Sport: Career Woman

Before rounding off his life with an autobiography and beginning to haggle with a publisher, many a great man waits until he nears three score and ten. Last week Mrs. Helen Wills Moody of San Francisco published her autobiography. Fifteen-Thirty*—15 for the age when she won her first National championship (junior), 30 for the age when she began to write her book.

Helen Wills began playing tennis during the War when her father, a Berkeley, Calif, physician, went to a French base hospital and left his 15-ounce racquet behind him. A pigtailed, direct little girl, she took it for granted from the start that winning was synonymous with trying. She did not revise that assumption until she was 16 and found herself facing the great Moila Bjurstedt Mallory in the final for the U. S. Singles Championship at Forest Hills. Hard-driving Mrs. Mallory won in straight sets. Next year Helen Wills played in all the major preliminary tournaments in the East and when Forest Hills, the final and Mrs. Mallory came around again, she recaptured her assurance by winning in straight sets. To celebrate she had pastry and three cups of chocolate for breakfast.

From then on a confirmed and even relentless careerist. Tennist Wills found the University of California an irrelevant interlude until she heard about Phi Beta Kappa. Then she ascertained “what average was necessary” and for three years did just enough work, in between tournaments, to win her key. “Pride,” reflects Autobiographer Wills, “. . . gave way to a much colder thing. Ambition.” Other Wills revelations:

¶ She never enjoyed meeting players whose games she had not mastered, always hoped that they would be put out of tournaments by someone whom she could beat.

¶ She refuses to regard her San Francisco neighbor, Helen Jacobs (to whom she lost the National Championship in 1933 by default because of a wrenched back), as an arch rival: “She was one among other players I had met.”

¶ When George Bernard Shaw told her that tennis should be played by nude young women in the long grass of the meadows, she “tried not to let a flicker of expression cross my face.”

¶ For two years she received several letters daily from a onetime editor of the Harvard Lampoon, who wrote her that she resembled a “beautiful white horse,” but disappointingly “would wander off onto the Baconian theory.”

¶ She was flattered when Will Durant included her, along with celebrities ranging from Benito Mussolini to Mary Garden, in a sober symposium on Life. (She wrote: “For me, life is interesting, entertaining, happy, if only I can have some activity for the restlessness that is in my heart.”)

¶ She mentions Frederick Shander Moody Jr., young San Francisco broker, as following her to tournaments, climbing the Jungfrau, playing an occasional game of tennis, once making off with a basket of champagne presented by an admirer, does not indicate why she decided to obtain the divorce granted her Aug. 23.

Helen Wills Moody is still an able tennis player as she demonstrated last fortnight when she paired with Germany’s Baron Gottfried von Cramm to win the mixed doubles in the Pacific Southwest championship tournament from Mrs. John Van Ryn and Donald Budge. But “a stupid mechanical difficulty with a joint called the sacroiliac” persists and, as she recognizes by writing her autobiography, her tennis career is over. Today her career is on other courts: she paints (mostly still life), designs sport clothes and Lastex underwear, has lately taken a screen test, entertains in her duplex studio apartment on Nob Hill, surrounded by an array of lamps created out of tennis trophies.

*Scriliner’s—$3.