Rita Will_Memoir of a Literary Rabble-Rouser

by Rita Mae Brown

  Martina did and damn well lost the 1980 U.S. Open thanks to my big mouth. Betty Stove, Hana’s coach, had obviously worked hard to correct Hana’s hands before the match.

  What I did was run the house in Virginia, fend off interlopers, keep Martina laughing and write novels. I packed. I unpacked. I packed again. I forced her to make her own phone calls and then I asked her to make mine. I hate the telephone. Grumbling, she’d do it, then we’d laugh about it.

  She’d read her contracts. I’d read them, too, but I offered no advice. I knew IMG wanted me out of the picture. I could understand their point of view. They hoped to sell more endorsements without me and that’s how they made money. I sometimes felt uneasy about the balance sheets they’d send in, but whenever I suggested she audit IMG, she brushed off the idea.

  Bantam has been my publisher for over twenty years. I audit Bantam periodically. It’s expensive. I trust them, but machines and people make mistakes. Auditing makes for a healthier relationship and my publisher has never balked even though it’s a pain in the ass for them, too. By the way, I love Bantam, having seen it through many incarnations.

  To this day, editors will sidle up to me and say things like “Well, you know that Borzoi is a more, uh, more literary house” or “Bantam started out as a paperback house.” Snigger. Snigger. “How can they edit a rough draft?” After that comes the promise that I will be better handled at Snot and Snob Publishing Company.

  Still, business is business and Martina wasn’t vigilant. I suggested turning financial statements over to a conservative, even-tempered Virginia lawyer and an equally conservative accountant if she didn’t want to review the statement carefully.

  No.

  I stayed out of it.

  She asked me to stop giving political speeches because she wanted me with her when she traveled. I balked. She pleaded. I finally agreed because I figured I could give them once she was off the road.

  At this time, Martina hadn’t gone the way of rock stars, dragging with her, like a momma possum, an entourage of motivators, cooks, workout pals, coaches, etc. It was just the two of us and it was a damn sight cheaper and healthier.

  If she suffered a moment of the Big Head, I could deflate her as quickly as Mom deflated me. Everyone on top needs that. We couldn’t fight, though, because she wouldn’t. I’d rather avoid irritations, too, but sooner or later I’ll hash it out. You must. She wouldn’t.

  Storing resentment is a dangerous thing to do. It gets you in the end.

  For a brief time her parents lived with her in Dallas, then in a house nearby. When she moved to Virginia they came often and wanted to live with us. I put my foot down, which is what Martina wanted me to do. They were driving her crazy. This way I could be the bad cop. She stayed the good cop.

  I liked her mother. Her younger half sister was likable too, but since she was in her teens, I wasn’t around her much.

  I can’t speak about her stepfather, Mirek Navratil, without exhibiting symptoms of Tourette’s syndrome.

  I will attempt to be brief. He never lost an opportunity to criticize Martina. He never lost an opportunity to tell her he had made her the great tennis player she was because he was there at the beginning. He never lost an opportunity to criticize my country. When he found out Martina was gay he accused me of corrupting her.

  May he flourish in the Czech Republic and refrain from visiting the decadent, spiritless, racist USA. He called us worse than that.

  That Martina does not share his gene pool has continued to be a source of comfort to me.

  What drove Martina around the bend about her parents was their dependency. She almost skipped for joy when they returned to Czechoslovakia. Then she lapsed into guilt.

  For a girl raised in godless Communism she could be Catholic, she has so much guilt. She actually was baptized Catholic thanks to her paternal grandmother, Angelika Suberta. I used to kid her that we’d wind up like Mom and Aunt Mimi, fighting the Protestant Reformation between us.

  Since she evidenced little interest in organized religion, we were safe.

  But we weren’t safe from the constant sniping and wearing down, the endless negative information she heard from all sides. It wasn’t that she believed it. Martina knows better. But she isn’t a person who wants to hear that. She wants sunny days and sunny people. Her work was becoming unpleasant because some of the people were unpleasant.

  I loved the one week each month that we’d spend back at the farm. I had to give up the boarding operation, we were away so much, but I’d hop in the car and run over to the Barracks, a big stable, or hang over a fence and talk to horses. The only time I could ride was that one week each month.

  Once I took Martina riding with Barbara Malik and Clare Schaeffer, two lively members of Farmington Hunt Club. She enjoyed herself. I allowed myself to hope that maybe someday, far off in the future, she’d come around to my sport.

  One of the dumbest things I did was to talk too much about Martina’s retirement. I feared she wouldn’t plan. I feared the money would be spent, and I’m sure you’ve gathered by now that poverty has left a deep mark on me. (This doesn’t mean that I can’t be improvident.) I feared she’d hang on too long, which for an athlete is especially upsetting because the public can’t forgive their aging. Athletes are tied to a specific generation’s youth and are held there. Younger generations couldn’t care less about them, and their own generation doesn’t want reminders that they too are getting older.

  I worried too damn much and I talked about it because I was miserable. If it hadn’t been for Judy, Bud, Don and Elaine, I would have lived in silence.

