Kim Maree Penn is looking for a few good women.
She’s not recruiting for the military. She’s recruiting women for a job she believes is uniquely suited to the abilities and talents of the “weaker sex.”
She wants to hire female bodyguards.
She’s not talking about well-muscled Amazons with a fistful of martial-arts black belts, either. She’s talking about ordinary-looking women who can think on their feet and who have good interpersonal skills.
“The brain is the first weapon,” explained Penn, relaxing in her airy apartment in the Peak, a quiet, upscale neighborhood in Hong Kong. “You’ve got a lot of guards who are very big, but that’s all they are. They stand in the gym all day and pump weights, but as far as knowing how to deal with people and avoiding a situation and not aggravating it, they don’t have a clue.”
Penn should know. As director of Signal 8 Security, a Hong Kong-based personal-security firm, the 26-year-old Australian has provided protection to a host of visiting VIPs, including Sylvester Stallone, Don Johnson, Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown and Peter Ustinov. She believes that her slender, 5-foot-9-inch frame and her cheery, girl-next-door demeanor give her a distinct advantage over the stereotypical male bodyguard, with his imposing bulk and intimidating bluster.
“As a woman, I can blend more easily into the client’s entourage. I can pass for a secretary or a hotel employee,” Penn said. This helps to avoid drawing attention to the VIP, who then has a better chance to slip by unnoticed, she explained.
“Also I’m less threatening, especially to men,” she added. “In a man-to-man confrontation, you get ego involved. But by staying calm and patient and explaining, `I’m sorry, I’m just doing my job,’ I can talk my way out of most confrontations.”
By relying on brains rather than brawn, Penn is typical of a new breed of bodyguards, said Jim Shortt, director general of the International Bodyguards Association, a professional group based in Kenley, England, founded in 1957.
Shortt, who travels around the world setting up bodyguard-training and licensing programs, said that small but increasing numbers of these new-style bodyguards are women. He believes the numbers will grow when more women realize it is a profession more dependent on foresight and professional training than on muscle power and martial-arts skills.
The association’s training programs cover hand-to-hand combat and firearms (with women held to the same standards as men, Shortt emphasized), but those are a relatively small part of the instruction. Most important is training in what Shortt calls “proactive” strategies–legwork and brainwork designed to detect potential problems and prevent them from happening.
For instance, before a VIP arrives, Penn will visit the stops on the VIP’s itinerary–hotels, clubs, stadiums and restaurants–to check out the entrances and exits, looking for problem areas, such as a narrow entranceway that might become overcrowded at a critical point.
Penn also stays in touch with the managers and security staff in Hong Kong’s exclusive hotels and nightspots. Then, if the VIP announces that he or she wants to go out for dinner, Penn will have an idea of the kinds of security problems she might face at a particular restaurant and anticipate the number of staff members she will need to assign to it.
Penn began studying martial arts at age 11, becoming the female winner of the 1987 World Junior Karate Championship in Tokyo. She now holds three martial-arts black belts, but she insisted she has never had to use her martial-arts training on the job. Instead, she uses a variety of strategies to head off trouble before it starts.
For example, during the 1994 opening of Planet Hollywood in Hong Kong, Penn took personal charge of the 12-year-old son of actor Don Johnson and actress Melanie Griffith, who were then undergoing a very public and painful divorce. Her job was to keep at bay reporters who might ask the child upsetting questions. Penn chatted and drank Cokes with the boy, all the while keeping a sharp eye out for anyone making a beeline toward him.
Hong Kong’s nightlife is familiar territory for Penn, who, after winning the karate championship, abandoned her studies in biomedical science to pursue a career in kung fu movies. Although she soon chalked up featured roles in 11 films, including Jackie Chan’s “Supercop,” there were often long stretches between shootings. During one such lull, Penn took a job as a bouncer at a Hong Kong nightclub.
Penn quickly tired of the late hours and dealing with drunken customers, but she learned valuable skills. “It takes patience. It takes being nice. You’ll get the odd guy who wants to grab your arm and take you to the dance floor. You learn all sorts of breaks and holds, usually just a flick of the wrist and then, `Come on, leave me alone.’ “
She also met other bouncers with security or martial-arts experience, including her current business partner, Bruce McLaren. Six years ago, they formed Sensei Security, recently renamed Signal 8. The firm handles celebrity promotional tours, concerts and international tennis events.
In her movies, Penn said, she often portrays glamorous female bodyguards who turn out to be the secret archvillain. “So I have to fight the police and the whole entourage,” she said, grinning. “These films aren’t big on plot, but the action is great.”
But the image of the “glamor girl” bodyguard is one that Shortt’s group is trying to dispel. According to Shortt, in Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union, as well as in China, entrepreneurs are starting security firms that hawk the services of good-looking young women with martial-arts training. “Unfortunately, the emphasis is primarily on the martial arts,” Shortt said. “Essentially the women are just bullet-catchers.”
Bullet-catchers, he explained, are poorly trained bodyguards who believe their job is to “take a bullet for the client.” It’s an attitude, Shortt emphasized, that can endanger the bodyguard and the client.
Shortt cited a recent case in which a client and his two bodyguards were machine-gunned by two men as they sat in a restaurant in St. Petersburg. “My question is, why were the two bodyguards sitting at the table? Why wasn’t one of them out in the street, so that when he saw two guys coming with guns, he could radio the guard inside to get the VIP out through the kitchen?
“Once women understand that these are the kinds of skills they need to be a bodyguard–that they don’t need to (undergo training in) weight-lifting or muscle-building–then I think we’ll see more women in the profession,” Shortt said.
Penn hopes so. Only 3 of 70 guards working for her agency are women, and she would like to hire more. Penn recently advertised in a local newspaper, but she received no responses from women. “It’s a shame,” she said.
“The No. 1 trait I look for is intelligence,” Penn said. “And common sense. If they’ve had some sort of martial arts, it’s a bonus, but if they haven’t, I’m not so fussed about it because I can teach them.”
Has she ever used her martial arts in self-defense? Just once, she said. She was out with her family on her father’s birthday when they encountered a man beating up a woman. Her father tried to intervene, and both the man and the woman jumped him. Penn rushed to her father’s defense.
“I had my nose broken, unfortunately,” she recalled somberly. “I didn’t see the other three mates of the guy coming.” How did it end? Her jaw tightened and a trace of steel glinted in her eyes. “We sort of managed to sit them down.”
