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Message. Break up long thoughts into shorter paragraphs: [QUOTE="Fading Fast, post: 1960435, member: 213782"][ATTACH=full]48997[/ATTACH]The Divine Miss Marble: A Life of Tennis, Fame and Mystery by Robert WeintraubAlice Marble might be the most-famous twentieth-century athlete that almost no one today has heard of. She is a tennis great with a long list of 1930s National titles who, also, sang at famous nighclubs and on the radio, overcame tuberculosis in the middle of her career, was bi-sexual when it was neither chic nor easy, edited early Wonder Woman comics and boldly used her fame and pen to open tennis up for black athletes. Oh, and she might have been a spy in World War II.But before all that, Alice Marble was born in 1913 into a hardscrabble Northern California farming family who fortunately moved to San Francisco when Alice was six, thus giving her exposure and access to municipal tennis courts. However, even prior to taking up her life-defining game, her preternatural athletic skills revealed themselves early as, by fourteen, tomboy Alice was shagging practice flies for the local professional baseball team the San Francisco Seals.But it was on those pedestrian city-sponsored tennis courts where Alice found her future in an amateur sport that favored wealthy kids with early access to good equipment, courts, coaching and sponsorship. All things that young Alice lacked. A book could be written about the craziness, at least to our modern-day perspective, of amateur sports. While it might sound noble on paper - athletes pursuing excellence for the love of the game, not money - the most salient feature of amateur sports is that it keeps the money away from the athletes who generate it. So even superstar amateur athletes, unless independently wealthy, need to scrounge for sponsorship and outside work.During her career, Alice wound up with an interestingly eclectic but uncertain mix of sponsorship and work that ran the gamut from occasionally being her coach's secretary to a modestly successful effort as a nightclub and radio singer owing to her genuine vocal talent and tennis stardom. That she headlined at the Waldorf Hotel in New York City, when that was a thing, tells you she had some singing chops to compliment her tennis fame.But she only achieved that tennis fame, like every elite athlete, by overcoming several obstacles with some combination of arrant grit, passionate drive, out-sized talent and timely serendipity. And Alice had more than her share of obstacles - lack of funds, lack of coaching, lack of guidance and a crushing early career illness (the aforementioned tuberculosis). But she did have an, overall, supportive family with older brothers who, despite limited means themselves, early on came through with funds at critical times as did, later, wealthy sponsors and her coach.And it is that coach who proved to be the single biggest obstacle smasher and life-impacting deus ex machina for Alice. Eighteen years her senior and a former tennis star herself, Eleanor "Teach" Tennant became Alice's tennis coach, life instructor and maybe lover. They met in 1932 when Alice, after some losses in prestigious east-coast tennis events, realized she needed a coach to take her game to the next level. And as with all good relationships, Tennant saw an equally auspicious opportunity in Alice as the athlete she could coach to reach the pinnacle of tennis, which would also drive more top-tier students Tennant's way. Under Tennant's tutelage, Alice's career took off. Author Weintraub does a serviceable job of taking us on the journey of Alice's playing career, including her initial defeats on the East Coast - the locus of U.S. tennis then - her nearly career-ending bout with and recovery from tuberculosis followed by her success at the sport's highest venues and events. Those heights saw Alice win eighteen National titles (the equivalent of Grand Slam titles today), including five singles titles, two of those at Wimbledon.On her way up, owing to some connections of Tennant, her rising fame, blonde good looks and bi-sexuality, Alice, like many athletes today, found herself hobnobbing with that era's Hollywood royalty including power couple Clark Gable and Carol Lombard at famous glitterati retreats like San Simeon and Palm Springs. Perhaps not crucial to her career - although Gable and Lombard became good friends providing timely emotional support for Alice - the exposure to that world is fun for Alice and the reader.But with World War II breaking out and shutting down most international tennis competition, and after two years of completely dominating amateur women's tennis, Alice turned pro to, finally, earn some money at a career that had provided her with fame but no wealth. And Alice made good money, effectively, barnstorming around the country playing exhibition matches with a few other well-known amateur-turned-pro athletes. Alice then spent her war years doing some sponsorships, some radio announcing and a lot of selfless fund raising for the war effort. She tried to join the "women" branches, but her former tuberculosis made her medically ineligible.  Toward the end of the war and quite dramatically, Alice either did or did not perform a spy mission for the US government which involved going to Switzerland to revive an old romantic relationship with a Swiss banker now controlling money for bigwig Nazis. She either did or did not sleep with him to gain access to his files so that she could obtain photographic evidence. Finally, she either did or did not get shot trying to escape with that evidence at night, during a high-speed chase on a dark and winding Swiss road.In one of her biographies, Alice tells this incredibly gripping tale in believable fashion, but author Weintraub is unable to produce almost any supporting evidence leaving this reader leaning toward disbelief but open to new evidence being found. Also hurting Alice's credibility here, and in general, is a penchant for exaggeration and  fabrications that makes you suspicious of this and other of Alice's claims. Also during the war and continuing for many years after, Alice had a long running affair with wealthy scion William Du Pont - he wanted to marry, she didn't - that provided her with often-needed financial support and high-level connections. There's nothing inherently wrong with this, assuming they were honest with each other, but as a feminist icon, this is not Ms. Marble's most ennobling and independent act.Away from that and following the war itself, Alice's activities included traveling the country giving inspirational speeches, performing tennis exhibitions, coaching young players, doing radio work and writing columns and articles. Her writing efforts included some editing work on the early Wonder Woman comic strip and typing scripts for Rod Serling of The Twilight Zone fame. Somehow or other, Alice touched many twentieth-century cultural icons in her long and atypical life. But it was one article she penned - really an editorial - that changed the game of tennis, the life of Althea Gibson and showed Alice at her moral and fighting best. After the American Tennis Association, in 1950, rejected Althea Gibson's application to play at the Nationals on a technicality, but effectively, because she was black, Alice wrote a powerful and scathing pro-Gibson editorial. In American Lawn Tennis, "the bible of the sport," Alice passionately, logically and morally argued on behalf of Ms. Gibson's application challenging the sport of tennis to live up to its own ideals and accept players of all races. This editorial broke the dam leading to Gibson and other black players competing in American Tennis Association events. As the fifties and sixties moved along, Alice's name faded (but, fortunately, Du Pont's necessary-to-Alice's-lifestyle money did not) and her health deteriorated, but she kept active and even managed a doctor's office for a while - there's little this woman didn't do. And by the seventies and eighties, with her health declining further and with not much more to live on than the modest income from a trust set up by the now-deceased Du Pont, Alice struggled to make ends meet. She lived the final years of her life in a nondescript home in Palm Desert California, with the sport she loved occasionally remembering her with an award or ceremony. The best biographies read like novels while transporting you to an almost different world. Seabiscuit by Laura Hillenbrand and The Greatest Game Ever Played by Mark Frost are two outstanding biographies of athletes that do this: they entwine their subject in his or her (or the horse's) cultural, social, economic and political zeitgeist. You almost forget that you're reading a biography as those books take you to another time and place.The Divine Miss Marble: A Life of Tennis, Fame and Mystery doesn't do this as many parts read like a very thoughtful and well-researched straight timeline of Alice's life where the surrounding cultural, political and social context is competently noted, but not seamlessly weaved into Alice's world. Notwithstanding its limitations, it is still an outstanding recounting of one of the twentieth-century's top athletes and all-around charismatic figures.[/QUOTE]

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