No one had made Norway as well known across the globe as she

SCANDINAVIAN SONJA HENIE
LEGENDS
the
Glamorous
monster
2
S c a n o r a m a f e b r u a ry 2 0 0 7
No one had made Norway as well known across the globe as she
had. In the USA, she was so famous that she needed protection
from the FBI. Sonja Henie conquered one male bastion after
the other. But fraternizing with Nazi leaders and being brutally
cold in business also made her known as a monster. Author
Bodil Stenseth reveals the great story of the Queen on Ice.
S c a n o r a m a f e b r u a ry 2 0 0 7 3
D
uring the 1936 Olympic Games, Sonja Henie had
become a political pariah. Before the free skating
program on February 15, she had raised her right
arm in an unmistakable Nazi salute. None of the other Norwegian contestants had done so and, by all accounts, their
reactions afterward were the reason she chose not to repeat the
gesture on the victory podium. But the story really began two
weeks prior to the Games, during the European Championships
in Berlin, when Henie shook Hitler’s hand as he was standing
there with his retinue on the grandstand. The press photo of the
Norwegian figure skater and the German chancellor, taken in the
winter of 1936, captured the moment for all time. A short article
mentioned Hitler’s admiration for Henie and their meeting
afterward. But that the two became friends and kept in touch, as
claimed by the American Raymond Strait and Henie’s brother,
Leif, in Queen of Ice, Queen of Shadows (1985), is just gossip. As,
indeed, is the claim that this event prompted the Norwegian
newspapers to ask “Is Sonja a Nazi?”
What is true, however, is that the photograph from the European Championships in 1936 would haunt her like a dark shadow
and nurture the myth of the icon who was also a monster. It is as
if Norwe­gians and Americans are incapable of remembering
Sonja Henie without recalling this infamous image. Yet countless other photos bear witness to the fact that virtually all of
Europe’s crowned heads and heads of state more or less stood in
line to shower praise over the Norwegian skating star. No doubt
the truth of the matter is that Henie was interested in politics,
but only if politics could lend a helping hand to her career. So, in
the winter of 1936, she sailed across the Atlantic Ocean to set up
home “over there.” In the summer of 1940, the same year she
married an American and bought a home in ritzy Beverly Hills,
Sonja Henie became a US citizen.
I
t was in the liberal market economy of Hollywood that
Henie made such a resounding success, not in the Nazified
German film studios of Babelsberg. But there were other
reasons behind her choice of the USA. There a woman
could be a vamp or a tomboy; she could be something other than
the baby machine and hausfrau to which her sex had been
re­duced in Hitler’s Germany. Last but not least, there were big
bucks to be made in American show business. Henie knew that.
Her strategy for conquering Hollywood reveals her as a shrewd
businesswoman. First she rented indoor ice rinks and gave performances of such startling flamboyance that the whole of Holly­
wood became “ice-minded.” Then, one by one, the film pro­ducers
fell into her grasp like fruits ripe for the picking. One of them was
Darryl F. Zanuck at 20th Century Fox.
“What can I offer you?” he asked.
“The leading role!” Henie replied.
“Anything, Miss Henie – apart from that.”
But Miss Henie would not give an inch. The films must rely
heavily on her dazzling displays of skating. She wasn’t prepared
to settle for a supporting role or a walk-on part, and she was
determined to negotiate until she got what she wanted. Zanuck
offered her a fee, and she demanded four times as much. They
met halfway. He was a bit slow on the uptake, she claimed in her
autobiography from 1938. She wasn’t much for shilly-shallying
and preferred quick decisions. The result was that Henie’s con­
tract cost Fox 300,000 dollars, catapulting the ex-sportswoman
The photo from the European Championships in 1936
would haunt her and nurture the myth of the “monster icon.”
4
S c a n o r a m a f e b r u a ry 2 0 0 7
previous spread : henie onstad kunst sent er. l eft page: scanpix. top: he ni e o nstad kunstsenter. scanpix. middle 2: © maurice estève/bus 2006
LEGENDS
E
legantly dressed all in white and with a smile
on her lips, Sonja Henie took her place on
the highest step of the victory podium. It
was February 15, 1936, and the Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen could have
marked the crowning glory of this young woman’s outstanding
career as a figure skater. But it wasn’t to be. She didn’t attend
the party afterward. Nor did she travel back home to Oslo. The
24-year-old – one of the first and the greatest female stars in
the sporting world, a woman the whole of Norway knew simply
as “Sonja” – would not set foot on Norwegian soil again for 18
months. She simply ran away.
