Carol Heiss (SNOW WHITE AND THE THREE STOOGES) Interview
Jim Burns
From last week's NEWSDAY, the Long Island newspaper, an interview with
Carol Heiss (SNOW WHITE AND THE THREE STOGES)...
Best, Jim Burns
______________________________
"Carol Heiss, New York's first Olympic figure skating champion, was ...
A Blue-Collar Star in a Sequin-Spangled Sport"
By John Hanc
March 13, 2002
CAROL Heiss-Jenkins remembers her glory days - even if you might not.
She recalls, in delicious, dreamy detail, the winter and spring of 1960,
when she was a princess and New York was her golden slipper. When the
face on the cover of the tabloids was hers; when she was the one in the
eye of the ticker tape storm on Broadway; when Queens held a "Carol
Heiss Day," and everybody from the mayor to Ed Sullivan was eager to get
time with her.
Then, seemingly in a New York minute, she was gone. At a time when the
city glittered with Herculean sports stars, most of whose names still
resonate with local fans - Mantle, Maris, Gifford, Huff - Heiss was a
5-foot, 2-inch, 109-pound comet who soared across the skyline but
quickly vanished from public memory.
So who was - or, more precisely, who is - Carol Heiss-Jenkins, once the
toast of the town, now yesterday's bagel? Well, the glib answer is that
Heiss was "the original Sarah Hughes." But that's unfair both to her and
to the 16-year-old from Great Neck who pulled a huge upset in winning
the gold medal in women's figure skating at last month's Winter Olympics
in Salt Lake City. In doing so, Hughes became the seventh American woman
to win gold in women's figure skating, the Winter Olympics' marquee
event. Heiss was the second, winning a gold medal in the 1960 Olympics,
also held on U.S. soil, in Squaw Valley, Calif. In addition, Heiss was
the Olympic silver medalist in 1956 and a five-time world champion.
And, although it's long forgotten, the story of how Heiss reached that
pinnacle, and what she did afterward, is inspiring. She was a
blue-collar star in a sequin-spangled sport; a young lady whose solid
Queens upbringing, tinged with tragedy, gave her maturity and stability
- qualities that seem inconsistent with the seemingly adolescent,
airy-fairy world of figure skating.
Now Carol Heiss-Jenkins, she lives in Westlake, Ohio, with her husband
of 42 years, Hayes Jenkins, himself an Olympic star (he won the 1956
gold medal in men's figure skating). She's 62 years old, with three
grown children and six grandchildren. But as she began to talk to a
reporter about her moment in the spotlight - expressing nostalgic
pleasure "to hear a New York accent" on the other end of the phone - one
could almost hear her wrapping herself in the warm, comforting
recollections of her childhood in Ozone Park.
"I have wonderful memories," she said. "Memories of playing stickball
and hopscotch and riding bikes. We used to go to Liberty Avenue to go
shopping, and Rockaway Beach in the summer. Jones Beach was a big trip.
Hempstead, where we had relatives, was the country."
Heiss lived with her parents, both German immigrants, and two younger
siblings on 105th Street in a close-knit neighborhood of what she called
"Archie Bunker type houses ...connected, with a common wall. Everybody
got together in their driveways and chitchatted. Everyone knew
everyone." Her father, Edward Heiss, worked in a bakery in Kew Gardens.
One winter when Carol was 4, her mother, Marie, took her skating on
Baisley Pond in nearby South Jamaica. When Carol expressed interest in
continuing to skate that spring, her mother took her to the Brooklyn
Figure Skating Club on Atlantic Avenue, where her talent was quickly
recognized. Former French Olympian Pierre Brunet, who was then a skating
instructor in New York, contacted Marie Heiss.
He told her that Carol would have to practice five to six hours a day,
but that she had championship potential.
Marie assented, but it wasn't an easy decision.
"My parents were never well off financially," Heiss told a reporter in
1959. "My training is quite expensive, with skates, costumes and other
incidentals. Without their help, understanding and encouragement I never
could have gotten started." Brunet's assessment soon proved correct: In
1952, at age 12, Heiss won the National Junior Championship and went on
to finish fourth in the world championships in Switzerland. She was the
youngest member of the U.S. team.
