by Lynn Sherr
There were some adjustments. “You continue to communicate with your parents but you stop using pronouns,” Molly explains. “You become very vague. You know, I went to the San Jose flea market, I went to the Shakespeare Festival. As far as they know, you’re by yourself. Now, because this is about Sally it’s going to get some attention, but this is a very familiar story.”
In retrospect, it seems impossible that Sally felt no angst from hiding their relationship. With Molly she had found the love that eluded her with John: not “something that just happens,” Sally had written him, “but it grows slowly, probably imperceptibly, from little things, special memories, and shared experiences and feelings—but more than anything, from close and constant association.” They were inseparable. Sally was smitten. But she couldn’t share it with anyone except Molly.
“It’s a very uncomfortable feeling to be completely in love with somebody and think, ‘This is so wrong,’ ” Molly says.
Because society says it’s wrong?
“Yes.”
Molly agonized over the secrecy. But if Sally did, it wasn’t obvious. “There was never any sign that she was troubled about her relationship with me or anything else,” Molly says, still amazed. “That’s what’s so attractive about her: she is the loosest. She’d be joking in the most stressful kind of situation.”
And, of course, she was also a superb compartmentalizer.
• • •
Physics (and Shakespeare) kept her busy in class, and tennis still claimed a large chunk of her life. During the summers of 1971 and 1972, she and Molly worked as counselors at Dennis Van der Meer’s TennisAmerica camp in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, a joint venture with superstar Billie Jean King, the four-time Wimbledon champion, and her husband, Larry King. Bear Ride worked in the pro shop. Sally and Molly were not only smart, accomplished athletes; they were the kind of fun-loving leaders campers wanted to hang out with, writing lyrics to silly camp songs with Molly strumming on the guitar.
“Sally and Molly were the heart of the camp,” says Gordon Kent, another counselor at the time who now runs his own tennis camps. “They patiently went through all the step-by-step progressions to teach the basic strokes. They were great—understanding, patient, fun. And Sally was so attractive. I had a big crush on her.”
Jan Graham was a camper, a self-described awkward adolescent. “The Sally and Molly I remember were smart,” she writes on her blog. “And gentle. And inclusive. And worldly … without being snotty or blasé about it. They shared a lot of ‘grownup’ observations in a casual way, as though we were mature enough to appreciate it.” Graham remembers the day “Molly broke her arm tripping over a tennis ball and had to get a cast. Sally washed Molly’s hair in the sink and goofed for the camera (not mine, sadly), pretending she was in a Prell commercial. Both of them helped us write tennis-camp specific parodies of Simon and Garfunkel songs for the ‘talent’ show.” Graham tells me that as her counselors, they were “just those great sort of role models who seemed to understand that teens struggle, and that a bit of warmth and kindness and a kick-ass sense of humor goes a long way.”
More importantly for Graham, “Molly and Sally seemed to honor their friendship as something important and integral, not something to pass the time until the right guy came long. I didn’t have many friends. I wore the wrong clothes, had the wrong haircut, didn’t know how to be a proper ‘girl’ even had I wanted to, which I wasn’t all that sure I did. (This was not yet a time when ‘alternative lifestyles’ were condoned.) Yet Sally and Molly made me feel … totally okay about who I was. So Sally was a role model for at least one anxious, confused, self-doubting dweeb who is forever grateful.”
Graham, who came out as a lesbian sometime later, had no idea about Sally and Molly’s relationship. No one did. They were, says Molly, very discreet.
One day in August 1972, as the Watergate scandal unfolded in Washington, DC, Billie Jean stopped by TennisAmerica in Nevada after her latest Wimbledon victory. The campers and counselors had cheered her success when it was announced over the camp PA system. Now they were thrilled at her appearance; awed, too, by the scars from her latest knee surgery. Even more exciting, King would participate in an exhibition mixed doubles match. To her utter delight, Sally (considered the best female player in residence) was asked to be the fourth, partnering with Van der Meer against King and camp director Dick Peters before a crowd of two hundred cheering campers, parents and other spectators. It was an elite crowd. The ballboys, both campers, were Martin Luther King III and his brother Dexter.
