Intrepid Ingenue

Intrepid Ingenue

The customs men had gone through her boxes quickly and she was free to leave. Most of the other passengers from the Majestic still sat about, perched on trunks or, wearily, on baggage carts, in the salt-smelling cavern of the pier. She moved away, accompanied by a handsome woman of 45, whose maternal caveat alone discouraged the imminent addresses of a young man in a Panama, who had been staring for fifteen minutes with a sort of scholarly zeal, as if, he seemed to say, her face reminded him of someone. As she passed through the ticket lines he turned again, pointed his finger, suddenly and rudely exclaimed: "Helen Wills!"

Her expression--the "Little Poker Face" of a thousand newspaper stories--sustained no change. Yet surely she heard. And surely she was pleased. For the Panama's cry was the one important recognition accorded her on her return to the U. S. last week.

There might have been speeches. There might have been tugboats swathed in flags and a police band playing Sousa's march and the Mayor standing in the bow waving the Keys of the City. There might have been all these delights and many more if, one hot day last February on the Riviera, she had drunk a glass of brandy when Mlle. Lenglen drank one, and if an attack of appendicitis had not forced her to occupy the Royal Box instead of Court No. 1 at the recent festivities at Wimbledon. For the exclamation of the Panama really punctuated a cycle.

That cycle began in 1905 when a female child was born to Dr. and Mrs. C. A. Wills in Centreville, Alameda County, Calif. Sleep-- simple food--outdoor exercise--her father had used the phrases before. He used them on his patients, and pretty soon he was able to move to Berkeley and send Helen east to school at Hopkins Hall (near Bennington, Vt.). She was still very small when the War started, and one year she came home for the summer holidays to find the house strangely empty. Her father had gone to France. When, two years later, he came back, she had grown out of all recognition. A friend of the family's, William C. ("Pop") Fuller, had had a hand in promoting this growth. Knowing how things were apt to be with the doctor away and all, he got into the way of dropping over every afternoon and taking Helen down to the Berkeley Tennis Club. "Pop" would spread his silk handerchief on the service line, give Helen four dozen balls and let her shoot at it.

One evening over a cigar he suggested that Dr. Wills let Helen enter the girls' tournament--"just to see how far she would get." She won this tournament, the Bay Counties. Next year she won the state championship. When she was 16 she went east and won the girl's national. She still had her hair down, two thick brown ropes that gently flogged her shoulders as she moved after the ball. In 1922 she played through all the important tournaments, won the doubles with Mrs. Marion Zinderstein Jessup, and gave Molla Mailory a run for the singles. The sports writers boosted her and she acquired a "public." You could not help liking the steady eyes under the crisp sun-visor,* the strong, immature body in the short white skirt and pull-on blouse. That winter she grew four inches. When she began her eastern season at Seabright in 1923 TIME, reporting possibilities for the national title, said "She looms. . . ."

What happened that year on the centre court at Forest Hills is, as the editorial writers say, "history." That burly Norwegian woman, Molla Bjurstedt Mallory, had been champion for a long time. None of the other women could compare with her and she went through to the finals without effort. She seemed at once wiser and more primitive than the California ingenue who faced her, rather pale, under the livid August sun.

After the first set Mrs. Mallory could still produce the flash of her square, sudden smile; after the second set she looked suddenly darker; she played the third set with dogged courage, the perspiration running down into her eyes. Helen Wills was as pale at the end of the match as she had been at the beginning. Let the people in the stands behave like maniacs. What did she care? At 17, very quietly, she had won the woman's championship of the U. S. She had now reached full growth -- 142 pounds, 5 ft. 7. It was time for her to go to college -- the University of California. In her first year she was an honor student and won a scholarship for "excellence in all studies," but she managed to play tennis three times a week, summer and winter. She specialized in art courses; "Pop" Fuller had stimulated her interest in drawing; he owned some good pictures and took her every year to the exhibition of the Bohemian Club in San Francisco. In 1924 she won the U. S. national title again, but lost in the Wimbledon finals to Kathleen McKane.

Last year she took the national cup for the third time and now holds it as her own. The papers have been prodigal in reporting her recent doings--how she won many tinkling little Riviera tournaments and lost to Suzanne Lenglen and got appendicitis. She made no apologies for that match at Cannes. Mlle. Lenglen beat her because she is, still, a better match player. They hit the ball about equally hard; Miss Wills is somewhat the better stylist; Mlle. Lenglen is faster on her feet. But when they played at Cannes the sunburned gentlemen at the courtside were betting two-to-one against Miss Wills, and the odds, at their next encounter, will probably be the same. Odds are curious equations: they are often based on the personalities of two contenders, on differences in temperament; the difference between Mlle. Lenglen and Helen Wills is probably the difference between their thyroid glands. Suzanne Lenglen is a prima donna. Every stroke, to her, is an emergency which she must meet in some sensational manner. Helen Wills goes about the business of tennis as calmly as an etcher making a design. The Frenchwoman cannot play unless people are watching.

Mlle. Lenglen likes bandeaux and silks and flounces; the little brown moons under her eyes suggest that she has come to the court without sleep after a night of carnival. Miss Wills is, essentially, as simple as her father's prescription for a healthy childhood. Once, in their third set, she was three games ahead of the Frenchwoman. Mlle. Lenglen had won the first set but she was obviously tiring; the little moons were ominous. She went to the side lines and asked for a glass of brandy. Helen Wills lost the match. She would not, matching drink for drink, implore the gods of a strange land. In the clubhouse the King of Sweden tapped her on the shoulder. "You played nobly," he said:

Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit! Last year every girl had in her wardrobe a jaunty little toque called "The Helen Wills." This year, despite the fashionableness of those big hats that make plain girls pretty and conceal the looks of pretty girls, so that it is equal for every one, Helen Wills retains the chapeau of which she is godmother. Her own mother, the handsome woman who warned off the Panama, is her "best friend." They go to luncheons and fetes and their hairdresser together; together they receive the adulation of the public.

Helen Wills was never excited about committee receptions and tugboats filled with flowers. Indeed, she has just begun to dislike them. That was why the exclamation of the youth on the pier marked off a cycle; it reminded her how delightful it is to be a private citizen and--just sometimes--to be recognized. She was a very different person, this amused woman in the satin traveling suit by Callot, with her just-inspected trunks packed with the dreams of Patou, from the pig-tailed girl in white duck, who played on Long Island five years ago.

*Last week, in Hartford, Conn., Morris Marinocopio, day laborer, raised high his shovel and brought it crashing down upon the skull of Raymond Hardie, his fellow, after the latter, pointing at an eyeshade worn by Morris, called him"HelenWills." . . . Little had Miss Wills reckoned that, upon her return to the U. S., she was to find imitations of a very necessary part of her sporting equipment bound upon the skulls of millions of shopgirls, street sheiks, idlers, bummers, city park loungers, knickered female motorists.