Word: sonja
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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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...
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...
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...
...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...
...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...