by Johnny Weir
As the renowned makeup artist Kabuki applied neon products to my face that only showed up under black lights, I felt belittled. I thought I was going to strut my stuff in a hot outfit and makeup. Instead, I was Cirque du Soleil.
While not exactly Men’s Vogue material, it turned out to be very funny. With people flipping behind me, I walked down the runway, shaking my glow sticks and doing my best style poses in complete blackness.
The fashion show was fun but nothing compared to being invited to Elton John’s Oscar party a couple of weeks later. Now this was a real diversion that started the minute Paris, my date, and I stepped into the first-class section of the plane and started drinking champagne. The A-List treatment continued when we arrived at the Peninsula Beverly Hills Hotel, where we were treated to a gorgeous room, which was also gigantic. Thank God. Butch and Grämz, who had flown themselves out there coach to continue capturing my life, were also staying in it with us. The Johnny Weir documentary was so low budget that Paris and I shared one bed while Butch and Grämz had the other. It was like fancy camp.
My fashion situation didn’t go down as smoothly as my accommodations. Dior had agreed to dress me but by the day of the party, no clothes had showed up. I waited as long as I could before making an emergency shopping trip to Barneys, where I picked up a pair of pants to go with my own black velvet Costume National jacket with beaded lapels that I had brought in case of an emergency. With the Weir luck there were often emergencies.
No outfit could have prepared me for the moment I stepped out of the car and into my first real Hollywood event. I hadn’t expected that anyone would want me to walk the red carpet or take my picture. It had been a year since the Olympics, my biggest claim to fame, and the carpet was populated with huge stars—basically everyone who wasn’t at the Oscars. But all of a sudden I found myself on this mega red carpet facing a wall of about 150 photographers and cameramen.
“Johnny! Johnny! Johnny!” they shouted.
I loved the sensation: the throng calling my name and snapping my picture. As the flashes went off, I tried to channel Tyra Banks and heed her tips on America’s Next Top Model. I smiled with my eyes and looked up at the camera while keeping my chin down. I think Mama would have been proud.
Once Paris and I walked into the party, we became nobodies enjoying the craziness unfold. We met our host Elton John, who had no idea who I was, and the cast of Queer as Folk, who of course did. I had a particularly good time watching Sharon Stone auction off some car for Elton’s charity. Cursing and telling dirty jokes, this famous lady was totally uninhibited in front of people, as if she didn’t have a care in the world. I liked her style and envied her power.
Running away to L.A. for the weekend was fun, but I still needed to get my act together in terms of my sport. Skating was who I was and I couldn’t run away from it, even if it wasn’t going well. Being invited to a few parties was no Plan B.
At this point, hard work wasn’t enough. If I continued to skate, I needed to work in a different way. And that meant a new coach. If I stayed with Priscilla, just going through the motions, I probably wouldn’t make it through another season, let alone another Olympics.
Over the season, my training situation with Priscilla had become stressed. Both of us were locked in a passive-aggressive war of silent wills. During one session, where I was training for my long program, I missed a triple salchow. I used the mistake on such a simple jump to show Priscilla how much I didn’t want to be there by throwing myself down on the ice like an overgrown toddler. Instead of getting in my face about it, she stopped talking, slowly gathered her things, and got off the ice. In that moment, and many that followed, she didn’t want to train with me, either.
I escalated the war by habitually calling up my rink and asking them to prep the ice forty-five minutes earlier than my scheduled morning session. After the Zamboni cleared and the ice was still soaked, I skated before Priscilla had even showed up. As she arrived for our session, I would be finishing and, to her astonishment, I would just say “bye” and walk out to the sound of her uncomfortable laughter. By the end of the season we were both avoiding each other, a ludicrous relationship for a coach and skater.
I knew how lucky I had been to start out with someone as nurturing and gentle as Priscilla. Most kids with any hope of becoming competitive skaters begin with hard-asses who have coached Olympic champions. A lot of children drop out because these coaches are too tough too fast. I had a great skating childhood that included the babying and pampering all kids should have. But now I needed a business partner—someone to scare me in the rink—not a babysitter.
My mom could see what was happening and, as my greatest confidante and supporter, forced me to face the situation. After some hard talks, she and I decided that by the time the World Championships finished, I should put an offer out to a new coach.
First I had to find that person. I definitely wanted a Russian coach because I liked the way many of them trained their students. The most radical idea that my mom and I discussed was my moving to Moscow in order train with Tatiana Tarasova. I loved and respected what she was able to do with her skaters. Working with her in the summers, I felt alive—and afraid. Other Russians on the list were Tarasova’s ex-assistant coach Nikolai Morozov, who now taught in Connecticut, and Oleg Vassiliev, who had Olympic pair champions in Chicago.
What gave me pause with all those coaches was the fact that all of them worked in the Russian style with a stable of great skaters in a team situation, on the ice together. Growing up with one coach to myself, I worried it would be too much of a culture shock to train in a group full-time.
By the time I boarded the plane for Tokyo, I still hadn’t made a decision. Tarasova was the clear front-runner. She expressed interest, but we needed to hear how much money it would be and how we might work out the complicated logistics. I had never lived away from home full-time, so for my first experience to be halfway around the world seemed a bit daunting. There were also skating politics to consider. The federation was not going to like me living and training in Russia—something no American had ever done before.