Sally’s entertaining recap of the event in a letter to John Tompkins (they were friends by then, as all of her serious romances would become) barely disguises her excitement:
I got to rally with BJK in the warmup and (hold onto your seat) didn’t miss a shot—on the other hand, she didn’t either. Dennis served first, and imagine my surprise when, 4 points later, we changed sides ahead 1–0 (after I won a point off a mildly difficult volley, and bowed to the wild applause). 8 games later, I held serve to put us ahead 6–3 … unfortunately, we decided to play an 8 game pro set (first team to eight), so instead of winning the set, we ended up losing 8–7. I played nothing short of spectacular (for me), got in all kinds of pictures, and even got to sign a couple of autographs while BJK was being besieged by pen and paper … why … SHE even told me I have a good backhand, and fair reflexes … so I’ve decided to quit tennis, and retire my racket, shoes, socks, and sweatsuit. See you at the ping-pong table.
Anyway, my illustrious career has reached its climax—I’m afraid it’s all downhill once you’ve played the #1. We may schedule a rematch for tomorrow, but she doesn’t seem overly eager. I should probably quit while I’m not too far behind.
For Sally, the unexpected match created an important mentor and friend. A year later, she would interrupt a qualifying test for her doctoral degree to watch King, the world’s top female tennis player, take on Bobby Riggs, formerly the world’s number 1 male tennis player, in a battle of the sexes witnessed by some ninety million TV viewers. Riggs had boasted to King that since no woman was as strong as a man, of course he could beat her. King trounced him in straight sets, breathing air under the wings of women—including Sally—on and off the court. Billie Jean, who transformed women’s tennis into a big-money, big-time sport, remained Sally’s hero.
The admiration was mutual, but while King remembers seeing Sally play in Junior Tennis, she has no specific recollection—as has frequently been cited—of urging her to turn pro. “She was a very smart tennis player,” King tells me, “with a really good backhand. But she wasn’t really powerful because she wasn’t really big.” King suspects she advised Sally that if she had any interest in playing professionally, she should “at least try, because you don’t want to look in the mirror in your sixties and say, ‘Oh, I never tried.’ ”
By the time of the camp match in Lake Tahoe, Sally had tried and rejected the possibility. Now her professional sights were set on science. After they played, Billie Jean King asked what she was majoring in at Stanford. Sally said astrophysics. She also said she’d be the first woman on the Moon. At least, that’s how King remembers it.
BILL
Back at Stanford, a couple of years later, Sally and Molly widened their little circle to include two more physics grad students: Rich Teets, a tall, slim Coloradan with shoulder-length blond hair and a quick wit; and Bill Colson, a tall, slim Michigander from “a nice wholesome community” who had never seen a play or read a wine label before he got to California. Body size mattered because the new foursome spent hours playing volleyball, a campus-wide addiction of pickup games that they played indoors and out, endlessly. The women were the “setters,” the men the “spikers,” with excellent results. “We became known as a volleyball power on campus—the physics department!” Colson notes. “In California, that’s pretty good.” They also spent hours playing bridge together, canoeing on the Russian River, and joining the party when Dale and Joyce came to
town, a fun-loving quartet of “mad scientists” (Colson’s term) who once made Baked Alaska by putting the ice cream in liquid nitrogen so it wouldn’t melt in the oven. The frozen brick that resulted was inedible for hours.
Bill was ready for new friends. His marriage was breaking up and he had moved out of his house, sometimes sleeping in his office like any other obsessed graduate student. He and Sally would consult on physics questions, later collaborating on a number of papers about free electron lasers. They were colleagues in an unusually close and supportive group of what Teets describes as “somewhat liberal agnostics with our noses buried in the lab.” Sally and Bill were friends. Just friends. Which is how it always started with her.
