Ice Queen

(See Cover)

In the Swiss Alps this week, on the slopes of the highest (6,000 feet) major valley in Europe, the snow lay five feet deep. It was dry and powdery on top, packed solid beneath, ideal for skiing. Above towered the two mountain giants, Languard and Julier, up to their waists in dark green firs. On a terrace, its streets white-carpeted with snow, lay the famed resort town of St. Moritz, a chockablock jumble of low, square houses and great, ugly, expensive hotels. Villagers, doing their day's marketing, dodged visiting skiers in the streets. Crowded little St. Moritz (pop. 2,500) had set up 4,000 extra beds, which would not be nearly enough. For St. Moritz this week is the scene of the fifth winter Olympics, the first since 1936.

At the swank Palace Hotel, untitled rich and titled rich & poor had their choice of more varieties of scotch than could be had in all Paris. Celebrity-hunters had their pick of ex-King Peter and Alexandra of Yugoslavia, any number of princes and dukes, Britain's famed Jockey Gordon Richards, or Paulette Goddard.

Sport fans had their choice of 19 events, in which contestants from 31 nations would risk their necks and their reputations on skates, ski jumps and the perilous Cresta Run toboggan course. The experts were betting on Switzerland to win its first winter Olympics (Norway has won three, the U.S. one). More people would see the ice hockey and figure skating than anything else: a guest could watch them from his hotel balcony, highball in hand.

At 10 o'clock Friday morning, 2,000 competitors will assemble before the gates of the Kulm Hotel, march three by three to the stadium and there in chorus repeat the Olympic oath: "We swear we come to the Olympic games . . . in a chivalrous spirit for the honor of our countries and the glory of sport."

The same oath had often before been honored more in the breach than in the observance, and there were some in St. Moritz who thought the 1948 Olympic games would be the last. It was not simply the old sneering gossip about which amateur got paid how much, or the sometimes unequal struggle between sportsmanship and competitive spirit, intensified by national rivalries. There was a deeper and grimmer game afoot: for some "iron cur tain" countries, like Rumania and Yugoslavia, competition had become almost a matter of life & death; some athletes were nervous about going back home if they didn't perform up to snuff. Soviet Russia sent no competitors, only a vigilante squad of ten observers.

If this were indeed to be the last Olympics, the world would lose something as old as the 8th Century B.C.* and as ever-new and refreshing as the ambitions of the 19-year-old Canadian girl who was the cynosure of St. Moritz this week.

Ottawa to Oslo. Canada's Barbara Ann Scott was the girl everybody's eyes were on. Like a wind-whipped prairie fire, her fame has swept eastward from Ottawa to London and Oslo; a few sparks were even observed in Hollywood. In Prague, her photograph was printed in local newspapers 17 times in three days--Rita Hayworth, in Prague recently, got her picture in the paper only eight times. Back home in Ottawa, where a whole Dominion gurgles appreciatively every time Barbara Ann winks an eye, the wheels of government once stopped while the Canadian House of Commons adopted a resolution saying that it approved everything about her.

Barbara Ann, with a peaches-&-cream complexion, saucer-size blue eyes and rosebud mouth, is certainly pretty enough. Her light brown hair (golden now that she bleaches it) falls pageboy style on her shoulders. She weighs a trim, girlish 107 Ibs. neither as full-bosomed as a Hollywood starlet nor as wide-hipped as most skaters. She looks, in fact, like a doll which is to be looked at but not touched. But Barbara Ann Scott is no fragile mammet. She is the women's figure-skating champion of the world.

By next week, if Canada's 12,500,000 prayers are answered, Barbara Ann will wear the crown of an Olympic champion. No Canadian from Vancouver to Halifax doubted that she would, but it was comforting nevertheless to hear one neutral European judge say: "Scott shows up the others when she merely skates on one foot in a straight line." The last skater to do that was Norway's brassy Sonja Henie, who in 1936 danced off the Olympic ice into a $1,000,000 Hollywood contract.

Threes & Eights. When Barbara Ann skates, she seems to float on ice. She turns effortlessly and unexpectedly--only clever performers can manage that--and never has to push to get up momentum for an eight or a loop-change-loop. She always seems to be enjoying herself, and as a result people always enjoy watching her. She has equilibrium, charm and style. A U.S. skating judge, who likes to define the quality of a skater in one word ("push" is his word for Sonja), puzzled over Barbara Ann a while, then described her quality as "femininity."

