James Erskine (2018)
I, Tonya wasn’t the only skating film to open in Britain during this Winter Olympics month, though James Erskine’s The Ice King is showing in rather fewer cinemas. This documentary about the life of John Curry (1949-94) is based on Bill Jones’s biography of the skater, Alone: The Triumph and Tragedy of John Curry. It’s unusual for this viewer to go to a documentary feeling well informed about its subject but I read Jones’s book shortly after it was published in 2014 and I did so out of an abiding interest in Curry. His sporting success in 1976 – he won the men’s figure skating at the European, Olympic and World Championships in the space of what a BBC programme of the time called John Curry’s Fifty Golden Days – was a big deal for me. (The dates of the three victories – 15 January, 11 February, 4 March – are embedded in memory.) The next year, I went down from York to London to see both of Curry’s ‘Theatre of Skating’ shows, at the Cambridge Theatre and the Palladium.
John Curry tends to be defined as a performer who straddled the worlds of sporting and artistic achievement but Erskine’s film, which includes plenty of footage of interviews with Curry, quickly confirms that he wanted chiefly to realise his potential as a dancer and skating’s potential as an art form. Growing up in a middle-class Birmingham family (the youngest of three sons), he was keen to have ballet lessons. His father refused but agreed instead to John’s going, with his mother, for lessons at a local ice rink: skating had at least a patina of athletic respectability. Describing his feelings before the free skate at the Innsbruck Winter Olympics, Curry makes clear that he saw those five minutes as his chance in a lifetime to attain sporting celebrity enough to pursue his greater ambition for a theatre of skating. Olympic gold was a means to an end.
In July 1984, Curry and his company performed at the New York Met. The significance of appearing there, the big names in the first-night audience and the admiring reviews in the New York press combined to make this the zenith of his professional success. The one-night-only opportunity of Innsbruck finds an odd echo in Erskine’s film in an anecdote from Elva Corrie, the Curry company’s executive director. Once the first performance at the Met was successfully over, Curry asked Corrie, ‘Can I stop now?’ Although he may have meant simply that he wanted to give up performing and devote himself entirely to choreographing other skaters, Curry’s question can signify more. It hints at the emotional exhaustion of someone who, for years, had been both a creative pioneer and an evidently troubled personality.
As The Ice King makes clear, Curry’s perfectionism and refusal to compromise made professional life more difficult for him and for his colleagues. He wouldn’t have his company perform in arenas with commercial signage in evidence. He wanted a live orchestra. He was demanding, of himself and as a coach: his cutting remarks to other skaters could be personally hurtful (and, it’s suggested, misogynist). The first Theatre of Skating shows in London in 1977 were spatially misconceived. For Curry and his troupe, the postage-stamp Cambridge Theatre stage was seriously inhibiting; even the much larger Palladium seemed too small to exploit some of the movements that make skating distinctive. Curry’s quest for artistic legitimacy made him anxious to avoid ice rinks and their taint of Holiday on Ice-type shows. The chance to perform at cultural meccas like the Met and the Royal Albert Hall was naturally irresistible but converting their stages into temporary skating areas was fraught with technical problems. James Erskine doesn’t force connections between Curry’s creative ambitions and personal insecurities but there’s a link in one very obvious sense: in his skating life and his private one, Curry was defying longstanding convention.
Although he has sometimes been described (including in publicity about this film) as a trailblazer too in being ‘openly gay’, one of Curry’s interviews in The Ice King qualifies that. It was his naivete in dealing with the press rather than an intention to declare his sexuality that led to his making ‘off the record’ remarks to a German journalist, and being outed, a few hours after winning the Olympic gold medal. That Curry didn’t talk much subsequently about his sexual orientation wasn’t a matter of professional self-protection, especially once he’d moved from a sporting milieu into a theatrical one: it was, rather, a subject that a gay man of his generation had learned to keep quiet about. For most of John Curry’s teenage years, male homosexuality was still illegal. Homophobia, often expressed jokily, was the norm for years after the partial decriminalisation legislation of 1967. The consequence of being publicly queer was significant: as a gay celebrity who’d achieved international sporting success and who didn’t use his sexual orientation as part of a comic persona, Curry placed himself in what was practically a one-man firing line.
The Ice King mentions that he won the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award in December 1976. It doesn’t mention what happened the same month at the British Sports Journalists’ Awards dinner. Bill Jones’s book does:
‘That year’s big winner – John Curry – was late. When he finally arrived, and began inching towards the top table, the evening’s comic turn was midway through his repertoire of seedy gags. “It’s good to feel the Christmas spirit among us all,” he quipped, into the microphone. “Here comes the fairy for the tree.” ’
The ‘comic turn’ remains nameless in Jones’s account, though I remember from the press coverage of the time that it was Roger De Courcey (with or without Nookie Bear, I don’t recall). Although Jones describes Curry as the ‘year’s big winner’, he hadn’t in fact been voted the SJA Sportsman of the Year. That prize went to the 1976 Formula 1 world champion James Hunt; Curry and David Wilkie, the Olympic swimming gold medallist, were runners-up. The reversal of Curry’s and Hunt’s positions in the public vote for the BBC award gives some credence to James Erskine’s suggestion, in a recent interview about his film with the online Irish journal The42, that ‘the general public was much more accepting and sophisticated than the press were at the time’. This theory shouldn’t be pushed too far, though. Soon after seeing the Theatre of Skating show at the London Palladium in August 1977, I stayed a weekend with one of my former teachers and his wife. I mentioned having seen the Palladium show very shortly after Curry had returned to it: he was out of action for several days, following a beating up on the street one night in Earls Court. My host, in his mid-thirties, was an Oxford graduate – charming, cultured, socially liberal. He was amused to hear that Curry had been ‘done over’.
