Monthly archives for October, 2011

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BIG CHILD STARS OF THE 1940′s — Who are They?

Oct31
2011 2 Comments Written by classicmovieguys

Hello everybody. Joe Morella and Frank Segers, your classic movie guys, back again to report that Ms. Norman Maine is STILL Missing.

Today, we pose a REAL challenge.

If you can identify the two subjects above, you will be awarded our informal child-star-sleuth-of-the-year award. (That and a token will get you on a New York subway.)

Because of their limited professional spans, child stars are sometimes tough to remember. Frank could NOT name the two pictured above if his life or the contents of his wallet depended on it.  Joe has a warmer appreciation of child performers, and therefore regards our mystery couple as familiar faces.

In any case, you’re probably going to need help here, so check out the following hints:

– She starred opposite Bing Crosby, Ingrid Bergman and Judy Garland.  Before entering films he was a child star on Broadway at age 13, playing a nasty Nazi youth.

– Both are still living.

– She changed her real surname to Carroll because “it sounded musical.”

– He costarred with some heavy hitters including Gregory Peck and Randolph Scott. He also played “Billy Jack” in a 1957 film directed by Budd Boetticher.  This was many years before actor-writer-director Tom Laughlin created his Seventies screen version of the tough law enforcer of the same name.

– His shortened first name is the same as a famous brand of peanut butter.

– (This may give the whole ballgame away.)  She had a sisterly tie onscreen with Garland and Margaret O’Brien.

– He developed into a convincing bad guy in westerns and crime dramas.

– She won a West Coast ice skating competition in 1938, three years after Sonja Henie won her Gold Medal in the Olympic Games in Germany. She also was a pretty good piano player.

– He did a lot of tv.

– She has been retired since her last movie in 1944.

So, there you have it.  To provide more hints would make things a tad too easy.  But never let it be said we aren’t willing to help, at least a little.

So, OK, who are these two?  E-mail as soon as you can.  

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JEAN SEBERG — Breathless

Oct28
2011 1 Comment Written by classicmovieguys

 

Jean Seberg at her best.

Hello, everybody, Joe Morella and Frank Segers, your Classic Movie guys, here again to continue our look at the life and career of  the actress who still beguiles audiences as “Patricia Franchini,” the very pretty, not-so-innocent abroad who betrays her gangster-on-the-run boyfriend (Jean-Paul Belmondo, pictured above) in Jean-Luc Godard’s1960 French classic, “Breathless.”

This “new wave” gem is now more available than ever thanks to the Criterion Collection’s 50th Anniversary DVD collection issued last year providing a host of informative supporting features along with a new high-definition digital transfer approved by the film’s cinematographer Raoul Coutard.  Seberg and costar Belmondo never looked better.

“Breathless” was more than a serendipitous Godsend to Seberg’s career — it was its salvation. After appearing in two Hollywood bombs from director Otto Preminger (“Saint Joan,” “Bonjour Tristesse”) her career fell off a cliff. She later said she spent two years mired “in a very dark abyss.”

Godard admired Preminger and liked the 20-year-old, French-speaking pride of Marshalltown, Iowa. He cast Seberg with little fanfare, and began shooting in Paris in August of 1959. Upon its release a year later, “Breathless” was declared a worldwide sensation although Godard himself admitted that “it is no ‘Citizen Kane.’” Seberg and Belmondo instantly became international stars.

In the ensuing two decades, Seberg made a slew of movies, many in Europe (she had moved permanently to France in the early Sixties) and most forgettable.

Her occasional Hollywood returns in the Sixties and early Seventies yielded roles in director Robert Rossen’s ”Lilith,” playing a schizophrenic beloved by a therapist (Warren Beatty); in Joshua Logan’s 1969 musical “Paint Your Wagon;” and a stint in George Seaton’s disaster prototype “Airport.” (At loose ends maritally at the time she made “Paint Your Wagon,” Seberg supposedly had an affair with costar Clint Eastwood.)

