If it hurt Rita that John was choosing New York over Birmingham, she would never say. On every measure, her son’s choice made absolute sense, but – despite Rita’s now permanently brave face – her dismay must have been intense. The boy she’d driven to 6 a.m. skating lessons, with a winter coat slung over her nightie, was passing over the Atlantic horizon. ‘I’m sure John was often rough with Rita,’ thinks Penny Malec. ‘He talked about how difficult she was to separate yourself from.’
Without fail she would always get a Valentine’s Day card from him – likewise a note at Christmas and birthdays – but her Sutton Coldfield maisonette was no match for either Nancy Streeter’s Manhattan apartment or her intuitive, artistic instincts. And unlike Nancy, she could rarely even afford to watch John skate in Europe. ‘If there was jealousy then, somehow they all got past it,’ thinks Meg Streeter. ‘Mum and Rita had a good relationship. She came here, and Nancy went there.’
From the spring of 1974, however, New York effectively became Curry’s permanent home. There would be very little room in it for his yesterdays. ‘Nancy loved him and took him in,’ explains Penny Malec. ‘They were very rich – which he liked – and gave him the sort of life which he thought he ought to be living. I would also say he had more of a home life with the Streeters in New York than he did anywhere else.’
For almost the first time in 17 years, he’d packed away his skates. No early calls. No school figures. No barking coaches. Just occasionally, he’d slip across to the Sky Rink, where the paying public would stand back in awe, but Curry’s energies were mostly consumed by dance. If a class was recommended, he’d try it; modern, classical or jazz. If a ballet came into town, he’d be in the audience. Nothing stood still in New York anyway.
‘Being such an up and down person it is strange to feel so tranquil and at ease,’ Curry confessed. ‘I have the feeling that this is going to be one of the golden years of my life. In a way it is frightening to be so happy because one knows it cannot last.’
Energy seemed to flow down New York’s avenues and straight back into his feet. To expiate it, he joined a gymnastics class at the New York Athletics Club. He watched Nureyev dance at the city’s Metropolitan Opera House. He gaped at Anthony Dowell and Antoinette Sibley and swooned at ‘three pas de deux which moved me more than any dancing I’ve ever seen’. Back in London with Alison Smith he’d often melted at Fonteyn, but this was different. In New York he felt liberated. In Britain, he’d felt crushed.
From very early on, Nancy had known what Rita did not. ‘I wasn’t his mother and we are New Yorkers,’ she explained. ‘We take it as it comes.’ In the beginning, needing her to understand – but possibly lacking the courage to spell it out – he’d given her a copy of Maurice, E. M. Forster’s tale of homosexual yearning. Not for the first time, or the last, Curry was employing code to avoid direct revelations. ‘We were not so close that he felt he could always open up to me. However, I did sometimes find that John, and also many of his friends, found it easier to talk about their lives with someone who was not so close. It was a lonely existence, I guess.’
Incrementally the picture also cleared for Nancy’s three daughters. Ellen had found John’s copy of Maurice on her mother’s bedside table and started reading it. ‘Before then I really didn’t get that men and women could be attracted to each other.’ Gradually, and with no discomfort, the penny had dropped.
The Streeters embraced John emphatically, and without judgement. New York – on a grander scale – had done the same. With every visit he’d loved it more. Cushioned from Manhattan’s darker corners, Curry saw only a city proud of its artistic pretentions. In New York it was all right to talk about ballet or dance. Better still, it was all right to be gay. After two months, Curry’s post-Munich blues had blown away and he was charged with fresh conviction.
‘There was something about his single-mindedness which was compelling,’ recalled Nancy. ‘But it was so important that he got things right in his head. Not the feet. If you have the capability but not the mindset, it won’t happen.’
With barely 18 months to go to the 1976 Olympics, Curry’s challenge was a formidable one. In Munich, his ‘head’ had reduced him to a hopeless quiver; his school figures – the mandatory shape tracings in the ice – remained inconsistent; and although his free-flowing programmes were admired they still fell short of the technical standards required. Jumping wasn’t a choice, it was an obligation, and he would win nothing until it was mastered. Those that he could do he often performed desultorily and the triple loop – in which the skater takes off and lands from the same backward edge – was still beyond him.
In the time that remained – with the right team – Curry believed he could eliminate all these deficiencies. But, as he surveyed his options in mid-1974, the biggest obstacle to success seemed insurmountable. In the Munich World Championships the winner, Jan Hoffman, had been East German. The runner-up, Sergei Volkov, was a Russian. In the previous year the top three places had gone to government-sponsored skaters from Eastern bloc countries. In 1972 – and in every European Championship since 1969 – the outcome had been virtually the same. By the tiniest of increments, skaters like Curry – and Toller Cranston – were slowly changing the game. But between them and success was an Iron Curtain they somehow had to dismantle.
It wouldn’t be easy. While no one doubted the ability of Eastern bloc skaters, the outcome of few sports seemed as vulnerable to abuse as figure skating. Traditionally, scores had been awarded by a panel based on each member’s subjective appraisal of a performance. Finding nine judges capable of doing this impartially seemed impossible. Under pressure, many appeared too afraid to shed partisan affiliations. To neutral onlookers – and growing television audiences – the results could often be baffling. On the same night that mediocrity struck gold, virtuosity could vanish without trace.
Everyone had their explanations, but most Western skaters – and Curry was no different – believed corruption was poisoning their sport.
‘It isn’t Bill versus Joe,’ he claimed in 1976.
It’s Britain versus East Germany or Czechoslovakia … The judges are judging the countries unfortunately. They can’t do it to an absolutely blatant degree but if there’s any room at all where they can fiddle it [they do]. If there are five Eastern judges judging … you know the Western skater doesn’t stand a chance. The most important day in a competition was the day they drew the judges. I would just sit there counting East, West. One for East Germany. One for UK. And I’d just hope this side won because I knew that I would do well if it did.
For years he’d been offering his elegant alternative to the Soviet tide, and yet still – backed by block-voting – Eastern European athleticism stood in his way. He understood that judges felt safer with the textbook vaulting prowess of men like Volkov. He understood that brilliant showmen like Hoffman ticked all the required boxes. What he couldn’t comprehend was why anyone in their right mind would like watching it. Or how he could permanently tilt the way sufficient judges thought.
‘I don’t think the Russian men can skate,’ he told the BBC.
Of the ones I’ve competed against there isn’t one who has a line in his body. They are technically like bulldozers. They have no refinement. It probably sounds horrible but they are so crude and so unmusical … no quality … I know the Russian skaters better than most and I know how bad they are, and I know that they won’t take a ballet class …
For once, Curry was not entirely alone. After one major tournament, Toller Cranston had branded his Russian rival ‘a hammer thrower’ who had skated ‘like a meat chopper’. The former British judge Sally-Anne Stapleford – a six-times UK ladies champion – thought that most Eastern European skaters showed ‘no passion and no life’. ‘If you took out the jumps and just watched what was left you’d be bored to tears,’ she suggests. ‘Music meant nothing. Light and shade meant nothing. Skating is not just a sport. It’s an artistic sport.’
