On a dank day in Blackpool, barely a donkey ride from the Irish Sea, a few dozen holidaymakers are staring out across a patch of spot-lit ice. Suddenly, 30 skaters enter the auditorium at speed under thunderously amplified music. Sculpted men in pink bowler hats wearing tight red sparkling trousers. Slender girls – mostly – with peach-perfect posteriors and scarcely a square inch of flesh which doesn’t shimmer or shine. It’s fun, it’s fast and its deliriously, athletically, good fun. But John Curry would have winced through every vulgar seaside second of it; and in 1971 this was the future that loomed.
These skaters spending their summers in Blackpool have come from, and have previously competed, all over the world. Each is a brilliant athlete but no longer interested in striving for amateur honours; this is what they do. Before the knees crumple, or the hip surgeons come calling, they’re cashing in on their youth. It was a dilemma John Curry knew well. Three months with a travelling ice show, or a lifetime as a receptionist on Marylebone Road. He had faced it at 17, and in his twenty-second year he faced it again.
Every skater on the cusp knew the story. After another lacklustre tournament, there’d be a tap on the arm or a phone call, followed by an offer. For the very best, it would be Holiday On Ice, which came calling with its dollars. Since 1943, Holiday had been touring the United States and Europe, staging schmaltzy spectaculars stuffed with disillusioned amateurs who didn’t gag at its skating dwarves or its cheesy themes. And if not Holiday On Ice, then maybe rival outfits like Ice Follies or Ice Capades, with Trixie the skating juggler warming up for the fabulous 16 dancing Ice-Capets, tonight performing ‘Parade of the Wooden Soldiers’.
While his father was still alive, Holiday had offered the teenage Curry a three-year professional contract. When they refused to cede control over his choreography and costumes, John had turned his back. After his failure in Lyons, they came calling again, dangling £110 a week. Once again, they were rebuffed.
To be told by the owner of the show that … I would never beat anyone in competitive skating and therefore I might as well accept his offer … was sufficient to make me more determined than ever. Back I would go to the chill of the bedsitter and the ice rink.
Or as he later put it: ‘I would rather wash dishes.’
A radical new future was suggesting itself to John Curry, one in which he would set the parameters. Nothing would ever endear him to the gurning gloss of stadium ice shows. As with the prevailing machismo of competition, he was repulsed by it. From the beginning, he’d wanted to be a dancer and cherished skating as an art form in waiting, not merely a sub-species of gymnastics. Somehow, it had to be possible to imbue the glorious freedoms of the ice with the credibility, and repertoire, of ballet.
If he could somehow soften the calcified public perception of his sport; if he could somehow provide himself with a visible platform; maybe then he could take absolute control of a professional theatrical venture of his own; something bold; something to rattle even Holiday On Ice with its fists full of cash. ‘It wasn’t difficult to turn the money down. The reason I stuck it out was to win and [then] do what I really felt,’ he explained.
Curry’s single-minded ploy was land-mined with risk. By the early 1970s – like a fish in a torrent – he’d given himself only one way to go. The only way out, it seemed, was to prove Arnold Gerschwiler wrong and climb to the Olympic pinnacle of a sport he now longed to turn his back on. It was a forward orientation that suited his habitual separateness. ‘I have a new exhibition to a Frank Sinatra song, “Ebb Tide”,’ he told Heinz. ‘It is very slow and swirly and I do some very slow jumps at the start and then some very fast ones … just for the Morons.’
Curry’s approach to the challenge was as brutally uncompromising as his view of his fellow human beings. Before leaving Lyons, and without the knowledge of the wounded Gerschwiler, John had introduced himself to a fashionable Canadian coach called Peter Dunfield. Twenty years before, Dunfield had competed with distinction in North America, but it was his ‘modern attitude to teaching’ that excited Curry and the two men quickly came to a private agreement. If John could pay his way, the Canadian would coach him for four months in New York between June and November. The ‘if’ amounted to a sum of around £700.
For a young man living out of a suitcase it was vast amount of cash. For a man with Curry’s indifference to money, it was an obstacle of mountainous proportions. Back in London, however, reinstalled in Julian Pettifer’s flat, Curry set about raising the funds. With Penny Malec’s help he charmed a £400 overdraft out of his bank and with a further £300 loan (also courtesy of Malec) John was ready for what he called ‘my exciting journey’. Favours and gifts from close acquaintances would always come easily to Curry. Repayment – although rarely demanded – would come a lot harder.
Throughout the spring of 1971, ahead of the trip John let his days drift. Since his split with Gerschwiler, he’d continued to practise at Richmond unfazed by the glowering proximity of his former coach. Revelling in his new-found freedom, Curry – to Gerschwiler’s irritation – invited his ballet teacher to join him on the ice where unrestrained ‘arm-waving’ was now much in evidence.
‘My new exhibition,’ he wrote mischievously, ‘is to music written specially for me by Chopin … the encore (I am being very hopeful) is to the Russian dance from NUTCRACKER. Nice and short.’
The ‘exhibition’ Curry referred to was – to him – one of the irksome penalties of success. Major tournaments ran between December and March. Once they were over, the best skaters were dragooned on a short European tour – performing unrestricted programmes to paying audiences. As British champion, Curry’s simmering presence was required. ‘It is slave labour,’ he spat, neglectful of the fact that his costs were borne by the National Skating Association, or that for once he could skate precisely as he wanted.
It was an obligation which once again accentuated John’s growing isolation. ‘He hated those tours,’ remembers Heinz ‘He had to share dressing rooms with farting, burping guys. There were very few people with the class that he had. They’d all come to do their tricks, and he didn’t like that either.’
To ameliorate his distaste, Curry allowed himself contrasting distractions. In May, his mother had joined him during a short exhibition tour of France. ‘We had a day in Paris … we walked for miles.’ After dark, John promptly climbed into bed with a fellow skater from Britain. The exploratory inhibitions of Curry’s first months in London had evaporated. ‘John had sex not love,’ explains David Barker. ‘In the beginning it was all to do with sex.’ It was also about breaking the law.
Startlingly blond, and with the looks to match, Barker had started ice dancing when he was 11. In May 1971 he was only 18. ‘The law?’ he says. ‘I never concerned myself with those details. I just did it.’ Although the career paths of the two men would cross again, their night together in France meant nothing to either. Barker found Curry ‘boring and unspontaneous’. Curry, who was still proclaiming his love for Julian Pettifer, almost certainly felt the same about Barker. ‘John had this grandness that made him unpopular with other skaters,’ says Barker.
We’d all flown out in a little plane to Lille and of course John wasn’t there. He had to come a special way and arrive the day before or the day after … then we went to Paris and skated in the Grand Salon and instead of being with the group he went off somewhere special afterwards. It wasn’t his gayness which caused him problems, it was his aloofness. If he’d been happy and smiling he’d have conquered that.
Nevertheless, by the end of June, Curry was in a state of high excitement. On the ice, his skating had acquired a confident new elegance, and the exhibitions – for all his grumbling – had satisfied an innate need to perform and to feel loved, if only by an audience of strangers. ‘I love having people watch me,’ he wrote. ‘It inspires me to be better.’
I have discovered I am very like – in my moods and home life – Marilyn Monroe. They say that she used to act in her bedroom by herself. Well you know, I do that … I must go and practise in front of the mirror. I must try and look very innocent and childlike. This is what Marilyn did … She had the will to be beautiful because she wanted everyone to love her.
