The Lost Loves of Suzanne Lenglen

I recently saw a PBS airing of the "American Masters" documentary about tennis champion Billie Jean King. The biography naturally leads up to her "Battle of the Sexes" match with Bobbie Riggs in the 1960's. In the course of recounting all the hoopla connected with that match, the film writers/directors (of which King is herself one) repeatedly suggest that the match served to finally bring women's tennis to the forefront as an interesting, box-office-worthy sport. They imply that always before, women's tennis had been in the shadows, a poor second cousin to men's playing. There had never been much interest or legitimacy granted to women's tennis before King's match with Riggs put it on the map.

What!!? That kind of amnesia, especially on the part of King herself, astounded me. Because of a personal association I’ll tell more about later – I was fairly certain that women's tennis had in fact been one of the most wildly popular spectator sports in the early part of the 20^th century, outstripping the men’s activities in many ways. To confirm my impression on this score, I bought a book entitled The Goddess and the American Girl by Larry Engelmann. That sounds a bit like a comic book title, but it’s actually a very good, authoritative account of the careers of 1920's tennis champions Suzanne Lenglen (pronounced like a nasalized "long-glong") and Helen Wills.

The author didn’t himself know who Lenglen was much before he got drawn into the project of chronicling her life. He tells how in his 1960’s college English class, he had been assigned Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises as reading homework. In those pages, he came across a line describing one of the protagonists as "wanting to win as hard as Lenglen." Engelmann asked the teacher who or what a "Lenglen" was? The teacher had no idea. Other students had also vaguely wondered - but none of them had the slightest idea either, and no one was then inspired to research the matter. It remained a mystery until some years later when the author of the eventual "Goddess” was re-reading Hemingway. He came across the passage again and this time his curiosity was really piqued. He looked up "Lenglen" - and this whole treasure trove of history was opened up to him.

Lenglen was the French/European star who drew throngs of fans to all her matches. She was a sort of female Michael Jordan. Her leaps, pirouettes, and dancing returns, were said to be superhuman, beyond belief. Helen Wills was America's champion. Both of these women had followings that exceeded those of the male tennis stars of the day, such as Bill Tilden. Screaming, imploring fans dogged their every step.

The real worldwide hysteria started to build though as everyone anticipated a match between Lenglen and Wills. This was more than a "Battle of the Sexes." It was a "Battle of the Nations" - a "War of the Worlds." People everywhere saw it as a pitting of the old European Machiavellianism against the common, steady, democratic decency of America. Notables came from all over to cover the event. James Thurber and a myriad of other writers and reporters came from the U.S. Spain sent their most popular, award-winning author, Vicente Ibanez (of Blood and Sand fame). Hemingway was probably there, although he wasn't yet such a notable.

When the two women faced each other in Cannes, in 1926 - crowds queued up around the block hoping to wrangle a seat inside somehow. People climbed the palm trees outside the court to get a view, and gendarmes comically (and generally unsuccessfully) climbed up after them, trying to grapple-hook them down to the ground. Residents of the surrounding villas rented their premises to eager gawkers. Some homeowners removed the tiles from their roofs so they could jam more paying customers in to poke their heads out, like gophers, between the beams of the attics.

To sum up - Lenglen won. But it was a hard-fought, brilliant game - rightfully dubbed "The Game of the Century." Newspapers all over the world, from London to Melbourne to Timbuktu, and everywhere in-between, carried the headline on February 16 - "Lenglen Wins!"

But it seems that now almost everyone has forgotten about Lenglen and Wills. The success of these two women and numerous other female tennis stars of the 20’s, has faded into history. Billie Jean King is now considered the one to have broken the gender barrier – to have made women’s tennis a media-worthy event. Well, I myself would have been oblivious to the earlier pioneers of women’s sports - if it hadn’t been for a personal experience my mother had with Suzanne Lenglen. My mother was one of the very few people, and probably the only tennis novice, ever to beat Lenglen.

It happened in the early 30's, after Lenglen had gone professional. My mother and her first husband, Norman, were in Canada to view some motor boat races on Lake Ontario. Norman was an executive with Valvoline then and in fact had invented the advertising slogan the Company used for decades for their motor oil - "Valvoline - Friction's Foremost Foe."