Imperceptibly, the Soviet monopoly was faltering. Even if some judges demurred, audiences undoubtedly loved Curry’s silky lines. Given the right guidance, despite his three months’ hiatus, Curry might yet turn the waverers around. Steered cleverly by Nancy Streeter, John Curry crept back. ‘I came to the decision that I was not going out of skating through the back door. I was going to make changes. I was going to put right everything that everyone said was wrong with my skating.’
He had scarcely a second to lose. Everything had to be right. No distractions. No weak links. To jump like a winner he would turn to a master. To penetrate the political labyrinth of international judging, he would turn to a legend. Sadly, there would be limited space in this plan for Alison Smith. After almost four years, their partnership on the ice was petering out. Anchored in London by her father’s ill health, Smith felt unable to join her friend in America. And America was clearly where Curry intended to remain. ‘I wasn’t going to leave my father,’ says Smith. ‘I just couldn’t do it, so I said to John, you have to go. Just go … It was extremely difficult.’
Privately, Curry was probably relieved. Events had moved fast in Alison’s absence. Thanks to Ed Mosler’s free-flowing financial support, two of the skating world’s most sought-after luminaries had signed up to his mission. In June he was booked to be in Lake Placid for six weeks with Gus Lussi. By the autumn he was expected in Denver to start work with Carlo Fassi. Both men were giants; and both had stepped enthusiastically into a role that had proved beyond at least five previous incumbents.
The village of Lake Placid – 250 miles due north of New York – is a place of few distractions. Sheltered by the Adirondack Mountains, its 2,600 residents have always favoured physical pursuits over cerebral ones. While its hills are not high, they are unprotected from the north and, during the endless winters, Whiteface Mountain invariably lives up to its name. For decades, Lake Placid has been a magnet for fresh-faced action-seekers and since the 1930s, for skaters with gold on their minds, it has been a place of work.
Like Perren and Gerschwiler, Gustave François Lussi had been born in Switzerland. As a child he’d wanted to be a ski jumper, but had lost his nerve after a fall. In 1915, aged 17, he’d emigrated to the United States, washing dishes in a Manhattan hotel before taking the skills he’d learned on a frozen Lake Lucerne up to the fast-growing winter resort of Lake Placid. By 1924 he’d mentored his first champion. By 1932, he was watching the luminous Norwegian figure skater Sonja Henie win Olympic gold on the ice where he now coached. By the late 1940s he’d refined a method of teaching that had aspirants begging him to stop hunting moose and tell them what to do.
Sequestered in the Adirondacks, Lussi hadn’t just embellished the skating manual, he’d rewritten it. His spins were so fast it was said NASA sought him out seeking solutions to the nausea suffered in orbit. Together with his American protégé, Dick Button, the Swiss guru had fabricated entirely new techniques and jumps – the flying camel and the flying sit spin, the two-and-a-half aerial turns of the double axel, and in 1952 the world’s first three-revolution jump, the triple loop.
Just three days before his death – aged 95 in 1993 – Lussi was still giving lessons. ‘Dedication beyond feeding, sleeping or living’ was all he demanded. ‘If you are great enough, you are going to win.’ It was precisely what John Curry needed to hear. The perennial question when he arrived in Lake Placid on 16 June 1974 was whether John Curry would listen. What followed, however, was little short of a sporting miracle.
At 75, Gus Lussi didn’t believe in wasting time, not when there were animals to track, edelweiss to plant and antiques to collect. On their first morning together, Curry was ordered to run through his jumps. ‘He was far from impressed … and told me bluntly we would have to start again from scratch. You can’t put a roof on a faulty foundation [said Lussi]. So, deeply chastened, I agreed to go back to square one.’
The following day, Curry was led out across the town’s vast Olympic rink to a marked-off section of ice ‘no larger than an average sitting room’. Expecting to stretch out and soar, the Briton was confined. Until he could perform flawless rotating jumps inside this 20 × 30ft ‘box’, nothing else would happen. Lengthy run-ups were forbidden. Momentum could be generated only within the designated patch. Lussi, surely, was senile. ‘Triple jumps on a piece of ice I could not have fitted a school figure on to; what trick was this? There began then, on that portion of ice, a most drastic reassembling of everything I had been taught.’
It was as unceremonious as it was ingenious. Not even when he was a child had Curry fallen like this. Thirty or 40 times a day he clattered to the ice in an undignified heap. Every night, as he nursed his battered rump, he cursed this latest in his collection of ageing Swiss sadists. Every day, the same challenges confronted him. How could he attain elevation using only muscular coordination? ‘My embarrassment knew no bounds … nearby were ten-year-old girls doing things which seemed beyond [me]. I fell and I fell and I fell.’
After three weeks, Curry was in despair. ‘The evenings away from the rink were spent in abject misery thinking about the misery on the rink.’ Even the simplest jumps were now failing him. Five years before, he would have walked. Somehow in Lake Placid, against all his instincts, he was still clinging on. ‘John realised that he was never going anywhere unless he did this,’ explains Haig Oundjian. ‘That’s the power of the spirit. The spirit that says you can rise up. John said, “I have to change myself to do this.” It’s a huge life-changing moment.’
And when it came, the moment was sublime. As he prepared to quit, Curry threw himself into a jump that had thwarted him for days. For the first time he seemed to hang magically in the air, allowing his rising body to complete two rotations before landing sweetly on his extended leg. From behind him he heard a single pair of hands clapping. It was Lussi … ‘watching me with just the suggestion of a smile at the corner of his normally stern mouth. “Good,” he said simply, “now we can begin.”’
For the first time in a month Curry was smiling again. Living in Lake Placid had suited him. Although it was summer, and the snows were long gone, he’d thrived on his own in the mountains. In his room he played Mozart and Leonard Cohen. At the weekends, the town’s orchestra gathered beside the lake to play tunes from their classical repertoire. All through July, hikers and fishermen filled the hotels, and, as the snowline retreated, the air buzzed to the sound of carnivorous flies and chainsaws.
Since so few of Lake Placid’s rustic charms challenged his concentration, Curry built swiftly on his first gravity-defying moment of flight. By the end of summer, his entire jumping technique had been dismantled, rebuilt and enhanced. Lussi’s stipulated mission statement – dedication beyond living – had been met unconditionally. Rarely had Curry gone so long without a flounce.