She even re-teamed with Godard and Belmondo in separate 1964 crime capers. Under Godard’s direction in one episode — titled “Le Grand Escroq” (The Great Fraud) — of the compilation film,  ”Les plus belles escroqueries du mond” (The World’s Most Beautiful Frauds), Seberg got lost in a foreign cast that included Catherine Deneuve and Godard himself. With Belmondo, she played the icily glamorous love interest in “Enchappement libre” (Backfire), director Jean Becker’s gem heist comedy. The Belmondo-Seberg reunion, four years after “Breathless,” came and went largely unnoticed, especially by Hollywood.

It was Rossen who described his female lead as “the All-American cheerleader who cracked up.” She married four times most notably from 1962 to 1970 to former French diplomat and novelist Roman Gary, who was 25 year Seberg’s senior.

It was Gary who wrote and directed Seberg’s 1968 movie, “Birds In Peru,” about a woman in search of an orgasm. Their marriage fell apart a year later, and Seberg embarked on affairs, drugs, alcohol and most dangerous of all — radical politics, which caught the attention of J.Edgar Hoover and the FBI.

Like Marlon Brando and Jane Fonda, Seberg flirted with various left wing causes in the late Sixties, notably the Oakland-based Black Panthers. But her involvement with the group moved beyond flirtation.  She had affairs with at least two Panther figures, and supposedly ran guns for the cause.

During a separation from Gary, Jean at 31 became pregnant.  A story was planted in the American press that she and Gary were trying to reconcile “even though the baby that Jean expects …is by another man — a black activist she met in California.” The baby, a girl named Nina, died days after her birth in August of 1970. The baby was white, supposedly the issue of Jean’s affair with a “revolutionary” student.

Seberg’s fragile mental condition deteriorated sharply.  Suicide attempts occurred on the anniversary of the baby’s death. In August of 1979, the actress succeeded. Her breathless body was found under a blanket of a car parked on a Paris street. Empty vials of barbituates were strewn about the vehicle.

Seaberg’s career covers more than 30 films of all types ranging from intimate European dramas to all-star Hollywood blockbusters. But we suspect you’d be hard pressed to identify more than a handful of these movies without checking.

Who knew — and certainly Seberg herself didn’t — that “Breathless,” the little, no-budget gangster drama made in Paris in the summer of 1959, would enthrall international movie audiences to this day, and make the ill-fated actress the durable face of one of the most creative periods in film history?

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JEAN SEBERG — The Wholesome Cheerleader Who Cracked Up

Oct27
2011 Leave a Comment Written by classicmovieguys

Hi, everybody.  Joe Morella and Frank Segers, your Classic Movies guys,  here again today to introduce our two-part look at the abbreviated, sad career of Jean Seberg – the actress director Robert Rossen once described as “the all-American cheerleader who cracked up.”

We were enormously assisted in today’s report by Mark Rappaport’s crisp, informative video essay about the actress included in the superb Criterion Collection’s 50th anniversary DVD reissue of director Jean-Luc Goddard’s “Breathless,” the most memorable film of Seberg’s career.

Hollywood-centrics know her as the corn-fed 17-year-old unknown from Marshalltown, Iowa, by picked by Otto Preminger out of a field of some 18,000 prospects to play the title role of Joan of Arc in the director’s 1957 costume drama, “Saint Joan.”

It was billed as the biggest talent search since the quest for Scarlett O’Hara in 1939′s “Gone With The Wind.”

Her screen test for the role amply demonstrates that Jean, who pinpointed her age at the time (1956) as 17 years and 11 months, was fresh-faced and gorgeous, an obvious choice for the part of the saintly “Maid of Orleans,” a French naif of heroic accomplishments done in by ruthlessly amoral 15the century aristocrats.

When the off-camera voice of Preminger asked Seberg, “do you want to be an actress,” she earnestly replied, “very badly.” Well, “badly” sums up how things went with the youthful actress during the making “Saint Joan” under the infamously dictatorial Otto.