More importantly, he felt certain that his balletic style was winning crucial admirers among even the ‘morons’. Liberated from the steely governance of his two previous coaches, Curry confidently expected Peter Dunfield and America to embrace and complete him. Not for the first time (or the last) his optimism would prove catastrophically misjudged.
The forthcoming adventure, however, would inaugurate two of the most significant relationships in his life. One with a city. And the other with a woman.
Amid the sad knot of flotsam John left behind when he died, three items stand out: his British passports. From John Curry the fresh-faced ‘student ice skater’ to ‘John Anthony Curry O.B.E’, these battered documents chronicle a journey by way of the journeys they represent. Prague. Moscow. Geneva. Toronto. Amsterdam. Barcelona. Tokyo. Berlin. Stockholm. Madrid. Vancouver. Honolulu. Helsinki. Cairo. Oslo. And many more.
Faded visas. Scribbled signatures. Dates and departures. Baggage receipts. Airports and arrival halls. A mush of overlapping stamps in inks of every colour. Black, green, purple, pink and blue. Rectangles and circles. Squares and sticky labels. Only those marks that are beyond deciphering – the most blurred and blotted – keep their secrets. The rest, when carefully disentangled, trace out the gypsy arc of a lonely man’s life. And one city above all dominates the list; the place where he would spend 15 years of his life; the city that first shocked, and then embraced him. New York.
I am not very happy about New York. It is filthy dirty – smelly – overcrowded – dehumanised – and very very sordid. I have not been out yet because I feel quite sure that I shall be MUGGED – hit and robbed by thugs. So many awful things here. I’m quite frightened. Worst of all, most of the boys/men are fat!! I’m sure I shall be a virgin for the whole of the stay … PS. The other skaters are not very nice really but they are American so we must expect that.
With £100 in his pocket, John had touched down in New York on 20 June. The city, he said, ‘was like a kettle about to blow its lid’. Life there, he noted some years later in an ironic understatement, was ‘full of extremes’. After six days he was penning pompous diatribes about Manhattan’s squalor to Heinz Wirz. Barely a month later, he had fully integrated himself into a luxurious new nest and found himself a new ‘mother’ and lifelong benefactor in the process.
Throughout his life, Curry’s knack for identifying besotted – mostly female – companions would cushion him from untold cold realities. In New York, as he reappraised the city’s lascivious possibilities, he had been embraced by the most influential woman in the public storm that would become his life. And although it would eventually cause her both pain and joy, few people ever loved John Curry quite so long, or devotedly, as Nancy Streeter.
Born Nancy Angell in 1928, she had spent a lifetime living up to her surname. Her husband, Frank Streeter, was financial adviser to John Hay ‘Jock’ Whitney, then one of the world’s wealthiest men. While Whitney mixed cocktails with Fred Astaire, or plotted presidential power with Dwight D. Eisenhower, Streeter adroitly juggled his employer’s sprawling fortune. There was a lot to look after. Even at 22, Whitney was counting his millions in multiples, and Frank was well rewarded for his diligence.
By the 1970s success had taken the Streeters to East 72nd Street, New York, a stately apartment a few blocks out from Central Park. Rising from a low-ceilinged black and white tiled lobby, an elevator would open directly into sunlit quarters furnished in the manner of an English country retreat. Every horizontal surface sprouted forests of family photographs, and every wall bore the fruits of Frank’s loyalty to ‘Jock’ Whitney. From his own father, Streeter had inherited a passion for collecting rare books and maps from the great age of exploration. On tome-heavy shelves, epic first editions – of pioneers like William Clark and Captain Cook – fought for space between fine oil paintings and antique plates.
Nancy Streeter had never needed to earn a living. In New York there were countless other outlets for her industry. Churches, hospitals, societies and schools; places run on goodwill and fuelled by philanthropy. Since she adored people – and was supremely well connected – Nancy’s cultivated life was no less committed than her husband’s. In her own words, ‘When I get involved, I get involved pretty heartily.’ If she was a housewife, then she was a gloriously well-endowed one, and for recreation she liked nothing better than the ice.
Now demolished, the New York Sky Rink was a city institution. It was perched on the sixteenth floor of an office block on West 33rd Street, its location alone making it unforgettable. The quality of its skaters made it more so. Everyone was welcome, but the Sky Rink – and the esteemed Skating Club of New York – had become a breeding ground for champions. ‘There was no feeling of being cooped up,’ remembers Dorothy Hamill, a future Olympic gold medal winner. ‘It had huge windows that overlooked the New York skyline … It was almost a holy experience as the sunrise would fill the rink each day.’
Nancy Streeter worked on its management committee and was a capable skater herself. Her 14-year-old daughter Meg was training five hours a day there and flowering as an intermediate skater. Everyone knew Nancy, and – if they mattered – Nancy knew them, too. So when Peter Dunfield needed a billet for a promising English talent he’d found, his friends on East 72nd seemed the obvious choice. ‘It was pure chance,’ said Nancy, ‘I had no idea six weeks would grow into so many years.’
The Streeters had three daughters, Meg, Ruth and Ellen. Overnight they had acquired a son (and ‘brother’) with such scrupulous charm that he slotted perfectly into their milieu of urbane good taste. Curry was upright, elegant and deported himself with the self-assurance of a young prince. He was also artistic and had a sharp sense of fun. Along with John’s good looks and carefully crafted Englishness, the combination proved overpoweringly seductive. ‘We all became close very quickly. It just fell into place,’ explained Nancy, adding pointedly that ‘it was clear he had not had a great deal of family life before’.
Indeed, John had never lived like this. Down on the tree-lined streets, ageing Hollywood stars popped into Neil’s Coffee Shop for eggs over easy or into York Barbers (established 1828) for a wet shave. Stepping into the Streeter apartment from its private escalator, he crossed an entrance lobby festooned with curiosities, to enter a large twin-bedded room with its own en-suite facilities. For almost 20 years, this would be his – free of charge – whenever he needed it. All he had to do was pick up the phone.
East 72nd would become his New York comfort and his hiding place. It would be this apartment he rang within minutes of winning his Olympic gold. And it would be here that he told Nancy he was HIV positive, many years before he breathed a word to his own mother. After his glorious triumphs, she dubbed his quarters ‘the golden room’ or ‘the enchanted room’ and, many years after his death, the memory of his presence there could still move her to tears.
John was to be no mere lodger. From the beginning, almost everything the Streeters now did included the bashful young skater. At the weekends there would be ballet, the theatre or the movies, and when summer baked the city they’d tumble into the family station wagon, tune the radio to a music station and head for their country retreat in Connecticut. ‘We were a normal all-American family,’ recalls Meg Streeter. ‘There was a nice chemistry.’
On the Atlantic shoreline Curry would work tirelessly on his tan, often alone. In the evenings, they would gather for ping-pong or rumbustious meals on the patio. ‘We would tease him. We would never allow him to take himself too seriously,’ remembers Ellen Streeter, then 19. ‘He was quite square. Everything with John seemed to be from the past, so he began to absorb that era through teenage eyes.’