  Not that some of the players didn’t talk to me or weren’t good to me. They were, as I’ve said. But they had a job to do. They couldn’t sit around and chat with me or read a book I was reading. The players put on blinders much of the time because it was the only way they could compete.

  One person who did not put on blinders was John McEnroe. John has an artistic temperament. He soaks up vibes. He always went out of his way to be nice to me when we were at the same tournaments, and once he saved me from missing an airplane.

  He’d been raised to treat women as ladies, to be the breadwinner and to protect a woman. You can be the biggest, brawniest woman but John will observe the gentlemanly etiquette. He even paid courtesies to Martina and men rarely did. I adored John for that. After his divorce from Tatum O’Neal he was presented as a sexist bully. Since I wasn’t privy to his divorce, how would I know, but it sure doesn’t sound like the John I knew. Take magazine reports with a grain of salt.

  On the court he’d explode, forget his manners, but it was because he cared so much. In that he was like Virginia Wade. It wasn’t enough to win a match, it had to be done beautifully. But Virginia could keep a lid on her emotions. John couldn’t. They were both artists trapped in tennis players’ bodies.

  The most brilliant tennis I ever saw was played by John McEnroe. He’d string points together like pearls.

  Lee Jackson, the umpire, was one who warned me not to mention Martina’s retirement.

  “She won’t hear it.”

  She was right.

  I think Martina came to believe I didn’t like her tennis partly because of all that retirement talk.

  At one point, she suggested I could take a break from my career. She’d pay me a salary.

  Of all the things she said and did in our relationship, that one scared me the most. She didn’t understand that writing isn’t just my work. It’s the air I breathe. Every day millions of people inhale and exhale the English language. The atmosphere is saturated with our sounds, our sense, our collective history held in our language. Stop writing? I wrote when I lived in a cold-water flat. I wrote when the money came in and if you, reader, ever leave me, I’ll keep on writing.

  I deserved her offer, though. I had blabbed on and on about her retirement. Now the shoe was on the other foot. I shut up after that. Yet I know she truly meant the suggestion as a help since I worried abo
ut money. It was her way of saying we had enough money.

  I’m not sure I could live with someone and not bring in money on my own. This is a comment on my character, not hers.

  Visiting Mom tested Martina. She’d never met anyone like my mother. For Mother’s part, she’d never met anyone like Martina. They hit it off. What a relief.

  Martina’s sitting through Aunt Mimi’s rendition of “Tiny Bubbles” on the organ, banjo effect to the fore, gave me new respect for the woman. She didn’t double over laughing until we crawled into the car.

  She learned that all those stories I told about Mom and Aunt Mimi were true. I have few friends left who knew the Buckingham sisters. I’m glad she knew them. She probably never thinks of them, but I’m glad she met them.

  Mother and Aunt Mimi didn’t have one fight while we were home. And Mother tried not to swear. She buttoned her lip even when she wanted to shout, “Bullshit,” and instead said, “Bugjuice.”

  64

  The Cloisters

  Apart from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the cloisters at Fort Tryon Park is my favorite American museum. The Middle Ages feel familiar to me, probably because Medieval Latin is easier to read than classical Latin, so I’ve read reams of it.

  I took Martina there once. She’d seen more medieval structures than I had but she enjoyed herself.

  I had accomplished a few things that I hope will delight her in her old age. I pushed her to buy art. I pushed her to express her sense of humor because she has a good one.

  At the New South Wales Tournament in December 1980 in Sydney it rained and rained. That was when the Australian tournaments were still in December. Martina and Pam Shriver were to play singles against each other. I found a deep-sea-diving establishment and sent Phil Rodgers, now coach of the University of Virginia’s women’s tennis team, to get scuba outfits. He brought them back, and Martina and Pam put them on and went out onto the court to the wild appreciation of the fans.

  Little things like that edged her a bit closer, I think, to enjoying where she was in life and helped create positive press for her. I didn’t do enough of them because I was wrapped up in my own career, and much as Martina may have wanted to believe a two-career household will work, in that stratosphere it won’t.

  I put together a Thanksgiving dinner in Melbourne and invited the Aussies and players from other countries. Teaching the Aussies how to cook a Thanksgiving turkey was fun because I can’t cook. I simply put Mom on the phone to the hotel cook, at an ungodly hour for her.

  Then I explained why Americans celebrate Thanksgiving, a story they didn’t know. That was the only time during my tour duty that we socialized together. No sponsors, no tournament directors, just us.

  We’d traveled to so many countries that they blurred, because all you do is play tennis. Most of the players didn’t like Japan. I did. The position of women rankles but it is an amazing culture. I’d run into bookstores to see how they sold books and to read books “backward.” My favorite haunts were paper stores since I like the fine texture of the paper, so different than our own because their ink is different. We rarely could go out but when we did we moved along.

  We caught the bullet train and took a half-day trip to Kyoto, where we walked up the steps of temples thousands of years old, so old that the stepping stones were worn like half moons from the millions of worshipping feet.

  Our return to the States was marred by the death of Judy Lacy. January 1, 1981, started with the announcement being made during halftime of a bowl game as the NBC commentator extended condolences.

