Crazy Salad and Scribble Scribble (17 page)

It all began a little over two years ago, when former Wimbledon champion Bobby Riggs made a few derogatory comments about women’s tennis in
Sports Illustrated
and issued a challenge to Billie Jean King: “You insist that top women players provide a brand of tennis comparable to men’s. I challenge you to prove it. I contend
that you not only cannot beat a top male player but that you can’t beat me, a tired old man.” As it happens, Billie Jean King did not say precisely that; what she did say was that women’s tennis was more entertaining than men’s, and that women deserved equal prize money. “Women play about twenty-five percent as good as men,” Riggs countered, “so they should get about twenty-five percent of the money men receive.” Nothing much came of Riggs’s initial challenge, but this year Tony Trabert, the pro at San Diego Country Estates, prodded Riggs to try again, and after Mrs. King turned him down, he sent telegrams challenging six other top women players and offering $5,000 of his own money and $5,000 put up by the land-development corporation to the winner. Margaret Court was first to respond. “I’d still rather play Billie Jean,” Riggs said later, “because she’s really the ringleader of the liberation movement. She’s the revolutionary. Margaret Court is such a nice person—I don’t want to say by contrast.” Margaret Court, thirty years old, Australian, mother of a fourteen-month-old boy, is such a nice person by contrast that she doesn’t even think women deserve the same prize money as men. “I don’t feel there’s a depth in the women’s game,” she said. “There are so many good men. There are only six or eight good women. If you have a thirty-two-draw tournament, you’re going to give some youngster a thousand dollars to lose in the first round, and she doesn’t deserve it. I don’t think it’s good for the game. The money will come. The depth will come. At the moment, we’re rushing it a little.”

Margaret Court trained for the match in Berkeley, working out quietly with her coach, a South African named Dennis Van der Meer. Occasionally reporters
would come to the court for an interview and she would reluctantly grant one. Her answers were short and genteel; she was visibly uncomfortable with the press. “Margaret really doesn’t enjoy this,” her husband, Barry, would explain. Meanwhile, every day, Riggs played five sets, jogged two miles, swallowed 415 vitamin pills, and gave out interviews. Hundreds of interviews. Any reporter who called or showed up got more than he came for. “This is so much fun,” Riggs said during one interview, “that I wish it were postponed so we could go on like this another six weeks.”

By the weekend of the match, Riggs had worked his remarks into a finely honed performance, with set lines that varied only slightly from press conference to press conference. “This,” he would announce, in a wonderfully unsyntactical sentence, “is the match of the century between the battle of the sexes.” When even that description seemed inadequate, he would shout, “This is the most important match ever played in tennis!” After the match, he concluded at the top of his lungs that he had just played the most significant sporting event of all time. He would stand, or sit, surrounded by sports reporters, and spin a simple question into a thirty-minute monologue, inserting rhetorical questions to stretch it out, waving his copper bracelet in the air for a plug or dropping in a remark about “beautiful San Diego Country Estates.” The delivery would begin slowly, usually with his old-person routine (“I’m a fifty-five-year-old man with one foot in the grave”), heavily studded with a series of impotence jokes (“The flesh won’t do what the mind tells it to,” and “Why shouldn’t they let me into the women’s tournaments—everyone knows there’s no sex after fifty-five”). Then Riggs would build, gradually,
ignore interrupting questions, pitch his high voice even higher, and suddenly he would be speaking so quickly that no one could quite get it down or get a word in. A typical Riggs monologue, this one recorded in the
Los Angeles Times
, went like this:

“It’s pretty fantastic to think I am playing the match of the century and the battle of the sexes. This match is going to be more important than the Wimbledon, Forest Hills, or a fifty-thousand-dollar match between Laver and Rosewall. Why? Because Margaret Court is carrying the banner for women all over the world and I’m carrying the banner for all the old guys who have always felt superior to women, and they’ll want to see an old guy win because then they’ll feel superior, too, and I’ll be doing a very good thing for all the men all over the world and they won’t give in to the women’s lib quite so easily. She’s got twenty-five years on me. She’s bigger, stronger, more agile. She’s got better shots. Does everything better on a tennis court. She’s the best woman player in the world. What’s she going to do if she can’t even beat a fifty-five-year-old guy with one foot in the grave? What are people going to think of women’s tennis after that? She’s going to have a lot of pressure on her. I love tension. Not that there will be that much on me. I thrive—I have always played my best under tension. Whereas just the opposite is true with her. We’re going to be playing in front of the biggest audience ever to see a tennis match, right here at San Diego Country Estates.”

