Rita Will_Memoir of a Literary Rabble-Rouser

by Rita Mae Brown

  Finding a new lover renews Martina; that’s why she rolls them over cyclically. If she’d consider how she disengages from last year’s model, she would hurt people less, including herself.

  No matter how she left me, no matter how she tried to publicly humiliate me, she did love me and I loved her. I can’t change that, nor would I wish to.

  As I’ve said before, “You can’t judge the quality of love by its results.”

  But I can judge people by their actions, including myself.

  I was a damned fool to take out the window of the BMW. Fannie would have stopped the car, tackled me and socked the living bejesus out of me, but then Fannie is from Alabama.

  Martina kept running.

  I was about to enter that period of my life I think of as my Cloisters, but not before I was dragged through the cesspool by a Martina who needed to beat me, who needed to extract revenge for the petty irritations of the previous three years.

  Jesus, had I known I was that irritating I would have gone back to cotillion.

  65

  M Is for the Millions of Things She Gave Me

  IMG, ever vigilant, is supposed to be the best in the business. On July 31, 1981, they weren’t.

  Martina and her new trainer, Nancy Lieberman, then twenty-two, gave a press conference in Dallas to declare that Martina had been under my pernicious lesbian spell. Nancy, overflowing with the milk of human kindness—why, she almost mooed—was going to lead Martina back to men. A mistake must have been made, because Martina surely was straight now.

  The Washington Post, on August 1, ran a few paragraphs on this subject:

  “Tennis star Martina Navratilova is moving back to Dallas, where she will share a town house with Nancy Lieberman of the Dallas Diamonds basketball team.

  “Navratilova told The Dallas Morning News in yesterday’s editions that she is bisexual, but said her relationship with the Women’s Basketball League star is strictly platonic.”

  Nancy Lieberman is quoted in the same article, “I’m not saying it [lesbianism] is wrong, but I want to give her [Navratilova] a fair chance of changing and seeing the other side. I’m not here to force guys on her, but just to help her get out of that environment.”

  No doubt Nancy heroically applied herself to her task.

  However, in giving this press conference, what they did was admit that Martina had been leading a lesbian life. The libel laws no longer held. Had she said nothing, the press could have hinted but not printed.

  I woke up that morning to find the lawn liberally sprinkled with stringers from the English and Australian newspapers. Rebecca Brown, my secretary, dashed through a phalanx of photographers to go to the grocery store.

  When she returned she said more reporters were walking up the hill.

  I called John Lowe, a lawyer who had made his national name representing the Indians after the Battle of Wounded Knee. He lived in Charlottesville at the time.

  The lawyer closest to me, Lucius Bracey Jr., excelled at trusts, wills, contracts. This wasn’t his bailiwick.

  John listened and said, “If you don’t give an interview they’ll print whatever they like, figuring you don’t have the money to pursue a suit through the courts.”

  Ugly as that statement was, it sounded right. Why do you think the sleaze papers can exist?

  Because of its proximity and because I used to know it so well, I chose The Washington Post. It wasn’t that I thought they’d flatter me, but they would send a writer who would tell the truth as he or she saw it. If they knocked my tits in the sand, I would assume I deserved it.

  Since I started out in journalism, I carry a high regard for reporters. It’s easy to pick apart a story or find the odd errant fact. I wish more people would try to write a simple report, like covering a flood, to find out how difficult it is to dig out the facts.

  Stephanie Mansfield from the Post drove down to the house on Flordon Drive. I’d moved out of my old farmhouse because it was an old farmhouse, which to Martina meant poor. Flordon, a stone Norman-style mansion, suited her taste. I liked it enough to live in it, but I would have liked it a lot more on acres and acres. As it was, I sold my farm but held a second mortgage on it. This was later to prove crucial.

  Stephanie, young and bright, asked questions. I answered as best I could. The story that ran was a thoughtful piece. It made me think about my situation in a new way. I hadn’t placed my experiences in the context of an older wife replaced by a younger wife. Stephanie made that connection.