Bill found himself attracted to Sally and wondered why she seemed so distant. Finally, he worked up the courage to ask her. Sitting on the green couch near the front door of the house on College Avenue she shared with Molly, he got his answer. “She said she was in love with somebody,” he recalls. “I said, ‘Okay.’ And that answered a lot of questions.” Then Sally said, “This is really hard.” She had a difficult time of it, but she told him she was in love with Molly. “It’s as if she expected I’d say, ‘Oh, you’re homosexual,’ and walk out the door,” Colson tells me. His impression was very different from Molly’s. “She was afraid of what people thought about her.” The next day Molly sat with him out on the front lawn and confirmed their relationship. I ask him how he reacted.
“That’s an interesting question for a dumb kid from Michigan,” he says. “I think it was as much a relief as anything else, so I could move on. It wasn’t, ‘You’re a jerk and I don’t want to spend time with you.’ It answered the behavior. I still liked this person, so I said ‘Okay, I guess so.’ It wasn’t something I told anybody else about. It didn’t seem to be their business. I didn’t even tell Rich, and I was quite close to Rich.” The foursome remained intact.
• • •
Sometime in 1975, Molly wanted out. She’d been feeling uncomfortable for a long while, thought the relationship was strained, hated living in what she saw as Sally’s shadow. “It wasn’t her fault,” Molly says now. “She was a better athlete, a better scholar, and a more confident person. It was actually a great relief when she was chosen for the astronaut program and eventually chosen to be the first American woman astronaut, because I didn’t have to compare myself to a mere mortal. Although Sally never cast me in the role of sidekick, I saw myself that way and it probably contributed to my need to get away.”
Molly also felt trapped by the secrecy. “If you have to live in a bunker or a closet or a box with somebody, you can’t get anyone better than Sally,” she says. “But I wanted to bust loose. I was very burdened by this secret. If you’re always worried that people are going to find out, you’re not relaxed. I don’t think Sally cared about pleasing people. I do. And I did. And I felt that I was hiding a big part of myself. I wanted to be out.”
They had been together nearly five years. Molly left for New York, to work as an editor at womenSports magazine. It broke Sally’s heart. “It was excruciatingly difficult to leave the relationship, and Sally must have felt really hurt,” Molly says. “Not to flatter myself, but the only mean thing I think she ever said to me was, ‘You won’t be able to write without me editing your stuff.’ I took that to mean that I’d really hurt her. But once I make a decision, I don’t look back.”
She had no regrets about her relationship with Sally. “I want to make it clear that it was a very fun time,” Molly volunteers. “And I want the bad guy in your story to be a world that makes it so hard for people who love each other to be together. Thankfully, that is changing.”
Sally later told Tam that it took her several years to get over Molly, an eternity for someone with a deep need for an anchor in her life. Then again, she lived in the moment, one day at a time. So when Bill Colson, who was by then divorced, found out about the breakup some time later, what happened next was probably inevitable. “I think we would both say we fell in love at that point,” Colson says confidently. “She told me that, I told her that.” And while he admits, “I might have gotten Sally on the rebound,” he does not think it was any kind of trial period. “I think she was jumping in with both feet.”
I ask about their sexual relationship.
“It was very good,” he tells me without hesitation. “She was a willing and fully participating partner.”
Sally and Bill became an item, a picture-perfect grad school couple in their jeans and plaid shirts, with his beard and her long hair surrounding a face untouched by cosmetics. They never again discussed Sally’s time with Molly, and Bill never tried to define it. “It just didn’t register one way or the other to categorize Sally,” he explains. “Whatever the label is, she’s more complicated than that. It was about intimacy, not sexual orientation. I think she found that it was about being with the right person. If she was interested in being with Molly, sex was part of it, and the same thing happened to me.”
Once, Bill says, when they briefly broke up and he showed up at a volleyball game with another woman, Sally came to his office and announced, “I’m jealous.” Bill was stunned. “Because Sally doesn’t let down her guard like that,” he tells me, “she has a lot of pride.” They got back together. I ask if they spoke about getting married. “Not specifically. Her relatives talked about marriage more than we did. But we talked about moving in together.”
