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In the free skating, Sonja's showmanship was incomparable. She held crowds, kings and skating judges spellbound. Watching Henie skate did queer things to people: ex-Crown Prince Wilhelm of Germany once beckoned her to his box and gave her a diamond stickpin he was wearing; Adolf Hitler presented her with a huge picture of himself in a silver frame, flatteringly inscribed; Benito Mussolini simply said: "I wish I could skate like her." Besides skill and showmanship, Sonja possessed a talent for covering up the few technical mistakes she made.
For example, it required a slow-motion camera to discover that Sonja sometimes did not cleanly complete her Axel Paulsens (a revolution-and-a-half, taking off from one foot and landing on the other): she disguised the last part of the turn so expertly that the people never saw the difference. Sonja put on a tremendous show. While she performed, her businesslike father made sure everybody knew it by bustling about handing out autographed, postcard-size pictures of the champion. So far, Barbara Ann is a mile behind Sonja in showmanship.
Both Sonja and Barbara Ann subscribe to the theory that it is wiser to try a single jump and be sure of making it than to try a double jump and miss. As a result, their "free" programs—which are, in effect, ballet solos on ice—are less daring than some skaters'. But there the likeness ends. Barbara Ann usually manages to say the right thing (or at least the polite thing). When something irked Sonja, and many things did, she was more than apt to blurt: "It stinks."
Daddy's Girl. How do you become the best figure skater in the world? In Barbara Ann's case, a casualty on the battlefield of St. Julien in April 1915 (13 years before she was born) had something to do with it. Lieut. Clyde Scott of Canada's "Iron 2nd" Battalion had been hit by shrapnel and machine-gun fire in both hips, one knee and one eye, and left for dead. By sheerest luck, a German search party kicked at a pile of bodies, causing Lieut. Scott, who was on top, to turn .over and groan. He was taken to a German hospital. Two years later, after his parents had given him up for dead (memorial services for him had been held at Perth, Ont.), he came back, married a divorcee and settled down in the starchy provincialism of Canada's capital.
Barbara Ann's daddy, with his broken body (the army rated him 75% invalid) wanted his only daughter to do everything he couldn't, and to do it well. He called her "Tinker"—a nickname nobody else ever used—and she thought her daddy was something pretty special. When Clyde Scott hobbled around the nine-hole cow-pasture golf course at Kingsmere in the summers, "Tinker" caddied for him.