Gee-Whizzer

Gee-Whizzer (See Cover)

In 1927 Finnish Paavo Nurmi was the world's greatest distance runner, Yankee Babe Ruth cracked out his 416th home run, Bobby Jones won his third national amateur championship and Jack Dempsey was training for a return match with Champion Gene Tunney. That year a brown-eyed little Norwegian girl named Sonja Henie, having won her first world's championship, was about to win her first Olympic crown. For the comparatively few who took an interest in skating, she was the most famous woman skater in the world.

Last week Gene Tunney was in the whiskey business, Restaurateur Jack Dempsey was recuperating from an appendectomy, Babe Ruth was looking for a manager's job in the major leagues, Bobby Jones was an aging, paunchy Atlanta lawyer, Paavo Nurmi was managing a tidy fortune invested in Finnish real estate. Having accepted a back seat or had it thrust upon them, none of these once-great sporting figures was much more than a brave memory.

Last week Sonja Henie, vacationing in Norway, was still the most famous woman skater in the world. In competition no longer, at 29 she was a greater box-office name, a more compelling magnet for crowds than ever before. She was not only, in Sportswriter Joe Williams' words, "undoubtedly the biggest individual draw sports ever produced," but she was also Hollywood's third-ranking box-office star* with four phenomenally successful pictures behind her and another, just released, well calculated to ring the bell again. Sonja Henie has been called variously Queen of the Ice, Pavlova on Skates and the Nasturtium of the North. But no captioner has hit her off quite so neatly as did Broadway's knowing old verbal free skater, Damon Runyon. Sonja Henie, says admiring Mr. Runyon, is just a gee-whizzer.

Second Fiddle. Because Sonja Henie is still a celebrity-in-the-movies rather than a movie celebrity, a skater who plays in skating pictures, her cinema personality is closer to her real one than Hollywood usually allows. Many of her more literal-minded fans, indeed, have a tendency to interpret her pictures as autobiographical. In One In a Million her fans recognized the story of her painstaking rise to an Olympic title, coached and protected by a loving father who once had Olympic ambitions himself--a figure much like that jolly, bicycle-riding Oslo shopkeeper, Wilhelm Henie. When, as a professional skater in Happy Landing, Sonja fell in love with her manager, sophisticated cinemaddicts reminded each other of her long-faithful swain, Paris Sports Promoter Jefferson Davis ("The Tex Rickard of Europe") Dickson.

To such celluloid researchers, Second Fiddle, which brings Sonja to Hollywood and wraps her in the toils of a publicity romance with Rudy Vallee--a scheme concocted by Pressagent Tyrone Power--will be full of delicious possibilities. For, as Sonja's fans well know, the liveliest Hollywood buzz-buzz of 1937 concerned her studio romance with Tyrone Power, cooked up by no pressagent but by smart little Darryl Zanuck himself. Actually, Second Fiddle is no more of a personal history than any other Henie movie. Like its predecessors, it is an artfully contrived showcase for the display of a camera-kind young woman with a bag of unique and spectacular tricks.

Second Fiddle displays Sonja as Trudi Hovland, a schoolmarm of Bergen, Minn. who is called to Hollywood because her local swain has sent her photograph to Consolidated Pictures Corp., which has been looking high & low for just such a heroine.* Jimmy Suttou (Tyrone Power), the pressagent sent to Bergen to fetch her, at first treats her merely as Entry No. 436. He agrees that she has no chance for the part but talks her into flying to Hollywood for the trip, with her Aunt Phoebe (Edna May Oliver). After a twirl on the ice with her pupils, Trudi consents. Although Trudi does no skating in her screen test, she makes the grade. Jimmy believes that, as the new star, she can be used to bolster the publicity value of Roger Maxwell (Rudy Vallee), a crooner on the studio pay roll whose self-esteem is more impressive than his newsworthiness. Touched by Roger's mash notes, which are really written by Jimmy, Trudi moons over him all during production of Girl of the North. Only when she learns the real author of the notes does Trudi realize that her heart has been bent, not broken.

No recognizable portrait of Sonja Henie's past, Second Fiddle raises several interesting questions about her future. It is the first picture in which her skating is incidental to the plot. The skating sequences show her informally on the schoolhouse rink, formally in an elaborate production number that takes place in her daydreams while she is lounging by a California swimming pool. For, as Ginger Rogers yearns to do, and occasionally does, pictures without her dancing shoes, Sonja Henie's ambition is to do one without her skates. Judging from the acting Trudi Hovland does before her glass with heavy dramatic lines like "Let me go, Aye tall yu," this ambition will take some realizing. But so have all Sonja Henie's ambitions. And as she herself has remarked: "Most always I win."