In these early days, no one doubted his sexuality or questioned his motives. Frank Streeter was not threatened by his 43-year-old wife’s new companion, and to his teenage daughters he was an alluring, if enigmatic, bundle of possibilities. ‘I don’t think I even knew there were people who were gay. I was just thinking this is nice. This guy’s handsome. This guy’s shy,’ remembers Ellen. ‘At first he was a little overwhelmed by us. Were all so New York chatty chatty chatty. Like a houseful of girls. Then gradually there was transition. From a shy boy into something a little more hip; into a force. In the company of lively New York girls … and Nancy.’
In the early weeks, John had told Heinz the Streeters were ‘very nice indeed – rather formal – but very nice’. Years later he deleted the qualification. ‘One of the nicest homes I had ever been in,’ he admitted, ‘with the most tranquil home atmosphere I had experienced.’ This was not Acocks Green. There were no ghosts and precious few secrets. At a very early stage, John felt sufficiently comfortable to tell Nancy about Julian and his feelings for men. In the afternoons they would discuss Nureyev together over a pot of Earl Grey tea. And when her husband came home from work Frank would reach for one of his beloved books, not a bottle of brandy.
‘John and Nancy surprised all of us,’ says Meg Streeter. ‘I have a feeling that she was maybe the first person who really sat down and listened to what his vision was beyond competing. She was a History of Arts major and always had her finger on the arts world and I think initially they connected on that level.’ After that it became much deeper. ‘I think she was able to draw him out personally,’ adds Ellen. ‘Trust became the key. He realised that he could trust her. He needed a stable person in his life. A lot of people in his life didn’t have that quality.’
It wouldn’t be an easy journey for Nancy. In the coming years, she would travel alone to Europe to watch John skate. Her vibrant correspondence would prop him up when he was down. Her advice would steer him through the public hell of coming out in 1976. She’d see him garlanded onstage at the New York Met with the city at his feet. And she would be there as, one by one, his friends and ex-lovers began to die.
But much as John loved and periodically needed her, he could not sustain the role of a natural son. Dutifully, he would shower her with letters but later, as he tasted New York’s ‘extremes’, Curry began to drift away. As Heinz Wirz already knew, and others would soon discover, John Curry was not overendowed with sentiment. As he moved forward, people – and possessions – very often got left behind.
The fear had gone. For six weeks, Curry soaked up everything New York could offer. ‘He was just radiating this sense of wonder,’ recalls Meg. Every afternoon, after six hours’ training at Sky Rink, he’d wander alone, from block to block, popping into galleries or gazing winsomely into store windows. ‘He was like an artistic sponge. Music. Books. Window displays. He’d suck it in. He was beaming with this sense of what people can do.’ Only one familiar issue was casting its shadow. By mid-August, the relationship with his third coach was in tatters.
As always, it had started well. But after John had been in New York for just six weeks, construction work at the rink had required Dunfield to shift his classes to Toronto. Overnight, Curry’s pampered sojourn with the Streeter family had been curtailed. ‘A disaster … a disaster for all of us,’ he grumbled. After Manhattan, Toronto seemed dismal, and, shorn of his new ‘family’, Curry felt his Davos demons resurface. ‘Feeling very lonely,’ he told a friend.
‘My skating seems to be getting worse by the minute.’ And, as always, so was his mood. Peter Dunfield had never encountered anything like it. The boy’s skating was – as he put it – ‘strong and sensitive at the same time’, but the Englishman’s demeanour was a disgrace.
‘In England he’d not been exposed to any opposition to what he did … he didn’t know how to cope with other big personalities around him,’ says Dunfield. Back at the New York rink, the Canadian had already been required to arbitrate in spats triggered by Curry’s ‘rude actions and comments’. Relocated in Canada – and once again housed with a local family – John discovered that Dunfield’s Toronto class was crammed with brilliant athletes. ‘Every session was a competition and John just couldn’t take it.’
As the ice shuddered with high-speed jumpers, Curry went into retreat. ‘I didn’t condemn his style,’ insists Dunfield:
It was his attitude. I never saw him sweat. He was more worried about the twist of a wrist than the triple jump. Also, in figure skating you might have to fall a few times and he didn’t want to fall … He was defeated. He had always been the best, but no one there was giving way. There was a glass mirror at one end so the skaters could check their positions and John just stood there and posed, so naturally people would hit him when they passed him because he didn’t keep moving.
Curry was in turmoil. Not only did Dunfield’s exhortations to ‘get tough and be more manly’ revolt him, but he also baulked at being told – repeatedly – that he was too old to win tournaments. ‘Some of the harsh comments were not easily borne when I thought of the £400 that had purchased them,’ he noted icily. Curry was 22 years old and the British champion. With Gerschwiler he’d been in control. He’d enjoyed his own music and his own space. In Toronto, the ‘Morons’ were closing in; and all of them skating like spinning tops. Only one man had caught his eye.
Two years before, Heinz Wirz had seen Toller Cranston skating and warned John that he might have a rival. Now for the first time they were on the ice together. Born in Hamilton, Ontario, the extravagantly named Toller Shalitoe Montague Cranston shared both John’s age and his conviction that skating could elevate itself beyond the pedestrian bounds of sport. Over the next five years, their rivalry would generate one of the most curious sporting duels of all time. In the years beyond that, at different times, they would share and sack the same co-producer; endure separate but comparably disastrous experiences in business; and very publicly hate each other’s guts.
In August 1971, however, they were strangers united by an experience that was crippling them both. ‘Toronto that summer was the epicentre of skating in the world,’ says Toller.
There were no known skaters who were not on that ice. French champion. Austrian champion. American pairs champion. Haig Oundjian, I think. John Curry and me. I was nothing at that time. None of us could hack it in that environment. At the end of that summer I could not take it and I was ready to write a note saying I was quitting.
Subsequently, Curry never once mentioned seeing Cranston in Toronto. Perhaps the memory was too raw. But for Peter Dunfield, the fledgling rivalry between the two men had been the defining narrative of his summer. Session after session, he says, Cranston’s bravado trumped Curry’s posturing on the ice. ‘When he trained, Toller didn’t stop for 60 minutes. He was extrovert. Innovative. Athletic. Toller was never going to give and if he wanted an area of the rink, Toller got the rink. It blew John away. He lasted about a month and then he had to leave.’
Curry’s sexuality, however – Dunfield insists – played no part. ‘I knew all about that. It’s not unusual in this sport but it wasn’t offensive. Other skaters were entranced by their exposure to his [Curry’s] movement on the ice but not by his attitude or his conduct. For me it was simple. Either he got with the programme or he left.’ So Curry left.
His exit, when it came, was swift. In late August, after a dismal dawn session working on his school figures, Curry studied the shapes he’d left in the ice. ‘Terrible, miserable figures,’ he said. ‘I looked at them and thought, “This is ridiculous … you are homesick … what are you doing here?”’ Within two hours he was checking out flights back to London; by mid-afternoon he was airborne. The following morning, Julian Pettifer was at Gatwick airport to meet him. ‘[He] was obviously very nervous,’ Curry wrote to Nancy:
He could not even smile at me. Julian just had time to drive me to London and then he had to go straight to Heathrow and get a flight to Hong Kong on route to China. We had a chance to talk and he told me that he had been living with someone else while I was away and that he now felt very badly about it all and dishonest. To put you more in the picture, this other person has been visiting us and going out with us all the time I have known Julian – and he knew Julian before I did … hardly the homecoming I have been thinking about for the past three months.