  Martina did say to me as she was leaving, “You’re old and I don’t want you anymore.”

  I was thirty-six that April.

  John Lowe’s advice was blue-chip. Other papers ran Stephanie’s article or lifted quotes from it. The reporters left the hill. I granted no more interviews on the subject.

  I was grateful to be left alone. Adam Mars-Jones, the wonderful English writer, a student at UVA then, would come and play the piano for me. He read Latin and Greek fluently, displaying a subtle, marvelous mind. He adored Rebecca and spent as much time with her as he could. They were buoyant friends. It wasn’t a romantic love but it was a deep one.

  Why it’s believed that people who physically love a member of their own sex can’t love a member of the opposite sex emotionally or physically amazes me.

  As for me, I never minded sleeping with a man, I just minded marrying one.

  Martina used to say she thought I’d leave her for a man; I wouldn’t have. Actually, I would never have left her. I probably would have bitched and moaned about Martina’s girlfriend, then gotten over it. Where I come from, mistresses are a fact of life so long as you play by the rules. The first rule is, you don’t break up your marriage. The second is that you’re discreet. These affairs so often burn themselves out.

  Muffin Spencer-Devlin visited from California. Jolly, bright, she acted as though I was utterly fascinating. She deserved an Oscar but she made me feel better.

  Charlotte Bunch stopped by. Any time I see Charlotte has to be counted among one of the best times of my life. Juanita Weaver, an old friend from my D.C. days, visited and wouldn’t be satisfied until I sat in her lap and cried on her shoulder. I did. I don’t know if I felt better, but she did.

  Friends filtered in from all over. I hadn’t realized I had so many friends.

  The biggest surprise was that people on the tennis tour took the trouble to pay their respects. Lee Jackson hoped I would be all right. Virginia Wade called to offer condolences. Bud Collins, being Bud, called often, ready with a joke, ready with sympathy all the while the poor man was in the depths of grief over Judy. She’d been dead but four months. Trish Faulkner, the director of the tour, called. That really surprised me.

  Don and Elaine Candy were great. Pam Shriver was kind, too, and that could have gotten her in trouble since she was playing doubles with Martina.

  Jerry Pfeiffer decided to come off his antiwoman kick and arrived to spend time with me. We talked a lot about Nixon during his visit, which might seem peculiar since I’d been publicly dumped and branded an evil seducer of young Czech womanhood, but Nixon’s trajectory was spellbinding. His resignation in 1974 was burned in our consciousness.

  Jerry was hopeful about Reagan. I wasn’t. Too many faces from the old regime.

  Jerry had come a long way, though. “I used to think the purpose of a corporation was to make a profit. Now I think it’s full employment.” I almost fell over when he said that.

  Martina was telling anyone who would listen that I was Annie Oakley. Jerry thought it was funny.

  I said, “It’s not funny. We’re southern. It’s funny to us. Passion expressed through violence doesn’t cut it in Cleveland, Ohio. What she’s consciously doing is destroying all hope of a political career for me. She knows I want to run for office someday.”

  Sobered, he stroked his chin. “Run in Virginia.”

  “Jerry, I’m behind the eight ball. Running at home won’t help.”

  “Would you run as a Dem
ocrat or a Republican?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

  “Cincinnatus is at the plow.” He mentioned a famous episode in Roman history, 458 B.C., when the citizens filed out of the city to implore Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus to put down his plow and save them. The Roman army was about to be destroyed. Cincinnatus defeated the enemy, then returned to his plow once Rome was safe.

  This was one of George Washington’s favorite stories and one of mine because it involved citizens recognizing a true leader. I also liked it, I guess, because of the Society of Cincinnatus, which was formed by those staff officers serving under Washington. Washington is one of my great heroes.

  “Don’t hold your breath,” I told Jerry.

  “What’s the first thing you would do if you were president?”

  “Taxes were declared unconstitutional in 1913. I’d again declare them unconstitutional. Our nation became great precisely because we didn’t tax our citizens.”