They lived on peanut butter sandwiches, put their heads together in her living room over the thesis each was writing. And talked about what they would do with their doctoral degrees. “We thought were going to be physics professors together and go off and have a life,” Colson says.
Deep into her research and completely engrossed with the science that had fixated her since childhood, Sally figured she’d go for a postdoc, probably in laser physics, at some university. She felt at home in academia and was looking forward to teaching.
It was January 1977. Jimmy Carter was headed for the White House, outgoing President Gerald Ford said he had no regrets about pardoning Richard Nixon, sideburns and moustaches decorated the faces of hip men, and the first-ever snow fell in Miami, Florida. For Sally, it was time to start writing the next set of graduate school applications. One morning, she was sitting in the student union with a cinnamon roll and coffee, trying to wake up before class. She picked up a copy of The Stanford Daily and never got beyond the front page. The headline was just above the fold: “NASA to Recruit Women.”
Sally’s future had just landed in her lap.
3
*
WAIT!
OCTOBER 1957–JUNE 1978
The cartoon appeared just after she died, wry commentary on the power of progress. In a bedroom bursting with science textbooks and space shuttle knickknacks, a tee-shirted teen sits at her desk, eyes widened in disbelief. It’s not so much what she sees on her computer—the familiar face alongside the newspaper headline mourning “Sally Ride, 1951–2012”—as her shock at the back story. “Wait,” she says to her mother, hovering behind her in mom-jeans. “Are you saying there was a time when women weren’t astronauts?!”
SPUTNIK
Listen up, kids.
America entered the space age in 1958. It would take another quarter century to let a woman do the job. The struggle to open that door reflects the social upheaval and political pressures that would transform almost every segment of traditional culture. The world was spinning far beyond its geophysical axis, tugging NASA along with it.
It began with a beep. Make that “beep-beep-beep,” the eerie transmission from the shiny metal sphere lofted into the sky by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957. “This is Radio Moscow,” came the startling announcement from our Cold War adversary. “The first artificial Earth satellite in the world … was today successfully launched …” It was no bigger than a beach ball and could do nothing besides circle the globe. But the stunning achievement introduced a new word to the language—“Sputnik,” or “fellow
traveler”—along with an icy terror: someone was up there, and it wasn’t us. Today, with several thousand satellites reliably delivering everything from Jon Stewart to Words with Friends, it is hard to grasp the impact of 184 pounds of hardware on the American psyche. But at the time it was scary, a dramatic wake-up call that threatened our presumed supremacy. Our archenemies, the “godless Commies” (the ones we disparaged as our technological inferiors), had a platform for weapons that could annihilate us, plus rockets powerful enough to launch them. We, with all our vaunted scientific know-how, had nothing close. Sputnik taunted Americans as it girded the planet, a mini-moon in what once was an empty sky.
As a teenager in suburban Philadelphia, I bundled up against the early autumn frost one night and watched Sputnik cross the autumn darkness above me, like a tiny star dancing over the horizon. I was in high school, where the implications of the Soviet achievement became an object lesson in American unpreparedness. Almost overnight, Russian language classes were introduced into the classroom, along with more math and science. Technology was how you avoided being either dead or Red.
In Washington, Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the five-star general who had led the allied victory in Europe, refused to panic. He saw space as a place for peace and was determined to prevent its militarization. Or bust the federal budget. “They have put one small ball into the air,” he said dismissively. But Democratic senator Lyndon Baines Johnson, the Senate Majority Leader, who would became the US space program’s biggest booster, disagreed and seized the political moment for his party. A month later, when the USSR launched a second Sputnik—carrying a dog named Laika, which inevitably led the American press to rechristen the spacecraft “Muttnik”—Johnson scheduled hearings on the issue. The testimony was more convincing than the satellite, which did not return the dog to Earth. “Control of space means control of the world,” LBJ concluded. In 1958, after the US got its first satellite aloft, Ike gave in. He replaced the outdated National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), which had focused only on airplanes (and where space travel was disdained as “Buck Rogers nonsense”), with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), pointedly making it a civilian entity. He also authorized a program to put a human in space. The race was on.
