by John Clarke
‘Mad’ was Diaghilev’s verdict on his opponent. ‘If I ever play him again I’ll crush him.’
The finale this evening had an element of tragedy about it. Frank Lloyd Wright, lacklustre against John Masefield in the first round, came out tonight against Rainer Rilke with a different plan. ‘This time I went back to what I learnt in Tokyo.’ (Wright won the Japanese Open the year the tournament was played during an earthquake.) Rilke won the first set and at 2–4 in the second Wright sat down and began to run water over his head and across his shoulders, allowing it to cascade over the back of the chair and onto the ground. At 4–4 he ran it down his arms and let it plunge from his thighs onto some nearby plants. Then he came out and began opening up huge spaces out wide and balancing them with volleys to the other side. In no time he had taken the second set and was looking a very good thing at 5–2 in the third. His confidence was high and he was punching the air and shouting ‘Come on!’ after points which went his way.
The more assured Wright became of victory, however, the more Rilke lifted. At 8–8 in the tie-break Rilke dropped back and moved wide to receive service and Wright went down the middle. How Rilke got to this is anyone’s guess but he put it on the line in the back corner. Wright knew he was in trouble at a set down and the Czech looked as if he had just invented a new type of saxophone. Wright came back and took the fourth and might have pulled off a famous victory if Rilke hadn’t kept his head, steadied and got the job done.
André Derain, in easily the loudest shorts we’ve seen so far, looked a class above his compact countryman Jacques Prevert, but afterwards had little to say about his own form.
‘Did you see Matisse?’ he said. ‘What a player! Did you see him against Miller? What a match! He was magnificent. Six times I thought he was gone and he came back. There’s only one man in the tournament who can beat him.’
And who might that be?
‘The Dutchman, van Gogh. I saw him play for the first time just the other day. If that guy doesn’t change the way this whole game is played I’m a monkey’s uncle.’
Derain has been asked to present himself to referee Charles Darwin, ‘for a few quiet words regarding trousers, predictions and primates generally’.
Day 16
* * *
Earhart v. Luxemburg • Duncan v. Mandelstam • Christie v. Noether • McCarthy v. Hellman • Keynes v. Paderewski • Mayakovsky v. Porter • Gödel v. Hemingway • Pirandello v. Lacan
* * *
Today number 1 seed Amelia Earhart was knocked out. The marvellous Isadora Duncan was stretchered off. Agatha Christie went missing and French police hold ‘grave fears’ for her safety. And just before the close of business Lillian Hellman launched legal proceedings against Mary McCarthy.
On top of everything else a submission has been put by a group representing ‘the players’ that they should be able to enter the doubles with multiple partners.
Earhart’s plan against Rosa Luxemburg was to rush the net at every opportunity. With Luxemburg in a defiant mood, however, it was a plan that never got off the ground. Time and again she was passed as she came in. ‘Are you going to keep doing that all day?’ she asked Luxemburg.
‘I have to beat you to stay in the tournament,’ said Luxemburg. ‘We’re in a cockfight. Let’s just refuse to play against one another.’
‘If we refuse to play the tournament won’t work.’
‘Exactly,’ said Luxemburg. ‘Then we can get the rules changed and start again without trying to eliminate one another.’
‘You mean change the way the whole system works?’
‘Of course.’
‘I don’t think so. Get back up there. I’m going to serve even faster.’
‘And I’m going to belt it back past you as you come in.’
Both players were correct in these prognostications.
Two courts away the crowd was traumatised when Isadora Duncan caught part of her clothing in the umpire’s stand as she stretched for a drop shot. There was a sickening thud as her head snapped back and she didn’t move again. Her opponent Nadezhda Mandelstam was shaken and after the match was counselled by Russian officials by being forced to dig her own grave and stand next to it naked.
French police have issued a description of Agatha Christie and are stopping traffic in and out of the area. Christie was last seen two nights ago on a train with a Welsh male voice choir and an extension ladder. Her second-round match against the understanding Amalie Noether has been rescheduled for Friday.