  Jerry said too many people were sucking on the big white titty, our description of the Capitol. I’d never wean them off it.

  We batted ideas back and forth. I was my most relaxed with Jerry. He knew me at my best. He knew me at my worst. He loved me anyway.

  Martina was making material demands. She wanted to get back everything she’d given me. If she’d let out that steam when she was with me, we both would have done better.

  Our financial arrangement had been a simple one. I’d put down the initial payment on the house, she made the quarterly payments. My money paid for maintenance, and so on.

  I hired John Lowe. I didn’t want to be unfair but I knew I needed time to assess what had happened, why it had happened, and how I had contributed to this pain. Nothing happens in a vacuum. She had wanted me to run her life. Now she wanted to rebel against me. Her behavior carried a whiff of old rebellion, though; it wasn’t just about me, but I was the target, a stand-in for people she still couldn’t fight.

  We made few counterdemands other than that she lower the tenor of the proceedings. Cool off.

  If she was blissfully happy with her newfound lover, a woman (although perhaps it was hard to tell), why pound on me? Clearly the heterosexual reclamation project was failing.

  The biggest surprise was Mother. She acted like a mother.

  She didn’t say, “I told you so,” although she allowed herself the gray pleasure of saying, “Don’t marry a child, have one.”

  “This feels like a death, doesn’t it?”

  “A dirty one.” Mother offered sympathy and a surprise of her own.

  “Your father had an affair in 1933 with a woman named Lola. Everyone said she looked just like me. I caught him and told him, her or me.”

  She elaborated on this, waxing vituperative even though nearly fifty years had passed. For all her citing the rules of how to tolerate a mistress, she couldn’t accept one. I think I could have. We talked about that.

  Mother said, “You were good to that girl.”

  Of all the things my mother ever said to me, that surprised me the most. I hadn’t thought about my being good to Martina. I thought about her being good to me because she was. Sure, she avoided making decisions, but everyone around her colluded in keeping her mentally adolescent—except me. I trusted she’d grow up sooner or later, and while she was growing it wouldn’t hurt me to grow, either. I hardly had a lock on maturity.

  I loved Mother more openly after that. It was the first time I felt that she had met me on an emotional level without making a demand or pushing me to be better and stronger.

  Seeing me dragged through the tabloid sludge proved to her, if nothing else, that I’m tough. I had earned her respect through my work and through sending money, but after this I earned her admiration.

  I liked having Mother look up to me.

  Baby Jesus brought grasshoppers, a chipmunk and one tiny squirrel. At her age these were magnificent triumphs. I pretended to eat them while she purred. She desperately wanted me to be happy.

  Me too, but I suffered all the same. I needed to suffer because it was the only way I would learn. We build lives that work, more or less. As we age we must continually dismantle and rebuild, like the pink chambered nautilus. We need a bigger shell. I mean shell, too. A healthy covering is necessary in this world. You’ve got to know who to let in and who to shut out.

  Even Aunt Mimi offered a few prayers on my behalf. She hoped this would bring me to the One True Church. I assured her I’d buy a rosary.

  I found out that my friends loved me. No one liked seeing me shredded in the press. No one believed Martina’s protestations about how I had lured her into this dreadful lesbian life. Even her friends knew better. God knows what the public thought.

  Tove Parker, Dr. and Mrs. Jimmy Turner, Susan Scott and Chic Thompson, neighbors and friends, flew into my life like angels. Suddenly I was part of the varied, exciting social life of Albemarle County. I had never been home long enough to be part of Charlottesville.

  I called Fannie. I apologized for not having given us enough time to heal our own relationship, if such a thing was possible. She didn’t gloat. If anything, she was sympathetic. I wanted to ask her to come back. Under the circumstances that would have been ludicrous and even shameful. I get dumped and want my old lover back? That’s not the way.

  Fannie was my great love. If we lived in a society that didn’t hate gay people, we might have made it. But we don’t.