“Sonja Henie says no to 500,000 check for US tour” ran the
headline to an article in the Norwegian daily Dagbladet on
February 19, 1936 – the same day as reports of the Olympic
team’s triumphal parade through Oslo filled the first page. “I’ll
never turn professional,” Henie said, referring to the check. The
sporting world of the day, which prohibited amateur athletes
from accepting money, was no stranger to financial scandals.
As Henie already had a number of them to her name, maybe
the International Skating Union was making preparations to
investigate new violations of the amateur code. But that wasn’t
the only reason the gold medalist fled.
to a position as one of Hollywood’s
best-paid film stars.
With One in a Million, the first of
a total of nine romantic comedies
for Fox, she skated her way into the
hearts of the nation. But to do so, the
bubbly, brown-eyed blonde from
Norway needed all the skills she
had learned during those years of
fiercely competitive dancing on the
ice rinks. Discipline and stamina.
Training, training and more training still. In the 1920s, the adolescent Sonja had already captured the
attention of the media. She had her
own private trainer, and every day,
with the sole exception of the summer vacation, she submitted herself
to two lengthy training sessions on the ice. It was also extremely
unusual for parents to take their daughter out of school so that
she could concentrate all her energies on an international career
as an elite athlete. Her father, the furrier Wilhelm Henie, who
was her constant companion as agent, adviser and general Mr
Fixit, did not have the best of reputations. Indeed, the Henie
family as a whole was an odd bunch, rather like Sonja herself.
She loved makeup and fashionable clothes, but there was no way
she was like other girls.
Left page: Henie outside
her and her husband Niels
Onstad’s home Granholtet
in Landøya, Norway.
Above: Henie and Clark
Gable in 1948, at one of
her annual garden parties.
Henie was a brilliant host­
ess and entertained many
celebrities during the
Hollywood years.
Left: A beautiful woman
needs a fabulous car.
Henie poses in 1936.
T
he myth of the monster icon started to evolve as soon
as she had won her first gold medals as a figure skater.
In those days, hard training and serious competition
were reserved for men. A woman determined to
en­croach upon male territory was met by a wall of prejudice. But
Henie did not give up. She performed a program of strengthsapping leaps and exercises on the ice that only men had attempted previously. It was against the laws of nature. A woman who
trained like a man, medical science claimed, lost her femininity
and maternal characteristics. In addition, she developed muscles, and “muscle molls” were regarded as ugly.
Few competitive sports were open to women at the time. Fig­
ure skating had long been the only women’s event in winter
sports. Apart from Henie, there was only a handful of female
stars in the international sporting firmament. All the more reason for Henie to perfect the art of creating the right impression:
made up like a film star and touting her elegant, short-skirted
creations, she was the image of sweet, feminine charm. But her
brutal winner’s instinct and temperamental demeanor instilled
fear into competitors, who described her as “dressed to kill.”
Henie had become independent, tough and strong-minded at
an early age. While still a young girl, she had put her father firmly
in his place and taken over the reins of her own career. Behind a
smiling, female facade, she took on the social role of a man of the
time. She shocked people with her deep voice and could swear
like a trooper. Her experiences from the world of sport made her
well equipped to cope with the rough and tumble of American
showbiz. In Hollywood, she used men as her stand-in on the ice
and made two films a year. And besides, her mother was always
in tow, somewhere in the wings.
“I was almost overwhelmed by emotion,” Henie recalls in Mitt
livs eventyr (The Fairy-Tale of My Life, 1938). The reception
Right: Henie and Onstad
in Oslo in 1961, when
they decided to donate
their art collec­tion to a
public trust bearing their
names.
Below: The famous
picture of Henie’s
shaking hands with
Adolf Hitler in the
winter of 1936. Joseph
Goebbles to the right.
