Roy Blakey
Photographer and former ice skater reveals the tremendous joy of fantastic twentieth century travel
Roy Blakey is a veteran of the U.S. Armed Forces and Holiday on Ice. He’s served a tour of duty in Germany and twirled across Brazil, Japan, Thailand, and the former Soviet Union, keeping the home front updated with his dandy self-portraits – definitely a foretaste of more spicy things to come…
From Fantastic Man n° 1 — 2005
Text by GERT JONKERS
Photography by ROY BLAKEY
‘In the 1940s in the little town in Oklahoma where I grew up, I saw an ice-skating film with Sonja Henie, a three-time Olympic champion who went to Hollywood and became a movie star. In one amazing scene the ice was painted black and covered with a film of water so all the skaters swirling around wearing white were reflected in the mirror-like ice. I thought, ‘This is the most unbelievable thing I saw in my whole life, I have to do that!’ I was 11, 12, 13; somewhere around there. But we didn’t have any ice in Enid, Oklahoma, so I became a roller-skater and took a bus every Saturday to Wichita, Kansas, and later to Tulsa, Oklahoma to take my lessons. I skated in competitions and I won a few, but I always knew one day I’d be in an ice-skating show. My parents, of course, had something else in mind. My father, who worked at a Christian university, automatically thought that when I finished high school I’d go to his university. The summer I graduated from high school, a buddy and I went out to Colorado, which is a little west of Oklahoma, and spent the summer picking peaches. It got to be late August, then September, and my parents kept writing to me to see where I was and when I was coming home to enrol in the university. Their letters got more and more frantic. So finally I sat down and wrote a letter saying I didn’t want to go. I told them what my dreams were in my letter. This was 1948. I re-read my letter in the 80s, and it’s amazing – everything I said I wanted to do in that letter came true. I got into show business, I travelled around the world, I did everything, never realising I’d really set those goals so early on. Ultimately my father agreed to let me go to a different university where I could take my roller-skating lessons. I went there for two and a half years, but I was the worst student – I was only interested in skating. Ultimately I thought I was wasting my time. So I left university, and two minutes later I got a notice that I had been drafted into the Army. I was just very lucky that they didn’t send me to Korea – this was the time when the Korean war was on – but to Germany, where I was a mail clerk for an anti-aircraft unit for two years in Kaiserlaudern.
I tell you, I was the luckiest guy in the world. I couldn’t even believe it myself. I loved Europe and went to Spain, England, Sicily – I went everywhere. All my fellow soldiers thought I was crazy. They were all getting drunk in their spare time while I was travelling around, learning a bit of German. I read about an ice-skating show in the Casa Carioca nightclub that was run by the American Military down in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, near Munich in the Bavarian Alps. You could go to Garmisch-Partenkirchen during leave to ski, swim or play golf. Some buddies and I went there on a three-day leave and right next to the Casa Carioca was the Olympic Ice Skating stadium where they had held the 1936 winter Olympics. And so for three days I went skating every day in this gorgeous outside stadium. I left a note at the nightclub saying that I was interested in joining the show. And back at the hotel I got a call for an audition. So the lady show-director told me she thought they could use me as they could use military personnel in the show. Well, I thought it was my dream come true, but I never heard from her again. So at the end of my two years in the military, I wrote her a letter, and then she finally sent me a contract. My lieutenant in the army thought I was crazy. Why aren’t you going back to the States? He thought I was some sort of a communist, I guess. So, anyway, I was there in the show in that picture-perfect Alpine village for a year and a half. Every night when I walked to work, looking up at the snow-capped mountains in the moonlight, I was thinking, “Thank you, thank you!” And that same lady then got me a terrific job skating in the elegant Boulevard Room ice show of the Chicago Hilton where I stayed for five years, doing two shows a night, seven nights a week.
Anyway, while I was at the Chicago Hilton I started photographing my colleagues. I’d set up big lights in the hallway, you know, two o’clock in the morning. Finally when I got my own apartment with a rollaway bed, I could pull a little background down and could photograph in the daytime. I’d already bought my first camera in Germany, a Rolleiflex. After Chicago I went on tour with Holiday on Ice and performed in about forty countries. We went through Europe the first year, and then Asia, starting in Bangkok, Thailand, and I was always taking pictures. When we went to Japan I bought a Nikon 35, which I’ve used exclusively ever since. Japan is amazing, but I really fell totally in love with Thailand. I experienced something very profound in the art, culture, and people there. I remember when we first went to Paris to get our visas. I saw this big poster of Thai temples on the wall in the embassy, and I thought. “I’m gonna like it there!” You can certainly see that here in my home. I went totally nuts in Thailand. Other people bring back a doll as a souvenir, I brought the interior of at least two temples. Well, some of this I found later in New York City as a matter of fact, like this giant wall piece. Thank goodness that I didn’t have to drag that all the way from Thailand.
So after fifteen years ice-skating I had to start to think about making some money – something that didn’t happen with skating. I planned to start my new photography career in Hollywood, because I just loved the warm climate there, but ended up in New York, set up a studio, and, well, that was it. I didn’t know much about the technical side of photography. I still really don’t, in fact. My father would know all about how a camera worked but not me. But I can take a picture and my father couldn’t. You know what I mean? It’s instinctive. So that’s what I’ve done ever since, take pictures. I had a great studio in New York and worked with the great Broadway stars and film stars, shooting their casting cards – just wonderful. I photographed Divine several times, do you remember him? You would think the zingers would be flying out of him, but he was very serious and boring, in fact. Not a hoot at all, surprisingly.
One of the reasons that I finally left New York was that I had done everything I wanted to do there. Also, in the 90s, my rent was flying through the roof, and my parents, who lived to be 97 and 101 years old, were still alive here in Minneapolis, so I finally moved here where I share a studio with my niece Keri, and I love it. But the moving… man, that nearly killed me. My house, my studio, my skating collection, which I believe is the world’s biggest ice-skating memorabilia collection in the world. I lost 10 pounds. I couldn’t take it. I had to throw away so much. The mover thought he could do it in one day, but it took three days to get it all in the trucks. I said never again. If I ever have to move again, I’m taking only a carry-on. You know, passport, camera, that’s all. Thankfully I don’t have many clothes. What you see on me is about it – jeans and a t-shirt. Okay, I do have one other pair of pants. But clothes just don’t interest me at all. Of course if I were a gorgeous young man, I’d just be wearing a thong! I didn’t specialise in photographing nudes for nothing, you see? I’m sure you know, a lot of these models look better without clothes.’