A New Arena : Ice Capades Star Dorothy Hamill Doesn’t Just Skate in the Show--She Runs It

She’s beautiful, she’s accomplished, and eight times a week, she’s Cinderella in the new Ice Capades production of the fairy tale. What’s more, she owns the company.

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At 37--in her words, “getting up there�--Dorothy Hamill seems to have realized her life’s dream. In fact, she’s realized several great dreams already--an Olympic gold medal, ice-show stardom, a happy family, her own business.

It hasn’t been a rags-to-riches struggle, but it can’t have been easy. Indeed, asked about the possibility of a skating career for her 5-year-old daughter, Hamill’s response is categorically negative: “From Day One,� she says, “I said I would never let her do it.�

In many ways, her experience may be typical for Olympic medalists, who must first become athletic champions and then, overnight, turn that ability into something of value to the world and themselves. At least as a skater, says Hamill, “I was really lucky that I could do something. Some athletes can’t. How could Mark Spitz go on swimming?�

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Hamill’s path from teen-age sensation to mature impresario contains more than a few widely reported twists and turns, including a brief show-business marriage, disputes with various managers and the feeling that her years as a cloistered skating prodigy left her ill-prepared for the grown-up business world.

Things began to change in 1987, when Hamill married Kenneth Forsythe, a sports-medicine doctor. They’d met in Palm Springs, where both had “getaway condos� in the same complex. She was drawn to him because “he looked so much like my ex-husband� (the late actor Dean Paul Martin) and he to her because she “just seemed like such a nice person, which was particularly refreshing because I guess my expectation was, I’d find someone more self-impressed, but she has zero of that.�

Forsythe, 49, has a sports background, having served as an alternate on the Canadian Olympic ski team. He also has a penchant for business, having built, run and then sold a medical software company.

So when the opportunity arose to buy the troubled Ice Capades last spring, they leaped--along with their friend Ben Tisdale, an Alaska businessman.

In substance, they bought “the assets of the bankrupt company,� says Hamill, “a warehouse of old costumes (not as many as I thought), some old ice machines, and the name.�

In essence, Hamill bought freedom.

Finally able to do what she wanted, she changed the show from a revue, a collection of disparate numbers, to a single story, “with original music, a lot of elements of the theater, and most important, the choreography. When I go to be entertained, I want to be taken on a journey; the old Las Vegas format is kind of dead.�

“Cinderella,� the first production of “Dorothy Hamill’s Ice Capades,� made its debut in Tulsa, Okla., in September, and opened its Southland tour in Anaheim last week and moves to the Forum on Wednesday. Forsythe involves himself in the business end, Hamill in the creative, believing that it’s a great advantage “to be a skater and treat the skaters the way they want to be treated--not being abused or taken for granted, and given material they’re proud to be part of.�

At the same time, she’s still a performer--the lead performer--�and while I’m still performing, I like to take the position that I’m just one of them.�

In fact, she says, “I’m still learning new things as a performer, trying to get better, even if it’s in the tilting of a head, the pointing of a toe. I’m not interested in back flips: I’m too old.�

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Hamill won her Olympic gold medal in 1976 at age 19, half a lifetime ago. Her skating was said to be both flawless and seamless: she didn’t signal coming moves, but flowed into her jumps, her spins, her signature “Hamill Camels�--a melding of arabesques and sit spins. She was also small, smiley and equipped with a much-copied wedge haircut--the kind of mien that immediately draws the gushy phrase “America’s sweetheart.�

Behind her success, of course, was training and sacrifice. Youngest of three children of a Pitney Bowes engineer, she grew up in Riverside, Conn., and didn’t don skates till she was 8. Her first pair was her brother’s, or maybe her father’s: “I do know they were brown,� she says.

She was the first serious skater in her family, moving to Colorado by age 15 to train for competition. Her schooling was a combination of tutors, local classes and summer school, and “was very difficult. Education is really very important, and I wish I could go back. I’d like to some day, maybe in business.�

The training was even harder on her parents. At the end, “my dad was about $50,000 in debt and even owed back taxes,� and her mother, who’d moved to Colorado with her daughter, had been away from home for most of six years. “She’d be on her own,� says Hamill, “or she’d just watch, and when I’d go off to school, she’d sit alone in an apartment . . . with no money. Sometimes she had only $5 in her purse, and she’d say, ‘Go get something to eat.’ She probably didn’t eat anything herself.�

Life after winning brings its own problems for Olympians, who have to decide not so much how to “cash in� on their gold medals, but simply what to do with the rest of their lives. For a skater, says Hamill, “the options in those days were the Ice Follies and Ice Capades, or teaching, and I didn’t want that.� Fairly quickly, she chose the Ice Capades and a million-dollar-a-year contract. It was enough to allow her the great pleasure of handing her father her first two paychecks.

With hindsight, she says she chose too quickly: “I was burned out from training, and probably needed a year off. I took a month, and it was filled with seeing managers and agencies, being wined and dined. The first four years out were difficult: It took that long before I became guided again.�

At the outset, she chose a high-powered manager, Jerry Weintraub, and confessed at the time that she was afraid of him. Under his aegis, she took on endorsements (Clairol, Ideal Toy, American Optical) and TV specials. She was given costumes and numbers that she herself thought demeaning, and that critics thought better-suited to a “trained seal.�

Overnight, she “went from sport to entertainment 13 shows a week. As an amateur, you’re pampered, you’re fed, you get massages, 13 hours sleep a night. Suddenly you’re out on the road making a living, you’re doing 13 shows a week, you have to have your suitcases in the lobby at 6 a.m., you have early-morning press conferences, the food is terrible.�

She was also alone and no match for managers or media, which were alternately gushing or scornful: “I was 19 and hadn’t done anything but skate, I wasn’t that educated and was painfully shy, and I had no self-esteem, even though I had an Olympic medal.� Today’s medalists “are savvier. As amateurs, they now have managers and agents and contracts with companies, and we couldn’t do that then. The kids are allowed to make money now, to make commercials.�

The years that followed may have been more guided, but they were hardly smooth. Hamill married Martin, her longtime boyfriend, and they divorced the following year. She left the Ice Capades, and while work didn’t quite dry up, it sure thinned out. Her relationship with her new managers, International Management Group, ended in lawsuits, with IMG accusing Hamill of refusing to pay their commissions and Hamill accusing IMG of mishandling both her funds and her fee negotiations. “It’s still in litigation,� sighs Hamill.

Even though she clearly enjoys her newly bought freedom, Hamill might happily give it all up, or at least much of it. She doesn’t really like touring from city to city, with her home in Indian Wells and her company headquarters in Scottsdale, Ariz. Her daughter, Alexandra, will be in school next year and unable to travel with her, so “this might be my last year of a full tour, 26 weeks of 10 shows a week. Instead, I’d do something like a special Christmas engagement. And I’d like to have another baby.� After all, she adds, “I’m getting up there. . . .