Years later, Seberg told a French interviewer that the whole experience permanently damaged her. She compared Preminger to a “tank, who crushes people and terrifies them. He yells and shouts and insults you. Bit by bit I drew back inside myself like a turtle.” Despite this, Seberg again wound up under Preminger’s direction in the 1958 screen version of French writer Francoise Sagan’s “Bonjour Tristesse” (Hello Sadness), playing the spoiled, worldly-beyond-her-years daughter of playboy father (David Niven).

Both “Bonjour” and “Saint Joan” were firebombed by the critics, and the still teenaged Seberg feared her acting career was finished.

But what she hadn’t counted on was the enthusiasm for her and Preminger’s work harbored by Godard and Francois Truffaut, critics at the French buff journal Cahier du Cinema — and on the cusp of becoming directors and originators of the fabled French “new wave.”

Godard was planning on making a mixture policier-character study titled “A bout de souffle” (Breathless) with French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo cast as a low-level crook on the run who falls for a not-what-she-seems pretty, young American (Seberg) hawking copies of the International Herald Tribune on the Champs-Elysees.

Godard saw Seberg’s character as a “continuation of her role in ‘Bonjour Tristesse.’ I could have taken the last shot of Preminger’s film and started (‘Breathless’) after dissolving to a title, ‘Three Years Later.’”

The on-the-fly shooting of “Breathless” on streets of Paris and in a cramped hotel room (Chambre 12 of the Hotel de Suede, since torn down). It was in all a process described at the time as “organized chaos,” and it unnerved the 20-year-old Seberg. She was accustomed to Hollywood studio-style efficiency.

She was paid just under $10,000 to make the picture (about $75,000 in today’s dollars) the biggest line item in the bare-bones-budget picture. Although she was fluent in French, her dialogue arrived via prompts from Godard AS the scene was being filmed. Seberg had no hopes for the picture at all.

She was wrong.  When “Breathless” was released in 1960, its free-form visual style electrified international critics and film fans.  The picture was compared to Orson Welles’s “Citizen Kane” and to Robert Rossellini ‘s ”Open City,” shot in 1945 in the streets of Rome.  Seberg and Belmondo ascended to international stardom, and Godard embarked on perhaps the most restlessly experimental  career in film history.

Stay tuned!  We’ll take a look at Seberg’s post-”Breathless” career in our next blog. Warning:  The end is not pretty.

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DORIS DAY and SANTA (aka Hy Hollinger)

Oct26
2011 Leave a Comment Written by classicmovieguys

Hello, everybody.  Joe Morella and Frank Segers, your classic movie guys, here again with more ruminations on the entertaining world of old-fashioned Hollywood movie publicity.

Sometimes the publicity back then was more entertaining than the movie, but that’s a discussion for another day.

Today, we’ve invited a special guest — our longtime friend, veteran Hollywood trade journalist and former studio publicist Hy Hollinger – to join us in evoking a once-upon-a-time publicity adventure he vividly recalls to this day involving a young Doris Day (she was 24 at the time) at the very beginning of her movie career.

As we discussed in a previous blog, getting newspapers to publish a studio-manufactured publicity still was a key objective back in the Forties when print media ruled the media roost. Sometimes the studios would lend their stars to inventive photo ideas dreamed up by the newspapers themselves.

This is where Hy comes in, so let him tell it:

There’s a color photo somewhere in the archives of the New York Daily News showing me – as Santa Claus – pinning a necklace on Doris Day.

That photo was taken in late 1948, when I, as a junior publicist at Warner Bros. in New York City, escorted her to the News building to launch a promotional effort for her first movie, “Romance on the High Seas.”

The News photo editor wanted a shot for the Christmas issue of the Sunday magazine section. Thus, I was dispatched to Brooks theatrical costumes to be fitted with the Santa garb. 

The high-spirited Doris made no fuss during the Santa Claus business. (“Romance”) was her first movie following a career as a band singer, including touring with the Les Brown band and entertaining the troops with Bob Hope. A screen test landed her a contract with Warner Bros. Nobody signed me to play Santa Claus.

