the back while doing the work, narrowly escaping death.
It’s a story, Blais says, that doesn’t seem to hold up to scrutiny, but one that also can’t be refuted out of hand.
“It’s hard to prove a negative,” said Blais, who notes that Marble seemed to embellish other parts of her journey as she got older. “The best I can do is leave this as a nuanced discussion for readers.”
Marble’s story ended on a sad note, as she died alone in a small, nondescript house in Palms Springs, California, after many years of excessive tobacco and alcohol use.
As Blais writes: “History has never favored marble. Not after she became the most decorated tennis woman of her era – just when the whole world was going dark.
But “Queen of the Court” is full of indelible scenes showing what a lively and unconventional person she could be. Billie Jean King remembers Marble teaching her when she was a teenager, offering valuable corrections and advice in the field between puffs of cigarettes.
In an essay she wrote for the online news site AIR MAIL, Blais said her feelings about Marble varied widely while working on her biography, ranging from “fear to frustration, d ‘an impulse of protection with the desire to give it meaning again’.
But, adds Blais, “the deep admiration ended up winning out. The more I learned about this complicated, fragile, accomplished, witty, resilient, brilliant and talented woman, the more I wanted to know.
Madeleine Blais will discuss “Queen of the Court” at Amherst Books on November 6 at 6 p.m.
Steve Pfarrer can be contacted at [email protected].
