The Glittering Rise and Fall of Sonja Henie, Ice Skating’s Original Queen | Vanity Fair
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Left, world-champion figure skater Sonja Henie, circa 1938. Right, Henie, the defending gold medalist, performing her skating routine at the 1936 Winter Olympics, in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany., Left, from Photofest; right, from © Bettmann/Corbis.
There are now three generations that have never heard of her. Say her name to anyone under 40, and they won’t know that she was the first teen phenom of modern times—that in 1928, months before Shirley Temple was even born, this dimpled imp of 15 was already a child star on the world’s stage. She was called “the Nasturtium of the North,” “the Ice Queen of Norway,” “the White Swan,” and, less flatteringly, “Little Miss Moneybags.” Her surname rhymes with “penny,” so perhaps it’s no surprise that she counted every last one. When she died, in 1969, her holdings were estimated at more than $47 million. Indeed, the word that really fit this bundle of cutting-edge charisma would not be coined until the 1960s, when Andy Warhol packed star wattage and have-it-all hunger into three syllables: “superstar.” Sonja Henie was the first.
What did she do? Sonja Henie was a figure skater. And while there were famous figure skaters before her—Jackson Haines, known as the “American skating prince,” and men such as Axel Paulsen and Ulrich Salchow, for whom jumps were named—none caught the attention of the public, no, the adoration, as Henie did. Beginning in 1927, at the age of 14, she won 10 world championships in a row. More amazing still, during those 10 years, she won three successive gold medals in the Winter Olympics of 1928, 1932, and 1936. Without missing a beat, Henie stepped off the gold-medal podium and into the Twentieth Century-Fox studio system, where she proved to be a monster at the box office, reportedly earning more than $500,000 within a year. Simultaneous with her film career, Henie launched an ice extravaganza that would crisscross the country. Her sold-out ice shows worked as advertising for her movies. Or, perhaps it was the other way around: the movies brought the masses to the shows. Whichever way you look at it, the synergy, like Henie, was irresistible. She put figure skating on the map and got everyone heading for the ice.
The second child of Wilhelm and Selma Henie was born in a snowstorm. “Winter had given way to spring,” Sonja wrote in a 1940 memoir, Wings on My Feet. “Then came the worst blizzard Oslo ever suffered—and me.” The date was April 8, 1912, and although the Henies had a handsome son, four-year-old Leif, the new daughter had a special lock on their hearts, especially Wilhelm’s. Whatever Sonja wanted, she eventually got—a family dynamic that would last a lifetime. The first thing she remembers wanting was to skate.
The Henies were in a position to satisfy Sonja’s every desire. Wilhelm, who came from old money generated by a brush factory and a fur company, was a smart businessman who grew the family fortune. He was also a world-class athlete who’d been a competitive speed skater, and won the track cycling world championship in 1894. Sonja inherited Wilhelm’s need for speed—“winter drunk” is how she described the sensation of sledding, skiing, and skating into icy winds. She also shared her father’s no-nonsense approach to getting what you want in life fast.
Sonja’s mother, Selma, was not keen on sports or speed. A ship captain’s daughter with her own inheritance, she was as introverted as Wilhelm was extroverted. But the couple balanced each other. And both were happy to build home life around their tiny star, who remembers being on skis by age four, impressing everyone with her coordination and grace. By five she was studying ballet with a former teacher of the renowned Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova. Classical dance was Sonja’s first love by default, because the one thing her parents would not give her outright was ice skates; they thought she was too young. Sonja spent her earliest years begging, yearning, for skates.
Leif wrote that Sonja snitched a pair of his old clamp-on blades at age five and within months surprised everyone by winning a children’s skating competition. Sonja’s memory is that her parents gave her the clamp-ons at age six, that Leif taught her how to fall on the ice (“the way a length of rope drops”), and that she learned figures from a local skater, who then asked Wilhelm to enter her, aged seven, in that first competition. Whichever time line is correct, the essential truths are these: once on the ice, Sonja didn’t want to come off, and once having won, her winning became the family grail.
