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Because she is the current First Lady of Tennis, Pauline usually chooses what tournaments she will play, demands and gets top expense money. Since the rest of the girls have little choice but to tag along, women's tennis today is known as the Betz Club. Its eastern home is with Delaware's wealthy tennis fan William du Pont, who subsidizes Ozzie, Bruffie and a dozen or so lesser lady tennists as much as the watchdog of amateur tennis, the U.S.L.T.A., allows. Betz owns to having been helped financially at one time (it is permissible to accept "gifts"), but now she gets along on her own and the legitimate take.
Tennis for the King. The Betz Club got its first foreign seasoning in June. For the first time since 1938, the top five U.S. women players—Betz, Osborne, Brough, Pat Todd and Florida's Doris Hart—headed for England to play Britain's top women in Wightman Cup competition. The U.S. team blasted Britain's out-of-practice best off the courts in seven straight matches without dropping a set. Betz won the Wimbledon Singles crown, a glory at least equal to the U.S. championship. In Paris three weeks later, Osborne handed Betz one of her few beatings. The Betz Club romped up to Sweden, and played barelegged before 88-year-old tennis bug King Gustav. Then the other club members returned to the U.S., but Pauline headed for a Swiss resort (Gunten) to celebrate her 27th birthday with Millionheiress Barbara Hutton. They swam, jitterbugged and went mountain-climbing for ten days—Pauline's longest vacation from tennis in ten years.
Something Ladylike. Pauline Betz has had a tennis racket in her hands almost every day ever since she was nine. Her mother, a gym teacher at Los Angeles' Jefferson High School, put it there. Pauline is convinced that her mother set her playing tennis "to get me off the streets and doing something more ladylike." She was a tree-climbing tomboy. Every night when her father came home, Pauline and her younger brother greeted him by walking down the street on their hands. Papa complained once: "I wish I could see those children right side up once in a while."
From the time she was 16, and got her first real tennis instruction (from Bruce Ainley, pro at swank Town House), Pauline set the alarm clock for 5 a.m., took a basketful of balls to the practice court and worked on her strokes until it was time for school. At 21, she won a scholarship to Florida's tennis-conscious Rollins College, played No. 4 on the men's team and got enough As in the classroom to earn a scholarship in economics at Columbia. She didn't like Manhattan's weather, and quit Columbia after six months. At 23 she was national champion.
Hobnobbing with Headliners. She liked the life—checking in & out of hotels, hopping planes, eating in restaurants, hobnobbing with headline names. Winters, when the tournament season is over, she rarely spends an evening in the Betzes' small Los Angeles apartment, where the family serves vegetables in her sterling silver trophies. Usually she is to be found with movie folk, especially the Bill Powells. At the elegant Beverly Hills Tennis Club, she has little trouble beating Cinemactors Paul Lukas and Robert Taylor.