In 1957, while attending Temple University, Lane struck and killed an elderly woman while driving her mother's car (she was not charged).

After investing her savings in a Philadelphia bookstore, she began playing chess at a nearby coffeehouse and others in the neighborhood, "winning all the time", she said.

[citation needed] Lane was married twice – first to Walter Rich, a Philadelphia ad man and commercial artist, from 1959 to 1961;[6] then to Neil Hickey, a writer and journalist who eventually became editor-at-large of the Columbia Journalism Review, in 1962.

In the 1970s, Lane and her husband opened a health and natural food store called Amber Waves of Grain, in Carmel, New York, which later evolved into a gift shop called Earth Lore Gems & Minerals in Pawling, New York,[7] which in its last years moved to Kent, Connecticut in 2012.

The four panel members (Polly Bergen, Don Ameche, Kitty Carlisle, and Tom Poston) correctly guessed her identity.

[11][12][6] Chess.com noted in their eulogy that "the glamor cut both ways: media often fixated on her physical appearance and personal life, with chess being a secondary point of interest".