Sonja’s new schedule included three hours’ practice in the morning, two in the afternoon, and a diet strictly monitored and rather pagan—all her life, Sonja would swear by raw eggs and rare steaks. Schooling was out and the best skating teachers were in: Oscar Holte, Martin Stixrud, and later, for a steep price, the full-time services of Howard Nicholson. Because balletic line was a key facet in Sonja’s developing Jackson Haines-like skating style, she spent time in London studying classical dance with the Russian ballerina Tamara Karsavina.
“I wanted more than anything else,” Sonja wrote, “to make my free-skating program a blend of dancing and figure skating.”
“You have to have an image of yourself,” says Peggy Fleming, the 1968 Olympic gold medalist. “She had style and artistry and athleticism, but most important, I think, at the beginning and back in that era, she had guts. She had the guts to follow her thoughts—to follow the image that she had of herself.”
The creation of Sonja’s “image” was a family project. In her first Olympics—1924, Chamonix, aged 11—she wore a baggy outfit, the black skate boots of the day, and finished last in a field of eight competitors. Three years later, in 1927, when she won her first world title, her uniquely choreographed free skate was delivered in a svelte costume of white velvet, its bell skirt hemmed to just above the knee. The audience was shocked . . . and delighted. Sonja’s liberation from those old-crow skating skirts showed off spins and spirals to better advantage, and allowed her to perform tricks—the single axel, for instance—that had previously belonged to male skaters.
And one more thing. As Michael Kirby, the Canadian champion who was Sonja’s skating partner in the late 1940s, would write, “She had what was thought to be incredible gall for wearing pure white skates. This, she told the press, was because it reminded her of the beautiful snow in her homeland of Norway.”
Here was a huge visual shift—from masculine to feminine, from prose to poetry. Just as the ballerina’s pointe shoes were pink, suddenly the female ice skater’s boots were white, redolent of fairy and folk tales, of youthful purity and Nordic power. Sonja had single-handedly pulled figure skating into the realm of metaphor—and where there is metaphor, there can also be art. In “The Pavlova of the Ice,” film footage shot in 1928 ( and available on YouTube ), she is skating outdoors, her slow-motion leaps and spins set against snow-dusted mountains that are nothing short of Wagnerian. One can see why chief among her legion of fans was Adolf Hitler.
Sonja’s 10 years of domination date from her 1927 world title. When the Henies weren’t moving Sonja’s training from one winter wonderland to another, she was skating exhibitions in the great cities of the globe. This extensive exhibition skating was meant to give her poise under any pressure. And it did. She won gold in St. Moritz, 1928, gold in Lake Placid, 1932, and—despite Cecilia Colledge snapping at her heels—gold in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, 1936. Sonja set an Olympic record that has been nearly impossible to match.
Which is not to say there weren’t controversies during her years of competition. Skating in Berlin, ahead of the 1936 Winter Olympics, Sonja was told that Hitler and his entourage had been seated. She skated into the rink at full speed, did her sharp little skid stop in front of the Führer, raised her arm and declared, “Heil Hitler.” The crowd went mad. The next day, her compatriots in Scandinavia were distraught, the newspapers asking, “Is Sonja a Nazi?” Her impulsive act was a stain on her white velvet. At the Olympics, a chastened Sonja did not salute, though word that she and her parents had lunched with Hitler at his retreat in the mountains didn’t help matters. According to her brother’s writings, Sonja’s response to the uproar was “I don’t even know what a Nazi is.”
Henie shaking hands with Adolf Hitler, among her legion of fans, following her third Olympic victory at the 1936 Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Paternkirchen, Germany., From AP Images.
“I don’t think Sonja Henie was a political person in any way, shape, or form,” says Dick Button, the winner of two Olympic gold medals in a row, 1948 and 1952. “She was an opportunist . . . I don’t think she could have cared less who Hitler was, except for whatever power he had and what it would do for her career.”
“I want to do with skates what Fred Astaire is doing with dancing,” Sonja told The New York Times on March 18, 1936, about a month after the closing ceremonies of the Olympics. Sonja’s amateur status—and when she might lose it—had been a hot topic for years, almost as if it were her virginity. Now the question was, what’s next? Sonja had observed that there were no skaters in Hollywood, which meant there was a vacuum to be filled. She decided she was the one to fill it—and not as a specialty act.
