And then there was the time she was shot in the back by Nazi assassins while on a one-woman mission to avenge her murdered husband. According to her autobiography, Marble was married to an ace pilot named Joe Crowley (as a tennis star, she preferred to slam aces). When Crowley was killed during WWII, Marble agreed to join America’s OSS spy agency, who sent her to Switzerland. Her mission was to seduce a former lover who had become a powerful financier, then steal the details of Hitler’s Swiss bank accounts. But German spies discovered the plan and pursued her in a high-speed car chase through the Swiss Alps. Forced to stop to avoid toppling into a ravine, she was shot in the back and left for dead by the Nazis. Miraculously, she survived and was able to resume her tennis career after her wounds healed.
Now that’s the wildest story we’ve ever heard and we once spent a weekend trapped in a broken elevator with Werner Herzog and a case of Kahlua. Marble was basically like a jock Indiana Jones, breaking serves by day and Nazi necks by night. Unfortunately, it’s almost certainly not true. For starters, the American government apparently has no record of Marble ever being a spy. There’s also no record of Marble, a huge worldwide celebrity, being seen in Switzerland during the war. And Joe Crowley -- the husband she was avenging -- doesn’t seem to have ever existed in the first place.
Weirdly, the press reported Marble’s spy claims as true for years, including in her obituaries. It was kind of like if Serena Williams' autobiography turned into James Bond for one chapter, then moved on like nothing happened (“As Dr. Clawfist plummeted from the cliff, still firing his sex laser, I knew I’d face an even bigger challenge next week -- improving my game on clay courts”). People just went along with it, because why would Serena Williams lie about that? Although in Marble’s case it’s entirely possible that one of her Wonder Woman drafts just got mixed into the autobiography pages and everyone at the publisher was too polite to say anything.