At 19, she was on the cover of Time.
Tens of thousands of her fellow Canadians turned out for her triumphant homecoming after she won the gold medal in figure skating at the 1948 Winter Olympics. They closed the schools in Ottawa, her hometown, so children could cheer her. Government offices emptied during the parade in her honor.
Everyone wanted to see Barbara Ann Scott.
She was Canada`s first and, to this day, only female skater to bring home the Olympic gold.
Even today, more than 40 years later, her star shines in Canada as brightly as ever. She continues to get fan mail, requests for photos, pleas for interviews and invitations to public events.
”She was a great national hero,” says the veteran Toronto Star sports columnist Jim Hunt. ”And she still is.” For a time, her likeness was on display at Madame Tussaud`s Wax Museum in London.
In earning her Olympic gold medal, Scott followed the Norwegian figure skater Sonja Henie into an elite group of skaters that later would include Katarina Witt, Dorothy Hamill, Peggy Fleming and Tenley Albright.
”She`s a legend. If she walks down the street in Ottawa or Toronto or Montreal, she gets stopped for autographs,” says Bob Moir, a producer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. who has followed Scott`s career since the 1948 Games. Recently, he notes, when she returned to Canada to attend a TV advertisers` luncheon, she received a standing ovation from the audience of 400. ”There`s been nobody since her day able to eclipse her fame,” says Moir.
Ironically, this internationally celebrated woman today lives in a city where relatively few people recognize her name, let alone her face.
Scott is a Chicagoan, known to her friends here as Barbara Ann Scott King. Since 1955 she has lived quietly, and, she says, contentedly, on the Gold Coast with her husband, Thomas V. King, a successful real estate developer, and their cats.
It`s as if Joe DiMaggio, having completed his career with the New York Yankees, had packed his bags and retired to Montreal.
”This is a very complete life, and I`m very happy this way,” says Scott King, 62, sitting in the living room of her elegant townhouse, nursing a cold and sipping coffee.
On this crisp winter afternoon, she is impeccably dressed in a blue suede suit, pearls and matching shoes, her blonde hair perfectly combed, her makeup flawless. At 5 feet 3 inches, weighing less than 100 pounds, and with a ramrod-straight back, she still appears every inch an athlete.
To remain in condition, she swims in her basement pool and rides daily, driving to suburban Morton Grove to groom her horse and pony.
She busies herself with her husband, her friends, her horses and the International Academies of Merchandising and Fashion Design, schools she and King established in Tampa, Chicago, Montreal and Toronto to offer degrees in fashion merchandising, design and interior design.
Scott King retired from skating in 1955 (she was a professional by that time), soon after she married King. She hasn`t skated competitively since, though she continues to serve as a judge at skating championships in the U.S. and Canada. Since her marriage, her appetite for competition has been satisfied by showing horses at events across the country, winning hundreds of ribbons.
”It`s like being two different people,” she says of her lives: one the celebrated Canadian, the other the low-profile Chicagoan.
”I enjoy being Tom`s wife,” she says. ”I`m no women`s libber. I`m happy to be the Indian and let him be the chief.” Indeed, every day she brings her husband breakfast in bed and drives him to one of his offices in the North Loop. The two have no children, although King does from a previous marriage.
Modest and unassuming
For the most part they lead a private life, going to the theater and movies, and entertaining frequently (she is planning their annual Super Bowl party). They are regulars on the charity-party circuit.
When there`s time, she says, she likes to read fiction, especially mysteries. And she avoids shopping in stores: ”I`d much rather order from catalogs.”
”I`m old-fashioned,” she says. ”By the time I drive him to the office and take the cleaning and straighten the house and do the grocery shopping and spend four hours back and forth to the stable-the days go by very quickly.
”But when I go back to Canada it`s like going back to a former world, like I`m another person.”
”She`s so modest,” says her husband. ”The fame is meaningless to her.” King knows a thing or two about fame: He played professional basketball in the 1940s for the Detroit Falcons of the Basketball Association of America and later worked for Arthur Wirtz as public relations director at the Chicago Stadium.
That was how the two met in 1951, when Scott came to Chicago to headline Wirtz`s ”Hollywood Ice Revue.” King also was an executive at the Merchandise Mart from 1956 to 1984, the last 14 years as general manager.
He proudly shows off his wife`s trophies and medals, the engraved silver trays, the huge gold and silver keys to Canadian cities, the framed magazine covers-all tucked into stairwells or displayed in an upstairs den. He jokes that to this day he remains ”Mr. Scott” when the two travel to Canada.
”She`s so unassuming,” says close friend Heather Bilandic, wife of Michael Bilandic, the former mayor of Chicago and current Illinois Supreme Court Justice. ”She`s the kind of person who will do anything for you if you`re her friend.”
Heather Bilandic remembers the time Scott King quietly went to a hospital day after day to sit by the side of a friend whose husband was desperately ill. When Bilandic`s son was a 2nd grader, she recalls, the boy invited Scott King to talk to his class about her skating career, and she obliged, arriving with all kinds of pictures and posters and regaling the children with stories of her years in the spotlight.
”The kids were thrilled,” Heather Bilandic says. ”When asked, Barbara Ann will talk about her skating. But she won`t bring it up.”
Loved by all
What a time it was, though. Movie stars would kill for such adulation. And consider that this, the late 1940s, was an era before most people had TV sets. Many Canadians never saw Barbara Ann Scott skate.
It didn`t matter. For much of this century, figure skating has been enormously popular in Canada, second in popularity only to ice hockey. And Barbara Ann Scott epitomized everything Canadians loved about the sport: the beauty, the technical skill, the wholesome athleticism.
