If any player may be said to have been the sweetheart of tennis, as Mary Pickford was of the movies, her name was Sarah Palfrey.

Twice U.S. champion, Sarah Hammond Palfrey Fabyan Cooke Danzig was thrice a runner-up for the title to Helen Jacobs, nine times U.S. Doubles champion, and twice doubles champion at Wimbledon, and she was an international attraction on both sides of the Atlantic and west to the Pacific.

Born September 18, 1912, in Sharon, MA, she was a carefully reared girl of upper-register Boston and a protégé of Hazel Hotchkiss Wightman. The galleries loved her radiant smile and her unfailing graciousness in triumph and defeat alike, and they marveled at the cleverness and dispatch she used in the volleying position and at the execution of her sweeping backhand. She was one of the most accomplished performers around the net, thanks in part to the instruction of Wightman, a pioneer in introducing the volley as a major component of the women's game. A slip of a girl (5-foot-4, 116), Sarah was remarkable in the way she stood up to the more powerful hitters.

Sarah was so prized as a doubles partner in the 1930s and 1940s that she had the pick of the best. Seven times in Wightman Cup play she teamed with Jacobs, three times with Alice Marble, and once with Helen Wills Moody. But prestige comes from superiority in singles play, and in this the artful right-hander ranked no fewer than 13 times in the U.S. Top Ten. She was No. 1, No. 2 or No. 3 seven times. She was in the World Top Ten six times between 1933 and 1939.

A 15-year-old Sarah made her Forest Hills debut in 1928, but not until her 13th campaign in 1941 did she go all the way. She joyfully remembered her initial trip abroad, so different from the casual jet-jaunting of today: "It was 1930, and I was 17. My mother and a sister went with me aboard the liner Scythia. We dressed for dinner and danced away every night."

Unable to defend her 1941 U.S. Singles title because of pregnancy and wartime family commitments to her husband, naval officer Elwood Cooke (1939 Wimbledon finalist to Bobby Riggs), Sarah made an extraordinary comeback to the Forest Hills scene in 1945 to win again, this time as a mother on the verge of her 33rd birthday. She mirrored her idol Wightman in this, too, becoming only the second to win the U.S. after bearing a child.

"She was a thorn for me," says four-time champ Pauline Betz Addie, recalling that but for Sarah she might well have run a record six straight championships. Pauline was in six successive finals, but Sarah won in 1941, 7-5, 6-2, and in a 1945 thriller, 3-6, 8-6, 6-4. "That 1945 final was the best I played, but still Sarah beat me with her volleying." She won the last three games from a service break behind.

An oddity was Sarah's appearance on a male championship honor roll. Because of the wartime manpower crisis, she and husband Elwood were permitted to enter the men's doubles of the Tri-State Championships in Cincinnati. They went to the final, losing to Hal Surface and Hall of Famer Bill Talbert.

A brood of tennis prodigies were the five Palfrey sisters, each of whom won at least one U.S. junior title, but Sarah was the one to achieve international renown. After her playing career, she was a successful business executive (as Mrs. Jerry Danzig in New York), and wrote on tennis in books and magazines.

Along with Alice Marble she lobbied the USTA to remove the color bar and allow future Hall of Famer Althea Gibson to play at the upper-level amid whites in 1950. "She was calmly persuasive, had clout as an ex-champ, and got Althea into the U.S. Championships in 1950," says Gladys Heldman, founder of the women's pro tour. She was voted into the Hall of Fame in 1963, and died February 27, 1996, in New York.