  We knew Judy had a brain tumor but we didn’t think it was considered that serious. Martina and I were to meet her and Bud in Sarasota in two weeks.

  Stunned, we stared at the television. Judy had been threatening to write a book about the tour. Three days before she died we’d called her to firm up our schedules.

  “Hey, help me write my book.”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Promise you’ll write my book.”

  “You write it. I’m not doing all the work. I’ll help.”

  “Remember.”

  I remembered.

  Several months later I brought this up to Martina. She told me that I should write it and it didn’t matter what people said. It’s one of the complexities of Martina’s character that on personal issues, she makes the right call, then resents it later on. When she moves beyond the personal, she might originally make the right call, but then the flak flies and she retreats. She can’t take the hostility.

  She can also forget what she’s said when it’s convenient but I think 99.44 percent of us do that occasionally.

  Having to make a deadline, I didn’t go with her to Amelia Island in April. It was rare for me not to accompany her.

  The day she left, June Arnold, the original publisher of Rubyfruit Jungle, died, a blow to me and other writers.

  I was starting to have a funny feeling. I chalked it up to the losses of recent months.

  The week before, on April 9th, we’d thrown a hen party at the house, ladies only, although one night we had a big bash and invited lots of men—but no one’s husbands. Boy, if that didn’t scare the men back home. Every now and then a man needs to know that someone else desires his wife. This was the first big party we’d given together. We even slept in the room over the garage so everyone else would have good beds. As there was no heat in that little room, we piled on the blankets.

  Anyway, Martina held up a glass of Cristal and toasted me. She said I made her happy, she’d love me forever. It was the first public acknowledgment of our union.

  Everyone cheered.

  On April 20, 1981, she slept with someone else, falling instantly in love.

  Baby Jesus knew before I did. Baby followed me around, which was hard for her since she was fifteen and slowing down. I don’t know what possessed me. On the phone I asked Martina. She admitted it. I give her credit for ’fessing up. I hung up the phone but I didn’t hang up on her. Actually, I’ve only hung up on one person in my whole life and that was because I was overcome.

  I had to go to Sacramento to give a speech. From there I flew to Amelia Island. Martina picked me up. She was happy to see me but nervous.

  She finished the tournament. We drove down to Mother’s because Mother was sick. I was getting hammered.

  I cried when I saw Mom.

  “Shut up, bawl baby.” She pushed me away.

  Obviously she was feeling better. Sweetness would have meant she was really sick.

  Martina compulsively called her new love as she had once compulsively called me. She made little effort to go to another room. I heard most of their courtship. My many failings were the subject of conversation, the failings she had never mentioned before.

  Since I’d been freer in expressing my discontents, she cited those as proof that I didn’t love her.

  When Martina is done with you she cuts you off in a millisecond. She has no feelings left for you and she can’t comprehend that you might harbor feelings for her, although she was still happy to sleep with me. For three weeks she hovered, edging back and forth, but finally she packed her bags and flew to her house in Rancho Mirage in Palm Springs to be with her new love.

  Baby Jesus stuck close.

  Our two secretaries heard enough from me to bore them to tears. They were superb, nonjudgmental and attentive.

  When Martina returned she said she had found the great love of her life and she could only be happy with this woman.

  Many people know who this woman is, but since neither she nor Martina admits to their affair, I can’t say they had one, although I saw them kissing and holding hands.

  When we first moved in together Martina was supposed to get her handguns out of the house. I’m not opposed to guns, but one should know how to use them and they ought not be loaded in the house. You can’t live in the country without guns, though. Rabies alone is an important reason to have one.

  For whatever reason she had a gun on the bat
hroom sink the day she was packing for her trip with Madame X. I picked it up and told her to get rid of it.

  I often wonder if it was a guilty conscience or if she thought I’d fill her full of holes like Swiss cheese. She hit me. I hit back.

  That’s not such a big deal. People are passionate and I can put up with hitting a lot better than with lies. Martina is not by nature a violent person and whatever violence is in her she would be more inclined to inflict upon herself.

  I’m more inclined to inflict it on the offending party.

  She knocked me around and screamed for her gun.

  I wouldn’t give it to her. She waxed furious, then realized that I had the gun in my hand. She ran down the stairs and hopped in the BMW. I blew out the back window of the BMW.

  Rarely have I been that angry. But angry and heartbroken as I was, if I’d wanted to hit her she’d be six feet under. What I wanted was to scare the shit out of her and to make her feel as bad as I did.

  What I did was relieve her of moral responsibility for her actions and give her a story she could embellish over the years. Not only has she embellished it, Billie Jean thrives on the story of me as the gun-toting writer. Since Billie Jean was nowhere near the state of Virginia at the time, I find her reports less than trustworthy.

  After you’re forty you get the face you deserve. In Billie Jean’s case she also got the thighs she deserves.

  As for Martina, I used to think it was me, that she left me because of my faults. Enough years have passed for me to recognize instead that this was part of her pattern. She heaps abuse on the discarded lover, in most cases returning to make friends with them years later.

  It’s an immature pattern, but who among us should cast the first stone—or fire the first pistol?

  It takes decades to learn how to live with and love another human being, and by the time you learn it you’re too old to care.