A courtly tennis queen, Alice Marble, comes to life

In my early years working at The Buffalo News, our managing editor, Foster Spencer, had an expression for a human-interest story he thought was worthy of the front page. He called it a “hey, Martha” story, one that a guy reading the paper would want to tell his wife about.

A new book about the 20th century tennis star Alice Marble delivers so many “hey, Martha” stories, I don’t know how the author, Madeleine Blais, decided where to begin. (My wife, whose name is Allison, is tired of hearing these tales, as well as curious about why I keep calling her Martha.)

Marble, who learned the game on public courts in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, won 18 major championship titles – five in singles, six in women’s doubles and seven in mixed doubles. Her power game was frequently compared to the way men played. To use a 1980s reference, her game was more like Martina Navratilova than Chris Evert.

Besides conquering the tennis world in the 1930s and ‘40s, Marble was an accomplished singer, a friend to celebrities such as Carole Lombard and Clark Gable, and eventually a radio broadcaster, sportswear designer, a magazine columnist and the author-editor of a dozen “Wonder Women” comic books.

Marble also played an important role in helping to democratize tennis by standing up for Althea Gibson, who in 1950 became the first African American to play in the national grass-court championship in Forest Hills, a year before breaking the color barrier at Wimbledon. Gibson would become the first Black player to win the French Open, Wimbledon and U.S. Open singles championships.

Marble, whose writing appeared frequently in American Lawn Tennis magazine, wrote an editorial there in July 1950 stating that Gibson should be allowed to play in the U.S. National Championships, now known as the U.S. Open. Gibson had been unable to meet the qualifications of making a strong showing in other prominent East Coast tournaments. Those were all invitationals, and Gibson had not been invited.

“If tennis is a sport for ladies and gentlemen,” wrote Marble, “it’s also time we acted a little more like gentlepeople and less like sanctimonious hypocrites…. If Althea Gibson represents a challenge to the present crop of women players, it's only fair that they should meet that challenge on the courts." …. If she is refused a chance to succeed or to fail, then there is an ineradicable mark against a game to which I have devoted most of my life.”

Gibson was admitted to the tournament, a historic moment that Marble played an enormous role in. Marble and Gibson became longtime friends.

Billie Jean King, who knew Marble and was coached by her as a 15-year-old (CHECK), has written that Marble’s advocacy for Gibson carried the same significance as when Brooklyn Dodgers shortstop Pee Wee Reese put his arm around Jackie Robinson as a show of support in front of fans in Cincinnati. (There’s a disagreement about whether the incident took place in Robinson’s first Dodgers season, 1947, or his second.)

Blais, who won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 1980, covers a lot of ground in recounting the many and varied phases of Marble’s life and career. There have been other Marble biographies published, including Marble’s own account of her life, “Courting Danger,” but the depths of Blais’ research is apparent in “Queen of the Court.”

When Marble had passed her prime as a player, she missed the attention, and took steps to stay in the public eye. One example was her claim to have worked as a spy for the U.S. government during World War II. Blais documents facts that contradict Marble’s claims. Blais also demonstrates doubts over Marble’s claims to have married a soldier who was killed in World War II and her adoption of a boy who was killed in a car crash.

Marble had romantic relationships with men and women, including a platonic one with Will du Pont, a member of Delaware’s wealthy du Pont family. There were suspicions throughout Marble’s life that she had a romance with her longtime tennis coach, Eleanor “Teach” Tennant, but Blais finds no corroboration.

Blais’ documentation of Marble’s tennis career occasionally gets bogged down in too much detail, as when reporting every score of her matches in a given tournament, including many exhibitions. But the reader learns to skim over those and get back to the stories’ rich details.

Marble’s name is not as well-known as other early tennis luminaries, including Billie Jean King, Althea Gibson, Margaret Court or even the French star Suzanne Lenglen. I hope this book changes that.

sportsliterate.com · September 22, 2024

Extremely well researched and presented.

I didn't know anything about tennis champion Alice Marble prior to reading this book though I had heard of some of her contemporaries. The section when Alice is winning all the major championships gets a little bogged down with all the match summaries and box scores. Her athletic career was cut short due to World War II. She spent the rest of her life hustling to make ends meet in public speaking, coaching clinics, and tennis club culture.

