It was the most aggressively competitive series of confessions since Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Like a sinner who does not want to miss any bets, Billie Jean King made the rounds of the major churches and synagogues of press and television last week. She unburdened herself to ABC'S Barbara Walters, the one woman in America officially empowered to hear confessions and grant absolution. She went over the scandal with Rona Barrett. She spent ten hours with an old friend from PEOPLE.
Well, in the words of every high school football coach and that famous felon John Mitchell: When the going gets tough, the tough get going. King was bouncing back from public humiliation better than any similarly poleaxed public figure in a long time. She had slipped only briefly at the start of the whole ridiculous business. When her former secretary Marilyn Barnett for "palimony," a lesbian relationship with King, Billie Jean first responded with a denial.
Then she got very smart, very fast. Her instinct for competitive public relations, as shrewd and sure as her court sense, told her that you only win if you control the game. She knew that the story was shaking loose, and that more denials would only put reporters into a feeding frenzy. She knew that if Barnett had to prove the sapphic connection in court, she could organize a parade of witnesses who would keep the tabloids happy for weeks. So King decided that she herself must manage the stagecraft of her public humiliation. Her parents on one side, her husband Larry on the other wearing an expression of indecipherable calm, she faced a press conference and admitted the lesbian affair; was, she said, a "mistake." The homosexual rights movement may have curled its lip just then. And feminists, if they thought about it, might worry about the almost cynically unliberated way that Larry later took the rap for his wife's affair, saying that it was his long absences on business that drove her into the arms of another for consolation, like a sulking housewife. Never mind. Billie Jean practiced first-class damage control and won the grace-under-pressure award for this month. She managed to transform an ugly and preposterously public embarrassment into something else: an affectingly human little drama about Billie Jean King in trouble.
Perhaps her athlete's instincts told King that when the ghastly truth splits open like a suitcase, one's moves must be fast and sure. Public figures rarely have that aplomb: when someone abruptly turns on the light and catches them, they bunk in astonishment and guilt or reach their palms out desperately to cover the lens of the minicam.
What is the best strategy to adopt when the undignified or even incriminating truth comes out? Reactions are always a matter of personal style and self-possession. The possibilities range from stonewalling ("Never apologize, never explain," as the British classicist Benjamin Jowett said) to full disclosure. Within that range there are as many subtle variations as there are shades of the truth.