Working with the septuagenarian visionary had done more than refashion his skating. It had refreshed his temporarily deflated ego. ‘All those people who had giggled at me began giggling less and looking more. I was no longer told that at my age it was impossible to change. I had changed. Mr Lussi’s trick had worked.’ The peculiar thing was that in their six weeks together, Curry had only ever seen Lussi in shoes, never skates. And rarely, in all his later years, would anyone else.
Oddly, it would be Alison Smith who bore first witness to the refashioned John Curry. After their split she’d taken a senior coaching job at Jaca in the shadow of the Spanish Pyrenees. And since they’d parted on good terms, John travelled from New York to join her in Spain in early August. ‘She has never looked so well,’ he wrote. ‘She is brown as a berry … her skin is clear and her hair looks healthy again.’ After just a few days, however, he was already beginning to doubt the wisdom of his visit.
In Lake Placid, with Gus Lussi, Curry had controlled himself. Working alongside Alison Smith – now more a friend than a coach – the scarcely buried diva was stirring. ‘Today, for the first time I felt myself slip again and recognised the old traits,’ he told Heinz. ‘It is awful to feel the tranquillity of the last few months just melting away.’ Alone in the Adirondacks, Curry had found inner balance. He couldn’t let it slip now.
These last few months have been among the best of my life. I’ve lived in great style, in beautiful places, skating to my heart’s content … being away from Alison and Richmond has been very calming. Being away from the gay world has also had a very soothing effect.
It is not Ali’s fault and it is not mine either. It is just the way of it … but I feel she is a child playing in an adult world. It seems unnecessarily cruel. I hate the way I am. There are some good aspects but they are not nearly good enough to make up for all the rest. There is more debt than credit in my account.
For three weeks, Curry and Smith persevered. Just enough of their old chemistry remained intact and Curry’s devils were invariably hushed when he was skating. With Alison’s help, he finally mastered the triple toe loop. Working alone, he’d also plotted a new routine. ‘It is very modern, athletic and highly masculine in form,’ he told Heinz. ‘As it is I shall probably lend it that special curry flavour of half-baked effeminate slush that has characterised all my other works.’
As the sun sizzled over Jaca’s medieval walls, Curry deepened his tan and made plans to visit England. Rita had booked a summer cottage in Cornwall. His brother Andrew would be joining them there. On the way, John had stopped in London, firing off a letter to Nancy before catching the train to Penzance. ‘Spending those few days in London made me realise how few friends I have there,’ he wrote, later adding: ‘I know that I do cut myself off from people and that having done this for all these years it is not surprising I now find myself rootless in the big city.’
In Cornwall, Curry’s memories returned to his childhood. Rita had rented the clifftop bungalow near Sennen, which they’d stayed in 20 years before. Inside, running hot water had replaced bedroom bowls and basins. Outside, the sweeping view of the bay was unchanged. ‘This is a house that I’d one day like to own,’ he told Nancy. ‘It is very modest but has a truly happy feeling to it. I cannot remember my father ever being here and when I think back on times spent here they are simply good times.’
By day, Rita and her two sons would walk the sands and watch the waves roll in from America. At night, John would compose childlike doodles of Hell’s Angels in leathers and post them to Switzerland, replete with familiarly gloomy contemplations:
There are so many awful people everywhere; the gumblie bumbliness of people is dreadful … Living on a boat in the middle of a silent sea and having special friends on very short visits every now and then would be fine. But the visits would have to be short … Your nasty friend. John
It was perhaps as well he was due back in the United States. In Spain, and then England, he’d begun drifting back towards the undertow. On 6 September, Curry flew into JFK airport, picked up a hire car and pointed it west towards the Rocky Mountains. Although he’d rarely travelled outside New York State, no one questioned the scale of his mission. Three days, and 1,800 miles later, he was standing under the Colorado sun with the great Carlo Fassi. ‘It would be no more than the truth to say that at that time I did not like Mr Fassi and Mr Fassi did not like me. We shook hands without either of us smiling … and then I departed to settle in.’
With his dark sideburns, deep-set eyes and Italian breeding, Carlo Fassi had the unblinking flamboyance of a Mafia don. It was a look that suited him well. Carlo Fassi was a player and John Curry had met his match. Born in Milan in 1929, he’d been the Italian champion ten times and a European champion twice before settling in the Dolomites to mould young female skaters into winners. One of them – a fair-haired German girl called Christa von Kuczkowski – had become his wife.
Side by side, Carlo and Christa had developed their coaching skills together, and by the early 1960s they’d swapped the jagged peaks of northern Italy for the Rocky Mountains of Denver and Colorado Springs. After a plane crash had robbed the United States of many of its leading skaters and coaches, the Fassis were deemed vital to the sport’s domestic recovery. By 1968 they’d groomed their first US Olympic champion in the form of 16-year-old Peggy Fleming. By 1974, they had John Curry racing halfway across America to be gilded by their Midas touch.
Simply to be in their presence would help him. Judges took notice of who was on the Fassi roster and who was not. Carlo always made sure of that. In a sport infected by politics, Fassi was a master politician; a professor of spin. Every national judge knew who he was and he knew every national judge. No one dared to ignore him and at major tournaments Fassi prowled backstage tirelessly, gathering information and raw intelligence with forensic zeal.
Since he was fluent in several languages, few judges escaped his Lombardian charm. Fassi could speak perfect German to a judge on his left, while smooth-talking an English judge to his right. Nor did he care on which side of the Iron Curtain he was operating. ‘The East Germans were our greatest rivals but he was unafraid of them,’ remembers one of his American champions. ‘At competitions [there] he would walk right up to their judges and referees and ask, “What’s the talk?”, “What’s in now?”, “What are you looking for?”’
Fassi was smart because he had to be. In a sport of fine margins plagued by suspect judging, every nugget of gossip was precious. Every slender opportunity to promote one of his skaters had to be grabbed. If a little gamesmanship could give him an edge, then so be it. Even Alison Smith, now watching ruefully from afar, deferred to his guile. ‘John made the right move at the right time because it was all politics then and Carlo was the politician,’ she says.
Whether Curry actually liked Carlo Fassi was immaterial. By September 1974, he was going nowhere without him. Whatever pleasure John had taken from baiting Arnold Gerschwiler would not be repeated on the Italian. Where Gerschwiler had been old school and weak, Fassi was streetwise and shrewd. In tandem with Christa – 16 years younger than her husband – he was also a brilliant coach; every bit as meticulous about the details of skating as he was about the politics. ‘My husband was a little bit hesitant at the beginning but he really learned to love him,’ says Christa. ‘We’d been worried he might be a little highly strung – high-maintenance – but he really was not at all.’ Provided he behaved, Curry could not have been anywhere better.