By lunchtime, Curry was sitting crestfallen on a train to Birmingham. It was unfortunate timing. Assuming her son to be in Canada, Rita had left just a few hours before for a short holiday in Scotland. ‘The world has quite fallen from under my feet,’ he told Nancy.
For the next three days, Curry lived alone in an empty family house full of complex memories. It was no place for an unhappy man with jetlag and a propensity for despair. ‘I really wish that whatever controls me would leave me alone for some time,’ he had once told Heinz. On the bed he’d slept in as a child, he curled up and wept, alone ‘at the bottom of a deep pit [with] no interest in climbing out’.
By the time his mother returned, John was famished and frantic – ‘at a very low ebb’ – but it was almost certainly far worse than that. According to one account, Curry told Rita he’d be better off dead. Suddenly very little in his life seemed on track any more.
During his months in North America, his friendship with Julian Pettifer had begun to cool. Before Curry flew to New York, the two men had rarely seen each other. Now they were often living and working on different continents. ‘Absence certainly does not make the heart grow fonder’ was how Pettifer put it. ‘Propinquity propinks.’ Soon after his return, Curry had moved out of the journalist’s flat, leaving Pettifer puzzled ever after by the skater’s portrait of their time together. ‘I am deeply saddened to discover John had such thoughts,’ he says. ‘He never spoke to me in those terms. I never spoke to him in those terms.’
However mutual their feelings had been – and for whatever reasons Curry might have exaggerated them – the experience left him nursing a sorrow that endured for many years. ‘Quite by accident I turned on the TV and saw Julian the other day,’ he wrote a few months later. ‘Usually if this happens I turn off quickly but this time I did not. Now I feel so sad and full of emptiness. It is hard to live with a broken heart. Wonder if I’ll ever feel differently?’
Since leaving home, Curry’s relationship with his mother had been under periodic strain too. ‘Mother has a habit of making me nervous and that makes me works badly,’ he complained. Much as he adored her, he was abysmal at maintaining regular contact. During his New York summer, it had been Nancy who’d kept Rita informed. ‘I used to know more or less where he was but he was a bit lax,’ she says. Even Haig Oundjian had picked up on John’s neglect. ‘He was very rough, terribly rough, on Rita. But he was like that. He could suddenly switch off.’
Occasionally he would hitch-hike north from London to see her, but his letters and phone calls had become so infrequent that Rita shared her feelings of maternal dislocation with her Solihull friends. As a result, one of them had even contacted Curry directly, telling him he’d ‘broken his mother’s heart’.
It [her letter] was so horrible I never even finished reading it; she said I was selfish and nasty and everything bad … Oh! I feel awful. I am going to write Mother a nice letter today … I’m going to tell how I feel about her and say it is not her I don’t like, it is all the other things, like Michael.
John and his older brother Michael had never been close as children. Andrew, on the other hand, had remained a steady presence. Quiet and wisely measured, the middle brother had been left short of self-confidence by his years spent quarantined by tuberculosis. His was a softer, less accusing disposition than John’s and the two always dovetailed well.
In Solihull, Andrew had fraternised harmoniously with John’s skating friends. In London, he’d taken John to the theatre to see musicals. Occasionally, he’d even passed on his clothes to his impoverished younger brother. ‘I’m sure he knows about me,’ wrote John revealingly. ‘But he would never speak about it. He is so kind.’ Rita, on the other hand, appeared to know nothing about ‘it’, and Andrew would eventually be told only that he ‘didn’t really like girls’.
It was John’s way to be oblique. Where possible he preferred hints to overt disclosure. Besides, in the early 1970s homosexuals rarely revealed their inclinations unless absolutely necessary. Gay men didn’t formally come out. The risks were simply too high. If they were lucky, awareness dawned kindly on those around them. If they were not, they merely continued living the lie.
In the circumstances, Curry’s ‘low ebb’ was understandable, but Acocks Green was no longer the place to turn it around. During his years in London, the family’s financial health had worsened. The property in Ireland had been sold, and Warwick Road would shortly go the same way. Rita was moving a few miles north to a two-bedroom flat overlooking Sutton Park. ‘I was sad to leave but it had never felt the same after Joseph’s death,’ she says. Whatever had gone wrong in Toronto wouldn’t be put right at ‘home’. After three weeks’ contemplation, Curry caught the train to London where, once again, it would be a woman who reassembled the pieces and put him back on the ice.
No one had emerged with credit from the Toronto debacle, but not all the blame lay with John Curry. Like Perren and Gerschwiler before him, Peter Dunfield had utterly failed to penetrate the complex mindset of his troubled young student. Ordering him to ‘man up’ had merely emphasised the canyon that had always separated John from his contemporaries. It wasn’t that he couldn’t skate like a muscle-bound East European. He simply chose not to. And until he found a coach prepared to work with, and not against him, then Curry seemed destined to be seen as a brilliant, but peripheral, novelty act.
Behind the frustration, his strategy remained clear. In New York he had informed Nancy Streeter that he was going to win the Olympics and then launch his own ice dance company. Although that prospect looked distant – the 1972 Sapporo Winter Olympics were less than six months away – Curry now had someone at his side who might actually change his fortunes. Even as his relationship with Dunfield was imploding, he had been secretly wooing a successor. Once again, Curry’s dramatic posturing had disguised a chilling ruthlessness.
Alison Smith was a dark-haired, no-nonsense skater who’d turned professional at eighteen. She lived by the Thames with her widower father, a nuclear physicist, in a grand Victorian apartment block. The young Canadian skater Patricia Dodd was a neighbour. Richmond and its ice rink were her second home. Arnold Gerschwiler had formerly been Alison’s coach and, unlike John, she’d grown to respect the Swiss grandee. Those feelings were clearly mutual. By late 1970 he’d invited her to join his paid teaching staff under the Richmond rink’s imposing arches.
When Arnold and John clashed, it was always Alison he turned to for help. ‘He didn’t want John to do any arm-waving as he called it and I saw the whole thing in a different light because I was an arm-waver myself.’ A ray of light had broken through. Four years older than John, Alison also loved music and ballet. They also had mutual acquaintances – Heinz Wirz was a good friend to them both – and Alison’s indifference to John’s sexuality was authentic and persuasive.
‘Arnold totally totally totally had a problem with John being gay. That’s what the big problem was,’ explains Alison. ‘He was always trying to cover it up in John’s skating and I was setting the bird free. That’s basically all it was. Setting the bird free.’
Even before his final winter in Davos, John had been entranced by Alison. Four mornings a week, Gerschwiler had allowed Alison to work with his tiresome pupil. ‘She makes me feel like working even when I don’t want to. CLEVER GIRL,’ gushed John. ‘So cool and calm and helpful,’ he told Nancy. After she’d successfully ironed out a long-standing technical problem with his backward jumps, Curry was sold. Arnold out; Alison in. Whatever the pain, he would have what he wanted. It was a hallmark John Curry putsch.
In the limbo weeks before his trip to North America, Curry and Smith had worked discreetly together. Once he was in New York, he bombarded her with letters. ‘He was saying he couldn’t stand it there and he wanted to come back. At first I said no and then I got the final letter that asked me straight out whether I would like to teach him, so I said yes … and when I showed Arnold the letter he was absolutely furious. He said, “Do you honestly think you can teach him?” But that year John moved up from fifteenth to twentieth in Europeans and Worlds and his success came as a huge shock for Arnold.’
