Baron Of The Court

In April 1951, Von Cramm surprised many of his friends by actually getting a job. He had played tennis so often in Egypt before and after the war and had made so many contacts there that he was persuaded by an Egyptian cotton magnate to start a company in Hamburg to import Egyptian cotton for West German mills. "What he did in tennis," says Hofer, "he did in business."

Yet Von Cramm continued to play in tournaments, winning the German championship in 1948 and '49. In 1951, at age 42, a fledgling business tycoon, he returned to Wimbledon for the first time in 14 years. Obviously nervous and certainly not the player he had been, he lost his first-round match in straight sets to 1949 finalist Jaroslav Drobny, but only after extending the younger man to 9-7 in the first set.

Still, Von Cramm created a stir at Wimbledon, not so much for the brilliance of his tennis as for having as his companion the Woolworth heiress, Barbara Hutton. The baron and the "poor little rich girl" had been friends since 1937, and though he discouraged any intimacy, Hutton "was crazy about him," says Budge. "She couldn't rest until she got what she wanted."

"She liked having a good-looking guy around," says Talbert. "And in dinner clothes, who looked better than Gottfried? He was a beautiful dancer. He had great charm. And he was an international figure. He was the perfect escort." Hutton was addicted to alcohol and drugs, and many of her friends told Von Cramm that only he could save her. "I loved you from the first time I laid eyes on your face," she wrote him. Uncharacteristically, Von Cramm did discuss Hutton with friends. He had no wish to marry her, he told Hofer, but he did want to help her.

"Gottfried was an angelic man," says Hofer. "He wanted to help all of his fiends. When Kai Lund, his old doubles partner, came back from the war missing an arm and a leg, Gottfried bought him a small hotel near Baden-Baden. The baron constantly gave money to former servants to get them started in business. He opened up his castle to those East Germans. I think he really believed he could help Barbara Hutton by marrying her. Some people would say he married her for her money, but that's not true."

Von Cramm became Hutton's sixth husband on Nov. 8, 1955. He was her first baron, following two princes, a count, Cary Grant and the notorious Dominican playboy Porfirio Rubirosa. (She had one more prince to come, her seventh husband, Raymond Doan Vinh of Laos.)

Once acquired, the baron, of course, quickly lost his allure for Hutton. She divorced him in January 1960, leaving him $600,000 as a going-away gift. Von Cramm had little use for the Hutton fortune. His business was prospering, and he divided his time between his office in Hamburg and his suppliers in Cairo and Alexandria. He played tennis in Cairo at the lush Gezira Sporting Club, often with Kovaleski, who was working for a soft-drink company there. A bit paunchy now in middle age, the baron still cut a dashing figure on the court.

"He was an incredible player in his 40's," says Dick Savitt, the 1951 Wimbledon and Australian champion, who played Von Cramm in a tournament in Cairo in the spring of '51, "and he dressed so well that I hated to walk out on the court with him. The other thing was, my being Jewish, I wasn't sure how he'd react to me. I needn't have worried, because he went out of his way for me. In fact, he sent me a telegram when I won Wimbledon. The baron didn't care what a person's background was. He just cared how people acted."

"He loved Egypt," says Kovaleski. "He knew everybody in Cairo, all the very rich and every important member of the diplomatic corps. He was a much-loved foreigner there."

"In fact," says Savitt, "I don't think I've ever seen a man more revered in a foreign country than the baron was in Egypt."