Meanwhile, Priscilla had no idea that I was planning on switching coaches because we had kept everything very discreet—no small feat in the incestuous world of skating. I felt bad about going behind her back because Priscilla had given me so much and had been a part of the family for so long, but I couldn’t tell her until I had secured a new coach.
As if purposefully trying to give me a massive guilt trip, Priscilla spent the entire time at the World Championships talking to everyone and anyone about my situation and ways to improve me next season. With the zeal of a crusading physician hell-bent on finding a cure for her patient, she grilled judges, fellow coaches, and officials to amass their best advice. My mom, who always roomed with Priscilla to keep costs down, had to do the lion’s share of acting. “Priscilla kept me up until two, making a plan of your summer,” my mom said to me wearily over Starbucks.
When we left Japan after the World Championships, I was no closer to finding a new coach. Nothing felt right. Having next season hang like a big question mark over my head was extremely stressful. The only thing I knew for sure was that whoever took me on had his work cut out. At the Worlds I placed eighth—a total disaster, just like the current state of my skating career.
On the plane back from Japan, I got to talking with two other American team members, Melissa Gregory and Denis Petukhov, husband and wife ice dancers who also trained in Delaware. I normally hate conversing on planes, preferring to shut my eyes to the fact that I’m trapped in such close proximity to other people. But on this trip, I needed to escape from my thoughts and though Melissa and Denis weren’t great friends, we bonded over our underdog status in the skating world.
Although an American citizen, Denis was born in Russia, which made him and Melissa less desirable than other pairs in the eyes of the U.S. Figure Skating Association. The married skating partners were always top ten in the World Champi
onships but could never seem to rise to the very top of American skating. Thirty thousand feet in the air, we moaned about the role of politics in our sport and marveled at one another’s inherent abilities on the ice. Just like when you’re a kid making a new friend and you want to instantly start a craft project or open up a business together, so the three of us mused that we should skate together. But as we discussed it, we became more and more excited about making the concept a reality. And we had a perfect venue—an upcoming made-for-TV exhibition near my hometown in Reading, Pennsylvania, in which we were all invited to perform.
It was a shocking idea, the sort concocted on transatlantic flights, and something big-name skaters just didn’t do. In general, well-known skaters don’t skate in groups because of the worry that someone else might steal their thunder. And nobody ever mixed ice dancing with singles skating, or pairs skating with ice dancing. It was like dogs mating with cats, complete Armageddon. I had already freaked out the skating community with gender bending and was now fully prepared to do it with genre bending.
Before landing, we came up with the story for our program: we would play fallen angels because that’s what we felt like. It would be beautiful and light, but tragic and dramatic—like us. “I’m going to skate with my two wives,” Denis joked. Why not? I was already in love.
Getting approval to skate this number from the federation turned out to be like pulling teeth without Novocain. The pain was not surprising but incredibly irritating nonetheless. They absolutely didn’t want us to skate together. Anything that veers from the traditional path sends them into a huge tizzy.
Their excuse was that they didn’t know how to pay us because there was no scale if we skated together. But the truth is they were terrified. Here you had me, deemed publicly unreliable, and a pair of dark-horse ice dancers? Put those three scary things together and I’m sure they conjured up images of an erotic sex number that would make all the elderly folks tuning into the exhibition at home lose their dentures. We had to explain every single detail of the program, which we only had a week and a half to choreograph, and the whole story behind it. We told them how much we would be skating together and how much apart. The whole process took about a million phone calls and came right down to the deadline before we finally received approval, but the three of us were convinced it was worth the effort because the program would be a revelation.
The Marshalls Showcase was to be held twenty minutes from where I grew up. Kids from my elementary school had entered a writing contest to win tickets for the event and so the rink was stacked with fans from my hometown.
Still Melissa, Denis, and I were nervous about what was going to happen on the ice. All the elements were in place. Denis had procured us ethereal music from Globus, a band that does music for many movie and TV trailers, and we all had matching blue and white costumes as light as a cotton candy confection. The choreography expressed the essence of three angels, alone and connecting in loving, chaste, and barely there touches. I added the final drama with crazy blue makeup,àla Hamburglar on our faces. But because of the fast turnaround time of the program and the effort that went into getting its approval, we had only one run-through together. It didn’t help that backstage, officials and other skaters were staring at us like freaks. Three of us skating together. The horror!
On the ice, while clasping hands before beginning, I could feel Melissa and Denis’s sweaty palms. We had more riding on this than just a TV performance. The three of us had become great friends, and as with all my friends I wanted to help them out. In this particular moment that meant getting them a spot on the Champions on Ice tour, which was about to begin. They needed the money and I needed the friends on tour. The only problem was Champions already had a pair of ice dancers. It would be a hard sell to bring on Melissa and Denis, but if this program made the right kind of waves, we had a shot. If it didn’t go off perfectly, we would never be allowed to do it again.
