Nadia Comaneci’s Coming of Age

As soon as I stepped into the office I heard the rumbling.

“Tramp!”

“Trollop!”

“Heifer!”

Wait a second, I said. I may have sown a few wild oats in my time, but I’m no heifer.

“We are not speaking of you,” a colleague informed me. “We are talking about that Commie concubine, Nadia Comaneci.”

When gymnastics superstar Nadia Comaneci defected to this country the week before last, she became an instant hero.

Today, she is a bum. A home-wrecker, a harlot, a hussy.

Nadia’s crime was to become romantically involved with a man who has a wife and four children.

But her real crime, I think, was to believe in America’s advance publicity.

An explanation is in order:

Nadia, 28, escaped from Romania so she could continue her torrid love affair with self-employed Florida roofer and Romanian emigre, Constantin Panait, 36.

Panait’s wife, Maria, is 25, they have been married seven years and they have four children, ages 6, 5, 3 and 2.

Got all the numbers straight? Good, let’s plunge on.

While Nadia and Constantin were standing in front of reporters and announcing Nadia’s intention to star in a movie about her own life, poor Mrs. Panait was learning about the love affair by watching the press conference on TV.

And Nadia seemed blissfully unconcerned about the home she was wrecking.

What about Constantin’s wife and four children? she was asked.

“So what?” Nadia replied.

I think I know what lies behind that “so what.”

Nadia got the wrong idea about this country. She had read American publications and seen American films and had traveled here and watched American TV.

And she knew from the media that America in the ‘80s was The Land Beyond Outrage.

America was free-wheeling and fun-loving and anything-goes. This was on every made-for-TV movie Nadia saw.

And her big mistake was that she actually believed it.

I can see her living in Romania, dreaming about all the freedom of life style she knew existed in America.

I imagine her crouched under her bed, holding a tiny flashlight in her teeth and reading smuggled copies of Walter Scott’s Personality Parade.

She reads how the famous people of America are allowed to live with wild abandon. Movie stars sleeping around! Swapping partners! Having babies without getting married! And nobody cares!

Heck, they go on Carson and they talk about it as if making a baby takes as much responsibility as making a milkshake.

And did I mention marriage? Who cares about marriage in America? Look at the divorce rate. Look at all those surveys in the women’s magazines about how many people cheat on their spouses.

So naturally Nadia thought this was the United States of Whoopee.

And so she falls in love with this married guy who has four children. And they could go off to any country in the world to live. But Nadia knows which country is best. What better place to go and make a movie about all this than America?

She figured she would be on “Later With Bob Costas” by the end of the year.

But in America, we didn’t know she was coming here to roll around with some guy. We thought she was coming her for the freedom and the opportunity and the Big Macs.

That’s the kind of story we like. Because, after all, Nadia was not just some ordinary hero.

At age 14, she had earned an unprecedented seven perfect 10s and won three gold medals, two silver and one bronze at the 1976 Montreal Olympics.

Here are some words written about her back then: perfection, child-heroine, joyous, breathtaking, triumphant. And these came in just the first two paragraphs of the Newsweek cover story on her. (There were also cover stories in Time and Sports Illustrated.)

“Nadia has become a household word, synonymous with gymnastic excellence, youth and beauty,” one newspaper reporter wrote. “ ‘Nadia’s Theme,’ the music she performed to, sold a million records and its lilting melody was adopted as the theme song of a television soap opera.”

(If you’d like to hear it, it opens “The Young and the Restless,” a show that Nadia also probably thinks is real life.)

But then Nadia did the unforgiveable.

She grew up.

Americans wanted her to stay the virgin pixie, preserved in innocence forever like one of those tiny ballerinas twirling atop a child’s jewelry box.

But Nadia committed the sin of becoming an adult. And acting like a star. And becoming like all the rest.

America, however, has a fitting punishment for heroes who dare do that:

We will not let her flog products on TV.

“We prefer people to be squeaky clean,” said a representative of J. Walter Thompson.

“If anyone has a bad image with the public or does something distasteful, it makes it difficult to endorse a product,” said a representative of Grey Advertising.

“No one is going to touch her right now,” said a representative of International Management Group.

So no Wheaties for Nadia. No Reeboks. No Danskins.

All she will have is her Constantin Panait.

And soon, maybe Romania won’t look so bad.