The studio pulled out all stops to introduce their new movie queen. Her costars were Jack Carson (clowning with Doris in the top photo), Janis Paige and Don Defore, and the cast included such recognizable supporting players as Oscar Levant, S.Z. Sakall, Eric Blore and Franklin Pangborn.

Michael Curtiz produced and directed, Julius J. Epstein and I.A. Diamond wrote the screenplay, and Julie Styne and Sammy Cahn provided the music, including the Oscar-winning song “It’s Magic.”

Working for a movie company and playing Santa Claus way back in 1948 launched a Bronx-born hick’s career as a fringe observer of the quirks of movie stars and moguls.

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Publicity is the Name of the Game

Oct25
2011 Leave a Comment Written by classicmovieguys

Notice what’s special about the photo above?

Sure, it’s a still of Spencer Tracy, Ingrid Bergman and Lana Turner — all in the cast of MGM’s version of  ”Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” directed in 1941 by Victor Fleming (the director of credit for “Gone With The Wind.”)

But it’s a posed shot with a twist, and certainly isn’t in the movie. 

Hello, everybody.  Your classic movie guys, Joe Morella and Frank Segers, here again to ponder bits of hype, hoopla and wonderful, old-fashioned studio publicity. Hollywood just doesn’t ballyhoo movies like it used to back when, we maintain.

A bit of backround of how the studios used photographic stills.

Each studio had a publicity department, and their job was to hype, hype and keeping on hyping that important new release. Stills from the picture were, of course, sent to newspapers and magazines.

But the publicity guys had to be creative.

Thus a still with a special visual twist had a greater advantage of being chosen for use. The studios had to come up with inventive shots which might capture the imagination of the editors, get the picture published and hence the film publicized.

In Hollywood’s heyday the studios’ publicity departments often staged their stills by posing stars together in situations that were not necessarily in the movie. Thousands of these orchestrated photos would be blanketed world wide to what was the communications maw of the time – the vast print media.

Print was king in the U.S. in the 1940’s with nearly 2,000 newspapers published every day.  Worldwide, that total was geometrically increased. The global reach of print was staggering back then, and the studios took full advantage. Photo stills were second only to theater trailers as promotional tools for movies.

So competition for print space was fierce, and most often photo stills with that special twist won the day, and a place in the next edition.  Take the photo above. Many editors chose it because of the unavoidable visual presence of that large, black figure (Mr. Hyde, we presume) looming over an unsuspecting trio — three of the best known Hollywood stars of the day.

A clever bit of publicity.  And the movie itself wasn’t bad either. 

 

 

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READER COMMENT — Not So Fast About ‘Forgotten’ Hayward

Oct24
2011 1 Comment Written by classicmovieguys

Hello, everybody.  Joe Morella and Frank Segers, your classic movie guys, back again to field a most welcome e-mail from another reader who demurs from our dismissal of Susan Hayward.

In our blog of July 14 — “Susan Hayward — Forgotten Star?” — we wrote that although Hayward was popular in the late Forties and Fifties,  she is a largely “who dat?” today.  On Oct. 11, we ran reader Philippe Elan’s comment that took us (mildly, thank heaven) to task with his opening line, “happy to disagree on the fact that Susan Hayward is a forgotten star.”

We were delighted to receive Phillipe’s defense of the actress. But we also pointed out that although such Hollywood luminaries as Rita Hayworth and Lana Turner may not be household names today to those under 40, their respective films — eg. “Gilda” and “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” among others — are so good that both actresses are assured cinematic immortality.

Did Susan Hayward make films as good?  We said and say, no.  Thus, her largely forgottten status today.

But reader “iarla” gracefully disagrees, and e-mailed us the following wide-ranging and thoughtful consideration of Hayward. We like it so much that we just had to let you in on the exchange. So here’s “iarla.”

It’s true that Edythe Marrenner (Hayward’s real name) is unfortunate in that none of her movies are as well revived as say, Lana’s “Postman” or Rita’s “Gilda”.