“Sonja was visionary in that she saw what the audience for figure skating could be,” says Edward Z. Epstein, an author and playwright who worked with Universal Pictures for many years and was a competitive skater in his teens. “She refused to do a number in someone else’s movie.”
For Sonja, the year 1936 was like winning the lottery. Having announced her retirement from competition, she received calls from producers and film studios. The most important of these calls would be the one that came from Arthur Wirtz, a brilliant Chicago entrepreneur and real-estate mogul who was easily as enterprising as Sonja. The owner of the Chicago Blackhawks, the Chicago Bulls, and the Chicago Stadium, he saw Sonja as a way to fill stadiums around the country. He signed her to a touring contract and within weeks tested the waters by presenting “Sonja Henie Night” at Madison Square Garden—a smashing success. He asked her to put together her dream show to launch the following year.
“The plan of that pioneer show,” Sonja wrote in her memoir, “was new in that I was to be the prima ballerina, so to speak, of a two-hour show, with a professional cast supporting me.”
The one call Sonja hadn’t gotten was from her film studio of choice: Darryl F. Zanuck’s Twentieth Century-Fox. “The studios had their little niches,” Epstein explains. “Sonja fit into Fox. As she said, Zanuck had a reputation for looking for cutting-edge people. He would take a chance on something that wasn’t conventional.”
To get Zanuck’s attention, Sonja and her father, with the help of Wirtz, brought an ice show to Hollywood’s Polar Palace ice rink. With his usual chutzpah, Wilhelm went to see William Randolph Hearst. Leif would write that Wilhelm said he’d give $5,000 to the charity of Hearst’s choice if the actress Marion Davies, Hearst’s mistress, would sponsor Sonja’s shows. The deal was struck, and those two performances, in May of 1936, were glittering events attended by the biggest stars in town, including Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable, and Myrna Loy.
Zanuck did not attend the first show, but he was there for the second and soon summoned the Henies. He offered supporting-role status, and Sonja insisted she would accept nothing less than title roles. She didn’t give an inch, and Zanuck caved. Sonja signed a five-year contract stipulating $125,000 per picture, one picture a year, its filming to be done during the summer so she could tour with her ice show in the winter. Her first picture, One in a Million, was a hit that premiered in December 1936 at New York’s Roxy Theatre, where Sonja arrived on the arm of the beauteous Fox actor Tyrone Power, thought to be the love of her life.
Henie in her first Hollywood film, One in a Million, 1936., © 20th Century Fox/courtesy of Everett Collection.
It was pretty savvy, Sonja’s focus on RKO’s Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers franchise as the model for what she might do in pictures. She saw that as a dimpled soubrette she’d have to do some form of musical comedy. She also knew that Hollywood wasn’t stocked with leading men who could skate. What Fox copied were RKO’s black-and-white Art Deco sets, the nimble pace, the stock characters, the silly plots, and the big production numbers that got more inventive—black ice, special effects, dream sequences—with every movie. Sonja had innate musicality, which gave her skating numbers a feeling of well-being. She had a lovely, Astaire-like élan on the ice. And she had a signature move of pure joy: her Tinker Bell toe-tip runs, something no one else has done to such powerful effect.
“It’s very unusual to run on toe picks,” says Aja Zanova Steindler, the world-champion figure skater who defected from Czechoslovakia in 1950, at the age of 18. “But she just up and took off like a bird.”
Sonja may not have been a Ziegfeld beauty, and as an actress, well, she was one of the few female stars in Hollywood not tested for the role of Scarlett O’Hara. It didn’t matter. Smiling, spinning, she was giving the world exactly what it wanted. Her movies, so many of them nestled in frosty-paned Mitteleuropa mountain resorts, were an alternate universe made of powdered sugar—an antidote to Europe’s ominous rumbling toward war. “She kept Fox alive,” says Connie Wald, the widow of producer Jerry Wald. “She was so big,” says Epstein, “at one point MGM produced a movie, with Joan Crawford for God’s sake, called Ice Follies of 1939. It was ridiculous. Joan couldn’t even walk on ice.”