I was so used to skating alone—either pissed or ecstatic with myself—but with two other people on the ice I got to be part of a team. Having been so isolated in my sport for so long, I relished the feeling of moving in sync with Melissa and Denis. The audience, even if they didn’t understand the groundbreaking aspect of the moment, sensed our excitement and came along with us for the tender ride.
When we finished, the crowd rose to its feet, having received the program in the way we had hoped. The TV commentators, who had expressed wariness when we took our starting positions, offered unadulterated praise. Even the bewildered skating folks backstage slapped us on the back. The number had been an unmitigated success.
But the best attention was the mainstream interest our number garnered the next day on PerezHilton.com. The gossip blogger, who has been a big supporter for a long time because he loves my kind of crazy, found a YouTube video of the program and posted it on his site. The video ended up with upward of one hundred thousand hits over a couple of days, way more than figure skating usually gets, because Perez had exposed our work far beyond the usual scope of those tuning in to the Marshalls Showcase.
Melissa, Denis, and I had bypassed the pettiness of the federation and brought a stunning, personal moment of skating directly to the people. With hard page-view numbers behind us, we made our pitch to perform the program on the Champions on Ice tour. It took some negotiating and a trial period of a couple of show dates (where the directors realized that people bought tickets just to see this act), but Melissa and Denis landed the gig. That summer these three fallen angels were loved and accepted everywhere.
While on tour, I spent a lot of time talking to people about ideas for a new coach. It was Viktor Petrenko, a gold medalist in the 1992 Olympics, who first brought up someone nobody had mentioned before: Galina Yakovlevna Zmievskaya, his former coach and current mother-in-law. The idea intrigued me. A lot of the pieces seemed to be in place for a good partnership. Tough and Russian, she didn’t have any major men skaters so could offer me personal attention. Galina’s rink was only a two-hour ride from Newark, so I would have to move, but not as far as Moscow, which would make my mom happy. Plus, Galina had a great history, having taught my idol Oksana Baiul.
At the first opportunity, my mom and I set out to have a meeting with the great Galina. Of course the Weir family luck struck and we had a disaster getting there. Flooding in Bergen County meant we couldn’t cross a certain bridge and had to weave our way through the back roads, getting very lost and arriving really late. Even though I was an Olympic athlete, who garnered a lot of attention in my sport and beyond, I still felt it was incumbent upon me to impress her. That’s just the way it is when you work with coaches. Like Marina, who kept me waiting before agreeing to choreograph for me, the power dynamic always seems to spin in their direction. I worried that when we didn’t show up on time, she wouldn’t honor the meeting.
My fears proved unfounded. In the middle of training her daily crop of kids, she got right off the ice to greet me. A classic Ukrainian babushka with pinkish-blond hair in a red down comforter coat approached us with a formal nod. She didn’t say hello or speak any English, preferring instead to have Viktor translate. The hour-long meeting was quite a family affair, with Nina, Viktor’s wife and Galina’s daughter, also present.
“I don’t need a best friend,” I said. “I need a jump start in my career.”
Still pretty cocky despite my floundering career, I felt I was at a level where any new coach wouldn’t really have to teach me, just kick my ass.
But Galina, exuding the air of a businesslike grandma, had devised a plan—and I hadn’t even said yes to her.
“Galina already told me that she wants to work with you,” Viktor said, “if it’s the right fit. It’s going to be hard work. There are a lot of things we want to fix. We aren’t here to babysit you.”
Fix? Priscilla had taught me great technique. I needed discipline but I wasn’t sure about fixing.
“I’ve studied your skating. You’re very fun and unique,” she said thro
ugh Viktor. “You have all this raw talent, but you’re not using it. And I want you to be able to use it. I want you to have stronger technique on your jumps.”
As this little Russian ballbuster rattled off my flaws, at first she made me feel mildly uncomfortable, like a film or TV actress caught outside her home with no makeup on. Then she gained my respect. I didn’t think my jumps needed work, but I realized that if she’s not afraid to say all these things to my face and offend me, she can probably do great things for me.
“We need to change your image to the skating world,” continued Galina, wise words from a woman with years in the sport. “You need people to think you’re a serious athlete.”
That’s what I was changing coaches for, or at least what I thought at the time. I was ready to sign up.
On the drive home, my mother and I hashed out all the details and made our decision: I’d move to New Jersey and be on the ice training with Galina by the first week in August.
The only other person I had to convince was Paris. I had never lived alone before and going through all these changes careerwise, I didn’t know if I could go handle it all by myself. Paris would provide a great support system and much-needed comic relief. He also needed a change. There wasn’t a lot going on in Delaware for him. He had quit skating and many of our original group of friends had moved away. Having lost his way a bit, he, too, needed to grow up. Paris was onboard, not so much for any of those reasons. He loved the idea of living close to the madness and adventure of New York City.
We headed to New Jersey with my mom for the weekend to look at apartments. When we arrived at one immaculate complex filled with perfectly appointed orchids and pictures of smiling families of all ethnicities enjoying the place’s amenities, the man who showed us around turned out to be a fan of mine.
“Hi, Mr. Weir,” said the agent, who was obviously a gay man. “Welcome. I’ve been waiting for you all day. I love your skating.”