"What would you like to know about my sex life?"
Gene Mako, playfully greeting a visitor to his West Hollywood home, laughs as he poses the question. The mischievous former tennis champion, winner of four Grand Slam doubles titles in the 1930s and married since\o7 \f7before the attack on Pearl Harbor, is 91 years old. His walker, stationed nearby, is ever present since he suffered a stroke 1 1/2 years ago. A full-time nurse provides round-the-clock care.
The years have slowed him, sure, but the Hungarian-born and Southern California-bred Mako still possesses the same sense of humor and engaging wit that ingratiated him to the Hollywood glitterati of his youth.
His many friends included Charlie Chaplin, Howard Hughes, Clark Gable, Fred Astaire, Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Walt Disney, bandleader Jimmy Dorsey and jazz pianist Oscar Peterson. He built tennis courts for Ginger Rogers and Jack Nicholson. He says it was he who introduced Crosby to Hope.
As he recalls, "Bing and I were coming out of a restaurant ... "
Along the way, Mako surely must have shared stories with his famous pals of the day he stood in, improbably, as the last line of defense between Don Budge, his best friend and doubles partner, and the first Grand Slam in tennis history.
Improbably because two years before encountering Budge in the U.S. National Championship final at New York on Sept. 24, 1938, Mako suffered a shoulder injury that threatened to end his career, turning his once-blistering serves and emphatic overheads into cruel memories.
"Everybody said I had the best serve and overhead in the world," Mako says. "And I went from that to nothing. Mentally, it was a terrible thing."
Mako says that only a nudge from Budge, who persuaded the former USC star to continue as his doubles partner, kept him from quitting tennis. Together, Mako and Budge won Wimbledon doubles titles in 1937 and '38, even though Mako says he served "like an old lady," striking the ball with a sidearm motion. They reached four consecutive U.S. championship finals starting in 1935, winning in '36 and '38, and twice helped the U.S. win Davis Cup titles.
Mostly because of his successful partnership with Budge, Mako was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, R.I., in 1973.
But Mako, who won national collegiate singles and doubles titles as a USC sophomore in 1934, says he rarely played singles after injuring his shoulder in an awkward fall on a grass court in England in the summer of 1936.
