Astaire on Ice

Slowly the giant overhead lights of Manhattan's Madison Square Garden dimmed. Across a bright lattice of wavering spotlights glided a tiny girl in an abbreviated costume of red & gold, a ribbon fluttering saucily in her hair. In the centre of the ice, her sturdy little legs suddenly twinkled into the first steps of a mazurka. Then she swung into a Lutz jump, a Jackson-Haynes spin, glided backward the length of the rink in a fadeaway stop. To lay observers, this brief turn was not remarkable. For experts it was an exercise in sheer genius, the climax of the evening. Cheering wildly, they demanded two encores.

This extravagant reception at the International Skating Carnival last week was nothing new for 23-year-old Sonja Henie, Olympic Figure-skating Champion in 1928-32-36, World Champion in 1927-28-29-30-31-32-33-34-35-36. What was new was that Norway's Henie was making her first appearance as a professional. For ten performances in the East and Midwest, she will receive $70,000, plus a percentage of the gate receipts.

Sonja Henie (pronounced to rhyme with penny) says she decided to turn professional for two reasons: 1) as long as she had to practice twice a day, shun smoking and drinking, abide the stares of the curious, she might as well get something out of it besides entertainment and silverware; 2) hers is a consuming desire to be a cinema star. Last summer at the neat Henie country place just outside Oslo, she discussed with her parents her longtime ambition. They heartily approved the idea. Wary of professional managers, including Sonja's faithful swain, 40 year-old Promoter Jefferson Davis ("Tex Rickard of Europe") Dickson, they made contact with a longtime friend named Dennis Scanlon. Mr. Scanlon, who runs a surgical-instrument factory in Sweden but lives in Manhattan, promptly set to work to ballyhoo Sonja to Hollywood by way of a U.S. skating tour.

Fortnight ago Sonja arrived in Manhattan, squired by her watchful father, whose fur business seldom receives his attention, and her morose, dour-faced mother. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer offered her screen tests, two other companies put in bids. When M-G-M demanded that she skate in her pictures, thus losing her amateur status, she hesitated. Then her sound business sense got the better of her. She signed for the tour. Signed with her was 19 year-old British Jack Dunn, who finished fifth at Garmisch-Partenkirchen last month, is now her most persistent companion.

Should the solid, saucy-faced little blonde appear in cinema, most of Europe's royalty would be her devoted fans. Queen Mary gasped when she saw Sonja in 1928, deplored the fact that she herself could not figure skate. Edward VIII has paid her many a kingly compliment. In 1934 ex-Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm of Germany gave her his diamond stickpin crowned with the Hohenzollern crest. Her own sovereign, King Haakon VII of Norway, sends her a telegram or cable before every foreign appearance. And Reichsfuehrer Adolf Hitler this winter invited Sonja and her parents to his Munich abode, gave her a silver-framed picture of himself, talked all evening to her about the importance of sport to the German people.

Exactly what she hopes to do in the cinema, Sonja Henie last week made quite clear: "I want to do with skates what Fred Astaire is doing with dancing. No one has ever done it in the movies, and I want to." Tremendously impressed with Miss Henie, M-G-M frantically searched for a "suitable vehicle."

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