And just as movies like 1948’s The Red Shoes inspired a generation of girls to become ballerinas, so Sonja’s movies—along with her ice shows—launched a generation of figure skaters.
“She was my idol,” says “Boots” Beyer, an adagio skater in the team Narena & Norris. “I saw Sonja’s first movie, One in a Million, and said to myself, That’s what I want to do. I never dreamed I’d end my career with her.”
Into the first flush of her celluloid-and-ice-show stardom came the greatest loss of Sonja’s life, the death of her father in May 1937. Michael Kirby remembers in his book, Figure Skating to Fancy Skating, Sonja once telling him of that first competition she won, at age seven, how her father “was not clapping or yelling, but he had the biggest smile I have ever seen.” Kirby believed that for the rest of her life, “She was yearning to be something special to one man, the way she had been for her father.”
And yet, the death of Wilhelm worked a change in Sonja. “The Nasturtium of the North” became tough and acquisitive about money, according to her brother. “The Ice Queen of Norway” took over the show. At Fox, the production people deferred to her unerring judgment when shooting the skating numbers, while performing in her Hollywood Ice Revue, she rode herd over every aspect of production—music, costumes, chorus, box office, ancillary products (“Sonja Henie” sweaters, ski outfits, skates). She kept a cold eye on her cash, a critical eye on her ice show, and a perfectionist’s eye on her public persona—all of which required unflagging energy and attention to detail. It was a kind of control at odds with catching and keeping a man.
When it came to sex, “the White Swan” was reportedly aggressive, progressive—though only after Wilhelm died. Leif would later paint his sister as promiscuous, but as one male skater of the era says, she was “a lusty, healthy, happy woman.” In the skating world, it was common knowledge that Sonja’s skating partners often partnered her in bed. “I think she slept with them all,” says Susan Strong Davis, a former skater in Sonja’s show. “She was always in bed with somebody.” Milton Sperling, a screenwriter at Fox, put it succinctly: “She really loved to fuck.” Still, when Sonja did fall in love, she dropped like a length of rope. Those who knew her say that Tyrone Power was the one.
Henie with actor and love-interest Tyrone Power in a scene from the film *Thin Ice,*1937., © 20th Century Fox/courtesy of Getty Images.
Power, it turned out, was one of the few things Sonja wanted that she didn’t get: in 1939 he married the French actress Annabella. Sonja went on to not one but two Social Register marriages: the first, in 1940, to Dan Topping, an heir to millions and part owner of the New York Yankees (his brother Bob was married to Lana Turner), and the second, in 1949, to Winthrop Gardiner Jr., who had inherited Gardiners Island. Neither man worked, both took advantage of Sonja’s generosity, according to her brother, and both marriages failed.
Husbands aside, for “Little Miss Moneybags,” the 1940s were glitter and gold. Sonja wore Van Cleef & Arpels jewelry and Henie furs, traveled with masses of luggage, and stayed at the best hotels. At her gorgeous Holmby Hills house, at 243 Delfern Drive, and elsewhere around the city, she became famous for throwing the most extravagant parties in Hollywood, entering one of them on the back of a small elephant. And she built an elegant estate just outside of Oslo.
Sonja made a lot of money from her pictures (11 in all), but this was merely a fraction of the multi-millions she was making with the shows, which continued to pull in sold-out crowds long after her draw at the movies declined. Rolling annually into Madison Square Garden, “Sonja Henie’s Hollywood Ice Revue” rocked the house. “She had a way of doing several strokes,” says Don Watson, a young virtuoso she hired in 1952, who went on to an illustrious career in skating. “Then she’d flip her head up high, and with those large eyes and big smile, she acknowledged the balcony, their existence up there. And they loved her for it.”