Mary McCarthy was giving an interview after her win over Lillian Hellman this evening when she was handed a writ. ‘Good Lord,’ she said. ‘Hellman is suing me. What for?’ Her eye ran down the document. ‘Listen to this: “That McCarthy did allege both publicly and privately that Hellman did not compete in the German Open and did not win it in a heroic manner and that, further, Hellman had never been to Germany.”’ McCarthy put the writ down and asked for a glass of water.
Would McCarthy be making a statement at some future time?
‘McCarthy will be making a statement right now,’ she said. ‘Everything that Lillian Hellman says or writes is a lie, including “and” and “the”.’
After this the motion that competitors should be able to play doubles with multiple partners seemed tame. It was seconded by Peggy Guggenheim, Eleanor Roosevelt, Tallulah Bankhead, Edna St Vincent Millay, and everyone in the men’s draw except Auden.
From the beginning of his match against fluent and charismatic Jan Paderewski, John Keynes determined that one of the keys to winning this was to make his opponent play a lot of balls. ‘Padders has been hitting the ball so well this week,’ Keynes said later, ‘I couldn’t let him just stand and deliver. The more winners he hit the more the marginal propensity for error increased and the more confidence I seemed to get in my own game, over time.’
Betting markets responded by firming, with support for Nijinsky, Keynes and Picasso. The big mover was Spock, from 80s in to 7s.
An hour after Isadora Duncan’s terrible accident there was another medical emergency, this time on Court 11. Vladimir Mayakovsky has been impressive here in practice and Cole Porter is playing the tennis of his life. Porter won the first set with a barrage of volleying and measured drop shots. The Russian came back in the second, varying his pace, slowing his serve down and moving Porter around more. At 3–3 in the third set a ball called ‘out’ by the lines-person was overruled as ‘in’ by the AustroHungarian umpire who then became concerned that he had upset Mayakovsky.
‘No. I’m happy,’ said Mayakovsky.
‘Play a let if you like,’ said the umpire.
‘No. You’re the boss,’ said Mayakovsky.
‘You’re the boss,’ agreed Porter, ‘you’re the judge and jury.’
‘You’re the boss,’ they assured him, ‘and you’re both the Curies,
‘You’re the quick response, of the dog of old Pavlov,
You’re the clout of Ruth, you’re the hope of youth,
You’re Ulyanov.
You’re the grace of a novice kneeling,
You’re the height of the Sistine ceiling,
You’re a yard and a half of the Queen’s Own Household Guards,
You’re Atlantic flights, you’re the Northern Lights,
You’re credit cards.
You’re the luft in the old luftwaffe,
You’re the catch in a cash-back offer,
You’re Revere’s ride and you’re vaudeville before it died.
You’re the rebel yell, you’re the Liberty Bell,
You’re genocide.
You’re the rise, in a great crescendo,
You’re the fall, of diminuendo,
When the rolling stones have rolled, you are the moss,
And if we, sir, are the players, you’re the boss.’
And so it went, and a delightful spectacle it all was until Porter fell and twisted his back, damaging a leg so badly he had to be strapped and stretchered off.
/> Kurt Gödel was brilliant for two sets but couldn’t go the distance against a hard-hitting Ernie Hemingway, who finished, dripping with sweat, bandages on his left arm and right knee and with a cut over his eye, looking like a gladiator, spent but victorious. Gödel said later that he proved what he had set out to prove and was happy. Asked what this was, he remarked that ‘it is difficult to prove anything’.
‘Crap,’ said Hemingway. ‘There was him and there was me. Two of us. The old one and the young one. In the sun. By the middle of the day it would be hot. We both knew what would happen. We would both sweat. Old sweat and young sweat. We both knew.’
There appeared to be a scuffle in the crowd during Luigi Pirandello’s confidence-building win over the young French pretender Jacques Lacan but police reported no trouble, just half-a-dozen characters who had turned up at the wrong venue. And in the best of the matches late in the day, Big Bill Yeats played the important points well against Fermi and was delighted to get out of a close contest with a lovely forehand cross-court winner in the warm purple twilight of an evening dripping with promise.