She is also neat and precise, and neat and precise things please her. ("I know exactly where I put my nail file," she says, "and I like to find it exactly where I left it.") This is why she prefers, as few skaters do, the required school figures to free skating. The school figures, 41 types in all, are the tedious, exacting, incredibly difficult fundamentals of figure skating (like a vocabulary test that must be passed before being allowed to make a speech). They count 60% in championship competition.

Barbara Ann takes a perfectionist's delight in tracing threes (bunnies' ears, she calls them) and double-three-change-double-threes on the ice. Even ice--when it's smooth--delights her. "I suppose most people think of ice as cold and artificial. But to me it's warm. It isn't artificial, really--it's alive."

In a sport that attracts natural show-offs, Barbara Ann is full of inhibitions. She has a whole wardrobe of plain & fancy costumes, but only one gold-spangled one, which she refers to as her "white horse" outfit. When she wears it, she says, "I feel as if I ought to be riding in a circus."

Smiles & Spins. Like Sonja Henie, Barbara Ann does not jump higher or skate more daringly than her rivals. She just does it better. In Prague two weeks ago, with her European championship at stake, whatever she tried--from difficult double Salchows to simple open Choctaws--was carefully and beautifully done. She ended her free skating with a spin, her arms at her sides, whirling faster, then slower, then faster again, then stopping suddenly. (She is the world's best spinner.) Curtsying to the judges--the youngest 50, the oldest 71--she skated quickly to the boards.

The other girls were panting as they left the ice. The smile that had been fixed on their faces disappeared as quickly as a chorus girl's. Barbara Ann was not winded, nor was her smile switched off. It vanished slowly and was replaced by a tiny frown as she strained to read on the Scoreboard what marks the judges gave her. All seven marked her between five (very good) and six (faultless). Then, instead of hurrying off to her dressing room, she sat and applauded those who performed after her. All her life, she had been taught to be a little lady.

When the final results went up, she had beaten four national champions (from England, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Hungary)--practically everybody she has to beat for the Olympic crown except Boston's golden-haired Gretchen Merrill, U.S. champion, who did not compete at Prague.

Barbara Ann is generally liked by the other girl skaters, but their liking carries a tinge of reserve. After all, she is the champion, and as such the object of envy. They suspect, too, that underlying her good nature, ready smile and ladylike disposition is a certain basic quality of toughness that every real champion has to have--even when the champion is a little lady. Whenever anyone tries to compare her, the first two words that come out of his mouth are "Sonja Henie."

Fire v. Femininity. Right now (with Barbara Ann 19, Sonja crowding 35), Sonja would be no match for Barbara Ann. If both champions were 19, the contest would be a thriller of fire v. femininity--and the betting about even money. Sonja's school figures were near perfection. Her skate seemed to cut deeper into the ice than Barbara Ann's, due probably to her weight: Sonja was a butterball in her Olympic days.* Unlike Barbara Ann, who averages eight hours a day practicing, Sonja never practiced more than three. "I'd go simply nuts," she once said. Barbara Ann's school figures, skated with less effort and more tidiness, are as perfect as anybody's ever were.

In the free skating, Sonja's showmanship was incomparable. She held crowds, kings and skating judges spellbound. Watching Henie skate did queer things to people: ex-Crown Prince Wilhelm of Germany once beckoned her to his box and gave her a diamond stickpin he was wearing; Adolf Hitler presented her with a huge picture of himself in a silver frame, flatteringly inscribed; Benito Mussolini simply said: "I wish I could skate like her." Besides skill and showmanship, Sonja possessed a talent for covering up the few technical mistakes she made.

For example, it required a slow-motion camera to discover that Sonja sometimes did not cleanly complete her Axel Paulsens (a revolution-and-a-half, taking off from one foot and landing on the other): she disguised the last part of the turn so expertly that the people never saw the difference. Sonja put on a tremendous show. While she performed, her businesslike father made sure everybody knew it by bustling about handing out autographed, postcard-size pictures of the champion. So far, Barbara Ann is a mile behind Sonja in showmanship.