She is simply unlucky in that none of her films achieved cult status, with the sole — startling — exception being “Valley of the Dolls”, and it is screened today for reasons other than Hayward’s contribution.

Although this was possibly the most comercially popular film Hayward ever appeared in, its not exactly a prestigious credit for any of its participants. Although, female audiences loved Hayward back in the Fifties when she was considered a “strong” actress as well as a box office star.

Though critics were not always as impressed, and I recall Hayward being unflatteringly referred to as a “bargain basement Bette Davis”( ! ).

(The late film critic) Pauline Kael, while enjoying the earlier Hayward of (director Harold Clurman’s 1946 murder mystery) “Deadline at Dawn” felt she had “slipped” considerably by the time (1955) of (Daniel Mann’s biopic of singer Lillian Roth) “I’ll Cry Tomorrow.”

It’s as if certain performers, who start out as starlets, become almost embarrassed and self-conscious and unfortunately mannered when they strive to be taken ‘seriously’ as dramatic actresses.

But I’ve always wondered why ‘actressy’ types date badly in comparison to the glamour queens, such as (Norma) Shearer and Louise Rainer versus (Jean) Harlow and (Marlene) Dietrich in the Thirties, or (Greer) Garson and Jennifer Jones against Rita and Lana in the forties.

Maybe its the sense of ‘fun’ and approachability thats lacking.

Hayward never had the good fortune to become a cult figure. Also, although her private life was rather tempestuous, and covered as such by the media at the time, there was always a brittle, cold quality to the private Hayward image as opposed to the more inviting, vulnerable qualities emitted by some of the sex symbols like (Kim) Novak or (Marilyn) Monroe in the Fifties.

Changing fashions dictate public tastes and interests, and Susan Hayward is simply not in the public consciousness. Oftentimes, clotheshorses like Lana or Rita are referenced as emblems of classical Hollywood glamour when designers like Valentino (“Ziegfeld Girl”) or Gaultier (“Shanghai Express”) discuss their muses/inspirations. Hayward was never identified in this way either then or now, proving the power and endurabilty of image over talent, especially today!

Now that I think of it, Hayward died (of cancer in 1975 at 57) relatively early compared to her peers, which is a pity as she would almost certainly have had a substantial shot at television like (Barbara) Stanwyck or (Jane) Wyman.

But she was a genuine star, and context is everything, and I’m glad to remember her even though her heyday had passed long before I was born!”

Thanks iarla.  And keep on commenting.

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Henie Meets Hitler — Sonja Sells War Bonds

Oct21
2011 Leave a Comment Written by Joe Morella and Frank Segers

Hello, everybody, Joe Morella and Frank Segers, your Classic Movie guys, here to wind up our Sonja Henie series with a look at her World War II bond-selling activities, which in retrospect contain rich historical irony.

Almost all of the top film stars of the 1940s did their bit helping the war effort. World War II was the last U.S. military effort which had the full-throated, unambiguous support of the big studios and their talent. (Can you imagine the Hollywood of today similarly supporting, say, the Afghanistan conflict?)

Back then, many stars toured to entertain the troops.  Many more participated in what were called “Bond Drives.” That is to say, they would show up at big cities rallies to hawk War Bonds in person.

Dorothy Lamour, for example, was renowned for being one of the most successful of Hollywood’s pitch women. And who can forget that 33-year-old Carole Lombard, returning to California from a 1942 war bond rally in her native state of Indiana, was killed when her plane crashed near Las Vegas.

Our friend, Pat Williamson, as we’ve noted in earlier blogs, was a member of a select group of young women sponsored by The Standard Oil Company of California who were dubbed “The Chevronettes.” Pat was also a talented musician, put in a stint in Phil Spitalny’s All-Girl Orchestra, and once had a bit speaking part in an Abbott and Costello movie.

In any event, when she heard we were doing several blogs on the ice skating star Sonja Henie she went to her scrapbook and found the clipping above. (Pat looks rather serious in the shot while Sonja flashes one of her trademark dippled grins.)

Sonja’s participation in the War Bond drive was a smart move at the time by her and her studio, Twentieth Century Fox.

