Osborne duPont’s career haul of six major singles titles–three at Forest Hills, two at the French, and one at Wimbledon–puts her in elite company. The strikes against her were largely out of her control: her peak was relatively short, and she excelled during a relatively weak era, when Pauline Betz had just turned pro and the European game was still recovering from World War II.
The war limited her playing opportunities when she could have been at her peak. She didn’t win her first major until 1946, when she was 28. She cut back on travel after her marriage in late 1947, and the 1950 season was the last time that she played at least 30 matches. An elite doubles player for two decades, she packed a lot of results into a much shorter span as a world-beater on the singles court. * * * It’s ironic that family life limited Osborne duPont’s playing opportunities, because she married one of the great tennis fans of the 20th century. William duPont, Jr. was a scion of the Delaware duPont family, whose fortune dated back nearly a century to its origins in the gunpowder business. Will was more interested in horses, and he turned the family’s 400-acre estate, Bellevue Hall, into a center for his thoroughbred breeding and training operation. He also converted Bellevue into a luxurious stop on the women’s tennis circuit. He built eight tennis courts–including grass, cement, and both outdoor and indoor clay. During World War II, some long-established tournaments were suspended, and duPont stepped into the breach. The estate in Wilmington, Delaware became part of the summer grass-court swing. Pauline Betz played at Bellevue in 1944 and 1945, beating Margaret both years. She described the experience:
As many as thirty-six players at the same time have been living at [Bellevue] wondering what the poor folk were doing. We drop tennis clothes on the floor and receive them back laundered and ironed; breakfast and lunch at any hour; converge on the dinner table for home-grown steak or roast beef; raid the ice box once or twice per night for home-made ice-cream, and just can’t understand how we gain weight during an exhausting tournament. Margaret said of Will, “He wasn’t very good, but he sure loved to play.” Perhaps it was inevitable that after he divorced his first wife in 1941, he would marry a tennis player. Alice Marble claimed that Will said he’d leave his wife for her. Louise Brough told an interviewer much later in life that he had hit on her as well. Both Brough and Betz reported that Will always smelled bad, a trait they attributed to his eccentricity but might have been because he spent so much time with his horses.
