When Ginger Rogers competed in grand slam tennis with a notorious playboy

Telegraph

9 hours ago

Among the Wimbledon Museum's collection lies a stylish Louis Vuitton racket bag that used to be the property of Hollywood legend Fred Astaire.
It is one of several items which allude to the glory days of the Californian tennis scene: a whirl of Gatsby-esque glamour and excess. In the 1920s and 30s, actors and studio bosses regularly danced, drank and dined with famous champions like Big Bill Tilden, Helen Wills Moody and Alice Marble.
But while Astaire is remembered as a stylish amateur player who possessed – naturally – quick feet, his regular dance partner Ginger Rogers went one better. In 1950, she teamed up with former Wimbledon runner-up Frank Shields in the mixed-doubles draw at Forest Hills. This was the US Nationals, or – as we would know it better now – the US Open.
For Rogers, who was famously said to have 'done everything Astaire did backwards and in high heels', it must have been quite a leap from the social matches she regularly played on her own homemade court in Beverly Hills.
Mind you, that house saw some famous tennis names over the years. Her autobiography Ginger reports that 'I had the only en-tout-cas court in Southern California', which sounds like some sort of artificial clay. As Rogers adds, 'I was delighted to open my court to competitors like Pancho Gonzales, Gussie Moran' – she of the scandalously frilly knickers – 'and Billie Jean King.'
The mixed-doubles escapade was short-lived, as Rogers and Shields lost in the first round at Forest Hills. But then, the tennis may not have been the whole story. Other star names who were part of the Hollywood racket crowd remember Rogers as being a very competent but nevertheless limited player who was never going to go too deep in the event. Budge Patty, who won Wimbledon that summer, once said that 'there was only one reason why Frank would have been playing with her,' and gave a meaningful look as he did so.
Rogers certainly favoured a sporting man. In Ginger, she reports that her third husband – a strapping Marine by the name of Jack Briggs – had wooed her on the court, and adds that 'I wouldn't have gone out with him if he hadn't liked tennis.' Even her fourth husband, Jacques Bergerac, was often to be found partnering her at tennis and golf.
But Shields, who appeared in 10 movies of his own without ever building a genuine screen career, was on a different level. His world ranking, which in those days was calculated by the world's tennis correspondents, peaked at No 2 in 1931, and he was a long-serving captain of the USA's Davis Cup team before a fondness for drink seems to have got the better of him in the mid-1930s.
Shields, simply put, was a hellraiser. Headlines abounded about scraps and scrapes, including one notorious occasion when he disappeared after losing in the quarter-finals of the 1934 French Open and eventually popped up at sea, with no money and no possessions other than the tuxedo he had boarded the ship in.
I mentioned before that Shields was a Wimbledon runner-up in 1931. Technically, though, he was not a finalist. To quote the American cultural critic Jeffrey Hart, 'Shields became the only player in history to fail to show up for a Wimbledon final, against his crony Sidney B. Wood. This was a murky episode, in which legend has it that Shields was busy investigating the attributes of a matched pair of French countesses; the truth is probably that he had a badly twisted leg from his previous match with [Jean] Borotra – though the explanations are not mutually exclusive.'
In the same article – a review of the biography that was published by Shields' son William in 1986 – Hart describes him as a 'natural athlete, astonishingly quick and strong at six-six, and drop-dead handsome, a dark Apollo.' He used these attributes to marry three rich heiresses in succession, including a Spanish princess who rejoiced in the name of Marina Torlonia di Civitella-Cesi.
It was through her, and their son Francis Alexander, that Frank became the grandfather of Brooke Shields, the actress and early 'It Girl' who wound up as Andre Agassi's first wife.
Given how much we know about Shields and his rake's progress, it's perhaps surprising that his son's biography – which is subtitled 'The Last Great Amateur' – makes almost no mention of his partnership with Rogers. Only one bland sentence appears: 'Ginger Rogers and Pop were pals from his Hollywood days and would occasionally play mixed doubles together. One year they teamed up at Forest Hills.'
If we turn to Ginger, there is no mention of Shields in its 560 pages and exhaustive index, which runs the gamut of Hollywood's great and good. Whatever the exact nature of their liaison, my money's on one thing: it didn't end well.