TELEVISION TACKLES THE RENEE RICHARDS STORY

Producer Linda Yellen has gotten approval from CBS to go ahead with her TV drama about transsexual Renee Richards. There’s plenty to put on the screen. What will not be on the screen?

“A bunch of freaks,” Yellen replied.

Beside her was the TV script for “Second Serve,” which is also the title of Richards’ autobiography, a medically and sexually explicit book whose rights were purchased by Yellen some time ago. In two hours, Yellen would show the script to the CBS standards and practices department, the network’s last word on alleged taste and accuracy.

No freaks?

Richards would applaud that. Freak was an obnoxious label frequently applied to her when she rose to prominence in the late 1970s as a former male amateur tennis player determined to play professionally on the women’s circuit. Already in her early 40s, Richards had only mild success on the court.

She was initially threatened with humiliating chromosome tests to qualify for women’s tournaments and was made to endure insults from more ignorant members of the public and press.

A few female tennis players refused to play Richards and one sports columnist even referred to her as “an it.”

But that narrow attitude has greatly diminished in recent years as Richards has become more of a household name and awareness and understanding of transsexuality has increased.

“Second Serve” would arrive at a time of intense sexual ambivalence, as reflected in the public worship of Boy George, Prince, Michael Jackson and other androgynous superstars.

Sexual blurriness seems to be on the rise.

TV can provide illumination with sensitive treatment of Richards’ story and more documentaries like the recent “What Sex Am I?” on HBO, Lee Grant’s intelligent and candid hour humanizing transsexuals and transvestites.

Richards went on to become Martina Navratilova’s coach. Now retired from tennis and continuing to work as a prominent ophthalmologist, she is no freak. Her life could make a fascinating TV drama.

But who would play the 6-foot-2 Richards?

Yellen says she is very near signing 6-foot Vanessa Redgrave, the politically controversial anti-Zionist actress who caused a large furor by playing Nazi concentration camp survivor Fania Fenelon in Yellen’s outstanding CBS movie “Playing for Time.”

“It’s just a matter of dollars and cents,” Yellen said about Redgrave s Richards. “But there’s also been some talk about casting a man.” That’s because half the story is about Richards as a male, when she was Richard Raskind, a heterosexual husband and father who had yearned to be female since childhood. His life was torture.

“But this is a story that transcends one person’s life,” Yellen said. “It’s about sexuality and role-playing and what’s expected of us. We have a man who had enormous sexual pressures to be something he wasn’t as a little boy. What happened (Richard Raskind becoming Renee Richards) would have happened anyway. But relationships played a part in it.”

That sounds contradictory, for if transsexuality is the product of internal forces, then how can environment be a significant influence?

In her book, however, Renee does castigate her mother and sister as the “villains” of her life story. Yellen said Richard Raskind had a weak father and a strong mother who dressed the little boy in girl’s clothing until he was about 7 years old. “And his sister was extremely jealous of him,” said Yellen. “Her name was Mike.”

Transsexuals are frequently misidentified as always being former homosexuals. Richards says she was never homosexual. “So it’s important to show that Renee as Richard had meaningful heterosexual relationships,” Yellen said. “Dick Raskind was a handsome guy, a womanizer, a star tennis player, a medical genius.”

And a man with a secret.

“He had tried to become a woman and was blocked everywhere, except in Casablanca,” Yellen said, “but found the conditions so unsanitary there that he returned to the States and was determined to live as a man.”

It was during this period that Raskind and his wife had a son. The former wife has remarried, Yellen said, and their 13-year-old son “still calls Renee daddy.”

Yellen is also determined to show that Raskind’s personal anguish did not affect his performance as an ophthalmologist. And how do patients of Dr. Renee Richards feel about being treated by a transsexual?

“Renee has a funny story about that,” Yellen said. “She says that she had this little old Jewish lady who was her patient when she was Richard Raskind and that she was really nervous when this woman came in for the first time and saw her as Renee Richards. The woman looked her (Richards) over slowly, and then said, ‘So, doctor . . . can you help me with my cataracts?’ ”

Game, set, match.