Since Alice is such an unreliable narrator, even in her two memoir/autobiographies, it's hard to find the truth in almost anything except those box scores. But boy, she sure can tell a good tale! I can imagine she was fantastic to hear at a ladies' luncheon back in the day.

*Thank you for the advance reader copy of this book from Grove Atlantic and Netgalley. I am required to disclose that in my review in compliance with federal law.

I did quite enjoy reading this book mainly because I am a tennis fan. However I don't know if I have overdone it on the biography front recently this is the 4th one I have read recently ,and I think I need to change genres for a while as this one was my least favourite .It was okay but didn't really grab me .

Alice Marble was one of the first celebrity champions in women’s tennis. This biography explores her career, her improbable rise from a working class background in an era when tennis was the provenance of the wealthy, her experiences among the rich and famous, her part time work as singer, actor and writer and the influence she had on changing the status of women athletes. It is also an interesting story of the origins of tennis. Tennis fans will find this book full of technical and behind the scenes descriptions of Marbles matches. For non-tennis fans, less play by play would have made it a better book.

A truly diligent, informative, and interesting biography Madeleine Blais, the US-based journalist and author, has written on Alice Marble, one of the first professional female tennis players of our times. And make no mistake: this is not a book for sports buffs, only. Sure, Alice Marble, from a modest San Francisco home, was an exceptional athlete, who started her career at a time, when tennis – as compared to (American) football and other „real sports“ was considered an activity for „sissies“, and maybe for „gals“, who wanted to spend some time moving in fresh air. Because, while tennis was considered a noble activity for the rich on green grass at the US East Coast, Californian West Coast kids just went to the park with their rackets to play, like Alice did in the Golden Gate Park. Blaise tells us Alice Marble’s life story and offers at the same time an abundant panorama of the period. She tackles issues like class (Marble’s dedication to the young and disadvantaged prodigies from poor families, like her own), race (Marble‘s support for Althea Gibson), gender (Marble’s fight for the same pay for female tennis pros), and the discriminatory, classicist and anti-female politics of major sports federations, including the US National Lawn Tennis Association and its very own agenda. We read about the discrimination of queer athletes in times, when you clearly risked your career by coming out (or being pushed out) of the closet as a gay or lesbian. A very topical book, actually. With at least as many footnotes as Alice Marble’s trophies (750, according to Blaise). We learn a lot by reading this testimony of a time that covers almost the whole 20th century – wars and cold war included. We learn a lot about how power tennis and professional tours and tournaments came about in this discipline, about what happened in the US and the European tennis world, about the early years of Wimbledon and the other Grand Slam events. And if we maybe only ever had heard of Suzanne Lenglen (an idol, when Marble started playing tennis) or Billie Jean King (whom Marble once trained) before, we now get a chance to meet many more famous women, who played this great game between the 1920s and the 1950s (and later). Alice Marble was born in 1913, was at the top of her career and fame in 1939 and carried on (as coach or sponsor of young talents) until 1990. She was a feminist (even before that word was used), and lived many years from the donations and gifts of a very generous billionaire whom she never married, although he would have loved too, and she died very poor. She was the most decorated woman in tennis in her time. And “she gloried in being the center of attention”, as Martina Navratilova’s ex-partner Rita Mae Brown (remember Rubyfruit Jungle?) once said about her. At the end of her book, just before the very long annex of endnotes, Madeleine Blais adds a chapter about the doubts and inconsistencies in Alice Marble’s lifestory, as told by herself or in anecdotes reported by others, and as written down in her two autobiographies Road to Wimbledon and Courting Danger. Well, here's your careful investigative reporter at work. I mostly skipped the “corrections”, because I felt that after reading the book I have got an excellent idea of an outstanding woman and athlete, even if not every detail of her life as told in Queen of the Court is true. I am usually not a biography reader, but I am very much into tennis, and I liked this biography a lot. Thank you netgalley for having made it available to me in exchange for a fair review.