Jonas had Sonja conclude this part of the programme with a move of her own invention, ‘the strip’, in which she glided backwards, balancing on the toe of one skate and leaving a glorious groove in the ice, to simulate the way in which she had cut her way through the ice and the firmament, like a diamond through glass, to suddenly find herself in another world, the one place where she had always dreamed of being: Hollywood.
The Hollywood sequence concentrated on the first of the eleven films she had made in the USA, One in a Million. They reconstructed a number of meetings between Sonja and Darryl F. Zanuck, the redoubtable head of 20th Century Fox, and made much of the fact that she secured herself a sensational five-year contract and a stupendous amount of money for each film, even though she had no experience in front of the camera. They also showed a clip from One in a Million, the story of a country girl who becomes Olympic champion, then turns professional and scores an overwhelming success at Madison Square Gardens — in other words, pretty much identical to Sonja’s own story. The film culminated in a lavish set piece, a forerunner to her ice shows, in which Sonja twirled and leaped in a skating ballet featuring hundreds of girls in extravagant costumes, as if in some glamorous opera on ice.
In also illustrating how this film was received, with an acclaim that fulfilled all expectations, Jonas aimed to make two points. Firstly, that Sonja Henie was the greatest Norwegian film star of all time. In short, she conquered that most impregnable of all realms: Hollywood. And secondly — and it is surprising how often this is forgotten — Sonja Henie was a brilliant figure skater, a true virtuoso, three times Olympic champion. And when she won such a victory — even in a silly film in which she spoke dreadful English and only had two facial expressions to choose from, with a script which was nothing but a mishmash of romantic drivel, sets composed of fake ice and artificial snow and the Swiss Alps as backdrop — it was thanks solely to her charm, her personality and her skating skills, the fact that she sparkled, did things on skates which the audience could not have imagined possible and which made them cheer in admiration. Even a few clips from this second-rate — and antiquated — film was enough to show viewers why Sonja Henie deserved to be called one of the western world’s first superstars. There was no lack of response either — interestingly enough in a day and age when television channels strove so hard to encourage viewers to take an active part in programmes: NRK, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, was inundated with letters and faxes, the switchboard jammed by calls from people wanting to compliment Jonas Wergeland on how well he had comported himself on skates in his own regular slot and demanding that NRK show all of Sonja Henie’s films immediately, which they duly did, to the great delight and satisfaction of the nation.
The transition from Hollywood to the programme’s closing sequence was a masterstroke: from thunderous applause straight into a soundless pirouette, a vertiginous whirl, and then, clearer and clearer, the solitary sound of the blade on the ice, Sonja alone again on the tarn on a winter’s night in Norway, in a magical — some said, demonic — atmosphere. Jonas lingered particularly on the pirouettes now, the corkscrew turns, imparting a sense of how mind-reeling they were, ecstatic almost, as if executed by a seductive winter dryad or by a dervish attempting to throw himself into a trance. And for Sonja, figure skating had as much to do with mystery as it did with the dream of winning, of conquering the world. Jonas ran the turns in slow motion, very, very slowly, such that the shots of the solitary, pirouetting woman had as mesmerizing an effect as any big production number from Hollywood with its meticulously choreographed repetitions, duplications and symmetrical formations.
And then, again: Sonja Henie, zooming along, alone on the ice, alone with her skates and yet happy here, on the ice, with her dancing, her art. Jonas Wergeland took issue, indirectly, with the myth that said that all her life Sonja Henie was a lonely, unhappy child who never found real purpose. The way Jonas saw it, and presented it to the people of Norway, she did find happiness, here, in her pirouettes, in the total control, in the innate musicality of her movements, in the jumps, in speeding across the ice, when she tilted her body forwards or back — and anyone who has tried this, as in fact very many Norwegians have, has some idea of what an exhilarating experience this can be. During those seconds, Sonja became something that no one else was, or understood: when she used the toe picks to stop dead in the middle of a pirouette, then run forwards on her toes, throw herself into another jump, into flying spins and parallel spins, three corkscrew spins with an Arabian cartwheel. Again the camera captured the breathtaking speed, with close-ups of the skate blade, the tracks crisscrossing, steel suddenly scraping the ice and sending up a flurry of ice. A small camera had also been fixed to one of her skates, thus giving viewers something of the same thrill as that derived from watching a film shot from the front of a racing car, or a car on a roller-coaster. ‘My stomach lurched just watching her,’ people said.
Finally, Jonas got the camera to pull up slowly, pull high up to reveal that Sonja was dancing — almost sketching it out herself, the loops, the design, with her skating — on a huge painting by Joan Miró, projected onto the ice by means of trick photography. It was, aptly enough, a masterpiece by Miró entitled Women in the Night, one of the first paintings which Sonja bought for herself after meeting Niels Onstad — for this too was one of her gifts, a talent akin to the art of drawing lines on ice: she knew a good picture when she saw it.
What was Jonas Wergeland saying with this? He was saying that Sonja Henie’s exercises on the ice, what she did, was just as childlike, just as lovely, just as mischievous and bold as Joan Miró’s paintings. And I’m sure you have already observed, Professor, how this closing scene puts one in mind of Jonas Wergeland’s experience in the forest as a little boy, the sight of a living brooch in the ground. It might not be going too far to regard the whole of the programme on Sonja Henie as a silvery tracery of ‘S’s and figures of eight on an enormous brooch of ice — that, at any rate, is how one critic summed it up: ‘A real gem.’ And if you were to ask anyone what they remember from that programme, this is the first thing they would mention, this shot of Sonja on the Miró painting; it has become a kind of national ornament, imprinted on the consciousness of the viewers.
Even those viewers — a fair number of older people — who had been negative to start with were delighted with Jonas Wergeland’s slant on Sonja Henie’s character. They realized what her unique talent had been when she was at her peak: to skate like no one else in the world. Sonja Henie elevated figure skating to an art form. She paired the essence of all things Norwegian, winter sport, with a global spirit. As a human being, and a Norwegian at that, Sonja Henie truly was one in a million.
Napoleon
Are you tired, Professor? Just one more story, then we’ll call it a night.
At the end of the eighties, after the last programme in the Thinking Big series had been screened, the plaudits rained down on Jonas Wergeland from all quarters. Advertisers felt that he had helped to colour the nation’s image of itself in that rare way in which only a troubadour can do with his simple yet unforgettable ballads. Teachers testified to the positive effect the series had had in terms of filling in the gaps in young people’s knowledge of history. Another outcome, more interesting within our own context, was all the interviews which Jonas Wergeland gave at that time, and in which he repeatedly used the same expression in describing his first years in television: ‘A life of luxury.’ Time and again too, he compared the chance he was given to make his earliest programmes with that of a trainee chef suddenly being given the run of a huge kitchen complete with every mod-con and all the world’s freshest raw ingredients, where his imagination alone set the limits for what he could serve up. The descriptions of Jonas Wergeland’s early days in television were positively aromatic, people said.