REDGRAVE’S GRAND SLAM IN CBS’ ‘SECOND SERVE’

“Second Serve” is a smash and so is Vanessa Redgrave.

Redgrave is so extraordinary as Renee Richards--so commanding and convincing as a man, and as a woman, and as a tortured soul in sexual limbo--that Redgrave the real-life stormy political figure fades into the background. More about the politics later.

Richards is the transsexual eye surgeon and former male amateur tennis champion who shot to prominence and controversy in the late 1970s when she began playing professionally as a woman.

Based on her own book, this absolutely intriguing and fascinating CBS drama (9 p.m. Tuesday on Channels 2 and 8) charts Richards’ many epic battles. As a woman trapped in a man’s body, cross-dressing Richard Raskind battles his own sexual identity, ultimately marrying and fathering a son. Later, as a transsexual, Renee battles for her right to play professional tennis as a woman.

The son of a passive father and strong, rigid mother who approves his older sister dressing him as a girl, Richard has a traumatic childhood that apparently contributes to his sexual ambivalence. He becomes a tennis champion at Yale, goes on to a successful medical career and even becomes engaged, while leading two lives. The secret one is as a transvestite whose psychiatrist urges him to suppress his female inner self.

Richard’s evolution as Renee--the anguished self-awareness and tentative, circuitous route to sex-change surgery--is handled with delicacy by director Anthony Page. And you just have to see Redgrave to believe her, not only because she passes physically, but because of her spiritual sense of both Richard and Renee.

It’s in the eyes, the shadings, the tones, the strata of emotions.

Consider Redgrave’s task: At one point, this brilliant female plays a man wearing women’s clothes. Or to put it another way, she is a woman in women’s clothes, playing a man. Other times, she is a woman playing a man trying to suppress the woman within. Other times, she is a woman playing a man whose appearance has been softened by female hormones. And finally, she is Renee Richards, physically, emotionally and legally a woman, going fishing with her young son, who calls her Dad.

Add to that, she is an Englishwoman talking like an American.

Redgrave’s voice has been lowered electronically, which works most of the time, but occasionally makes her sound almost muffled. She is so believable at every level, however, that when Renee has sex with a man, it seems no less natural than Richard kissing women. And Louise Fletcher and Alice Krige give strong supporting performances as Richard’s mother and fiancee, respectively.

There are minor bones to pick. Richards was a superior tennis player and left-handed. Redgrave can’t play tennis a lick and is right-handed. Also, Richard Raskind has been renamed Richard Radley for this TV version, because of Renee Richards’ wish to protect her son, who is now 14, and father (her mother has died). Good idea, but too late. The real family name has already been widely publicized through the years, including by Richards in her book.

More serious is the sense of incompleteness about “Second Serve,” which ends in 1976, a year after Renee’s surgery, omitting many critical elements of her life, including her personal and legal battle for acceptance in pro tennis. The story is also fuzzy--at the network’s behest--about some of the details of the surgery that viewers probably will be curious about.

“You could ask what happened to the penis and what about the vagina,” executive producer Linda Yellen noted by phone from New York. “I would like to have explained that, but we couldn’t. There was so much to tell. The story could have been much longer. You could do two hours just on one episode of her life.”

Ditto for the pro-Palestine Liberation Organization, anti-Zionist Redgrave, whose latest episode was her call for a boycott of Israel by England’s actors’ union. Her petition was signed by 37 members.

As a result, Yellen recently announced she would never again hire Redgrave, who sparked a huge protest in 1980 when playing half-Jewish Fania Fenelon in Yellen’s Nazi Holocaust film on CBS, “Playing for Time.”

“I was really just appalled this time,” said Yellen, who is Jewish. “She had made a point about not mixing politics with this film. She even wanted me to sit in on some of the interviews because she didn’t want to answer political questions. She seemed to have mellowed. I left her on a Wednesday, and she must have gone out the very next day and made these (anti-Israel) statements. And I started getting the same crazy rash of phone calls I did six years ago.”

CBS and Yellen were then heavily criticized by Jewish groups for keeping Redgrave on “Playing for Time” even after Redgrave had brandished a rifle in a pro-PLO film.

“It was a different set of circumstances then,” said Yellen, who had defended Redgrave’s right to work in 1980 on artistic grounds. “I had already hired her then and had been working with her. And then people wanted me to fire her. Today’s world is more dangerous than it was then. Terrorism is an everyday reality, and there is more danger of someone listening to her and going off and doing something.”

The issue now is not Redgrave’s pro-PLO activism, which is her right, but her intolerance of pro-Israel feelings. Her call for Israel’s blacklisting seems especially hypocritical in view of her court win against the Boston Symphony for allegedly blacklisting her in 1982 because of her political views. “She told me that winning that case was the most important event in her life,” Yellen said, “even more important than having her children.”

Yellen is convinced that only Redgrave could have played Renee Richards. “But Renee is Jewish and pro-Israel,” Yellen said. “And now she has to be linked to this.”

Renee Richards--even now a work in progress.