Seems that in the 1936 Olympic Games hosted by Germany in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Henie, representing Norway, was one of the gold medalists (it was her third Olympic gold medal win.) She was photographed shaking hands with Adolph Hitler, leader of the host nation. In Sonja’s case, the Fuhrer autographed the picture.

It didn’t help her movie career any when that ceremonial picture of the ice skating superstar with Hitler got into general circulation.

Henie lore has it that she later made good use of that photo with Adolph.

After Nazi Germany began its five-year occupation of Norway in April 1940, Henie — then in Hollywood — feared her house would be confiscated by the Wehrmacht. She supposedly instructed her Norwegian domestic staff to haul out the picture with Hitler, and position it in a conspicuous spot. The upshot was that despite (or because of) several visits, the Nazis decided against taking over her house.

By the time World War II was well underway, Henie was a U.S. citizen and one of Hollywood’s highest paid actresses.  She and Fox had a lot to protect.

So it’s easy to imagine Fox studio boss Darryl F. Zanuck barking the order:  Sonja, get out there and sell those War Bonds!  As you can see from the photo above, she did just that.

 

 

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Sonja Henie — “One In A Million”

Oct20
2011 Leave a Comment Written by classicmovieguys

Only 10 months after she turned professional, the world’s most famous non-Hollywood movie star was on the precipice of becoming, well, a Hollywood movie star.

Sonja Henie’s amateur figure skating career — boasting of an unheard of three consecutive Olympic gold medals plus 10 consecutive world championships — had electrified the sporting world. By the mid-1930′s Hollywood took notice. For her part, Sonja was more than ready to begin the movie career she had long coveted.

Enter 20th Century Fox mogul Darryl F. Zanuck (pictured with Sonja above), who had been dazzled by her performances in one of Sonja’s ice-capades. “I’ve signed Miss Henie and her skates,” he announced. “Even if she couldn’t skate, I’d have signed her anyway, but not for so much money.” In fact, the skating phenomenon passed studio muster without having to take the usual screen test.

Hello, everybody, Joe Morella and Frank Segers back again with our pal, author and former figure skater Edward Z. Epstein, to continue our Sonja Henie series with a look at her abreviated (only 11 movies) but commercially hyper-successful  Hollywood movie career.

What did Zanuck see in this diminutive, strikingly dimpled, 22-year-old Norwegian gamin that convinced him she was star material?

Besides having that charismatic je ne sais quoi genuine stars possess, Henie’s extraordinary skills afforded rare opportunities for the kinds of big, lavish production numbers that play well onscreen. From a strictly commercial standpoint, her signing was one of Zanuck’s best talent moves.

Henie made her screen debut in 1936′s romantic musical comedy “One In A Million,” playing an Olympic skating aspirant discovered by a theatrical manager (Adolphe Menjou), who brings his find to Madison Square Garden. Observing all this is a young Paris-based newspaper reporter (Don Ameche).

Making the picture wasn’t easy. Writes Epstein: It had been excruciatingly hard work to film the skating scenes. The cameramen had never had to photograph a swiftly moving skater. Keeping her in focus was a technical nightmare, and often skating scenes had to be repeated 25 and 30 times. The exhausted Sonya — only 22 years old — thought she’d drop from the effort.

She didn’t, and the movie was an enormous success at the box office. ”One In A Million” set the boilerplate for a Henie picture, frothy comedies sometimes with music but always with extravagantly-mounted skating numbers. “I want to do for figure skating what Fred Astaire has done for dancing,” said Sonja early in her career.

She instantly became a star, and was cast opposite another Fox star, Tyrone Power, in the second of her movies, 1937′s “Thin Ice.” Described by Zanuck biographer Mel Gussow as “a creaky vehicle about a skating instructor who is wooed by a prince disguised as a commoner,”  the picture — creaky or not — proved to be Fox’s biggest-grossing movie that year.

In fact, after making only two studio pictures, Henie was the highest paid actress in Hollywood.

