Providing a dose of dignity and celebrity, the seventy-two-year-old queen mother perched in the royal box, “a large enclosure, seating fifty persons, with armchairs in the front row.” Alice Marble and her opponent stood side by side and performed, in unison, a bow, in the style of a page boy, in the queen’s direction. Among her guests were Joseph Kennedy Sr., the ambassador from the United States to the Court of St. James’s, bespectacled, with a ready grin and a bouncing gait, and his wife, Rose, the youthful dark-haired mother of nine.
Marble’s measured manner as she traveled to Centre Court contrasted with her headlong dash as a child toward the public courts at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, not far from her house. After playing for hours, she would return to her home “at the center of two very high hills” in the Sunset District. Sixty steps took her from the bottom of the yard to the lofty elevation of the front door. How often she had bounded up and down, two steps at a time, especially when she had forgotten something—her baseball mitt, her beanie, her kid brother, Tim, at one point almost a permanent appendage.
Now at the height of her powers as one of the most decorated athletes of her day, Alice Marble carried herself like a movie star: gorgeous outfits, a love of the spotlight, a side job as a torch singer. More than one person has observed that she was the human equivalent of Seabiscuit, the racehorse that won the hearts of so many Americans in the same era. Her ups and downs during the Great Depression fed the public’s need for color in a world that was all too black and white. Newspapers in the most remote sections of the country ran wire-service stories extolling her accomplishments. In both 1939 and 1940, the Associated Press named her female athlete of the year.
She was called “the girl who has everything” in a book by Charlotte Himber, Famous in Their Twenties: “If the tennis champion had never played a game in her life Alice Marble would nevertheless have been included in one of those lists that organizations draw up annually of famous people. First of all, she is good to look at, with her golden crown of hair cut in the latest vagabond style, her large green-tinted eyes with the slightly overhanging lids, her pert nose, and her husky, endearing voice. She speaks like a delighted child breaking often into a wide, warm smile that makes one cheek dimple. She has a crisp, tingling quality.” Magazines predicted a glorious future in film: “A Tennis Tumble Bug Becomes a Hollywood Oomph Girl.” In the bloated language of a promotional brochure for a tour, she was hailed as a combination of “Joan D’Arc, Victoria Regina and Helen of Troy.”
An early avatar of the pressures and rewards attached to the public woman, she was a female with the gall and ability to make a name for herself, such that she could ride the gale force of her celebrity even after her athletic star faded into various new roles: pundit, fashion maven, book author, columnist, and sought-after public speaker. If Marble felt any misgivings or bitterness about having donated some essential component of her selfhood to her admirers as a form of entertainment, she rarely expressed it.
Born in 1913 on an isolated farm, Marble spent her early years on the frontier before moving to San Francisco, a city then in rapid transition. Her young womanhood in her twenties reflected America between the wars and the extremes of wealth in that time. Tennis offered her temporary membership in the upper class via transcontinental rail travel, ocean crossings, big band dinner dances, and impeccable service at grand hotels. After the Second World War put an end to her tennis career, she enjoyed a freedom of expression and movement not experienced by many women before her time. Marble had her share of secrets, including the exact details about her relationship with her mentor and coach, Eleanor “Teach” Tennant, whose hold over her protégée verged on a kind of ownership. Questions abound about her friendship with the patron who saw to it that Marble would never sink into poverty for as long as he lived and beyond. Details of her biography spin out in unexpected directions. Two major events, a romance and a heroic mission, may have been fantasies. Smaller, less consequential contradictions weave in and out. She liked to embellish, and the question is not so much in what ways she gilded the lily but why.
The brilliance of Marble’s tennis at her peak has never been in doubt. Martina Navratilova called her “a pioneer” and “the first woman to serve and volley well.” Althea Gibson said, “She was my idol.” In her 1990 obituary, the New York Times quoted Jack Kramer, the United States champion in 1946 and 1947, winner of men’s singles at Wimbledon in 1947, known above all for establishing the open era in American tennis for men: “She was the lady who most changed the style of play for women. She introduced the aggressive and athletic style that has led down to the female stars of today like Billie Jean King, Martina Navratilova and Steffi Graf.”
Billie Jean King, Marble’s most famous pupil, admired her on many levels, calling her, in the same obituary, a “picture of unrestrained athleticism. She is remembered as one of the greatest women to play the game because of her pioneering style in power tennis. I also admired her tremendously because she always helped others.”
Marble changed the game of women’s tennis, turning it from a baseline-clinging endeavor into an all-court spectacle, but perhaps her greatest contribution was as a leader in civil rights. Marble influenced the future of tennis when she wrote an editorial in American Lawn Tennis magazine in 1950 (see appendix for full text), successfully urging integration, welcoming Althea Gibson first and foremost. A statue of Gibson has greeted visitors to the US Open in Forest Hills, Queens, New York, since 2019. During its unveiling, older fans shared stories of how thrilling it had been to see Gibson play.
Alice Marble faded from view long before her death, in 1990, at the age of seventy-seven, replaced by younger players with their own signature shots and their own compelling personalities, yet her story, if anything, has become more intriguing, not less, over the years.
Grove Press
Atlantic Monthly Press
