The short and sassy wedge hairdo that sparked a ’70s fashion revolution is still in place. Her face is freckled and round, as it was at Innsbruck, Austria, in the winter of 1976. Her outlook is as cheerful as her wide smile, certainly sunnier than it has been at other times in her life.
Today, Dorothy Hamill is owner and producer of the Ice Capades and the headline attraction of its new production, “Cinderella … Frozen in Time.”
The Ice Capades will perform in Chicago Wednesday through Sunday at the Rosemont Horizon. Hamill will portray Cinderella, and Andrew Naylor, British pairs skating champion, will play her prince.
In the 18 years after arriving meteorically on the cusp of fame with the Olympic figure-skating gold medal firmly in hand, Hamill, 37, has entered a new stage, realizing a long-postponed dream: to create her own performing company on ice.
“Rather than being an ice show, we’re a skating company,” she said recently in an interview. She, her husband, sports medicine physician Dr. Kenneth Forsythe, and corporate executive Ben Tisdale assumed control of the famed troupe in June 1993 after its emergence from Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings.
Last August, Dorothy Hamill’s Ice Capades, its new name, moved its headquarters from Hollywood to Scottsdale, Ariz. The company is now housed in offices adjoining an airplane hangar that has been turned into a training facility, complete with ice rink.
Hamill and Forsythe plan to relocate the family to Arizona from Palm Springs, Calif., in time for their daughter, Alexandra, 5, to start school.
The shifts in the ice troupe involve approach as well as locale. Hamill is creating a series of theme-based, plot-driven productions, with original musical scores, costumes and sets. “Cinderella” will be followed by “Hansel and Gretel.” It is a “new vision” for this type of entertainment, replacing the “exhibition format” and series of unconnected star turns that have been staples of professional ice revues, she said.
The takeover of Ice Capades and the new thematic approach are for the gritty, methodical Hamill the latest chapter in a life that from her Olympic days on has rarely been free of turbulence.
It began in the solitude of suburbia, the public sessions and community rinks of eastern Connecticut and New York where she honed her talent. Later came the gold medal at Innsbruck, a storybook marriage, a divorce, a new marriage and motherhood.
“I fell in love with skating on a pond in Connecticut at the ripe old age of 8,” she said, recalling the ice skates she received that Christmas. Her older sister (she also has an older brother) took ballet and piano, so young Dorothy “begged” her mother for skating lessons and was immediately signed
“My father (Pitney Bowes executive Chalmers Hamill) and I worked on my music together, and my mom (Carolyn Hamill), a pretty sharp overseer, would drive me to the skating rinks that were far away.”
From age 14, she was tutored through the end of high school. Strengthening, she went to Denver for grueling training sessions taking up seven hours a day, six days a week, for 11 months of the year. In 1974, at 17, Hamill began a string of American figure-skating titles that carried her to Olympic victory.
Even so, as she observed, “Nobody knew who I was until two weeks before the Olympics.” She referred to her appearance on the cover of Time Feb. 2, 1976.
As the competition ensued, the nearsighted girl nicknamed “Squint” started to attract the media and fans. Within weeks after her first-place figure-skating showing on Feb. 16, 1976, her hairdo-now called “the wedge”-was featured in a New York Times fashion piece, and then-First Lady Betty Ford presented to her the outstanding young woman of the year award of the National Women’s Republican Club.
“I skate for myself and not anybody else,” she told a Newsweek reporter at the time.
But that didn’t hold for the intoxicating professional world she soon encountered, with its professional skating offers and commercial possibilities. By July of 1976 she was Clairol’s new hairstyle television and print model, with her “short and sassy” look. And she was under contract to Ice Capades. In March 1978, on the second anniversary of her Olympic victory, Esquire ran an article, “The Exploitation of Dorothy Hamill,” describing her trials as “a pawn of Hollywood, Madison Avenue and television.”
That phenomenon may hit Nancy Kerrigan, this year’s Olympic silver medal skating champion, who has a reported $2 million-plus contract with Disney and can be seen in Seiko and Campbell Soup ads.
Hamill recalls that period in her life, when so many people wanted a piece of her, with some degree of pain. Publicity, in particular, brought her to tears. Even today, Hamill says she’s “still uncomfortable in large numbers,” preferring “one-on-one” encounters.