Quite how the assault occurred is, as Bill Jones’s book explains, uncertain. It became a news story because Curry was forced to take a break from the show but he hadn’t, at the time of the beating up, reported the matter to the police. Heinz Wirz, one of his first sexual partners and, on the evidence of both Alone and The Ice King, a loyal friend for the remainder of Curry’s life, saw the bruises and told Jones he thought ‘it must have been in one of those sexual experiences but I’m not sure and John would not say’. The film too is opaque about the incident but it’s mentioned in the narrative in virtually the same breath as Curry’s relationship with Ron Alexander. An undistinguished skater but sexually experienced and adventurous, Alexander was well qualified to encourage Curry’s appetite to experiment and, in Jones’s phrase, ‘enjoy the wilder trappings of 1970’s fame’. One of Erskine’s interviewees describes Alexander more succinctly as Curry’s ‘downfall’. If so, it’s unfortunately apt that the pair were Daedalus (Alexander) and Icarus (Curry) in the most notorious (and, I thought at the time, silliest) item in the Palladium programme.
Beside Bill Jones’s three-hundred-plus-page biography, The Ice King, which runs just under ninety minutes, is bound to skimp on some areas. I’d have liked more on the arc of Curry’s competitive career. The film doesn’t even mention that he won the world title after the Olympics: this matters not only as sporting information but also because Curry’s decision to compete at the Worlds was psychologically significant. It took his coach Carlo Fassi by surprise: the intention had always been that if Curry won the Olympic gold he would quit while he was ahead – that is, turn professional immediately. James Erskine doesn’t allude either to Curry’s non-skating theatrical career, except – for downbeat, riches-to-rags effect – his appearance as Buttons in Cinderella at the Liverpool Playhouse at Christmas 1986, when he had also just been diagnosed as HIV-positive. The casting, in view of Curry’s cool aesthete image, sounds bizarre but the panto engagement, according to Bill Jones, wasn’t an unqualified humiliation:
‘It was a long way from the New York Met. Instead of Manhattan’s elite, Curry stepped out every night in a bell-hop’s suit to entertain 600 raucous children guzzling popcorn. As the unrequited lover of Cinderella, Curry’s role required him both to galvanise the audience and make them laugh. Neither task came naturally, but neither was he a dud. “He wouldn’t have done it for eight weeks if he hadn’t enjoyed it”, notes Andrew Curry [his brother] …’
In one major respect, though, The Ice King isn’t as dispiriting to watch as Alone is to read. Bill Jones’s detailed, painstaking narrative – every success that Curry enjoys is quickly followed by a setback or conflict, often of his own making – is inevitably unrelieved by visual evidence of his beautiful skating. Erskine and his team have assembled an excellent collection of film of the work of Curry and company. More than one of these excerpts is introduced as amateur footage and the sole known recording of the performance – a poignant reminder of how fragile Curry’s professional success was. The connection the viewer makes between Curry’s own life and the story he’s telling in ice dance is, of course, poignant too. Erskine, like Jones, does well to resist a conclusive psychoanalysis of its leading man. It’s not hard to find explanations in his family background for Curry’s solitariness and depressive tendencies; but it wouldn’t be hard to use the same background to explain a happy, gregarious adult life, if that had materialised instead. The father who put his foot down about ballet lessons committed suicide at the age of fifty. The mother who took John to the ice rink celebrated her hundredth birthday in 2013. Rita Curry, to whose home her youngest son returned to spend the last years of his life, always seemed unassuming, grounded and cheerful in television interviews – in the golden days of 1976 and the aftermath of John’s death eighteen years later.
Except for Curry himself and a small number of the present-day interviewees, testimony in The Ice King is heard and not seen. Erskine introduces each new voice with text on screen but doesn’t repeat the visual aid when we hear the voice again. He thereby avoids talking heads getting in the way of his varied footage and it’s only occasionally unclear who’s speaking. Freddie Fox reads from Curry’s letters. He does it skilfully, though he always sounds like an actor doing a character. There are differing views about the strength of Curry’s artistic legacy. Meg Streeter Lauck, whose mother Nancy gave Curry a second home and, in effect, a new family in New York in the early 1970s, thinks he transformed professional ice dancing for good. Elva Corrie feels many of the changes he brought about died with Curry. There’s nothing in the film about the Canadian skater, Toller Cranston, who often matched or bettered Curry’s artistic impression marks in global skating competitions. After turning professional, Cranston enjoyed sustained success in an ice show that, while flashier than Curry’s, was a big advance on Holiday on Ice. (According to Bill Jones’s book, Curry and Cranston, who died in 2015, consistently loathed each other.)
The Ice King doesn’t attempt to define John Curry’s status in competitive skating history. It’s not possible to make ‘greatest of all time’ claims on the basis of his record in the sport. He won major international championships in only one season. His failure to do so previously wasn’t solely the result of judges, especially those from behind the Iron Curtain, refusing to accept his innovativeness: until 1976, Curry tended to get nervous and make technical errors. There’s another way of interpreting sporting immortality, though. At the end of the 1976 world championships, held in Gothenburg, John Hennessy reported in the Times that Curry had received a second gold medal, from the widow of the great Swedish skater Gillis Grafström. He won at three successive Winter Olympics, in 1920, 1924 and 1928; his widow was so taken with Curry’s skating that she gave him one of her late husband’s Olympic golds. Mrs Grafström told John Hennessy that Curry would be ‘the one whose skating you remember’. For me, she was right but it’s good that James Erskine has made The Ice King lest others forget – or are too young to be able to do even that.
27 February 2018