While they were there, Norman saw an opportunity to enter a charity tennis match that was being held. It was one of those “All-Comers” matches that gives average men (or women) the chance to get bragging rights. “I went a round with Joe Lewis; I pitched to Ernie Banks.” In this case, Suzanne Lenglen had consented to be one of the superstar champions to play against plucky amateurs.

Both my mother and Norman had been dabblers in the game. Neither one ever practiced or had any serious ambition to win at anything. However, Norman had in fact often won, even some of the more official games he’d played in in the past. He’d won without much trying, largely on the basis of height. He was 6’4” and fit.

Just as a telling digression - I oddly enough don’t think I heard any talk about the advantage that height gives a person in the game of tennis when the King/Riggs match was pending and people were debating whether or not women could seriously play against men. All my feminist friends stoutly maintained they could, that it was only the world’s naysaying that deflated women’s aspirations and their willingness to even try. As much of an advocate for women’s rights as I have always been though, I somewhat doubted that appeal to the power of pumped-up self-confidence. My mother had told me about the easy advantage Norman had gained just by being tall. He could slam down his serves with shattering impact from a promontory that is just not available to an average woman standing not much over five-feet. So Norman held his serves – and won game after game.

However my mother had nothing going for her – neither hubris nor height. I’m sure she must have rued her husband’s signing her up for what would surely be an embarrassing trouncing. He had likely done so without her knowledge. But the day came, and her turn came – to face the mighty Suzanne Lenglen, the unbeatable "Goddess" of the Riviera, of Wimbledon, of the Olympics, of all she surveyed. My mother padded out onto the court to what could only be swift defeat and dispatch.

Indeed the first few points did go easily, automatically to Lenglen. It was obvious that my mother was out there unarmed - without any native ability, any plan, any practice. Lenglen must have wondered why such a complete tennis nonentity was wasting her time - even for charity.

But as the result of a fluke here and there, or perhaps as the result of Lenglen’s over-confidence -my mother made a couple of fairly decent returns in succession and actually pulled ahead in the score. Then the miracle. Lenglen sent an angry, seemingly unreturnable ball spinning over the net. My mother fell toward it, making one last-ditch effort. She stumbled, lurched – and with her racket being used more to break her fall than to attempt a return, the extended paddle actually made stunning contact with the ball. Pursuing some incalculable trajectory, the ball went flying to the far corner of Lenglen’s court. Lenglen couldn't get it. My mother won the game.

Lenglen threw her racket to the ground, and yelled, “Well I’ll be God damned!” Known for her diva fits of temper, she glowered frighteningly at my mother, then stalked off the court to regroup before meeting her next challenger.

My mother had won a rare triumph. Surely though, that one misstep in an obscure charity game could in no way have tarnished Lenglen’s reputation as a superhuman star. Her name continued to be bruited about for a few more years – but then she oddly disappeared from the public mind, as suddenly as if she and all her Olympian accomplishments had dropped off a cliff - as if she and her co-stars had become the targets of the kind of erasure and historical eradication committed by the minions of Orwell’s 1984 regime. While most people who have even the remotest interest in sports continue to recall the names of male sports greats of the early 1900’s – figures such as Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Bobby Jones, and Jack Dempsey – virtually no one recalls Lenglen. None of the commentators who surrounded the King/Riggs match, and none of the participants themselves, as far as I could hear - brought up her name. So it seems that even when women win – they lose – or, at least, people lose sight of them.

However Lenglen’s name remained alive in my house as I was growing up. We were a tiny island of remembrance of her.

The financial trials of the Depression took a toll on my mother’s first marriage. She and Norman divorced. A decade or so later on, my mother met the man who would be my father. After they married, her life veered too much into drudgery, far away from the golden days of motor boat racing and suites at Toronto’s Royal George Hotel. Now she became melded into my father’s dream of owning his own mailing/printing business. With hardly any starting capital, they bought machinery that even in the 1940’s was already antiquated. My mother became tied to operating these machines – typing, addressing envelopes, stamping, stuffing – through long nights. She had Franklin McCormack and Jack Eigen to keep her company on the radio.

But sometimes, even when the radio was silent and there was nothing to entertain my mother, I would see a secret, slightly triumphant smile spread across her face. I thought then that perhaps she might be casting back in time, away from her present tedium - back to that startling, unimaginable dash of a day – that day she beat the unbeatable Suzanne Lenglen.