“One of the reasons I got into ice skating was because I was so shy,” Hamill says. “It was the one place where I could express myself and not have to talk to anybody.
“After the Olympics that was all gone. All of a sudden it was sink or swim. I remember the press conferences the first year on the road with Ice Capades, and being devastated up there in front of all those people. I didn’t have anything to say.”
Being Olympic champion gave her the false impression that “my life is going to be a piece of cake now. Little did I know my life was a piece of cake until that point.” Needing a rest, a break from skating, she was contractually obligated to perform with Ice Capades, model for Clairol and do a series of four network television specials. The result was a bleeding ulcer.
Still, she kept on skating, following her Ice Capades tenure with performances in John Curry’s “ice dancing” troupe and in other guest exhibition slots, as well as in various advertising ventures.
Shortly after her 1976 Olympic win, she met Dean Paul Martin, son of the actor and singer. Six years later they were married. Within two years, however, the marriage was over.
“Dean had actually helped me through all those really difficult times in the beginning-he was the one person who kept me sane. I never thought we wouldn’t be together. So the divorce was very difficult-devastating-by far the hardest thing I’ve ever had to deal with in my life. And by most standards, it was very amicable. We still loved each other-we just couldn’t live together.”
In 1987, Hamill met Forsythe at a golf tournament in Palm Springs. A week after their wedding, Martin, who was a captain in the Air National Guard as well as an actor, was killed in the crash of his fighter plane.
Since Hamill gave birth to Alexandra, motherhood has claimed much of her interest and perspective, even though she’s hard at work on the artistic aspects of her new enterprise, leaving the business side to her husband and others. She plans to perform until the end of the run of “Cinderella” later this year.
Hamill and Forsythe began developing the concept of plot-driven shows in 1990. They produced a “Nutcracker” that played in Minneapolis in 1991 and 1992 and in Chicago last year. Next, they began to shape a “Cinderella” but didn’t have the financial resources to make it happen. Then the Ice Capades, her first professional home after her Olympic triumph, asked her back after nearly 10 years.
“I thought it would be wonderful. It would give me the chance, first of all, to skate because that’s really what I love to do. Also, my husband and I thought this would give us a venue or format to show the ideas that we have.”
Aware of the trouble the company was in, she also learned that “Ice Capades is still the most recognized name in the ice business.
“It might be a little tarnished, but still, from all the marketing studies that have been done, we’ve learned that Ice Capades is known by 98 percent of the population.”
Of the Harding/Kerrigan skating incident before the Olympics, Hamill said: “It was a very unusual, isolated, unfortunate incident. I don’t think we’ll see anything like it again-at least I hope not. I sure hope it’s over. I’m sorry it overshadowed the Olympics.”
Hamill had her own version of the Kerrigan incident in Innsbruck, albeit a much less publicized one. She and her coach were walking through the Olympic Village one day when a car driven by an opposing coach, with her rival skater as a passenger, nearly ran her down. Looking back on the episode, she says, “I thought it was intentional, and my coach did, too, but we never followed up on it.”
Hamill also said she is “very saddened” by the United States Olympic Committee’s decision to allow professionals to compete and to award cash prizes to gold medalists, even if other countries have been doing that for years.
“What was so beautiful, whether it was true or not, was the idea that these fresh young faces were competing for the glory of sport and for that medal, or, in ancient times, that olive branch. That’s what the Olympic movement was. And it’s gone.”
With “Cinderella” well along on its tour, Hamill is concentrating on lining up additional sponsors for the show, beginning to plan “Hansel and Gretel”-all while performing eight times a week. Now that the winter Olympics are over, Hamill hopes to hire some of the leading skaters for her troupe.
“I’d love to hire Oksana Baiul. I think she’s the most gifted young skater I’ve seen in decades.”
As for Kerrigan, Hamill says, “we were talking to her a year ago. She’s a beautiful girl, a strong skater and her jumps were technically expert. We’d love to have her with us someday.”
With all that has gone before and the new work that energizes her now, she still hasn’t escaped the shadows. Although she won’t discuss details, she does acknowledge that she’s still entangled in a lawsuit with a former management company, and it “has taken its toll.”
Aside from that, though, she said, “I thank God every day for my health and family, because at the end of the day, when all of the lawyers have gone, that little smiling face (Alexandra) waiting when I come home is worth everything.”