Sitting a mile above sea level, on the western edge of the High Plains, Denver is a city of sunshine. In the long summers, the streets can fry at 41°C. From October to April, snow growls through the southern Rockies, dumping over 50 inches even in a quiet year, very little of which stays long. Even when the sun is not shining, the warm chinook winds melt it quickly. It was an environment well matched to Curry’s oscillating psyche. Within a few days of unpacking his skates, the mutual anxiety that had preceded his arrival was vanishing fast.
In the thin mountain air, Curry blossomed. Everything the Fassis did seemed to have a purpose. Consistency suited him. Routine kept anxiety at bay. ‘I started to feel marvellously alive,’ he enthused. At any one time the couple would be working with around half a dozen students. If Carlo was busy with one of them, Curry would work with Christa. Likewise, when Christa was busy he’d train with Carlo. Nothing was left to chance. Neither of them, Curry soon realised, was any softer than the other.
Sometimes on the ice Mr Fassi would look at something I’d done and say: ‘This is a really hexellent figure. Hexellent! Hexcellent’. And invariably Mrs Fassi would then say something like: ‘Oh no no. Just look down here. There’s a slight double line; just here. Look Carlo’. I could not get past her with anything.
For the first time in years, Curry’s behaviour was blemish-free. There was a steeliness about Carlo which compelled him to silence. Although he was by nature laid-back – and a master of savagely funny anecdotes – his languid manner concealed a formidable Latin temper. The meteoric American teenager Dorothy Hamill – a student of Fassi’s at this time – had good cause to remember it. In the middle of a training session, after ‘acting like a temperamental spoiled brat’, Fassi had ripped her music from the rink-side record player and ‘flung it across the ice like a Frisbee’.
Like Curry, Dorothy Hamill had found relief from family tension on the ice. Like Curry, her father had been a hard-drinking undiagnosed depressive. Just for once, the British skater had met someone whose childhood appeared almost as compromised as his own. Under the Colorado sun, the peevish teenager from Connecticut and the fine-spoken 24-year-old from Solihull made a connection. Quietly, under the watchful eye of the Fassis, both of them were being calmed in the presence of a ‘new’ family.
Although Curry had his own apartment, he’d become a welcome fixture at the Fassi’s home. Dorothy Hamill was the same. ‘Christa loved being a mom and homemaker and every night there was a family dinner in their house,’ she wrote in her autobiography.
They had two children at the time. Everyone was expected to pitch in and help, including me. Life at the Fassis’ gave me a first glimpse into how normal happy families behave … I didn’t feel homesick for my own family because our home life had never been quite like this.
By mid-autumn, Curry’s sense of wellbeing was being expressed in superlatives. ‘Ecstatically happy,’ he said. ‘Skating could not have seemed easier … Perfect ice, and Mr Fassi always in the same mood; a half-wit could have done it. All I had to do was skate, and perhaps for the first and only time in my life, skating was absolutely easy for me. Even in New York it had never been so easy.’
The Fassis, too, seemed delighted. ‘When we knew him he was always alone,’ says Christa. ‘I’m almost sure the years he spent with us were the best years in life. I had kids and he loved them just as they loved him. He cooked. He was always there. He’d fix stuff. He was family. This was when he was happiest.’
The British wunderkind Robin Cousins understood perfectly why Curry was so content. Some years later, when John was dazzling Broadway, it would be Robin’s turn to pursue Olympic glory, and, like his older shadow, he too reached out to Carlo and Christa. The Fassis, he said, never imposed their own artistic vision. They had no need to show Curry how to skate. Their job was to teach him how to win.
We were all taught to work with what we had to offer. Carlo would package and hone what you wanted to do. He’d also manipulate you without you really knowing you were being manipulated. He’d say, do what you want to do but do it the way the judges will appreciate it. There was no reason not to trust them implicitly. You felt you could not be in better hands.
It would work for Robin Cousins. In Lake Placid – watched by Gus Lussi – Cousins won his Olympic gold in 1980. Back in 1974, however, as the winter tournament season approached, Curry still had much to do. In the Adirondacks, Lussi had tackled the deficiencies in Curry’s jumping. Inside the Colorado Ice Arena – charging his student just $9 for a 20-minute session – Carlo Fassi was preoccupied by Curry’s recalcitrant school figures; a discipline that made even the steeliest competitors quite so nervous.
Surrounded by nine judges – in chapel-like silence – skaters traced designated shapes in the ice. If the blade wobbled, the shape was lost. If the trailing foot dragged it might scuff, or damage, the line of the figure. Even the sound of the blade on the ice would indicate mediocrity. A clean single note invariably came from a perfectly sliced pattern beneath an upright blade. If the foot trembled, slicing shavings from the ice, judges were drawn to the tell-tale rasp. ‘Figures are like scales to a piano player,’ says ex-judge Sally-Anne Stapleford. Finally, John Curry appeared reconciled to their mystic cadences.
If it was Fassi who engineered this mellowing, it was a master stroke. Further afield, however, there was even better news. Under pressure, figure skating’s lawmakers had belatedly acknowledged the absurdities of their rules. During the early 1970s, the much-derided school figures had been worth 40 per cent of a skater’s final mark. In 1976 – precisely when John would be at the Innsbruck Olympics – that value would be lowered to 30 per cent. Another 20 per cent of the score would come from the short technical programme and the remaining 50 per cent would be determined by the extended musical routine upon which Curry had always lavished such time. It was a small but significant shift. If the paying public wanted to be entertained – and they did – then the odds were moving decisively in Curry’s favour.
Up in the mountains, as snow began to fall, Curry’s sense of wellbeing persisted. A young family who shared the same apartment block had welcomed him as a friend, and in breaks between lessons Curry would help their two young children build crude igloos and grinning snowmen. ‘That was as much a family life as the Fassis [for him],’ recalls Dorothy Hamill. ‘She would cook for him and have a cup of tea with him when her kids were at school. I’m sure it was lonely for John, because it was for me and I was there with my mom.’
It was only in the long evenings that Curry’s composure faltered. Mindful of his reputation, the Fassis had lodged him in rooms directly across from the rink. There could be no excuses for tardiness, but the arena was out of town and Curry’s social options were limited. ‘I’ve just heard La Traviata on the wireless,’ he told Nancy. ‘Oh I’m so happy I have that lovely black box – a voice in the wilderness.’ Eventually Carlo Fassi would lend him a television, but the city’s gay scene had eluded him. The occasional snowball fight with his neighbour’s kids was about as good as it got.
‘I am at home feeling very lonesome and frustrated. The rink and my apartment is way out of town,’ he told Heinz.
