Romance On Court, And In The Courts

Imagine yourself in Judy Nelson's situation: You're a blonde Southern beauty queen, practicing Methodist, daughter of country club parents, married to a handsome doctor, the mother of two young sons.

And above all you've been raised to be a "good girl" who pleases everyone, offends no one.

Then you leave it all behind to run off with a famous athlete of the same sex.

Judy Nelson says she was never, ever attracted to women before she met all-time Wimbledon tennis champ Martina Navratilova in 1984.

But before the final headline was writ, Nelson not only became Navratilova's lover, but her functional wife, business partner - and after they split in 1990, her legal adversary, challenging Navratilova to honor the relationship contract they'd signed in 1986.

Sounds like perfect fodder for a celebrity tell-all book, and while Nelson didn't exactly tell all, she did tell a lot in a new book, "Love Match." It was mostly written by Sandra Faulkner, a sociologist and first-time author who's a friend of hers.

Published by Birch Lane Press ($19.95), the book is intriguing and maddening for what it includes - and excludes.

Like how could she do it?

In Faulkner's telling, leaving one's husband to take up with arguably the world's most famous lesbian is a relatively painless transition that requires no re-examination of one's values or sexual orientation - let alone what it will do to your family. It was, Faulkner would have us believe, simply a romance like any other, except they're both female.

In Seattle yesterday to promote the book, Nelson was considerably more candid, easily using words like lesbian, which the book rarely does.

Author Rita Mae Brown may have something to do with that. Brown, who's also had a relationship with Navratilova, is now Nelson's partner, both in love and in a Virginia horse farm.

After Brown read the first draft of "Love Match" she bluntly told Nelson that "nobody's going to believe that you were sprinkled with fairy dust and all of a sudden became this glorious lesbian. You've got to tell people."

So Nelson added several pages to "Love Match." But what she really wants is to write her own book - one that, judging from her comments yesterday will be less a kiss-and-tell than the story of a woman painfully and publicly figuring out who she really is.

"I love Martina still, and she'll always be the great love of my life, but I'm very different now," Nelson says. She's 47, and sees in herself the lives of lots of women - first somebody's daughter, then wife, then mother, and finally, who knows? That's the defining part Nelson is struggling to understand today.

But at first, she confides, none of that was clear to her. A former Maid of Cotton and Southern Methodist University student, she'd put her husband through medical school and been rewarded with the perfect upper-middle-class life in Fort Worth.

But what few knew - because, she laughs ruefully now, "good girls" always make nice - was that her handsome husband had been cheating on her and love had left their marriage.

When she met Navratilova, romance blossomed quickly, and before Nelson had time to explore the implications of her decision, she'd left her family to follow her lover on the grueling pro-tennis circuit.

Her debut as Navratilova's mate came at no less than 1984 Wimbledon. Martina won. But Nelson's sons Bales and Eddie, 9 and 13 at the time, lost a stay-at-home mom.

As author Faulkner writes, "Martina was not simply another woman. She was Martina, a household name, a multimillionaire, the No. 1 tennis player in the world. Martina could give Judy something which every parent wants for their children: resources and opportunity."

Nelson also saw it as something else: a chance to break out of the traditional male-female mold and have a partner who was an equal. But the problem was, they weren't equal. Navratilova was a sports empire unto herself with a whole retinue of handlers. Into this world, Nelson became her paid companion, earning $90,000 a year for doing the support stuff.

So instead of being the woman behind the man, she became the woman behind the woman - at the time sensing no incongruity that her big break with traditional roles led her right back into one.

Why? "Because I was fighting for my life just to keep my family. My sons were crying and my parents were dying of broken hearts, and then I was trying to be with Martina. I didn't have a clue what it all meant. I was just in it."

Apparently they both felt comfortable enough with this arrangement that on Feb. 12, 1986, in Fort Worth, they signed an agreement thick with legalese agreeing to "act as companion and homemaker to the other" and that "the earnings and income of each partner will become the joint property of the partners. . . ."

Nelson says she never saw the breakup coming. She says Navratilova left and never explained (only later in therapy did Nelson realize she's a controlling person and that may have had something to do with it), and that for months afterward she was so numb with despair that she could barely function.

But her lawyers could, and what erupted was Lesbian Divorce Wars, Texas-style - larger than life with both sides wrangling over their 1986 contract. Nelson argued she deserved a share of Martina's multi-million dollar earnings during their years together and that to not pay up amounted to breach of contract. Martina said she'd already been compensated and didn't deserve more.

Complicating this was the fact that Texas is not a community-property state, homosexuality is illegal and the court said it's illegal to profit from something that's illegal.

In the end, the whole mess was settled out of court, with Nelson getting a vacation home they'd shared; what else she got she will not say.

Perhaps more will come out in the next book. Certainly there will be more about Nelson's inner journey from heterosexual to homosexual.

"There are a lot of people like me," she says tantalizingly.

Ten years ago, she wouldn't have thought it.