Nadia Takes a Tumble : One-Time Olympic Sweetheart Is the Butt of Jokes Over Friendship With Married Man

Once she was a perfect 10. Small and lithe, at 14 Nadia Comaneci had the dark-eyed look of a pixie and a way of flipping her hand at the end of a floor routine that charmed the judges at the Montreal Olympics and fans the world over. That year, 1976, the diminutive Romanian became the first gymnast ever to receive a perfect score in Olympic competition. She won three gold medals and millions of American hearts.

Now, 13 years, a few pounds and several public relations gaffes later, Comaneci’s scores are lower. Much lower.

“It was my decision to present her the key to the city,” says Hollywood, Fla., Mayor Mara Guilianti. “But if you could have seen my face when she gave that ‘So what?’ response. I just thought to myself, ‘Nadia, you have blown it.’ ”

Even for a woman who has spent her life doing flips and somersaults, it’s been quite a tumble. Comaneci’s fall began with a press conference last week in Hollywood City Hall, where she and a 36-year-old roofer named Constantin Panait showed up for an official welcome to south Florida.

Panait, a Romanian who has lived in the United States for 10 years, helped Comaneci defect from Romania to the West and has been her companion since the couple arrived in New York late last month.

But Panait is also married. He has a wife named Maria and four children, ages 2 to 6. During the press conference, the roofer’s family was sitting in a rented house in neighboring Hallendale, waiting for some word that their husband and father had returned from his European visit with relatives. They were there at home when Comaneci and Panait held hands and teased a horde of attentive reporters with hints of their romantic plans.

Comaneci, 28, her hair frosted and her face looking a bit puffy, said she wanted to make a movie of her life. There was talk of commercials and lucrative product endorsements. The subject of marriage to Panait came up. “We will stay together,” she said with a smile.

Panait’s family was also home alone when Comaneci, asked if she was bothered by the fact that Panait had a wife and four children, answered, “So what?”

As soon as the press conference broke up, Maria Panait and her neighbors were swamped by inquiring journalists, and America’s latest fun couple was off on a week of hotel hopping in south Florida as they made a largely unsuccessful effort to dodge the news media while figuring out a way to repair Comaneci’s tattered image.

“This is not what I expected,” Comaneci said Tuesday in reference to the bashing she has taken in the press since those two words escaped her lips. “I am disappointed,” she added as she and Panait prepared to flee a beach-front hotel in Pompano Beach ahead of the gathering media mob. “Very disappointed.”

The feeling seems to be mutual. Over the past week Comaneci has been the object of scorn and ridicule as people who remember a cute teen-age athlete in a leotard find in her place a bewildered woman with little grasp of image-building in a free-market economy.

She has become the butt of countless jokes on FM radio, and letters to newspapers castigate her as an insensitive home-wrecker. In the Miami Herald, for example--which in covering the international soap opera so far has run three Page 1 stories, a sidebar on the jilted wife, one column of commentary and a feature page article on her plummeting market value--several readers have expressed outrage over Comaneci’s behavior and the extensive coverage given her.

“Maybe she should follow in Donna Rice’s footsteps,” wrote one Miami Springs woman. “Rice promoted a line of clothing, ‘No Excuses.’ Comaneci could call her line ‘So what?’ I hope that she would fare as poorly as Rice did.”

Sports agents have speculated on just how much Comaneci’s other-woman image might have cost her.

“She could have made anywhere from half a million to $1.5 million in six months,” estimated Ross Levinsohn of ProServ Inc., a Washington-based international sports management and marketing company.

Miami Herald columnist Carl Hiaasen compared her celebrity refugee status to that of the thousands of Haitians who each year attempt to come to Florida and are deported immediately or locked up.

“Maybe Emma Lazarus needs a rewrite,” said Hiaasen. “Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free . . . oh, and don’t forget your retired sports stars looking for a Wheaties gig and a Nike endorsement.”

Comaneci and Panait, meanwhile, have attempted to work some damage control. Although they shared a one-bed motel room in Pompano Beach for part of the past week, they are not sleeping together, they say.

“He’s not my lover boy; he’s my manager,” she said Tuesday in one interview.

Panait added: “We’re friends, good friends. But until we get married--if we get married--there will be no sex between us. That was Nadia’s idea. We have one room, but we can stay as friends. I can hold her hand. I can kiss her on the cheek. But that does not mean a serious relationship.”

