That summer, she lost in the finals at Forest Hills in three exciting sets to Sarah Palfrey Cooke, but then won the championship for the fourth and final time the following year, as well as her first—and last—Wimbledon championship.
After beating her frequent rival, Louise Brough Clapp, 6-2, 6-4, at Wimbledon, she found herself curtsying to the Queen of England as she accepted the winner’s trophy. Mumbling her thanks, she began to cry as the realization sank in: “I had won the championship I had dreamed about ever since I first picked up a racket.”
On reaching the pinnacle, she was overtaken by “a feeling of completion.” A lucky thing, because within months, she would be banned from tournaments.
Some time after her Wimbledon victory in July 1946, the husband of on-court nemesis Sarah Palfrey Cooke wrote to Pauline and offered to see if he could arrange a lucrative tour of exhibitions between the two women. Many of the top men had prospected for professional exhibitions while continuing to play the amateur championships. But officials of the United States Lawn Tennis Association decided to make an example of Pauline and Palfrey Cooke. They called their exploration “negotiating to turn professional,” and informed them that they could no longer play in amateur tournaments.
Palfrey Cooke had already announced her retirement from amateur tennis in 1945, but Pauline still wanted to play. “I don’t want to just sit in the corner,” she told reporters at the time. The cablegram with the news had reached her in Monte Carlo, where she was playing a tournament. She went out and lost to an inferior player, then continued her losing streak at a roulette table in the casino that night. Several New York papers reported that she burst into tears at the news, but “it actually affected me very little,” she wrote in her autobiography. “I would have liked to have defended my world title, but I didn’t think that any future grandchildren would care whether grandma had won the U.S. championship four or five times.” 
By the time Pauline was banned, says lifelong friend Nancy Dillon, “she was ready to move on to something else. She’d accomplished everything possible in amateur tennis. I can’t tell you how many tin trophies we have.”
Pauline’s daughter, Kim Addonizio, a well-known writer who lives in San Francisco, says her mother “was not the type to dwell on things. She felt she had a very lucky life. She loved teaching, was devoted to the game. She’d laugh about the millions of dollars the women players were earning now, while she had traveled around with a sleeping bag, and four or five of them would share a floor and eat peanut butter. But she was very glad that women’s tennis has gained so much respect.”
Famous for serving vegetables in victory cups and stashing her Wimbledon trophy in the basement, Pauline didn’t waste time feeling sorry for herself. She and Palfrey Cooke launched their tour, playing each other for 50 percent of gate receipts plus $350 per weekday and $500 on weekends. Pauline often played the clown, appearing in oversized men’s shorts, a sloppy orange sweatshirt, huge basketball shoes, a floppy rain hat and a broken racket. But when she played her matches, she consistently won.
Back in California, Pauline was invited to play at the Racquet Club of Palm Springs, home to Hollywood’s royalty. Her new playing partners included Jack Benny, Harpo Marx, William Powell, Danny Kaye, George Burns and Peter Lawford. And Spencer Tracy. The two became friends, even dating during his “breaks” from Katharine Hepburn. Tracy and Pauline “lost so many doubles matches” together, Tracy joked that Pauline might be the first national champion to be impeached.
“My mom called him Spence,” Gary Addie says. “She always stayed in touch with him.”
Ultimately, Pauline couldn’t compete with Hepburn, but she dated other big-name celebrities, including former heavyweight boxing champ Jack Dempsey.
Pauline’s days on the arm of A-listers came to a close when a short, dark and handsome sports columnist for The Washington Post named Bob Addie persuaded her to sit in the press box with him for a Redskins-Giants football game. On an early date, Addie, trying to impress Pauline, took her to the Stork Club in New York City. The maitre d’ took one look at the couple and effusively escorted them to the Cub Room, where only the elite were seated.
It didn’t dawn on Addie that the star treatment was directed not at him, but at Pauline. He got the message when he went to the men’s room, and they wouldn’t let him back in.