It was a well-oiled enterprise Sonja had going, and she couldn’t have asked for a better business partner than Arthur Wirtz. He was a man of his word who honored a handshake. He not only kept the bookings and travel running smoothly—on its own train, no less, the Sonja Henie Special—but also helped Sonja to invest in real estate, restaurants, even Black & White scotch, according to Dick Button. He liked Sonja, admired her, and though he knew himself to be shrewd, he once said, “Sonja is shrewder.”
But Sonja would part ways with Wirtz, prodded on by her second husband, Winnie Gardiner, who thought she should be getting a bigger percentage from Wirtz, even though she was already getting half. “I told her at the time it was an extraordinarily bad business decision,” says Tom King, who was then the publicity director for all Wirtz concerns, and who later married Barbara Ann Scott, the Olympic gold medalist in 1948. Perhaps Sonja was trying to find Wilhelm in Winnie, trying to locate a strong man in the lightweight she’d married. It’s also true she was peeved because Wirtz, according to King, “wanted to have backup people. He always wanted to improve the show. And she wasn’t going to take any second billing.” Sonja wouldn’t let other blonds in the show, never mind another star.
She was refusing to recognize what those around her saw clearly: that while actresses can go on forever, athletes cannot. Never a drinker, she started hitting the scotch which, according to her brother, accentuated the black-and-white sides of her personality. Sidney Smith, who directed Sonja’s live television specials in the 1950s and also her last movie, the documentary Hello, London, remembers something the Czech cinematographer Otto Heller had observed: “He said, ‘Don’t you see? She’s one side good, one side money.’”
The fact is, Sonja could be extremely generous and often was, though quietly. She was very giving with Leif’s three sons, for a time, and with Michael Kirby’s children. And yet, Sonja risked further enmity from Norway when she chose not to donate funds to the Norwegian underground during World War II. She fought incessantly with Leif over real estate and family trusts. And over money, she ungratefully broke with Wirtz. The karmic backlash began.
For the 1951–52 season, Sonja had to build a whole new show from scratch—the Sonja Henie Ice Revue. “A lot of skaters wouldn’t skate with her, because she was the whole show,” recalls Boots Beyer, a headliner in the new show. “She did eight numbers. I mean, you’d have to have a constitution of iron to be so strong.” Furthermore, what Winnie hadn’t known when he sewed the seeds of discontent was that bookings were done two years in advance, and Wirtz’s revue, now starring Barbara Ann Scott, was already scheduled in all the stadiums Sonja had played through the years. It meant that Sonja’s new show had to go into second-rate spaces, with long jumps from stop to stop. Sonja never found a company manager who could handle the job the way Wirtz’s people had. And in March of 1952, when a section of bleachers collapsed on her opening night in Baltimore because the construction crew hired to build them was still working minutes before the show, it was the beginning of a downward spiral. No one was killed, and Sonja handled the disaster with aplomb, super-lawyer Jerry Geisler at her side, but the season was a financial disaster. Sonja had to borrow from, yes, Wirtz to meet her payroll. “Arthur Wirtz gave me the check, and I gave it to Sonja,” says King. “That’s a fact.”
Henie receiving the gold medal at the Winter Olympic Games at Lake Placid, New York, 1932., From AP Images.
Things dwindled to the point where Sonja and a much-reduced company found themselves performing in New Brunswick, Canada, in a Quonset hut that held 600. “It was so cold,” says Don Watson, “she was doing her hula number with one of those Norwegian sweaters on.”
Nonetheless, Sonja had one last hurrah ahead of her. Morris Chalfen, the owner of Holiday on Ice, had gotten word of the Quonset-hut gig. He, too, had always admired Sonja. He offered her a European tour—Paris, London, Berlin . . . and Oslo. Sonja didn’t want to go to Oslo. She feared the wrath of those who couldn’t forget her “Heil Hitler,” or who hadn’t forgiven her for not helping, with all her millions, to fund the Resistance. Chalfen told her he’d test the waters. She swept through Europe during the summer of 1953, beautifully presented by Chalfen, and prepared to face her fears in Oslo—33 performances from August 21 to September 20.
