Had it not been for a bit of lace attached to the knickers that she dared to wear at Wimbledon in 1949, Gussie Moran, who has died aged 89, would have faded into tennis history as a good player who was ranked No 4 in the US. As it was, Moran became "Gorgeous Gussie", an international sensation who adorned magazine covers and earned tennis wider recognition than all the great champions of the immediate postwar years.
The "culprit" in this saga was British tennis player turned fashion designer Ted Tinling, an extraordinary personality who worked for the All England Club. He went on to be the foremost designer of tennis dresses worn by many great players, including Maria Bueno, Billie Jean King, Virginia Wade, Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova.
When Moran asked Tinling to design a Wimbledon dress for her, he took the result of his labours around to the Dorchester hotel for Gussie's approval. "Yes, that's lovely," she said. "But what am I going to wear underneath? I have always worn shorts before."
Tinling's immediate reaction was that Moran's undergarments were no responsibility of his but, in the end, he agreed to make a pair of knickers. Material was in short supply after the war and he was forced to use leftover material from the dress, which he had made out of the new fabric rayon.
"But I thought they needed something extra," said Tinling. "So, as Wimbledon rules forbade us to use colour, I thought a little lace trimming might look nice. It was nothing special. In fact it was nothing more than what my mother would have called 'kitchen' lace."
"Nothing special" turned into a sensation. Too nervous to wear the dress for her first match, Moran eventually appeared on Court One – accompanied by Tinling himself in his role of "call boy", as player escorts were called – for her match against Betty Wilford, and the photographers swamped the court. Once the match started most of them lay flat so as to get the right angle to catch the knickers.
As Tinling recounts in his book Sixty Years in Tennis: "The situation snowballed out of all proportion. Gussie was inundated with requests for personal appearances – hospitals, garden fetes and beauty contests. The Marx Brothers, in London at the time, invited her to join their act. A racehorse, an aircraft and a restaurant's special sauce were named after her. She was voted the best dressed sports woman by the US Fashion Academy. The whole thing was staggering."
It was all too staggering for the All England Club chairman, Sir Louis Greig, who berated Tinling for, in a classic pronouncement, "having drawn attention to the sexual area". The knickers became responsible for Tinling leaving Wimbledon, although he was rehired as a PR consultant in 1983, seven years before his death.
While Tinling's fashion career thrived, it cannot be said that Moran's tennis career blossomed in the same way. As a direct result of her fame, Moran was signed up by Bobby Riggs and Jack Kramer, who had started a professional tour in the US. "We needed a name with some glamour," said Kramer. "We had a great little player called Pancho Segura playing me, but the public didn't know him from Pancho Villa."
The problem became obvious on the opening night in 1950 at Madison Square Garden in New York. The other female player signed up for the tour was Pauline Betz, the 1946 Wimbledon champion. And she was far too good for Gussie, beating her 6-0, 6-3 in 33 minutes.
To her horror, Betz was asked by an embarrassed Riggs to "go easy on Gussie", but the difference in class was always obvious and the experiment never worked. Kramer was sympathetic. "Gussie wasn't looking to be a sexpot. She wanted to be a tennis champion. She was a good player, but not that good."
Gertrude Agusta Moran was born in Santa Monica, California. Her father worked as a sound technician at Universal Studios and the family lived in a lovely 19th-century house on Pacific Ocean Boulevard that still stands today. Once she started playing tennis, her father's connections soon ensured that she was playing on Charlie Chaplin's court and hitting against stars such as Greta Garbo.
After her tennis career ended, Moran worked as a radio host in Los Angeles and New York and formed her own clothing company. Having had a brother killed in the second world war, she was eager to help out with the USO (United Service Organizations) in Vietnam, and was injured when riding in a helicopter that was shot down.
The great sadness of her later life was having to leave the family home in Santa Monica. She ended up living in small apartments in Hollywood and became something of a recluse, supported by a small group of friends. However, when I spoke to her on the phone five years ago, she was as sharp and provocative as always, revealing how closely she still followed the tennis circuit.
Moran was married, briefly, three times, once to a former RAF fighter pilot.