First Fiddle. Figure skating, the art in which Sonja Henie was first feminine fiddle for more than a decade, is a graceful competitive pastime which was once regarded as about as unsalable as china painting. In championship competition, figure skaters are called on to do about seven out of about 41 compulsory school figures. Although many of these figures are inordinately difficult to learn, most are very dull to watch. The second half of a figure-skating contest is free skating, where invention counts as well as execution. Theoretically unlimited, in practice most free-skating repertories, including Sonja Henie's, are limited by the fact that competitive figure skaters ordinarily perfect no more feats than they need to eke out four minutes (five minutes for men) in competition. This official time limit was determined by the period figure skaters can leap and whirl without falling on their exhausted faces. Although Henie has enriched her repertory with ice dances such as her Pavlova-inspired "Dying Swan," her standbys are those of other figure skaters: the Lutze jump; Jackson Haynes (a sit spin); Axel-Paulsen (a one-and-a-half jump ending on the other skate); camel spin (on one foot); double Salchow (a double jump from the inside edge of one skate to the inside edge of the other).

This exacting art Sonja Henie began to study when she was eight. For Christmas that year Father Wilhelm, a Scandinavian copy of W. C. Fields, gave her her first, cheap pair of skates. Trying them out at the Frogner Stadium, little Sonja promptly sat down. Getting up, she practiced her outer and inner edges so diligently that next year she won Oslo's junior competition; five years after that, aged 14, the Norwegian championship. That was the Olympic Year of 1924 and Sonja went to Chamonix to try out in the great games. The trial was a disappointment. The stringy little Norwegian champion placed last.

Then & there Sonja Henie, who has a competitive spirit only in the sense that she cannot brook a serious rival, decided that she would be beaten no more. She withdrew from competition, began practicing seven hours a day. Because Norway then had no indoor rinks and the good ice lasted only a few months, Papa Henie dug down into his capacious pantaloons and Sonja followed the ice and the good teachers into Germany, England, Switzerland, Austria. To develop her defective sense of rhythm, she studied ballet. In 1926, feeling her oats, she entered the world's championship matches in Stockholm, took second place. There followed another year of training, and in 1927 Sonja at last was first.

During her ensuing reign as amateur queen of the ice, Sonja Henie won the world's championship ten times running, an unequaled record. She also won the seven European championships she entered, and she won the last three Olympic Games of her amateur era. She became a national idol such as Norway had not worshipped since Ibsen. Above the iron bedstead in her chamber in her small Oslo apartment hung autographed pictures of Hitler and Mussolini. England's Queen Mary and King Edward VIII were her devoted fans. Norway's moosey King Haakon took to telegraphing her before every public appearance. Germany's Crown Prince Wilhelm called her to him after a performance and impulsively gave her his diamond stickpin, adorned with the Hohenzollern crest. She had a room filled with some 100 gold and silver mugs, gold placques, decorations, certificates. Sonja had almost everything she wanted--but not quite everything. She had a consuming desire to be a movie star.

Fimplaner. The man who told Sonja Henie she could be another Garbo was an ebullient Irish-American, Dennis Russell Scanlan of St. Paul, who ran, and runs today, a prosperous surgical-instruments business in Sweden and Manhattan. In 1920 Scanlan had set Norway on its ear by staging an Oslo show for Chicago Skater Bobby McLean that grossed $76,000. The Henies and Mr. Scanlan saw something attractive in each other. In 1935 they put their heads together over Sonja. The Henie filmplaner were simple. Sonja was to go out in a blaze of amateur glory in the 1936 Olympics, then cash in before she became that bitterest of all drugs on the market, an ex-champ.

In her anxiety to carry out this plan, Sonja dramatically demonstrated the trait her friends call determination. With so much at stake in that year's Olympic championship, Sonja, who is uneasy except when she is leading the field by a safe distance, was infuriated to learn that the judges had rated her school figures only two points better than England's Cecilia Colledge's, a renowned free skater. Biting her lip, she told her entourage to tear down the posted scores. When they refused, Sonja Henie indignantly scooted out, tore them down herself. Thus reassured, she went on to give a magnificent free-skating exhibition that saved the day, gave her the third and final victory in the Olympics that crowned her amateur career.

