When I set out to capture the life story of tennis legend Alice Marble, more than one person asked, “Alice who?” Such unfamiliarity would have been unheard of in her prime, during the Great Depression, when she was omnipresent in newspapers and the public followed her ups and downs with the same ardor that they followed Seabiscuit.
Marble’s athletic career reached its apex in July 1939, when she took Wimbledon in a clean sweep, then achieved same stellar accomplishment at the U.S. Open two months later, making her the first woman to do so.
Marble’s life is the story of the 20th century. In addition to playing tennis, she was a torch singer, a fashion designer, a sought-after lecturer, an author, and an activist. She met kings, presidents, movie stars, and Kennedys. Among her dear friends was the actress Carole Lombard, who was married to the actor Clark Gable. The publishing giant Maxwell Perkins edited the first of her two memoirs. “She knew everyone,” says writer Rita Mae Brown, one of her many fans. “Even Ronald Reagan.”
Her backstory is humble. Growing up in San Francisco, she was fatherless and working-class, but preternaturally gifted as an athlete and lucky enough to live close to free public tennis courts. She practiced incessantly, beginning with a borrowed racquet.
In 1932, her pursuit of excellence brought her under the tutelage of a coach named Eleanor “Teach” Tennant, who transformed Marble from a pudgy, pigeon-toed, acne-beset teenager into a world-class athlete. Together, they stayed at the Hearst Castle and played tennis with the likes of Marion Davies and Charlie Chaplin, and dined with prominent guests, such as the playwright George Bernard Shaw.
Before World War II, Marble was hailed as “the girl who had everything.” During it, she maintained a high profile, with frequent exhibition matches in places ranging from the U.S. Naval Academy, in Maryland, to the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, on Long Island, to build morale among the troops. Newspapers sang her praises. A summer playground with young female tennis players was described as filled with “potential Alice Marbles.” Someone who looked polished had that “Alice Marble look.” She was even an example in a grammar lesson: “If you think punctuation doesn’t matter, try shifting the comma in that news head, ‘Alice Marble, Champion.’”
“She knew everyone. Even Ronald Reagan. ”
After the war, her strong stand in favor of integration led the way for Althea Gibson, a Black tennis player, to compete in the U.S. Open, in 1950. In Marble’s later years, she taught tennis. Her most famous pupil was a teenage Billie Jean King, who credited Marble’s aggressive style of play with influencing her own.
While Marble was once swept up in fame, she, like many women, ended up in the shadow of history. As her prominence receded, she survived by working as a social director, pool attendant, and even a bartender in Palm Desert, California. Well liked in the community, she was always game to speak at a luncheon and stroll down memory lane. On those occasions the frail, sunspotted, chain-smoking, cocktail-enjoying woman would reconstitute herself, re-invigorated by the return to the limelight. One observer said she was like “an old warhorse heeding the call of a bugle.”
She spent her final days in a small, nondescript house with concrete walls and a cat named Friskie to keep her company.
When I set forth to capture Marble’s story, I worried I had no business doing so, imagining there was some kind of special license I lacked that would give me carte blanche to invade the privacy of someone who is long gone. What kept me afloat was the one prerequisite for this kind of work, what the writer Elizabeth Strout calls the “insatiable curiosity about knowing what it feels like to be a different person.”
As genres go, biography, with its goal of bringing someone back to life, is the most brazen. The desired result is, after all, a kind of resurrection. I felt as if I were Marble’s word valet, getting to know her so well that she could be no mere one-dimensional hero. My feelings for her ranged from awe to frustration, from an impulse of protectiveness to wanting to shake some sense into her.
Deep admiration won out in the end. The more I learned about this complicated, fragile, accomplished, witty, resilient, brilliant, talented woman, the more I wanted to know.
Madeleine Blais is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her book Queen of the Court: The Many Lives of Tennis Legend Alice Marble will be out from Atlantic Monthly Press beginning August 15
