BILL TILDEN: FROM ICON TO PARIAH.

Byline: Frank Fitzpatrick Philadelphia Inquirer 

Only a few mourners, shading themselves from the hot afternoon sun, watched as Bill Tilden's ashes were buried at Ivy Hill Cemetery in June, 1953.

This wasn't how it was supposed to end.

Born to Philadelphia's aristocracy, Tilden had been the world's best tennis player and one of sports' brightest celebrities. He had been rich, stylish and erudite, the epitome of amateur gentility in the early 20th century.

He grew up in a Germantown mansion that his father, a prosperous wool merchant, named Overleigh. A three-time Union League chairman and prominent Republican, William Tatem Tilden Sr. had hosted presidents in the Tudor home on McKean Street. The Tildens belonged to all the right organizations, including the Germantown Cricket Club, whose foreboding walls were just a hundred yards or so from their front door.

Yet when Bill Tilden died of a massive heart attack on June 5, 1953, he was alone in a run-down Hollywood boarding house. His money and his reputation - especially in his hometown - were gone.

Proper Philadelphia society had ostracized him long before, purging his name wherever it could be found. His trophies - those he hadn't pawned - were in a warehouse somewhere. And before he could be laid out for a funeral service in Los Angeles, a friend had to buy a decent sweater to put on the body.

By then, even Overleigh was a tattered relic of a world Bill Tilden had lost. It was almost as if Tilden, in those postwar years, had been revealed to be a Communist. But the real story of his decline - in the minds of proper Philadelphians, anyway - was worse.

Tilden was a homosexual. Twice in Los Angeles in the late 1940s, he had been arrested for incidents involving teen-age boys. The Philadelphia patrician quickly became a pariah.

``Maybe it was because this was Philadelphia, where you had the Main Line and that type attitude,'' said Ed Fabricius, a Philadelphian who was a longtime official of the United States Tennis Association. ``Maybe somewhere else it all would have been overlooked more easily.''

Philadelphia has a strange history of ignoring some of its greatest sports figures while memorializing the trivial.

Wilt Chamberlain's No. 13, for example, was not raised to the Spectrum rafters until 18 years after his last NBA game. Outside that South Philadelphia arena, meanwhile, there already were statues to honor a fictional boxer (Rocky) and a singing good-luck charm (Kate Smith).

The only place in his hometown where anyone today is likely to stumble across the name of William Tatem Tilden II, nearly 44 years after his death, is on a nondescript marker at Ivy Hill, in Northwest Philadelphia.

``I always find it kind of amazing,'' Fabricius said, ``that you can't find his name anywhere.''

There are no Bill Tilden Tennis Centers in Philadelphia, no photos of the tall, dapper champion on the walls of local sports bars, no streets named for him, the way one memorializes Dave Zinkoff, the former 76ers P.A. announcer. (The William Tilden Middle School in Southwest Philadelphia honors the tennis star's father, who was president of the Philadelphia Board of Education for many years.)

Tilden won seven U.S. singles titles in the 1920s, including six in a row. He was the first American to triumph at Wimbledon, and though he rarely played in any national championship but his own, he captured 10 Grand Slam singles crowns, plus six in doubles and five in mixed doubles. He led the United States to an unprecedented seven consecutive Davis Cup championships and went an entire year (1924) without a loss.

In 1950, when an Associated Press poll selected the greatest performer in each sport during the century's first 50 years, Tilden emerged with the widest margin of victory, one greater even than Babe Ruth's in baseball or Bobby Jones' in golf.

``Bill Tilden revolutionized the game of tennis,'' said Rich Ashburn, the Phillies' broadcaster, who, as a quality Main Line tennis player himself, has had a half-century fascination with Tilden and once considered writing a biography about him.

``He was the first of the big, powerful serve-and-volleyers. And he was a great strategist.''

But on Nov. 23, 1946, Tilden was arrested in a car with a 14-year-old boy and charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Two years later, after serving nearly eight months at a prison work farm, he was arrested for violating his probation. A 16-year-old hitchhiker had accused Tilden of fondling him.

``The local tennis community,'' Fabricius said, ``just ostracized him after that.''

On the big Main Line estates, tongues that once wagged now galloped. Those Philadelphians had always found Tilden's outspokenness and the rumors of his homosexuality distasteful. This, though, was something else entirely.

``You see, he moved out to California and he was there about four or five years and was in jail twice,'' said William J. Clothier, 81, a former USTA official whose prominent Philadelphia family included a national singles champion - his father, William Sr., who won the title in 1906.

``People here were just disgusted with him - even when he died,'' Clothier said. ``Nobody from Philadelphia or the USTA went to the funeral.''

The University of Pennsylvania, where Tilden majored unhappily in business and never graduated, expunged his name from files.

``It was amazing what you couldn't find,'' said Fabricius, a Penn graduate, recalling research he conducted at the school in the early 1970s for ``Big Bill Tilden,'' a 1975 biography by Frank Deford.

At the Germantown Cricket Club, whose green lawns Tilden could see from his bedroom window for much of his life and where he had both fetched balls and won two national championships, a large framed photo of him was removed from its lobby.

``When he had that trouble out in Hollywood, he lost his membership here,'' said Bob Couch, a member and club archivist at GCC, where the picture was rehanged several years ago. ``All the references to him came down.''

Dunlop, one of the country's leading manufacturers of tennis products, removed Tilden's name from its equipment. A tournament Tilden had been planning to host in Los Angeles was canceled.

The arrests seemed to confirm what the United States Lawn Tennis Association (the USLTA, precursor to the USTA) had feared.

They ``were scared that the original effete image of American men's tennis . . . could be revived by the world's No. 1 player projecting a homosexual aura,'' the late Ted Tinling wrote in ``Love and Faults.''

The USLTA's blueblood leadership upheld what it perceived to be the code of the gentleman amateur. It wanted no controversy of any sort, certainly not about a man's sexual appetites.

``I don't think there's any question that the powers that be in tennis blackballed him,'' Ashburn said. ``They wouldn't let him have anything to do with the Davis Cup, which in those days was really the big event.''

Tilden discussed his homosexuality publicly only once. That was in a veiled passage in his 1948 memoir, ``My Story,'' written after his first arrest.

``Throughout all history there has been a record of occasional relationships somewhat away from the normal,'' he wrote. ``One knows that this condition exists, that it is more or less prevalent and always will be. History further demonstrates that in frequent instances, creative, useful and even great human beings have known such relationships.''

While Tilden brought U.S. tennis unprecedented glory, he also gave its officials near-constant headaches. Concerns about his homosexuality, as troubling as they might have been, were raised only in private. It was Tilden's habit of criticizing the USLTA in public that its stodgy leaders found even more disturbing.

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Photo

Photo: Bill Tilden, one of tennis' greatest champions, ultimately died a fallen hero.