Gerschwiler’s wrath was unbounded. Richmond had been his fiefdom since 1937. His pupils included Princess Anne and the Hollywood actor James Mason. To have been dumped by John Curry was bad enough. To be usurped by one of his own junior coaches was a humiliation too far. ‘From that time,’ observed Curry, ‘it seemed to Alison and me that normal levels of internal cooperation and goodwill at the rink had disappeared. It got to the point where both of us dreaded an impending training session.’
Curry and Smith had become, as he put it, ‘untouchables’. And for once John had someone with whom to share his feelings of isolation. Frozen out by Arnold and his team, the pair withdrew into themselves, propelled by a smouldering sense of shared injustice. They grew tighter on the ice and closer off it. For the first time, Curry had a coach who completely understood and accepted him. It was only just in time.
Curry’s year of trauma and plotting had finally caught up with his skating. In December 1971, Haig Oundjian had reclaimed the British title. Few sports demand such relentless attention to detail and Curry had become distracted. Under Alison Smith, that swiftly changed. He still baulked at the disciplines of school figures, and he still burned with impatience – ‘I spent most of my time holding onto my temper’ – but unlike Curry’s previous coaches, Alison had a secret weapon: their mutual friend Heinz Wirz. When Curry was proving especially difficult, Smith would invite John’s ex-lover over from Switzerland for the weekend. Appropriately briefed, Heinz would then find time alone on the rink with Curry. ‘I’d suggest to him it would be a good idea if you took this line or that, and this was all because Alison had told me in advance. We both loved him, you see.’
Sheltered within this triumvirate, Curry flourished. Since Alison placed no boundaries on his free skating, John’s jumping began to improve. ‘I allowed him to be himself on the ice, and if he wanted more arm movements in a programme, then we put more in.’ Nobody had handled him like this before. No two people knew him so well or seemed so unwilling to judge.
It was a safety net that extended way beyond the rink. Although NCR had kept his job open, Curry had nowhere to live. In New York, Nancy Streeter had promised him an open door and a bed. In London, for the next five years, Alison Smith and her father would do the same. ‘It was right on the rink; right on the river,’ says Alison:
We’d come out of the engine room door of the rink and it was literally like 20 steps into the apartment. He’d sometimes sleep in my room, and then – because he travelled a lot – I’d sleep in my father’s room. Or he had a very beautiful leather sofa and John would sometimes fall asleep listening to music in there. If he brought a ‘friend’ back with him they’d be in the living room, so I just minded my own business. I didn’t care …
Nor did Alison’s bounty end there. If he had the money, Curry paid for his lessons. If he didn’t, Smith worked for free. Her rewards, when they came, were more nebulous than cash. John Curry’s fortunes were suddenly on the move, and his passport was filling up fast. In January 1972, her protégé had finished fifth in the European Championships at Gothenburg, Sweden, one place behind Haig Oundjian. For the first time, Nancy Streeter had travelled from New York to see him and John’s appreciation was effusive.
I did enjoy our meals together and seeing the skating with you made it nicer for me, but most of all I enjoyed our talks. I think it was really wonderful. Your being there was such a compliment to me and my skating.
The following month, Curry was in Japan for the Sapporo Olympics, where he finished a disappointing tenth, six places behind Haig Oundjian, and one behind the fast-rising Canadian Toller Cranston. The experience, however, had left an unexpected mark. At the opening ceremony, as helicopters showered pink roses over the national teams, Curry seethed at the ‘blasé dilettantes’ who mocked the Union Jack with ‘ribald and facetious jokes’. ‘I longed for someone to be standing near me who would share the same feelings, but those around me seemed to find yet another excuse for a snigger or a slice of cheap sarcasm.’ ‘The British team is the largest collection of snobs imaginable,’ he complained to Nancy.
Having very little snow in GB and no mountains at all, the bobsleigh skiers all train in St Moritz ‘old chap’ and as we have no sponsorship this means they are all rich 25–35 year olds. We must be the only team to have a Prince as a reserve bobsleigh man. TRUE. Prince Michael. Sometimes being a commoner is just gross.
Curry was nothing if not conflicted. To strangers, his lifelong streak of patriotic conservatism seemed at odds with the acrid asides and the unconventional private life. To intimates, it had always been this way. ‘He was a bit of a prig, but he was not a cynic,’ says Penny Malec. ‘He thought being British was tremendously important.’ Although he eschewed politics, Curry’s instincts, like his accent, were old Tory and deeply unfashionable. After being detained by two police inspectors for fare dodging on the London Underground, he’d written indignantly: ‘Me a criminal. Can you imagine? I told them my name was Bunny. They did not like that at all. You could tell they were strictly lower class. Ha ha.’
During the investiture of Prince Charles three years earlier, in 1969, John had wept in front of his television set, and it was not uncommon for members of the Royal Family to feature in his nightly reveries. ‘The Queen was lovely, as she always is, in my dreams,’ he told Heinz. In life, it seemed, as in art, he was invariably drawn to the rarefied end of the spectrum. The ‘common’ man would always be a stranger to him and – in many ways – the 1960s appeared to have passed him by entirely.
Curry’s nationalistic pride was authentic – and unfashionable – but no one had expected him to win in Japan. After reclaiming his British title, Haig Oundjian had travelled east as the British Number One. All the pressure had been on him. For years, his father had been urging him to quit; warning him that prejudice against the Oundjian name would always block his way. In Sapporo on the first day, despite having flu, he’d been just one place off the bronze medal position after seven of eight compulsory school figures.
It just blew me. I was already nursing a fever. Me, fourth in the Olympics. Oh my God. I just blew it and completely bottled the last figure. Even though I went on to do the best free skate of my life, it didn’t matter. I’d gone back to ninth with that one figure which meant there were eight to free skate after me and they never give top marks if there are eight to come. They hold them back. John Curry fell over on or missed both his triples and got higher marks from the British judge than me. You can’t refute that can you? My father always said I was never going to make it. This is the British way.
It was to be Haig Oundjian’s last hoorah. Hampered by an old ankle injury, he withdrew from the following month’s World Championships in Calgary and would never skate competitively again. No longer restrained, he went public to lambast bias in the marks of British skating judges. ‘When John came eighth overall, the British judge has him fifth. When I come overall third, the British judge has me fourth. What does that tell you, event after event?’ When the National Skating Association banned him for a year, he told them he’d already quit. Perhaps his father had been right. The British ‘way’ had got him at last.
Curry had been inspired by Sapporo. Alison Smith had been inspired by John Curry. Although the NSA had been unable to pay for her airfare, the two friends had stayed in touch by telephone throughout. ‘We had some special music we both liked to listen to and I’d open the window in my Richmond flat and put it on full belt so it would fly over there to lift him.’ From the moment he returned, the race was on. By 1976, the date of the next Winter Olympics, he would be 26. One last chance. There was nothing else he could do.
‘There should be nothing less than perfection,’ he told Nancy. ‘At the moment I am so inspired I could explode with what I feel to be inside me. I want to work and work for – something!’
