Gussie Moran - Telegraph Gertrude Agusta Moran was born in Santa Monica, California, on September 8 1923, the daughter of a sound technician at Universal Studios, and brought up in a substantial Victorian house on Ocean Avenue. She started playing tennis at Santa Monica High School and was soon a welcome guest on the tennis court at Charlie Chaplin's estate above Sunset Boulevard, where stars such as Greta Garbo would turn up to play the occasional match. "I was good friends with Charlie's sons Sidney and Charlie Junior, " she recalled. We would hang out there and have fun. After leaving school she went to work for the Douglas Aircraft Company, helping to assemble aircraft for the war effort. Having entered several amateur tennis tournaments, in early 1949 she won the triple crown at the US Indoor championships, winning the singles, ladies" doubles and mixed doubles (with Pancho Gonzalez). This achievement earned her the number 4 ranking among US women at Wimbledon later in the year. In 1950 she reached the semi-finals of the US Open in singles and returned to Wimbledon for her second (and last) appearance. This time, she recalled, she tried to look as inconspicuous as possible, after being taken out by a po-faced tennis correspondent from an unnamed British newspaper who advised her, for the sake of decency, to abandon Teddy Tinling. Gussie Moran left the amateur circuit to turn professional in 1951 and agreed to join a travelling group of players organised by Bobby Riggs. The decision was a financial and professional disaster. As the troupe criss-crossed the United States, she was crushed night after night by Pauline Betz, as a result of which she abandoned the tour a month before the end of its run. She never received the money she was owed. For a while Gussie Moran worked as a radio and television sports commentator in Los Angeles and New York. But the jobs did not last and neither did her three husbands - a former RAF pilot from Jersey, a New York trucking firm executive and a California lawyer - all of whom came and went within the space of six years. Gussie Moran held a variety of increasingly unsatisfying jobs over the years and spoke of having more than one abortion and of an attack in which she claimed to have been gang-raped. She eventually moved back into her family home in Santa Monica, but after her mother died she could not maintain it. Evicted in 1986, she moved into a one-room apartment furnished with a thin mattress, an old vinyl chair and a television, where she lived in near penury with five cats, her social life reduced to "going to the market for groceries." In a 2004 interview Gussie Moran claimed that in a fit of depression she had burned all the photograph albums containing a record of her life on the tennis circuit. In recent years, however, she had allowed a benefactor to persuade her to sign vintage "Gussie-style" knickers and sell them on eBay to raise desperately-needed cash. "Gussie was a beautiful woman with a beautiful body," recalled the tennis star Jack Kramer in 2002. If [she] had played in the era of television, there's no telling what would have happened. Gussie Moran, born September 8 1923, died January 16 2013