The secret gay life of one of the greatest female athletes in history
Babe Didrikson Zaharias was an American sports icon and remained a closeted lesbian. Her biographer sheds light on a great athlete.
Mark
Babe Didrikson Zaharias was almost impossibly good at sports, and perhaps one of the greatest athletes — male or female — in history. And I will wager that many of you who are reading this have absolutely no idea who she is, or what she was.
She succeeded in multiple sports. She won two gold medals and a silver at the 1932 Olympics. She excelled at basketball, baseball, track and field, swimming, bowling, tennis and, most famously, golf. She helped found the Ladies Professional Golf Association and became one of the most celebrated athletes in America.
She was also something else: a woman who loved another woman at a time when acknowledging that love could destroy a career.
For decades, that part of Babe’s story was largely left out.
I remember watching a rerun of the 1975 biopic “Babe” years after it aired. The television movie intentionally sanitized Mildred “Babe” Didrikson Zaharias’s life by completely omitting her identity as a lesbian. By forcing her into a neat, heterosexual narrative — and reducing her romantic relationship with golfer Betty Dodd to a mere friendship.
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In the film, her husband, George, a former professional wrestler, was played by NFL Hall-of-Famer Alex Karrass, who served as a crucial, life-saving LGBTQ ally to his Detroit Lions teammate Dave Kopay, who later became the first former NFL player to publicly come out as gay.
Then came Susan Cayleff’s groundbreaking book in 1995, that was the first major biography to openly detail and validate Babe’s intimate, long-term romantic relationship with fellow Dodd
So, I jumped at the chance to speak to Cayleff, and about the revelations she discovered by researching her biography, “Babe: The Life and Legend of Babe Didrikson Zaharias.”
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A hidden partner
She told me the evidence of Babe’s relationship with fellow golfer Betty Dodd surfaced almost immediately. “A nurse who had treated Babe when she was dying of cancer, asked me about ‘that young woman’ who used to sleep on a cot near Babe’s hospital bed,” she said.
Cayleff assumed she meant Babe’s sister. “No, no,” the nurse told her. “That young girl.”
Turns out the young woman was Betty Dodd.
Dodd was alive when Cayleff was doing her research, and what Cayleff learned eventually became one of the most consequential elements of her 1995 biography. Babe and Betty were not simply friends, teammates or protégée and mentor. They were partners.
Cayleff told me they met in 1950, when Dodd was a young aspiring golfer and Babe was already an international sports icon. What began as a professional relationship became an intimate one. Dodd eventually lived with Babe and her husband, George Zaharias, and traveled with Babe on the golf circuit.
Their relationship lasted six years, until the end of Babe’s life in 1956.
Cayleff, who is openly lesbian herself, made a conscious decision that she was not going to tell Babe’s story while erasing the most important relationship of her final years.
“I’m an out lesbian myself,” Cayleff told me. “So I made the decision that I was going to tell Babe’s life story inclusive of her same-sex relationship.”
That decision sounds obvious now. It wasn’t then.
‘Failed to conform to expectations of femininity’
Earlier biographers had plenty of opportunities to discover the relationship, Cayleff said, but chose not to pursue it. Instead, Babe’s carefully constructed heterosexual public image remained largely intact.
And Babe had good reason to be terrified of what might happen if the truth became public.
She had already experienced the cruelty of the press.
Cayleff explained that during the 1930s, reporters openly questioned her femininity and sexuality. Stories portrayed her as something between male and female and treated her muscular body, athletic ability and aggressive personality as evidence that something about her womanhood was suspect.
Cayleff believes those experiences stayed with Babe.
“She had seen what happened when a woman athlete failed to conform to expectations of femininity,” Cayleff said. “And she knew that her enormous financial success depended in part on being acceptable to a mainstream American audience.”
The stakes were not theoretical.
Cayleff pointed to the experience of Marilyn Barnett, whose relationship with tennis star Billie Jean King became public in the 1980s. King lost virtually all of her endorsements after the relationship was exposed.
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For Babe, the danger was even greater. This was the 1950s, when homosexuality could cost someone a job, a home, a reputation and a livelihood.
So Babe constructed another story.
She married George. But as Babe’s relationship with Betty developed, George increasingly became part of an unusual and often painful arrangement.
It was an uneasy alliance, but it allowed Babe to maintain the public identity she needed.
That is part of what makes the erasure of her sexuality so frustrating, Cayleff relayed. “Babe was a master at controlling the story told about her, but the story she had to control was one constructed in a world that gave her very little room to be honest.”
The woman who, because of the time in which she lived, believed that love had to remain invisible.
Babe was diagnosed with cancer at the age of 42, and she went public with her illness at a time when cancer was rarely discussed openly. She became an advocate for cancer patients and raised money for cancer research. Even while battling cancer, she returned to competitive golf and won the U.S. Women’s Open in 1954.
Babe died in 1956 at the age of 45. She never had the luxury of coming out. That is why her story still matters.
She was one of the greatest athletes who ever lived, but she also spent much of her life carefully managing what the world was allowed to know about her.
Susan Cayleff did not diminish Babe by telling that story. Instead she gave everyone, especially the LGBTQ+ community a gift in allowing us to know who she really was.
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