Robert Weintraub - The Divine Miss Marble: A Life of Tennis, Fame, and Mystery

No Better Friend

The Victory Season

The House That Ruth Built

The Swiss Alps dominated the landscape. The mountains didnt know it was 1945, or that the world was at war. Those snow-capped heights were likewise disinterested in the drama playing out far below.

On a winding mountain road, a sports car skidded around tight switchbacks, the driver, whose story this is, fighting to keep the vehicle from plunging into the distant valley below. Not far behind, another car, in hot pursuit and gaining.

The driver of the first car was an international icon, a tennis great who had won the sports most important title, the Wimbledon championship, six years before, the last time the tournament was played before World War II interfered. She was also a four-time US National champion and had accumulated every accolade worth having in the prewar era of sports. She was renowned for her oratory, her singing voice, her appearance, her style, her closeness with the elite of Hollywood and Wall Street, and her optimistic, winning personality. She had become especially famous after coming back from two years away from the sport, stricken down by disease in what had seemed the prime of her career, only to fight her way back to the top.

She was just about the last person anyone would expect to be driving for her life down a European mountain, protecting evidence of Nazi war crimes on the seat beside her, squinting into the inky blackness, afraid to slow down even if it meant a fiery death.

Soon the other car forced her to stop. There was a confrontation. The precious evidence she had stolen a short time earlier, the reason she claimed to have come to the mountains in the first place, was taken from her by force. Alice turned and ran, her breath ragged in the high elevation.

A shot rang out. A blow to the back, a burning sensation, and then, nothing.

What in the world was she doing there?

For that matter, was she really there at all?

Alice Marble was the foremost female tennis player in the years before World War II. As the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum wrote about her in its Pocket History of Champions, Womens tennis can be put into two erasbefore Alice Marble and after. She created the womens game in its aggressive, modern style. Hardly a contemporary match report or profile was written about Alice that failed to note that she played like a manthat is, her ferocious serve-and-volley style and powerhouse lan were so overwhelming that only her occasional lack of control could stop her. Using her next-level athleticism and an unreturnable serve, Alice swept to eighteen victories in what today would be called Grand Slam events, the US Nationals and Wimbledon (she never played the big tournaments in France or Australia, for monetary reasons). That number includes multiple womens and mixed doubles titles, all but one in the five-year window between 1936 and 1940. Then the war forced Alice into quite different activities.

She was an outsize figure during this time, Alice Marvel, the Garbo of Tennis Courts, the blonde bombshell of her day. She caused a stir by playing in shorts, rather than the skirts then in favor. The press was quick to remind their readers that her legs are like two columns of polished mahogany, bare to the knees, her figure perfect, as one dazzled reporter wrote. Miss Marble looks lovely even when she has just come off the court, thought the well-known English writer Charles Graves, in a typical description that focused on Alices physical presence. Few girls can do that. On the court itself you see how beautifully built she is. She walks like a prizefighter.

But Alice was just as famous for the times when she was looking and feeling far from her best. A series of illnesses led to a collapse on the historic red clay of Roland-Garros stadium in Paris, which culminated in a diagnosis of tuberculosis that seemed to swerve her budding career into an abutment. Sidelined and committed to a sanitorium, she was forgotten for nearly two years, until a dramatic comeback lifted her to the very top. Her revival to capture victory at the 1936 US National Championships lifted Alice to new heights of popularity, at one stage receiving roughly five hundred fan letters a day from admirers who asked her for health tips, relationship advice, or her hand in marriage.

Her combination of on-court excellence and off-court style had her greatly in demand and opened up many doors. She was a regular on radio programs, as an interviewee, as a guest host, and as a singer, where her contralto voice won enough plaudits that she was asked to sing at posh nightclubs in New York and London. Her writing ability was outstanding, especially for someone who gave up a college education for the courts. She contributed pieces to newspapers and magazines with great frequency, and even was part of the original writing staff for the Wonder Woman comic book. She developed a speech based on her will to win and relentlessly toured the country to deliver it. Her eye for fashion and love of sporting it led to a side career as a designer of athletic outfits as well as clothes made for everyday use.

A natural athlete such as womens tennis had never seen, Alice had risen from humble beginnings in San Francisco to conquer the sport of royalty. Her father passed away when she was still a child, and the family lived on the edge of poverty thereafter.