“In 1937, she was making $210,729 ($3.3 million in today’s dollars),” according to Gussow, compared with studio boss Zanuck’s payout of $260,000 ($4.1 million in today’s dollars).”

The curtain rang down on Henie’s movie career in the late Forties, but before then she had appeared with a raft of Fox stars. She was reunited with Ameche in 1938′s “Happy Landing” and with Power (that fellow pictured to the right below) a year later in “Second Fiddle,” with the actor cast as a studio publicist of all things who falls for a Minnesota skating teacher.

Sonja played opposite Ray Milland and Robert Cummings in 1939′s “Everything Happens At Night,” and was double-billed with John Payne in 1941′s “Sun Valley Serenade” (notably featuring the Glenn Miller orchestra) and in 1942′s “Iceland.”  Her costar in 1943′s “Wintertime” was Cesar Romero.

As Gussow put it, “Sonja Henie was (depicted) as pure as the driven snow, and in all her movies she was surrounded with it.”

Always an astute businesswoman, Henie parlayed her movie fame by appearing in The Hollywood Ice Revue, an in-person forerunner of today’s Ice Capades. Her show packed huge arenas. (Towards the end of her life — she died of leukemia in 1969 — Sonja was ranked among the world’s wealthiest women.)

 

 

 

 

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SONJA HENIE — The Athlete

Oct19
2011 Leave a Comment Written by classicmovieguys

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yes, Sonja Henie was one of the most successful actresses in Thirtes and Forties Hollywood.

But she was also a supremely gifted athlete, a pioneering figure skater whose competitive record — three consecutive Olympic gold medals , ten consecutive world championships — has never been approached much less equaled.

Hello, everybody. Joe Morella and Frank Segers, your Classic Movie guys, to continue our Sonja Henie series, this time focusing on her astounding athleticism.  (She was also a pretty fair skier and tennis player.).

Since Joe and Frank know little about figure skating — we are being charitable here — we have invited our friend Edward Z. Epstein, Joe’s collaborator on some 15 books about famous Hollywood stars and a talented ice skater in his own right, to take the editorial reigns today.  Here’s Ed…..

Just how did (Henie), a diminutive Norwegian-born lass become the premiere ice ballerina of the world?

“I was fortunate. I discovered what I loved to do and wanted to do from a very early age,” she would say.  Her obsession: “to skate.” Sonja was also fortunate to have a solid support system: her parents were willing and able (he was a fur wholesaler in Oslo) to underwrite, with dollars and encouragement, their daughter’s unswerving desire to perform on ice.

Sonja proved to be a prodigy. At six, after badgering her mother and father for months, she received her first pair of skates. At seven, competing against skaters twice her age, she won her first competition. By the age of eight, she was the Norwegian Junion Class C Champion, and at nine she became champion of Norway, Senior Class A. At ten, Sonja entered her first Olympics (the 1924 Games) and place last.  

That was one of the last times Sonja Henie was not the leader of the pack.

At 13, she became the youngest girl ever to win a world championship (that distinction still holds). Sonja’s idol was the legendary ballerina Anna Pavlova (Henie subsequently took ballet lessons from Pavlova’s instructor, Mme. Karsavina). Sonja’s goal was to become a true artist of the ice.

She was an innovator in her sport, the first to combine dance and figure skating. Sonja won her first Olympics in 1928, in St. Moritz; her second world title in London; her third the following year in Budapest. She journeyed to the U.S. for the first time in 1930, to compete in the world championships.

The much-heralded event took place in Madison Square Garden in New York City, where 16-year-old Sonja placed first. Naturally, she greatly intrigued both press and public alike — just who was this talented kid who’d already won four world titles?

In news reports Sonja was affectionately dubbed “New York’s Scandinavian Sweetheart.” Berlin was the scene of Sonja’s next skating victory (her fifth world championship). And the following year, 1932, she won her second Olympic gold medal in Lake Placid, N.Y. (Then) in 1936, in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, Sonja accomplished the impossible: a third Olympic gold medal, followed by a tenth world championship in Paris.