But a year later, during a practice session on the ice at the skating
club, where Heiss was preparing for the World Championships in Norway,
she collided with her sister, Nancy, whose skate severed a tendon in
Carol's left leg. At first, there was doubt she would ever skate
competitively again, but she recovered, and in 1955 placed second to
another American star, Boston's Tenley Albright, at the World
Championships in Vienna.
That same year, Carol's world was turned upside down, when her mother
was diagnosed with colon cancer. Carol was forced to become caregiver to
her younger brother and sister. Despite the additional burdens at home,
she qualified for the 1956 Olympics, where she faced off against
Albright in the finals. Writing in the old New York Herald Tribune,
Barrett McGunn described Heiss' efforts that night on the ice in Cortina
D'Ampezzo, Italy: "Carol, a pretty little blond with hair done up in a
pony tail, put on a striking performance, crowded with high leaps, spins
in the air and even dizzier spins on the ice in a vain attempt to
overtake her teammate."
Afterward, it was reported that Heiss refused to pose for photos with
Albright, the gold medal winner. Not so, she says today. "It was so
cold, I went back inside [the arena]," says Heiss-Jenkins. "They tried
to make the story about the rivalry between us. There wasn't one."
In October 1956, Heiss' mother died. She was 40. Carol was 16. "I grew
up overnight," Heiss-Jenkins says wistfully. Every morning, while her
father was off working his shift at the bakery, she cooked breakfast for
her younger siblings, got them off to school, and then took a bus and
subway into Manhattan for a morning skate at the New York Rangers'
practice rink on the fourth floor of the old Madison Square Garden. In
the afternoon, she attended the New York Professional Children's School
near Columbus Circle, before returning to the ice for more practice.
The community knew about her situation and rallied to support her: At
one point, her neighbors on 105th Street chipped in to buy her a pair of
ice skates. Brunet waived his coaching fee. It all paid off in February
1960, when Heiss, by then 20 and a student at New York University,
dazzled the world - or at least that part of the world that watched the
fragmented Olympic TV coverage of the time - with her performance in
Squaw Valley. In those days, skaters were judged first in the compulsory
"school figures" portion of the competition, which involved tracing a
series of difficult circles on the ice. Heiss displayed a graceful
precision on the ice that put her far ahead of the rest of the field and
earned her points from the press as well. "The pretty blond charmer ...
is poised, is technically perfect, [and] has practiced to a
fare-thee-well," read one glowing newspaper account. Unlike Sarah
Hughes's dramatic, come-from-behind performance in the final, long
program at Salt Lake City (which Heiss-Jenkins watched on TV and
described as "magical"), Heiss was ahead of the competition going into
the finals in 1960. "It was for me to lose," she says. "I didn't skate
the best, but I didn't fall or miss anything."
Heiss the skater was a combination of aesthete and athlete (and in that
sense, a harbinger of the type of power skater that would dominate this
event in the decades to come). That sweetness belied an underlying
toughness others associate with a New York upbringing.
"She looked the part of figure skating's Goody Two Shoes, with perfect
blond hair and perfect makeup and perfect nails," wrote Christine
Brennan in her 1996 best seller on the world of figure skating, "Inside
Edge." "But her personality was more like that of some babe who played
the horses. She spoke with a gravelly New York accent, courtesy of
Queens, she was competitive as hell and she was always trying to
outguess the judges."
Skating to a Rossini overture during her freestyle performance, Heiss
maintained her lead and won the gold. As she stepped off the ice, she
was interviewed not by some fawning skating analyst but by Harry
Reasoner, later of CBS "60 Minutes" fame. (That was the first year the
Winter Olympics was nationally televised. It was covered not by sports
announcers, but on a special half-hour addition to the CBS Evening News,
anchored by Walter Cronkite.)
NOW FAMOUS, and with a gold medal in hand, Heiss returned home, where
she was greeted with the type of reception only New York can muster. She
got the key to the city from then-Mayor Robert Wagner; she was booked on
both the "Today" show and the "Ed Sullivan Show." A day was declared in
her honor in her home borough; even a ticker tape parade down Broadway.
"It was unbelievable," she said. "People hanging out of their office
windows yelling, 'Good for you, Carol!'"
