Word: free
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...much of a trouper to complain about that. Besides, she was free to sing old songs, which have a way of turning out to be hits these days. Kay's formula is simple: "If a tune is comfortable . . . if it feels good, I sing...
...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...
...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...
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...
Huston has no truck with theories of esthetics or questions of style; his sharp directing is intuitive. He has a coldly intelligent knowledge of how much to leave free within the frame, and the born artist's passion for the possibilities of his medium. "In a given scene," he says, "I have an idea what should happen, but I don't tell the actors. Instead I tell them to go ahead and do it. Sometimes they do it better. Sometimes they do something accidentally which is effective and true. I jump on the accident...