My Nun of Richmond days may be over but now I’m the Hermit of Denver. My lessons with Mr Fassi are really great. I like him even though I should not like him at all … The only possible distraction is that there are no distractions. I do 4 figure patches every day and 2 free skating sessions. And that is IT. If I did not work myself to a standstill, I’d be very unhappy here … when I was in London and New York I did not go out either. Sometimes I wonder if it is all worth it.
After six months as a ‘hermit’ he was about to find out. In early December, Curry travelled to London to defend his British title. Only Robin Cousins came close. Two weeks later he was back in New York to spend Christmas with the Streeters. Once again, his mood rocketed skywards. ‘New York looked so beautiful. I’ve never loved that city more,’ he told Heinz. ‘Sometimes I feel I shall burst with shear [sic] ecstasy. When I’m there, there is a voice whispering in my ear – “Here, anything is possible, there is always a chance, always a chance”. One day I shall live in New York.’
In a thank-you letter to Nancy Streeter he was no less ecstatic: ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been sadder to leave the city than I was this time. It was so strong a feeling I could have very easily have just said “No, I won’t go”. It is strange that I am so enchanted with New York. I love being with you. I love being a part of your family.’
Manhattan had worked its seasonal magic. By mid-January he’d returned to the High Plains, enjoying a delirious surge of energy he couldn’t quite explain. ‘Mr Fassi and Mrs Fassi and I; no problems,’ he told Heinz. There were just two weeks left before the 1975 European Championships in Copenhagen and he had never felt fitter or happier.
Everything here goes well and I’m so happy skating and skating my heart out. This is what I’ve wanted all my life and the most wonderful thing about it is that now I have it I want it even more. I am so lucky to have this wonderful love in my life and even luckier to be able to live it out like this.
I don’t know where my energy comes from. I do six or even more [school figures] patches per day and I free skate twice and I still want to do more and more. Stamina here [at altitude] is very difficult … I am running to help my condition … We have been lucky in our lives haven’t we? Keep well. Love John.
Only one thing blackened this otherwise serene horizon. Shortly before Christmas he had written to Alison Smith in Spain. Although she was surely in no doubt, Curry informed her that he would be travelling to Copenhagen with the Fassis, and that her role as his coach was formally over.
‘It was not an easy decision to reach and not an easy letter to write … she has done so much for me as a person and a skater. As yet I have not heard from [her]. She must be upset but I still feel I’m right.’ Satisfied that he had acted correctly, Curry, Carlo and Christa made their final preparations for Denmark. It would be the first significant test of his progress. Unless he’d managed to shake Munich out of his system, he was finished.
As a teenager, John Curry’s physique had been impressive. In his twenty-fifth year it was a form worthy of Michelangelo. Where other skaters had bulk, Curry had line. The torso was perfectly triangular, descending from straight shoulders to a waist that allowed no fat. The legs were long – although he decried them as short – encased in muscle which was conspicuous but never grotesque. It was a body designed for grace, not feats of brute strength.
It was typical of John Curry that he could never see it like this. ‘I’m the wrong shape for a skater,’ he later told the BBC. ‘Long body and short legs. There are certain movements that no matter how I twist myself they just look horrible. We have to disguise this as best as we can. There are certain movements which exaggerate the length of your leg and there are certain movements which make them look shorter. What you wear makes a tremendous difference.’
Curry’s attention to detail had always been impressive. It was inevitable this would extend to his costumes. For years, his letters had been festooned with sketches, for shirts and dancing suits. While ‘guarding against any blatant hint of indecency’, he understood the challenge: to appear in outfits that complimented his music (and his shape) but gave no ammunition to his nameless critics. It was an almost impossible line to walk.
Curry’s instincts were stylish and minimalist; blacks and blues in preference to the sport’s prevailing obsession with ‘sequins, spangles and nylon lace sleeves’. Had he opted for the glitter, Curry’s fragile stock would have fallen. By choosing to ignore it, he merely opened himself up to more criticism. It was a dilemma even the fastidious Fassis had overlooked.
Curry’s bid for European gold in Copenhagen had started well. After the school figures – for which he’d chosen plain black trousers, gloves and a thick sweater – he was among the medals. The following day, in the short free-skating programme, Curry opted for an outfit he’d designed himself, a tight-fitting electric-blue leotard and trousers overpainted with a white ‘vapour trail’ spiral, which uncurled around his body from the right wrist to the hip.
When Curry entered a spin – he was skating to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring – he looked like a dazzling human top. When he came off the ice, to giddy applause, he was lambasted by officials of the International Skating Union: ‘I was told that I must not wear the costume again as it had influenced the judges against me. The form-fitting line, which was entirely innocuous, had startled them’.
Alongside Alison Smith, he’d found himself in similar situations. Either his music had been too ‘faggy’ or his skating had been too ‘feminine’. ‘We didn’t tell people to fuck off in those days, though,’ says Alison. ‘We were taught to respect authority and that’s what we did.’ Carlo Fassi was the same. Realpolitik was his middle name. With just his long free programme to go, Curry had fallen back to sixth. The ‘vapour trail’ outfit had to go. In the hours before his final skate, out came his ‘good old navy-blue’.
Between them, Fassi and Curry had fixed it. Placated by his costume change, the judges devoted their attention to the Briton’s subtle brilliance. Five minutes later he was clutching the silver medal that would yank him back from obscurity. The year before, in Munich, officials had taken Curry to one side and told him he was finished. One performance in Copenhagen had neutralised establishment negativity.
‘It was a sweet moment for me,’ he said; made sweeter still by closer scrutiny of the results. Only the Russian Vladimir Kovalev had bettered him. Floundering in his wake were six skaters from East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. At a critical moment, Curry had driven a wedge into the heart of Eastern bloc dominance. The strategy he’d drawn up in New York the previous summer was working. Gus Lussi had polished the tricks. Carlo Fassi’s endorsement was ripping away the blinkers.
Mr Fassi is wonderful. He intimidates the judges in such a way. Everybody knows he knows more about skating than anyone else. He goes up to them and says. ‘My John. He’s skating so well. You should see this. When he comes out of that triple jump watch how his skates come down. You watch this. You watch that’. The judges have to listen to this barrage but the thing is, they actually do then see it when it comes to the point.
The following month – at the 1975 World Championships in Colorado Springs – Curry won bronze and his renaissance was complete. Two Russians had beaten him, but he was officially the third best skater in the world. It was the fourth-placed Canadian skater, however, who had become Curry’s biggest worry.
Ever since Toronto, Toller Cranston and John Curry had circled each other like respectful boxers. Although connected by a passion for the fine arts, they were distanced by the strictures of competition. ‘John and I were different yet the same,’ explained Cranston. ‘Neither of us was the boy next door. Both of us laughed at ourselves, yet we were both absolutely convinced about our destinies. Unfortunately we wanted the same thing and two people can never win the same Olympic gold medal.’