But few believe it. “Naughty Nadia” is how one Miami television station bills its nightly report on the couple’s escapades.

Comaneci and Panait had met two years earlier at a party in Bucharest, where their parents are friends. Panait said he went to Romania determined to help her flee. But she said this week that he was not the reason she left.

“If it was somebody else prepared to help me, I was prepared to do it,” she said.

Comaneci had reportedly thought of leaving Romania for years, despite the fact that as a sports great she lived a life of relative privilege. She had a big house, a car and a boyfriend who worked as a gas station attendant. But she was also troubled, friends said, ever since the breakup four years ago of a relationship with Nicu Ceausescu, son of the Romanian leader, Nicolae Ceaucescu. She had begun to drink more than usual and gain weight, they said.

Comaneci says she was penniless when she walked through mud to cross the border into Hungary, where Panait was waiting in a rented Audi. She even left behind her gold medals. After a stop in New York, the couple arrived Dec. 4 in Florida, where they apparently have been living off the sale of her story to British newspapers and to the American syndicated television show “Inside Edition.”

And living well. The room they shared at the Beachcomber Hotel in Pompano Beach cost $125 a day. Under intensive questioning by reporters, hotel waiters said that Comaneci eats up to five meals a day and is partial to steak and shrimp. Sales clerks at a shopping mall department store disclosed that she bought a white dress--size 8--adorned with pearls and beads, for $184 plus tax. She was also seen at the perfume counter and in the shoe department.

Comaneci and Panait are zipping around in a black 1990 Camaro RS convertible, which a Pompano Beach car salesman says Comaneci bought Saturday after falling in love with it. The car has automatic transmission, and “in her country all they have is stick shift,” said the salesman, Thomas Martin. Martin said he sold the car for a little less than the $20,300 sticker price, and that Comaneci paid with traveler’s checks.

Panait’s wife, meanwhile, says her husband has come home only once in the past 10 days, for a quick visit with the kids, and has told her nothing about what is going on. Maria, 25, said that after seeing her husband, called Costica, and Comaneci, wearing her husband’s gold necklace and ring, on television at the news conference, she cried all day.

And then she hired a publicist.

“As you know, the window is open only for a little time to make a few bucks,” says Norman Gross, “and we’re going to try and generate as much income as we can. Here’s a woman with four kids, no transportation, no job, no job skills, the rent’s overdue and the landlord’s hounding her.”

When Maria, also a Romanian native, met Constantin in Cleveland several years ago, she was a short-order cook and salad girl, said Gross, a partner in the Boca Raton firm of Barry Norman & Associates. But with four young children to care for, she is not in the market for a job like that.

So Gross is generating income by charging for interviews. On her own, Maria agreed to take $2,000 from the Daily Mail of London for talking last week. Under Gross’s management, her fee has risen. He won’t say how much. But in addition to coming to terms with a syndicated tabloid television show, “Hard Copy,” Maria has also been paid to tell her story to “a couple of London publications and a Japanese magazine,” Gross said.

He added that his client was scheduled to appear Thursday on CNN’s “Larry King Live,” and that Sally Jessy Raphael and Oprah Winfrey had also been in touch.

“With Christmas coming, there could be some real human interest in a woman left penniless with four young children,” Gross said.

Comaneci has not been specific about her plans, long-range or immediate. But rumors are swirling. She will write a book. She’s on her way to Disney World. She and Panait are headed for Los Angeles, where he will negotiate a film deal.

Back in Hollywood, Guilianti said she has no regrets about presenting Comaneci with the key to the city.

“No, I give out keys in recognition of accomplishments,” she said. “It is not a Good Housekeeping seal. If Elizabeth Taylor showed up, I’d give her the key.”

As for the “So what?” reply, Guilianti is willing to be charitable.

“She was extremely nervous, and she is not exactly fluent in English,” she said. “What she might have meant was, ‘I can’t help it, I love him.’

“I think the press has treated her harshly. She was rescued by this man, and he ended up (being) a romantic figure. But he’s been here (for 10 years); he’s the one with the wife and four children Nadia has never met. I feel terribly for the wife, believe me. But I don’t blame Nadia; I blame Constantin. I’d be surprised if they do end up marching off into the sunset together. Because I would describe him as a creep.”