Both Sonja and Barbara Ann subscribe to the theory that it is wiser to try a single jump and be sure of making it than to try a double jump and miss. As a result, their "free" programs--which are, in effect, ballet solos on ice--are less daring than some skaters'. But there the likeness ends. Barbara Ann usually manages to say the right thing (or at least the polite thing). When something irked Sonja, and many things did, she was more than apt to blurt: "It stinks."

Daddy's Girl. How do you become the best figure skater in the world? In Barbara Ann's case, a casualty on the battlefield of St. Julien in April 1915 (13 years before she was born) had something to do with it. Lieut. Clyde Scott of Canada's "Iron 2nd" Battalion had been hit by shrapnel and machine-gun fire in both hips, one knee and one eye, and left for dead. By sheerest luck, a German search party kicked at a pile of bodies, causing Lieut. Scott, who was on top, to turn .over and groan. He was taken to a German hospital. Two years later, after his parents had given him up for dead (memorial services for him had been held at Perth, Ont.), he came back, married a divorcee and settled down in the starchy provincialism of Canada's capital.

Barbara Ann's daddy, with his broken body (the army rated him 75% invalid) wanted his only daughter to do everything he couldn't, and to do it well. He called her "Tinker"--a nickname nobody else ever used--and she thought her daddy was something pretty special. When Clyde Scott hobbled around the nine-hole cow-pasture golf course at Kingsmere in the summers, "Tinker" caddied for him.

The Scotts fitted easily into Ottawa society--the society, basically, of a small town (despite its 154,951 population) that depends less on money than on knowing people and being of respectable family. The Scotts had little money, but they gave their daughter everything they could afford. She went to the Ottawa Normal Model School, got plenty of dolls, and a pair of ice skates when she was six. Until Barbara Ann was ten, her mother made all her clothes. She was the kind of little girl who was nev.er mussed or wrinkled. She kept dogs, cats, birds, rabbits and white mice, and played the piano. The boy who used to be a neighbor still proudly displays a scar over his left eye where Barbara Ann hit him with a shovel: it is one of the few unladylike acts ever recorded against her; and the boy is now convinced that he must have been in the wrong.

The Determined Girl. She was already devoted to ice skating by the time she was nine, and gave up going to school. For 2 1/2 hours each morning she was tutored by Miss Seeley, who later also tutored the grandchildren of Princess Alice and the Governor General. As a French student, Barbara Ann was embarrassed by "masculine" and "feminine" for genders, and substituted "boy" and "girl."

She wa's a natural athlete. Her daddy taught her how to swim in two weeks. She climbed trees like a monkey and hung by her knees from the branches. She rode horseback and played golf. Skating was her own idea. From her father, who despite his invalid body worked 18 to 20 hours a day in the Department of National Defense, she learned tenacity. In the barnlike Minto Club, not far from her house, she practiced her first figures;--learning to do eights, brackets and counters ; to skate on the inside or outside edge of the runners (never on the flat of the blade); to avoid the "wobbles" which leave wavering traces.

Big kids used to tear-skate through the figures she was laboriously tracing. Sometimes they knocked her down. But she always got up and went carefully on. She never went home until she finished the required number of hours of practice, and when she did, it was often with chafed knees and dried tearstains on her cheeks. At eight, as the Spirit of the New Year in the Minto Follies, the Ottawa Journal called her "the darling of the show." At ten she became the youngest Canadian girl ever to win the gold medal,* and met Sonja Henie, who took Barbara out to tea and gave her an autographed picture of herself in a gold frame.

The Dedicated Girl. Sonja, ten times world's champion, was not very popular around Ottawa, after a visit in 1932 (as an amateur) when she demanded, but did not get, $2,000 expense money for herself, papa, mama, trainer, maid, dog and parrot. She was never Barbara Ann's ideal, but she represented her objective. At eleven, Barbara Ann took one big step toward that objective--by becoming junior champion of Canada. Two years later, in September 1941, Clyde Scott collapsed while watching a bridge game, and died. It almost broke his daughter's heart.