In tournaments, Cranston’s performances were electrically charged with theatrical emotion and technical risk. Most skaters performing the so-called Russian split jump brought their skates up to their waist. Cranston’s invariably contorted up to his shoulders. ‘Toller was angry. Toller was bizarre. Toller was extremist,’ says Haig Oundjian. ‘John was ballet and classical. Toller was weird, but they were both very artistic … and Cranston was a much better jumper than John.’
In his own words, the Canadian was a ‘mystical child left on the doorstep by folkloric creatures’ who’d gone on to become a ‘self-invented renegade artiste’. Whatever he was, modesty played very little part in it. His autobiography Zero Tollerance opened with a prologue entitled ‘The Genesis of a Legend’. ‘I think of myself as being androgynous,’ he wrote. ‘And not really of this world.’ Like Curry, he’d wanted to be a ballet dancer at the age of six. Like Curry, Cranston had unerring faith in his own rebel instincts. And like Curry he was an imperious national champion.
I felt more, suffered more and tried harder than anyone. I was under a microscope. I lived by extremes. At the same time, I cultivated a persona that exemplified strength and confidence, but it was false. I wasn’t always a victim. Often I invited controversy. I was uninhibited in a day when lack of inhibition was virtually unknown; uninhibited in interpretation, original moves and body language – which I felt was inherently neither male nor female.
The words might have been Curry’s. There were even persistent rumours that Cranston was gay – and that Curry and he had enjoyed a brief fling. ‘I’m not sure they didn’t,’ says Oundjian. ‘He and Toller had a love-hate thing.’ Alison Smith had her suspicions too. ‘Something happened around Munich. I don’t know what it was. They’d had a good friendship but after Munich they were not in each other’s pockets so much. Why? Maybe someone tickled the wrong guy’s stick? I just wouldn’t get involved with it.’ John’s long-time confidant Heinz Wirz, however, thinks not. ‘I would be surprised if they had ever had a love affair,’ he says. ‘I’m convinced John would have told me about it. As far as I remember he didn’t like Toller at all.’
By March 1975, that feeling was entirely mutual. Cranston found his rival’s skating ‘as cold as an iceberg’ and Curry had been badly rattled by the Canadian’s verve. As he collected his bronze at Colorado Springs, the two men could barely look at each other. From what the bemused Canadian could see, his old rival had come down from the Rockies with ‘a disposition makeover’, a ‘Jekyll and Hyde metamorphosis’. ‘Even “good morning” was no longer in his repertoire.’
‘Only a few things have ever intimidated me,’ says Cranston, today a painter living in Mexico. ‘One of them is Rome. The other is John Curry. He always made me feel uncomfortable. At one time I was actually friendly with him and then there was this about-face. He ceased to communicate with anyone. He was austere, aloof, rude, but it was very clever and it pushed the buttons of the other competitors.’
Undoubtedly, Curry had changed. He was still a nervous competitor, but the Fassis had bolstered his fragile self-belief. Emboldened by their rink-side presence, he had developed his otherness into a valuable tool. If his attitude to Cranston had cooled after Munich, it was simply because he’d seen the Canadian outperform him so brilliantly there. The rudeness that blanked Toller Cranston wasn’t a misunderstanding; it was a strategically deployed weapon in Curry’s arsenal.
Beneath the Briton’s icy reserve lay a ruthlessness that Toller would always struggle to match. ‘I was a lousy competitor,’ admits Cranston. ‘Being creative was more important than winning.’ With less than a year to go to the Olympics, his British counterpart had found a way of fusing both. ‘He had the tenacity of a rusty old nail. You can’t be a wimp and be the Olympic champion.’
Curry’s regal demeanour dovetailed perfectly with his grander purpose. Within days of meeting Nancy Streeter, he’d promised to win the Olympics and establish his own company. Toller Cranston’s fatal flaw was that he neither shared, nor needed, such a singular goal. Even before John Curry’s journey to Denver, Cranston claimed the Fassis had approached him offering ‘free lessons, ice time, and even my own car … to defect to Colorado’. If true, the fate of both men might have been different. Out of loyalty to his long-standing Canadian coach, however, Cranston had declined. A few weeks later Curry – with no such qualms – had stepped unknowingly into his place.
For the time being, their rivalry was put on hold. The two former friends – together with Eastern Europe’s finest – would not resume formal combat until the 1976 Winter Olympics and the World Championships, now both less than 12 months away. Before the 1975 ice skating season ended, however, it required one last duty of its star turns.
Curry’s loathing for the annual Tour of Champions was extreme. Everything about it incensed him, from the dreary company of his fellow skaters to its lack of financial reward. ‘He said it felt like they wanted him to be in a circus,’ explains Christa Fassi. ‘He didn’t want to be a circus animal that was paraded around.’ Nevertheless it was Carlo who persuaded Curry to join the springtime tour of the United States, insisting ‘it would be political suicide to refuse to go in the year before the Olympics’. ‘So off I went,’ scoffed Curry, ‘dressed in my sober little black outfits and trying to persuade Toller that I was still his friend.’
By mid-March, after a ‘gruelling succession of one-night stands’, the circus had reached Canada. Nothing about it had softened Curry’s repugnance. In the American venues, audiences had accorded him grudging respect, before showering the ice with bouquets for home-grown stars like Dorothy Hamill. Then, if it were possible, in Vancouver things got even worse.
As Curry stood alone under a spotlight waiting for his music, all he could hear was a chorus of boos. It wasn’t an unknown Englishman these people had paid to see. It was their larger than life Canadian national champion, Toller Cranston, whose every spin was greeted with flag-waving applause. As Curry would later remember it:
They started a steady chant and began to bang their feet on the floor and I could stand it no longer. As I left the ice, an empty Coca-Cola can was hurled at me, and I went to the dressing room, took off my skates and left for the airport. Even if it meant I would not be acceptable to the Olympic Committee, I had no intention of staying any longer. I swore I would never foot in Canada again.
For a few weeks, Curry hid from the flak at the Streeter apartment in New York. Over the years, his private circle of intimates had grown there. More than London, he now regarded the city as his home and Nancy’s discreet presence at both the European Championships in Copenhagen and the Worlds in Colorado Springs had cemented her place at his side. Even that hitherto sunny relationship, however, was fraying at the seams.