Day 17
* * *
Sartre v. Mandelstam • Matisse v. Low • Apollinaire v. Benchley • Fields v. Dali • Montessori v. Markievicz • Pavlova v. Klein • Magritte v. Kazantzakis
* * *
It was 11.49 am. The French media were in disarray. The players had left the arena. The crowd was stunned. Jean-Paul Sartre had just been beaten. Gone. Goodnight nurse. Eliminé.
Some say he was lucky to get past Duke Ellington in the first round. French commentators disagreed. Everyone has a bad match somewhere in a tournament, they argued; Ellington was his and JPS would move on.
It looked like business as usual as the players warmed up. Sartre appeared to be moving well, hitting the ball hard and serving at full strength in front of a huge partisan crowd, many of them students.
But let us now praise famous Mandelstam, who was magnificent today. It is hard to think of a shot he didn’t play and after 2–0 in the third he didn’t lose a point.
Sartre’s response after his demolition was to quarrel with Simone de Beauvoir over the idea of multiple partners in the mixed doubles.
‘We disagree. I am opposed to the proposal in its current form. If I wish to have multiple partners I will do so. And so can de Beauvoir. Although if she does, I won’t be one of them.’
De Beauvoir’s position is slightly different. ‘I support the right of all women to have multiple partners but since my man doesn’t want me to do so, I will be doing as I’m told.’
‘I am a feminist too,’ said Sartre. ‘I support your right to do so.’
‘I have, however, played with other partners in the past,’ said de Beauvoir.
‘You’re telling me you have,’ said Nelson Algren from the players’ box.
‘But from now on I won’t be doing that,’ continued de Beauvoir. ‘I will be writing about it.’
‘Heartless bitch,’ said Nelson Algren.
‘Get the car, Simone,’ said Sartre. ‘We’re leaving.’
Strictly speaking this wasn’t a great morning for French prestige. Henri Matisse spent nearly four hours trying to hold out New Zealander David Low before getting on top of him in the final set. Low made a lot of friends in this match and Matisse was impressed. He said afterwards it was the best match he had played in a long time and that Low was a considerable player whose influence on the game would be profound. ‘In England he has already changed the look of the game.’
Next door on Court 3 local clay-court specialist Billy Apollinaire found himself in a heap of trouble against the resourceful Robert Benchley, who had come to the match on his way back from dinner ‘at the home of someone called Harris’. The American played the first set very gingerly, in a sweater and dark glasses and socks ‘to keep the noise down’. Apollinaire grabbed the initiative in the third and was up 3–1 when Uncle Bob got annoyed by some pigeons sitting on the roof. He scowled at them. He walked over to them and explained the situation. ‘That’s the thing with pigeons. They like clarity.’ He was prepared to be reasonable, he said. He was trying to get some work done and could they please be quiet, less ‘pigeon-like’ and ‘could you three, in particular, stop looking askance at me?’
Apollinaire tried everything but Benchley got out of jail after the pigeons agreed to terms.
And will he be practising his serve before his next match?
Benchley smiled. Yes, he said. He would. As soon as he could find Harris.
Another chapter of oddities began on the same court shortly afterwards when Bill Fields turned up at four o’clock to find he had no opponent, Salvador Dali having arrived an hour earlier on Court 4 to find that he, also, had no opponent. Both players were notified that their match would commence at 3 at 4. Officials explained that their intention was to start the match at four o’clock on Court 3.
If that was the case, the remarkable Spaniard asked, why had it been advertised on television as a feature match? He was only here to play in feature matches, he said, and the middle of the afternoon on a remote court was not a feature match. Fields felt that the match should be postponed for twenty-four hours. Dali agreed and suggested the matter be put to Fields. Fields thought it an excellent idea and, subject to approval by Dali, proposed the delay be put into action immediately. Dali agreed. So did Fields.
