‘I’m not a hundred per cent fit,’ said Mansfield. ‘That’s what’s the matter. Thanks for your sympathy.’
‘You should be like a train. Driving. Onward. We’re not going to win like this. Where is your thrust?’
‘Perhaps if you got your serve in and stopped being quite so repulsive, we might get out of this.’
It was not to be. Lawrence said later that he had done what he could for women but there was ‘no helping some of them’.
The other semi in the mixed was a real upset. Astaire and Rogers didn’t want the win as badly as Freud and Klein. The Austrians concentrated on Rogers in the first set, whom Freud thought ‘a hysteric’, and on Astaire in the second, whom Klein thought ‘very charming indeed’.
Finals
Day 36
Freud and Klein v. Bankhead and partner • Lenya and Dietrich v. Mansfield and Hodgkins • Magritte and Dali v. Beckett and Duchamp • Millay v. Akhmatova • Joyce v. Orwell
Today eighteen billion viewers in 512 countries tuned in to the live broadcast of the finals.
‘This figure is staggering,’ said George Plimpton. ‘Everyone knew there’d be an audience for this thing but what we’re looking at here is the highest rating for a single event in sporting history.’
‘Not just in sporting history,’ added Norman Mailer. ‘This is an audience far beyond that of any previous television event. Far beyond.’
It is certainly an audience well north of the wildest dreams of the WTO. Nike’s Friedrich Nietzsche confirmed that sponsors ‘are now looking at a minimum of fifteen to twenty million dollars per player for an annual contract. Take Picasso—he was knocked out of the singles in the second round but he’s apparently negotiating a lifetime deal worth an estimated $400 million.’
Many players have rejected the blandishments of management and the corporates but, for those who want it, fortunes are there for the taking. Keynes, Chaplin, Hemingway, Mae West, Bill Fields, Wodehouse, Sartre and de Beauvoir, Chanel, Sackville-West, Frankie Wright, Crosby and Disney have all become millionaires.
On the other hand, men’s singles finalists Orwell and Joyce have constant money worries and have only been able to compete here through the assistance of friends. Van Gogh has to give lessons to kids in Arles to buy bread. ‘There’s a lot of money about,’ said Nietzsche, ‘but it’s not well distributed. Anyway, in terms of the individual, the money isn’t the point. The title is the thing.’
Roland Barthes ‘wasn’t surprised’ by the huge popularity of the event, elaborating that it ‘depended on what you mean by “the event”. The original event has been colonised by its own discourse. Discourse is now the event.’
Oscar Wilde mourned the tournament’s popularity as ‘a requiem for genius. We stand on the threshold of idiocy and the army of commerce is advancing.
‘All men kill the thing they love
In deciding to be bought.
Some do it very early
And some as a last resort.
The coward does it through endorsements
The brave man, on the court.’
Were there other trends which worried him?
‘All trends give rise to the gravest possible concern,’ Wilde said. ‘A trend is a lack of imagination masquerading as an idea. It has neither the appeal of the former, nor the rigour of the latter. There was a trend to fidelity in marriage at one point. It almost completely destroyed conversation.’
Was he concerned about the trend to nationalism?
‘An excellent example. Either these flags go, or I do.’
As the mixed-doubles final got under way it was evident that Freud and Klein had done some homework on Bankhead and were playing to a plan. What was less obvious was that Bankhead had done some homework on Freud and Klein and was playing to another plan altogether.
When Bankhead and her partner took the first set, Freud said he regarded this as aggressive behaviour.
‘Really?’ said Bankhead. ‘I thought we were rather demure.’
‘You think we are your parents,’ announced the Doc, ‘and we are engaged in the primal scene. This enrages you and you want to kill us.’
‘You are my parents?’ checked Bankhead. ‘And what is it that enrages me so?’
‘We are engaged in the primal scene.’
‘Goodness, how interesting. And what is that?’
‘The act of sexual congress. Children have in their heads an image of their parents in congress. Do you know Plato’s theory of forms?’
‘I spent an evening with Chico Marx once. We spoke of little else.’
‘Plato’s idea of “form” is that certain ideas, or “forms”, exist in our minds, and that if they did not we wouldn’t recognise objects in the real world.’
‘Has anyone ever told you you’re very attractive?’ crooned Bankhead.
‘Very interesting,’ said the Doc. ‘In what way?’
‘Not you,’ said Bankhead. ‘You, Melanie.’
Freud was grim when play resumed. He stood at the net like a customs official, jumping on anything he could reach and confiscating it. He glowered and he focused, and every time he drifted towards the centre Bankhead and her partner put the ball past him down the line. Freud then decided he should be behind Klein and they changed places. He couldn’t stay out of the action, though, and every time he strayed towards the net Bankhead and her partner put the ball behind him. The matter was wrapped up in two sets, the players waved to the crowd and left the arena. Bankhead refused to say who her partner was but said she’d be thanking him later. She said she had enjoyed the match, ‘Except for that little man who wanted to talk about sex. Good grief. I’m only playing tennis for a rest.’
The mixed-doubles final had been an anti-climax and the organisers were anxious. Freud, one of the great authorities on doubles play, had just blown a great opportunity and the identity of one of the winners remained a mystery. (It was apparently not Douglas Fairbanks jnr.) In addition, the women’s doubles final was a marketer’s