On April 30 of that year, Heiss married fellow skater Hayes Jenkins.
They moved to Akron, Ohio, where he went to work for a law firm (he
later became international counsel at Goodyear, a position from which he
retired in 1997). Carol would return to New York only a few times after
that - most recently in the mid-1980s, when her father died.
The next stop for Heiss-Jenkins during that dizzying period in her life
was Hollywood.
Seeking to capitalize on her Olympic stardom, 20th Century Fox signed
her to co-star in "Snow White and the Three Stooges." After a month of
acting lessons, she went to work opposite the trio of veteran funnymen.
Larry Fine, she says, was the clown off-camera, whereas, Moe Howard was
"serious." But, she emphasizes, "all three of them were very warm, kind
men. They all looked after me." (The third member at the time was Joe
DeRita.)
Heiss-Jenkins spent five months in Hollywood, celebrating her 21st
birthday at a party attended by the Stooges as well as stars Joseph
Cotten and Tuesday Weld.
The film - which went on to do well with young audiences at the box
office - was shot on the sound stage that originally had been
constructed for another Olympic skater, the legendary Sonja Henie, who
won three consecutive gold medals in figure skating in the 1920s and
1930s and then became a major star in such films as 1941's "Sun Valley
Serenade." But while she enjoyed the movie-making experience,
Heiss-Jenkins didn't want to follow in Henie's tracings. She discussed
it with the Three Stooges who, she says, gave her "wonderful" advice on
taxes and finances. (Imagine the Three Stooges as your financial
advisers.) "They said, 'Save the money you made from the movie, and then
go on with your life.'"
Heiss-Jenkins took their advice, but not before paying some debts to
people in her life: She gave her father money and paid her coach,
Brunet, for the three years of free skating lessons he had given her
since her mother's death.
Although Fox had another movie project for her, Heiss-Jenkins was set to
go back to her new husband and their home in Ohio. But not before she
had to endure one more shock in her young life: In 1961, most of the
U.S. national skating team - a total of 34 athletes, coaches, judges and
family members - were killed in a plane crash en route to the World
Championships in Prague. Many of the victims were her friends. A passage
in Brennan's book describes Carol screaming hysterically, after getting
a call in Los Angeles in the middle of the night about the tragedy. "It
just made you sick," she says today.
Heiss-Jenkins' telegenic looks kept her in the public eye for a while in
the 1960s. She worked for ABC as the skating analyst for the 1964 and
'68 Winter Games. In the 1964 Games, she boldly predicted on-air that a
then-unknown 15-year-old American had a gold medal in her future.
"I said, 'This is your next Olympic champion,'" she recalls. "I remember
the producer saying, 'We don't predict these things live.'" But she was
right. In 1968, that same skater, Peggy Fleming, came back to the
Olympics and won the gold. She and Heiss-Jenkins became and remain close
friends. In fact, ever since Fleming married a man named Jenkins,
unrelated to Carol's husband, they've taken to calling each other "sis."
Heiss-Jenkins spent the 1970s, she says, "being a mom." But when her two
daughters and one son went off to college, she returned to the sport.
She became a coach - an outstanding one, tutoring some top-level skaters
(including Tonia Kwiatkowski, Jenni Menno and Tim Goebel, who went on to
win a bronze medal in Salt Lake City) at the Winterhurst Rink in
Lakewood, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. These days, the girl from Queens,
whose strong family and neighborhood roots helped her stay balanced on
the ice and off, has nothing but encouragement for little girls from the
Midwest who shuffle tentatively out onto the ice with dreams of ...
well, probably Sarah Hughes ... in their heads. She encourages their
fantasies. "If you can't dream at 8, 9 or 10 years old, when can you
dream?" she says.
What most of these girls want is what Carol Heiss-Jenkins has: A gold
medal. They'll be lucky to get that - but perhaps just as lucky to get
the rest of what she has, as well.
"You choose the life you want to have," said the one-time New York hero,
who has no regrets about turning away from the spotlight, a decision she
says she made when her fame was at its brightest. "I kept thinking, when
I'm 40, what will make me happy?" she said. "I decided it was being
married, having children and having a home. And that's what I did."
Copyright © 2002, Newsday, Inc.