Tirelessly, Curry threw himself into the challenge. It didn’t make him any easier. There were still filthy arguments between coach and pupil. ‘She felt his cruelty,’ says Heinz. ‘He could be really, really hard – really scary – and Alison suffered from it a great deal.’ Unlike previous coaches, however, Smith had taken the time to work Curry out. If a storm was coming, she could often with Heinz’s covert help circumnavigate the worst of it. And should the storm actually break, she knew how to make Curry laugh:
For instance, John hated back paragraph brackets [one of the compulsory school figures] and I’d see the mood he was in before the lesson so I’d think, let’s really get him in a mood. It’s supposed to be perfect circles and he’d probably miss the axis of the turn by half a foot and I’d stop him and put him right, then next time half a foot became a foot, so I wouldn’t take any notice, then he’d miss it half a foot on the other side. So we played this game and I’d say you’ve got to go round six times and of course he was laughing inside, then suddenly we’d both be openly laughing about it.
No one had ever manipulated Curry before. ‘Without Alison,’ he admitted in 1987, ‘I would not have been able to make it because Alison held me up during the hardest period … because she liked the way I skated … without her it would not have worked out.’
Was he temperamental? Yes. Would I let him get away with it? No. Three hundred and sixty-five days of the year, maybe ten he was extremely difficult, but I had other students to teach, so had to be able to switch off and carry on. If he started being silly and doing the opposite to what I’d told him to do, I’d let him do it. I’d say I’m obviously more interested in winning than you are. But then John’s a genius. You’re always going to have these ups and downs. When he knew he’d lost the battle I’d get a bunch of flowers and a letter apologising. He was a totally class act.
Curry had found the dream coach – a contemporary coach; ears and eyes open to the modern world. Every day, usually for around five hours, he would work on the ice. On at least two days a week he was also continuing his London lessons in modern and classical dance. In September, he’d even performed at Coventry Cathedral with 14 girls from the Elmhurst Ballet School. ‘Needless to say I am the only male in the entire production unless you count Albinoni who wrote some of the music,’ he informed Nancy. ‘Tonight I had dinner in the school dining room with about seventeen girls!! That’s a lot of women even for me.’
It helped that there were no significant distractions elsewhere. Although John’s evenings still revolved around London’s gay clubs, he very rarely came home with company. ‘I’ve never had so many good glances from people, even the leather ones,’ he told Heinz after a night in the Coleherne: ‘I made a date with a boy about my age and I’m sure you would approve. Last week I saw him somewhere dressed in leather and we smiled at one another but he was with someone dressed as a cowboy … I came home alone (as bloody usual) … Love and miss you John.’
Leather clothing – and one-night stands – would subsequently become a feature of John’s other life. But in 1972, as December approached, very little got in the way of his skating. Early that month, with Oundjian now retired, Curry effortlessly reclaimed the British figure skating title. He would hold it without interruption until 1975, and only a young tyro called Robin Cousins would ever remotely threaten his perch.
Other, more insidious, things were corroding Curry’s state of grace that winter. Like all amateur skaters, his attendance at international events was managed, and underwritten, by the National Skating Association. It was the NSA that planned his trips and booked the flights. It was the NSA that ran the rule over his outfits and his choice of music. And like all such organisations, the NSA accorded the sport’s rules with the weight of biblical commandments.
Nonconformists like John Curry unsettled them, even more so when paired with unknown quantities like Alison Smith. Ever since his teenage years, Curry had kicked at skating’s codes. Now firmly entrenched as Britain’s Number One, he felt empowered to kick them even harder. Only the year before, Curry had fired off a bitter broadside in their direction: ‘The English judges don’t like me to free skate in black!! I think they are completely wrong because it looks so nice. They want me to have a green suit, all one colour. I suppose I must do it if I ever want to win in England. Anyway, we shall see about that later.’
Battle lines had been clearly drawn. Curry’s balletic unorthodoxy on one side; the sport’s establishment on the other. There were no formal groups, no identifiable cliques. This was a whispering war, waged between conflicting attitudes, and as the competition season progressed into 1973 it was clear which camp had dominance. As Curry expressed it, ‘I felt like I was working a whole year to learn a poem and then having to recite it to deaf people.’
At the World Championships in Bratislava, he’d finished a dazzling fourth but still couldn’t silence the negative backchat. ‘Curry’s art not fully appreciated’ was the Guardian’s headline, above copy which stated that although ‘Curry’s graceful skating has earned him the name “Nureyev of the Ice” … there are many who do not wish skating to progress along such balletic lines’.
Even Canada’s greatest ice acrobat had stepped up among the naysayers. Donald Jackson was a high-jumping, four-time national champion who’d performed the first triple lutz ever seen in open competition. ‘Many judges will not give high marks to someone who makes it look so easy,’ he declared. It was a bizarre observation.
In his pomp, Jackson had made it look easy, too. The difference was that the Canadian’s performances ran on testosterone while the British skater’s did not. Once again, Curry would be required to defend himself. ‘I don’t think that anything I do is vaguely effeminate or feminine at all,’ he insisted, ‘I don’t think that any movement I do looks bad on a male body.’
Some years later – when his fame was threatening to overwhelm him – Curry would take sweet revenge on Jackson in a television documentary he presented exploring the difference between their two styles. First he shows a black and white film clip of the Canadian skating to a piece of classical music. Next, Curry himself performs to the same recording.
Where Jackson leaps, Curry glides. Where Jackson bustles and grins, Curry beckons sensuously. Where Jackson dazzles and spins, Curry creates fluid shapes. Both men make their craft look easy, but only the Canadian’s moves are wantonly telegraphed. And only one man transcends. ‘I tried to incorporate the jumps into a framework that was not just preparation jump preparation jump ... because I think the jump is much more effective if one doesn’t expect it.’
Details; with Curry it was all about details. Every skater choreographed their jumps. Curry choreographed down to his fingertips. Everything he wore and every arm movement was meticulously prepared. Every piece of music he ever selected was chosen for a reason. Historically, skaters had favoured classical crowd-pleasing beats, hoping to land their jumps on a giant chord or a cymbal crash. For John Curry, who had skipped up his childhood stairs to the rhythms in his head, the music was everything. Heinz Wirz, in particular, had always been in awe of Curry’s musicality.
Whatever piece he was using as the basis for a programme, he went to read the books; went to see the plays; and went to the museums to see period costumes. This was always how he wanted it to be. He had one Tchaikovsky programme – 6th Symphony, I think – and he read thousands of things on Tchaikovsky. He had to know how Tchaikovsky felt and only then could he start to put things together. Sometimes he would work on something for two or three months and then abandon it.
Now Alison Smith was fathoming the depths of her student’s passion. In a lifetime’s disregard for possessions, few things mattered more to Curry than his record collection. And nothing made him happier than music. ‘To me the music said exactly what it wanted me to do and I just did it. It wasn’t a chore. It was the part I enjoyed most.’
‘He’d suddenly fall in love with something like Cavalleria rusticana [an Italian opera by Mascagni],’ says Smith. ‘My father would have bought all the latest hi-fi equipment and I’d come into the apartment in the afternoon and he’d have the headphones on and be singing along. You just don’t get that kind of culture now.’
In Bratislava – to predictably negative mutterings – Curry had skated to a piece of sitar music by Ravi Shankar, wearing a jacket picked up on Kensington Market. In December 1973 – at the British Championships in Richmond – he performed his short programme to a Scott Joplin ragtime piano. No one had ever taken such liberties with tradition. According to one national newspaper, his daring had ‘caused a sensation’. Some audience members had even laughed out loud.