It was difficult to distinguish how much of Riggs’s remarks were put on, how much mere hysteria, and how much utterly sincere babble, but I finally concluded after hearing the routine some two dozen times that underneath all that surface male chauvinism was heartfelt
male chauvinism, heightened, in this case, by Riggs’s bitterness toward open tennis.

All the older men tennis players are dismayed that open tennis, with its huge prize money, came too late for them to take advantage of it. That women are playing open tennis, too, and in some cities even beginning to outdraw the men’s tour, that a player like Margaret Court can earn $100,000 a year—this is almost more than a man like Riggs can bear. Instead of playing in high-stakes tournaments, Riggs has been forced in the past twenty-five years to play the kind of tennis he really prefers, hustling opponents with poodles tied to his legs, umbrellas and suitcases in hand, top hat on his head.

Stories of Riggs’s hustling have been legendary in the sports world, and the press managed to dredge most of them up again for this match. What few in the press realized, though, was that they were being conned at least as cleverly as Mrs. Court. Eighteen of the twenty-four reporters covering the match picked Margaret Court to win, most of them in straight sets. Explanations of sentimentality and sheer stupidity aside, the reason for all this faulty judgment had mainly to do with the amazing total performance Riggs put on the week before the match. Whenever the press watched him practice, he played well under his game. Whenever he was interviewed, he discoursed at length on his failing strength. He spent days fighting for a lightweight ball, lost in a flip he referred to as “the flip of the century,” and spent days sulking about how the weight of the balls would permanently cripple his game. After the match, of course, he confessed he had wanted the heavy-duty balls all along and had just made the fuss to throw Mrs. Court off.

The scene over the weight of the balls was just one of
several incidents that served to cloud the already murky male-female issues. Most men would have wanted to flip for heavy-duty balls, while women prefer lightweight ones; Riggs uses the lighter aluminum racket while Court plays with wood; Riggs’s game is all lobs and slices and spins and twists, while Court plays the serve-and-volley technique favored by strong male players. What happened as a result was that the press covering the match, all of whom were male except for me, became far more interested and threatened by the women’s liberation implications of the relationship between Margaret Court and her husband than by the totally confusing implications of the match itself.

“Look at that,” one reporter said to me, pointing to Barry Court, who was carrying the Courts’ young son Danny. “He always carries the baby. Margaret never carries the baby.” In fact, Mrs. Court carried the baby as often as her husband did when she was off court; this was never registered by the press, who persisted in referring to Barry Court, a tall Australian who manages his wife’s career, as “the baby-sitter.” Sunday night, after Mrs. Court had been trounced by Riggs, I was walking back to my room and bumped into Brent Musberger of CBS. “Do you know who the real winner of today’s match was?” he asked. Yes, I thought, I know exactly who the real winner was. Bobby Riggs. That, however, was obviously not the answer Musberger was going for. “Who?” I asked. “Barry Court,” he replied. “What are you talking about?” I asked. “It’s simple,” he explained. “Now she’ll really need him. Now she’ll really have to depend on him.” The notion that Mrs. Court’s defeat by a male would somehow alter her relationship with her husband—who has been married to her for six years and presumably came to terms with
the bargain at least that long ago—seemed a peculiarly male fantasy. On the other hand, it may be my peculiarly feminist fantasy to believe that Barry Court is happy in his life.