Addie, who died in 1982, loved telling that story, and the fact that he could laugh at himself may have been the thing that most attracted Pauline. “She just worshipped humor,” Gary says.
Pauline’s 1948 marriage to Addie is the final paragraph of her book. “I think I’ll return to the Adams boulevard swap shop,” she wrote, “and see if I can’t exchange a tennis racket for a cookery book.”
Pauline kept her racket, but rarely picked up a cooking spoon. “That’s the funniest line in her book,” Gary says. “We grew up on Swanson’s TV dinners.”
For a few years, Pauline continued her pro tours. Having five children—Rusty and Gary (both of whom played college tennis), Jon, Rick and Kim—barely slowed her down. She became a life master tournament bridge player and shot in the high 70s on the golf course.
In 1950, she embarked on her last professional tour, organized by her Rollins classmate Kramer, the tennis great, and Bobby Riggs. By then, Pauline’s star was already dimming, and the tour was headlined by an inferior player, Gertrude “Gorgeous Gussie” Moran, a shapely American who captivated the world at Wimbledon in 1949 by wearing ruffled lace panties that showed every time she sprinted for a ball.
Not to be outdone, Pauline appeared for the first match at New York’s Madison Square Garden in tight leopard skin shorts and proceeded to trounce Moran, who doubly disappointed fans with her weak play and refusal to flash her panties. The matches were so lopsided that Kramer feared for the future of his tour. In his 1979 autobiography, The Game: My 40 Years in Tennis, he recalled, “Our solution was to try and get rid of Pauline. …Bobby and I went to her room, and Bobby said: ‘Kid, isn’t there something we can do to get you to sprain an ankle?’ Pauline looked at us bewildered. So Riggs, a hustler himself, figured she must be negotiating. ‘All right, Kid, we’ll give you a car if you’ll sprain an ankle,’ he said. In response to this Pauline broke down and cried.”
In 1959, five months pregnant with Rick, her last child, she defeated the legendary Althea Gibson in an exhibition match. By then, Pauline had enthusiastically embarked on her second career, teaching tennis. She taught at various clubs around Washington until she was recruited by the Edgemoor Club in 1955. There, she discovered a talented and driven kid named Donald Dell, whose house was just across the street from Edgemoor’s courts. He practically lived at the backboard. She became Dell’s coach and mentor, traveling with him to tournaments as he became the national junior champion, then America’s Davis Cup captain, en route to becoming a tennis Hall of Famer.
Rob Arner, now a conservationist and tennis instructor at Bryce Resort in Virginia, taught alongside Pauline for 25 years. Arner says Pauline was unusual for a former champion. She lavished attention on her most talented protégés, but “she really loved teaching beginners best,” Arner says. “She said she enjoyed giving them the gift of the game.”
After eight years, Pauline left Edgemoor—“private clubs can be a very tough place to work for a long time,” Arner says—to begin teaching tennis at Sidwell Friends School in the District, where she established one of the first tennis camps in the country. She also taught at the Cabin John indoor tennis facility, which she co-founded with St. Albans School tennis coach Allie Ritzenberg, and which was renamed in her honor in 2008.
There she taught generations of Washington’s rising tennis talent, including a couple of St. Albans players, Donald Graham and Bo Jones, who went on to become, respectively, the chairman of the board of The Washington Post Company, and the publisher of The Washington Post.
Pauline has often been described as one of the Washington area’s forgotten champions. Had she come of age at a different time, after the war or after the game went professional, who knows how many major championships she could have won. Her name may well have been as recognizable as Billie Jean King’s or Martina Navratilova’s. As it is, she is known mostly to tennis insiders. She was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, R.I., in 1965, and is one of 82 names listed in the “Washington Hall of Stars” at RFK Stadium and Nationals Park.
But to her friends, that seems far too small a tribute.
“I defy you to find anyone who didn’t like Pauline,” says Dell, who now lives in Potomac. “She is one of the sport’s forgotten jewels. I was a good player. Pauline was a great champion.”
Tom Shroder, a freelance editor and former editor of The Washington Post Magazine, is an avid tennis player.