The second part of her filmplaner was a demonstration to Hollywood magnates that, unlike such great women athletes as Babe Didrikson, Joyce Wethered and Gertrude Ederle, she had something to sell. Turning professional after the Olympics, she embarked on a barnstorming tour of the U. S., packing them in in New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Boston, where she and Scanlan persuaded the local rink to reopen after the skating season had closed, rang up $20,000 in one night. Climax was an appearance as guest star for Marion Davies' Children's Hospital Fund in Hollywood's Polar Palace. Hollywood attended, watched the turnstiles, was impressed. Just prior to the show, a nibble had come from M. G. M., $35,000 for a scene in a revue. Now from Twentieth Century-Fox came a better offer: stardom. Scanlan, whose suit for part of the Henie earnings is pending, is now engaged in research on a new lightweight respirator with famed paralytic Fred B. Snite Jr.

$2,000,000. Sonja Henie's very considerable affairs are now handled by: 1) Cinemagent Vic Orsatti, brother of the onetime St. Louis Cardinal outfielder; 2) Sporting Promoter Arthur Wirtz. who runs her carnival tours; 3) the Manhattan firm of Byrne & Byrne; 4) her quiet, long-faced mother, her closest companion since her father died in Hollywood in 1937; 5) (and mostly) herself. For each of two pictures a year Sonja gets $125,000, plus overtime. Her skating exhibitions, more popular than ever since she became a star, net her almost as much again. Royalties from Sonja Henie skates, toys, doodads bring a tidy additional income. Most reliable estimates put Sonja Henie's take, since she became a professional three years ago, at about $2,000,000.

Sonja Henie is not popular in Hollywood. Although most of the stories told about her tightfistedness and her snobbishness are apocryphal, it is true that Sonja Henie has few of the traits that make for Hollywood popularity. A world celebrity, she is indifferent to other celebrities. Uninterested in show, she rents a different, and usually a modest, house each year. Her latest, in Bel Air, is California-Moorish, with a swimming pool and tennis court, which rents at $1,500 a month.

Sonja's chief personal diversions are tennis and her cars: a white Mercury cabriolet which she drives expertly at illegal speeds, and a 16-cylinder Cadillac, which Louis drives for more formal occasions. She also likes diamonds, an occasional champagne cocktail, and U. S. slang, which she puts to individual use. Of ice that does not satisfy her, she will casually observe that it is "stinking lousy," or of someone who bores her, "he stinks." A good dancer, she is fond of other good dancers like slinky Cesar Romero, lanky Lee Bowman. There was talk of a Bowman-Henie romance until it became known that Sonja, noting Bowman's high hairline, had baldly advised him to get fitted for a toupee.

The great worry in Sonja Henie's life is that she will kill or maim herself at her very dangerous profession. To keep the ice clear of objects that might send her arsy-versy when she is traveling at 35 m.p.h., her troupe is forbidden to wear hairpins, the electrical superstructure over the rink is scrupulously vacuumed. Among Sonja's skating shoes, of white calf lined with chamois which cost her $45 a pair, and her skates, which are made by John E. Strauss of St. Paul, Minn, (sometimes described as "the master skate man of the world"), for about $30, are several supposedly lucky pairs. Despite these precautions, she has taken falls which she believes would have killed a less experienced skater, got a brain concussion when she tripped over the edge of the rink making Happy Landing. The Henie legs, as shapely as they are useful, are insured against accident for the largest sum Lloyd's would underwrite, $5,000 a week.

The second greatest worry in Sonja Henie's life, according to other people is her unmarried state. Her friends contend that her most publicized "romance," with Tyrone Power, was just that. Her less publicized friendship for Jeff Dickson* ended when she left Europe for the U. S. in 1936. She gave him back his jewelry. Her parents regarded with approval middle-aged Clifford Jeapes (pronounced Geeps), British cinemagnate who gave Sonja her first (unsuccessful) screen test. Romantic friends incline to the belief that the only man Sonja Henie has ever really been interested in was Jack Dunn, the handsome 19-year-old Cambridge undergraduate aviator who was her fellow-skater and constant companion on her 1936 tour, had a movie contract in his pocket when he was fatally stricken with tularemia last This year she took up with one Bob Shaw, a $50-a-week Fox stock boy (extra). To public curiosity about her private life, Sonja Henie is about as impervious as Greta Garbo. Says she: "I am too busy to get married. I have too much to do. Anyway I have no one to get married to."

*In the Motion Picture Herald's exhibitors' Poll, after Shirley Temple, Clark Gable.

*For the actual story of such a contest, see P. 54.

*For news of whom, see p. 55.

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