Burning all amateur bridges behind her she turned professional, singing with American entrepreneur Arthur Wirtz. While Sonja’s skating repertoire didn’t include today’s requisite double and triple jumps (many of which didn’t exist then), the skater’s personal charisma compensates for that arguable shortcoming.

Her performing seems effortless; she appears to be having the time of her life, inviting one and all to share in the fun: “It’s easy! Try it yourself!” is the message, and the public flocked as never before to ice rinks. Many new rinks sprang up throughout the country.

Thanks to Sonja Henie, ice skating became (and has remained) one of the most popular sports throughout the world.

Thanks, Ed.  Next up? We’ll take a close look at Henie’s highly successful movie career.  She was a star in two worlds, after all.  

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The World’s Most Famous Ice Skater Is … Who?

Oct18
2011 1 Comment Written by classicmovieguys

What name springs to mind when one thinks of Ice Skating?

Sonja Henie, you say?

You are right! She is to ice skating what Babe Ruth is the baseball. Synonymous. While many today don’t know what she looked like or what she accompished, they know her name.

Sonja Henie (there she is, above) was not only a superb world class athlete and BIG movie star in the Thirties and Forties, she was the first to bring the world of skating to the masses.

Hello, everybody.  Joe Morella and Frank Segers, your Classic Movie guys, here to begin our multiple-part visit with a groundbreaking figure of literally Olympic proportions who is, for our money, the most successful athlete-turned-movie star in Hollywood history.

We’ll be joined in our Sonja Henie triptych by longtime friend Edward Z. Epstein, who co-authored with Joe more than 15 books about show business and stars that drive movie box office. Ed is particularly suited to assess Henie the athlete since he himself has been a skating enthusiast since childhood, and is a former Middle-Atlantic States Novice Champion.

The diminutive (5 foot 3 inch) “scintillating sensation on ice” was born in Oslo, Norway in 1912, the daughter of a fur wholesaler. She was given her first pair of skates when she was just six years old.  By 14, Henie was Norwegian skating champion. A year later she won an Olympic gold medal in skating, as she would again in 1932 and in 1936.

In all, Henie won 10 consecutive world championships. Writes Epstein: “to the present day no singles’ skater has ever equaled (or come close to equaling) Sonja’s competitive record.”

Forget Peggy Fleming, Dorothy Hamill, Michelle Kwan, Katarina Witt, Nancy Kerrigan — much less Tonya Harding. Sonja Henie is a figure skating legend who set the competitive and sylistic bar.  She brought ballet, white skates and short skating dresses to competition, and inspired Walter Winchell, that notoriously curmudgeonly newspaper columnist, to dub her “Norway’s most dazzling export.”

By the late Thirties, Henie was the world’s most famous non-movie star. Following her Olympic triumphs she turned professional and toured with her own ice show. With an eye towards establishing a movie career despite the conventional wisdom of the time that no figure skater can “carry” a picture, Sonja booked Hollywood’s sole ice arena and staged her shows.

As Epstein writes, “she was a sensation. Her show became the hottest ticket in town, with such local notables as Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, Myrna Loy and Ginger Rogers on hand, ‘yelling themselves hoarse, applauding like first-time fans at a football game,’ recalled actor-comedian Jack Oakie.”

Also in the audience was Darryl F. Zanuck, the mogul sitting atop 20th Century Fox, who later recalled that he was told “to watch the boy she was dancing with.” In his biography of Zanuck — “The Last Movie Tycoon” — author Mel Gussow noted that instead, the Fox boss’s gaze was riveted exclusively on Sonja.

The studio boss quickly “signed her to a contract without a screen test — in purely commercial terms one of Zanuck’s best decisions.”  By 1937, Henie was the highest paid actress in Hollywood, earning almost as much money as Zanuck himself.

We’ll have much more on Henie’s Hollywood career in a later blog.  And relying heavily on Epstein — after all, what do we know about figure skating? — we’ll also take a look at Sonja Henie the athlete.

 

 

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