From being just a determined little girl, she became a dedicated big girl. At 15, she was national champion. Somebody at the Minto Club figured out that Barbara Ann skated eleven miles a day on school figures alone. She and her mother had moved into a cheerful, chintzy apartment on the top floor of an old house on Metcalfe Street, trying to make ends meet on Clyde Scott's pension of about $3,000 a year. The big problem was to get money to pay skating instructors, buy skates (at $60 a pair for boots and $30 for blades) and pay expenses to places like Seattle, St. Paul and Vancouver for competitions. Some Ottawa businessmen, old friends of Clyde Scott, came to the rescue. Last winter they raised almost $10,000 to send Barbara Ann to Stockholm, where she became world's champion.

Suddenly she was a national heroine, along with Princess Elizabeth and the Dionne quintuplets. Her mother took the name plate off the front door: the callers were kind, but there were apt to be too many of them.

When she is home, Barbara Ann still gets up at 7, makes her own bed, helps wash the breakfast dishes, spends the day skating and is usually in bed by 8:30. She no longer has much time for boys, dances and movies (her favorites: anything with Ingrid Bergman or Walter Pidgeon in it) or flying, which she learned to do because her father, although no pilot, liked flying.

The Ambassadress. Barbara' Ann's conversation, like the chatter of most girls her age, is full of expressions like "super" and "fiendish" and "divine"--and she giggles. For all that, she knows how to handle herself, and without prompting. Prime Minister Mackenzie King calls her Canada's "ambassadress." On the big circuit in Europe, she has learned to take one sip of champagne ("so people won't think I'm stuffy") and leave the rest, hoping no one will be offended. "Give me a good old American milk shake any time," she says.

Last year, after winning the world title, she got a tip, as her train was neafing Ottawa, that the townspeople were going to give her a new car. Quickly she hurried into the women's toilet, wrote out and memorized a short speech. Sure enough, when she stepped off the train, the Governor General's Foot Guards' Band struck up O Canada!, there were cheers from M.P.s and the kids who had been let out of school, and she was given a canary-colored Buick convertible. Her speech, which sounded spontaneous, went over big. Two months later, when she had to give the Buick back (for fear it would harm her amateur standing), her tears were unrehearsed.

The Crossroads. Like every champion, Barbara Ann has reached a point where people are trying to knock her crown off. There is also a polite tug-of-war being waged over her. On one side is Sheldon Galbraith, her coach, an earthy, likable American ex-G.I. who thinks that, since her basic skating has reached its peak, she should now improve her showmanship. On the other side is her mother.

"Skating mamas" are a strange breed, like the mothers of violin prodigies and child movie stars. They watch over their daughters like circling hawks, and fuss around them like anxious hens. This week, as usual, they will sit around hotel lobbies in St. Moritz, discussing other skating mothers who are out of earshot--and their daughters. Mrs. Scott is understandably possessive and protective of her daughter, but does her best to avoid the infighting among "skating mamas." She wants Barbara Ann to stay as she is: winning titles by trying harder and being more precise than her rivals. But it is Barbara Ann herself who seems to have most to say about what she is going to do --and she is gradually being converted to Coach Galbraith's accent on showmanship.

If Barbara Ann wins the Olympic title, will she turn pro? It is a good bet that she will. Hollywood is making eyes at her, so is at least one ice show, and 101 manufacturers of soaps and skin lotions would soon be waving $1,000 bills at her. Says Barbara Ann: "I wish people would stop saying I am going to turn professional all the time. There is no world competition in professional skating--and I like competition." This was obviously the right thing to say at this point, said the cynics at St. Moritz.

Barbara Ann ignores them. Says she: "You know, what I would like would be to take a degree in domestic science. Some time I want to marry and have children, and I believe that should be organized economically, tidily and exactly, like Olympic skating, or anything else."

* With a lapse of 1,500 years between the last of the ancient Greek games and the first of the moden ones in Athens in 1896. In the first Olympics, women were barred not only as contestants but as spectators; in reprisal, they started the Heraea games in which they ran barefoot, with right shoulder and breast bare. They wouldn't let the men look.

* In Madison Square Garden last week, as the hula-dancing queen of her own Hollywood Ice Revue, La Henie had fined down to 107.

* By passing the last of eight basic school figure tests.

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