Personal life
Wills married Frederick S. Moody Jr., a San Francisco stockbroker, at the Berkeley chapel of St. Clement's Episcopal Church, on December 23, 1929. They had met in February 1926 at the Riviera after the match against Lenglen, and announced their engagement in January 1929. In marriage, she wished to retain her professional name in arts as Helen Wills. The couple settled near the Claremont Hotel and the adjoining Berkeley Tennis Club where she worked out. They lived in a "tiny apartment", according to Wills, so she kept a separate studio to practice painting and sketching. Moody was fond of squash rather than tennis, and Wills occasionally played against him for recreation. She divorced Moody in August 1937 and married Irish polo player Aidan Roark in October 1939. She did not have any children from either marriage.
Wills wrote a coaching manual, Tennis (1928), her autobiography, Fifteen-Thirty: The Story of a Tennis Player (1937), and a mystery, Death Serves an Ace (1939, with Robert Murphy). She also wrote articles for The Saturday Evening Post and other magazines.
Senator James D. Phelan befriended Wills and invited her as a frequent guest to his estate, Villa Montalvo. Wills wrote poetry as a hobby, and presented two of her works, The Awakening and The Narrow Street, to a literary competition hosted by Phelan in 1926. Wills settled laurel wreaths over the heads of the winners. Phelan himself wrote a poem dedicated to Wills. Phelan commissioned Haig Patigian, sculptor and fellow member of the Bohemian Club, to create a likeness of Wills. Patigian completed a marble bust of Wills in 1927 called Helen of California, and Phelan donated it to the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum. At his death in 1930, Phelan left Wills $20,000 ($385,458 today) in his will, "in appreciation of her winning the tennis championship for California".
Wills met painter Frida Kahlo and her husband Diego Rivera at the San Francisco studio of her friend sculptor Ralph Stackpole in 1930. Rivera sketched Wills and asked her to model as the main figure of "California" for the 30-foot-high mural Allegory of California he was painting for the City Club of the San Francisco Stock Exchange. The committee of the Stock Exchange found out that Wills was being portrayed and insisted that no living person be represented in the mural. Subsequently, Rivera darkened the hair, broadened the eyes, changed the corners of the mouth and angled the jawline to remove any specific resemblance to Wills. A portrait of Stackpole's son Peter Stackpole holding a model airplane remained unnoticed in the mural.
Wills painted all her life, giving exhibitions of her paintings and etchings in New York galleries. She personally drew all of the illustrations in her book Tennis. Her work was also part of the painting event in the art competition at the 1932 Summer Olympics. On June 17, 1929, the first exhibition of her drawings was opened at the Cooling Gallery in London.
Wills remained an avid tennis player into her 80s.
Wills died on New Year's Day 1998 at Carmel Convalescent Hospital. Her death was announced a day later. Wills bequeathed US$10 million to the University of California, Berkeley to fund the establishment of a Neuroscience institute. The resulting institute, the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, began in 1999 and is home to more than 70 faculty researchers and 36 graduate students.