W
hen Henie appeared as Santa at a Chicago
or­phanage on Christmas Eve in 1937, she made
sure a photographer was there to record the
occasion. Her new touring ice revue had just
opened, and she needed some good PR. She had devised the business concept herself: creating synergies through her films and
shows to build the Sonja Henie brand. Some of the same song
and dance numbers appear both in Happy Landing (her fourth
film for Fox) and her ice revue, and she handpicked the dancers,
musicians and technicians she needed for the tour direct from
the film set. The revues also meant that she could keep herself
in trim when she wasn’t filming. The Hollywood Ice Revue not
only transformed ice shows into a gold mine in American show
business, but it also generated plenty of extra income through
the sale of Sonja Henie products. Skates, sportswear, dolls and
pins were moneymakers she had already started peddling back
in her sporting heyday. Now, at the age of 26, she had three
ca­reers – all with skating as the common denominator. So why
did she never become a modern-day female icon? Back home in
Norway, she was so highly regarded that on December 6, 1937,
she was dubbed a Knight of the Order of St Olav. No one had
made the name of Norway as well known across the globe as she
had done, boasted the press release from the Norwegian Embassy in Washington. In the USA, she was so famous that she needed
pro­tection from the FBI. In the summer of 1939, her face
ap­peared on the cover of Time magazine. Inside, however, she
was portrayed as something of a monster.
The story of her early years as a child prodigy and the world
number one on ice was spiced with both sugar and salt. Here was
the photo of Henie and Hitler, and the revelation that auto­
graphed pictures of Hitler and Mussolini hung above her bed in
her Oslo home. She also had a reputation for being sly, grasping
and greedy. Henie was not popular in Hollywood, even though
she had made the big time there. As the feature in Time confirm­
ed, “she was not only, in sportswriter Joe Williams’ words,
‘undoubtedly the biggest individual draw sports ever produced,’
but she was also Hollywood’s third-ranking box-office star.”
Only Shirley Temple and Clark Gable earned more than she did.
The magazine estimated that, in the course of her three years on
the professional circuit, Henie had netted two million dollars.
But, at the same time, the article went on to say that the film star
was past her prime.
I
know I’m unpopular, and I realize now that I ought to have
taken a clearer stand earlier than I did,” Henie admitted
to the Norwegian journalist Jørgen Juve when he visited
her in Hollywood in April 1946. After the war, she again
demonstrated a startling lack of judgment. She was roundly crit­
icized for thinking only of herself, her ice shows and her business interests during the time Norway had been occupied,
in­stead of providing funds for the resistance movement and
using her position in the USA as an advocate for Norway’s cause.
It was her indifference during the war years that her compatriots could not accept, despite the journalist’s best efforts to ex­on­
erate her. Her own defense was that, for a long time, she had no
reliable information about the situation in Norway and that
when she finally was enlightened, she had made generous donations. Stung by the realization that she had let her country down,
she was plagued by her conscience. That’s the story as she tells
it in her updated autobiography from 1953, which also includes
photos from her visit to Little Norway, a training school for
airmen of the Free Norwegian Air Force, in Canada in the spring
of 1944.
Wins her first World
Championship and
begins to give solo
perfomances abroad.
Acts in her first film,
Seven Days for
Elizabeth, in Oslo
Sonja Henie is
born on April 8,
just six days
before the Titanic
hit the iceberg
1912
1927
1918
Begins skating
at Frogner
Stadion in Oslo.
World War I ends
6
Competes for the first
time for the World title
and the Olympics. Begins
training abroad
1924
Like so many other celebrities, Henie could survive only
by allowing herself to be destroyed as a human being.
1928
Wins her first
Norwegian
Championship
Henie’s postwar years were difficult ones. Audiences desert­ed
the movie theaters; TV entered American homes; her star was
fading; and new, dangerous competitors were challenging the
domination of her ice show. With true business acumen, how­
ever, she knew how to maintain appearances, no matter how bad
things were looking.
“Miss Henie, who is known to be as cold at a business conference as the ice she skates on, does not like to talk about the
money she makes,” wrote Newsweek in the autumn of 1948. The
following year, she married for the second time, once again to an
American society lion. But otherwise it was “business as usual,”
and she was soon touring again, now with her own portable rink.
“I like the stimulation of flesh-and-blood shows. I even like
the headaches,” she confided to Will Connolly of the San Francisco Chronicle in November 1951. He had been warned, “Henie
is likely to blow her top at the slightest provocation.” Not only
that, but she also had a reputation for slamming the door in the
face of an interviewer.
Connolly, however, found her to be “nice as pie.” For the arrival of the Henie ice circus, the San Francisco Cow Palace, usually
a rodeo venue where cattle and horses skidded about in muck and
sawdust, had been transformed into an ice-covered lake. When
one reporter quipped about Henie’s comedown – from Buckingham Palace to Cow Palace – she retorted without a moment’s
hesitation, “Yes, but there’s more money at the Cow Palace. And
I’m still the best cow you’ve ever had here!”