With so little to report from west Denver, the skater’s letters to Nancy had become shorter and less frequent. Those that he sent were often either requesting or thanking her for money. During his time in New York, Curry was also torn between his desire to meet men and the importance of not offending his hosts. It was a balance he was signally failing to achieve. In mid-May, shortly before Curry returned to Britain for a brief exhibition tour, the tensions at East 72nd Street broke the surface. In a letter from London, Curry reviewed what had happened:
You feel that the person I was died, and with him died all his feelings and loves. You feel that my love for you has died. In the several talks we have had over these weeks, I have repeatedly told you that is not so Nancy, but still you don’t believe me. Lately you are seeing me for the first time at my own full strength. I’m recovered from my broken heart and my broken skating and my broken mind. And I guess this is me in one piece. You are seeing me lately through less rose-coloured glasses. It is inevitable that as time, YEARS, go by we begin to see one another as the people we are.
Although Nancy’s half of this correspondence has not survived, it isn’t hard to imagine her distress. Curry’s ‘breakfast bombshell’ – as he called it – was not only peevish, it was cruel and devoid of gratitude. ‘I’m not going to appologise [sic] for staying out late and one, or fifty one lovers. In the same way I’m not going to appologise for having brown eyes and skating to ‘Rite of Spring’. This is all me. However I am sorry if I have given you reason to doubt my feelings (and it seems I have).’ As the letter wound up, Curry wrote:
People often say I’m your son – I’ve never felt this is quite the right way of putting it, but there is something I like in it. I think we are friends. However what I’m trying to say is having sons can be as painful as having daughters or mothers. See you very soon Nancy. PS In case you had not noticed this letter is TEN pages long.
By early June, Curry was back in Denver – and his ‘difficult patch’ with Nancy appeared to be over. Once again, however, the skater’s correspondence had dried up. This time, it was Nancy’s turn to pen some home truths. In a letter – now lost – she rounded on her friend for his coldness and neglect. Mortified, Curry sent back a note so stripped of aggression, it read like the confession of a penitent.
You said you felt I’d withdrawn from you and at the same time taken for granted all that you and your family, and the security of your household have given me. Well Nancy, this is a side of myself that I guess I shrink from even thinking about. People have said things like this to me before. Pat Dodd once said to me in an emotionless voice, ‘You are a great user of people, John’. My mother tells me I only like people with money. It is not a terribly attractive picture is it?
In mitigation, Curry blamed sexual boredom and loneliness. ‘Just lately the parts of my life do not fit together. I feel as empty and broken as I’ve ever felt,’ he said, later adding: ‘It’s kind of funny to think that most of the millions and millions of people could never even think of winning a medal in the Olympic games, but most of them can and do find someone to make them feel alive for a while.’
Curry badly needed a break. Under scorching skies, he pointed himself west, passing through the Utah deserts and Las Vegas, before checking into a seaside hotel at Laguna Beach, California. Everything about it thrilled him. At dawn the coast was draped in chilly mist. By mid-morning clean Pacific light had exploded right down along the coastline. Of the five surf-stroked beaches, one was almost entirely gay and, in a joyous letter to Nancy, Curry frothed with happiness:
I’ve never seen so many beautiful people in one place – in fact I’ve never seen such beautiful people anywhere, ever. Perhaps even more sensational is the fact that all these hundreds of people are gay and behaving just as any young people would on a beach. There is lots of flirting and people playing volley ball and frisby [sic], some walking hand in hand, lots of people playing in the surf – everyone just being themselves like anyone else on any beach anywhere except all these people are homosexuals.
He had never seen anything like it. And outside of California – with very few exceptions – nor had anyone else. ‘How good it feels to be oneself in broad daylight, not to be in some dark smoky bar in a deserted backstreet, some time when normal folk are fast asleep.’ For a few days Curry wandered between beach fires and gay pool parties, one hundred-strong: ‘Like a scene from the last days of the Roman Empire (American style).’ When company dried up, he walked for miles through the night along deserted starlit beaches. ‘I’m glad we can be honest with each other,’ he told Nancy. ‘It’s worth a lot isn’t it?’
By the early autumn, after spending several weeks in California ‘the hermit of Denver’ was back in Colorado. For the next six months, allowing himself very little time off, he stuck dutifully to the agreed plan. Only rarely would he deviate; and, when he did, the old private frustrations burst through. In late September he’d found himself in New York fantasising about leather trousers and a place of his own:
Thoughts of giving into my desires took me to a shop called the ‘Leather Man’. The assistant helped me very well and I tried on some trousers. They fitted me well and I felt very good in them, however I thought I’d save the money for my HOME … I had one little adventure but it was difficult to get away from Nancy … Mr Mosler has been very nice to me and we have become friends. His [Manhattan] flat is like a dream come true …
Just as he’d promised in Bratislava, ‘Mr Mosler’ had kept the funds flowing. Curry, in return, had become an industrious – if sometimes, tardy – pupil. ‘John was not the hardest worker,’ says Christa Fassi. ‘But then he didn’t need to be.’ Inside the Ice Arena off West Evans Avenue, it was his unfailing creative intelligence that impressed them the most. ‘Skaters are very immature most of the time,’ she remembers. ‘John was a breath of fresh air.’ Only once in 18 months had he misbehaved. ‘Fortunately, he was smart enough to stay away until he came out of it.’ Fortunately for all of them, the end was getting nearer.
Just one facet of John’s preparation remained unresolved: his nerves. In Colorado Springs, at the World Championships, despite ‘shaking like a leaf in a hurricane’ he’d held it together ‘by pure consciousness and willpower’. There was no guarantee he could do it again. In his own words, ‘something had to be done’.
In the late 1950s Werner Hans Erhard – born John Paul Rosenberg – had been selling cars in St Louis. By the early 1970s he was running a ‘self-empowerment’ empire with centres in Aspen, Honolulu, New York and Los Angeles. In a country with a weakness for the glib platitudes of life-coaching, Werner Erhard had struck pay dirt. He was slick, charismatic, persuasive and an open admirer of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. He was also extremely lucky.
The fast-wilting appeal of flower-power’s sloganeering had beached an entire generation of disillusioned neo-hippies awash with cash. Erhard Seminar Training – or EST as it became known – tapped into both their money and their feelings of post-1960s dislocation. When it all eventually wound up in 1984, amidst accusations of brainwashing, EST had more than 250,000 disciples. Even today, on websites for diehard believers, John Curry is offered as incontrovertible proof of the efficacies of the Erhard way.
At the heart of the EST pitch was a promise to ‘transform one’s ability to experience living’. Reaching that Zenlike state, however, would require students to endure a soul-stripping, four-day course of mind-numbing intensity. Upon arrival, wristwatches would be removed from delegates. The 15-hour daily workshops that followed were punctuated by a single meal break alleviated only by rationed pauses for the toilet.
No one could speak unless spoken to; no water was allowed; delegates were referred to as ‘estholes’; the chairs were famously uncomfortable; and the onstage rhetoric consisted largely of machine-gun aphorisms fired either by the eloquently plausible ex-car salesman from St Louis or his carefully prepped acolytes. ‘What is, is and what ain’t, ain’t’ was one of them. ‘The truth is always and only found in the circumstances you’ve got’ was another.