  I love Martina, too, but in a different way. Her dependency lured me into thinking I was important to her. I felt loved for my work, my services. I should be loved for myself. It took this relationship for me to know the difference.

  Martina tired of knocking me. She tired of her new love, too. A year later she was calling to tell me what this girl did or didn’t do, then she’d quickly hang up when she heard the woman approaching. There wasn’t anything I could do about it. She kept saying, “I lost it for her.”

  By the time she decided to divide up what we owned together in a nonhostile way, the love of her life was out of the picture and she was obsessively calling Judy Nelson. She expected my 100 percent support of their new relationship.

  It would have been better for everyone, the principals included, if Martina had not decided that Judy Nelson was yet another one true great love of her life.

  Both women were snakebit, but it would take almost eight years for the poison to draw through their systems.

  66

  Weeping Cross

  There’s a southern expression, “I’ve been in Sorrow’s kitchen and licked the pots clean.”

  I was in Sorrow’s kitchen.

  I mourned Martina, Fannie, the women’s movement, Juliann Young. You name it, I mourned it. The sadness that I’d stored away poured over me. No dragging around with tears in my eyes, though. I kept working.

  Work is prayer. I prayed a lot.

  Reflection comes hard to me since I exist triumphantly in the present, looking toward the future. I read history constantly, but I don’t think about my own history.

  I did now.

  Being sensate animals, we avoid pain. But being thinking animals, we must conquer pain.

  The primary cause of pain, setting aside disease and disaster, is your own self. This is unwelcome knowledge. I knew it intellectually. I had to know it emotionally.

  When I went out on the road for my tennis novel, Sudden Death, which I will always consider Judy Lacy’s book, the press whooped it up about my lesbianism. Big surprise. The literary people paid no attention to the novel since sport cannot be a proper metaphor to carry a novel. Simple reason: In sport you win or lose. Life is complicated, so complicated that you can lose when you win, win when you lose, lose completely yet win your soul.

  Since athletes, like insects preserved in amber, live in games, which is adolescence, they cannot represent the journey to the soul. When they’re done for, they certainly can.

  I wondered what I had done that was so awful. I’d loved a woman. I’d been getting ki
cked in the teeth for that since age fifteen and I hadn’t even loved anyone at that point. This wasn’t new information. The media spin was new. I watched with lurid fascination as they boosted their ratings, tittering over the subject. One of the least attractive aspects of our country is our shallow approach to sex and love.

  The women’s movement had prepared me. I think I interviewed my interviewers more than they interviewed me. I wasn’t going to blab on about Martina except to say that she was straight now and that I wished her well. I did.

  Book tours are like boot camp but with little sleep and less food. I’d survived a number of campaigns. I’d survive this one. I used it to gather information about how far gay people had come. Oh sure, I was the butt of the joke, but twenty years earlier the issue wouldn’t have been discussed at all in public.

  This was a left-handed victory.

  While I worked on the surface, I worked underneath. I tried to untangle what was me, my distinct character, from the times in which I lived. Where did I start and the twentieth century leave off? Where did I stand firm and Mom and Aunt Mimi fade? I’ll never know. If you know these answers about yourself, you’re way ahead of me.

  I don’t know what I would have been like if I’d been born in 1744 in Swabia or 414 B.C. in Athens. My talents would be identical, but what would I have developed and what would lie fallow?

  I had to untangle what I could. I paid a heavy price for my honesty. I thought I didn’t care, I was above it. I wasn’t. The subsequent isolation tainted me with a touch of self-righteousness. By God, I faced down the whole world; I had to be right because I was strong. Not so. The two are not connected.

  Fighting for a large principle doesn’t necessarily make you a good person. I don’t think I would have wanted to dine with Robespierre.

  My work was my life. That’s not enough. When few people would traffic with me, my work had to be my life. A writer is a small god. Our characters live or die at our prompting—although characters can and do take over. I had withdrawn into my work for obvious reasons, although they weren’t obvious to me then. That kid with the big brown eyes heard too many times that she was a stray cat. She worked to earn her place at the table.