And finally, there was the match. No point in dwelling too long on that. Riggs bounced down to the court in a sky-blue workout suit that looked like a pair of Doctor Dentons; he presented his opponent with a bouquet of twenty-four roses that were arranged exactly like a funeral spray. Margaret Court appeared in a specially designed yellow-and-green tennis dress with the word “Margaret” stitched into its high collar; it was exactly the sort of dress Queen Elizabeth would choose to play tennis in. The match began, and by the time the first three games were over, Riggs was in total control: his lovely lollipop game and his psych-out had Margaret blowing her first serves, failing to rush the net, missing shots she had no business missing. “She’s just not bright enough,” said the man next to me, who happened to be Pancho Segura. The match ended with Riggs winning 6–2, 6–1. “I played awful,” said Mrs. Court afterward. “He hit softer than many of the girls I’ve been playing. I couldn’t get my timing. It was one of the worst matches I’ve played in a long long time.” In the end, Margaret provided a perfect illustration of Radcliffe president Matina Horner’s thesis on women fearing success. About the only thing she failed to do was cry.

And we were left with Bobby Riggs. Margaret Court went off to her room—the baby was sick, her husband explained—and Riggs held the press conference alone. Two hours later, when I left San Diego Country Estates, he was still talking. He was planning to enter the Virginia Slims tournament and would even consider wearing
a dress. He was knocking women’s tennis. He was contemplating a match against Billie Jean King.
^*
“Tell her she has to play for fifty thousand dollars a side,” he said. “And she’s got to put up the money. I’m not putting up any more free shots. I’ve done enough for these women.” He was describing the last-minute bets he had made and won. He was plugging his vitamin pills and waving his copper bracelet. He was pumping for senior tennis. “The girls say they should get as much money as men,” he was saying. “Well, if girls should get as much as men, us seniors should get as much as the girls. Look at this. One of the best woman players beaten by a fifty-five-year-old guy with one foot in the grave.” Every so often, you turn a corner and Life, or the times, or the public-relations mechanism that makes the world go round throws out a hero you have to live with for a while.

September, 1973

Eleven years ago, shortly after I came to New York, I met a young man named Victor Navasky. Victor was trying relentlessly at that point to start a small humor magazine called
Monocle
, and there were a lot of meetings. Some of them were business meetings, I suppose; I don’t remember them. The ones I do remember were pure social occasions, and most of them took place at the Algonquin Hotel. Every Tuesday at 6 p.m., we would meet for drinks there and sit around pretending to be the Algonquin Round Table. I had it all worked out: Victor got to be Harold Ross, Bud Trillin and C. D. B. Bryan alternated at Benchley, whoever was fattest and grumpiest got to be Alexander Woollcott. I, of course, got to be Dorothy Parker. It was all very heady, and very silly, and very self-conscious. It was also very boring, which disturbed me. Then Dorothy Parker, who was living in Los Angeles, gave a seventieth-birthday interview to the Associated Press, an interview I have always thought of as the beginning of the Revisionist School of Thinking on the Algonquin Round Table, and she said that it, too, had been boring. Which made me feel a whole lot better.

I had never really known Dorothy Parker at all. My
parents, who were screenwriters, knew her when I was a child in Hollywood, and they tell me I met her at several parties where I was trotted out in pajamas to meet the guests. I don’t remember that, and neither, I suspect, did Dorothy Parker. I met her again briefly when I was twenty. She was paying a call on Oscar Levant, whose daughter I grew up with. She was frail and tiny and twinkly, and she shook my hand and told me that when I was a child I had had masses of curly black hair. As it happens, it was my sister Hallie who had had masses of curly black hair. So there you are.

None of which is really the point. The point is the legend. I grew up on it and coveted it desperately. All I wanted in this world was to come to New York and be Dorothy Parker. The funny lady. The only lady at the table. The woman who made her living by her wit. Who wrote for
The New Yorker
. Who always got off the perfect line at the perfect moment, who never went home and lay awake wondering what she ought to have said because she had said exactly what she ought to have. I was raised on Dorothy Parker lines. Some were unbearably mean, and some were sad, but I managed to fuzz those over and remember the ones I loved. My mother had a first-rate Parker story I carried around for years. One night, it seems, Dorothy Parker was playing anagrams at our home with a writer named Sam Lauren. Lauren had just made the word “currie,” and Dorothy Parker insisted there was no such spelling. A great deal of scrapping ensued. Finally, my mother said she had some curry in the kitchen and went to get it. She returned with a jar of Crosse & Blackwell currie and showed it to Dorothy Parker. “What do they know?” said Parker. “Look at the way they spell Crosse.”