There is initially something jarring about Vanessa Redgrave’s performance as Renée Richards, the pioneering transgender athlete, in Second Serve. Her unconvincing male appearance pre-transition conjures memories of Jean Arless as gawky Warren in William Castle’s Homicidal, a classic Psycho knockoff with a memorable gender gimmick, and you worry this 1986 CBS adaptation of Richards’s autobiography might cheapen a complex story. But it doesn’t take long for the magnetic Redgrave to draw you in, particularly when filmed in medium-closeups that remove her hips (which, like Shakira’s, don’t lie) from the equation.
We’re introduced to Renée first as Dr. Richard Raskind (changed to Radley for the film), and Redgrave exudes an Anthony Perkins quality—lanky, haunted, alternately reserved and impetuous—that suits the character well. You suspect she understands Richard, whose private struggles with gender dysphoria aren’t immediately revealed, more intuitively than director Anthony Page (I Never Promised You a Rose Garden) and screenwriters Gavin Lambert and Stephanie Liss. Yet there are limits to her powers of empathy. You’d never guess from Redgrave’s vaguely WASPy characterization (and sometimes thinly-suppressed British accent) that she’s playing a Queens-bred Jew.*
To understand Renée it helps to recognize her very privileged life as Richard. Born in 1934 to a surgeon father and psychiatrist mother, Richard graduated from Horace Mann and Yale before moving on to medical school, Navy service and a distinguished career in ophthalmology. A standout athlete in many sports, he captained the Yale men’s tennis team and still held a high regional ranking years later, in his late thirties. Despite these achievements and a mostly satisfying relationship with fiancée Gwen (Alice Krige), Richard is reluctant to marry and start a family, due to an inner torment that only eases when, in ritualized secret outings, Renée is allowed to emerge.
[Note: For simplicity’s sake, both male and female pronouns are used for Richard and Renée. It’s not a personal slight, it’s not a political commentary. It’s a reflection of how the story is told.]
“I’m sure, of course, that you’re familiar with certain mental disorders that arise from gender confusion,” Renée, still presenting as Richard, eventually asks mother Sadie (Louise Fletcher, who amusingly dons glasses when her character shifts back into professional mode). “Talking about certain individuals that identify completely with the opposite sex. Men who have fantasies about becoming women.” After Sadie, who has never treated a transsexual patient, produces a recent journal article on the subject, he thumbs through it before casually adding “I’m talking about myself.” With that, Sadie’s academic interest vanishes and she refers her progeny to a fellow analyst, Dr. Beck (Martin Balsam).
Together they comb through Richard’s childhood, with Dr. Beck vowing “We’ll work together and get you over it.” There are flashbacks to disturbing, abusive incidents in which Richard was dressed as a girl by an older sister and paraded in public with Sadie’s approval, despite his tearful protests. He recalls watching Sadie apply makeup each day before she left for work. “First thing in the morning, she could be loving. But by the time she got dressed, she turned into Dr. Bishop, stern, professional, ready to take on the whole male world—including my father.” Viewers are likely to groan, but Renée, still living as Richard, is uncertain that any of it is relevant: “I read that problems like mine are biological.”
Dr. Beck, who forever seems on the cusp of recreating Marlon Brando’s “You can act like a man!” scene from The Godfather, has his own theories and after many agonizing sessions instructs his patient to grow a beard. Surprised, Richard reports “It worked incredibly well. Whenever I looked in the mirror, all thoughts of Renée disappeared.” But then comes a Navy stint that requires a bare face, which is soon covered in makeup once more. Again miserable, Renée’s deliverance finally arrives in the form of Dr. Harry Benjamin, an endocrinologist whose gentler approach moves his new patient to tears: “When the spirit refuses to fit the body, why not make the body fit the spirit?”
There is more to their life-altering consultation than that, including a warning that an operation won’t solve all of anyone’s problems. But once Renée starts hormone therapy and begins the arduous process of electrolysis, she says that she’s finally at peace with herself. As with most TV movie heroines, her happiness is short-lived—Dr. Benjamin, concerned that “no transsexual has ever been a practicing physician,” gets cold feet and discontinues her treatment, fearful her notoriety might jeopardize his ability to treat the rest of his “fairly obscure” patients.
