Carey’s Career Needs No Hype, but It Is No Holiday on Ice

It was to be a career move. Lisa Carey, after nearly a decade on the road as a professional ice skater, was coming home to Woodland Hills to enter the public relations field. She would start at the firm of Lapin and Rose to get her foot in the door.

Only problem was, once the foot got past the door, the skates never quite came off.

So today, Lisa Carey is living a double life as perhaps the world’s only ice skater/press agent.

One week, she worked her normal 40 hours of PR, planning press conferences, briefing athletes and doing the myriad of small details required of her.

Then at the end of the week, she closed up her desk, hopped a jet and took off for London where she performed with partner Chris Harrison as part of the international Sport Aid fund-raising effort. She was back at her desk in time for work at the start of the next week.

Moonlighting is a common practice, but that’s a little ridiculous.

“It’s hectic,” Carey says, “but I think I have the best of both worlds.”

No complaints from the PR side.

“She’ll work out in the morning,” says her boss, Jackie Lapin, “beat herself up on the rinks on the weekend, then come back to work fresh in the morning. Her energy level is incredible. She’s a champion on the ice and a champion in the office.”

Literally.

The Carey story begins as it did for all the Dorothy Hamills and the Peggy Flemings of the world. You know the routine: a young schoolgirl up at 4 a.m., on the ice by 5, then to school, then more skating time in the afternoon, day after day, week after week. No dates, no vacations, practically no life off the ice.

Carey put in her time, five to six hours a day, six days a week, since she was 12. In 1974, competing out of the Los Angeles Figure Skating Club of Burbank, she won a national amateur junior pair championship. A year later, she moved up to the seniors division and finished eighth in pair competition, then fourth the following year. She and her pair partner, Doug Varvais, were alternates to the 1976 U.S. Olympic squad.

Soon after, Carey discovered she was being followed, by talent scouts for the professional tour. In 1977, the 17-year-old Carey was offered a contract to join Ice Follies.

It was more scary than flattering. She had never been anywhere outside of Southern California alone and now she was being asked to start a new life in faraway Cleveland. Alone. Varvais, the only true partner she’d ever had, was not given a similar offer.

Once Carey put pen to paper, she could forget any lingering dreams of the Olympics and further competitive glory.

But she did it. Goodby Olympics. Hello Cleveland.

She was met at the airport by a tall, 21-year-old British pair champion named Chris Harrison.

“Hello, Love,” he told her.

It was a match made on ice.

After three months, they were the featured skaters in the show and, over the ensuing years, they skated around much of the world with the Ice Follies, the Ice Capades, as special guest stars on Scott Hamilton’s America Tour and the Sun Valley Ice Spectacular and on television shows ranging from “Snoopy’s Musical on Ice” to the “Dinah Shore Show.”

They won the United States professional pair championship in Philadelphia in 1982 and the world professional pair title in Jaca, Spain, the same year.

She is 5-7 and he is 6-3 and together they form one of the largest, if not the largest, teams in the world of pair skating. That could have put them at a disadvantage with many of the smaller teams that dazzle crowds with finesse. Carey and Harrison made up for it with speed and a routine that combines acrobatic and gymnastics skills. The result, with these large people flying across the ice, is often spectacular.

And sometimes quite dangerous.

One night in Billings, Mont., Harrison skated across a hair pin somebody had left on the ice. Unfortunately, Carey was over his head at the time. The pair collapsed like a house of cards. Carey landed hard. And unconscious.

The music stopped. Harrison dramatically picked her up and carried her off the ice while an announcer asked if there was a doctor in the house.

“It was Doctors Night at the Billings show,” Harrison says. “When Lisa came to, backstage, she had 50 doctors around her, everybody from a gynecologist to a heart specialist.”

It wasn’t funny at the time. Carey had suffered a broken collarbone and a concussion. Three weeks later, she was back on the ice, but finally, last year, after numerous pulled muscles and bad backs and 30,000 to 40,000 miles a year on the road, Carey and Harrison agreed to take off the skates permanently.

They have since learned never to say never.

One year after becoming a press agent, Carey has clients ranging from a video dating service to a firm making nutritional products. Harrison is into acting, modeling and his own Southern California business, making pizzas for home delivery.

But the ice show people keep calling. So they keep doing shows--a weekend here, a one-stand there. And Lisa Carey continues to give new meaning to the term double agent.