Few cities were as curious and welcoming as New York. Among Manhattan’s chattering classes, EST was a regular topic of dinner party conversation. Nancy Streeter was an advocate. So were a number of Curry’s friends within the dance world. Urged to try it as a cure for his nerves, John checked in at a Manhattan hotel for an introductory seminar. Despite loathing the people – and the messianic hectoring – he handed over $250 for two full weekends of training. ‘There are rare moments in my life when a course of action seems not only right but inevitable – almost preordained,’ he said. The Olympic preparations would have to wait.
It was an extraordinary impulse. With Carlo Fassi drumming his fingers in Colorado, Curry had gone walkabout. For the next two weeks, instead of carving school figures his prized student would be weeping confessionally among 225 total strangers. ‘True enlightenment is knowing you are a machine’ ran one EST truism, but, amidst the fatuous Californian-style psycho-babble, there were shards of genuine wisdom, which seemed to help the troubled skater.
Erhard’s core mantra was that individuals must take responsibility for what they are; displaying ‘a willingness to acknowledge that [they] are a cause in the matter’. At the emotional climax of the course, ‘students’ in batches of 25 took part in the ‘danger process’, standing silently in line before a vast room of people while EST staff tried to provoke a reaction from each one in turn. ‘The real secret is whether your ego runs your life or you do,’ claimed Erhard. ‘The only way you can transcend your ego is to accept responsibility for it.’
For a controlling individual like John Curry these were pertinent observations. It was also remarkable that he had engaged in such searing, albeit private, disclosure. At the raw heart of his difficulties, EST taught him, were repeat patterns of behaviour over which he should exert command. Since he alone was responsible for switching them on, he should, and could, learn how to switch them off. In the afterglow of epiphany he appeared transformed.
‘It brought me a new kind of freedom,’ he was quoted as saying. ‘I was no longer plagued by nerves … I was buoyant, eager to do my programmes and very sure of myself. Even more important was the fact that I was no longer lonely. I felt high all the time.’ ‘He was completely changed,’ says Heinz, another ‘graduate’ of EST. ‘Absolutely changed. He really was a darling man again. I mean not for long, though. He soon got back into his ways.’
In early December 1975, Curry got his first chance to put EST to the test. The first signs were not good. Back in London he’d retained his British title by a controversial whisker. There’d been no nerves, but he’d skated like a novice. ‘He had a hideous championship, one of the worst skates of his career,’ recalls Robin Cousins. ‘He fell. I beat him in the short programme and the long programme and he still won.’
Everyone knew why. Curry himself had railed against ‘pre-ordered’ results at big tournaments. This time he’d been a beneficiary of them. This close to the Olympics, it would have been unhelpful if Curry had lost. The judges knew Cousins would come again. Their current champion almost certainly would not. Blind eyes had been turned on his mistakes. Publicly, Curry blamed his lacklustre performance on a desire not to peak too soon. Privately, he saw nothing that undermined his faith in EST.
Precisely what had passed between Curry and his American mentors was never divulged. Among friends he would sometimes describe how they’d invited him to pretend that he was either inside a strawberry, or that his blood had been replaced with orange juice. Many years later he was quoted as saying his ‘private thoughts’ had been ‘scattered across the floor for everyone to see’; that ‘a central core of strength’ had emerged afresh from the ‘emotional rubble’. In view of the timing – whatever had happened inside the Hilton Hotel – it was hardly surprising just how deeply Curry had been affected. Almost exactly ten years before, John’s father had been checking into a Paddington hotel with a bottle of chloral hydrate. Given what lay ahead of Curry – and knowing what his father had already missed – the skater’s emotional susceptibility would have been preternaturally high. Quite simply, EST had found him at the right time and – whatever it had done – he would always be thankful for it.
That Christmas, Curry joined the gathering around the tree at the Streeter apartment. With three lively ‘sisters’ around, it was easier to shut things out. ‘John did not like Christmas,’ explains one later confidant. ‘[He] spent most Christmases alone, allowing himself to be coerced only on rare occasion by close friends to do otherwise. I don’t recall why he did not like this particular holiday, but he didn’t. I think all the celebrating was somehow depressing to him.’ From Nancy he got a shirt with the message ‘EST IS BEST’ stitched into the front. ‘There are times when things just don’t add up,’ he told her in an emotional thank-you letter. ‘And at those times I think of you.’
By late December, after dazzling Madison Square Gardens with two exhibition performances, Curry was back in Denver, sporting a tight perm (which his mother loathed) and the gleaming eyes of a zealot. Any irritation the Fassis might have harboured over his absences were never aired. There was no longer any time for recriminations.
Ahead of them, between January and March, they had the European Championships, the Winter Olympics and the World Championships – the most important 50 days of John Curry’s life. Not until it was all over did Carlo Fassi, with an Italian shrug of his shoulders, pass comment on EST: ‘Everybody has got to believe in something, so I let him believe in that,’ he said. As always, the arch-manipulator had played it with style.
With winter approaching, Curry got back to work. There had been more ‘little adventures’ in New York, but nothing serious had gelled. Such would be the pattern of his life. ‘He never really had a soulmate,’ said Nancy Streeter. ‘He was always very sad about this.’ Over the months – after their summer spat – John’s trust in Nancy had strengthened. The vicissitudes of his private life were no secret to her and his struggles would be her constant sorrow.
On New Year’s Eve 1975 in the family’s Manhattan apartment, Nancy Streeter, not for the first time, couldn’t get John out of her mind. Around her were her family. Only the day before, John had rung from his Colorado apartment for a chat. At her side was the plant-holder he’d left for her Christmas present. In return, she was thinking of buying him a new canvas skate bag as a late gift. As the crowds gathered in Times Square to usher in the New Year she picked up her pen:
It is wonderful to see you skating so well. You have a big job to do these next months – but you can do it. You can win, John, and you know you can, and that you want to. It was very good to talk to you yesterday and know that your EST strength has helped you. It is remarkable isn’t it, what EST has done for you in so many ways; that you are so much happier with yourself and with other people; and that you reach out to others is so wonderful.
Even though you have disappointments, and you have had more than your share these last weeks, don’t let them discourage you and draw back in to yourself. This has not been one of the greatest years for me but what you have done, and our friendship are among the good things in it.
Geneva is just around the corner. I am so looking forward to it and will try to be your exemplary friend and skating mother – I will be on my pills so should be calm and collected. Again – happy and successful 1976 – and that means on beyond March for whatever comes in this new year. With my love Nancy xxx
Nobody yet knew it, but ‘on beyond March’, John Curry would be one of the most famous men on the planet.