”She was one of those people at the right place at the right time with the right ability,” says the CBC`s Moir. ”She`s a really nice person on top of it all.”
No wonder everyone loved her. A flap over a car she was given in 1947, in the wake of winning the women`s figure skating world championship, erupted into a national controversy, with nearly everyone in Canada appearing to take Barbara Ann Scott`s side. After Scott`s victory (a feat she would repeat the following year), the City of Ottawa presented her with a canary-yellow Buick convertible. But she was forced to give it back; Avery Brundage, then-president of the International Olympic Committee, declared that by
accepting the car, Scott had relinquished her amateur standing.
”I didn`t lose my amateur status, because I gave the car back right away,” she says today. ”Mr. Brundage was doing his job and was quite right.”
Still, many Canadians were furious. The nation`s newspapers were filled with indignant columns and editorials.
”When she had to give that car back, it was a really big deal,” recalls the Toronto Star`s Hunt. ”That car is still the thing she`s remembered most for.”
Unlike other international sports heroes, such as Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson, whose images suffer once they find themselves touched by controversy, King emerged from the incident with her reputation intact, perhaps even enhanced.
The next year, 1948, she went on to even greater glory in St. Moritz, Switzerland, winning the first Winter Olympic Games to be held since 1936.
”When Barbara Ann skates, she seems to float on ice,” Time said in its cover story, published even before she had won the gold medal. She was declared the likely heir to the world figure-skating crown worn in the 1930s by Norway`s Henie, a three-time Olympic champion.
Everyone in the sport recognized her exceptional talent, recalls Dick Button, the American who won the men`s Olympic gold the same year Scott King won the women`s. ”It wasn`t only that she was better than everyone else,” he says. ”It`s that, overall, she was wonderful.
”She was the most complete, precise, secure and charming skater I`ve ever seen,” says Button, who is now a TV producer responsible for bringing the Nutrasweet World Professional Skating Championships to television, and is an ABC-TV skating commentator.
`On top of it all`
Button and Scott King are close friends. As children, they trained together summers in Lake Placid, N.Y.
”She was like a pink powderpuff with a rod of iron down the middle,”
Button says. ”She worked very hard, and it was like she was on top of it all.”
Her looks certainly didn`t hurt. Time noted her ”peaches-&-cream complexion, saucer-size blue eyes and rosebud mouth. . . . She looks, in fact, like a doll which is to be looked at but not touched.”
In February 1952, she appeared on the cover of Life, striking the pose of a glamorous fashion model. ”My husband set it up,” she says, laughing.
”That was publicity for the ice show.”
From the beginning, she seemed to take her fame in stride. ”Canada is such a small country, and I was their little girl,” she says. ”Everybody was so depressed after the war. I gave Canada something to be be happy about, and they certainly were wonderful to me.”
Before the adulation and the medals came years of hard work, often at wind-swept rinks where temperatures sometimes dropped to 20 below zero. Routinely, she recalls, her feet would freeze, but even that didn`t deter her. ”She was the last of the great skaters who came in when skating was the way it should be: outdoors,” says Button. ”To see her skate in the snow was enchanting.”
She started skating seriously at age 6 in Ottawa, encouraged by her father, a Canadian military officer so badly wounded during World War I that he could no longer participate in the sports he loved. He transferred his enthusiasm for athletics to his daughter.
By the time Barbara Ann was 11, she was Canada`s junior champion. She was training eight hours a day, out on the rink by 7 a.m., even on the most bitterly cold mornings. There was no time for a normal education; she had a private tutor and would do schoolwork in the evenings.
”I was always with grownups,” she says. ”When I was with kids my own age, I felt like a fish out of water.”
When the `48 Olympics came, she was ready. Soon after her gold-medal performance, she turned pro, traveling in ice shows across Canada and the U.S., and in London. That wasn`t nearly as much fun as she had expected, she says. ”All of a sudden, there I was in New York, wearing plunging necklines and feather headresses, doing five shows a day.”
When she married, she says, it wasn`t a difficult decision to hang up her skates. ”I just decided that part of my life was over.”
The sport changes
Now she laments what`s happening to her sport, what she sees as the commercialization, the emphasis on show-biz glitz. ”It doesn`t seem like a sport people go into anymore for fun and exercise.”
There`s so much emphasis today on complex jumps, Scott King says, that the skaters look nervous and uptight rather than as if they`re enjoying themselves.
She also notes with sadness the de-emphasis of compulsory ”school figures,” those precise tracings of loops and circles and brackets at which Scott King always excelled. To compete internationally, she had to master some 70 different figures. They counted in her day for 60 percent of a skater`s score; today they`ve been eliminated from world competitions.
”The public isn`t interested,” says Button. ”And they`re expensive because of the time and the judging.” They don`t make very good TV either, he adds.
But, says Scott King, ”It teaches you discipline and control. It would be like a pianist not practicing her exercises. She wouldn`t play very well.” What dismays Scott King most is that skaters now perceive winning as an avenue to wealth. In her day, she says, no competitor would have employed a business manager.
”A lot of them are doing it now because of the potential money,” she says. ”But there is only one winter, and it`s sad that if you don`t win, you`re nothing.
”It`s an honor just to be on a national team, to represent your country. Just because you don`t win doesn`t mean you`re not good.”
As for Barbara Ann Scott King, she counts herself lucky to have lived the life she`s had.
And she makes one thing very clear: ”I don`t live in the past. Your life goes on.”