In a letter to Nancy Streeter, Curry confirmed as much. ‘They laughed and smiled all the way through and clapped a good deal. The judges on the other hand were shocked by the overall “fem” effect.’ It was true. For many British officials, this was all too much. ‘I must say I did enjoy shocking those old fogies,’ said John. But the ‘fogies’ were growing restless. ‘General laughter during the compulsories is unheard of,’ grumbled one of them. It was time to do something about Curry and Smith.
A few weeks later – as they were leaving for the 1974 European Championships in Zagreb – a letter arrived from the NSA. Inside was a cheque for £20, and a letter requesting that Curry desist from skating to the Scott Joplin soundtrack.
We started laughing. We were furious about it. It was a fantastic programme. John had tap danced and done a change foot sit spin all to the beat of the music. Wonderful, but the NSA didn’t like it. It was too advanced for the old fuddy-duddies. So we changed it for the Europeans – he did all the elements without using his arms – and he still got a standing ovation. In the end we spent the twenty quid on tickets for the ballet.
Ever since his Davos exhibitions, Curry had sensed that the public were way ahead of the administrators. Unacquainted with skating’s rulebooks, audiences followed their hearts and this ethereal Englishman stirred them. In 1970, while winning the St Gervais International, he’d noticed ‘a few people moved to tears by my slow section’. In Prague the previous November, a Czech audience had been roused by his Indian dance. Finally, in Zagreb, the passion of his skating had decisively got through to the judges. He hadn’t won – he’d got the bronze medal – but for the first time in a major tournament Curry had finished on the podium.
He should have been happy, but he was not. Throughout the previous year, Curry’s inexorable march up the rankings had been mirrored by a deepening sense of solitary desperation. After the champions tour of 1973 – the obligatory post-tournament circus – he’d returned to his private darkness. This was the old John Curry, beset with anxiety.
I long to feel something permanent in my life; some reason for myself. Think back to when we were 17 and 18 … It seems not long ago but it was SEVEN years … I came to your room and listened to some music. We were strangers then, Hene. There must be something more to living than what I feel. There must be fire not only warmth. When I skated on the tour I felt so wonderful. I felt alive. The whole of my body and my soul lived for those minutes. Since then I’ve been waiting for something; just sitting feeling nothing again.
It’s not much to want to feel alive is it? Youth is such a glorious, precious time and my youth is spent waiting. Every day should be full of life.
In London, Curry had friends, but not partners. A charismatic young Welshman called Roger Roberts had drifted into his orbit but, as with Julian Pettifer, no one seemed sure whether he was a lover or a companion. ‘John told me he was the most beautiful person he’d ever seen,’ recalls Penny Malec. ‘He said I had to meet him and, yes, he was a truly lovely person. Very much at ease with his sexuality. Laughed all the time. I even met a couple of Roger’s boyfriends. One was black, the other Asian, which John was a bit iffy about. John would have said, “Oh, Roger likes black boys”. He could be very sniffy when he wanted to be.’
For the next 20 years, the two men would stay close. While Curry lived in London, Roberts was a housing officer in Brixton. When Curry moved permanently to New York, Roberts took a job running a basement restaurant off Times Square. If any letters passed between them, none have survived. In due course, both men would be consumed by the AIDS epidemic, and when Roberts died before him – in truly grim circumstances – Curry was devastated.
John had once said to Heinz, ‘There seems to be no end to my loneliness.’ Even Nancy Streeter was no stranger to his hopeless sense of isolation. Earlier in the year, during his exhibition tour, he’d reached out to her as never before:
Do you think that it is my fault that I feel lonely – even when in the midst of all this hectic activity? Is it because I don’t let people come too close to me – by people I mean people one just sees every now and then and does not really know. I am very lonely. I’m neither fish nor flesh and the sun is too bright – the shadows too dark. The other skaters look on at me as a strange being. I love skating but the judges see my skating as symptoms of homosexuality. They really do. It is not easy to be judged by a pack of fools who know nothing of art. I feel out of step with a hostile world. What should I do? I’m sure all the trouble is all inside myself.
Skating was to blame. Since childhood, Curry had isolated himself and isolation was its consequence. Sacrificing his adolescence had rendered him socially naïve. When he was away from the rink, his prickly hauteur often turned to shyness and his sexuality compounded the constant nag of detachment.
I try to be a very private person. I think that’s partly due to the solitary life learning to skate. I was always pretty private as a child. The ice was a world where I could go and be free and alone and that suited me. Maybe it’s because one is shy that one needs that place where one can come out and feel free.
One critical aspect of John Curry’s fortunes had finally improved, however. For the first time in his life he had some money.
Curry was no stranger to uninvited advances from older men. But Ed Mosler was different. Moments after his fourth place finish in Bratislava the previous February, Mosler had sought the Englishman out. As Curry fretted, the balding stranger peppered him with compliments. ‘Your skating has given me a great deal of pleasure over the last three years,’ he told him. ‘I’d like to help you.’ Puzzled – and understandably suspicious – Curry politely steered the stranger away. The following day, Mosler was back. ‘[He] walked up to me, laughed and said: “You don’t really know who I am, do you?” and I had to admit that I did not.’
Few Americans skaters would have made the same mistake. In Cincinnati in 1848 Ed’s great-grandfather Gustave Mosler had founded what became the largest safe-making company in the world. It was a Mosler vault that guarded the nation’s gold reserves in Fort Knox. In Washington it was a Mosler safe that housed the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. After the family business was sold in 1968, Ed Mosler had turned his energies – and his fortune – towards less commercial pursuits. Firstly, his vast collection of mechanical money boxes, and, secondly, his near-obsessive love of ice skating.
By the early 1970s, Mosler’s largesse – channelled through a charitable foundation – had already helped dozens of American skaters. No targets were ever set, no stipulations were ever made and his only return appeared to be the pleasure he took from excellence. Few major tournaments were not marked by his discreet presence, and, without exception, the skaters seemed to love him.
Unmarried and softly spoken, Mosler – with his square, jowly chin and drooping nose – offered an antidote to the poison of competition. He was also fiercely loyal. Whenever one of ‘his’ skaters won a medal, it was rumoured he presented them with an engraved Tiffany decanter filled with melted ice from the winning rink. If they’d finished first, tiny flakes of gold would be dispersed in the liquid. If they’d finished second, the flakes would be silver.
That Curry had no idea who’d approached him was not surprising. Until Bratislava, Mosler’s cash oiled only American wheels. Anything else seemed absolutely contrary to the rules. For years he’d been quietly admiring John Curry while feeling powerless to intervene. In Czechoslovakia, for whatever reason, Mosler had broken this long silence with an initial offer of £500 for Curry’s travel and training. More was likely to follow. ‘Rather dazed’ was Curry’s reaction. His days demonstrating cash registers looked to be over. ‘From that day on, I really didn’t have to think about money.’
Back in London there was a cool response from the National Skating Association. A British winner backed by American cash might become embarrassing. On the other hand, the NSA had little money and seemed incapable of finding Curry a sponsor. ‘There was some feeling that it might be better if I went on … skating on cornflakes rather than actually accepting money from an American,’ he said. In the arguments that followed, Curry’s stance prevailed. Muddling through on the generosity of friends was over. Mosler’s money immediately started to flow.
