San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Tennis legend’s mystery life traced in new biography.
Alice Marble rose to Hall of Fame after start on public courts in S.F.
Near the crest of Russian Hill, with views that stretch to the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz, four tennis courts sit atop the covered Lombard Street Reservoir.
Half a mile upslope from the Joe DiMaggio Playground, where the baseball legend played as a boy, these courts are named for another Hall of Fame San Francisco athlete. But unlike DiMaggio, tennis player Alice Marble has largely faded from the city’s collective memory.
Marble rose to international stardom in the 1930s and eventually won 18 Grand Slam titles, including four U.S. National and one Wimbledon singles championship. But as Robert Weintraub’s compelling, entertaining and occasionally frustrating biography “The Divine Miss Marble: A Life of Tennis, Fame, and Mystery” reveals, there was much more to Alice Marble than her revolutionary attacking game that helped change women’s tennis.
Raised on a ranch in Plumas County before moving to San Francisco at age 5, Marble would grow up to be a clothing designer, singer, motivational speaker, celebrity confidant and writer, including of two biographies and a stint on the original staff of “Wonder Woman” comics.
Marble was truly a wonder woman herself, the possessor of a keen intelligence, photographic memory and an athletic grace that would entrance a series of male and female lovers alike. Weintraub quotes journalist Arthur Brisbane, who wrote, “What a girl Alice Marble is, with everything the Venus de Milo has, plus two muscular, bare, sunburned arms marvelously efficient. Her legs are like two columns of polished mahogany, bare to the knees, her figure perfect.”
She was also a survivor. Weintraub describes the harrowing rape the 15yearold Marble suffered in Golden Gate Park, as well as a seemingly endless series of setbacks she endured as an adult: financial struggles (Marble was an amateur for much of her playing career), numerous car accidents, endless illnesses and even a broken foot after an errant skateboard struck her in Palm Springs.
Oh, and Marble was shot in the back after a car chase in the Swiss Alps while she worked as a spy during World War II. Or maybe none of that ever happened — more on this later. What we do know with certainty about Marble is that she grew up on 12th Avenue in the Inner Sunset and learned tennis not on the courts that would one day bear her name, nor at some exclusive private club as was far more common in her time, but on the dusty, gray asphalt courts in Golden Gate Park.
Baseball was her real passion, and Weintraub brings alive Marble’s days as an unofficial mascot for the San Francisco Seals when she shagged flies and was introduced to the crowd at
Recreation Park as the “Little Queen of Swat.” Marble would eventually play with the boys on the Polytechnic High School Parrots baseball team before, at least as one story goes, a brother chided her for being a tomboy and suggested she take up tennis.
For all of Marble’s natural athleticism, it was Eleanor “Teach” Tennant, a legendary tennis coach and a veteran of the Golden Gate Park courts herself, who would guide Marble to greatness. Theirs was a complex relationship — professionally, financially and probably romantically — and Weintraub nicely conveys the intricacies of the bond between these two women.
In Southern California, Tennant worked as the tennis pro to the stars and helped usher Marble into a world of celebrity. Among the book’s most vivid passages are Weintraub’s accounts of Marble’s visits to Hearst Castle, where she became close to Marion Davies and partnered with William Randolph Hearst in mixed doubles.
While training in Beverly Hills with Tennant, Marble befriended Clark Gable and Carole Lombard. Weintraub writes that Marble was like a little sister to Lombard, who helped her navigate a number of crises, most notably a bout with tuberculosis that sidelined the tennis star for nearly two years. Marble bounced back and — starting with a victory in the 1936 U.S. National Championships over Helen Jacobs, another Grand Slam winner from San Francisco — Marble began a habit of giving the winning rackets she used in major events to Lombard.
There are cameos aplenty in the book. Tennant also taught Bobby Riggs, and Marble would go on to pair with the notorious hustler, who earned his greatest fame in the “battle of the sexes” matches during the 1970s; Riggs and Marble won mixed doubles titles at the U.S. Nationals and Wimbledon. After her playing career ended, she taught Billie Jean King, not to mention a surly girl who delighted in hitting balls directly at Marble: the future astronaut Sally Ride. And Marble’s 1950 article in American Lawn Tennis Magazine advocating for pioneering African American player Althea Gibson, who had been denied entry in the U.S. Nationals, helped desegregate the tournament and opened it to a woman who won five Grand Slam singles championships and earned eventual induction into the International Tennis Hall of Fame.
While the book is likely to renew interest in Marble’s enthralling story (another Marble biography by Pulitzer Prize winner Madeleine Blais is also coming out) and remains absorbing throughout, Weintraub, by his own admission, never resolves the biggest mysteries of her life, nor can he fully explain its many contradictions.
Weintraub relied on Marble’s 1946 book “The Road to Wimbledon” and 1991’s “Courting Danger: My Adventures in WorldClass Tennis, GoldenAge Hollywood, and HighStakes Spying” (cowritten with Dale Weatherman and recently rereleased and updated on Kindle) for details and a better understanding of her inner thoughts.
The problem he encountered is that these books were not necessarily consistent in their accounts. “The Road to Wimbledon,” for example, makes no mention of Marble’s work as a spy, and Weintraub’s extensive research, including Freedom of Information Act requests, also came up empty.
More frustrating are Weintraub’s unforced errors. He occasionally parachutes into the action and launches into firstperson accounts describing his quest for elusive answers about Marble, including verification of her spying and whether she had in fact been married to a pilot she said died during World War II.
Because he reaches dead ends, these side trips offer little payoff and Weintraub’s sudden appearances break the spell of Marble’s narrative. Weintraub is an able and amiable storyteller, yet the occasional clunker (“Alice was definitely bi in one regard in the early 1950s — bicoastal”) can also intrude on the flow.
In the end, whether you’re a tennis fan or an aficionado of California history, these missteps will likely feel like minor bumps along the way while you follow Marble’s journey from the windswept public courts of San Francisco to the pinnacle of her game. And if anything, the unanswered questions and contradictory details should only add to the fascination.
As Weintraub concludes, “Alice Marble may be mysterious, but she doesn’t disappoint.”
Matt Jaffe is an awardwinning journalist and author who has spent much of his career writing and reporting on the environment and culture of California, the Southwest, Mexico and Hawaii.
Robert Weintraub is an able and amiable storyteller, yet the occasional clunker can also intrude on the flow.