Then came the fateful accident. During an ice show in the Baltimore Armory on the evening of March 2, 1952, an entire section
of bleachers on the grandstand collapsed, injuring almost 300
people. Henie was on the brink of bankruptcy, but a mere four
months later she had managed to cobble together a new ice show
in the small Canadian resort of St Andrews-by-the-Sea. The following year, 1953, the show toured Europe, starting with Paris
and Berlin and culminating, to everyone’s surprise, in Oslo.
“Even today, I can’t recall my thoughts during that final halfhour countdown before the curtain went up,” she said later. But
if she had been afraid that the Norwegians would cold-shoulder
her, she couldn’t have been more wrong. They flocked to see
Henie’s ice show, not only from the whole of Oslo but from the
surrounding countryside as well. King Haakon and his family were there. The voices in the press were lyrical. Once again
Henie had been forgiven. Or so it seemed.
W
asn’t she the woman who had that awful father?”
“Wasn’t she a Nazi?” “Wasn’t she an alcoholic?”
“Wasn’t she a nymphomaniac?” The questions
I was peppered with while working on a biogra­
phy of her a few years ago made it patently clear that Sonja Henie
remains a monster icon. As if there wasn’t already enough information out there from acquaintances, close friends and rela­tives
about her turbulent and volatile private life. That’s the other
side of the coin, the reverse of the medal. Like so many other
celebrities, Henie could survive only by allowing herself to be
destroyed as a human being. But, my oh my, what an enormous
amount she achieved in her 57 short years of life! She conquered
one male bastion after the other. Even so, Henie was not feted
as a heroine by her contemporaries and is not feted today. Her
impressive career is drowned beneath a slew of gossip, drunk­
en­ness and rumors of romantic dalliances. Hardly anyone even
has a good word to say about Henie the collector and patron of
the arts, the woman she became in the final chapter of her most
extraordinary life.
Bodil Stenseth is a Norwegian historian and author living in Oslo. She has
published various books, including a family history of Edvard Munch and a cultural
history of Fridtjof Nansen. Her masterpiece on Sonja Henie, Kvinne på is, was
published in 2002. [email protected]
Wins the World title in New York.
Tours the USA and Canada, and
stars in big shows
Marries the Norwegian shipowner Niels Onstad. Together
they settle in Oslo and begin
building up an important
collection of modern art
1930
1956
Wins her first
Olympic gold medal
in St Moritz
1936
1925
h enie onstad kunstsenter
LEGENDS
awaiting her when she first dared to come home to Oslo in the
summer of 1937 was fit for a queen. “Was there really still so
much interest among ordinary people? I had let my old supporters down by running away when they had expected me to
return in 1936,” she writes. But she gives no clue to why she fled
– whether this was for fear of a scandal about money or rumors
of her Nazi sympathies.
Otherwise it was rare that Henie took the time to write. She
has left precious few private documents to give us a glimpse into
her thoughts and feelings. The little bundle of love letters that
remain reveals a sensitive, temperamental woman. Yet she did
not avoid conflicts and refused to be daunted by problems.
“Every­thing will sort itself out” was her motto. About Henie’s
life in the public gaze, on the other hand, newspapers, magazines
and press photos have no end to tell. But how much is true?
Hollywood’s publicists live by fabricating dreams, lies and halftruths – something that Henie herself excelled in. The question
is whether she had any real friends at all in the Hollywood gossip
and rumor mill, especially when you hear what these “friends”
later had to say about her.
Wins the European Championships in Berlin and
meets Adolf Hitler. Performs in Chicago, Los
Angeles and at the Madison Square Garden in
New York. Signs a five-year contract with Fox and
makes her Hollywood debut in One in a Million
S c a n o r a m a f e b r u a ry 2 0 0 7
Publishes her auto­
biography Mitt livs
eventyr (The Fairy-Tale
of My Life)
1938
S c a n o r a m a f e b r u a ry 2 0 0 7 1937–56
1958
1968
Acts in her
last film,
Hello London
Tours the USA and
Europe with big ice
shows of which she is
the star, the manager
and the owner
The Henie
Onstad
Art Centre
near Oslo
opens
1969
Dies from
leukemia
on a flight
from Paris
to Oslo on
October 11
1961
Henie and Onstad
donate their art
collection to a public
trust bearing their names
7