Second Serve occasionally combines characters (including several doctors) to condense the action into what remains a glacially slow, fitful transition. There’s a rash expedition to Casablanca, where Renée investigates surgical options and is beaten by strangers who yell “queer” and other homophobic slurs. She returns to the States and to life as Richard, impulsively marrying Meriam (Kerrie Keane), a model from whom she is soon estranged—but not before fathering Andy (Joshua Sonne), who accepts her as a woman and continues calling her ‘Dad.’ There is also a macho-but-tender love interest, Bill (Alan Feinstein), who is unaware of her past.
Like her postoperative return to competitive tennis (which was bound to end in discovery at a time when she claimed to want privacy), Renée’s affair with Bill raises more questions than it answers. And, in a film that plays like a loving ode to the formidability of its subject, I could’ve done without him shielding her from the press as if she were suddenly helpless. Richard’s relationships with women are also depicted in ways that feel incomplete, with Krige investing the most in an understanding character who is coldly cut loose in her greatest time of need. None of it matters to Redgrave, who has chemistry with all comers (and who has played gay many times, including in The Bostonians and If These Walls Could Talk 2).
Disturbingly, Krige’s Gwen is the only non-transgender woman character of note who isn’t cruel (like Renée’s mother and sister in flashbacks) or manipulative (like the acquisitive Meriam). In reality, Tucker Carlson’s father was the reporter who ‘outed’ Renée; in Second Serve, Alison La Placa does the deed. Men, on the other hand—from gallant Bill to Renée’s sensitive father and the best friend (William Russ) who humiliates her in front of strangers before they patch things up offscreen—are generally peaches, with the exceptions of Dr. Beck and her Casablanca attackers. This might be more the doing of the screenwriters than Richards, who appears to enjoy longstanding friendships with many women who simply aren’t represented here.
Despite Second Serve’s title and several scenes that feature Redgrave clumsily attempting to play tennis (her only major missteps, apart from the accent), Renée Richards’s most famous battle—a legal fight against the U.S. Tennis Association that arose over her participation in women’s tournaments—is regarded as almost an afterthought. Richards might prefer it that way. Though she triumphed in court in the 1970s, she looks back on the episode with regret and now believes, as both a physician and athlete, that she had distinct and unfair physical advantages over her competitors. It’s a stance that has earned her enmity in some quarters, but as Second Serve illustrates, Richards was never one to shy away from controversy.
*Sometimes my wife gets a little startled when I call someone a Jew, until she remembers I’m Jewish. I’m putting this here for anyone who shares her delicate sensibilities.
Streaming and DVD availability
Second Serve hasn’t made it to DVD yet and is generally hard to find on YouTube, where a kind soul recently shared a grainy old copy. You can report dead links in the comments below and I’ll try to find replacements if possible.
Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn a small commission from qualifying purchases.
… But wait, there’s more!
If you’d like to read more about Renée Richards in her own words, she has published three books: Second Serve; No Way Renée: The Second Half of My Notorious Life; and 1999: An Eye-Opening Medical Memoir. ESPN also produced a 30 for 30 documentary about her, directed by Eric Drath, called Renée (you can ignore Amazon’s $50 streaming price tag; you can rent individual episodes for under $5).
Richards has done a great deal of press over the years and you might enjoy this NPR interview from 2007 and Michael Weinreb’s 2011 Grantland piece, the latter of which is great if you can ignore his remarkably dismissive (and sexist) contention, of Richards’s competitors on the women’s circuit, that “Whatever the merits of their case, a middle-aged woman had frightened them beyond rationality.” (Her advanced age was likely precisely what worried them; Richards, in her 2019 Sports Illustrated interview, understands that, unlike Weinreb.)
Finally, Redgrave fans will want to revisit this Los Angeles Times interview with Second Serve’s executive producer Linda Yellen, which includes some choice quotes about both the film and Redgrave’s behavior. My favorites included “You could ask what happened to the penis and what about the vagina. I would like to have explained that, but we couldn’t.” And this deranged gem:
The issue now is not Redgrave’s pro-PLO activism, which is her right, but her intolerance of pro-Israel feelings. Her call for Israel’s blacklisting seems especially hypocritical in view of her court win against the Boston Symphony for allegedly blacklisting her in 1982 because of her political views. “She told me that winning that case was the most important event in her life,” Yellen said, “even more important than having her children.”
Howard rosenberg, los angeles times
Cranky Lesbian is a disgruntled homosexual with too much time on her hands. Click for film reviews or to follow on Instagram.
Leave a Reply