Officials, however, insisted that the players should be ready to commence in five minutes.
And so it was that at 4.38 pm Dali and Fields found themselves being ushered back to Court 3, Dali claiming he had now been waiting for so long he was beginning to see things and Fields claiming to have been bitten on the fibula by a Tibetan mountain yak during an attempt to get a hat down from a tree. When informed there were no yaks in France he said he was pleased to hear it and maybe now they’d stop biting people. Dali then described some of the things he had seen and the umpire ordered both players to be tested for stimulants. The match itself was conducted in good heart, Fields producing some delightful play, particularly his footwork, and it was no surprise to see Chaplin in the crowd, enjoying himself immensely.
At two sets up and 4–2 in the fourth Fields chased an angled cross-court smash from Dali, got to it and threw up a very high lob. Dali ran back and waited for it, let it bounce and smashed it again, this time deep into the other corner. Fields never re-appeared.
The drug tests established that Fields had been playing with a blood alcohol level of 24 per cent but that Dali showed no trace of any illegal substance. ‘That’s a relief,’ said Fields by phone, ‘although poor old Dali’s obviously got a few problems.’
In the women’s draw events were slightly less alarming, Maria Montessori going through against Constance Markievicz (one of the Gore-Booth sisters who did so well here as juniors), Virginia Stephen-Woolf (one of the Stephen sisters who did so well here as juniors) eventually getting on top of Katherine Mansfield (one of the Beauchamp sisters who did so well here as juniors) and Anna Pavlova impressive against Melanie Klein.
As dusk began to close around the arena and the lights came up, the controversial Magritte emerged on to Centre Court with his opponent, the marvellous Greek Nikos Kazantzakis. Magritte has been in fabulous form and tonight was magical. He mixed his game up beautifully and Kazantzakis had trouble picking what was coming. Magritte would appear to be setting up for a forehand and would hit a backhand. He would move into position to hit a smash and instead would let the ball bounce and hit a different shot altogether. Only the Greek’s great passion kept him in the match. His compatriots appear at this tournament with (Hel) after their name. Kazantzakis alone insists on (Gre). He took the third set and did a lap of honour in tunic and sandals, punching the air. Normal transmission was soon resumed, however, and the talented Belgian came away with the win.
Day 18
* * *
Bernhardt v. Lenya • Barnes v. Chanel • Picasso v. Beckett • MacNeice v. Levi • Krishnamurti v. Russell • Prokofiev
v. Tolstoy • Freud v. Casals
* * *
The sensation of the day occurred in the afternoon. Sarah Bernhardt and Coco Chanel had been cheered from the arena after good wins, the heroic Bernhardt draped in the French flag, Chanel in a little black dress.
The illuminated sign at the end of the Centre Court now read PICASSO V BECKETT. The match was delayed while a group of oil and movie people were photographed on court with Picasso in an atmosphere made up of equal parts radical chic and celebrity bullfight.
The Beckett people were also there but were quiet and slightly bored. They didn’t care where they sat, they purchased no memorabilia and some of them watched the entire match without dismounting from bicycles. Beckett, who has represented his country in both tennis and cricket, is very handy in a tough spot, which is exactly where he quickly found himself today.
Picasso came out firing on all six and for a while appeared to do no wrong. He is strong and his footwork is excellent. Beckett kept the ball in play a lot and, like Satie, encouraged the expectation that he would vary the play, and then didn’t. Picasso slipped away again in the second to win it 6–4. In the third set, however, he played to the crowd and began to spray his returns. As the replay showed, Beckett’s approach in the fourth was very simple. He hit the ball to Picasso’s strengths, his big forehand and that wonderful sliced backhand. Picasso found himself hitting six or eight superb shots in one rally but getting six or eight returns coming back at him like familiar friends. As the match wore on Beckett began to hit the ball later and very high and the player most famous for his speed would rush into position and wait. As the pauses got longer, people began to laugh. Someone asked a woman near the press box, ‘What are you laughing at?’