“I was there and every performance was sold out,” says Don Watson. “Oslo, only one announcement was made, and that was for the one person they knew. It was for Sonja. In her first entrance in the show, the boys, 24 in gold tails and top hats, they went down on one knee and made a sort of passageway. And she made her entrance, with the announcement ‘And now . . . Sonja.’ She came out with this huge train behind her, white ermine. Well, the audience gasped. It was like, My God, she’s here, she’s alive. Beautiful figure, costume, lighting. Some of the Norwegians had to come back twice. The majority of the audience stood. Seven thousand people standing.”
In 1955, things went south in South America. The audiences didn’t understand ice shows or skating or Sonja. Now 43, she was deeply unhappy with her diminishing skill.
“It was over,” says Aja Zanova Steindler. “The hardest thing is to quit at the top. You want to stay—this is your life. A marvelous life. How do you leave? It’s a terrible thing. And Sonja was going through that. … She was very sad. And drinking.”
Sonja retired in May 1956, and in June she married the Norwegian shipowner Niels Onstad, a childhood friend of the family whom she had secretly been seeing. Finally! A strong man with his own money.
The couple traveled the world and socialized. A Sonja Henie party was still a big deal—sparkling with stars like Joan Crawford, Cyd Charisse, Cesar Romero, Cary Grant, Liberace. And Sonja still loved speed. When she had her hair done by a new svengali of the scissors named Jon Peters (later to be a major Hollywood producer), the two hit it off, and for fun, with her in the back, they’d go flying through the Santa Monica mountains on his motorcycle. Believing in Peters, she lent him $100,000 toward his first salon.
Sonja’s biggest project of the 60s was the one she shared with her husband. Together, she and Onstad built a superb collection of modern art—Picasso, Matisse, Bonnard, Miró, Villon, Rouault. More than 100 paintings! After precise and careful planning, they built a modernist architectural gem in which to house the collection in Oslo. The Henie-Onstad Art Center opened with royal fanfare on August 23, 1968. A month later, Sonja got a cold she couldn’t shake.
Onstad took her to several doctors, unwilling to accept the diagnosis—leukemia—which he decided to keep from her. Don Watson, a friend until her death, says Sonja was told it was anemia, and she was treated with blood transfusions. (Jon Peters thinks she knew the truth: “She knew every dime, she knew every jewel, she knew every wig, she knew every painting. If she had leukemia, she knew it.”) Except for big dips in energy, followed by transfusions, life went on as usual. Sonja even began to prepare a skating show for television; she was rehearsing to “Lara’s Theme,” music from the film sensation Doctor Zhivago, Don Watson recalls. The couple spent the summer of 1969 in Europe, and in Paris, the night before their planned return to California, Sonja tired. She and Onstad flew instead to Oslo for a quick transfusion. On that flight, Sonja closed her eyes for a nap and never woke up. It was October 12, 1969, and she was 57.
In 1985, about 16 years after Sonja’s death, a biography co-written by Raymond Strait and Leif Henie (who died in 1984) was published: Queen of Ice, Queen of Shadows: The Unsuspected Life of Sonja Henie. The book is richly detailed, brimming with background information, and loaded with fascinating insights from Sonja’s colleagues and friends. It is also merciless, sharing every last foible and flaw. More than one reviewer compared the book to the Joan Crawford takedown Mommie Dearest. Obviously the sibling of a superstar is going to have grievances, but Sonja’s peers in the skating world, all that Vanity Fair spoke to, found the book “unfair.”
Dick Button: “Siblings fall out. She was very good to everybody.”
Boots Beyer: “I will never say anything bad about Sonja. She was wonderful to us. I know she was tough on some people—and probably for good reason.”
Susan Strong Davis: “Oh my God, she was the original bitch. The chorus, we were just the peasants. But she was fantastic. And she knew it. I really can’t say enough about her, bitch that she was.”
Jon Peters: “At the end of the day, Sonja Henie was this little girl in this big game—and people like to vilify others.”
Don Watson: “She was happy rehearsing. She was happy performing. She loved fine restaurants. She enjoyed champagne, and she enjoyed parties . . . She’d walk into the arena, backstage, rehearsal—I mean, when Sonja arrived there was excitement. Something was going to happen.”
And now . . . Sonja.