Within a year, Curry was showing the benefits. At the European Championships in Zagreb, his new focus, Smith’s nous and Mosler’s dollars had together notched up their first significant medal. Four weeks later – in March 1974 – everything went disastrously, and inexplicably, wrong.
Arriving in Munich with Alison Smith for the World Championships, Curry found his name being talked up as a favourite. From distant threat, he’d finally surfaced as a genuine contender. It was a prospect that turned his stomach to slush. Ever since his teens, he’d been hamstrung by nerves. Now, as the world’s best skaters poured into Germany, Curry’s self-confidence slumped. Struggling to sleep – and plagued by anxiety dreams when he did – he could see nothing clearly except the certainty of failure.
‘He started to get a bit depressed at that particular point,’ recalls Alison Smith. ‘He was uptight with the fact that he hadn’t been able to train the new programme enough. He also didn’t think the NSA wanted him there because he was gay.’ To lift him, Curry had summoned Heinz Wirz from Switzerland; and from New York, Nancy Streeter and her daughter Ellen were already on their way. For once, whatever happened next, he would not be alone.
After the silent ritual of the school figures, Curry was lying fourth. After the short programme of compulsory jumps, he’d dropped down to sixth. No one had ever seen him skate so badly. No one had the remotest idea why. Only a brilliant free skate could save his pride, but Curry – in his own words – was now ‘paralysed with fear’, unable even to recall the steps to his own salvation.
High in the packed stands of the Munich Olympiahalle, Nancy and Ellen Streeter looked down in disbelief. ‘It was agonising. It was like he was going around and around in slow motion. Mum and me were horrified. He just got worse and worse and then gave up right there. Awful. I was amazed he even got seventh,’ says Ellen.
As the East German skater Jan Hoffman kissed his gold medal, Curry told Ed Mosler that he could no longer accept his money. He was quitting. It was over. Calmly, Mosler told him: ‘There were a few moments in that programme that I thought were exceptionally beautiful.’
My reaction was that there could not have been one-thousandth of a second that was all right. Mr Mosler insisted that there were a few moments which he described as some of the most beautiful skating he had ever seen. Unconvinced, I told him that I was sorry that I had wasted his money and that I could not accept any more of it and that I was going to give up.
It was a full-blown crisis without any obvious cause. According to Meg Streeter, Nancy’s youngest daughter, Curry later alluded to ‘something traumatic that had happened to him the night before; something on a personal level that had unravelled him’. According to Curry himself – in one uncorroborated account – the unravelling had been caused unintentionally by his brilliant Canadian shadow, Toller Cranston.
After attending a preview of Cranston’s Munich programme the previous evening, Curry claimed he had found himself ‘choking back sobs’, having ‘just witnessed the future of skating’. ‘He [Cranston] was dressed in black and was in white face make-up with a tear painted on one cheek. For four minutes he skated like someone possessed.’ By the following day – in front of thousands of spectators – Curry’s veneer of superiority had dissolved. Just as it had done in Toronto three years before.
‘Did John see my programme beforehand?’ asks Cranston. ‘I have not a clue. I was in my own bubble and I was also hanging by a thread, as I had so bombed in school figures.’ Nevertheless it would be Cranston not John Curry who dazzled Munich. Theatrical, thrilling, unconventional, his performances crushed not only the Briton but everyone around him. Although it had earned Cranston only a bronze, the Canadian’s visionary athleticism had plundered Curry’s bearings. A black despair settled on the Englishman’s camp. ‘The day after the competition my mother and I had lunch with him,’ recalls Ellen Streeter.
He had this depression over him. Everyone was like doom and gloom at the table. No one knew what to say. No one was talking. John just had his head down and I blurted out that I had a new boyfriend and I was going to live with him in Atlanta. John looked horrified. So did my mum, so we ended up talking about that and not skating.
A few days later, back in Manhattan, Nancy was still deeply concerned about what Curry might do. In New York, she’d known only happy John. His darkly troubled alter ego had come as a shock. In a letter to Heinz Wirz she wrote : ‘His skating in Munich and his state of mind are still very baffling to me and I suspect they are to him too … I was able to say [to John] that I hoped he would not make any decision right away and would consider all the possibilities.’
As he stood alone in Munich airport, Curry’s resistance to one of those ‘possibilities’ was under assault. Twice before he’d turned down Holiday On Ice. Now, just a few hours before flying to London, they’d sought him out again. In a hastily scribbled note to Heinz, Curry explained what was happening: ‘Skee Goodheart [the owner of Holiday On Ice] talked me into going to Paris today as his guest … I must admit it is very flattering … I wish I had someone with me. I’m such a babe in the forest of wolves and bears.’
After two days of corporate arm-twisting – and a ringside seat at an ice show – Curry remained unconvinced. ‘I saw the show and can honestly say it was awful. All the skaters were totally blank of any expression. The costumes were dreadful, lighting was ill-planned … the sets were laughable … there is more dignity working in any job no matter how little one earns than in being in one of those shows.’
After an evening meal in the company of a skating dwarf, Curry had seen enough. Despite an offer of $500 a week, they could shove their razzle-dazzle. ‘It was fun but only highlighted the sordid sort of life one has to lead in an ice show. There is no beauty or refinement in this life, only brashness, vulgarity and tastelessness.’
Two weeks later, Curry’s post-Munich despair deepened. If Paris had been depressing, the post-Championship tour was worse. Seething with resentment, he expressed his angst in his correspondence:
It is such a bore to travel alone, without a friend, without a lover or anything … Next week I should go to Italy, then on to Japan to the USA to Sweden. That would mean me being away a whole month with skaters. Well, I’m not going to go … Why should I spend even one hour of my life wandering over the globe with a group of people who mean less than nothing to me? I’d rather be miserable in peace at home. I’m fed up with skating and skaters. They are such an artless bunch of morons.
Within days Curry was heading back to London, desperate for a tonic. For some time, fissures had been opening in his friendship with Alison Smith. Munich had undoubtedly widened them. A few months before, he’d told Nancy: ‘I’ve had enough from Alison. FULL STOP. If the worst comes to the worst, I’ll live in a hotel.’ Now he was crammed unhappily into a new bedsit listening to the stereo record player Nancy had provided for him. ‘I must say I’ve been a bit blue lately,’ he admitted. ‘I guess that living alone takes getting used to just like everything else.’
It was hopeless. Nothing he did seemed to lift his spirits. Even a trip to see his mother had plunged him further downwards. ‘Coming here is like taking a sidestep out of my real life – there is so little here with which I can identify. It is eight years since I lived at home and naturally one grows away. Here I mark time.’ And later: ‘Every now and then I get a huge fit of the blues over the Munich skating and I feel retched [sic] – really retched.’
By April, he’d had enough. Popping a letter in the post to Nancy, he made his way to his Manhattan bolt-hole via an exhibition skate in Japan. ‘Please try and understand how I feel. I’m totally panic-stricken. I’ve never doubted my skating like this. I am sorry that nothing has gone to plan but I hope that when I arrive in New York I’ll feel more like myself and not the failure I feel myself just now.’
By 19 April he was with the Streeters. He would stay with them for three desperate months. ‘He was good at running away,’ says Penny Malec.